By Fiona Vigo Marshall

There was once a girl who despaired of finding a man she could love. So she made him. She made him from three kilos of powdered almonds, three kilos of semolina and three kilos of sugar. This she mixed and melded to form a sweet, sweet clay; one her fingers would remember the taste of forever.

In the old Greek version of this fairy tale, Mr Simigdáli, the longed-for bridegroom was created overnight. But in real life, Mr Marzipan was long in the making. Day by day and far into the night the girl pummelled and kneaded him, for many months, until he was shaped to the contours of her desire. His fluid came from the tears of longing the girl cried every evening, his blood was what she lost each month, full of unfulfilled desires, and his clay was the stardust of which we are all comprised. She called him up at first starlight and at dawn, and his breath was the breath of love that she sighed into him, mouth to mouth. She fashioned him so beautifully that he glistened all over, like the sun shining on the early morning sea, full of life and hope.

Now Mr Marzipan lay on the kitchen table where he had been made, shedding sweet crumbs which the girl picked at thoughtfully while regarding her creation. His skin had the warm glow of candlelight; his limbs gleamed. He was perfectly formed, down to the tiny hairs glinting on his toes. His eyes were sealed like those of a baby in the womb, guarding the secret of life with a slight smile; or the subtle smile of death, where equally the person will not tell. He lay there on the scrubbed wood, beyond time.

It is said that the one who gave him life was the goddess of love. But that isn’t so; the truth is that the girl prayed for forty days and forty nights, and life came with the problematical co-operation of God. The condition was that she must not taste him for a year and a day; of course, she agreed.

As for the girl, from the moment she first saw Mr Marzipan’s eyes light up at the sight of her, she was lost.

‘Have we really only just met?’ she said. ‘I feel I’ve always known you.’

‘Me too,’ stammered Mr Marzipan eagerly, for he had that innate predisposition to language which is our human right, or lot, with appropriate vocal complexity and a deep, gravelly voice, although not as yet that much vocabulary.

‘I love you,’ said the girl. ‘Do you love me?’

‘Sure,’ said Mr Marzipan dazedly, sitting up on the table and grasping her hands, adding slowly, ‘I love you,’ as if memorising the first words we learn, that remain strange in many ways.

And the girl was overwhelmed with delight to hear them.

The marzipan man was slim, with a loose grace, a relaxed dignity, as befits one who has been summoned from the inmost recesses of the imagination. He had what the girl had missed in her previous suitors, the remoteness of one destined for her since time began. He had also an uncanny flash of the eyes when he smiled, like green waves out to sea. It was this distant quality that was the lure: he seemed to be gazing at her from some place she was yet to visit.

‘I’ll always, always love you,’ he said.

‘You won’t forget?’

‘Oh, I’ll never forget you.’

‘Promise?’

‘Oh, yeah. We were made for each other…’

Fame of the beautiful marzipan man quickly spread. Of this, the girl was unaware. She was still in the first throes, walking with Mr Marzipan along the seashore, the sunlight darting in jagged gleams on the water and on his smiling eyes. Like all lovers, they thought they were unobserved, and meeting in public, and mindful of the condition, they did nothing that could have caused perturbation: not a kiss, barely a touch. But everyone knew, in the small seaside town where she lived, and there was a lot of envy. The men sighed for just one finger of Mr Marzipan so they could emulate his success with the girls. Women fell in love with him from merely hearing about him. Such a sweetie! Could eat him all up, every bit of him!

If you had told the girl that she now missed the forty days and forty nights of prayer, she would have been astonished. Had she not everything she wanted? Delicious meetings, and the promise of more? But prayer in the void has an astonishing power over the soul of the person who prays; it is the true spiritual intoxication. It was perhaps this unconscious need for spiritual agony that caused events to fall out as they did.

For, after all that, the girl longed to taste her sweetheart. Maddened by the elusive scent of almond blossom he emitted, she was desperate to inhale more deeply this fragrance that seemed to conjure happier days, like some springtime long ago. That primal infant need to feel objects with the tongue, the dense nerve endings of love set up to explore that intolerable sweetness, its shape, texture and being, in a way the hands cannot. Just one little bite. Surely God would not mind a tiny morsel, the merest soupçon?

One day when they were sitting on the beach, watching the white triangles of yachts on the horizon, unable to resist any longer, she took a bite out of him, nipping the top off his little finger. She had to. She just had to see what he was really, really like.

‘God,’ she said. ‘You’re even more delicious than I thought.’

He looked at her in hurt reproach. ‘Why’d you do that?’

‘Only a tiny nibble. It’ll grow back.’

Mr Marzipan, like so many ideal lovers, was not that articulate. Maybe the girl should have spent longer on his language faculty.

‘Yeah, but… you were supposed to hold out this one year… then we would’ve been free…’

She gazed at him, tears filling her eyes. The almond turned bitter in her mouth.

He put his arms round her. ‘Ah well… don’t cry, sweetheart.’

‘It was impossible,’ she sobbed. ‘An impossible condition, impossible.’

She turned her head away so her tears would not do him further damage, but continued to hold him tight. His skin retained the luxuriant, moist quality of his original ingredient. They lay there listening to the eternal crash of the waves. Now that she was vulnerable, the girl felt a new emotion: fear. Anyone could take him, like a sweet left lying around.

And indeed, he was stolen. Another girl was driving by in her sports car and saw him working in their clifftop garden, in the shadow of the lighthouse that dominated the shoreline in those parts. This new girl had heard of him, of course; that was why she happened to be passing. A pain flew to her heart at the sight of his slim form in his overalls, bent over his task, with that otherworldly, lost grace that marked him out from all other men. The brakes screeched. She got out.

‘So this is the famous marzipan man.’

He straightened. ‘Eh?’

‘And you garden as well? How wonderful.’

The marzipan man began to preen, whipping off a glove and running his fingers – luckily the bitten tip had grown back – through his blonde hair.

‘Sure. Got to earn a living.’

‘What are you digging?’ said the thief. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh… Hoeing onions…  Should plant some radishes, too, today…’

She smiled at him. The breeze was shivering in the grass, the seagulls glinting and crying, the lights and shadows chasing round and round the garden and way out to sea.

‘I need some help with my garden.’

He stood very still. His hair lifted in the wind, his eyes gazed out to sea and the brown haze along the horizon that he knew meant rain later on. Minutes later he was sitting at her side, speeding along the coastline. It was a dangerous road. A few miles along there was a slight bend, with a tree to the left. It looked like nothing. But it was not a good bend to take at speed. Only last year a carload of sixteen-year-olds had plunged into the tree and over the clifftop to the rocks below, and the locals now spoke of the tree of death. There were ghosts from other accidents, too. But Mr Marzipan did not know this. He enjoyed the ride. He thought it was a fine thing to be rushing along in the spring sunshine. He was a fool.

With the problematical co-operation of God, the girl had given the marzipan man life, but she had not been able to give him a memory. Perhaps this was to have developed during their year of waiting. That she was completely forgotten, she had no doubt. She saw it the instant she came home and saw the downed tools in the garden, as if they had no further existence the moment they dropped from his marzipan fingers: fork, hoe and trowel all scattered. He left no note; the forgetter has no need to explain. But how to combat forgetting? The girl dared not approach God again. God had done God’s bit. Mr Marzipan was unfinished. He couldn’t help it. God had made him that way.

She had left it too late to create a memory. She hadn’t thought – she hadn’t had any idea that it would be necessary. Now she was left with the consequences of her ignorance, on a bright, cold, blowy day.

It was hard to leave their house, the garden they had planted together, the baby leaves of radish, the first flutterings of lettuce. But she set out, asking everyone she met whether they had seen him.

She heard of him. He had been seen water skiing in the bay with his new girl, golfing on the clifftop course, dining at the best fish restaurant in town. They said he had left in a yacht bound for the Greek islands. Rumour had it he was hosting his own TV chat show, that he earned a fortune as a super model, that he was the most exclusive male escort in the world.

So Mr Marzipan melted into public reality. The girl was frantic at the loss of his individuality. The very grain of his features became coarser in her memory, that fine, lost, wandering quality now dispersed, vulgarized; he had become popular.

‘He was the only one in the world. The only one who was different. And now he’s just the same as everyone else, and I can never make him again.’

Needless to say, her plight caused much merriment among her friends.

‘What a loser, crying over a doll you made yourself, a lightweight made of sugar!’

‘Someone’s probably eaten him.’

‘Make another puppet,’ they jeered. ‘Make a man of sand. Ask the seagulls to give you some feathers for his hair. Ask the waves for a few seaweed toes. One pretend man is as good as another.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she cried. ‘He had a life of his own. He was real. He was real.’

‘Get yourself a real man,’ advised her friends. ‘One who won’t melt in the sun or rain, or crumble in the wind. Someone you don’t have to make excuses for.’

The girl hesitated. She saw the wisdom of this, she was tempted. But she thought and thought and in the end she concluded, ‘I could do better, a lot better. There are loads of men who would be more suitable than Mr Marzipan. More competent, more cultured, funnier, sharper. Much, much higher achievers. But unfortunately, my heart has set.’

Her friends, not understanding her persistent sorrow, gave up on her.

Meanwhile the thief had been having an unsatisfactory time. She found Mr Marzipan strangely wanting; none too bright. In particular, he seemed to be bizarrely amnesiac for his entire life up until really quite recently. He covered it up fairly well, being naturally evasive and wandering in speech, and at first she found this spacey, cool remoteness part of his appeal. But as time went on, she realised that he only seemed to have a few burbled memories: of a garden and a lighthouse, and sitting on the beach with a darling long-lost friend. Which made it extremely difficult to sustain a conversation with him.

‘You don’t seem to have a past,’ she brooded at him.

‘Why, wasn’t I here yesterday?’ said he, with his slow, parrying irony.

‘What about your childhood? What bands did you listen to when you were a teenager?’

‘Oh… the past is past.’

‘Sweetheart, you just don’t want to tell me!’

‘I don’t believe too much in all this analysis…’

He trailed off into one of his dreamy states. And so it would end, with her almost forced to believe that he was just the strong, silent type. But she never did quite believe it; she was suspicious as hell, and canny, and her thief’s instinct told her there was more to this man than met the eye. But God, he was irritating: so slow! To be blunt, she didn’t quite know what to do with her booty, but she was not going to give him up.

Spring lengthened and our girl, the maker, was still searching, walking the streets. Sometimes she thought she caught a glimpse of him in the distance but when she caught up, with a thumping heart, it was always someone else. So frustrating. Like, who would do that? Who would even do that, make off with a man made of marzipan that belonged to someone else? With his special sensitivities and vulnerabilities: that he didn’t do well in extremes of temperature, that he needed careful handling?

Then, when she was at the end of her resources, around mid-summer, someone suggested she go to the town witch, who was fantastically expensive.

She was the highly respectable type of seaside suburban fortune teller, with a prudish horror of wrongdoing and a scrupulous respect for karma. She lived in a bungalow bigger inside than out, with a box of tissues on the table and a ceiling hung with crystals, like souls collected over a lifetime.

‘Yes, darling,’ said she. ‘What can I do for you?’

She already knew, of course. She sat the girl down and gave her a Greek coffee, black and sweet, with a fragrance, yes, surely a fragrance of almond blossom in spring.

‘It’s Mr Marzipan,’ said the girl, sobbing at the first touch of sympathy. ‘I’m the only one who really, really loves him, I know I am.’

‘Ah,’ said the witch. ‘I know, my sweet. You got to be so careful with marzipan.’

But the girl was in full flow. How she was frantic about her lost darling, how terrible imaginings tormented her, that he might come to a sticky end: knocked down in a hit and run and left a squashed, dirty-yellow mass in the road. Or mauled in a gang-bang, torn limb from limb and devoured by rabid, shrieking girls on a hen night that got out of hand. Chopped into little pieces by the thief and dipped into chocolate and—

The witch covered her eyes with her hand, for it pained her to see the younger woman running along the same path she had chased down herself so many years since. Then she shook her head.

‘Darling, that’s not going to happen.’

‘Really?’

‘You’ll get him back. Rest assured. But it’ll be a bit tricky, I’m not kidding you.’

The girl hesitated. ‘You do believe me, don’t you? You don’t think I’m making it up? My friends think it’s just a fantasy.’

‘No,’ said the witch. ‘It’s all too real.’

And gently, she explained to the girl the consequences of her actions, and what happens when we break a condition, and how it always has to be paid for, often at much greater expense than the worth of the original article would seem to merit. And how sometimes we can spend a lifetime wandering the wilderness, looking for what we have thrown away, and how finding it again depends not on us but on timing, persistence and the problematical co-operation of God.

Then she read the girl her life from her coffee cup, her story all written backwards in the black hieroglyphics traced by the grounds. And it was all there, every word.

Reaching up to her ceiling of crystals, she plucked one and gave it to the girl with a look not of compassion but almost of envy.

The crystal sparkled in the palm of the girl’s hand like a live thing and she whispered, ‘What does it do?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ said the other. ‘But maybe you’ll find it helpful.’

The girl paid gratefully, and the witch was equally grateful in return, saying it was exactly the amount she needed to pay her gas bill and get her nails done and her eyebrows threaded, adding, ‘I’m past everything but Turkish delight and Botox myself, these days.’

She gave the girl a hug and sent her on her way. She stood a minute in her porch full of plants and watched the girl down the road.

By this time poor Mr Marzipan was so limp from handling that even his fingers were flopping. His beautiful glisten remained, that seemed to come from deep within, beyond the skin. But he was in bad shape. He was being maltreated.

‘Come on,’ said the thief, shaking him again. ‘There must be more to you than that.’

‘But there isn’t,’ said he, bewildered. ‘What you see is what you get.’

She gave him another slap round his face, leaving the print of her fingers on his putty cheek.

‘I’ll eat you!’ she screamed.

‘I really don’t think that’s possible,’ he said. ‘You’d probably choke, or be sick. I think… I think there’s too much of me to eat in one go.’

‘I don’t care! Want to lose another toe?’

‘And anyway, I think I’m kind of magic… I think, if you bite a bit off me, it’ll grow back… I seem to remember… or something… So I’m not too bothered. Only I wish you’d stop yelling at me. Gives me a headache…’

He was much more upset than he let on. He wanted something, but he couldn’t think what. He was uncomfortable, he wanted to sleep, he wanted to think, he wanted to cry, he wanted to remember.

But our girl was on her way, to fetch him back to the land of the memorious. A long, lonely journey. Every day she took out the witch’s crystal for company and it sparkled in her hand, encouraging her to go on, and every night she slept clutching it. At last she came to a great valley where the sun beat down and the only sound was a desiccated wind, a faint sifflement like the snigger of some cosmic being just out of sight. A great fear filled her heart. Suddenly she knew that she was coming to the end of her journey, and that she would not like what she was going to find. She went on, slowly.

It was a tree, almost the same colour as the sun-whitened sky and the sere grass. She trudged the long, last mile, up a slight hill. And there, lying beneath the tree, she saw a man. She knew it was him; the yellowed bones gave him away. The flesh had dried on him. His spine trailed long and bumpy away, like a world. He lay with his head to one side, his bony fingers clutching at the earth, shreds of skin lifting from the knuckles. The eyes were sealed, wisps of light grey hair stirred in the wind, his long teeth dreaming the eternal dream. She could see the beautiful grain of his skin still, wrapped tight to the bones. A faint waft of almond reached her.

She had made him. She had made him of sea-light and sun-spray, of the brown aura far out to sea, of the smell of coming rain. His ribs were the ribs of sand after the tide goes out, his heart was the gallop of her own when she had been in the womb. Now he lay before her, bones wrapped tight in yellow parchment. She couldn’t believe it. The thief had allowed him to dry out. Even if she hadn’t loved him – which she clearly hadn’t – how could she have dumped him like this? She must know that marzipan left out in the sun will dry and crack. Now he was unusable.

So the girl sat there all day with his head on her lap, to see if he lived or if it was the old heartbeat of the world she could feel throbbing up through her hand. Evening came, orange and navy round the rim of the world, and when a long shadow fell over her, she knew it was her rival.

‘Get out,’ said the thief. ‘He belongs to me. Tomorrow I’m going to bury him in my back garden. Yellow roses will spring from his bones, and no one will ever see him again.’

At that the girl knew he was not dead but drugged, because the other was a liar.

But how to wake him? Calling and shaking did nothing; he slept on, doped with the sleep of forgetting. At last the girl remembered the witch’s crystal and held it up to the light. In that dry place, the sparkling gem looked a hundred times more beautiful than before, and somehow she could see it was full of teardrops, slowly circling round and round, with tiny tails like translucent tadpoles. As she held the crystal up to the sun, a ray of light shot out and caught it and it broke, shattering into pieces, and the tears came cascading out. And she began to cry.

All night she wept over him, and shook him, his head lolling, but all the crying in the world wouldn’t wake him. But her tears fell abundantly on him and, in the first light, she saw his skin was filling out a little, as a footprint on sand fills with sea-water.

Morning came and she fell asleep in exhaustion, tumbled over the marzipan bones.

The next two nights she sat with him again on her own, weeping, and each night he plumped out a little more, until he looked years younger.

The third night passed and the girl had reached the place where there are no more tears and all that is left is a place of quiet and stillness within.

Dawn came; the last star glimmered. And in the blue, homesick minutes when night and day meet, the girl saw this magic, mixed light looking at her from Mr Marzipan’s eyes. He was sitting up, looking tousled, as well he might. The first sun streak caught the beads of moisture standing out on his skin, and the golden hairs shimmering along his fore-arms. He gazed around at the wide sky, the tree above them, and the peep of the rising sun on the ocean’s rim. Then he looked at her again; another of his long looks, across seas, across time. He smiled, and reached out a hand.

‘I remember you!’

Next morning the thief came to look for the remains of Mr Marzipan, to fling them into the sea to be eaten by the fishes, but he was not there. He and the girl had long since gone home.