The Thief of Broken Toys (10 page)

It was all in his head.

“And now I'm stuck out here,” he said.
Laughter rumbled inside. He swallowed it, but
it was persistent. He noticed a flash of colour
closer to the cliff path, just a few feet away,
and as he worked his way toward it — ignoring
the pain, and ignoring that fact that he'd been
hallucinating something so clear, so defined —
he realized what it was. The saw toy.

He plucked the toy from the bushes and
placed his thumb on the switch. He paused
only for a moment, and then flicked it on.
Broken. Of course.

How could he think anything else?

It was late afternoon by the time he arrived
home. Not sure exactly where all the time had
gone, Ray locked the door and dropped the toy
saw into the kitchen bin. He'd have no need
of it again, and neither would Toby. Keeping
things like that just for the sake of it was
foolish. Backward-thinking.

“There's no way I could have done it,” he
said to the silent house, when what he'd
meant to say was,
There's no way that could have
happened
.

He switched the kettle on and went up
to the bathroom, ran a bath, dumped a load
of bath salts in, and thought of the bottle
of merlot sitting in the pantry. A long warm
bath, a couple of glasses of wine . . .

He paused in the bathroom doorway and
thought of Toby. A sadness filled him, but a
quiet sadness.
I wish you were here, little lad
,
he thought.
I so wish you'd never died and the
three of us were all here together, as was meant
to be
. But he was alone in the house. Maybe
it wouldn't always be that way, but for now it
was what he had.

“Some music,” he said, because he did not
like the silence.

Music playing, wine bottle opened and set
on the closed toilet seat with a large glass, Ray
lowered himself into the scalding bath with a
sigh. He intended to dwell upon what had or
had not happened, to analyze, and to consider
where and when things had started to change.

Instead, he slept. And in his dreams, he
heard the sounds of Toby playing with his
toys in his bedroom, the electrical beeps and
whistles and growls, and just as the dream
went bad, he heard Toby's delighted laughter
for the very last time.

We see that it's another stormy night in
Skentipple, and its residents are battening
down the hatches. In her room upstairs in
the Smugglers' Inn, Elizabeth is performing
vigorous fellatio on Jason, who sits on the
edge of the bed gasping in delight. He was
only in the room for a few seconds before she
reached for him, and he's glad, partly because
he's getting a blowjob and
any
guy is glad for
that, and partly because Elizabeth seems
to have emerged from that reflective state
she's been in for a while. She can't help it, he
knows, because what happened to her and
Ray was terrible, but sometimes he wonders
if he did the right thing getting mixed up
with her afterward. It was friendship at first,
and then the momentum of desire caught
them. He wonders what has happened today
that changed the way she was, but he doesn't
question it too much. He looks down at her
bobbing head and bare shoulder, bathed in
flashes of moonlight between fast-drifting
clouds.

We move up and away from the frantic
lovers, out through the window, and the wind
snags us. We go with the flow and let it pull us
quickly down toward the sea. That's unusual —
the breeze usually comes
from
the sea — and
sometimes when its direction shifts, it means
something unpleasant is about to happen.
That's an old wives' tale, but fishermen live,
work, and breathe for their old wives.

The road below is glistening with first
rainfall, and the clouds rolling above promise
plenty more. We see vague shapes moving
below, seeking the unique shelter of home.
They all have stories to tell, most of them
amazing, but none of them concerns us
tonight. They tell their tales to the darkness.
Skentipple will lose its power soon, a regular
occurrence during storms, and a thousand
candles will burn away a little more of their
lives until it comes back on.

We arrive above the house clasped to the
hillside just as the door bursts open. The man
stands there in the doorway, disbelief twisting
his features, and anger, and an impression
that something is drawing to a close. His
hands are fisted at his side, and he seems
to be examining his garden, searching for
something, scanning the deepening darkness
for something that isn't there.

While he was in the bath, something was
taken.

We drift down closer to see what, and by
whom, all the while knowing that some stories
are by necessity left unfinished, and that
some have their endings taken away by force.
It's a sad time. Something is indeed drawing
to a close. And if only he knew, Ray would be
grasping every frame of memory as if his life
depended on it.

“Bastard!” Ray shouted. “
Bastard!
” He ran
uphill, leaving Skentipple behind again, feet
slipping on the rain-slicked path.
He came into
my house while I was
in the bath
!

The water had been cool when he awoke,
bubbles popped away to nothing, wine glass
barely touched. The house had felt different.
He hadn't been able to pin down just how it
had changed, but he had dried and dressed
quickly, and then wandered into Toby's room.

Every broken toy was gone. Every broken
part was gone too; the springs and snapped
plastic, wheels and arms, those bits that had
been retained with the toys so they could be
fixed one day. There was a sheen of fluff and
dust on the floor beside the bed, and the duvet
was crumpled and dusty where he'd laid out
a selection of the toys. The plastic box from
beneath the bed was still there, empty.

And Ray knew who had taken them. If he
could come here at night and leave a mended
toy, surely he could enter and steal them all
away.

So he ran to find the old man, because
whatever he had done — with the Ben 10
watch, the safari jeep, and the plastic saw
toy — he was now little more than a thief.

The rain cooled him, but did not touch
Ray's anger. What did the bastard expect of
him? How could he possibly think that he
could take over whatever strange thing the old
fucker even
did
? It seemed all so unreasonable,
and Ray had not even asked for any help.

Yet he
had
been helped, and there was no
denying that. Ray had no clue how any of it
had worked. Perhaps it was simply a subtle
psychological nudge: get him to remember
his promise to his dead son —
I'll fix your toy
tomorrow, Buddy —
and from there a gradual
acceptance, a gentle moving on. But he
thought not. He thought there was something
much more to whatever it was the old man
had done, and it was the stuff of storms and
wind and deepening shadows, not sunlight
and cheerful remembrance.

He left the village behind and slowed,
following the path in the fading light. This
was what the old man wanted, he knew, but
his anger drew him on. Fear nestled inside,
but Ray shoved it away. The bastard had come
into his house . . . touched Toby's toys . . . taken
them, without invite or offer. And if he'd done
so to cause a confrontation, then the fucker
would get just that.

Ray reopened scabbed wounds as he forced
himself through the bushes and hawthorns,
shoving toward the cliff's edge and not
caring how close he might be, hearing the
rain pattering close, and the rumble of waves
eroding the land far away, and down. The
stone structure stood there, a shadow against
the sea, and from this angle, there was no sign
of light.
How can there be? He can't be there, just
sitting, just welcoming the storm
.

Ray forged forward. The light was fading
fast, and the rain was heavier than ever, but
seeing the building, he was better able to
locate the cliff edge. Water ran into his eyes
and he blinked it away. His legs hurt, his
ankles and feet grabbed by a hundred roots,
but eventually he reached the back of the stone
building and climbed. He found a foothold
and reached up, hands pressing down atop the
wall. Pushing, pulling, he rose.

There was nothing there. The building's
exposed interior was completely overgrown.
He climbed higher so he could lean across the
head of the wall, picturing it crumbling and
collapsing and trapping him here in the storm.
But the wall held, allowing him to look down
and see only plants growing from it, not metal
racking and hooks and toys.

“Damn it!” Ray shouted, but there was
no one, and nothing there to hear. Rain ran
down the back of his neck and plastered his
hair to his head. He was struck by a sudden,
overwhelming sense of hopelessness — the old
man had gone, and now any chance at control
had been ripped away. By coming here and
confronting him, perhaps Ray might have
been able to exert some influence over things.
But the old man was gone, leaving Ray alone,
and the unfairness of it all made him shout.

The storm swallowed his voice. After
a while, he left that old tumbled-down
building — a
place
he
could
not
imagine
having been occupied for decades — and made
his way back down to Skentipple. On that
twenty-minute walk in torrential rain and
an occasional flash of lightning from far out
at sea, the possibility of madness presented
itself to him yet again. His mind was playing
with him, conjuring a complex escape from
crippling grief, building layer upon layer of
make-believe and somehow losing itself in
the process. They would see him arriving back
at the village, watching from warm rooms
hidden behind twitching curtains as that
poor man walked down, sodden from the
cliffs, and they'd whisper that one day he'd
go up there and they'd never see him again,
the implication an echo of a time he'd believed
that himself.

But though certainties hovered around
him and never quite settled, like dancing
raindrops, he held on to the knowledge of what
he would find at home — the mended toys. He
would hold them and know the truth, and
Toby would smile in his dreams and welcome
his father back.

Rain flowed down the path like a new
stream, carrying him back to his house. Inside,
it was dark and lonely. He turned on every
light, stripped off his soaked clothes, slung
a heavy dressing gown around his shoulders
and built a fire in the hearth.

The fixed toys would be on the cabinet
beside Toby's bed. He would grab them soon,
return downstairs, and curl on the sofa with
the bottle of wine from earlier, listening to
Toby's laughter in the rain.
I like the wet
, his
son had said once, splashing and giggling.

“I like the wet too,” Ray said, but as he
finally pushed open Toby's bedroom door and
saw the empty space where the toys had been,
he forgot where those words had come from.

Ray awoke the next morning in an unfamiliar
bed, with unfamiliar scents in his nose. The
sheets were damp and musty, and when he
looked around at the room, he experienced
the unsettling feeling of not knowing where
he was. This had happened to him many times
before, and it always came as a rush of relief
when his mind caught up with his body and he
remembered. But this morning there was no
rush of memory, and no relief.

He sat up slowly in the bed. He'd slept in
his dressing gown, warm and snug, but his
feet were exposed and cold as ice. The room
was strange. He recognized that it was in his
house — if it was nothing in the room, then
it was the room's dimensions, the feel of the
place beyond the door — but the furniture in
there left him cold. A bed too small for him to
sleep in, piles of bagged clothes in one corner,
and a collection of dusty board games atop the
wardrobe.

“What is this?” Ray said to the silence. It
did not reply. His stomach rumbled and his
bladder was full, and he quickly fled that
room to piss.

Downstairs, his wet clothes from the night
before were piled in the corner of the kitchen.
He made tea and stood at the back door,
looking out at the grim wet day with the mug
in his hand, nodding as the old woman from
up the hill walked past and smiled at him. He'd
been up the hill the previous night, looking for
someone in the stormy darkness. He frowned,
because he could not quite remember who.

After breakfast he dressed and, just as he
was about to go downstairs again, he glanced
once more into the strange room in which he'd
woken up. It was empty to him. It echoed with
something that should have been memory,
but nothing quite struck home. He frowned,
trying to clasp the memory. But all that came
was a sense of bottomless sadness, its cause
lost in darkness.

He ventured down to the village, steering
himself without thought toward the bakery.
On the way, turning a corner, he saw Wendy,
the village untouchable. She pulled a tatty-wheeled shopping basket filled with her stuff
for the day: cider, clothes, personal things.
They had never spoken to each other, but now
she offered the saddest smile Ray had ever
seen, as if she saw an unbearable truth still
hidden to him. It brought a lump to his throat.
She sighed and walked away.

Ray hurried on until he reached the bakery.
Rachel smiled as he approached — she was
laying out a display of cakes and freshly baked
bread in the front window — but he could not
find it in himself to smile back. He should
have, he knew. Her young son had been poorly
for a while, and though he thought he was
better now, Ray should have still —