The Thief of Broken Toys Read online

  He was in my house, Ray thought. He was here, inside, while I slept. But that did not frighten or concern him as much as it should have. While the tea was brewing he went upstairs to his dead son’s room. Broken toys were still scattered across the bed and floor where Ray had left them the previous day, and he smiled sadly as he sat on the bed, picking them up at random, remembering. Here was the Power Ranger whose arm had come off when Elizabeth stepped on it, Toby’s cry of grief heartbreaking to both of them. They’d comforted him, given him a chocolate bar, and Ray had promised to fix it, but never had. Here was the self-propelling car whose mechanism had become jammed, and Toby had cried because it no longer moved on its own. It’s dead, he’d said, and Ray had not fixed that one, either.

  On the side of the wardrobe, which still held many of Toby’s little clothes, was a self-portrait he’d painted in school when he was five years old. It was the usual childish splodge of paint; big round pink head, bright blue eyes, smiling mouth with — much to Ray’s and Elizabeth’s amusement at the time — two long vampirish teeth. Since he’d gone, Ray had not been able to look at it without crying. It was something more than a photograph, evidence of Toby’s mind working, his hands moving, and a sign of the self-awareness he’d barely had time to explore. But now he looked at it and smiled, and his dead son smiled back. At least he’d had a chance. At least he’d spent some years on this planet, instead of no years at all. He’d known laughter and joy, and he had been loved.

  Ray gathered some toys to him and rested back on the bed, looking around the room with new eyes and finding in himself an ability to celebrate — instead of only mourn — Toby’s life.

  “Elizabeth,” he said. Something about his estranged wife’s name had changed. It held more meaning than it did yesterday, when it had simply been the first name of the woman who’d left him. Today it was Toby’s mother, part of this room, these toys, and part of Toby’s mind when he’d picked up the fat paintbrush and painted himself as he believed his mother and father saw him. “Elizabeth,” Ray said again. And he knew he had to talk to her.

  His walk through the village was alive with memories, and Ray wondered whether in his grief he’d been burying them so deep that they were as good as forgotten. They came to the fore now, bright sunlit moments of pushing Toby’s pram, guiding him on unsteady, unlearned legs, and chasing after him when he progressed from toddler to little boy. The most obscure, meaningless recollections hit home, and Ray realized that no moment is meaningless. His son’s smile over his shoulder as he entered the local post office holding his mother’s hand, skipping along the curbside with one foot on pavement and one on road, kneeling down with bread in his hand and a robin hopping cautiously closer, closer . . . each of these images was precious, because they were evidence of his son’s life. Toby was gone now, but memories could be as rich and as meaningful as experience. After all, every instant that passed — every step Ray took, every beat of his heart — was instantly consigned to memory.

  He passed the bakery and paused to look inside, but he could not see Rachel. Perhaps on the way back he’d call in to see her, after he’d spoken with Elizabeth and . . .

  “What am I going to say?” he whispered, walking on past the bakery and staring at the ground before him. He couldn’t tell the truth. That he’d met an old man on the cliffs, and that the old man was fixing Toby’s toys and somehow easing Ray’s grief. That was ridiculous. The very idea lessened their loss, but much as Ray dwelled on the reality of what was happening as he walked, he could not change the way he felt. Something was lifting from him.

  He worked his way through the winding streets and onto the road that curved out of the village. He’d decide what to say when he got there. Planning these things would never work, and he’d have to trust himself. They had such a history, so much love between them, and he’d always thought of their relationship as something that had paused rather than ended. There had been no ending; no shouting, arguing, or severing of ties. Elizabeth had simply moved out and on, but perhaps their past was not yet beyond reach.

  “We could have another,” Ray whispered, and his breath caught in his throat. He stood frozen by the roadside, trying to imagine Toby with a brother or sister. The idea was a shocking acknowledgement of there being a future.

  The day moved on, and when he reached the Smugglers’ Inn, he sat on a bench in the small beer garden, feeling damp soaking through his trousers, staring at the façade, wondering where Elizabeth was now and which room was hers. It was approaching midday, and a family of tourists was perusing the menu board, father silent, mother distracted, two kids laughing and joking. Ray thought of the old smuggling tunnel the landlord Tony Fox had shown him an age ago, and wondered why he never made more use of it with the tourists. Maybe some things were too private.

  The pub door opened and Elizabeth emerged. Ray caught his breath. She carried several ashtrays and started laying them on the tables, and she actually passed him by before pausing, turning back, and realizing who he was.

  “Ray,” she said, and her eyes filled up. I remind her of him, he thought. “What are you . . . ?”

  “I came to see you,” he said.

  “Why?” She could not quite look at him; her eyes flickered from side to side, as if in the sudden presence of her estranged husband she sought her son’s ghost.

  “Because . . . there’s life beyond. We don’t have to let it beat us. Destroy us. Toby wouldn’t have wanted — ”

  “Don’t say his name,” she breathed, staring right at him for the first time.

  “Toby?”

  “Don’t.” A plea.

  “Don’t be afraid of his memory, Liz.” He stood and walked toward her, hands coming up to hold her arms. She backed away.

  “I can’t . . . I can’t even . . .” She shook her head, and Ray thought she was going to crumple. He prepared to catch her, ease her onto a bench where they could sit and talk. But then she started shouting. “Just leave me alone! You have no idea! You just don’t know. How can you even . . . smile?”

  Was I smiling? Ray thought, but he frowned and backed away. Elizabeth was not crying. Her face was red, and her hands worked by her side, clawing.

  “It’s something we have to come to terms with,” he said. “Smiling isn’t forgetting him. We can move on, without dishonouring his memory. He was our little boy, Liz, and the last thing he’d want — ”

  “He’s dead!” she shouted, as if believing he’d forgotten all they’d gone through.

  There’s a man up on the cliffs, he thought, but there was no way he could say that, not even now.

  “Can’t we just talk?” he asked.

  “You know we can’t,” she said. She glanced sidelong at the parents who’d been perusing the menu board. They were leading their children away, trying to distract their fascinated kids from the shouting woman. “I just can’t, not with you. You remind me of him so much.”

  “That’s a bad thing?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” He thought she’d shout her reply, scream it, but it was little more than a gasp.

  “And Jason?”

  Elizabeth stared at him then, and it was the first time she’d looked at him like that since leaving. She wore the old Elizabeth behind her expression, not the grief-stricken shell she had become, and for a second he allowed himself hope.

  And then she shot it down.

  “Jason helps me forget.” She turned and went back into the pub, shutting him out. He sat down, clasped his hands on the wet bench, and stared down at them for a long time.

  From above, we follow him down below. He walks along the road like something defeated, but as he nears the harbour his shoulders straighten, his head lifts, and perhaps there’s a smile on his lips. He walks faster. He smells dead things, because that’s much of what the sea’s smell is — a familiar and nostalgic scent. He wonders whether the sea has always smelled the same, even before humans settled here hundreds, thousands of years ago. Almost, he guesses. Though without humans h
ere to sense, did the sea even smell at all?

  He starts climbing the path that leads up onto the hillside, where his home is balanced amongst many others, walls set into precarious footings, the buildings huddled and clinging like eager observers of the harbour down below. Up beyond his home, the path to the cliffs is empty for now. There are footprints in the mud, and a seagull is cracking a shelled thing against a rock tucked beneath a gorse bush at the path’s edge. Its own feet add more delicate prints as it dances back and forth, picking up the sea creature in its beak, dropping it on the rock, again and again. It knows that it could take flight and drop it from a greater height, but already the slick saltiness of the shell’s innards is exposed and leaking. A few more impacts and it will be able to prise the thing apart and swallow the insides.

  The sounds reach the old man’s ears where he stands up on the cliff path looking out to sea. We know that he is waiting for someone who will come from a different direction. The old man has intrigued, has entwined the younger man’s perception like a blade of grass around his finger, and now it is time to finish.

  He sighs and waits, and hopes that this time it will work. He has been doing these things for far too long.

  This time he took a brightly coloured toy that was supposed to be a hand-held saw. When it was pushed across the floor, the wheel beneath would turn, lights would flash, and it made a saw-like buzzing. Ray had bought it for his son on a work trip to the States, and it had been well-used over the following few months. Then one day, it had stopped working. He’d changed the batteries, to no avail. He took the thing apart, but he’d never been that handy, and the electronics of the thing just confused him. He saw no loose wires or broken connections, and he remembered screwing the toy back together thinking, It’ll work now; I’ve taken it apart, put it back together, and it’ll work, and I’ll never know what was wrong. But it had not worked, and after an evening sulking about it, he thought perhaps Toby had never considered it again.

  He slammed the front door behind him, didn’t bother locking it, strode up the hillside. Ray had never been as fit as he would have liked, and by the time the path levelled out, he was sweating and panting, but eager to reach his goal.

  It was mid-afternoon. The old man was waiting for him, dressed in jeans and a shirt, a light coat, and walking boots. He smiled gently as Ray approached, then held out his hand.

  “Here,” Ray said. “Whatever it is you do . . .” He placed the colourful plastic toy in the man’s hand, and stepped back.

  The old man looked down at the saw for a few seconds, and his face was so expressionless that Ray’s guts sank, his shoulders slumped, and he thought, Has anything been happening here at all? The man turned the toy this way and that, and sunlight shone between clouds and glinted from its garish colours.

  “Come with me,” he said at last. He lifted the toy, then nodded out toward the sea. “Something to show you.”

  “Come with you where?”

  But today, the old man was not wasting words. He turned and walked farther along the cliff, and then turned right from the path and forced his way into the plants growing thick at its edge. They seemed hardly to touch him, and when he glanced back to see if Ray was following, there was a strange look in his eyes. He appeared almost nervous.

  “Not far,” he said. “You’ve seen it before. Not been there, but seen it. And now I’ve something to show you.”

  Ray glanced at the gorse, the hawthorn bushes.

  “It’s easy if you know where to tread,” the old man said.

  So Ray followed, because he had the sense that this was the culmination of something, or the beginning of something new. At first he tried to judge just where the old man was stepping and follow his lead, but he soon found that the plants appeared to be parting around his legs. There was no sense of movement, no sound of them rustling or twisting out of his way, but his route was unimpeded. He stared at the old man’s back and, past him, the sea. Moments later, he saw the angular shoulder of the stone hut.

  “Home, sweet home,” the man said, chuckling. There was something not quite right about that sound, and Ray paused, the plants suddenly pressing in around him again. A thorn stuck into his thigh; a stem was curled around his ankle. As he tried to pull back, he was pricked and spiked again, more wounds to add to the scabbed punctures on his fingers and hands.

  “Come on, now,” the old man said. “You want to know what it is I do, don’t you?”

  Ray looked from him to the overgrown structure, and back again.

  “Don’t you?”

  Ray nodded. He moved forward, and the man let him.

  “Then step inside,” he said. “Gotta fix this broken toy.”

  He waited until Ray stood beside him. They were maybe ten feet from the cliff here, the actual edge blurred by the plants that grew out over the terrible drop. I thought about stepping from there once, he thought, and looked back along the cliff to where he’d stood.

  “Two men built it almost seventy years ago,” the old man said. “They were already middle-aged then. Fishermen, they’d seen the cruelties man can inflict on man in the mud of Ypres. So when the second war started, they wanted to do their part. Fish, they were told, help to feed our nation. But fishing to them was like breathing to us. It seemed . . . helpless. So they built this thing as well, and for the duration of the war, they took turns sitting up here, watching.” He looked out to sea at the three large ships on the horizon, and the smaller vessels bobbing closer in.

  “How do you know all that?” Ray asked.

  “Because I came here, and sat here, and they told me.” He stared at Ray as if challenging him to question.

  “So why bring me here now?”

  The old man looked again at the broken toy in his hand, and this time he seemed to give it serious attention. He turned it this way and that, held it up to the light, shook it, breathed onto it, and then held still, as if listening.

  “To show you how this whole thing works,” the old man said. “To show you how to perform wonders.” He edged past the hawthorn tree crowding the end of the stone building, and Ray followed.

  He didn’t know what to expect when they walked inside; he’d spent no time contemplating it. The instant before he saw, he imagined the insides to be overtaken with nature. There was no roof to the shelter — whatever had been built there had long-since collapsed and been subsumed — and the heads of the walls were crumbled by frost and plant growth. Inside might lie the rotting remains of the roof, piled into the corners and smothered with plants. Perhaps some wild rose bushes might have taken hold, sheltering against the walls. It was possible that the place had been found and used by lovers or drinkers, or those who simply wanted to be alone, and maybe evidence of their loving or solitude was still there — initials carved into the walls, an atmosphere of melancholy.

  What he saw was so far removed from what he had, briefly, imagined that he paused and closed his eyes, waiting for the image to vanish. But when he looked again, he saw the same view, and he had to concede that this was the truth.

  The inside of the ruined stone building had been completely cleared out. There was a table at its centre, as tall as a dining room table though much smaller, and a chair tucked beneath it. Something sat on the table shrouded with a soft chamois leather. Beside it, fixed to the end wall, was a large glass-fronted cabinet containing an array of tools. Such was his shock that Ray could not accurately make out shape or purpose; he simply saw the glint of metal and the shine of well-used wooden handles. There were other things in there too, made of material he wasn’t quite so sure of. But his attention was quickly snatched from the strange cabinet by the other, stranger display that took up the back wall.

  Hung from hooks on a fine metal mesh were dozens of toys. There were dolls and teddies, action figures and ballerinas, cars and models, and others Ray could not identify. They took his breath away. Each of them seemed to be broken, with limbs missing or plastic cracked, and they formed an orderly queue await
ing the man who would fix them.

  The old man stood quietly by his side.

  “How long have you . . . ?” Ray asked.

  “I’ve been here a while. Not too long, though. I move around.”

  “And all these . . . all from Skentipple?”

  “Some,” the man said. “Some are from the surrounding area, or from places a long time ago. There are always toys that can’t be fixed.”

  Ray’s eyes were drawn again and again to the chamois-covered object on the table. It was a mystery he wanted to uncover, but it was also something safe to look at. The toys and the tools, they were unreal, and —

  Impossible? he thought. Really? And why is that?

  The old man walked forward, his feet scratching grit across the smooth timber floor. He pulled out the chair and sat down. He seemed instantly at ease, comfortable where he was, as much a part of the tableau as everything else. With the old man in the picture, everything Ray saw started to make sense.

  The man moved the chamois aside, and on the table lay the broken toy saw.

  “But you just carried that in here!” Ray said. He looked on the ground around him, looking to see where the old man had dropped the real saw. Then he darted forward and snatched it up from the table. Turning it this way and that, depressing the button on the broken object, he saw a scrape here, a dent there, and he recognized them both.

  “Let me,” the old man said, taking it gently from his hands.

  “But what about all these?” Ray asked, nodding at the back wall. “Aren’t they all first?”

  “I get to decide what deserves my attention first,” he said. “I . . . prioritize. Doing so is freedom, but it’s also sometimes part of my curse. So watch. Learn. I brought you here because you need to take over when I’m gone.”