The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

For the first time, she realised that the noises had been coming from only one section of the skirting, the gap between the bedside cabinet and the fireplace where her wedding portraits still hung. Down there, the skirting was in shadow. The scuttling had stopped – but now there was movement, movement down there in the gloom.

  She crouched, peering downwards. This time she was certain. The skirting board was shifting. It trembled at the edges, a thin seam appeared where two boards had been whitewashed together, and out popped the little tin tacks holding it in place. Then, with the rattling ferocious in the cavity beyond, the skirting board tumbled outwards, landing in the deep pile of the rug.

  A myriad of black shapes rushed out of the cavity. Cathy staggered backwards, the candle she had been holding tumbling to her feet.

  Out of the skirting, a battalion of wooden soldiers streamed on to the carpet. They came three abreast, until there were twenty, thirty, forty of them all milling on the floor, the keys in their backs slowly winding down. Before Cathy had caught her breath, long before she had formulated a rational thought, they were swarming towards her.

  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.

  Look, he thought, for as he watched ice was forming across the glass in the Emporium dome, a mist that hardened to occlude the night sky beyond. It’s the very last first frost …

  So there it was: the shuttered-up shop at the end of the alley, lights still dangling from its awnings (but not lit up for a generation or more), sugar frost still in its windows (grown pitted and yellow with age).

  Iron Duke Mews was already strung up in notices of demolition, the streetlights torn up or snuffed out. Notices dangled from the other shops along the cobbled row: the gentlemen’s tailors had been closed for months already, and the windows of the shoemakers were either boarded up or bare. Service trucks were arrayed in a great horseshoe around the end of the mews, and ribbons forbidding passage made a spiderweb across the entrance.

  Sirius was the first to venture through, but the rattling chaos inside Cathy’s bag told her there were others demanding to make the march. Parting the ribbons to go into the mews, she knelt down and opened the clasp. First to venture out was the Imperial Kapitan. Turning a circuit across the cobbles, he lifted his bugle for a silent call. Then the wind-up soldiery marched out in procession. Poor creatures, thought Martha; they had not yet learned to think, but their time would come.

  The Emporium doors had been boarded already, but the tradesman’s entrance was not yet barred. Cathy took out her key and together they peered into the barren blackness within.

  It had been a decade and more since Martha came to this place – and, if she had expected fountains of colour and the swooping serpents of old, she was sorely disappointed. All was d
ark in the half-moon hall. Cathy had opened a cabinet on the wall and was flicking the switches contained within – but no lights sparked high up in the Emporium nave. ‘They’d been threatening to do this since 1949,’ she said, with an air of resignation. ‘I hadn’t wanted you to see it like this, Martha. It should have lived in your memory like it does for so many others. But …’

  The tiny footsteps of the toy soldiers echoed lonesomely in the vast expanse – until, at last, the Imperial Kapitan came to a halt, devastated at discovering such dust, such decay. In his mind, his homeland had been scoured, his mother country razed to the ground. Thirty years he had been waiting. Thirty years – and now, this.

  Cathy crouched down, pressed her finger gently to the finger of the Imperial Kapitan. ‘Which way?’ she whispered. ‘Why are we here?’

  The question lifted the Kapitan up and out of his despair. Turning on his heel, he began directing the other soldiers to assemble – and, as he did, Martha lifted a finger to point.

  ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘we’re not alone.’

  For there, where the aisles had once tapered to a point, where the shelves had once been stacked in such a spiral as to obscure completely the door on the other side, a lantern was burning. Emil Godman was in his workshop, alone, on this very last first frost.

  The Imperial Kapitan led the soldiers in a quick, forced march. Though the aisles had long been torn down, the Kapitan made his way by the charts chipped into his wooden mind, following the lines where the aisles used to be, circling the old carousel, marching in mock triumph across the glade where the Long War had long ago been played. Cathy and Martha hurried in their wake, the light of Emil’s workshop fading to a point behind them – until, at last, they stood among the stumps of the old paper forest.

  The soldiers amassed across the boards. WHERE? they asked and, with regret, Cathy whispered, ‘Felled so many years ago. Paper timber, sold off to schools and children’s homes and …’

  THE HOUSE …

  They formed and then re-formed again.

  WENDY’S HOUSE …

  The soldiers had not finished drilling their final word, its shape quivering and indistinct, when the Imperial Kapitan startled, wheeled around, and commanded them to line up behind them. Standing at the head of the phalanx, he lifted his wooden rifle, aiming into the darkness behind where Cathy stood. They had been the first to hear the footsteps but Cathy heard them now, tolling with a tread she had known for so many years.

  Emil appeared out of the swirling motes of dust, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, his beard an eruption of untended, wiry tufts. A broom hung at his side, wielded like a weapon.

  ‘Cathy,’ he gasped, ‘what are you—’

  ‘I might ask you the same thing. I thought you were long gone, Emil. We said goodbye, right there in the half-moon hall.’

  ‘I couldn’t go, Cathy, not until …’ It was only then, as his eyes panned down, that he saw the soldiers. In the same moment he recognised them, the Imperial Kapitan sounded the charge. Toy soldiers sallied forth. Wooden bullets flew. The first were drawing tiny balsa sabres to spear Emil’s shins when he brought down the broom and scattered them, a titan of the battlefield.

  The Imperial Kapitan was scrambling to stop the rout, desperate not to lose his soldiers to Wind Down in the unmapped darkness, when Emil cried out, ‘Where did they … How did they … Cathy, tell me! Why are you here?’

  His voice had risen to a shriek of desperation. ‘I don’t know, Emil,’ she snapped – but something had changed now. She had seen the faltering expression on Emil’s face. There was terror here, but it was not just terror of the toy soldiers.

  Martha was gone to collect the scattered troops from the darkness, but Sirius remained. ‘Emil,’ Cathy whispered, ‘what’s going on?’

  At her feet, the remaining soldiers formed up.

  TELL HER!

  ‘Tell me what, Emil?’ She reached out, grappled with his wrist. ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘You’ve been hiding them,’ he stammered. ‘All this time, and you’d—’

  ‘The Kapitan stowed away in my bag, Emil. Hidden there, like I was, all those summers ago in our Wendy House. He’s been waiting thirty years … and for this. Emil, please. What is he trying to say?’

  Emil tore his hand away, sank down to his haunches – and there he sat, a grown man with his arms wrapped around his knees like any bullied child. ‘He’s just a toy,’ he breathed. ‘He isn’t saying a thing. He isn’t to be trusted …’

  ‘Emil!’

  The way she barked dried up any tears he had been threatening to cry. Emil looked plaintively up as the soldiers formed a ring around him. ‘I was trying to save us. All this time, and that’s all I’ve been trying to do. But he wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t listen. They thought I was evil, and all because I wanted to play my Long War. They were going to bring us down. You see that, Cathy, don’t you? They were going to bring us down and Nina, she was going to take my boys.’

  ‘She took your boys anyway. The Emporium still came to an end.’

  ‘But I had to try. You see that. I had to …’

  Behind Cathy, Martha reappeared, the remaining soldiers trailing behind.

  ‘Emil,’ she uttered, ‘what did you do?’

  ‘It was the night we laid Papa to rest. Nina said it had to change, that something had to be done. She was right, wasn’t she? Whatever else she was, she was right on this. We couldn’t go on … So I did the only thing I thought I could do.’ Emil pointed down. The soldiers had abandoned their watch on him now and, under the Imperial Kapitan’s instruction, were drilling another word. ‘Parley,’ he read. ‘I woke my brother in the night and begged him to come to a parley.’

  Midnight came too quickly on the night that Kaspar Godman disappeared. As the clocks chimed, Emil prowled up and down the length of his workshop, repeating some petition beneath his breath. Later, the wooden eyes watching him from the skirting would look back and think: if only we’d understood, if only we’d had the capacity to anticipate, to plan. But those things came later, too late to save anyone that night, and instead the painted faces just watched him, wound each other up, and watched him again.

  Nina was already in bed. She had taken the boys with her, meaning for Emil to sleep alone in his workshop – but, damn it, Emil didn’t care if he never went to bed with her again, just as long as his boys grew up like he did, making their battles up and down the Emporium halls, pouring their every dream, every ounce of imagination, into the toys that would one day populate the shelves.

  He held one of his papa’s pinecone figurines between his fingers. Every time he touched it, memories breathed themselves back into being in the shadows around him. One moment he was in the Emporium; the next, he was back in that little hovel where he and Kaspar were born, and Kaspar was helping him clean the grazes on his knee. But the memories were too vivid, they played on him in ways he could not abide, and were it not for the thought of his papa being ashamed, he would have crushed the soldier between thumb and forefinger right then. Instead, he set it down. The clocks had finished tolling. It was time.

  Besieged by too many memories, he took the long route to the shopfloor. By the time he made it to the paper trees, navigating around the blockaded aisles, he had already stopped twice, each time forcing himself to go on. But through the trees he could hear the whirr of a thousand motors turning. The parley had already begun.

  He had taken only one step beneath the branches when he heard the footfall behind him. He knew it was Kaspar by his strange, stilted gait, and turned to meet him.

  ‘Little brother.’

  ‘Kaspar,’ Emil breathed, ‘thank you for this. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ve made no promises, remember.’

  ‘It’s for the best, you’ll see. What’s good for the Emporium, it’s good for us all. Good for Cathy, Kaspar, and good for Martha too. Don’t forget them …’

  Kaspar raised a hand. ‘It isn’t me you have to convince.’

/>   No, thought Emil, and tried not to bunch his fists, but I know how to convince them. ‘Shall we?’ he said. He would help his brother this last little way under the trees, take his arm or allow his arm to be taken. If this was the end, it was the least he could do.

  Above them, the Wendy House seemed more derelict than ever. The slats nailed across its windows gave it the appearance of a blind man, scar tissue crowding its sockets. Emil paused before venturing in, allowing Kaspar to go first.

  He counted to ten, then followed.

  Inside, the floor was thronged with toy soldiers, every last one who once swarmed in the Emporium walls. Kaspar was already among them, and they spun around him in dizzying array. As Emil approached, they turned and formed ranks.

  ‘Are they all here?’

  ‘All but the Imperial Kapitan. None has seen him.’

  ‘Let us not worry about the Kapitan. Perhaps he’s wound down already, somewhere out there. Let us begin.’ Emil lifted his hands – but tonight he would not flinch. ‘I’ve come in peace,’ he said, and watched as the soldiers turned in circles, each winding its neighbour up.

  In the middle of the army, Kaspar stood. ‘Tonight, he’s here as a friend. So let’s hear what he has to say.’

  The soldiers bristled, but at least they obeyed. That was good, thought Emil. Their loyalty to Kaspar was the thing he had staked the future of the Emporium upon, the last chance he had for a life with his boys.

  ‘I know what you think of me,’ he began. His voice was trembling, but desperation made heroes of mortal men, and he fought it back down. ‘You think me a coward … and you’re right. But the war’s gone on too long. I concede it.’ He looked across the soldiers to address Kaspar alone. ‘I beat a retreat, Kaspar. The Long War is over. The triumph is yours. All I ask is that the Emporium goes on.’

  Emil was not certain that the soldiers heard – or, if they heard, whether they had the capacity to understand. Perhaps theirs was the primitive intelligence of mice; perhaps they knew only fear. He tried not to startle as a troop of infantrymen made a sally for his shins – and was still holding his ground when a single gunshot popped in the middle of the army, bringing the infantry to a halt.