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Still Marvin refuses to visit. Once I physically put him into the room. “This is the laundry, Marvin,” I said. “Please clean it.” He spun on his wheels and trundled out.
Marvin’s map. Note the fictional rooms on the left, and the big balcony at the top: Marvin’s realm of dreams.Credit: Michael Bachelard
The laundry (he’s named it Study 1) may be dead to Marvin, but over time he has brought to life a number of other rooms on his little internal map. Off to the side of the toilet a room has appeared that he calls “Balcony”. There’s nothing there, I guarantee. I’ve checked. My daughter’s room has acquired a fictitious extension too, marked Room 2. Its irregular edges suggest Marvin is guessing at its dimensions, which is fair enough because IT DOESN’T EXIST.
A genuine space that Marvin can glimpse, and has mapped through the sliding glass doors, is our actual balcony. He’s imputed vast, fresh fields to mop there, divided it neatly into rooms called Room, Room 1 and, inexplicably, Dining Room. There’s a Room 3 somewhere in the ether too. I had to draw a firm line on his virtual map to stop Marvin’s frenzied attempts to get out there, during which he would repeatedly bang his little bumper bar against the glass.
Then there are the things he doesn’t see – and will apparently never learn. The legs of our barstools run along the ground, below Marvin’s gaze but high enough for him to get stuck on. After marooning himself there multiple times and requiring assistance, we now put them on the (actual) balcony at cleaning time, in the realm of Marvin’s dreams.
He found his way into my daughter’s wardrobe once, wrapped her dressing gown cord around his roller and virtually hanged himself while plaintively calling for help. That time I had to come home from work to untangle him.
A couple of weeks ago, I checked on him because he was making a funny noise, to realise he’d disembowelled himself in the middle of his task. Cat hair had plugged him up to such an extent that his roller had popped out. He was battling gamely on with his work without any of the requisite cleaning equipment on board.
“Is he worth it, do you think?” my wife inquired recently. She finds him irritating and inexplicable, and suspects I only bought him to shirk my duty as duster and vacuumer (she might be partially right there).
“What’s he doing?” she asked last week as Marvin burst out of his home station, bumped immediately into the staircase then turned circles for the next few minutes wondering where he was.
The honest answer is, I have no idea. Marvin, you’re a mystery to me too. But, as gormless as you are, as flawed, puzzling and lacking in intellectual and emotional depth, I’m coming to think you’re quite cute. Also, without you we’d be mopping every week.
Excuse me now; a little someone needs his dirty mop bucket emptied.
Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age.
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