The Toymakers(29)
‘Soon enough,’ whispered Cathy, and only after he was gone did she realise quite how soon that was.
She had been given the gift of too much time. Too much time to think about it, too much time to wallow in ideas of what birth might be like. Time, she already knew, played tricks in the Emporium, but never as markedly as it did now: the days going by so slowly, but her body changing so fast. Kaspar came back across the next evenings, always bringing her some new version of his toy. Four nights had passed by the time he brought her a prototype toybox, plain pine inscribed with the tin soldier emblem of Papa Jack’s Emporium. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him to stay that night, but something held her back. Perhaps it was only pride, for Cathy had asked for so little in her life. She faced the emptiness of that night as she had all others – in thinking about the Emporium and its past, and trying desperately not to imagine the future.
The next night was the first that Kaspar did not appear. She gave up thinking of him (it was easier said than done; she realised, now, how eagerly she awaited his visits) and slept early, only to wake an hour, a half hour, a scant few minutes later – and, disoriented, stand in the Wendy House door. She spent the next day in solitude, but when Kaspar did not appear that night, nor the night after that, the feeling of imprisonment became too intense. There were only so many times she could prowl around the Wendy House walls, only so many times she could go back through the photographs of the old Emporium and search for some detail she had not yet noticed. She did not want to, but when she found herself back at the Wendy House door, it was the most natural thing in the world to set foot outside. And, when the world did not end, it was the most natural thing to keep going, over the white picket fence, under the first of the paper trees, up out of the alcove and into the first aisle.
Almost immediately the restlessness bled out of her. The knots inside her chest unwound. It was dark in the Emporium but she wandered along aisles lit by moonlight pouring in from the skylights above, and for the first time in many weeks she felt free.
It was intoxicating to be out. She spent an hour in the alcove where the pop-up books had been covered up, ferreting under the dust sheets and going through each book in turn. In the atrium the Russian rocking horses had been corralled behind a wooden fence, but she stole through and (mindful of her bump) climbed on to the closest she saw. Almost instantly, she could feel the wind in her hair, hear the pounding of hoof beats across some verdant plain. The sensations were so acute she quite forgot she was in the dusty old Emporium at all; the shop walls simply faded away, until what she could see in the edges of her vision was a wild, rugged vista of green, across which other rocking horses cantered in wild abandon.
After that she was tired, but it would not do to go back to the Wendy House, not when the night was still vast. Determined, she set off, ducking along an aisle where lace butterflies had once cavorted on invisible threads. In the insectarium at its end, the shelves were packed with boxes of grubs and larvae. On a whim, Cathy picked up the first, warmed the cocoon inside her palms and watched as a woollen house fly emerged. Only Kaspar, she thought, could have spent long hours concocting something so mundane as a toy fly. Papa Jack’s were the golden dragonflies and grasshoppers, Emil’s the bright furry bumblebees.
She left the insectarium by the back door and came, at last, to the carousel in the heart of the Emporium floor. The carousel itself had not turned since the night the Emporium closed its doors, and its painted horses, its unicorn and stag, now slept beneath blinkers and roughspun blankets. The depression in which they sat was surrounded by an avalanche of pillows, draped in the same dust sheets as everywhere else. Cathy remembered long winter nights when mothers and fathers had reclined on these hills and watched as their children were borne around by the carousel. Those slopes had always seemed so inviting; even now, hidden under thick sheets, they tempted her down.
She made her way over and lowered herself in. No sooner had the land given way underneath her, moulding to the shape of her body, Sirius reappeared and wormed his way up on to her lap. Sandwiched between the pillows and the patchwork, it wasn’t long before Cathy’s eyes grew heavy. Fleetingly, she closed them, content to float, for a time, on a mountain of pillows through the Emporium dark.
Noises woke her.
It was still dark on the shopfloor. The first thing she noticed was the cold, for Sirius was no longer on her lap. With the clumsiness of the half-asleep, she stumbled to the bottom of the slope and got her bearings.
She could see which way Sirius had gone for he had left marks in the dust now carpeting the Emporium floor, the tell-tale swishing of a hastily stitched tail. He had disappeared into the dark beyond the carousel, where the spiderweb of aisles had once housed all manner of delights. Panic gripped her. What if, somewhere down there, Sirius had lain down in the dust, his motors winding down? What, then, of the promise she had made to Kaspar?
Cathy took off. Past the carousel, the darkness in the aisles was absolute. She fumbled on one of the empty shelves, groping blind beneath the dust sheets – and came back triumphant with a glass jar in her hand, a relic left behind after the Emporium was closed. Fortune favoured her. She screwed the lid tight and the crocheted fireflies inside turned incandescent. They buzzed against the edges of the glass – and suddenly the aisle was lit up, serpents and soldiers cavorting in shadow on the shelves.
Cathy bore the light to the end of the aisle. She had not noticed this door before – but, then, there were so many doors in the Emporium, and the aisles constantly refracting or being rearranged. It was easy to get lost. And yet – there was something about this door that made her certain she would have remembered it. It was like the door to Papa Jack’s workshop in miniature, oak with rivets of grey-black steel. Judging by the claw marks low down, the patchwork dog had scrabbled inside – and not for the first time.