The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  Imagine for a moment what the Kapitan thinks and feels (believe, now, that toys can think and feel) as he watches the workshop door open from behind the bars of his birdcage prison. His motor is almost winding down and, with it, comes a slowing of the world. He knows his death is near, but this is not the first time he has been wound down and it will not be the last. There is still a chance he can rise again. So he watches this figure, this behemoth, hove into view – and the last thing he sees, before the blackness of Wind Down comes (as it must come, in the end, for all of his People) is a vision of Creation: the daemon-god who chipped him from dead timber is stomping in his giant’s stride across this crucible, this Work Shop, where all life began, opening the birdcage door and taking him in his fist.

  The last thing he feels are fingers, vast as the trunks of trees. The Imperial Kapitan thinks: how like us he is, and yet how different we are. The gods made us in their own image … But the thought is stamped out, for Wind Down is here and all things must end.

  Life returns, with a feeling like his insides being wrenched. It is the bite that comes with Wind Up, so gentle at the hands of his brothers, so violent in the fist of a god. The world solidifies slowly. He would struggle if he thought it would do any good, but the god is holding him aloft, whirling him across the workshop, to where great Fires burn in the Hearthland.

  The god sits back in a chair. He sobs, the great fat tears of a god.

  ‘You were mine,’ he says (and the Imperial Kapitan thinks: no, I am mine). ‘I made you here, right here …’ (And the Kapitan thinks: no, I was made with my first idea, my first thought; or I was made when the tree from which I was hewn sprouted; but not here, never here). ‘He thinks it’s a miracle, his miracle, and this the final insult. Everything that was mine, turned to his. He couldn’t let me have one moment, one moment to make my papa proud, one toy that might last so my children could look back and say: there, that was my father, how great he was. And now … Now Papa’s gone, and he thinks this place is his, his to do with as he wishes … And what he wishes is to cede it to YOU.’

  The daemon-god grapples the Kapitan forward, until the heat of Fire starts to taint the colour of his wood. Paint and varnish run, the Kapitan’s lifeblood dripping on the god’s fat fingers.

  ‘Well, it isn’t going to be that way. Do you hear me? You’re toys. You’re not real. The Emporium is going to survive, and my sons are going to play here, safely, where they belong. And …’ He voices a fear; the Imperial Kapitan knows it for what it is by the tenor of his voice. ‘… my wife is going to stay. She won’t take my boys from me, not when you’re gone …’

  Fire again. The Imperial Kapitan has been turned so that he must face it. And in the flames he believes he sees an image of the daemon rendered in red and orange. Daemon Lord who sent us out to fight the Long War. Daemon Lord who set us against each other, who forced us to kill our fellows. Daemon Lord who revelled in war, war without end … Wind Up and Fight, Wind Up and Fight again …

  The feeling of wood turning to charcoal is not like Wind Down at all. This is the Always End of which their prophets sometimes speak. The Imperial Kapitan prepares himself but, at the last moment, the daemon stays its hand.

  ‘Did you think it would be that easy? One terrible moment, and then gone? No, you’re not to be destroyed. You’re to be paraded. Paraded so that the rest of them know. Paraded so that they know who I am and what they are. I’m the Toymaker. This is my Emporium.’ Then his voice breaks and, with a lilting sadness he says, ‘It didn’t have to be this way. You were mine, once. We used to play together.’

  The Imperial Kapitan finds himself cast back into his birdcage prison. There he picks himself up and, as he watches the behemoth retreat into the Outer Dark, thinks: but where is the other of which the daemon speaks, the Angel who saved us? The god-of-light who put the Long War to an end. Who saw the slaughter and thought: NO MORE! Why is he not here to take me in his hand and deliver me back to Skirting Board and Ward Robe?

  It is only as he starts to feel the dull ache of Wind Down once more that the Imperial Kapitan remembers: the one they call Kaspar, the brother god of the daemon, he did not set us free by his own hand. He gave us, instead, the power to wind ourselves and, in so doing, make decisions for ourselves. These decisions, they are the magic we call Life. He did not speak commandments, nor ordain from on high. It is the daemon who seeks to direct us with Rules of Engagement and forbids us from laying down our weapons. The Kaspar God helped us only until we could help ourselves.

  He did not say THOU WILL! He said THOU MAY …

  The spark of revelation is bright inside the Imperial Kapitan’s wooden mind. Had you been inside there, trapped in the swirling grain of sandalwood and teak, you might have seen connections springing together, the wood fusing in strange new patterns. This is the magic as thoughts coalesce.

  He has to save himself.

  But there isn’t much time. Wind Down grows closer each second and, here in his prison, only the daemon lord could help. So the Imperial Kapitan waits for his moment, reaches for the birdcage bars, and begins to strain. He has already seen a knot in the floorboards, and perhaps this is a way back home.

  The morning of Papa Jack’s funeral dawned crisp and white. Cathy gazed into the open skies above Iron Duke Mews and wondered: how white were the skies, in that faraway world where Jekabs Godman had become Papa Jack? Last night, she had crept into his workshop and lifted his toy from the trunk with a thousand legs – but when she wound it up, and though the cams drove the prisoners onwards with their march, the walls of the room did not dissolve away, winter did not come howling in, and no phantom Jekabs Godman was waiting to accompany her on the ride. Papa Jack’s story was finished, and the Emporium behind her suddenly seemed a shade more drab, a shade more grey.

  She had been up before dawn to help Mrs Hornung in the kitchens, but now she waited in the frigid morning air. Seven dawns had passed since the morning they found him sitting in his workshop chair, and she had spent so long wondering what Kaspar thought, what form his grief was taking behind those sad, vacant eyes, that only now did she ask what she herself was feeling. It had been Papa Jack who welcomed her to his world. She remembered the way he had intoned those questions, so weighted with understanding: are you lost? Are you afraid? And she thought, suddenly, that she would write to her father soon, or visit them out on the estuary sands.

  At the end of Iron Duke Mews the first carriage, bearing the coffin, was already manoeuvring to leave. Martha was helping Kaspar up into the second carriage, Nina corralling her boys with stern words and promises of sweet treats to come. Cathy was preparing to join them when the tradesman’s door flew open behind her and out barrelled Emil, his head tucked down like a scalded child. She could see he had been in his workshop by the soot and flecks of woodchip that still coloured his hands. He had been painting too, for his fingernails were rimed a deep and dirty red, the colour of the Imperial Kapitan.

  ‘For your papa,’ said Cathy.

  ‘For my children,’ said Emil and, ignoring her further, took his place aboard the carriage.

  How strange it was to venture out of the Emporium together. The procession took them north from Iron Duke Mews. Rounding the rails at King’s Cross, they followed the York Road, past the empty granaries and canalside wharves, through the tumbledown redbricks where soot-stained faces ogled them from the terrace – until, finally, they rolled through the green fields of Highgate. Here the cemetery yawned open.

  As the funeral procession ground to a halt, Cathy saw the well-wishers already lining the spaces between the graves.

  ‘Who are they all, Mama?’

  Cathy stared. In spite of Kaspar’s whispered protestations, Emil had taken out an announcement in The Times and, accordingly, the grounds were filled with customers past and present. Shop hands from seasons past had come to show their respects. The wives and daughters of those who had been lost along the way had come to catch a glimpse, again, of the gilded world thei
r husbands and fathers once left behind. Beneath hanging hawthorn, Frances Kesey was dressed in funereal grey; Sally-Anne (who later declared that Papa Jack’s was a life of colour and he did not deserve to see only sadness on this, his final day) had come in vaudeville black with lurid sapphire and emerald brocade.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Wordlessly, Kaspar nodded.

  Together, they emerged on to the cold hard ground between the graves. Martha, dressed in one of Nina’s black gowns, cringed from the wind. Cathy took her hand, thinking her still a little girl, but Martha did not resist. In turn, she took Kaspar’s – and, to Cathy’s astonishment, he did not resist either. Cathy looked up. Sally-Anne was right. There ought to have been patchwork horses drawing chariots of fire. The pegasi ought to have been set loose to cavort in the open skies, and to hell with the damage they caused when their motors stopped whirring and they came crashing back down. Ballerinas ought to have twirled en pointe while every tree in Highgate Cemetery was smothered in the tendrils of spreading paper vines. The trees, the sky, the world seemed so ordinary today.

  Behind them, Emil and Nina were emerging from the hearse, their boys dressed in miniature black suits. Emil, whose own suit seemed suddenly too small, waited while the pall-bearers lifted the coffin out of the carriage.

  ‘Are you certain you can do it?’ Cathy asked.

  Kaspar’s eyes had not left the coffin for a second. ‘Do you want honesty?’

  ‘Always, Kaspar.’

  ‘Then I’m far from certain. But I’m certain that, if I don’t, I would never forgive myself. So I’ll stand at Emil’s side, if only for today.’

  Cathy led Martha along the frost-hardened trail, as an honour guard grew up along the wild, untended banks. At its end, the earth was open and the gravediggers standing by. Cathy stood at its head, staring into the ground that would soon swallow Jekabs Godman whole. She had been telling herself: it’s only his husk, only what he left behind, and he left behind so much more, back in our Emporium. But seeing the earth made thoughts like those seem so facile. Jekabs Godman was gone.

  ‘Mama, there’s something changed in Papa today. Did you see? He held my hand in the carriage.’

  There were so few excuses she could make. The years had been a long litany of explaining her husband away, and Martha was not a girl any longer; she could not be persuaded to believe what her heart held as untrue.

  ‘Today is a strange day.’

  They were coming along the trail now: lean, angular Kaspar, still walking with a limp; ragged, rotund Emil, who looked as if he hadn’t slept in nights. Behind them two hired hands bore the second half of the coffin.

  ‘I remember being scared of him, up in that workshop. Can you believe that? Warm fuzzy Uncle Emil and Papa, just being Papa … and then there was Papa Jack, big as both of them, and with those eyes, and those hands, and that … would you call it hair, Mama?’

  ‘Tangled and matted, like he hadn’t had a wife in a century or more. But, yes, Martha, I’d call it hair.’

  Martha grinned.

  ‘I was scared of him too. The day I turned up, they took me up to his workshop, and he fixed me with those eyes and asked me those questions and … somewhere along the way, it clean melted away. He stitched you a bear out of spider silk. You lay in his hands, that day you were born, and, do you know, by then I wasn’t afraid at all. I would have let him carry you away.’ Cathy paused. ‘Here they come …’

  The funeral procession had arrived. In a succession of stutters and false starts, Kaspar and Emil guided the coffin to the ground at the graveside. Moments later, the cowled undertakers stepped in and began to attach cords.

  The graveside was growing crowded at last. There were faces here that Cathy knew, but so many more to which she could put no name. She reached out for Kaspar, guided him to the grave beside her.

  ‘Are you …’

  Kaspar gave her a knowing look. ‘My papa was the heaviest of men.’

  The crowd had gathered. The undertakers were in place. The coffin hung, suspended, over the grave – and then, inch by inch, Papa Jack vanished into the ground.

  At the head of the grave Emil waited nervously for his moment. The silence around him was absolute – and, with his boys at his side, he began.

  ‘My papa was a simple man. My papa was a great man. My papa was my world. The Emporium he created occupies such a place in all of our hearts that we would not be the people we are without it – and that is why we have joined here today, to commit my papa to the earth, to give our thanks that he was a part of this world at all.

  ‘Papa Jack is gone, but the Emporium lives on in all of us, in our hearts, and in the memories that exist out there – of everyone who ever shopped in the Emporium halls, the boys and girls and the games that they played.’ Cathy saw his eyes roaming the crowd until they found his brother, whose head was still bowed over the grave. ‘Our papa’s work lives on as long as the Emporium does. As long as we’re making toys. As long as we’re …’ His voice threatened to break, but he conquered it again. ‘… keeping magic in the world, never forgetting we used to be small – making the world better, one toy at a time.’

  From the clouds above, thin snowflakes started to fall. They sifted through the cemetery trees, dusting the graves – but they were not paper, so it was not right. Emil helped his boys throw handfuls of dirt on to the coffin; the gravediggers were waiting to do their task, but soon all of those gathered were tossing in more handfuls. In that way, Papa Jack’s coffin disappeared from view.

  At Cathy’s side, Martha threw a handful of earth. Cathy did the same, removing her glove to feel the frozen dirt on her fingers. She turned to deposit some into Kaspar’s hand – but there was another figure between them now, somebody sidled up from behind to make his offering.

  He was old as Papa Jack had been, with the look of a weasel and the only hair he had left hanging in a curtain of grey around the back of a scalp mottled with age. The suit he was wearing was freshly bought, and the raw red of his skin gave Cathy the impression that he had spent long days scouring away the filth in which he ordinarily lived. He smelt of cheap talc and peppermint lotion and, when he looked up, she saw that one of his eyes was made entirely of glass.

  ‘Are you the son?’

  His voice had the same inflection as Papa Jack’s, of a language learned long into life and peppered with old, harsher sounds never forgotten. It took Kaspar a moment to realise it was him to whom the stranger had spoken. ‘My name is Kaspar,’ he said. ‘Tell me, did you know my father?’

  ‘A long time ago and half a world away. But, yes, I am proud to say that I did. You might say that I was his apprentice, though perhaps he would not himself have used such a word. I am sorry for your loss, boy. Men have lived worse lives and lived on and on.’

  The stranger touched Kaspar’s hand with the ruin of his own, then drew back into the crowd. In the gap he left behind, Cathy caught Kaspar’s questing eye. She tracked the man as he left.

  ‘My papa?’ Kaspar said. ‘An apprentice?’

  Cathy had no strength to stop him; Kaspar disappeared after the man, angling his way through the mourners. By the time he breached the last of them, the man was already shambling into the hawthorn, disappearing around the looping trail. He had drawn up his collar, lost himself beneath a tall Homburg hat, and Kaspar had to strain to catch up. Finally, he grappled for the man’s elbow.

  ‘My papa never took an apprentice,’ he gasped. ‘My brother and I, we—’

  ‘Calm yourself, boy. I didn’t mean to alarm. Of course, I use the word loosely. I only ever set foot in your Emporium once, and by then I pray he did not recognise me. In the days I knew your papa, he was a different man. All of this – all of this was for the future. The Jekabs Godman I knew was a carpenter, but he turned sticks into soldiers, just for something to do with his hands, and he …’ The man stopped. ‘Your family, they are waiting for you, are they not?’

  Kaspar looked over his shoulder. Cathy wa
s watching him from the graveside.

  ‘They have been waiting for me longer than I can say. They can wait a little longer.’

  ‘It has been a lifetime since I saw your father, but when I saw the notice of his death … I had to come and say my farewell. I believe …’ The man’s face seemed to crumple for an instant, lending him a haggard, almost leering air. ‘… I would not be alive were it not for him. Certainly, I would not be the man I am today. You might say that Jekabs Godman saved my soul. He didn’t know that he did it, and he never knew what I did with it – he never knew that the little soldiers he showed me how to make went with me back home, never knew all the places I travelled to share them, places where the children don’t have any toys, places where they deserve to be reminded. Toys made me … good again. Perhaps you can understand? I had never thought of myself as a good man, not until I met your father.’

  At the graveside, as the crowd fanned out, each to their private griefs, Cathy watched her husband embrace the stranger, then let him go, off into the trees. Martha was already gone, helping Nina corral her boys, by the time Kaspar returned. His strides, as he returned along the trail, had new purpose.

  ‘We should retire. Back to the Emporium.’

  Cathy was still staring after the man, long after he had vanished.

  ‘Who was he?’ she asked.

  Kaspar put his arm through hers and, together, they followed the path.