The Toymakers(117)
It couldn’t be. The soldiers Harold had brought, they had been wound down, simple, prehistoric things. Not one of them had the knowledge …
As Cathy tried to make sense of what was happening, one of the toy soldiers broke ranks. Advancing beyond the others, it marched to the tip of her slipper, turned on its heel and marched back. By the time it was in front of the battalion, Cathy thought she recognised the uniform and all its golden stripes. ‘You,’ she whispered, ‘but it can’t be you …’
The Imperial Kapitan was spinning on the spot, his little bugle pressed to his lips, and at his direction the others were drawing a kaleidoscope across the carpet. When the Imperial Kapitan stopped his pirouette, so did the others come to a halt. Only now did Cathy see what they had been doing. It had been a drill. Now, they were standing in formation – and, as they marched from one formation to another, Cathy could quite clearly see the words being spelled out by the way that they stood:
WE … HAVE … COME
It couldn’t be. Not words. Not language, not as sophisticated as this. Only hours before, the soldiers had been simple contraptions of wire and wood.
AT LAST WE HAVE COME
Then she remembered the cavities under the shopfloor. The years Martha had spent reading to them. The way story and language seeped into sandalwood and teak, corrupting the grain of the wood, setting it in strange new spirals.
The Imperial Kapitan had been there. The Imperial Kapitan had learned. He had, she thought now, been learning for more than thirty years, trapped inside the confines of his own head …
He directed the soldiers and, once more, the soldiers swarmed:
HELP HIM!
‘Help him?’ Cathy whispered. ‘Help who?’
The Imperial Kapitan began to spin again, and in response the regiment returned to its dance.
COME WITH US
Cathy must have cried out, for she could hear doors opening underneath her now. Martha was on the stairs and coming up fast. ‘Mama?’ she called. ‘Mama, what’s happening up there?’
WE MUST GO BACK
‘Go back where?’
HE IS WAITING!
Cathy heard the thunder of footsteps behind her and, moments later, Martha was at her side. In a horror that quickly transformed to delight, she lifted her hand to her mouth.
BACK TO THE … EMPORIUM!
Wordlessly, Cathy nodded – and at this the soldiers broke into an uncontrolled dance. Only the gesticulations of the Imperial Kapitan seemed to bring them back under control. They twirled in laps around Cathy’s feet, and then they lined up, in ranks before her. One after another they raised their arms in salute, until finally only the Kapitan was left.
There would be no salute from him. Instead he marched forward, the key in his back still winding down, and extended his hand. It took a moment for Cathy to recollect, another for her to understand. Then, she crouched down and took his tiny wooden hand in her own. It was only then that she noticed how his wood was charred black, how his varnish had melted and run, leaving those unutterable wounds on his behind.
‘Little man, what happened to you?’
Outside, the first frost of winter was hardening across London town – but the Emporium was waiting and there was not far to go.
THE GREAT LONELINESS
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 30 NOVEMBER 1953
He had salvaged whatever he could. Oh, the removals men had tried, and then the bailiffs, and then the individual creditors (who had, to his opprobrium, been permitted to go into the storerooms and pick out whatever ephemera they wanted, if only to wipe out a little debt), but there were some things Emil was determined to keep. He piled them up behind his workshop door and wrote an inventory of all the things he had: three suitcases of journals, his father’s phoenix, a cloth bag lined with cotton and, nestling inside, all of his father’s pinecone figurines. This, the sum of a life. He didn’t even have ideas any more. He didn’t have imagination.
Emil stepped on to the shopfloor, so cavernous and empty that his footsteps echoed like the steps of a giant. There were still crates of bric-a-brac, perhaps even some older toys, in the stores, but across the shopfloor the shelf stacks were gone, the carousel dismantled, the Midnight Express taken to pieces for scrap. The cloud castle had been the first to go, sold off at auction to a charitable concern, and now there were only the floorboards (those would go too, before the demolition) and the disconnected pipes underneath.
Strange, but without everything in it, the shopfloor seemed so small. You could see straight through the glade where the Long War used to be played, up past the mezzanines, the corrals and seaport (where once the krakens had lurked beneath crêpe paper waves), over the stumps of the paper forest and the abandoned platforms of the Midnight Express. You could see one wall and then the next and, without anything in it, that was all the Emporium was: walls and walls and the space in between. He wondered that he had ever thought it as big as the world.
Emil did not dance across the empty expanse, because he had no feet for dancing. He did not charge around it, hollering into the dark, because even alone he felt foolish. He found a stool (stupid bailiffs, you could have had this stool!) and sat in the middle of the dusty expanse and, after a time, he dared to stare upwards, into the vaults where his cloud castle used to be.