The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  Cathy had not lived such a sheltered life that she had never been buttered up by a boy before. Boys talked to Lizzy all of the time, but there had been moments when it had been Cathy forced to listen to some simpleton prattle on about how his father was getting a motorcar, or the crabs he’d hauled in from the traps that morning. She looked at Kaspar with the same glassy expression as she had with those boys, but she was ashamed to admit there was a little corner of her that wanted him to go on. The idea that one of the paper trees decorating the alcove could spring from a box so small seemed absurd. She looked up at one now. The display was ringed by yews of crêpe paper and corrugated card, a hazel tree with catkins of newspaper curls. Even the smallest of them stood twice as tall as Cathy. The biggest, whose canopy stretched across the rest, reached as far as the gallery above, its branches rimed in hoarfrost of confetti.

  ‘I don’t know where the idea of trees in boxes came from. Only – I can still remember the little village where we Godmans used to live, and how big the trees seemed there. I was barely a boy when we left, but those images always stayed with me. And, at the end of the day, that’s what toys do, isn’t it? They take you back there, where a part of you always remains. And I knew – if I could only fix that memory in my mind, I could make the paper do anything I desired. Well, it took me a thousand-and-one attempts to make it work. One wrong fold, you see, and the magic just collapses. Some of the early ones opened up into great shredded nests. One became this gnarled archway of branches and bones – it looked just like a ruined temple. But then …’

  He had been toying with the boxed-up black larch all along, and now he cast it at the ground. Where it hit the hard Emporium floor, the varnished box cracked. As soon as the seal was open, whatever forces pinned the tree within grew frenzied and wild. The box whirled on the spot like a spinning top as the paper fought to break free. Then, it erupted forth. The box stopped dead, anchoring the paper as it tore upwards. In fits and bursts of unfolding, the trunk revolved and filled out. Low boughs sprang outwards, with yet more branches and twigs unfolding from them, and a myriad of brown paper leaves unfurled at their ends. Higher up, the pressure exploded and out rolled a canopy of interlocking branches and vines, a bird’s nest of shredded paper. From a hole in the trunk, the stencilled eyes of an owl gazed watchfully out.

  All of this had happened in seconds, but for long minutes afterwards the tremors worked in the tree and all of its details fell into place. The sound of the paper leaves settling was like the rustling of an autumn wind, even though the Emporium was already in the grip of deepest winter.

  ‘It’s … magical,’ breathed Cathy.

  ‘Would that it were,’ Kaspar replied, gazing into the branches above. ‘But some things aren’t magic at all. Some things are only mathematics.’ He stopped. ‘Cathy, I have to apologise. Ordinarily, when new shop hands enlist, I’m the first to welcome them. But you must understand, the night you arrived, it was …’

  ‘Opening night,’ finished Cathy.

  ‘And you arrived not a moment too soon. We’re understaffed this year, as every year. We never know how busy things are going to—’

  A cry went up, somewhere on the Emporium floor. Kaspar cut short whatever he was about to say and whirled around just in time to see two boys hurtling out of the aisle, their faces contorted in terror. Immediately, he knew what he had done. The bears between the bookshelves, they had been too real. He had aligned the eyes and teeth too well, taken his work too far again. It was not the first time. Probably one of those boys had dared to put his hand in the bear’s mouth, and when he had, he had felt the deep rumble from inside its belly, seen the gleeful malevolence sparkling in its eyes. It was all make believe, but to boys that didn’t matter. Once his father found out, the lecturing would last long into the night: until Kaspar knew what he was doing, until he properly knew his craft, he should contain himself. Things could go drastically wrong with a toy ill made; games turned sour on an instant. No doubt Emil would watch gleefully from the corner of their quarters, because any black mark against Kaspar was a golden star for Emil.

  Kaspar held up his hands. The boys were rampaging toward him, looking desperately for a place to hide. Some of the shoppers had noticed the commotion now; all eyes along the aisle revolved until they stared into the copse of paper trees.

  Clawing at each other to get ahead, the boys scrambled into the alcove. As they breached the first line of trees, Cathy felt Kaspar’s hand close over her own. Then he was wrenching her out of their path. Not a moment later, the boys came cartwheeling past, no longer in control of their own arms and legs. Tangled together, they plunged headlong into the pyramid of boxes.

  Kaspar’s hand was like a claw over Cathy’s own. She had been trying to tease hers away (this is what boys always did) but now he was straining in the other direction, and when she caught his eyes they too were open in horror. Only, unlike the boys spread-eagled in the boxes, this horror was tinged with glee. ‘Run!’ he mouthed. It took Cathy too long to understand what he meant. By then, the first paper tree was already sprouting.

  Beneath the prostrate boys, one of the boxes had started to unravel. Paper burst upwards like a geyser, forceful enough to send one boy flying and carry the other up high on a tide of unfolding boughs. Other boxes, their seals already broken, were pulsing as the paper tried to force its way into the light. More had been snagged in the branches of the first tree as it rocketed upwards, but when that tree’s growth suddenly stopped, they continued their flight, arcing up past the galleries and into the Emporium dome, where one of the serpents of fabric and lace looped the loop to avoid being hit. Through the branches still budding newsprint leaves, Kaspar saw the flying boxes open. One tree was exploding mid-flight; uncertain which way was down, it became an orb of latticed branches before crashing to earth, somewhere among the doll’s houses of the neighbouring aisle. Other boxes remained intact as they flew. They seemed to hang in the air, if only to tease, but in a second they would come down like hailstones.

  ‘This way!’ cried Kaspar. ‘New girl, now!’

  He took her by the hand and darted along the aisle. Behind them, one of the boxes crashed down and, seconds later, a Douglas fir erupted. Up ahead, a row of hawthorns ascended, battling against each other as they curled into the vault above the aisles. Kaspar steered her left, heard the panicked cries as other shoppers ditched their baskets and fled for the entrance. Somewhere, the patchwork dog was setting up the kind of bark only it could, with a sound like wet laundry.

  Cathy risked a glance upwards. Boxes were raining down. One had lodged in the rails of the gallery above, and the rowan tree that had sprouted out was teetering, ready to tumble. Instinctively, she cowered. That was when she felt Kaspar’s arm about her shoulder. ‘Here!’ he cried, and steered her into a dead end of an aisle. At its apex sat a Wendy House, ringed with a perfect picket fence.

  Kaspar was harrying her towards it when one of the boxes landed at her feet. She reeled back, just in time to feel the rush of paper leaves roaring across her face. Kaspar put his arms around her, pirouetting through the branches of yet more trees springing up around them. To Cathy, the Emporium was a whirlwind of whites and yellows, crêpe paper and card. Half blind, she let Kaspar usher her over the picket fence, and in through the Wendy House door.

  For the first time, the world felt still. Kaspar still had his arms around her, but now she tore herself out of the embrace. She was ready to barrack him, but the pained expression on his face made her pause. That was when she saw where she was standing.

  Inside the Wendy House, what had promised to be a cramped corner revealed itself to be a living room of preposterous size. Three armchairs gathered around an open hearth, and in between them was a table with board games piled high. There was a shelf full of books and a deep-pile rug, and in the corner a basket in which a toy tiger lounged. As they had approached, the Wendy House had barely reached the line of her shoulder. She closed her eyes, but they had not been deceiving her.
Inside, the room was big enough to perform a cartwheel – and she would have done exactly that, if only her insides had not been cartwheeling of their own accord all morning. She stretched a hand upwards but her fingers could not even grace the rafters overhead.

  She was about to step outside and check the veracity of her own vision, but Kaspar reached out for her again. ‘Not yet …’

  Outside, the Emporium floor was groaning as the new trees settled. Cathy and Kaspar gazed out across a paper forest. Some enterprising customer had opened a box of Emil’s pipe-cleaner birds and they were now fluttering up high, their wings spinning vainly as they searched for a roost.

  ‘It will be safe soon,’ said Kaspar. ‘Just wait to make sure they haven’t—’

  The words had barely left his lips when there was a rustling in the boughs of the nearest tree, and from its uppermost branches another varnished box crashed down, fracturing in front of the Wendy House door. Kaspar staggered back, taking Cathy with him, just as the tree exploded upwards, bulbous trunk and overhanging branches blocking their view. Moments later, when the tree was fully grown, Kaspar picked himself up and ran his hands across the bark. There was no way through.

  Half of him was already counting the cost of putting this right, imagining the grave look on his father’s face, but the other half was grinning inanely, overjoyed to behold this wonderland his toys had made. The customers who had seen this (those without concussions, at any rate) would make sure this story was told for Christmases to come. There would be a rush on EMPORIUM INSTANT TREES tomorrow; this he could say with every inch of merchant’s instinct that lay within him. Papa, he would say when the old man began his rebuke, don’t you see what I’ve done? I’ve done better than make us a fortune – I’ve made us a spectacle. My toys, they’ll outsell Emil’s soldiers for certain …

  He was about to impart all of this to the new girl – yet, when he looked around, she was still agape, exploring every recess of the Wendy House, running her fingers over every surface as if to make certain it was real.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This, Miss Wray, is my papa’s pride and joy. He loves it so much he can’t bear to sell it, so we keep it just for show. Last Christmas, a man waltzed in here with a Gladstone bag stuffed full of pound notes, but Papa wouldn’t even come out of his workshop to see him. I had to send him away with a flea in his ear.’

  ‘But … how?’

  It pained Kaspar to admit that he did not yet fully comprehend what his father had done to stretch out the space inside the playhouse. ‘Papa … does things. Emil or I, we’ll make a toy and along comes Papa and … he’s better, don’t you see? The things he does – why, there are toys, and then there are Papa Jack’s toys. And this Wendy House, well … I’ll get to the truth of the matter soon enough. Didn’t you ever have a lair when you were small? Somewhere secret only you knew about? A place in the bushes, or a corner of an attic, or …’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Cathy, ‘but never like this.’

  ‘When Emil and I were just boys, we must have had a dozen different dens hidden around the shopfloor. They still show up from time to time, never where you’d think to look.’

  ‘We had a treehouse,’ Cathy remembered. ‘Lizzy – that’s my sister – used to sneak up cups and saucers and old china.’

  ‘Well, there you have it. And didn’t that treehouse seem huge when you were small? It might have been a castle itself when you were five years old. You probably thought it had an east and west wing, different antechambers, a gatehouse and a bailey and a curtain wall. Only, if you went back to it now, you’d find it tiny, just a few lengths of stick and a cramped little cubby. Do you see?’

  Cathy really didn’t.

  ‘That’s the secret, I think. Papa won’t tell me because he says I’ll only really understand if I discover it myself, just like he did. But it’s got to be the perspectives. When you’re making toys, you’ve got to have the perspective of a child. Get that right and I would think you can do almost anything with space.’

  Cathy had finished walking the circumference of the room and, for the first time, returned to the door where the paper tree sprawled.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait it out,’ said Kaspar, still hardly masking his glee. ‘They’ll dig us out soon. But …’ He paused, for there was a pained expression on Cathy’s face. She was cupping her belly with one hand and, with the other, bracing herself against the Wendy House wall. ‘New girl, what’s wrong?’

  She opened her mouth to tell him it was nothing, but when no words came, Kaspar was already at her side. ‘New girl?’ He might have been shouting, but to Cathy the voice was as distant as the Emporium doors.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, but this time she did not resist as Kaspar put an arm around her and helped her into the armchair at the hearth.

  It had been happening too often, these moments when even the dizziness grew so acute she could feel the Emporium spinning. Normally it was in the mornings, when she woke in the small hours and had to creep to the washroom. On those occasions the dizziness could be stifled with tea and dry toast, but more and more often it was coming in the middle of the day. Only yesterday, she had been resting in the stacks when Sally-Anne had wandered past and made some remark about her shirking. Secrets, it seemed, always wanted to be shared.

  Kaspar had found water from somewhere. She put the mug to her lips and felt rejuvenated, if only for a second. It was only now, when she was at her weakest, that her thoughts flickered back to that little strip along the estuary sands and all the people she had left behind. And: is my mother still knotted with fear? she wondered. Is Lizzy worried for me, or does she secretly smile when our parents look the other way?

  Now that the room had come back into focus, she could see that Kaspar was considering her like she was some puzzle he had to unpick, all his glee at the paper forest suddenly drained away.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she promised. ‘I haven’t been eating properly, that’s all.’

  Kaspar’s eyes dropped from her face to her belly, before drifting back up. There was no doubt what he was thinking, for Cathy had felt her body straining at her clothes too often in the past days. It was foolish not to have brought more. New life was not the sort of thing you could overlook for ever. The baby had been tumbling all day; she could feel it as a new kind of nausea rippling across her insides.

  ‘Cathy,’ he whispered, ‘how old are you?’

  ‘I’m nineteen,’ she said, tensing beneath his touch.

  ‘You’re sixteen if you’re a day.’

  She held his stare. His eyes had pierced her, but she held it still.

  ‘You answered one of Papa’s adverts. That means you had to be running away from something. You can’t keep a secret in the Emporium, Cathy. Along these aisles, a secret’s never safe.’

  It seemed important to go on looking into his eyes. They were not eyes you could get lost in; they were open and empty as the oceans, blue threaded with grey like the breakers of waves. The more she stared, the deeper that ocean seemed. And yet she went on staring.

  He was on the verge of saying something, but she would never know what – for, at that moment, the paper trunk blocking the door began to buckle and crease. Kaspar leapt to his feet. Without exchanging another word, they watched as the glint of an axe appeared through the bark. It drew back, swung again, and at last the paper monstrosity began to list, revealing the Emporium floor.

  In the doorway, showered in scraps of paper and card, stood Emil. His eyes were alive with the joy of discovery.

  ‘Kaspar,’ he said, shaking shreds of paper bark out of his hair, ‘I just knew it would be you.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Papa knows it too. He’s looking for you.’

  ‘I’ll bet he is,’ beamed Kaspar – and Cathy saw the look they exchanged, the one that said: there’ll be stern words, brother, but every one of them worth it. Because – just look at all this! Look at all this beautiful chaos!

&n
bsp; ‘You’re a bona-fide Bedlamite,’ Emil laughed. And, with a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Kaspar, we should go up high, after hours, up to the highest gallery and just throw them all down. It would be like that time with Papa’s snow clouds. He’ll know it was us, but it will be—’

  Kaspar was poised to revel in the idea when Emil’s face suddenly soured. For the first time, he had looked beyond his brother – and there stood Cathy, plain as day and with no place to hide. Suddenly, all temptations vanished; whatever they had been scheming evaporated into thin air.

  ‘It isn’t what you think, Emil.’

  ‘No?’ the younger man breathed. ‘Then what is it?’

  Kaspar marched on, kicking the detritus of paper tree aside, and passed Emil. From the aisle, he looked back, his eyes taking in Cathy again: her face, her hair, the curves of her body that she knew, for the first time, were no longer invisible. He mouthed three words – ‘We’ll speak soon’ – and then he disappeared.

  Left behind, Emil looked her up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘but you really can’t be here. If my papa were to …’ He stopped. ‘My brother isn’t a bad man, but … Back to work,’ he said, abandoning the thought. ‘The evening stampede is about to begin.’

  And then he too was gone, leaving Cathy to pick her own way out of the ruin. In the aisles outside, the shopkeeps were already descending on the accidental forest. Some of them had hacksaws and more axes; some of them had brought shovels to lever up stumps. Yet more had decided to leave a tree in place and were rushing out boxes of baubles and other decorations.

  Ignoring the complaints of the baby putting up a protest inside her, she rolled up her sleeves and returned to her work.

  WARGAMES

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906

  That moment in the Wendy House had frightened her. She had to admit that. The way Kaspar Godman had looked at her – not admiringly, not possessively, as those fishermen’s sons used to do, but curiously. She had thought she was being careful. At the end of every shift she took toast and biscuits and stewed apples from Mrs Hornung’s trolley and retired to her room, just her and her baby to while away the long winter nights. She was keeping her head down, keeping out of sight, keeping herself to herself – and yet … I’m coiled, she admitted. Coiled too tight. Hiding away doesn’t keep you hidden, not in a place like this. Hiding away only gets you seen.