Cousins fall under the spell of plastic versions of Universal's monsters
There they stood, bodies shiny, brittle and black, heads and hands a curious white green - until you turned out the lights, and their torsos became one with the darkness and their glares and prying fingers became the only things alive in the room.
They were not the models of choice, back in that era in which little pieces of plastic and small tubes of airplane glue were a boy's best friends. Most preferred the oblique dune buggies and vintage wartime flying machines that were the heart of the manufacturer's line. But things mechanical - cars, airplanes, rockets even - left me cold. These do-it-yourself statuettes of Universal's great monsters, however, with glow-in-the-dark hands and faces no less, allowed me to experience the thrill of assembly that was so much a rite of passage of that time.
The ease with which one put these models together surprised me - so much so that I began to wonder if all of them were like this, if this much ballyhooed aptitude had a lot less to it than I was told, maybe even if the unlikeliest of scenarios was true: that I, movie-loving, book-reading I, was a mechanical genius.
Even if I was, I knew it would never be a component of my persona I would repeatedly exploit. The thrill for me was not in playing Dr Frankenstein, not in the actual creation of the creature. I was more the little girl or the blind man in that film; admiration was my penchant, the basking, quite literally in this case, in the glow. How many nights did I spend staring at the two of them, Frankenstein and Dracula, either in their fullness with the lights on or in their half state with them off? They didn't scare me - I was too old for that. Rather, they pulled me, by the tips of their beseeching, glowing fingers, deeper into the world of the movies, made me feel closer to it, as if, in helping to form their identities with my hands, I had been deemed a kind of director or producer.
My cousin Richard, much younger than I, was the one who took them at face - luminescent face - value. He was just as infatuated with them as I, but for completely different reasons, for the right reason in fact: because they scared the hell out of him.
It made me feel warm, important and - my first taste of it - parental to stand by him as he stood, mesmerized with fear, staring. I would reassure him that these figures were not real, that they had been created from a box. But so mesmerized was he that he scant believed me. Maybe he was right. For as I stood there with him, the pair of us looking up at that other pair, there was often the vague sensation that this was their world, that Frankenstein had gotten loose from its creator, and that Dracula had drawn us to his lair.
Sometimes Richard would run his tiny finger along the deepest recesses of their glowing parts, the tiny crevices that were their eyes and mouths, the thin, delicate extremities that were their hands. Once - our last occasion admiring these figures? - he turned to me and smiled afterwards, to tell me that, finally, he believed me.
His faith had turned from one kind of model to another.
