Nokio's Heart

I collected you from pawn and charity shops and kept you in tea chests in the front room till I was ready.

We'd known, Marfa and me, ever since you arrived in our lives twenty years ago, that you were faulty.

A loose connection they'd said. 

We didn't mind. You were our little robot girl.

Nokio. 

For a while we tried to get you perfect, so the Gepetto's, those government-appointed android vets, checked your cogs, springs and  servo rods. A little creaky brass, some off-set pewter and a really loose

 screw, you were almost good as new, your second heart was doing no harm But your limp was beyond repair.

I first saw one of your hands about ten years ago, just after you'd gone, a metal one with little pulleys sticking out at the wrist. A unmistakably dainty hand and still wearing the polished washer I'd put on your finger for your 4th birthday. 

They'd looked at me funny in the shop, my leaning head and rusted tear ducts. I know they thought I was weird. An bot oddity buying a hand way too small for my own steel arm but I didn't care.

I knew in my carbon heart that if one of your hands was out there then the rest of you was.

And so for a decade I searched every junk shop, curio corner, every Grandads' Basement, every car boot, flea market, table top sale, rummage sale, Derby and Joan, scrap yard and antique shop in a fifty mile radius of our home.

I even placed an ad in the local newspaper, the classifieds. 

Wanted: spare parts of a metal girl. Cash waiting. Will collect.

That ad got me both your legs back believe it not. They'd been gathering dust and cobwebs in a shed twenty miles away!

You'd been spread far and wide, but then again you always liked to travel.

I remember the time your mother and me, God rest her diamond soul, took you to Pontins. 

You'd loved the word 'tins' in the big sign, as we pulled up in our bubble car. 

"Look Mum! look Dad! Pon - tins! Tins, like us! This is going to be such a great holiday."

And it was. 

O Nokio!

Even when the teddy boys chucked you in the pool and you started to oxidate. The lifeguard threw in a ring and you were safe. He chucked those Teds out of the lido and we laughed so hard. Then we gave you a nice oil bath before seeing a show.

You were on cloud nine.

We should have known things were going too well. They never do for robots in this human world. We tried. Boy, how we tried to fit right in, but our flesh and blood neighbours tutted and scoffed as we clicked on by, waving our clunky digits in an act metal futility. 

They never waved back, rather, put up flags of human faces along the street.

We should have sent you to a school for droids but in our zeal to integrate we enrolled you at the Comprehensive down the way.

It was there the unbridled loathing for robots took on its true nature in the form of Tinks.

Tinks was a young girl like you, Year 7, starting big school. But Tinks was an angry human child, her home life an excuse for living, her parents prejudiced to the point of corruption and a family steeped in the hatred of anyone different to them, specially droids and bots like us.

They began almost immediately, the taunts, the curses, the insults and eventually, with teachers turning a blind eye, it culminated in a fight. 

Tinks the bully verses our little robot girl.

You never stood a chance, though made of aluminium and stuff. 

Tinks was hardened by cruelty and was a seasoned brawler of the streets.

"You limpy chunk of trash Nokio! A good-for-nothing Refuse-gee!"

Despite holding your own for a minute or so, we've been told you were knocked down by a devastating blow with a wrench, at which point Tinks Then kicked you to bits in the schoolyard, the other children, including half-bots, looking on.

Kids stuffed parts of you in bags and satchels and by the time we were called into school you were a mere pile of springs and wires.

That's all that was left of our little bot Nokio.

The Head said she was sorry but they really didn't have the facilities to have cared for you. You would have been better at a school for droids. There was nothing she could (and after all you wete only a robot and there really shouldn't be any in the community should there is what she actually thought).

We cried a sea of isotonic tears and watched our tinplate hearts break in two. No amount of fixative or soldering would mend them. Only you could do that. Only you. 

Marfa died of that broken heart. I put her n the attic. If only she'd hung on one more year when I found your head in Your old school cabinet, the final part.

And so today I'm ready to rebuild you from scratch, To start again where we left off a decade ago when you were ten. 

And here you are, my lost Nokio, stood before me once again, as bright as a robot button and twice as nice.

"Where's Mum?" you asked And I explained that I just didn't have to part to save her.

You stared at me and tapped your chest.

"but Dad, don't you Remember, look inside my breastplate window. Mum can have my old spare heart!"

"Yes!"

O Nokio, our little robot girl.