‘She’s called Cathy. Cathy Wray.’
‘There’s something about her.’ Kaspar slid the final tooth into place. Perhaps the effect caught even him off guard, for suddenly he could feel the moist breath of the bear across his cheek – and all the terror that came with it. That was when he knew he had the diorama just right; that was the kind of thrill little boys would want. ‘How long has it been since she came?’
‘Two weeks,’ said Emil. ‘Three?’
‘And you’re only just telling me now?’
‘Kaspar, I’m really not telling you a thing …’
Emil stared. This girl, this Cathy Wray, was filling shelves with more EMPORIUM INSTANT TREES. They were a new toy for this winter, and it pained him to remember that they were one of Kaspar’s inventions. Their papa hadn’t even seen any need to tweak them himself, and this pained him most of all. The toy over which Emil had spent all summer labouring – the pipe-cleaner birds who, released from their nests, would explode forth and find roosts on top of cupboards and bedposts and picture rails – were selling in pitiful numbers compared to the trees. When customers bought them at all, it was only so that they had something to roost in one of Kaspar’s Scots pines.
‘Do we know where she came from?’
‘She answered one of Papa’s adverts.’
‘So do they all,’ sighed Kaspar, and, picking himself up, he vaulted the first black bear and took off through the aisles.
Emil watched him go. There was a time when he used to think: when I’m Kaspar’s age, I’ll be just like him; I’ll be making the toys they all clamour for, and I’ll be vaulting bears; I’ll be talking to the shop girls whenever Papa’s looking the other way. But the thing he’d been thinking recently was: I’m already Kaspar’s age. I’m the age he was last year, and last year I was the age he was the year before that. That was the fate of being a younger brother. Sometimes he wished there was some way he might catch up, overtake him somehow – if, only for a moment, Kaspar might have been the one looking up to him, cooing over the toys he had made, sloping off to his workshop at night and thinking (no, dreaming) that one day he’d be as close to achieving the feats their papa could in his most marvellous toys. But that was a terrible thing to think about his own flesh and blood. He and Kaspar had played in these halls for so many years, built labyrinthine dens together, spent whole weeks running wild with the rocking horses. There was not a memory in Emil’s head in which Kaspar did not sit at his left-hand side – so why was it that, in recent seasons, things had started to feel so strained?
He thought, suddenly, of the feat of magic in the workshop above, how Kaspar’s night light had cast those enchantments, even before their papa’s tinkering had magnified it a thousandfold. There was a time only their father was capable of such things. He might have brooded further, but small hands were tugging at his sleeve, and when he looked down there was a girl, bearing up one of his father’s Russian horses and begging him to show her how to make it canter. He settled down, cross-legged, right there in the middle of the aisle. Let Kaspar talk to the shop girls all he wanted. Let him chase real magic, let him devise the most fanciful, flamboyant toys his imagination would allow. Emil (or so he told himself) needed nothing of that. He set the little horse to canter and placed by its side the Imperial Kapitan. Once wound up, the Kapitan marched off to war at the side of his trusty steed. The little girl beamed and clapped her hands at their dainty movements, and out of the aisles poured more boys, more girls, all desperate to see.
Yes, let Kaspar dream up anything he cared to dream; this was where the true joy of the Emporium existed – in the ordinary magic of children at play.
Cathy was concentrating so deeply on building her pyramid of boxed-up trees that she did not notice Kaspar’s approach. It was the middle of the afternoon and across the Emporium the shopkeeps were tending to their aisles. Seventeen days had passed since the night she stepped through the Emporium doors. There had been much to learn, and had it not been for the moments when nausea got the better of her and she had to bolt for a secluded corner or washroom, those first Emporium days might have passed in a blur. As it was, fixing her mind and trying to commit all its many corners to memory gave Cathy a focus that helped her ride each crest and wave.
It was important to do a good job. She made it her litany as she set about her tasks. ‘If we do a good job, they’ll want us to stay, even after Christmas.’ That seemed important. Get to Christmas, get to New Year, and things could begin afresh. By then, they’d like her. By then, she’d be indispensable. She’d done it before. That summer in the raspberry fields, they’d begged her to come back next season, said she did the work of ten other girls (and didn’t even shovel the berries into her face all day as well). ‘We’ll make it so this place can’t go on without us, little thing …’
She placed another box on the shelf. This one, or so the simple stencilling declared, was a black larch. The one she was placing on top of it was Bosnian pine. Most of the trees in the pyramid were hawthorn and horse chestnut, and a separate stack were simple firs, of the kind draped in tinsel outside the Emporium doors. People had been buying them instead of Christmas trees; there had even been a letter from the Forestry Commission instructing them to desist. Each box had a tiny image etched into it with a burnt match-head, and under that were the words ‘WARNING: DO NOT SHAKE’.
‘Watch how you go with those. Open them wrong and they’ll put down roots.’
She turned. There, propped against a pillar, was the boy they called Kaspar. She had seen him often enough, striding across the shopfloor with his black hair flowing behind him, dressed in a waistcoat more ostentatious than she had ever seen on a boy of his age. Like his brother Emil, he had eyes of the shrillest blue, but Kaspar was lean and angular where his brother was given to fat. The way he held himself, he almost seemed to be reclining, even while he stood upright. Sally-Anne, who lodged in a room in the same attic as Cathy and had been with the Emporium every winter since opening night, said he was the one you had to watch out for; his tongue was loose, but his hands were looser. ‘And him,’ she said, ‘just nineteen years of age …’
‘They’re mine, don’t you know?’
He said it with the same pride Cathy’s sister had when she was but two and three years old. Every last thing – be it a toy, a spoon, a seashell – had been mine mine mine.
‘These trees?’
‘You wouldn’t think it, but that’s three months of my life you’re putting on those shelves. Papa says it’s as good as any toy he ever made, and he wouldn’t say that lightly.’ At this point, a dog of cotton wadding and patchwork paws crossed the mouth of the alcove, stopped at one of the paper trees to cock a leg, and drifted on. Cathy followed it with her eyes, then looked at Kaspar as if to say: as good as that? But Kaspar was not deterred. ‘It really is a marvel of engineering. Shall I show you?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to excuse herself, but Kaspar was already lifting a boxed-up black larch from the pyramid and turning it in his hands.