The Toymakers
Page 36
‘I remember Sir Josiah’s,’ Cathy began, once Harold was settled, with Sirius up on his lap. ‘We would go there every summer, with stock from the winter before. Always my husband and me, and then my daughter. A summer day at Sir Josiah’s could rival first frost almost every year for its spectacle. All of those children waiting up against the windows, or spilling out into the yard …’
‘Well, that was me,’ Harold replied, with a modicum of pride – for to be remembered by an Emporium Lady was to fulfil the wish of his childhood. ‘Yes, Sir Josiah’s is a place that’s lodged up in this noggin of mine more than most. You know how that feels, I shouldn’t wonder. If I might be so bold … what happened to the Emporium, Mrs Godman? How could a place like that just shut up its doors and …’ He faltered, started wringing his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve spoken out of turn.’
‘You haven’t. It’s only … I wouldn’t know where to begin. A story like that has a thousand beginnings. I should need all night, and my grandchildren …’
‘I’ve had an inconsequential kind of life, Mrs Godman. I did my bit, I made a few friends, I had a good number of splendid luncheons, and now I spend my time pottering up and down the Finchley Road. I’ve been to the pictures twice this week already, and neither time for a matinee I cared to see. This Friday, I’m going to a department store. But when I think of the Emporium the way it used to be, why …’ Something must have caught in his throat, because suddenly he fell silent. ‘Oh, Mrs Godman, I didn’t mean to suggest … Well, it was so long ago, and fortunes can change. What happened to the place, well, who would have predicted? Hard times have fallen on so many in our lives.’ He stopped again, certain he had pursued the conversation into some dreadful quagmire from which he might never extricate himself. ‘What I meant to say was … You’ve lived a remarkable life, Mrs Godman. I should hope I might hear about it some time. And, if you don’t mind me saying, I feel … honoured to be sitting here with you. My Maud didn’t want me coming, she said I was to make a great fool of myself, but I could hardly stay away, not after I saw this old mutt here. And then, well, there’s the real reason I came …’ Harold shifted, depositing Sirius back on to the carpet, and brought up the bag he had brought with him.
He was lifting out its contents and placing them on the cushions at his side when the children clattered back into the room, Martha following behind. On seeing Harold they stopped dead – but it was not the sight of the old man that stilled them; for on the cushions beside him were sitting three editions of the Long War, two as pristine as the unopened boxes that had once sat upon the shopfloor, one weathered and worn around the edges. Curiosity had been piqued in Bethany, even in Lucas (who was struggling to project his obligatory indifference), but the colour had drained from Martha’s face, even as her eyes dared to believe. In the end, it was Cathy herself who said, ‘Mr Elderkin, wherever did you—’
‘This dog-eared old thing is my own,’ he began. ‘You won’t remember this but, one summer, you brought boxes down to Sir Josiah’s, and I became the proud owner of my very own Long War. When I finally moved on from there, well, I took it with me wherever I hung my hat. The other two, I’m afraid to say, I bought at auction. Maud would say I squandered my savings on them, but I’ll have none of that. These pieces are priceless …’ He paused. ‘And I want you to have them.’
‘Me?’
‘If not you, Mrs Godman, then the children. I’m afraid I never had children of my own. My Maud and I have been blessed, but not by the patter of tiny feet. I’m an old man now. I’ll have need for toys again, I shouldn’t wonder, but not for some time … and perhaps you’ll save them for me. Consider it a lifetime’s loan. But, for now, they should be played with. They’ve been wrapped up too long …’ Harold’s face broke into the simplest, wildest smile. ‘Well, go on then! Get stuck in! Perhaps you wouldn’t mind an old man playing a Long War with you, after all …’
The children needed no further tempting. Lucas and Bethany set about tearing open the sealed copies of the Long War, while Harold lined up the troops of his open box and read to them aloud from the Rules of Engagement.
Cathy and Martha watched as battle commenced. The clacking of wind-up soldiers was a familiar sound and if, at first, there was something sinister about the whirring motors, soon the anxiety was gone – and only the thrill of half-forgotten battles remained. Watching them now, Cathy could picture Kaspar and Emil battling across their bedroom floor, or Emil and Nina in the glade that first summer they met. She reached out and clasped her daughter’s hand. Sometimes, you had to choose the memories you held dear.
‘Wait!’ said Lucas, as they set the fronts up for the second time. ‘I’ve an idea …’
Then he was gone up the stairs, as if toy soldiers were far too old-fashioned a thing with which to waste his time.
While he was gone, Harold and Bethany continued to battle, the old man narrating at length how the older boys of Sir Josiah’s had returned, Christmas after Christmas, to wage campaigns with the brothers they had left behind. By the time Lucas returned, grasping something in his fist, Mr Elderkin had noticed the clock on the wall and, to his horror, announced that his poor wife Maud would, even now, have been sitting in front of a Sunday roast, watching the gravy congeal on her plate rather than begin the meal without him.
‘I’ll be back, if I may,’ he began, labouring out into the hall.
Lucas watched as his mother and grandmother saw the old man out. ‘Now we can see …’
‘What have you got there, in your fist?’
At first Lucas did not reveal it. ‘I knew she had something, up there in her bag. She’s full of secrets, isn’t she? I thought I saw it that very first day.’
‘You sneak thief! You went into her room. Mama will—’
‘Not if you don’t tell.’
Lucas brought out his fist and set down a soldier quite unlike the ones Bethany was lining up out of the box. The first thing she noticed was how much older he was than the rest. He had once had jackboots of sparkling green, a sash of crimson red and rows of tiny brass medals up and down his glistening coat. But his body was a lattice of wounds as well. There was a notch in the wood above his left eye that gave the impression of a scar, but that did not compare to the black char marks that covered his back, as if some brute of a boy had held him too close to the fire. In spite of all that, he had a kind of quiet dignity about him and (or so Bethany thought) there almost seemed an expressiveness in his dark, painted eyes. Wherever she shifted, the soldier’s eyes seemed to follow. Later she would think herself so foolish, but fleetingly she wondered what the soldier was thinking, to be staring at her with such intensity.
In the corner of the room, Sirius lifted his snout, turned one black button eye on the adults passing out into the hallway and the other on the children settling down across the carpet. It had been so long since he had seen toy soldiers that, at first, he considered it a dream. Then he yapped. When the soldiers did not scatter in fear, he judged them harmless and sank again to his slumber, curled up in a cushiony ball.
‘Wind him up then,’ said Bethany. ‘Let’s see how it goes …’
‘He’ll knock yours down in a second …’
Lucas reached down, took hold of the key in the burnt soldier’s back and started to turn.
He remembers running. He remembers forcing himself through the bars of his birdcage prison. He remembers hurtling headlong through the heartland, the Skirting Board and Wall Cavities that belonged to his people since the gods gave them life. He remembers what he saw. After that, there is only the terror: the knowledge he must do something, a secret he must tell, if only he could keep the inevitable Wind Down at bay. He remembers climbing up, up and ever up, emerging to bright light, desperate to tell her, desperate to be seen.
Then only blackness, decades long.
Reaching out, tumbling, cursing himself for having no words, for not having the capacity to speak.
All of these things, even now.
&nbs
p; The soldier picked itself up. It was, to Lucas’s mind, staggering as if drunk. Then, even when it righted, it marched in tiny circles, as if uncertain of its own feet. In the way it lurched there was none of the purpose, none of the bearing, that its expression implied. Probably it was broken. The burnt wood at its back must have stretched as far as its motors, disrupting the way it walked.
‘Is that all?’ Lucas muttered.
‘I think he’s priceless.’
‘I suppose he has a jaunty little strut, but I thought there’d be more. Why else would she have squirrelled him away like that? She’s such a strange old bird. However did we come from her?’
Lucas turned on his heel, already bored of the game, and as he did the soldier straightened. Bethany watched as it turned on its heel, as if taking in its surroundings. Its eyes met hers – she was not wrong, there was a moment of panic, of terrible realisation – and then it sprang forwards, legs clacking in a way wholly unlike the other solders around, and hurtled into the darkness beneath one of the sofas.
Bethany dropped to her knees, pressed her face to the carpet and peered into the dark.
‘It’s disappeared … Lucas! It’s disappeared!’
But Lucas was not in the least bit inclined to go hunting, not down there in the dust for anything so peculiarly old-fashioned as a wind-up soldier – and so nobody was there to witness the miracle of a sleeping mind awaking, and nobody heard the first scuttling in the walls.
In the Black Lands beneath the Sofa, in this strange new world of Carpet and Rug, a mind comes back into being. The fog in which it has been lost takes time to dissipate – but slowly the reefs of grey part and clear. For thirty years the mind of the Imperial Kapitan has been hemmed in. Thirty years of Wind Down. Thirty years: a mind, locked in place, unable to cry out, unable to get help. Thirty years of solitude – that was the real Long War. But now, here he is. He shakes himself out of his stupor, and at last he is alive.
A hand reaches in for him, a giant godly hand made out of blood and bone, and had he not had the instincts to skitter backwards, perhaps its unearthly fingers would have closed around him and dragged him out into the light. The hand comes again, but this time it does not come near – and when, some time after that, the great sonorous voices of the gods echo and fade, the Imperial Kapitan dares to believe he is safe.
He stumbles to the precipice, the edge of the Sofa, where the giant feet of his gods are looming. How the world has changed during his everlasting Wind Down! Out there he sees the children of gods grown, the grandchildren of gods newly cut from their own Workshop Lathe. He sees scores of his wooden brothers lying prone on the Carpet, this forest the gods have raised up to hide the true world of Floorboard underneath, but already he knows they are not like him; what minds reside in those carefully hewn heads have not yet been stirred to idea or imagination; probably these soldiers are yet to wind each other up, yet to march for any other reason than as playthings of the gods. He dares venture out further – and, curled up against the Skirting Board on the far side of the chamber, he sees Sirius, the patchwork dog. That is how he knows for certain that he remains in the same world in which his motors last died. Somehow he knows that Sirius is like him; Sirius understands.
Looming above him is the Lady, the one married to the Kaspar God. On seeing her, his wooden heart soars. He wants to run out and take her by the hand, for thirty years has not dulled the urgency of the one idea dominating his thoughts. But the key in his back is not wound to full, he knows that soon it will labour, soon it will slow … And if that happens there is a chance he must wait another thirty years before his chance comes around again. By then, what will the world be? It may already be too late.
There is, he decides, another way.
The gods are crossing the carpet, out into the kitchens beyond. The children of the gods follow after, until all that is left are the toy soldiers lying inert on the carpet fronds and the patchwork dog, lazily sleeping the day away. The Kapitan knows he has only one chance. He darts out of the darkness, grapples with the arms of the nearest toy soldier, and strains to heave him into the shelter from which he ran.
Too late, the patchwork dog sees him. It sets up its wet laundry howl and, seconds later, the grandchildren of the gods hurtle back into the room. But they see nothing – or, if they do, they cannot believe their eyes.
The Kapitan has mere minutes until Wind Down returns. On his knees, he turns over his brother. The contraption in his back is a basic design, sculpted by the daemon-lord himself. But the Kapitan remembers. He opens his brother up, presses his hands into the fine mesh of cogs and gears that drive him. A tweak here, a tweak there, and soon the soldier is up on his feet, his fingers and hands flexing in strange new ways. It is with some joy that the Kapitan feels himself being wound up, the rush of new energy and life to every corner of his frame.
Now that there are two, the work can truly begin. Together we stand; divided, we fall.
Toy soldiers cannot speak (remember, they are only toys). But if they could, the Imperial Kapitan would have taken his new comrade by the hands, turned him around, and shown him the battlefield where the rest of their brothers have been left to die. Look, he would have said. Look at what we are, look at what we were made to do – and look what we can do for ourselves. We have been appointed a task, one that, out of all the toy soldiers in the world, only we are fit to do.
But we are going to need some help.
That night, Cathy put the children to bed with another tale from THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS and, on turning out the lights, met Martha on the stair.
‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I was worried about you.’
Mindful that the children might hear, Cathy ushered Martha down the stairs. ‘Don’t be worried. Don’t be afraid. I’m a sturdy old thing, remember?’
‘For a moment I thought – what if they were real? Real in the way we’d understand it, Mama. But of course, they were only toy soldiers …’ She smiled. ‘The Emporium never leaves you, does it? I’ve been halfway around the world and back, but it doesn’t go. Sooner or later, bits of it start appearing.’
‘You might as well try and escape your own heart.’
For a time there was silence on the stairs.
‘It made me think of him,’ said Martha. ‘Oh, never a day goes by, of course, when he isn’t there – but sometimes he’s more there than others. Seeing his soldiers …’
‘Those weren’t your father’s soldiers, Martha, my love. They were Emil’s. Just plain, ordinary Emil’s, of the kind we used to rely on, once upon a time. A simpler time.’
Cathy drew close to plant a kiss on her daughter’s cheek. ‘Sleep tight, my little Martha.’
Martha said nothing until Cathy was halfway back up the stairs. Then, into the silence, she called out: ‘I miss him, Mama.’
Cathy stopped.
‘Do you ever wish you had one of his music boxes? Remember those dainty old things? You could turn its crank handle and be back there, and there he’d be.’
It was a question to which Cathy had devoted the better part of her life. She tightened her robe against a sudden draught. It was funny how talking about it could play tricks upon your senses. She almost felt as if she could hear the same scuttling in the walls that had disappeared along with her husband.
‘Never,’ she whispered. ‘I loved your father as much as anything else on this earth – but if I had one of his music boxes on my bedside, why, I’d take a hammer to it this very night. If Kaspar was here and in our lives, I’d want him as he is now, every last scar of it, all the things you can see and all the ones you can’t. Because the thing your father knew better than any of us, Martha dear, is still true: the past is the past; you can’t ever go back.’
The bedroom had a draught too. Cathy checked that the window was closed and watched for a time as the clouds parted, revealing the inky blackness and arcing stars above. A clear night: the kind of November night that might, once upon a time, have heralded first frost.
She woke in the blackness, propelled out of a dream. It was the thought of the soldiers, the visit from Harold Elderkin, those stolen moments with her daughter on the stairs. In her dreams they had been marching again, and she wasn’t sure where toy soldier ended and soldier of flesh and blood began.
It was a Kaspar dream, and for decades those dreams had been the worst.
She rolled over, wishing Sirius was here more than ever. She closed her eyes, willing sleep to return, but soon she realised that the dream hadn’t ended. She could still hear that terrible scuttling in the wall.
Cathy screwed her eyes tighter. She screwed her eyes tighter still. She drew the covers up and over her head, a little girl afraid of monsters, and still she could hear the scuttling.
All it had taken was one little sight of them. All the walls she had been building, all the ways of keeping the devastation at bay, they were all falling clean away.
Kaspar had once told her that she was brave but she did not feel brave tonight. She felt like the lost little girl she had never been – and, oh, how she hated it …
Kicking off the bedsheets, Cathy got to her feet. The scuttling was louder now, louder than ever, but hot milk would chase it away. Hot milk and hot tea and, yes, she would tempt Sirius to come back through, if only for one night. The children would understand. A patchwork dog’s loyalty was an inconstant thing …
She was at the door when the scuttling reached its zenith.
Then: silence.
It was the silence that stilled her. She had grown used to the nightmare but, now that it was gone, a different kind of dread seeped in. Her body was telling her to turn, but she did not want to turn.
She turned.