Read Online The Thief of Broken Toys by Tim Lebbon - Free Book Online Page A

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.

4
    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.
    When he woke up the next day he stretched,
unwilling to relinquish the comforting warmth
beneath the duvet for the chill bedroom air.
He’d woken with an erection and a dissolving
dream involving Rachel from the bakery, and
he smiled at the brightening room, sighing
contentedly. He supposed he’d always had a
crush on her, like an excitable teen instead
of the forty-something he was. He had no
memory of the dream, just a feeling, and it
shrank away in the promise of a new day.
    At last he stood up from his bed, shrugging
on a dressing gown and padding to the toilet.
After urinating he walked back to his room,
enjoying the feel of the landing floorboards
on his bare feet. Wood was never cold, just
cool, whatever the temperature outside. He
had always liked being this close to things.
Carpets were fine, but walking on them
barefoot he always felt as though he were
separated from the body of the house. The
wood was its skeleton, carpet merely clothing.
    Dressing,
Ray
frowned
at
a
memory
hovering just beyond his perception. He
paused with one leg in, one leg out of his
jeans.
What was that?
Something forced itself
toward him, a memory he should clasp, and
he blinked in surprise at the suddenness of
the vision that struck him: Rachel from the
bakery slipping off her blouse with flour-covered hands, her smile promising more.
That’s not it
, he thought, frowning the dream-memory away.
There’s something else, it wasn’t
that, it was never that
.
    It was halfway down the stairs, as he saw
the yellow toy safari jeep sitting on the fourth
step up from the bottom, that he remembered
he’d once had a son.
    And Toby was like a dream fading in
instead of out. There was a boy without a face
or voice, and he had gone somewhere. Then
his face emerged in Ray’s memory, freckled
in the summer, blond hair made lighter by
the sun, and he shouted in glee as he tipped
bucket after bucket of water onto the flower
bed, mud pies much more interesting to him
than daffodil bulbs.
    â€œToby,” Ray breathed as he sat down on
the stairs. He bent forward slowly and picked
up the jeep, wondering how the hell he could
have woken up and not remembered his dead
son. Every morning since Toby had died, Ray
had surfaced with the boy’s laughter or tears
on his mind, and the knowledge of his death
pressing him down like the greatest weight.
Some mornings he had risen from sleep that
had itself been infected with that dreadful
knowledge, and sometimes — the meanest of
times — he had dreamed that Toby was alive
and well and laughing, and the waking had
been unbearable.
    But this morning he had come awake like a
contented man.
    â€œTobes,” he said, “I do love you so much.”
He cried, but they were not bitter tears, nor
even tears driven by anger at himself. They
stopped quickly and he went to the kitchen,
nursing the mended toy as the kettle boiled. A
new door had been fixed on, and the three new
tires exactly matched the one remaining —
shapes, make, treads. He turned the jeep this
way and that, trying to see any mark or clue
the old man might have left as to how he’d
done it. But there was nothing.
    He was in my house
, Ray thought.
He was
here, inside, while I slept
. But that did not
frighten or concern him as much as it should
have. While the tea was brewing he went
upstairs to his dead son’s room. Broken toys
were still scattered across the bed and floor
where Ray had left them the previous day, and
he smiled sadly as he sat on the bed, picking
them up at random, remembering.