by Tim Lebbon
THE
THIEF
OF
BROKEN
TOYS
TIM LEBBON
ChiZine Publications
Copyright
The Thief of Broken Toys © 2010 by Tim Lebbon
Cover design and photography © 2010 by Erik Mohr
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92685-184-6
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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
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Edited by Brett Alexander Savory
Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi and Helen Marshall
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
Memory feeds imagination.
— Amy Tan
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
About the Author
1
A bright, cold autumn day, and the village is living. People ebb and flow through its streets like a pulse, moving from here to there with familiar regularity. Some are tourists, but they’re fewer in number now that the ice cream shops are closed and most of the self-catering cottages are wrapped up warm for the winter. Today has the feel of every familiar day. Down by the harbour we see a man stacking crates of just-landed fish onto a pallet, ready for the driver of a small forklift to transport into the big freezer behind the market. Soon, restaurant owners and shopkeepers will start milling and the fish will be brought out, displayed in their coffins of broken ice for inspection and purchase. Moving closer, drifting down on the low autumn sunbeams, we see the man more clearly.
He’s tall, middle-aged, fit and strong, and wearing skin leathered by years of exposure to the elements. There’s a small scar across his left cheek, which he remembers putting there when he was barely into his teens — a clumsily cast fishing line, the hook spinning as it flicked by his face. He recalls the cool feeling of open skin, the surprise as he saw sunlight splashed red before his face, and then the tears of pain. It hurt at the time, but the scar has stood him in good stead over the years. It gives him character — even though he has more than enough character for one man — and more than one woman has ended up in his bed because of an interest in that scar. It draws the eye, dashed at a rakish angle across his cheek. And above it, his piercing blue eyes. His name is Jason, and he used to be your friend until he started sleeping with your wife.
You’ve never seen them together, not yet. Their affair is a whisper in the village, oft-repeated like the hush of the incoming tide on the small pebble beach. Jason feels sorry for you, and as he stacks three more crates, you cross his mind. He stands up and kneads the small of his back. It’s been a long seven hours out at sea, and he’s glad to be in for the day. He’ll be going out again that evening, but in between will be sleep, a pint or two at the Old Anchor, and perhaps an hour with Elizabeth that afternoon. She loves him in the shower, swilling the salty tang from his skin while she coaxes more from him.
He stares across the harbour at the dozens of houses clinging to the steep hillside. Your house is up there, the one near the top with the small terraced garden and the shed leaning drunkenly against the rocky outcrop. He remembers looking up there before and seeing movement in the garden, the unmistakeable flitter of an excited child playing on his own. He knew even back then who the child was, of course, because he was the boy’s godfather. But the child is gone now, and the garden is still. He shields his eyes to see whether you are sitting in the garden, staring down at him staring up. Perhaps you are, but it’s too far to see. From this distance you’d simply fade into the background.
Leaving Jason, we rise up and revel in the sea breeze once again, like a seagull patrolling its familiar hunting ground. Jason continues stacking crates, and sometimes he thinks he’ll soon be too old to carry on fishing the dawn. He has vague plans about opening a bed-and-breakfast somewhere inland, perhaps up on the moors where hikers hike all year round. He’ll suggest it to your wife one day soon, and perhaps sometime — years from now, when Toby has been gone long enough for his shadow to disappear from the village — she will accept.
Following the stream inland, passing over the old slate roofs where seagulls roost, we spy the silvery snake of the stream passing beneath arched stone bridges and between buildings so tall and old they seem to lean in and touch. It looks serene and picturesque now, that stream, but in its bed it holds the silt of tragedy. Thirty years since the flood, but still it’s talked about in Skentipple when the pubs are closing and old men and women are shadows in the narrow streets. Eight people washed away, and their names are immortalized in metal in the small village square. You never knew any of them — you were a child, and you lived a hundred miles away — but their names are still familiar to you.
We pass above the village’s main car park, beyond which only people who live or work here are allowed to drive. The streets were never made for cars, and some of the sharper corners are carved with the memories of a thousand wing mirrors and bumpers. The car park is half empty today. Wendy sits on her usual bench, her old rucksack propped beside her and a plastic cider bottle already half empty between her knees. Her house is one of the finest in Skentipple, and also one of the largest, marking the entrance to the village from the main coastal road, but she has been like this ever since you can remember. She always dresses well and seems to take care of herself, but she won’t let anyone close enough to tell for sure. No one can recall the last time anyone touched Wendy. She leaves money on shop counters and rarely waits for change, and this corner of the car park is her own.
Today, as every day, she’s thinking about her husband Rodney and how he went away a decade before. And that is why there’s no room in her life for anyone else, because she’s doing her best to make Rodney still there. Her house echoes strangely at night, and every evening before bed she enters his study where she last saw him alive, and he is almost there again.
She looks up, as if she sees. But her expression does not change. She is long used to shadows in her life.
The road winds up from the car park, and on either side the valley slopes grow shallower. Most of the houses here are private, with a few holiday cottages scattered amongst them. We drift lower because there’s something in the street, and we pass above a discarded toy propped in the gutter. It looks like a beanie doll, its brightly painted face faded a li
ttle by sunlight or rain, right leg missing. Such a shame.
We flit along with the wind, and then fall gently as a feather toward the Smugglers’ Inn. It’s an old pub built into the side of the valley, and Tony Fox the landlord once took you down into the basement to show you the start of the tunnel that leads all the way down to the sea. An old river course, he said, and you can remember the way the shadows shifted in there as his candle was kissed by a breeze, the rich smell of seaweed and rot even half a mile from the sea, and the sense of history stirring the old air. Untouched by sunlight, that place had little inkling that the world had moved on.
You asked Fox if he’d been all the way down, and he looked at you strangely, as if it was a stupid question. You still don’t know.
Elizabeth is sitting in the small front beer garden smoking a cigarette. She has taken up smoking again since Toby died, having given up years before when you started trying for a baby. You still remember her smile as she smoked her final cigarette and threw it away half-smoked. Never again, she said. This is the first day of the future.
Now, every day is the last day of the past. Elizabeth is sad today, and she is always sad. You cannot know this, but you always assume it to be true. And you assume because you cannot bear the idea of her being happier than you. It was not her fault, and not yours either, but grief is a harsh mistress, and sometimes blame is the only way to appease her.
Your estranged wife enjoys this cigarette because it takes her back to a time of longing and hope. She doesn’t think it’s because it erases those smokeless years when everything was so happy — she’s not certain that’s the reason — but she allows herself to consider it. Don’t avoid thinking about him, the doctor told her, and she has become adept at believing she’s thinking about Toby without really considering him at all. Mostly she thinks about herself, as she was then. She closes her eyes and inhales again, and the smoke burns away the sweet smells of Skentipple. Maybe later she will see Jason, and his soft touch and restrained concern will further change her. Because that’s what she is trying to do, and she can’t help but acknowledge it. Change herself back to how she was before she met you, and before . . .
“Toby,” she says, glancing up. A seagull cries out as it passes over the pub. Her heart misses a beat, and sometimes she hopes one of those missed beats will stretch and stretch until the next one is left waiting forever.
She closes her eyes, but does not see because we are not really here. She turns and goes back inside the pub — it’s almost lunchtime, and soon she’ll be cooking — and we are alone for a while at the top of the village, looking down the valley toward the blur of the sea.
Drifting back that way, something pulls us in. We feel the tug, though there is no urgency, and the air up here just feels so good and fresh. We’re not part of the village or the air, but apart from them both.
Down in the street, the lost toy has vanished. Washed away by the rain, perhaps, like all those poor people three decades ago. But it has not rained for days.
And now there you are, sitting in your garden above the harbour looking down at the hypnotically shifting sea beyond the harbour wall. It sways and shifts, bulges and ebbs like the grey skin of a giant beast, a sleeping thing that has no concept of the humans who have come and built themselves around and over it. Sometimes there’s a distant splash as a wave impacts the stone wall, and the sound serenades the gulls to provide a melody for the village.
You’re motionless, because to move might allow in those memories you try so hard to keep at bay. You stare out and away from the garden where he played and laughed and ran, building sandcastles in his small sandpit, collecting bugs, pulling the petals from flowers to press, and sitting for long periods reading the books about pirates and smugglers he loved so much. And you keep your attention away from the house as well, though its stark south-facing wall reflects sunlight across you and provides a splash of warmth. In there he slept and cried and played, laughed and loved, and eventually died. In there you cannot bear to be, but the idea of leaving is even worse. Some of the villagers still ignore you because they don’t know what to say.
But sometimes, walking through the village is the closest thing there is to an escape.
We can help. And then you, comforted and calm, may return the favour.
Though Ray had not spoken to his estranged wife for several months, somehow they had developed a routine. They had seen each other maybe half a dozen times, but even those brief sightings were at a distance, never close enough so they had to talk. They set Ray’s heart skipping and his blood pulsing. Not because she was the woman he’d once loved — and who perhaps he still loved, if he could find the courage to look deep enough — but because from a distance, she reminded him so much of Toby.
Elizabeth had never told him why their life together had ended. Toby’s death was not a reason, nor a cause. It had been a catalyst for something more, a distancing, a stretching of the love between them that had been fractured by their son’s death, and eventually snapped. He often wondered whether it was because he reminded her of Toby as well. He has your piercing blue eyes, she used to say, Toby sleeping on his chest and her hair tickling his shoulder where she lay beside him. It’s what had attracted her to Ray. The second thing she’d ever said to him was, I always fancied Steve McQueen. Neither could remember the first.
Skentipple was a small fishing village on Cornwall’s south coast, and a place that lived two lives. One was an echo of every life lived there for hundreds of years — the trawlers went out with the tide, returned several hours later, and their catch was sold or auctioned off to provide a living for families whose ancestors had done the same. Fishermen were welcomed in by the pubs during the evenings, drinking local ale, singing, and telling stories of the sea whose origins were lost to the dark depths of time. Residents carried family names and traditions that were meaningless to outsiders, but which bore the substance of history to those who knew. Every building with its low doorways, every basement with a bricked-off section, every path that led up onto the cliffs or down to the rocky shore and then faded away . . . they all carried stories, and some were lost even to the memory of the village.
And the other life was more recent — the tourist’s haven, catered for by the same pubs that entertained the fishermen. New restaurants, tea shops, and cafés that boasted local produce in their fresh cream cakes and crabmeat sandwiches. An element of the village’s past had been eroded as surely as the cliffs it clung to, the abrasive rich families from London or the south-east who bought cottages to refurbish and rent to other strangers. They brought money and wonder to Skentipple, and when they wandered the narrow streets, alleys, and paths, some of them noticed the other people there: the villagers, breezing through ranks of tourists without a second glance as they went about their daily business. Two worlds in one, both of them overseen by the steep valley sides where people had deemed it necessary to build the most precarious dwellings.
Living in this place, avoiding someone was not easy. Though down at the harbour there was a network of alleys and paths, once away from the sea, there was only one road that led up out of the village, away from the restaurants, past the Smugglers’ Inn, curving around old mad Wendy’s house until it vented into the wild Cornish countryside. But Ray and Elizabeth managed. She lived in a room above the Smugglers’ Inn, and since she worked there as well, her visits to the harbour side were usually limited to evenings. Ray lived on the hillside above the harbour — he’d kept their family home because she couldn’t, co-existing with memories she could not bear — and he usually visited the harbour during the day.
Evenings, he walked the cliffs.
Sometimes he wondered whether he should purposely try to bump into her. Talk, maybe even hold hands, and broach the subject of their loss as they should have a year before. Though he didn’t think they had fallen out of love, he felt little for her anymore. Perhaps grief over Toby had eroded all capacity for other emotions, even love. But every time Ray thought of
doing this, he considered the fact that she was not seeking him out, and illogical though it seemed, he took this as reason enough to maintain his routine.
Really, he was afraid.
But today was different. Today, he had been sitting in the garden for hours, sleeping and waking, never quite sure whether he was dreaming of the village or seeing and hearing it for real. His hands and feet were cold from his long exposure to the autumn, and though he wore two woollen sweaters and a heavy coat, his sweat still managed to chill him. His limbs felt heavy and dead. The idea of a beer in one of the village pubs was attractive for once, and he left the house without checking the time. He had stopped wearing a watch months ago, tired of watching his life tick away.
Walking down the curving, steep path from his house toward the harbour, he passed an old woman on her way up. He’d never discovered her name, but they always exchanged a nod and a smile. Today she spoke, and Ray thought perhaps it was the first time.
“Love autumn,” she said, panting. She was maybe eighty years old, and the steps and steep path up from the harbour were a challenge for Ray, someone half her age.
He was so surprised that he could not find an answer.
“So how’re you?” she asked.
“I’m . . .” Terrible, he thought. I’m stuck a year ago. “I’m not too bad,” he said, and found a smile creeping across his face.
“Good to hear it,” the woman said. She puffed a little, rubbing at her knees. “I’m always here. Well, nearly always. If you need me for anything.”
“Thank you,” Ray said. He knew her house, an old fisherman’s cottage with its rough plaster walls inlaid with a beautiful array of shells. Toby had called it the shell house, and Ray remembered her talking to him once when he’d run on ahead. Ray and Elizabeth had climbed the hill to find their son accepting a slice of cake from the woman’s withered hands. For them she’d only had a smile, but that had been enough to make them feel good.
