Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Yours most sincerely,

  Borden Masters

  The third was written in a childish scrawl, “I don’t like Mr. Toppit, I wish he would die! I hope Uncle Ed gets better,” and was signed “Evangeline (Chicken) Little, aged 10, McHenry Ward.” McHenry was the children’s cancer ward.

  “So, what do you think?” Travis said eagerly.

  The truth was, Laurie didn’t know what to think.

  The next day there were more, and more after that. The final broadcast was on Friday, and when she came in the following Monday, just for her own show now—Connie had found someone to take over Ed’s slot—seventeen were waiting for her.

  On Tuesday, when she had just finished Laurie’s Round-up, the morning show she did at KCIF, her boss, Rick Whitcomb, strode into the studio and said, “What’s this Hayloft thing?” He glanced in the mirror and readjusted his comb-over, then sat down and put his cowboy boots on the control desk. “My girls have gone crazy for it.” By “my girls,” he was talking about his wife Jerrilee, and their fifteen-year-old daughter Merrilee, who, thankfully, they tended to call Merry. “Jerrilee’s been in Holy Spirit, didn’t I tell you? Had a hysterectomy.”

  “I wish I’d known, Rick,” she lied. “I’d have visited.” She tried to keep socializing with the Whitcombs to a minimum. She saw quite enough of Rick at work, and while Jerrilee was friendly to her now—she was always offering to take Laurie shopping to do something about her clothes—she could never quite forget how awful she had been to her when they were all at high school together.

  “Crazy for it, both of ’em,” Rick repeated. “Some book you found in England, Merry said. Deal was, she was going to keep house while Jerrilee was out of action, but she was at Holy Spirit every night listening to you.” He gave a hearty laugh. “I’ve had a ton of take-out pizza.”

  “Well …” Laurie began.

  “They had a party in Jerrilee’s room the night you finished. Whole ward came in and had cocktails. Jerrilee thinks you should do it on your show here. You know what she’s like when she gets something in her head.”

  Everything was strange now. That Jerrilee should be part of the chain made her smile.

  “No, I’m serious. Never stops talking about it,” Rick said. “Where does the thing come from?”

  For what was the first time but would not be the last, Laurie told a version of what had happened in England. Later, tuning the story according to whom she was telling it required a set of more precise and intricate calibrations but now, for Rick, she had to think on her feet and trust her instincts.

  “That’s some story, Laurie,” he said, when she had finished. “We could do something with this, get some publicity.”

  She wanted to say, There is no “we,” but what she said was: “Really?”

  “You’d have to do it in shorter chunks, between commercials. Maybe at the top of the show. What do you think?”

  Laurie cleared her throat. “I don’t want to do it like that,” she said.

  “You don’t?”

  “It’s not going to work on the Round-up, stuck between interviews and lists of church socials and recipes for eggnog. It’s not going to work in bite-size pieces.”

  “Well, what do you want to do with it?”

  “It needs a separate slot.”

  Rick held up his hands. “Whoa, Laurie, hold on a minute here—I’m not having the schedule taken over by some weird kids’ book from England. I’ve got advertisers to please.”

  Laurie knew where the power lay: “Ask Jerrilee what she thinks,” she said.

  They called it Hayseed Half Hour. Rick had begun his career as a journalist on the Modesto Bee and still went hunting some weekends with Vern Brisby, the editor. The week before Laurie began, the paper ran an interview with her in the women’s section—big photograph, headline saying, “Tragic accident bears fruit for KCIF’s Laurie Clow.”

  Afterwards, Laurie called it “the Hayseed summer.” It was the hottest year she could remember and everything seemed to move slowly. In the mornings she woke to the white noise of the sprinklers on her neighbors’ lawns, and in the long evenings she listened to the hiss of barbecues and the ghostly sound of children laughing. It felt like a dream and she didn’t mind whether it was or not: she had never felt more alone or more content.

  She was lost in the books as she read them during her show, floating through the words as weightless as an astronaut. Never had the phrase “on the air” seemed so pin-sharp a description. The books, the words, the letters, even the white space round the edges of the pages, lay like a haze over everything, not the dirty brown of smog but a color both vivid and pale at the same time. She looked up at the sky and she could see it.

  All the other things that were happening seemed almost peripheral: the window display in the bookstore on G Street with the photograph of her next to copies of the books that had been sent over from England; her evenings with Borden Masters and the group he had got together to discuss the meaning of the books; the interview she did on the chat show at the television station in San Francisco; the Fourth of July parade, with the Hayseed float that Merry Whitcomb had organized, with a little boy dressed as Luke in front of cardboard trees against a black backdrop with a pair of giant orange eyes to represent Mr. Toppit.

  The summer ended with a funeral, that of the little girl from the cancer ward called Evangeline Little, whose nickname was “Chicken.” Her wish had not, in the end, come true. It was not Mr. Toppit who had died but her, the white blood cells in her body multiplying out of control. She had passed away in the night and her parents had found a copy of Garden Green in her hands when they came to wake her in the morning. In her dying weeks when she was back at home as there was nothing more to be done for her at Holy Spirit, her parents had started raising money for a leukemia charity, with a series of concerts, rummage sales, and door-to-door collections. The Bee had publicized the fund and Laurie, who had come up with the slogan they used on the flyers—“The Little Fund That’s Getting Bigger!”—gave daily updates on her show.

  Evangeline’s death turned the fund committee into the funeral committee. They asked Laurie if she would talk at the service. People who were there never forgot her opening line, “We called her Chicken but there was nobody less chicken in this town than Miss Evangeline Little,” while the passage she read about Luke Hayseed and the bees seemed so right that some people told her afterwards they had wanted to stand up and applaud.

  But as Laurie had read it she had found herself strangely disassociated from the event. When she came out of the church at the end, with the child’s family, pushing her way through the people on the steps who had been unable to get in and the local TV crew who had covered the funeral, she realized she had been thinking about a different child, the enigmatic Jordan Hayman, and what that might mean. But by then she had a lot on her mind, not least of which was the offer she had received from the television station in San Francisco to do her own chat show.

  Luke

  Sometimes, in the years after the books became famous, people—backpackers, families with picnic baskets, couples with cameras slung round their necks—would wander up the drive on summer afternoons, ignoring the sign that blocked their path: PRIVATE—STRICTLY NO ACCESS. Presumably they thought it was intended not for them but for those dim enough to believe that a house immortalized in The Hayseed Chronicles could ever close its gates to the faithful, intended for the few people who did not assume that buying one of the million or so copies of the books sold in Britain—let alone the millions sold throughout the world—in the five years since Arthur’s death entitled them to a share of the action.

  Sometimes, when the spirit moved her, Martha would walk across the lawn and talk to them. We watched from the house, too far away to hear what was said but observing a scene as lively as a dumb show—a short exchange of conversation, then blankets swept up from the lawn, sandwiches put away, lens caps replaced on cameras. While Martha walked back towards us, the visitors we
re scurrying behind her, making for the drive with what seemed like indecent haste. What she had said to them was this: “I’m afraid you’ll have to go—there’s been a death in the family.”

  It was not only the gravity of the message that caused the exodus but Martha’s eccentric appearance and manner. She had taken to washing her hair under the kitchen tap and putting it up herself instead of going to the village hairdresser, so it had the fragile air of a temporary structure, while her clothes, although immaculately cut and expensively made, were sometimes thirty years old and threadbare. She had the spectral presence of someone who, to a stranger, might not seem precisely grounded in the here and now, someone with whom a conversation could go in any number of unnerving ways. Her announcement that there had been a death in the family might have been a simple statement of fact, but her manner hinted at further, potentially more disturbing, revelations. Anyway, nobody was going to hang around long enough to find out. They were off.

  At least there was only one entrance to the garden. The woods behind the house were more difficult. They stretched for several hundred acres to the top of the hill on which the house was built, and could be entered at various points on tracks that led from the road some distance from it. Of course there were gates, padlocked and chained, but the Hayseed faithful were never deterred. Who could have guessed they would be so adept with chain cutters and cans of spray paint, so strong that their boots could kick through fences, so determined to take possession of the Darkwood that no obstacle would stand in their way? They were like jungle ants that devour everything in their path, those civilized people who believed in the power of words, who read the books to their children, who listened to the audiotapes in their cars, who placed boiled eggs carefully in Hayseed eggcups, who politely requested autographs, who wrote to the Carter Press with their idiotic questions in such quantities that Graham had had to employ someone whose sole duty was to sort out the mass of correspondence and run what he called “The Hayseed Office.”

  The bonfires, the litter, the used condoms, the trees sprayed with “Mr. Toppit was here” in big white letters, or simply a giant T—the mess inside the woods was clearly our problem, but for years Martha engaged in a running battle with the council over whose responsibility it was to clean the graffiti off the long wall half a mile or so from the house next to the gate that was one of the most favored entrances to the woods. However often it was removed, one slogan kept coming back: THE DARKWOOD—ENTER AT YOUR PERIL. On an official sign it might have seemed like a warning, but in three-foot-high letters painted on a wall it became the most seductive of invitations. At the summer solstice the woods seemed to hum with mysterious comings and goings. Who knew what strange rituals took place there? It was as if the Darkwood had been appropriated into some all-purpose pagan consciousness and was jockeying for position with Glastonbury, Stonehenge, and those villages drowned by the sea where you could hear the church bells ringing at high tide.

  We coped with the intrusions in our own way. Rachel, if you didn’t keep an eye on her, might well entice—not that they needed much enticing—some of these wayfarers into the house. By the time she had been at her most intense for a couple of hours, had opened a second bottle of wine, and was digging out Lila’s rejected drawings or Arthur’s manuscript scrawlings for their perusal, you could see that even for the faithful there might be such a thing as too much Hayseed.

  As for me, I made myself scarce. I had enough problems with it at school, and it was too much to cope with dashed expectations on the faces of strangers. It wasn’t my fault that I had grown up. I couldn’t stay a seven-year-old forever, trapped on the pages of the books. I was still just about recognizable as the boy in Lila’s drawings and the comparison was not a favorable one. I came to learn the national characteristics of disappointment: the resentfulness of the English, the downright hostility of the French, who looked as if they might ask for their money back, the touching sadness on the gentle faces of the Japanese—such pain that I both was and wasn’t the boy in the books. I was Dorian Gray in reverse: my attic was in every bookshop in the world.

  Of the European countries, it was Germany where the sales were largest. Lila herself had supervised the German translation, had worn down Martha, Graham, and the German publishers and nearly driven the hapless translator over the brink into madness. It gave her one more notch of ownership in the books—an unselfconscious droit de seigneuse that enabled her to ring the doorbell at almost any time with friends or relations in tow, having given them a tour of the Darkwood during which, she told us, she had cleared up litter, waved her stick, and told anyone she had encountered that they were trespassing. Sometimes she threatened to call the police, and sometimes she actually did call the police, who would wearily turn up at the house only to be harangued by her for their failure to protect us properly.

  Once inside the house she waited for someone to make tea for her and her guests while she handed out the Lebkuchen she had brought with her. By now, Martha would have excused herself to go and have a rest, Rachel, who had said she was going to put on the kettle, would have just vanished but might or might not reappear later in a state of rambling disarray, and I would be left as the sacrificial lamb. “This is Luke,” Lila would say, as she gave her tinkling laugh and patted her beaded hairnet. “In due course he will show us round the house. He knows all of its secrets.”

  • • •

  When Laurie had phoned from California some months after Arthur’s death, she had mentioned, in passing, to Rachel that she had had an idea: she thought it might be fun maybe to feature a little bit from the books on her KCIF show. Rachel was never the most reliable reporter, but she recollected with some certainty that Laurie had not mentioned that she had already started to read the books on her hospital show, something we only discovered later.

  That summer Martha was not to be relied on for anything rational. We dated it, Rachel and I, to after the bonfire. Walking back from town one day, we could see a great cloud of smoke rising from the garden and in a panic we broke into a run, Rachel faster, more urgent, more prescient than I. Before I came round the side of the house, I could hear Rachel screaming, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” and when I got there Rachel was violently trying to stop Martha throwing things on the fire. Fights in real life aren’t choreographed like they are in films. They’re sloppy and fumbling; they’re graceless and unfocused. The people in them look sad and undignified. Rachel and Martha certainly did. Later, but not often, Rachel and I referred glancingly to the incident, but not to the awful details of it or the pained, silent aftermath that lasted for days. Martha never referred to it at all.

  Late into that evening, Rachel sat by the smoldering fire, so close to the house that you could still feel its dying heat as you opened the side door, such a mad, dangerous thing for Martha to have done on her own, but maybe that was the point. Her clothes filthy, her face blackened with soot and wet from the water she had put on the fire, Rachel picked over the things she had retrieved from it, the few things of Arthur’s life, all of which Martha had wanted to destroy. Upstairs we could hear her moving around, her soft footfall on the creaking floorboards. Martha wouldn’t come down again that night.

  Later, Rachel showed me some stuff she had rescued, bits and pieces of Hayseed stuff, and one thing that didn’t appear to have any Hayseed connection: a charred couple of pages that seemed to be the beginning of a short story called “A Trip To Le Touquet” about a woman who wins a ticket in a competition and goes there to meet someone.

  Anyway, the point of this is simply that, in other circumstances, we might have discussed Laurie’s request with Martha, but Rachel, without thinking too much about it, had said, “Fine, of course, why not?” We would have mentioned it at some point to Martha, I suppose, but more importantly, one of us must have mentioned it to Lila. What is certain, anyway, is that Lila phoned Graham Carter.

  Her call had one purpose: to stop Laurie. She dressed it up in a variety of ways, the princ
ipal one being that the integrity of the books would be destroyed if they were read on the radio by an American voice. The complex rhythm of the language would be altered, the purity, the essential Englishness of the books fatally compromised—an objection, of course, that Lila did not have when it came to translating the books into German. Graham, as an editor and publisher, as an English Scholar, would surely understand, she said. “Lila, it’s not The Canterbury Tales,” Graham said.

  Lila pleaded with him, told him that the family were paralyzed with grief and could not make the right decision, reminded him that this was in his control. She was technically correct: under the original contract that Arthur had signed with the Carter Press, they essentially acted as his agent and managed all subsidiary rights: film, television, stage, translation, merchandising, and—the rights in question—single voice readings. Without permission, without a fee being negotiated, KCIF would be in breach of copyright. Not that that was really the point: the contract might just have well been written in Urdu, given that the books had sold in negligible numbers in Britain and there was no money to argue over. It was only later that it became relevant, when Martha took the Carter Press to court to dispute the validity of the original contract.

  What happened in America might have happened anyway, but Lila’s call to Graham put him into play—but in a different way from how she had intended. In fact, by trying to stop it happening she actually set the ball in motion. Almost as soon as they finished the conversation, Graham phoned Laurie to explain the copyright situation, but in a positive way. He thought it was a great idea to read the books and that there might be some money in it. He discovered that Laurie, in fact, had started her KCIF broadcasts some days before she had spoken to Rachel, and when he talked to Rick Whitcomb, Rick had no option other than to agree to pay a fee. The timing was lucky: if Rick had realized before Laurie began the readings that he would have to pay, he would almost certainly have canned the idea.