The Toymakers(41)

The first thing he saw, as he reared up from those dreams (lest they swallow him whole, as they had on so many nights), was Mrs Hornung. She had arranged his feet in front of the fire, draped the blankets over his lap as she did every night. The teapot at his side (bark, pine needle, nettle – for Papa Jack remained the wild man Jekabs Godman at heart) was still hot, so perhaps he had not slept for long. Mrs Hornung clucked to see him wake, in the same admonishing tone she once used to scold his sons.

‘Is something wrong, Jekabs?’

Papa Jack picked himself up. At first Mrs Hornung thought he might topple, but as always he trudged slowly forward. In the fringes of the room, the patchwork creatures lifted their heads to follow him with their sightless eyes. A threadbare robin, loosely weaved, flapped its stubby wings and flew, in its own ungainly way, to his shoulder, where its motor promptly cut out.

Sometimes, the Emporium itself spoke its secrets to him, whispering through mortar and brick.

Papa Jack wound the little bird back up. As life returned to its motor, so it bounced upon his palm. Cupping it there, he left the Godmans’ quarters and went out on to the gallery skirting the Emporium dome. Far below, the shopfloor was in darkness. The Emporium in summer was at once a sad and glorious thing, filled with anticipation, filled with promise, filled with yearning. Papa Jack brought the bird to his lips, whispered a word and cast it out, into the air.

Follow …

The robin swoops down, as gracefully as a robin made of felt and duck down can. Plummeting and flying are two very different things; this robin conflates them in a dance of its own. Down through the dark, over the tops of empty aisles it comes; then, at last, to the copse of paper trees where the Wendy House lies hidden. Here it crashes through corrugated boughs. In the emptiness beneath, the Wendy House appears. Now the bird can control itself no longer; its motor is tiny, and it must save what energy it can for the return journey. It pretends to peck at the ground, looking for fallen grubs – and, as it does, it looks through the Wendy House door.

Imagine what it sees.

The return flight is an epic. If patchwork creatures had patchwork poets, one would have spun for this robin a myth of classical proportion. As it is, we must content ourselves with the image of the robin’s wings beating furiously as it fought gravity to return to the Godmans’ quarters. There it found Papa Jack’s palm once more. And there, before its motor wound down for a second time, it chirruped its last. Patchwork creatures have no language of their own; remember, they are only toys. But still, Papa Jack understood. Behind his beard, his face blanched as white as the Siberian snows. In seconds, he was in his robe, dark brown like the pelt of a bear; seconds later, he was holding his canes as he tramped through the door.

Papa Jack could not remember the last time he walked the shopfloor. The ways down to it were legion, but it had been so long that not even his feet remembered the way. He found himself in storerooms where patchwork mammoth lay; in the engine room where his flying locomotive still sat, awaiting the moment it might be needed again. He walked past the locked chamber where the Emporium Secret Doors had been barricaded (they opened in one place, but nobody knew where they went to; they had been locked away ever since), and only by sheer chance did he find the old night train and follow its tracks to the paper trees.

How furious he had been to hear of them rearing up, rupturing the boards of his shopfloor, and yet how majestic they now were! He would have stopped to marvel at them, but from deep within the copse there came a cry: somebody in pain, or terror, or both. Papa Jack had known pain before. He had known terror as well. It propelled him on – for there had never been such sounds in his Emporium, not this place he had created as a bulwark against the bitterness, the darkness, that was adult life.

He came out of the trees to find the Wendy House sitting there, crowned in paper vines. On a rock inside its white picket fence slumped Emil. The boy had his head hanging low so that, at first, he did not see Papa Jack arrive. But Papa Jack was a man whose presence could not go unnoticed. Emil felt a shadow cross him, and looked up to see his father.

What words Emil wanted to say withered on his tongue. But his eyes told a story. They directed his father to the Wendy House window. He had to crouch to peer in, for his great bulk towered above the Wendy House roof, his shoulders half as broad as the Wendy House itself. Inside, the space distorted with the quality of a kaleidoscope. And there, at the kaleidoscope’s centre, was his son. Kaspar was on his knees at the edge of a bed, and in that bed lay one of the shop girls, the one who had arrived on first frost. Her legs were parted and her back was arched and she was clinging to Kaspar as if he was the only thing tethering her to the world.

Papa Jack turned his tundra eyes on Emil.

‘Papa, listen …’

‘No.’

‘Papa, please.’

‘He’s taken it too far, these flirtations of his.’

‘No! It isn’t … Papa, it isn’t his.’

Papa Jack looked, incredulous, at Emil. ‘Then …’

‘Not me,’ Emil whispered, with unexpected regret. ‘It isn’t mine. Papa, she had nowhere to go and—’

Papa Jack could listen to nothing more. He hunched over, meaning to push through the diminutive door – and perhaps he would have done so as well, but at that moment there came a different kind of cry, the air rent apart by the squalling of a newborn child.