The Toymakers(13)
‘Watch how you go with those. Open them wrong and they’ll put down roots.’
She turned. There, propped against a pillar, was the boy they called Kaspar. She had seen him often enough, striding across the shopfloor with his black hair flowing behind him, dressed in a waistcoat more ostentatious than she had ever seen on a boy of his age. Like his brother Emil, he had eyes of the shrillest blue, but Kaspar was lean and angular where his brother was given to fat. The way he held himself, he almost seemed to be reclining, even while he stood upright. Sally-Anne, who lodged in a room in the same attic as Cathy and had been with the Emporium every winter since opening night, said he was the one you had to watch out for; his tongue was loose, but his hands were looser. ‘And him,’ she said, ‘just nineteen years of age …’
‘They’re mine, don’t you know?’
He said it with the same pride Cathy’s sister had when she was but two and three years old. Every last thing – be it a toy, a spoon, a seashell – had been mine mine mine.
‘These trees?’
‘You wouldn’t think it, but that’s three months of my life you’re putting on those shelves. Papa says it’s as good as any toy he ever made, and he wouldn’t say that lightly.’ At this point, a dog of cotton wadding and patchwork paws crossed the mouth of the alcove, stopped at one of the paper trees to cock a leg, and drifted on. Cathy followed it with her eyes, then looked at Kaspar as if to say: as good as that? But Kaspar was not deterred. ‘It really is a marvel of engineering. Shall I show you?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to excuse herself, but Kaspar was already lifting a boxed-up black larch from the pyramid and turning it in his hands.
‘You see, it’s all about perspective. You can do the most extraordinary things if you keep the perspective of a child. That’s how our papa’s training us – to never lose that perspective. To make a toy, you’ve got to burrow into that little part of you that never stopped being a boy. Because, hidden down there, are all the ideas you would have had, if only you’d never grown up.’
Cathy had not lived such a sheltered life that she had never been buttered up by a boy before. Boys talked to Lizzy all of the time, but there had been moments when it had been Cathy forced to listen to some simpleton prattle on about how his father was getting a motorcar, or the crabs he’d hauled in from the traps that morning. She looked at Kaspar with the same glassy expression as she had with those boys, but she was ashamed to admit there was a little corner of her that wanted him to go on. The idea that one of the paper trees decorating the alcove could spring from a box so small seemed absurd. She looked up at one now. The display was ringed by yews of crêpe paper and corrugated card, a hazel tree with catkins of newspaper curls. Even the smallest of them stood twice as tall as Cathy. The biggest, whose canopy stretched across the rest, reached as far as the gallery above, its branches rimed in hoarfrost of confetti.
‘I don’t know where the idea of trees in boxes came from. Only – I can still remember the little village where we Godmans used to live, and how big the trees seemed there. I was barely a boy when we left, but those images always stayed with me. And, at the end of the day, that’s what toys do, isn’t it? They take you back there, where a part of you always remains. And I knew – if I could only fix that memory in my mind, I could make the paper do anything I desired. Well, it took me a thousand-and-one attempts to make it work. One wrong fold, you see, and the magic just collapses. Some of the early ones opened up into great shredded nests. One became this gnarled archway of branches and bones – it looked just like a ruined temple. But then …’
He had been toying with the boxed-up black larch all along, and now he cast it at the ground. Where it hit the hard Emporium floor, the varnished box cracked. As soon as the seal was open, whatever forces pinned the tree within grew frenzied and wild. The box whirled on the spot like a spinning top as the paper fought to break free. Then, it erupted forth. The box stopped dead, anchoring the paper as it tore upwards. In fits and bursts of unfolding, the trunk revolved and filled out. Low boughs sprang outwards, with yet more branches and twigs unfolding from them, and a myriad of brown paper leaves unfurled at their ends. Higher up, the pressure exploded and out rolled a canopy of interlocking branches and vines, a bird’s nest of shredded paper. From a hole in the trunk, the stencilled eyes of an owl gazed watchfully out.
All of this had happened in seconds, but for long minutes afterwards the tremors worked in the tree and all of its details fell into place. The sound of the paper leaves settling was like the rustling of an autumn wind, even though the Emporium was already in the grip of deepest winter.
‘It’s … magical,’ breathed Cathy.
‘Would that it were,’ Kaspar replied, gazing into the branches above. ‘But some things aren’t magic at all. Some things are only mathematics.’ He stopped. ‘Cathy, I have to apologise. Ordinarily, when new shop hands enlist, I’m the first to welcome them. But you must understand, the night you arrived, it was …’
‘Opening night,’ finished Cathy.
‘And you arrived not a moment too soon. We’re understaffed this year, as every year. We never know how busy things are going to—’
A cry went up, somewhere on the Emporium floor. Kaspar cut short whatever he was about to say and whirled around just in time to see two boys hurtling out of the aisle, their faces contorted in terror. Immediately, he knew what he had done. The bears between the bookshelves, they had been too real. He had aligned the eyes and teeth too well, taken his work too far again. It was not the first time. Probably one of those boys had dared to put his hand in the bear’s mouth, and when he had, he had felt the deep rumble from inside its belly, seen the gleeful malevolence sparkling in its eyes. It was all make believe, but to boys that didn’t matter. Once his father found out, the lecturing would last long into the night: until Kaspar knew what he was doing, until he properly knew his craft, he should contain himself. Things could go drastically wrong with a toy ill made; games turned sour on an instant. No doubt Emil would watch gleefully from the corner of their quarters, because any black mark against Kaspar was a golden star for Emil.