Extracts
The Trojan Dog
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In this extract from The Trojan Dog, Sandra isn't sure yet what to make of Ivan, his love of electronic gadgetry, or the mysteries she is being drawn towards.

I'd seen virtual reality on television, not what Ivan promised us that afternoon, not inside, but programs about it, how it could be used to train pilots, and as a tool for architects and surgeons. I expected Ivan to have some glorified computer game to show us, something with lots of shooting, only instead of aiming a mouse at a moving coloured target, you aimed a joystick.
Ivan told Peter with a grin, `We'll let your mum go first, to show her that it's harmless.'
I stepped on to a round platform of shiny silver metal. Around me was a padded leather cage, a kind of corral. Was this to catch me if I fell? I felt a familiar prickle of nervousness inside my clothes.
The helmet, too, was made of metal, and soft padded leather. The eyepieces were round, bright blue incandescent eyes, spaced as they would be on a human head.
`Man! This is excellent!' cried Peter, when Ivan lifted up the helmet.
It felt like having to carry a load of bricks on my head, and I hadn't got the balance right.
`How much did this thing cost?' I was relieved to hear my voice sounding almost normal.
Ivan said proudly, `You don't want to know.'
I swayed a little sideways, and he steadied me with one arm around my waist.
There was a picture of a flower-pot upside down. `Is this right? I feel as though I'm standing on my head.'
`It's for the focus,' Ivan said. `Just tell me if the outline's clear.'
He pressed the eyepieces right up against my eyes, like swimming goggles, and tightened the helmet a notch or two so that it fitted snugly on my head.
`Now see the stick in front of you? It should be right underneath the flowerpot. Take it with both hands.'
I saw a hand come up in front of my eyes, a simulated hand, not mine, but moving exactly as my hand did. I took hold of the joystick and the fake hand mimicked mine exactly. Of course I couldn't see my real hand - all I could see was the black space in front of my eyes, the flowerpot, the stick and the fake hand.
`Now feel the button on the top. That's it. Press it and you should begin to move.'
`It's still all black,' I said after a moment. `It's like I'm in a dark room and I can't find the light switch.'
`Relax. You'll soon see where you are.'
At first I thought it was meant to be the inside of an early settler's bark hut, with the door shut, the light dim through regular gaps or cracks in wood, not the grey or silver-grey of night, or the pure black background to the flower-pot.
I noticed that the walls didn't join at right angles. Now I thought I might be inside a boat, or, since whatever it was had a roof that curved in the same way - long, curved, overlapping planks of wood - an oval-shaped coffin? The unlikely wooden belly of a submarine? There were voices whispering in a foreign language.
Suddenly I understood. It was the horse. The ancient sting. Ivan had built it, not out there, to touch and climb on and drag innocently through the gates of Troy. He had built the experience of being inside the Trojan Horse.
There were the barbed ends of spears as we were jostled one against the other. Sweating and afraid, I saw another soldier's hairy leg and foot, in its dusty leather sandal, shuffle next to mine. Metal against metal, wood against wood, the clat and brush of bodies flung together. The sound of children singing through a wooden wall.
I moved the joystick forward. The horse moved, with me inside it. I turned it sideways until I reached what felt like my spot against the clinkered wall, the spot in which to sink down, and wait and watch, voyeuristic traveller from the future.
So many. No mercy shown to children. Those sweet voices just outside.
My head and sinuses ached, and there was this feeling of being sucked along. My throat felt as if it was being pulled from the back, somewhere near my tonsils.
I realised that I was crouching against the padded leather hoop. I wasn't aware of getting myself into this position, only of the need to find my special spot inside the horse. The leather gave under my fingers, moulded itself to my cheek.
Everything was upside down. The blue moulded leather was barbed and splintered, new-felled wood that no carpenter had had time to smooth. Solid substances were changing places quicker than an adult human sense could follow. A boy might slip between the cracks. A bearded Peter Pan.
I took the helmet off, knowing that I could never walk into Ivan's room and see that stationary silver disc, the cage really nothing more than two parallel hoops of expensive leather joined by vertical struts - I knew I could never again look at them and see them as simple objects. And they were just the props.
I felt a need to understand the program Ivan must have written, the nuts and bolts of it, to unravel and comprehend it in a practical, mechanical, human way, and set this against my fear.
`It's not finished yet,' said Ivan.
`Let me try! It's my go!' Peter shouted.
Ivan was asking questions with his eyes.
I said, `I didn't want to be there.'
`It's just a game, Sandra. Don't go all huffy on me now.'
Ivan turned away from me to help Peter with the helmet. I watched him move the joystick to and fro.
My hands were very cold and I rubbed them roughly, feeling once again surrounded by the rumbling, dim, hot insides of the statue. The glint of a companion's spear next to my bare thigh when we were thrown from one side to the other. That terrible unknowing song as the Trojans hauled on their ropes and pulled us through the city gates.
In Ivan's kitchen, I found bread, cheese, margarine. I made a sandwich and put the kettle on, waiting till I felt calm enough to tell Ivan it had been too much for me, to make him listen.
`Got a great idea for what to do next!' Ivan called out through the open door.
I found some biscuits that were almost fresh. I felt I had to eat, though I wasn't ordinarily hungry, but heart-empty, hollowed out and dizzy.
Ivan stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, frowning at the sight of me scavenging in his kitchen.
`Peter doesn't need an ancient battle foisted on him as a form of entertainment,' I said stiffly, as I cleared a space at the table and sat down.
`Anything you do the first time can be a bit of a shock.' As though the risk, the shock, were necessary.
`How can the insides of a wooden horse help anybody look out there?
Ivan seemed interested, rather than annoyed.
`It's a journey,' he said. `Not all of it needs to make the kind of sense you're after.'
`Until you get there?'
`Maybe. Maybe not.'
Peter called from the other room for someone to help him off with the helmet, and Ivan said, `Be back in a minute,' as though I was about to run away.
`What's it about?' yelled Peter, running in. `I want to know!'
`Here.' I handed him half a sandwich, and he began to eat.
Ivan told him the story of the horse. `They were just so sick of the siege, of hanging in there, I guess,' he said slowly, watching Peter munch his sandwich, avoiding my eyes. He took nothing for himself, but sat with his hands flat on the table.
`I mean being walled up in a town with enemies all round. The Greeks weren't having a picnic either. Between a rock and a hard place. The Trojans - food's short, but at least they're at home. You know, sometimes the best ideas come when you've reached the end of your tether -'
Peter chewed, considering this, as Ivan began warming to his story.
`You're just about to give up and some joker says, "Hey, man, why don't we . . ." And at first you think - nah - the sun's got to this dude. Fried his brains.' Peter giggled. `But then you think about it, and you can't stop thinking about it, because, jeez man, there's nothing to do but think!'
Peter glanced at me. I knew he sensed that Ivan was going to tell him something wrong, a wrong thing to do, and he wanted to hear it, especially when he could see I disapproved. At the same time, he was keen not to give himself away.
`And then you say to yourself after a while - why not? Hell, man, why not? Fried brains.' Ivan grinned and touched Peter lightly on the arm, as though he felt that this small contact was all he could allow himself.
Peter wriggled. `But who won?'
`The Greeks, of course.'
Peter considered this for a long moment, then he said, `I'd rather have a dog.' He went back to the workroom.
`Why did you do it?' I asked Ivan.
He gave me a long look as if to gauge whether my question was an open one, or whether I planned to squash his answer as soon as he'd offered it.
`Just grabs me, that's all. I've loved that story ever since I was a kid.'
I wanted to leave, but I knew that if I walked out then, took Peter home, I'd never go back to Ivan's house again.
Ivan said softly that learning anything requires an act of faith. And with the technology we were talking about, maybe more faith was required, not less. I called him a magician, thinking it would make him angry, but he said there might be something in that.
`You have to get the incantation of the spell exactly right, and it's all illusion anyway.'
`How do you mean?' I asked.
`If you make even a titchy mistake in the program, the illusion's spoiled, it's obvious that the whole thing's a make-up.'
`So you're like that wizard.'
`Who?'
`I've forgotten his name. In The Wizard of Oz.'
`I see what you mean. Kind of, yes.'
Ivan was right. An act of faith was required - this was what frightened me - an imaginative leap that neither he nor Peter seemed to have any trouble making. A leap taken in trust and joy, without seat belts or life insurance.
I felt dirty and dull and sorry for myself. Yet I would have found it easier to believe that there were spirits nattering in the blond grass outside the windows than to toss myself in faith, just then, through Ivan's window of the mind.

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