The Thief of Broken Toys (7 page)

“He died with secrets,” he said, and the idea
shocked him to the core. He froze, plastic pig in
one hand and a yellow metal car in the other,
and thought about Toby as an actual person
instead of simply his child. He'd been a boy
who played and dreamed, loved and imagined,
and he had been so utterly wonderful. Ray
had always mourned the death of his son
as opposed to mourning the death of an
individual, as if he'd simply lost something
that belonged to him.

The loss of that unique potential was so
much worse.

Toby once said he wanted to be a zookeeper
when he was older, and there was a broken
safari jeep on its roof behind his bedroom
door. One door had broken off, long gone, and
three of the rubber tires were missing.

“That one,” Ray said, vision blurring as
he picked up the cold jeep. There was a tiny
plastic man behind the wheel, and Toby had
said,
One day that will be me, Daddy
.

He didn't even bother with his coat. It was
only just past lunchtime, and he had several
hours of daylight left. The way was still muddy
and slippery. Rain had fallen most of the
night, and in steeper places the path showed
where water had been flowing like a stream.
There were no fresh footprints in this muddy
flow, and he felt strangely like an explorer
climbing the path for the first time. Behind
him lay what he knew — Skentipple, and pain.
Ahead . . . who knew what he might find?

It did not seem like the right kind of day to
meet that shady old man.

He carried the safari jeep. Slipping a few
times, he let go of it once and it stuck in wet
mud. It took him a few minutes to clean it
off, using a handkerchief from his pocket
and drops of water from a rose bush hanging
over a garden wall. When it was clean again,
he turned around to look down on the village.
There had always been a timelessness to
Skentipple that progress could do nothing to
take away. A hundred years ago there would
have been no cars or modern fishing boats,
but the seagulls would have still mobbed the
harbour when fishermen came in, and much of
the village would have likely looked the same.
Some buildings had been reconstructed over
time, and added to, but planning restrictions
meant that there was rarely anything new
being built. It was a village frozen in time, and
in such a place perhaps anything was possible.

Maybe he's down there now, wandering the
streets and looking for us
, Ray thought. The idea
of his son lost and frightened was awful, and
he didn't know where it had come from. He
turned and walked on, climbing harder until
he was panting, concentrating on every step
to avoid slipping again.

The path levelled out and became muddier.
He took each step gently, arms held out to
either side for balance, and so he only saw the
man when he almost walked into him.

“Bit nicer this afternoon,” the old man said.

Ray stared at him, unable to reply. He
was dressed in old jeans and a thick woollen
jumper, boots that reached to his knees, and
a scarf wrapped casually around his neck.
A flat cap sat perched on his head, more
for affectation than warmth. Sparse hairs
sprouted from beneath it, and in daylight he
looked even older than he had in the dark.

“I . . .” Ray said. “I didn't think I'd see you.”

“Still brought that, though,” the man said,
nodding at the safari jeep.

Ray looked at the toy in his hand, then
away again. He hid it down by his side, behind
his leg, like an alcoholic caught with a bag-wrapped bottle.

“Thank you for returning the Ben 10
watch,” Ray said. His voice was firm, definite,
offering no chance for the man to deny it.

“A pleasure,” he said. “Took me all night.
Wasn't just the missing spring and its broken
mounting. Turns out . . .” He waved at the air,
as if searching for a word. “Circuit board thing
was fried, and the LED was smashed from
where the boy sat on it that time.”

“What?” Ray asked.
The boy? Sat on it? What
did he mean?

“Oh,”
the
old
man
said
through
an
embarrassed smile. “Maybe he didn't tell you.”

Ray wanted to rant and rage. He wanted to
shout at the old man, grasp handfuls of his
woollen jumper and swing him against the
low stone wall bounding the path, where he
would scream and beat the truth out of him.
But something about that smile gave Ray
pause, and he thought perhaps it was he who
would end up being held against the wall.

“
Why
did you fix it?”

“To help you keep your promise to your
son.”

“How can you know I promised to mend it?”

The man's eyes grew a little darker, as if
living an uncomfortable memory. “Because
every parent promises that when a child
breaks a toy.”

It's all hidden away
, Ray thought.
He's
talking, but saying nothing
. “So . . . how old are
you?” he asked instead. He wasn't sure where
the question had come from, but he found
himself examining the man's wrinkles and
sparse hair, distracting himself from difficult
questions.

“Older than I look,” the man said. His face
fell a little, and he glanced over Ray's shoulders
at the village behind him.

“I'll walk back down with you,” Ray said.

“No, no need. I wasn't visiting the village
just now. Just come down to meet you.”

“You brought the watch back to me last
night?”

The man smiled, nodded, shrugged, a
master of mixed messages.
And if I give him the
safari jeep?
Ray thought.
Do I really want to?

“What do you know of my son?” he asked
instead.

“That you miss him,” the old man said, and
true sadness sculpted his face into something
different. He looked down at the village again.
“That your life has been different since he
went. That your sadness marks you, just as
surely as happiness or illness or the knowledge
of violence marks other people. I know that
the best way to reach people is through their
imagination, and the most solid home of
imagination is a child's toys. And what I do
has helped.”

Ray scoffed, but he thought of how he'd felt
this morning in Toby's bedroom, and down
in the village, and how he'd found himself
walking toward Elizabeth. To see her? To offer
a hand of peace? He wasn't sure, because he'd
turned around and come back home.

And what harm could it do? Really, what
harm?

“I'm walking,” he said, nodding past the old
man and along the cliff path. “Join me?”

“With pleasure,” the man said.

Ray started ahead, walking hard. The old
man kept pace with him, and Ray thought,
If I walk fast he'll wear out, and when he's weak
and sitting by the path I can question him more
.
But as the damp path slipped and squelched
beneath their boots, and Ray felt his body
growing hot beneath the layers, the old man
hardly seemed to break a sweat. He followed
on behind, and now and then Ray heard small
gasps that might have been laughs. He did not
turn around to see. He knew where he was
going, though not why, and he was determined
to reach there soon.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Don't have much use for one.”

“That doesn't mean you don't
have
one,”
Ray said, covering his surprise.

The old man was silent for a while, the
thump of their footsteps the only sound.
Above them a seagull called. Out at sea a
speedboat thumped from wave to wave.

“So?” Ray asked.

“Hold up,” the man said, and Ray smiled to
himself.
Tired him out
, he thought. But when
he turned around, he saw that was not the
case at all. The old man stood staring at him,
one foot propped on a raised stone in the path,
hat cocked at a jaunty angle, and a look behind
his smile that said,
I know exactly what you
were trying to do
.

“Not far now,” the old man said. “Up past
that rise, then the hut's down close to the
cliff's edge.”

“Hut?”

“The place you think I might . . . use.”

He was right. Ray had that place in mind,
the overgrown stone structure he'd seen
nine months ago when he'd made his way
down toward the cliffs and death. Something
about it had worried at him last night, a
dream he could not recall that left dregs of
itself imprinted, suggestions for the day by a
voice he could not hear. And he had thought
maybe the old man lived there, a relatively
smart tramp. He looked him up and down,
and though the clothes weren't new or even
expensive, they were certainly clean. The old
guy took notice of his appearance.

“So what
is
your name?”

“Well,” the man said, flicking the hat back
on his head and scratching his scalp, “I'll bet
you've not had so much need for yours lately.
Have you?”

No
, Ray thought.
Elizabeth not there, I've
closed myself off, and today
. . . Down at the
bakery, Rachel, that was the first time he
recalled someone using his name for days,
perhaps weeks.

“So my name is as important to me now
as . . . where I was born. The shoes I wore
three years ago. The dream I had a year ago
last Christmas.” The old man shrugged, and
in that dismissive gesture Ray saw a level of
complete control, and calm confidence.

The safari jeep had grown warm in his
hand, absorbing heat through his skin, and
something made him look down at it. The last
time it had been this warm was when Toby
was playing with it, and a rush of emotions
shuddered through him.
That'll be me one
day, Daddy
, he'd said, squinting through the
scratched plastic window at the featureless
man cast behind the steering wheel.

“You know I can help it,” the man said. He
held out his hand. “There's no need for you to
. . .” He nodded sideways, toward the cliff edge
and the mounds of undergrowth there, hiding
whatever it hid. “Not yet, at least. Maybe next
time, when you're more settled, and you need
to see so you can take it on. Maybe then.”

“Take it on?”

The old man looked tired, at last, and
something else. Unsettled. Even nervous.
“The toy?”

For a moment, Ray thought of throwing
the toy jeep toward the cliffs and then
running back the way they'd come. But he was
scared that he'd arrive home and find it on his
doorstop, broken door fixed, three bare tires
rounded with rubber once more. So he placed
it gently in the old man's hand and mourned
the loss of warm metal against his skin.

“Hmm,” the old man said in satisfaction. He
nodded to Ray, then looked past him along the
path.
Time for you to leave
, that look said. Ray
wanted to defy him, to stay here and watch
while he did whatever it was he did up here.
But that would defeat the object. He'd brought
the jeep here for this reason, and now it was
time to go.

“Whatever it is you do . . .” he said, and the
nameless man raised an eyebrow, a faint smile
on his lips.
He's laughing at me
, Ray thought.

“What?” the man said.

“It works,” Ray said. And he turned and
marched back along the path, heading for the
village and the safe comfort of his house. With
every step he took, something drew him back,
a desire to understand, to witness. It wasn't
long before he stopped and turned around.

The man stood where he'd left him, in
exactly the same position. He waved Ray on.
Ray, feeling like a schoolchild, continued on
his way, but stopped again after twenty paces.
This time, the man was gone.

His hand suddenly very cold, as if it had
never held that jeep at all, Ray ran back up
the slippery path. He reached the place where
he and the old man had stood and there was
no sign that he had ever been there — no boot
prints in the mud, no scent of old clothes on
the air. He stood on tiptoes to look toward
the cliff edge, trying to make out the mound
of undergrowth that marked the location of
the old stone building. There was something
. . . an intimation of regularity, though he
could not quite see the stone itself. He tried
pushing through the undergrowth — gorse,
bracken, ferns fading away to winter — but
they snagged at his clothing and pricked his
skin. There was no clear path through, and the
old man could never have forced his way past
this quickly.

Ray looked up the cliff path, and it was
empty as far as he could see. He supposed the
old man might have run and reached the place
where it turned out of sight. He might have.
But he'd have had to run very quickly.

He pushed some more, stretching, tugging
branches and clumps of gorse aside and
pricking his fingers in the process. A dozen
blood droplets formed on his hands, smearing
as he tried to haul himself close to the cliff's
edge. But he was held back, and eventually he
retreated to the path. He was panting from
exertion, heart racing from something more.

“Damn it,” Ray said, looking around for the
man, seeing the place where that old stone
hut just might be. Then he turned and walked
slowly back down to the village.

Later, as he sat waiting on his doorstep, he
watched the old woman climbing up from the
village. She smiled wearily, made no comment
about his nakedness that morning, mentioned
only the weather and the cold. And he watched
her go, wondering what dreams would come.

After an unsettled evening trying to read,
trying to watch TV, trying to concentrate on
anything, but finding his attention drawn
again and again out into the falling darkness,
Ray went at last to bed.