The Toymakers(124)
Under the trees the briars grew less wild. Here there were trails and places where the trees had been coppiced, and in the roots the spoor of some animal. Something startled above them: the goldfinches of pipe cleaners and golden brocade that were roosting above.
A patchwork rabbit darted across Cathy’s path. She followed it with her eyes – and there, in the shadows between two cardboard elm, it looked back. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but its eyes seemed to pinch in imitation of a human’s surprise, before it turned tail and zigzagged back into the forest.
After that, more rabbits came. One, chewing at the petals of some felt flower, birthed a tiny kit, which took one look at the interlopers and hurtled for cover.
‘Mama,’ Martha whispered, ‘look …’
Together, their eyes turned upward. Through the lattice of branches, the sky seemed closer than ever. Unable to resist, Martha lifted herself into the nearest elm. There, she reached through a canopy of crinkling green – and felt the touch of the sky, a blue wall against her hand.
By the time she returned to the forest floor, Cathy had already gone on ahead. Somewhere, Sirius yelped in fright – and Cathy barrelled forward, until she chanced upon a clearing. Here was the place the forest met the sky, and surely the outer limit of the toybox. Nestled against the wall stood a cottage of imitation stone, cotton wool smoke billowing out of its chimney.
Cathy was standing outside its picket fence. Patchwork hens clucked around a coop, and in the trees a great wolfhound opened one lazy eye to consider them, then closed it to snooze once again.
‘Mama,’ Martha ventured, ‘mightn’t he …’
Cathy said nothing. She squeezed her daughter’s hand, and walked into the cottage.
Inside, there were only boxes – two dozen and more, lined up around the cottage walls, with paper grasses growing up in between. Martha and Cathy opened each one, gazing within. Inside lay new worlds, and nestled in them more worlds still. A great galleon lay beached upon the sand, with patchwork parrots nesting in its sails and troops of patchwork monkeys screeching from the jungles inland. Across icebound taiga, herds of embroidered reindeer outpaced the mountain tigers that stalked them, and beavers made dams out of paper spruce and fir. A miniature railway crossed a lunar landscape, populated by little green men.
‘Oh Papa,’ said Martha, ‘he lived a life …’
So many lives, thought Cathy, but where to begin?
It had taken them some time to catch up, but finally the Imperial Kapitan led the toy soldiers into the cottage. Cathy helped them on to the lips of the toyboxes, so that they might peer into the new worlds within. She was watching them sally in and out, seemingly inspecting each frontier, when she realised that Sirius was whimpering. He had been following a scent in the dirt and now he had risen on his hind paws, scrabbling at the lip of a toybox crammed in behind the others. Cathy moved toward it. The box was of a simple design – and there, on its lid, a single scarlet arrow, in florid design.
‘This way,’ she smiled.
The way in was a mountain ravine, with the bones of prehistoric patchwork bears littering the way – but soon they emerged into the box’s interior, where a rainbow arced across what Cathy took for the sky. On a cliff face above them, words were carved into imitation stone. Cathy read them to herself, each word a prayer. ROBERT KESEY, read the first. ANDREW DUNMORE. DOUGLAS FLOOD. JEKABS GODMAN, PAPA JACK. The names of every other Emporium shop hand lost along the way.
Onwards they went, beneath the memorial stone as high as the sky. Fields of incandescent flowers, like the sparklers of a bonfire night, dropped down toward the shores of a vast lake: streamers of crêpe paper in blue and green, with cross-stitch fish leaping from the waves and gulls, borne up by tiny balloons, hovering above. Cathy stood on the sand and looked across. In the heart of the lake rose an island, and on that island a tower of stone. There was only one window in that tower. Halfway up, firelight crackled, ringing the window in orange and red.
‘There’s a boat,’ Cathy said, and pointed to a coracle moored against a narrow jetty. ‘Come on …’
Together, they stood over it. ‘There’s only room for one, Mama.’ Martha looked down. The toy soldiers were already marching aboard. ‘And some tiny passengers, perhaps.’
Martha remained only to help her into the boat, Sirius diving into the paper waves alongside, and released her from the mooring. Then, determined to rescue the toybox from ruin, Martha returned to the flowers on fire, the cottage and forests in the world up above.
It was a slow journey over the lake; the paper waves moved sluggishly, and tendrils of satin seaweed seemed to anchor her down, but there was a current to the water and, by accident or design, it was drawing her to the island. Cathy could do nothing more than lie back and whisper in Sirius’s ragged ears, while the Imperial Kapitan stood on the coracle’s rounded prow and raised his rifle at every leaping fish.
Soon, she felt the quaking of the earth and stepped out of the coracle, on to a new shore of shale and confetti sand. The steps leading to the tower were weatherworn and she took to them carefully, allowing Sirius to venture ahead.
There were no nerves as she reached the tower. The door was nondescript, nothing more than a tradesman’s entrance, and up close the white walls seemed scored in lines, as if the paper had been folded, smoothed out and folded again. She stepped into the interior, but all was serene. A stair of ivory white beckoned her on.