Toby Alone

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Maya Alnorell married Sim Lolness. They were in love, and they stayed as much in love as when they had first met, at a knitting lesson.

  Knitting silk was something every daughter from a respectable family had to learn to do. Since Sim Lolness was already working very hard – dividing his days between the library, the laboratory and the botanical gardens – and seeing as he just didn’t have time to “meet someone special,” as his mother put it, he had enrolled in knitting lessons. Unsurprisingly, he was the only boy in the class. In just an hour a week, he was guaranteed to meet thirty girls at one go – it was an efficient way of getting an idea about this unknown species.

  The first week he observed.

  The second week he invented the knitting machine.

  The third week the class was cancelled.

  And that was the end of hand-knitted silk.

  But pretty Maya had immediately understood what was hiding under the beret of this young man, who had come from the Branches to study in the Treetop. She fell in love with him.

  One spring morning she tapped on the door of his poky student room.

  “Hello.”

  “Miss… Er… Yes?”

  “You left your beret behind at the last lesson.”

  “Oh! I… Goodness me…”

  Maya took a step inside. Sim shrank back. It was the first time he had looked at a girl properly, and he was discovering a whole new planet. He wanted to take notes, but realised it might not be the proper thing to do.

  The truth was, to his great surprise, he wanted to fill two or three books on the subject, but he also just wanted to look at her.

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” she asked after a while.

  “Yes… You’re… You’re… Turning my whole life upside down, if you don’t mind me saying so, with all due respect, miss.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry…”

  She went to the door. Sim rushed to block her exit. He adjusted his glasses.

  “No! I… You can stay…”

  He offered her some cold water and a ball of gum. The way she held her cup of water made Sim want to sketch her. But he resisted. He’d divided the ball of gum with his fingers, which kept sticking to things when he tried to pick them up.

  Maya giggled to herself.

  Sim reached for the walls to try and pull himself together, but he left a trail of gum all around the room.

  After a while, Maya made her excuses and left, stepping over one trail and under another.

  “Thanks for the beret,” Sim called, as he watched her leave. At which point he realised the beret was on his head, and that he had been wearing it when she’d arrived. In short, he had never left it behind.

  He took off his thick-lens glasses, put them down on the table and fell to the ground. Out cold.

  Later, he understood why he’d fainted that day – for the simple reason that if she had brought him a beret he hadn’t left behind, she must have wanted to see him again.

  Yes, him. Which was plenty to faint about.

  A year later they were married. It was a beautiful Summit wedding. Mrs Alnorell agreed to spend a few crumbs of her fortune. Mr Perlush, the accountant, sobbed as he took two golden coins from a bath full to overflowing.

  “Mrs Alnorell, we’re as good as ruined…” he lamented, staring at the bathtub with its contents spilling out, not to mention the corridor leading to fourteen rooms where the coffers were piled high with mountains of coins and notes.

  Mrs Alnorell behaved herself reasonably well during the wedding, but she did make fun of how awkward Sim’s father was.

  Being unfamiliar with the habits of high society, Sim Lolness’s father was trying a bit too hard. He snacked on the spring buds meant to decorate the buffet. He lifted up the women’s long dresses so they wouldn’t get dust on them. After a few glasses, he was kissing everyone’s hands, including the men’s, and twirling his tie like it was a sweet-paper.

  For twenty years, the happy couple was childless, which infuriated Mrs Alnorell.

  And then one day…

  Toby.

  He suddenly came into their life, and completed their joy.

  His grandmother quickly decided there was too much Lolness in him, and not enough Alnorell. So, when Toby spent his summers on his grandmother’s estates, she handed him over to a fleet of nannies, and did everything to avoid him. According to her, children were dirty and full of infections. She fled in the opposite direction the moment she saw him coming. In the five or six summers Toby spent there, she hardly ever saw her own grandson.

  And each time she did, she had a fit of hysterics.

  “Get him away from me! I’m having an attack of the vapours!” she would yelp, and Toby would be whisked off as if he had the plague.

  Which was why, as she made her way further down into the Low Branches, towards the place where she would be living from now on with her husband and son, Maya Lolness was choking back the tears. She had fought so hard against her own, and her mother’s, snobbery, but she felt her disgust for the dark, spongy territories of the Low Branches rising to the surface.

  Her husband could see she was crying. Every so often he asked her what was wrong.

  “I’m so happy to be with both of you,” she tried, smiling unconvincingly. And she walked on again, wrapping her shawl round her.

  Toby glanced at his father; he knew he was suffering. Not that he would be feeling sorry for himself, because Sim Lolness could always find something to be amazed about, even a fly’s intestines. No, he was suffering because he was dragging his wife and his son down with him, a part of his punishment.

  The family was in exile.

  These three beings, abandoned by the porters in the middle of nowhere, in the Land of Onessa, right at the end of a branch with two enormous flame-coloured leaves hanging under it, this family, had been banished from the rest of the Tree, condemned to decay and exile.

  “Here we are,” whispered Toby’s father.

  The branch was so damp it felt as if they were walking on cold soup. Toby was sitting on his suitcase, wringing out his socks.

  “Here we are,” said Sim again, in a tight voice.

  Maya Lolness was hiding her tears in her shawl.

  After so much glory, honour and success, Sim Lolness and his family were starting again from nothing.

  From less than nothing.

  3

  The Race

  Against Winter

  When they arrived in Onessa, Toby and his parents quickly realised that the countdown to winter had begun. A freezing autumn had already set in, and the Low Branches looked set for grim winters. The little family spent an uncomfortable first night outside. A damp breeze crept under the blanket where they shivered the night away.

  “Come on, son. Let’s set to work.”

  At dawn the next day, Sim Lolness started hollowing out their home.

  Up in the Treetop, it would take five or six workers and a team of trained weevils six months to hollow out a modestly-sized house. Down here, Toby and his parents started off by clearing the bark so they could put in the front door and windows. Then they carefully carved three or four main rooms out of the wood itself, making sure not to harm the Tree, or interrupt the flow of the sap.

  The most desirable homes in the Summit had balconies, comfortable furniture, and two fireplaces. Some even had a rain tank, providing running water. For their first winter in the Low Branches, the Lolness family was just hoping for a small communal room with a chimney. This alone would be a huge task.

  At nearly two millimetres, Sim Lolness was a tall man. He weighed a good eight centigrams. But though he was a well-built fifty-year-old, he had very little experience when it came to manual work. He could recite his times tables forwards and backwards, all the way to a thousand. He’d written five-hundred-page books with titles such as The Life Expectancy of Megalopods and Why Don’t Ladybirds Have Five Dots on their Backs? and The Optics of a Drop of Water. And he could spot a new star in a flash. B
ut he didn’t know one end of a hammer from the other, and he would have banged his finger all the way in before hitting the nail once. Anything practical Sim Lolness had to learn from scratch, with his wife and son looking on.

  Toby made progress much faster than anyone else. Aged seven, he was in charge of all the fiddly jobs. He was small enough to hollow out the chimney, the kind of delicate task you couldn’t give to digger weevils, with their jawbones sharp as machetes.

  Using weevils to carve out spaces did carry a serious risk, because they were capable of reducing the entire Tree to dust if they weren’t properly handled. Toby’s father was against the big weevil-rearing projects recently developed in the Tree and linked to the construction industry. But in any case, the Lolness family didn’t have a weevil or a worker or any kind of real tool at all. Toby used a nail file, his father a bread knife. Mrs Lolness moulded resin squares to make windows, and patched up scraps of cloth to make covers and carpets.

  That autumn could be summed up in one word: digging. Twice a day, a bowl of thin soup restored their strength. They slept for a few hours at night, but didn’t even wait for daybreak before getting back to work again, in the rain.

  On Christmas morning, they closed the wooden door behind them and had a good look at their work. It wasn’t exactly a dream house. The floor slanted, the walls were uneven and the windows were crooked. The fireplace looked like a triangular kennel, while the smoke went out through a corkscrew-shaped chimney.

  Toby’s bed was right by the fireplace, and at night he could pull a curtain across to be on his own. Among the odds and ends sewn into the curtain were a pair of boxer shorts, two shirts and a purple petticoat. Toby spent many hours on his bed, listening to the sounds of the fire, watching the glint of the flames through the white fabric of the boxer shorts. Every evening shadows and glimmers projected for Toby a never-ending and ever-changing story.

  But Toby didn’t tuck himself up in bed on the first evening the Lolness family entered their new home. The three of them sat on his parents’ bed, in front of a crackling fire. They held hands. No sooner had they lowered the door latch, than it started blowing a gale outside and a few melted snowflakes splatted against the panes. Winter was knocking at the windows.

  The house was rickety and small, but there is no better feeling than listening to a storm from the shelter of a house you have built with your own hands. Briefly, Toby saw his mother’s smile spring back to life, and he started to cry.

  “Well, make your minds up,” Sim sighed, seeing how emotional his wife and son were. “Are we happy here, or not?”

  “I’m crying because I’m so happy,” insisted Toby, and promptly started to laugh. A tear trickled down Maya’s cheek. They looked at each other and all three of them burst out laughing.

  Oddly, Toby had fond memories of that winter. They barely left the house. Every morning, they went out to do a few jobs. Maya would go and get a packet of leaf flour from the larder they’d dug out of the bark a few steps from the house. Sim and his son would gather firewood and do any essential repairs. All three of them returned to their communal room as quickly as possible, where the fire was waiting for them, crouching in its corner.

  Toby had given the fire a name, Flam, and he pretended it was his pet animal. Whenever he came back into the room, he’d chuck in a piece of wood that Flam happily pounced on. Maya would smile. An only child can always invent company for himself.

  Then Sim Lolness would take down a big blue file from the shelves, and put it on the table. He’d wave a great sheaf of pages under Toby’s nose, and fold his arms. Toby would start reading out loud.

  For four months this was the pattern of their days. In the beginning, Toby didn’t understand a single word of what he was reading to his father. For the first three weeks, the folder on bark tectonics was complete gobbledegook, even if his father gave an occasional sigh of satisfaction or a little groan, listening to these scientific readings as if they were adventure stories.

  Toby concentrated harder. He was beside himself with excitement when he recognised a word such as “light” or “sliding”. Little by little, there were flashes that made sense. The second file was called “The Psycho-sociology of Hymenopterans”, which Toby soon realised was about ants. His voice became more confident. Sometimes Maya, who had taken up knitting again, looked up from her work and listened carefully too. The files contained the main body of Professor Lolness’s research, and his wife could remember exactly when each of them had been written. The work on the cucullates chrysalis, for example, took her back to their first years together as a young couple, when Sim would rush home in the evenings, his beret skew-whiff, all fired up by a discovery he was bursting to tell his wife about.

  Up until April, they didn’t see a single person, and they never went more than ten minutes away from their home. Then, in the first week of April, while the enormous buds were starting to swell and crack with the rising sap, they heard a noise.

  At first, Toby thought he must have imagined it. There was a tapping noise at the window. Perhaps it was the last rainfall before the arrival of better weather? But the tap-tapping started up again. Toby turned towards the window and saw a bearded face staring at him. He waved to his father, who hesitated before going to open the door.

  An old man was standing in front of the house.

  “I’m your neighbour, Vigo Tornett.”

  “Sim Lolness, pleased to meet you.”

  The name Tornett sounded familiar.

  “I beg your pardon, but I believe I know you,” Sim added.

  “I’m the one who knows you, Professor. I’m a great admirer of your work. I’ve read your book on Origins. I just dropped by to say a neighbourly hello.”

  “Neighbourly?”

  Sim glanced over Tornett’s shoulder. He couldn’t see how there could be any neighbours in a place as desolate as Onessa.

  “I live in the first house, three hours’ walk west from here,” Old Tornett explained.

  He stepped inside and took a brown paper parcel out from a bundle.

  “I live with my nephew, who’s a grubber. I’ve brought you some grub pâté, Mrs Lolness.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr Tornett, but how can we accept when—”

  “Please, Mrs Lolness, what are neighbours for?”

  “Do at least stay and have lunch with us?”

  “I’m sorry, I must be getting back now. But I didn’t want to let another day go by without coming to see you. Unfortunately, I’m not good in this weather; I get crippled with rheumatism during the winter. I do hope you’ll forgive me for not being a very welcoming neighbour, until today.”

  He shook them all by the hand and departed.

  And with this visit the summer months began.

  Summer in the Low Branches is a bit less freezing, a bit less wet, and a bit less dark than the rest of the year. But it doesn’t stop your clothes being damp, or your feet and hands going numb the moment you go outside.

  Toby’s scientific readings came to an end and he started exploring the region for himself. He would set out in the morning, after drinking a bowl of black bark juice, and come back in the evening, dirty and soaked through, his hair tousled, his eyes tired but shining.

  Soon, he embarked on an expedition to the Tornett household. He got lost five times before coming across three enormous grubs snoring in their nests. Vigo Tornett had mentioned his nephew was a grubber, so Toby guessed he wasn’t far from his goal.

  At last he found the house – a low structure with no windows but a wide door. A strange-looking man was sitting on the threshold. When he saw Toby, he got up and disappeared. Old Tornett came out of the house and smiled at Toby.

  “Delighted to see you, my boy. How did you find your way here?”

  The other man reappeared behind Vigo Tornett.

  “This is my nephew, Plok,” he explained. “And this is his house. He’s been kind enough to put a roof over his elderly uncle’s head these past few years. Pl
ok, let me introduce you to—”

  “Toby,” said Toby, holding out his hand.

  “Yes, Toby Lolness,” Tornett went on. “I told you about Toby. He’s the son of a great man, a wonderful scientist, Sim Lolness.”

  Satisfied, Plok grunted and went back into the house.

  “Plok can’t speak. He’s been a grubber for twenty years. He’s thirty-five now.”

  Toby wouldn’t have guessed that Plok was a day over twelve and a half.

  He opened his pouch and shared some biscuits he had brought with Mr Tornett. He was surprised to be greeted man to man, like a friend. Vigo Tornett was hugely likeable. He talked fondly about the region, and said he was starting to feel attached to it, despite his legs complaining, making him suffer because of the damp.

  “Throughout my youth I was a scatterbrain. I did some very stupid things. Now I’m old and all done in, but I can see clearly. I think I’ve grown up at last.”

  Plok stuck his head round the door from time to time, to stare at their young visitor. Toby gave him a friendly wave and Plok vanished.

  “How old are you, young man?” asked Tornett.

  “Seven,” Toby replied.

  Tornett bit into his biscuit and nodded.

  “Same age as little Lee…”

  “Little what?”

  “The little Lee girl, at the Border.”

  “What Border?”

  “The Border with the Grass people, four or five hours away from your house.”

  Toby knew that the Grass people existed, but this was the first time anyone had mentioned them openly in front of him. “Grassies” – it was the kind of rude name you didn’t say in front of children.

  The conversation stopped there when Vigo Tornett suddenly noticed how late it was, and urged Toby to get home before nightfall.

  When Toby lay down on his bed that evening, listening to the crackling of the embers and the clicking of his mother’s knitting needles, he thought he could see the shadows of the mysterious Grass people on the white boxer shorts in the curtain. He also remembered the little Lee girl being mentioned.