The Thief of Broken Toys Read Free Page B

flickering on
to kill the shadows, and windows throughout
the village are illuminated from within.
    Up to the ridge and along from the village,
and a fox gambols on the slope of bracken and
ferns leading to the sheer cliffs. Several shapes
play around it, but they’re too quick and shy
to manifest properly. The wild welcomes the
dusk, as it has since the advent of humanity.
People have taken the day for themselves,
putting limits on it, sectioning it, adjusting it
for their own means and ends. But nighttime,
an absence, still belongs to the land.
    Yet there are those who walk the night.
People who tread carefully, but relish the
freedom inherent in the dark winds. Their
minds are often closer to the nature of things,
or the nature
in
things, and they understand
more than most that the wild is a cycle like
everything else. There are the aeons, and the
ages, the years and the seasons, but there is
also day and night, and there lies the truest of
nature’s distinctions.
    The cliff path is deserted tonight, swept of
fallen leaves by the sea breeze. The hawthorn
trees on either side are mostly leafless now,
and the ferns are fading to brown, readying
to die back and give way to new growth in
several months’ time. Some life hibernates
over seasons, and some hides for much shorter
periods.
    Below, down through the thick ferns and
gorse, clinging to the edge of the cliff like a
huge barnacle, we see the old stone structure.
Forever, it has been a forgotten remnant of
the village’s past. Perhaps a lookout post for
fishermen, or a refuge of some sort. Maybe
it is even a folly, built by a rich villager of
yesteryear to a love that might or might not
have been his. There is little vandalism here.
None of the casual spraypainted exhortations
of youths, or the intentional removal of blocks
to tumble over the cliff, whose sheer edge is
only a few short steps away. It could be that
kids don’t know about it, or maybe there are
other reasons. Perhaps animals use it for a
shelter sometimes, but today . . .
    There’s a spread of things outside the small
building’s seaward opening, and from inside . . .
is that a light? Faint, a feeble glow like the
echo of the sun’s setting beams that to most
would not even be visible.
    And here we are: sitting in the doorway is a
man, where perhaps he wasn’t before.
    He’s an old man. He’s smoking a pipe, and
its intermittent glow gives him a lighthouse
face. Something sways in his hand as he
works his fingers. He stretches, and feels the
bones in his shoulder grate together. The first
sign of age. Many other aches and pain have
developed since then, but these are still the
worst. At least his fingers can still flex, and
his hands still grip, and at least his sight is
still sharp.
    The shape in his hand is an old beanie doll,
and tonight he will give it a new leg.
    He stopped crying before he opened the door,
because he had spilled enough tears in that
room.
    Ray had used to read a lot of fiction. But
since Toby had passed away, what reading he
did usually revolved around real life, and was
lighter. Sports commentaries, biographies,
humorous books . . . fiction was inevitably
about conflict and loss, and his life had
suffered enough of those for real. He couldn’t
lose himself anymore. His disbelief could no
longer be suspended, because he was always
in the here and now. But when he’d used to
read, one of the things he’d scoffed at was
some people’s approach to bereavement.
The
room was exactly the same as the day his wife was
murdered
, a line in a book would say, and Ray
would joke about it to Elizabeth. He’d tell her
that when
she
was murdered he’d clear their
room out straight away, move to the spare
room, and take in a lodger. A pair of Swedish
au pairs, he’d suggested one day, to his wife’s
strained laughter. Back then he had demanded
that his fiction be realistic — truth in lies — and
he could not imagine