Toby Alone

  Each second was as full and delicious as a honey fritter.

  “And does your dream end happily ever after?”

  “That depends on you.”

  16

  Hideaway

  When you peel off a maggot’s skin (which is a bit like pulling off a big sock) to make a sleeping bag or plant protector, it leaves a sticky white substance behind.

  The Grass people were covered in this repulsive gloop, and their skin looked as if it had been boiled for too long. They came whooping and leaping out of the undergrowth. Elisha stopped swimming and stared at them: three Grass people were waving their arms about as they threw a wide-meshed net over her. Then they hauled the net onto the beach.

  Toby wanted to rush over, but his feet wouldn’t move from the branch. He was trembling like a leaf. When he tried to call out, he produced a tiny whisper nobody could hear. Elisha had stopped struggling in the net now. She had surrendered to her captors. She gave Toby a little wave goodbye. She didn’t look sad.

  When Toby finally managed to tear himself away from the bark, he let out a big cry and woke himself up. The night was silent. Toby pulled his blanket over him.

  His nightmare had left him chilled to the bone, soaked in a frosty sweat.

  For the last month, Toby had been sleeping in a hole in the bark cliff on the other side of the lake. The cave was reasonably wide and high, but a fly wouldn’t have been able to slip its leg through the entrance.

  Elisha had settled him in there from the first night.

  When Toby crawled into the cave for the first time, after clambering up the cliff, he had complained. He had been dreaming of Elisha’s mother’s delicious pancakes, and the thick mattresses in their colourful home. But Elisha had managed to convince him that he shouldn’t let anybody know his whereabouts, not even her mother, Isha Lee.

  And she was right, because the next morning one of Joe Mitch’s patrols knocked on the Lees’ front door.

  Elisha went to open up. Her mother was busy with the worm beetles. When she heard them rapping, Elisha slipped on a nightshirt over her clothes and rumpled her hair to make it look as if she had just been woken up. There were two men at the door. The others must have been waiting higher up.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Elisha gave the biggest yawn she could manage. The two men stared at her. She was twelve and a half, but you couldn’t tell from looking at her. Her clothing made the visitors step back. Was this a child in front of them, or a scantily clad young woman?

  Unsure what tone to adopt, they didn’t say anything. But not being gentlemen, they quickly reverted to their base nature.

  “We’ve got to do a search!”

  Elisha smiled.

  “I once taught a bug how to say hello, so I should be able to manage with two cockroaches… Hello,” she said again.

  The cockroaches in question were very surprised. In the normal course of events they would have squished this tiny louse of an Elisha against the door. But Elisha was Elisha, and you wouldn’t want to squish her.

  In fact, she was the one crushing them with her huge almond-shaped eyes that were spinning like lassos. They took another step back.

  “Hel-lo,” one of them stammered.

  “We’ve got to do a search,” the other repeated, foolishly.

  Elisha looked at this second man as if she felt sorry for him. Then she turned to the first. “Man-who-says-hello, you can come in, but I’ll have to ask you to leave your animal outside.”

  The man who had said hello watched his colleague blush. He stepped inside the house. Elisha banged the door behind them. The rude visitor stayed outside, dazed.

  Elisha sat down on the ground, close to the fire. The man realised it wouldn’t take long to search the house, once he had seen what it looked like from the inside. He pushed the colourful partitions aside, and lifted a few mattresses, before rejoining Elisha.

  “I… Thank you, Miss. I’ve done my searching…”

  He was discovering the unfamiliar joys of being polite. And, once he’d started, there was no stopping him. “I have greatest … delightings in thankings you … for your receptional … if I can allow you to express me like that.”

  Elisha was trying not to crease up with laughter. Pushing an ember into the fire, she managed to say, “Please feel free, dear Clot…”

  “Clot” was a word her mother used. Elisha didn’t even know what it meant. The man looked flattered. He started nodding and making little bows.

  “Forgivings for waking you, Miss. We won’t opportunity you again with another pesty search…”

  He was walking backwards now. Elisha was hiding her tears of laughter. He was really getting into his stride, “I am your humble Clot … your devoted Clot, Missie…”

  Finally he left, closing the door ever so gently.

  Elisha ran over and glued her ear to it. She heard the man calling out to his companion.

  “Well? Are you proud of yourself, you badly-brought-up-good-for-nothing? It’s not as if you’ll never be called a Clot by a young lady who’s just risen from her bed!”

  “But—”

  “No buts…”

  “Sorry—”

  “Sorry who? We say: sorry, Clot.”

  “All right, Clot. Sorry, Clot.”

  When she told Toby about the visit, the cave echoed long and loud with the sound of their laughter. They played at saying, “I am your humble Clot,” as they bowed all the way down to the ground.

  And so Elisha’s life was divided between time at home and time spent with Toby. Two or three times a day she would say to her mother, “I’m going to the lake, for a swim. I’ll be right back…”

  Because she worked hard the rest of the time, her mother let her go.

  On the way, Elisha would pick up a small bowl that she hid in a hollow near to the house. She popped the leftovers from each meal in there. Luckily, her mother had said one morning, “If you’re doing so much swimming, you’ll have to eat more.”

  So Isha gave her daughter bigger portions every day.

  Elisha took the bowl to Toby; he hadn’t lost any of his appetite. They would exchange a few words and sometimes she would give him a snippet of local news. “Did you know that the Olmechs’ mill has been destroyed?”

  Toby hadn’t told Elisha about his stay at the Olmechs’, because he didn’t want to condemn those poor people by letting their act of betrayal out of the bag.

  “Lex found the mill ransacked. His parents had disappeared. People think they’ve been arrested by Joe Mitch’s men. Lex set out to look for them. Now there’s no news of him either.”

  Toby listened, and thought, Those poor people, they’ve baked their own happiness just like you would a pudding: one drop of fear, a handful of lies, a lot of weakness, and a sprinkling of ambition. And now their son’s got to swallow all that.

  On several occasions, Toby saw groups of hunters skirting the lake, so he tended only to go out at night.

  He would climb down his cliff at dusk. He walked on the shores of the lake, skimming pebbles across the water and raising a foam that looked like the moon’s surface. He would do a few somersaults on the beach, to stay supple. He played funnyball by himself, kicking around a ball of compacted sawdust. Sometimes he would lie down and spend part of the night under the stars, despite the increasingly biting cold.

  Before the first rays of daylight, he would climb back up to his lair.

  Now and then, Elisha would join him in the middle of the night. When she had managed to sneak out without waking her mother, she would catch up with him on the shores of the lake.

  It was on one of these occasions that Toby asked her about the Grass people. She kept avoiding the question, making out she could hear a faraway noise, or that she had seen a shadow swimming towards them.

  But Toby wouldn’t give up, so she gave him a vague kind of answer, “I don’t know really … people talk. You shouldn’t believe a lot of it. They live down below, on the other side of the B
order.”

  After his brief and terrifying return to the Treetop, Toby had discovered how important the Grass people were. He had heard very little about them when he was small, but now everybody talked about the Grass people. According to Mano Asseldor, there had been a review of the case of Leo Blue’s father, the famous El Blue, the explorer who had been killed crossing the Border. At the time of his death, when Leo was very small, no one had been able to find any explanation. But now, no doubt about it, the Grass people were to blame. They had assassinated El Blue. The Neighbourhood Committees were sending out alarmist messages through public criers. People feared an invasion, but there was no actual mention of the “Grass people”. Instead they just talked about “the threat” in a mysterious sort of a way.

  Toby added, “All the same, people are saying that—”

  “But they’ve never seen them!” Elisha interrupted him.

  “Have you?”

  “Let me tell you something,” Elisha continued. “The first time I came across a may bug, I screamed I was so scared. I thought I was going to die, because people said may bugs eat children. May bugs make a lot of noise and they nibble away at our branches, but they wouldn’t harm a fly! You shouldn’t always believe what people say. If someone had told you I was an ugly wild animal, we’d never have been friends, and you’d have told everyone you met about the ugly wild animal who lived near the lake.”

  “As far as may bugs go,” said Toby, sounding very serious, “I’m happy to believe they’re not as bad as people make out. And maybe the Grass people aren’t either… But I wouldn’t like to cross paths with an Elisha!”

  Elisha pretended to be furious and jumped on top of him so he toppled over on to the bark, then she jumped on top of him again, pinning down both his arms. She was surprisingly strong. Laughing, Toby begged her to stop. Elisha’s hair was tickling his neck. She let go and slid down to join him.

  They stayed lying on the bark, side by side. It felt safe, like the good old days, getting lost in an abandoned bees’ nest, which they pretended was their very own fairytale castle. They would run through golden corridors leading into chapels where honey stalactites hung down. The nest was Elisha’s favourite place. Deserted by its swarm of killer bees, that hell had become a paradise, like the shores of the lake without Toby’s hunters.

  They listened to the waves lapping, the sound of the wind shaking the bare branches. The lake had drowned the last leaves. You could no longer see the rounded backs of water fleas that slept on its surface in summer.

  They drifted off. Elisha was curled up in a ball. Just her arm stuck out of her cape, digging into Toby’s shoulder, but Toby would never have dreamed of complaining about such discomfort.

  And so November slipped by, with almost too little to worry about, warm enough to make you forget how close winter was, or that you had to prepare for it.

  Then winter arrived without warning, in one night, and this is where the story should have drawn to a close. The fitting ending would have been, “Winter stole Toby away, and he was never heard of again.” But the outcome of a story always hinges on a tiny detail; and so it was that one detail changed the course of Toby’s story.

  This “detail” was actually eight centimetres long and had a wingspan of ten centimetres. This detail travelled at twenty-four kilometres an hour, cruising speed. Sim Lolness had proven, in one of his old research projects, that this detail could link the Tree to the moon in one year, nine months, twenty-eight days and seventeen minutes.

  This detail dropped dead in front of Isha Lee, on the first day in December.

  It was a blue dragonfly.

  In its mouth was a mosquito, still alive, which it had been trying to kill in mid-flight. The dragonfly died suddenly and peacefully, like most dragonflies at the first genuinely cold snap.

  Isha Lee stood there, dumbstruck. Its giant frame was twitching on the ground in front of her. She didn’t even see the mosquito remove its hooks from the beast and set off at a zigzag, with a lisping buzz. Isha wasn’t thinking about the tragic fate of the dragonfly, which had died like a plucky old lady staring retirement humorously in the eye.

  Isha was thinking about something else.

  She was thinking that winter had arrived. Right now. And a winter that mowed down the fastest insect in the Tree (twenty-four kilometres an hour) with its first kiss, would be a merciless winter.

  Elisha’s mother left the outsized insect’s skin where it was, and went back inside the house. She took a big cloth bag and emptied half her larder into it. Next Isha ran over to the two new worm beetles, Kim and Lorca. They were the fourth generation of beetles to lodge at the Lees’ since the Lolness family had first arrived in the region, six years earlier. Next to them, a shed kept the last eggs of the season safe. She stuffed at least half of them into the bag and set off towards the moss woods, by the path that led to the lake.

  She strode purposefully, her load over her shoulder, advancing against the freezing wind that had just seized the Tree. When she reached the viewing point, she surprised her daughter, who was on her way back.

  Elisha stopped in her tracks and stared at her mother. They looked like two slightly embarrassed reflections of the same person.

  “So, Elisha, have you been swimming?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “Not too cold?”

  “No, Mum.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes…”

  Isha gestured towards the lake. Elisha turned around to see.

  The lake’s surface was entirely frozen over.

  “So? It doesn’t hurt too much when you dive in?”

  Elisha’s cheeks were red. She was chewing her lips.

  “I didn’t go for a swim today, Mum.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “No I didn’t go then either … or the month before that…”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  Isha wasn’t angry, but she was starting to get impatient.

  “Quickly! Where is he?”

  The cold wind was spreading and night was about to fall. Elisha shivered as she looked at her mother.

  “He’s up there.”

  Isha Lee overtook her daughter, raced down the slope, skirted the lake and started climbing back up the other side. Elisha struggled to keep up, even though her mother was carrying a heavy bag.

  Toby was busy drawing on the cave walls. He was painting with a russet-coloured piece of mildew, the kind you find on the edge of the lake at the end of autumn. He was drawing a flower, an orchid.

  A flower had grown in the Tree a long time ago, or so the story goes. Out of nowhere, an orchid had taken root in a branch in the Heights. It died on the first day of December, long before Toby was born, or his parents, or his parents’ parents.

  Since that time, a Flower Festival was celebrated every first day of December. A crowd would throng onto the branch where the orchid had grown. No statue or monument marked the spot. The flower had simply been left to dry, and so it had kept on changing, with the wind and the rain, gradually shrivelling.

  But when Toby had gone back up to the Heights, the dried flower had been razed to the ground. A Joe Mitch Arbor housing project was blossoming in its place.

  So Toby was busy painting the memory of that orchid, when someone rose up behind him.

  “Elisha!” he called out, proud of his work. “Look!”

  He went over to her. But it wasn’t Elisha. It was Mrs Lee, beautiful Isha Lee, who was putting her bag down on the ground, utterly exhausted.

  “Hello, Mrs Lee,” said Toby.

  Elisha ran in just behind, even more out of breath than her mother.

  “Right, this isn’t a game any more,” said Isha Lee.

  “You found out,” said Toby, stating the obvious.

  “Yes, I found out! From day one! From the night when I heard a cicada singing in autumn, and I saw Elisha stealing out of the house.”

  “And you didn
’t say anything?”

  “The only thing I’d have said is that you shouldn’t take me for a brainless louse. Apart from that, what was there to say? I just had to carry on as if Toby was there, count him in for the meals, and let Elisha look after him.”

  Elisha and Toby were stunned. They had thought they were the smartest people in the world, but now they realised that luck and someone else had been on their side.

  “Now, you must be very careful. The cave could become inaccessible any moment now. If it snows, Toby will be cut off. We need to find him a winter hiding place. I’m thinking of the worm beetle shed. We’ll need to get it ready tonight. In the meantime, Toby, you stay here. I’m leaving you this bag. There’s enough to hold out for two whole weeks, in case something happens.

  She went to the cave entrance. At the last moment, she turned round and looked up at the flower.

  “What’s that, my Toby?”

  My Toby. Nobody had called him that for weeks. He felt a little twinge in his heart as he thought of his parents.

  “A flower,” he answered.

  Isha stopped for a moment. That word seemed to affect her.

  “It’s beautiful… I’d forgotten it was like that. And I grew up surrounded by flowers.”

  She went out. Toby thought about what she had just said. Where could you grow up surrounded by flowers? Elisha stayed a few seconds longer. She was looking down, with a contrite expression.

  “Your mother’s a very good person,” said Toby.

  “Yeah, she’s all right,” Elisha uttered faintly. “So, um … I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Elisha left through the hole.

  “Till tomorrow,” said Toby.

  When Toby tried to stick his nose outside the following morning, it met with a wall of snow. Despite digging all day, nothing shifted. The snow had taken him hostage.

  It was 2 December. The thaw would start in March.

  Four months.

  And he only had food supplies for two weeks.

  So…

  17

  Buried Alive

  In the Treetop, a gust of wind or a ray of sunshine is enough to sweep away the snow. But in the Low Branches it clings like a big white caterpillar and doesn’t leave until spring.