Chapter 9 - At The Centre Of Some Dead Space

HE WORE SULLENNESS like a cloak.

 

Falter Macree was a man without a mission, yet his days seemed full of activity as he swept away the dry dust that blew up from the south every Spring Halt only to be ground down into the cracks of the paving slabs outside his toy shop by the tramping feet of passersby.

 

Yes. Passersby. Not visitors, not customers, not people intent on entering his little abode of happiness where children might marvel at the wonders within. People who just walked past, barely giving the dusty shopfront a glance.

 

He polished the window glass till it became invisible. This only encouraged wobbly pigeons to crash into it, adding their burden of dusty feather marks to its hard and unyielding surface. Thus he found himself at times sweeping away wing feathers discarded in the shock of impact after a particularly impressive avian bounce and squawk of alarm, all the while wrapping his cloak of sullenness tighter around himself.

 

This was not how it was meant to be.

 

Those bright colourful brochures he had found under the door mat back in Little Steadfast where he once lived had crowed optimistically about the golden glories of the western districts of Frangea. There was the sea, the beaches, onshore breezes full of seaweed aroma and many independent shopowners doing a brisk trade in the consumer paradise that was the ever-burgeoning Cherryball Flats.

 

"Marthy," he had said to his indulgent wife of ten years standing, "look around you. What d'yer see?"

 

"A few trees Falter. Nice bit of grassland off into the distance and, oh look, another lightning strike on Digger Pontoon's water tower up yonder." Marthy Macree enjoyed sitting on the porch in her rocker and counting the flashes of blue light that scored the metal tower on the horizon. It had been painted red only two Summer Pauses ago. Now it was a brown, flaking thing, occasionally giving off superheated steam with such a whistle like a giant kettle it could be heard all the way to Winding Stream five miles off.

 

"And that's it Marthy. We're surrounded by nowhere. Every step we take takes us nowhere."

 

"Mine takes me to Mother Bash's Knit Store," Marthy disagreed with her husband's bland assessment of the quiet village that was Little Steadfast. "She's got a good selection of wool there, to my mind."

 

"Wouldn't you rather though, see the sea?"

 

"See the sea? What's to see at the sea but sea?" Marthy replied with a chuckle and sought some of Mother Bash's wool to begin another pair of unnecessary socks. She was going to try a new pattern this summer, one with whorls in it that discouraged bugs by sowing confusion in their bloodsucking ranks.

 

"Marthy, I'm selling up," Falter decided to dive right in without preamble, seeing as how that would prove pointless to such an immovable soul as the light of his life appeared to be. "We're at a deadend here in Steadfast, whittling toys and making pipe whistles for a living. Ain't gonna make us rich."

 

"Why be rich? We got all we need," and she indicated the barnlike structure that was their home. She had decorated it nicely with innumerable knitted curtains and mats and tea cosies devoid of tea pots to cosy and socks missing the necessary feet to make them of use. "Well, almost all," and she remembered the little clutch of tiny mittens she had made, some in pink wool and some in blue, and just to be safe, some in a kind of purply shade too. They were in a cedar box her husband had whittled down from a large tree struck by lightning. It took him four years with a knife and chisel and as it never seemed quite square it was eventually whittled to a smallness that only served as a repository for the tiniest things. Baby clothes no less.

 

"But we ain't got all we want," the man insisted, waving the brochures left by some enterprising salesman who had passed through the area, scattering dreams and unsettling settled lives in the quiet eastern districts of Frangea.

 

"Says right here a man can make a fortune on the back of hard work and tireless endeavour way across the land in Cherryball Flats. All we need is a startup business plan and a space to work. A space to expand, Marthy, and make something of ourselves."

 

The lady so addressed in high words of encouragement took one of the brochures and glanced over it with a doubtful eye.

 

"Says here, it'll cost a might of coins to get started, and there's them percentage things to consider too." Her education might have been limited to the necessaries of life, but she was an astute body in her way. Suspicion of outside influence, that is, beyond that of cousins and carefully vetted in-laws, was a natural consequence of the easy lifestyle around Winding Stream, the main settlement of the area.

 

"That's just details, Marthy," the man said in a voice that betrayed the dreaded tones of decisiveness. His mind was made up and Marthy knew when a Macree set his mind upon something he would pursue it to the end of the next field, and beyond sometimes. She sighed, sat back in her rocker and blessed the season.

 

Perhaps, she thought to herself, a change of air might do the trick. Thus she made no further objection to this momentous decision to relocate from the backwoods of a peaceful land to the hustle and bustle and even more hustle of the waterfront world by the Big Blue Sea.

 

***

 

THE TRICK OF marketing is to spread a wide net, the wider the better. If it could be cast right across the Face of the World, why that would be ideal. No knowing how many fish might be trawled up in such a capacious maw.

 

Teasel Marchmont had begun his entrepreneurial career in a wayward boyhood that tended to an idleness which avoided school and a home life best avoided too. Thus he ran about his neighbourhood and learned to be in more than one place at the same time. This he discovered created an interesting outcome. People in one street knew the doings of people in another, but those in a third, slightly farther off, were completely unaware of Dinty Squit's new hat or that Harris Mood was obliged through consideration to marry his neighbour's daughter Fudgee in a sudden and unavoidable love match.

 

"It's all true," he remembered telling the cornershop lady two blocks away from the Mood home. "I'll get you an invite to the wedding if you like."

 

"Better'n that, my lad," the lady said, "here's my terms for a bespoke wedding cake. They just might like the prices and I can do 'em quick, two tiered or three on request." The lady ran a cake shop on the corner, all pink and sweet it was, making Teasel linger for a taste, but he took the card and raced back along the relevant street and when no one was looking slipped the card into a mail slot, making a whooping noise as he did so by way of signal.

 

Not long after he could be seen slapping sticky posters on all sorts of surfaces, walls, gates, windows and the occasional moving vehicle whenever it slowed enough to let the paste dry. Of course he was not the originator of these advertising slips, merely the messenger, the spreader of good news, even if sometimes such posterings more resembled a plague that darkened windows with thick layers of gooey paper.

 

"You need, my son," a man in black, from hat to shoes, accosted the youngster as he dodged traffic while regaling outraged drivers with pie filling selections in colourful prints, "a regular vocation."

 

"A cycle?" the boy said, not heeding the words spoken clearly as he plastered three shop adverts on the same omnibus, obliterating a rival pie shop with his endeavours. He was well aware of the cut and thrust of competition in the world of marketing from a very young age.

 

"No, a vocation. I, Theon Silk, can offer you this," and he held his hand to his heart in imitation of an oath.

 

The boy stood there, one fist full of unused posters, and the other with a squeeze tube of quick-drying paste, panting for all he was worth.

 

"You mean, a job? A regular pay by the week job?"

 

"Something like that, only more a pay on performance kind of thing," Theon Silk assured his young auditor. "My card."

 

And so Teasel entered the hallowed precincts of 'Silk and Cell, Business Opportunities on the Fly.'

 

He did get that bicycle he dreamed of, but it served no purpose by this time to race through familiar streets to scatter the good news about bargains to be had in Racy Miggins's 'Second Hand Scrap Store' or the 'Used Fruit Purveyors' annual summer bruised peach purge.

 

For he had an Area.

 

He had been assigned Districts.

 

He had grown into a man with land to conquer, settlements to invade and customers to ensnare. Effectively speaking 'Silk and Cell' had assigned him a circuit, a box of brochures and a map of targets in the grassy east full of widespread homesteads overflowing with dreams of possible riches just waiting to be hinted at.

 

"Mind you merely hint, my boy," Theon advised his new recruit. "They don't like to be told what to do out there so to avoid a good pitchforking, merely suggest possibilities, sugarcoated of course, with malted barley for afters."

 

That was three years ago and following wise advice the boy had raced through the Winding Stream area, delivering brochures stealthily in the light of a summer moon before cycling rapidly on to the next settlement before anyone knew he had been there.

 

But they did know of course, for the brochures were bright and glossy and sugarcoated as required and Falter Macree found them sticky too, for they clung to him night and day, followed him around out in the fields and during his favourite whittling time, until he made that fatal decision to relocate. A peaceful life ended then, and toil, stress and neglected toys became his neverending future. Along with a sense of fatality.

 

***

 

"NOW WHAT I wouldn't give for an angle like that ice cream guy," Falter said as he read some on-grid report of the cooling joys of minty bits during the hot and dusty Summer Pause that never seemed to want to end.

 

"Overreaching, I call it," Marthy replied on hearing the details. "You want to make a toy rocket perhaps and shoot it off to the moon to see if anyone up there wants toys?"

 

"It's a thought Marthy, it's a thought."

 

The couple were sat in the back parlour, Marthy rocking in her favourite chair and knitting tiny clothes for some of the wooden dolls on display out front, while her husband seethed quietly at all the things going on around them. It was as if they were at the centre of some dead space with life and prosperity flowing either side, missing them out all together.

 

If only the happy train would make a stop right outside his shop, perhaps things might look up. Debts were growing and some of his bright displays were showing signs of fading through age.

 

"We're in the wrong spot," he eventually said. "Footfall's too low." He had been looking at marketing strategies on-grid and was up on some of the business jargon all successful shopkeepers needed to know.

 

"Lordy. You're not thinking of moving again?" Marthy said in alarm, missing a stitch. "The cost would be," and she sniffed, "prohibitive." She had learnt new words too in the three years they had tried to make a living in Cherryball Flats.

 

The man clenched his fists in impotence, knowing the light of his life was right.

 

"Somehow," he said through gritted teeth, "we need to make it the right spot."

 

"There's a dear," Marthy said, resuming her rocking and knitting in unison, glad that particular crisis was over till the next wave of depression appeared.

 

Then there was a sound which made the rocking lady halt in mid-tilt. It was a chime, like as if someone had pushed open the shop door.

 

Falter disappeared into the front part of the ground floor area in search of wonders and Marthy listened for voices. She strained her ears but heard nothing.

 

After an age Falter came back, a puzzled look on his face.

 

"Might have been the wind," he said, "except there ain't any. We're in the sultry hour. Plus," and he looked a little wild as he continued, "some of them dolls in the corner nearest the door had moved."

 

"Moved?"

 

"Like they wanted a chat or something and were sat facing each other rather than staring out across the floor as they were usually wont to do."

 

"Perhaps they were bored of looking at dust and wood shavings," Marthy said with a light chuckle. "Blessed be. What strange creatures we are discussing the feelings of pieces of wood shaped into our own likenesses. As if," and she paused to loop a difficult stitch, "we gave them something of ourselves, creating little souls."

 

It was her turn to stare now. Not at wood shavings or a curious cube of dust she could see just beyond the threshold to the shop front. She was thinking of another little soul waiting to be created. Some day, she hoped, some day it would be.