A night of falling stars, of explosions in the heavens. More magical than any other opening night – and yet, these things, they were not so out of the ordinary for Kaspar.
He was still trembling as he said, ‘They put on a good show. I couldn’t have done it better myself.’ But then he broke free of both their hands and stepped into the aisle, where the first customers were hurrying through. It had been all women last year; women and their children. Now there were others: a cripple on his crutches, a gentleman who wheezed with every breath. No wonder they were drawn back, thought Cathy. After everything that had happened, who wouldn’t long for the time before?
‘I should like to see some toys,’ said Kaspar. ‘There’s so much I’ve missed.’ And Cathy, thinking that a good thing, let him drift on.
Cathy had much to attend to, for most of the shop hands, three seasons old, still needed her to cluck around them like a mother hen. Martha, meanwhile, was determined to keep watch. She followed him at a distance, pretending to peruse shelves whose contents she knew by heart.
Kaspar headed first for the carousel, and next for the corrals where the children were riding rocking horses with wild abandon. Kaspar recognised some of these horses, but many others had been crafted since he left. Martha watched him clamber on to the one she called Black Star, the king of all rocking horses the Emporium had ever made. He rode for some time, eyes screwed against an imaginary wind, before he clambered out of the saddle and wandered on.
Sometimes he got lost. Aisles had been torn down, reassembled and torn down again – and he took to asking Sirius for directions, following wherever its nose led. And that was how, some time later, Kaspar strode into the glade where boys were playing at war.
A dozen skirmishes were being played out across the carpets. Gangs of boys crouched around what toy soldiers they had scavenged from the open boxes, wound them up and let them go. Tiny bugles sounded, wooden bullets flew, and all at once images raked across Kaspar’s eyes: the first time he went up and over the top, the time he battled Emil in the bedroom while the new shop girl, mysterious Cathy Wray, watched on. How energised he had been then! How in awe! Now, he was compelled to look the other way. The battle cries were too insistent, too loud. He cringed and found himself looking, instead, at a tower of cardboard boxes, decorated by an expert hand. The stencils across the sides were surrounded with a weave of Emporium soldiers in interlocking design. The words read: THE LONG WAR.
He had made an industry of it, then. While Kaspar discovered real war, Emil brought their game to the world.
ADVENTURE! the box declared. GLORY!
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
Kaspar turned away. There was a cabinet of other toys behind the tower and, hoping to distract himself, he picked one up. It was another of Emil’s creations; he could feel it in the weight and heft of the piece. Touching its crank handle, he felt the axle meshing with the mechanism inside.
Against a diorama of crosshatch hills and skeleton trees, tin soldiers were presented on spikes, as if peeping out of their foxholes. When he turned the handle, the soldiers rose, swivelling as if to bring their rifles to bear. Then, because a toy could only ever capture a moment in time, the soldiers retreated again, back into the safety of their dugouts, bound to repeat the same manoeuvre over and over: never seeing real battle, but never going back home. As Kaspar turned the handle for the third time, he heard, as if in the distance, the horns of war begin to sound, a single trumpeter turning into a chorus. A fourth time, and the edges of the aisles filled with sporadic bursts of tiny artillery fire, the miniature thunder of cavalry stampeding past, the alarm call of whistles and officers bellowing at their rank and file. Kaspar did not look up from the toy but, as he turned the handle again and again, the borders of the shopfloor fell away, the shelves dissolved into a blasted battlescape of trenches and barbed wire. It was then that the terror hit him. The rational part of him knew that he was safe, that it was only a game, the toy working on his imagination as toys are meant to do, but it was not the rational part of him in charge of his fingers. They kept turning the crank, solidifying all that he could see. And then he was back there. Back where his fingers were grimed in scarlet and black. Back in his uniform, with pieces of his second lieutenant’s brain smeared across his face. His ears were full of the sounds, his nose was full of the smells. He screamed and screamed and screamed.
It was a sound that had never been heard in the Emporium. Cathy was wrestling to wrap up a herd of toy sheep when she heard her husband’s cry. Abandoning her post, she hurried into the aisles.
She found Kaspar where he had fallen, his hands over his face. Sirius was trying to nuzzle him but he didn’t seem to know the dog. Martha was standing over him, asking ‘Papa? Papa, are you there?’ as if she had not been asking the same thing every hour of every day since he returned. ‘What happened?’ Cathy asked. Customers were being drawn into the glade. They craned to take a look over the tops of the aisles.
Martha looked at her, face contorted as if that was answer enough.
‘Help me get him out of here,’ Cathy said, and, avoiding the thrashing of his limbs, tried to get her arms under his. ‘Martha?’
‘I’ll fetch Uncle Emil …’
She was already darting off when Cathy shouted, ‘No, don’t tell Emil!’ She did not know why, but somehow that seemed important. ‘Just … stop them all staring.’
With strength she did not know she had, Cathy lifted Kaspar to his feet and laboured him out of the depression. Though his arms had stopped thrashing, now he was a dead weight, slumped against her shoulder.
By the time she reached the aisle where model tigers prowled the uppermost shelves, Martha had done her job. The cloud castle drawbridge had opened above them and yet more lights were fountaining out, painting extravagant snowflakes in the air. This was distraction enough. Eyes no longer followed her as she dragged him along – and, in that faltering way, she brought him through the paper trees.
In the Wendy House, she laid him down. Sirius had followed. He whimpered miserably in the corner.
‘Kaspar?’
On the bed, he rolled, drawing his knees up to his chin. What a thin, angular body his was. At least he was in the room with her now. His eyes recognised her, but still those guttural noises came from the back of his throat.
Cathy made room at the bedside. No matter what he wanted, she would touch him now. She went to grip him by the shoulders but her fingers resisted. She had to battle herself to do it.
‘Kaspar. My love. What happened?’
He choked with laughter again. ‘It’s supposed to be a toy. How could a toy …’ But then the laughter was silence, and into the silence came his sobbing.
She tried to hold him closer, drawing him on to her knee, but there was strength in him yet. He rolled away, fists bunching up the bedclothes.
‘My love, you have to tell me. Tell me what I can do.’
This time, he looked at her. He opened his hands and said, ‘There is nothing.’
‘You did it for me. You held me here, on this same bed, and told me I could do it, told me I was strong. So tell me, why can’t I do it for you?’
‘My Cathy, you can’t—’
Her body was at odds with itself, just like his. Part of her wanted to throw herself down and lie beside him, but other parts could not bear to be there, her body repelling his just as his repelled her. Her disgust disgusted her, but that way lay madness; that way lay hate. Finally, she screamed, ‘Then you have to do it! I don’t care what it is. I don’t care how. But if you won’t let me, then there’s only you left. Do you understand? You didn’t die out there, Kaspar. You came back to us. Was it for a reason? Was it just plain luck? I don’t know. But if you didn’t die, you have to live … because there isn’t anything else.’