Toby Alone

  To begin with, Toby was extremely angry.

  Ending his days like this! Having escaped every kind of dark evil imaginable, was he now going to be killed by an innocent blanket of snow? He kicked the heavy door of ice.

  His feet hurt after a few kicks, but there wasn’t even a dent in the door. He fell to his knees. The hope was draining out of him. All he had left in him were pain and anger.

  “Come back, Toby. Come back…”

  He kept saying the same thing, over and over again, but the hope was leaking away. The starry sky, which had always helped him, was no longer above his head. All he had was the cave’s cold walls and ceiling. One bag of food could never last four months. He would end up like an emaciated twig that would snap. Toby sat there for a while, weak and limp. Maybe not having to fight any more wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.

  He might never have got up again, if he hadn’t thought about his parents. He’d been waiting for them for the whole autumn, like a little boy perched on a chair at the meeting point for lost children.

  Suddenly, an image came to him. It was a small hut on the edge of a huge field, home to an abandoned funfair. Old scraps of paper littered the ground. Everything was deserted. There was a sign on the hut: LOST PARENTS OFFICE. And, if you took a closer look through the misty window, you could see Sim and Maya Lolness inside, sitting on two stools. They looked as if they had been waiting for centuries, with their hands on their knees.

  Toby realised that he had nothing to wait for, he was the one who was being waited for.

  They were counting on him.

  Instantly, without gaining so much as a thousandth of a millimetre, he felt tall. He got up slowly, like someone miraculously cured.

  Yes, his situation was dire, but at least he knew that. “Forewarned is forearmed,” his Grandmother Alnorell always used to say to her accountant, Mr Perlush, to keep him piling up the treasure. For once, Toby heeded old Radegonde Alnorell’s advice. He tried to anticipate what would happen.

  First of all, he sat on the ground and took off his socks. He put them by the fire to dry. Amazingly, the fire was still going. He would be able to get wood by digging away at the floor and pulling off the splinters. He had seven matches left. He put the precious box to one side. Luckily, the fire wasn’t smoky. There must be some unseen vents in the Trunk, which allowed the smoke to escape and fresh air to enter. So Toby had no trouble breathing.

  Air, heat, light – all that was missing was a spot of food.

  He emptied the bag, item by item. There were more than a hundred rations.

  Toby counted how many days there were between now and the first day of April. One hundred and twenty. So he should eat one ration per day, for four months. One egg, or one biscuit, one chunk of dried fat, or one lichen leaf.

  Toby pulled a face. It was going to be a bit tight. A bit? Total starvation, more like. A horribly painful and certain death.

  Feeding a thirteen-year-old an egg a day is worse than giving a hollow wooden ball to a team of eleven weevils for a game of funnyball. They’d first swallow the ball, which is when the referee should start worrying about his own safety.

  Toby watched his socks drying by the fire for a while. He saw the orchid on the wall dancing through the flames. His gaze slid to the floor, and the small pile of russet-coloured mildew he had left. He frowned, stood up and went over to the pile.

  It had doubled in size.

  The previous evening, he had drawn a charcoal circle on the floor. This was his palette, where he’d smeared his improvised paint. And now here was the mould spreading all around. It had definitely doubled.

  Toby stuck his finger in the mildew. He stared at it in disgust. It had the consistency of slightly greasy powder. Without hesitating, he stuffed his finger into his mouth. He chewed for a long time, and had to admit that it wasn’t so bad. It tasted of crushed mushroom. He took two more fingers’ worth, then a generous thumbful, and went back to the fire.

  Toby was proud of himself. Like all living organisms, the mildew never stopped growing, so he had an unlimited supply of fresh food (if you can call mildew fresh). Together with a chunk of meat or an egg, and some melted snow to drink, this meant that he would get a proper meal each day.

  He tripped against the word “day”. What does day mean when you’re in a black cave? How can you tell what time it is, without the sun? His grandmother had a clock, which chimed every hour. There were only two or three clocks in the whole Tree. Everyone else relied on the sun, or the quality of the light. But how could he tell what time it was, here, in this hole? Was there a single thing in this cavern that was governed by time? He thought it over for a while.

  Toby gave his belly a poke. Got it!

  His stomach ran like clockwork.

  When he was hungry, his stomach grumbled as noisily as a clock striking the hour. So, at first he thought he’d be able to tell what time it was according to when he felt peckish. It seemed the perfect solution. One rumble, two rumbles, three rumbles. Luckily, his thinking didn’t stop there.

  Toby had enough supplies to hold out for a hundred and twenty days, but not for a hundred and twenty rumbles. Even if he only felt peckish every twelve hours, he would have finished his supplies by February, meaning a diet of one hundred per cent mildew through until April. That would be tight. No, he couldn’t just listen to his stomach.

  He carried on thinking.

  He had to know what time it was. What was there in this hole that changed with time?

  He looked at the mildew again and grinned. Not only was it going to feed him, but it would be his clock too.

  Toby drew a second circle around the first one he had made the day before. In twenty-four hours, the russet powder had extended from one circle to the other. All he had to do was remove what was outside the small circle. When the mould reached the second circle, twenty-four hours would have gone by again, and he could have his next meal. With the powder he removed every day, he would have enough to feed himself.

  And so Toby’s winter began. With air, water, warmth, light, food – and a sense of time. Enough for the four months ahead. He spent the next few days feeling very excited. He was going to survive after all. He would see the light of day again.

  But when he celebrated the third day with a small, hard bread roll and a plate of mildew, and he calculated that he had one hundred and seventeen days left to go, he realised that we can’t survive on air, water, heat, light, food and a sense of time alone.

  What was it he was missing? What keeps us alive more than anything else?

  Other people.

  This was the conclusion he reached.

  Other people keep us alive.

  Two more days went by, during which Toby looked for other signs of life. But there wasn’t even the tiniest snippet of a hint of a beginning of other life in the cave. Not so much as a funny-looking insect he could have chased round the fire. At one stage, he tried the mildew again. Sometimes he hoped this would become his companion, since it was alive just like he was. It was growing just like he was. Maybe it even had a soul somewhere in that russet-coloured heap.

  But after talking to it for several hours, in the warm tones of an old friend, he realised he would go completely mad within a week if he carried on like that. He called out in the cave, “Toby! Stop talking to that pile of mildew! Toby! D’you hear me?”

  The echo prolonged the sound of his voice. He felt a lot better. All the same, he went to apologise briefly to the mildew, explaining that he didn’t have anything against it personally, it was a great help to him in many ways, but he wouldn’t be talking to it again.

  Toby dug away at the wood for a bit, extracted a few splinters to get the fire going, and went to sit down.

  And that was when he thought about Pol Colleen.

  Pol Colleen was a silly old fool. Or that was how people referred to him, even though he was neither old nor mad. There are some words like that, which don’t really mean anything: “simple minded” people
often have lots of complicated things going on inside their heads; and “bigwigs” can just as well be small, plus they probably don’t wear wigs either.

  Pol Colleen had one distinguishing feature: he lived on his own. All alone. He lived on a branch on the furthest tip of the Low Branches, on the east side. He drank dewdrops and ate the maggots from a small colony of midges that had settled near to his home. Toby had only gone that far once. Colleen had smiled at him over his shoulder. He didn’t tell Toby off for being there, then again he didn’t say anything at all. Toby had watched him. He looked happy.

  He sat at a small desk and wrote. He never stopped. Once a year, he went to get his supplies from the Asseldors, who were happy to give him paper. He made his own white ink by squashing young maggots. The paper he used was dark grey, so his long manuscripts looked like summer skies after a storm.

  Pol Collen wrote from dawn till dusk. One spring day, after writing and paper had been banned, Pol Colleen disappeared.

  Now, Toby contemplated his painted flower on the wall. He needed to be working at something, like Pol Colleen. In addition to air, water and all that, he needed a project. He made a new palette in one corner of the cave, and put a handful of mildew taken from his meal there. From that day on, Toby dedicated himself to his project.

  On the walls of the cave, he began to paint the world as he knew it. He was painting the Tree. His work took the form of a giant circular window around the orchid: dozens of scenes, landscapes and portraits, all linking and overlapping. The geography didn’t bear any relation to what you would find on a map, because it was the geography of Toby’s imagination. When he was painting the Tree, Toby was drawing himself, in the great stained-glass window of his memories.

  Close up, you could make out different characters, some familiar, others not, as well as real and imaginary insects. There was young Nils and his father, and Sim, Maya and everyone else too, including Rolok astride a snail, and the Asseldor sisters leaving the Ladies’ Pond in their white dresses. There was the Grand Council Chamber, like a teeming crater, full of weevils in ties. There were forests, bright and shady branches, Razor and Torn depicted as grubbers, rearing a big fat grub which look suspiciously like Joe Mitch. In one corner, a portrait of Leo Blue showed him with two faces, one smiling, the other scowling. Higher up, detailed landscapes unfurled: a perfect copy of the Lolness family’s former home, The Tufts, and its garden with the little hollow branch at the bottom.

  Day after day, the painting spread over all the walls of the cave, drawn in mildew red and charcoal black. When he had finished one particular painting, Toby held his flaming torch over it, in order to set the colours and prevent the mildew from blurring the outlines.

  Depending on what he was painting, he had happy days and sad days. By night, Toby stopped dreaming. His dreams were on the wall, in the glow of the fire.

  There was one scene that Toby painted through tears. He spent several days finishing it off. It took place in a small, clean sitting room belonging to Mr Clarac. Zef Clarac was a lawyer in the Treetop. Toby drew the scene with great precision, without adding or leaving anything out.

  It was the scene that had determined Toby’s fate. But, in order to understand it, we need to go back in time to find out everything about the curse on the Lolness family.

  Everything.

  Three weeks after the message from the Grand Council had been delivered by Pinhead-Rolok, another letter arrived for the Lolness family. Somebody slid it under the door one morning: a black envelope. Toby gave it to his father, handling it the way you would a fragile object.

  Sim Lolness put it on his desk. He called his wife. Since he’d been living in the Low Branches, he had learned how to work with his hands, just because he had to. He had become very adept, and had even recently made a new pair of glasses with lenses from recycled fly wings. It was a very time-consuming job, but one he couldn’t avoid, after sitting on his last pair.

  The new glasses weren’t dry yet, so for now he was working with a big magnifying glass, which tired his eyes. He asked Maya to open the envelope and read the letter.

  When she had the piece of paper laid out before her, Toby’s mother didn’t say anything at first, then she burst into tears.

  Sim and Toby were very worried. What new drama was about to befall them? They each imagined the worst catastrophe possible. Seeing that Maya was incapable of reading it out, Sim passed the letter to his son. Toby glanced at it and felt reassured. The letter didn’t contain anything serious. He put it down again, relieved.

  All this play-acting was starting to make the professor lose his temper.

  “Read-me-the-let-ter!”

  Toby gave his father the news: Grandmother Alnorell was dead. Radegonde was no more.

  Sim Lolness let out a big sigh. Phew! That was all. He kissed Maya on the forehead, as if she had just lost a thimble, and went outside into the garden.

  Toby went to sit next to Maya. He felt awkward. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what.

  He could have said, “Don’t be upset, she was old after all,” or “Don’t worry, she was silly anyway.” Luckily, he knew better. He stayed there for a long time, sitting next to his mother in silence.

  From watching Maya that day, Toby realised that when you mourn somebody, you also mourn what they didn’t give you. Maya was mourning the mother she’d never had. From now on, one thing was certain: she would never have a perfect mother in her life. And that was why she was sobbing.

  It was as if, right to the last, you hold out for a gesture or a word that will make up for everything. As if death also kills the gesture that was never made, or the word that was never said.

  Toby thought of it as the final example of his grandmother’s wickedness: “When I was there I hurt you, and now that I’m gone I’ll hurt you too.”

  You could call it the double effect of Radegonde. Even when she was dead, she made you suffer.

  The next morning, Maya packed her suitcase.

  18

  Good Old Zef

  “It’s completely out of the question!”

  The professor wasn’t joking.

  “Going off up there all by yourself! Crossing the Tree in your flimsy skirt, with your suitcase and shawl! I’d rather tie you up in the middle of an ants’ nest and cover you in honey! No, no and no again!”

  Maya Lolness was gentle-natured and considerate toward her husband, and as kind as she was attentive, but enough was enough. With the back of her hand, she sent an inkwell flying, knocked over Sim’s desk and then calmly said, “Since when did you decide for your wife, Professor? I’ll do exactly as I please.”

  Toby, who had been woken up by the noise, rushed into the study in his pyjamas.

  “I knocked my desk over,” said Sim, trying to downplay the situation in front of his son.

  “No, I trampled on it because you were treading on my toes, Sim, dear,” Maya put him right.

  Toby smiled. He knew all about his mother’s darker side. Even an angel’s feather can poke an eye out, if you mishandle it. But when he saw the suitcase, his face dropped.

  “Toby, I’m leaving,” said Maya. “Just for two weeks. I’m going to spend some time close to my late mother, and then I’m coming back. Look after your father.”

  “I’d look after your own backside, if I were you,” muttered Sim.

  When goaded, his temper was no better than hers.

  “And as for you, Toby, look after the house. I’m leaving with your mother,” he added.

  Maya was speechless. She saw Sim piling up a few papers and stuffing them into a bag. A quarter of an hour later, they were standing on the threshold and giving Toby last minute bits of advice.

  “Ask the Asseldors, if you need anything. We’ll let them know when we pass by their place.”

  Toby kissed his parents. Maya was overcome because she hadn’t spent more than three days apart from her son in six years of exile. So just to play at being mum, she said things like “Don’
t catch cold,” and then she did up the top button of his pyjamas.

  That evening, the Lolnesses reached Seldor Farm.

  They knew what a magical welcome the Asseldor family always offered, but they were still surprised to see two places nicely laid on the big table. The others had already eaten. They were playing music in the adjacent room. While Lola Asseldor warmed up their soup, Sim and Maya went to listen to the concert. They pushed the door. There was the full orchestra line-up with a special guest soloist playing the marbles: Toby Lolness.

  Sim and Maya stared at each other, flabbergasted.

  After keeping up a steady pace for just over four hours, Toby had reached the farm in time for lunch. He had spent the afternoon kneading bread with Lila and Lola, chopping up wood and smoking cockroaches. Smoked cockroach, finely sliced, tasted quite similar to smoked cricket, he discovered, but with an added hint of aniseed.

  And now Toby was playing the marbles in front of his astonished parents.

  The music stopped, and Toby made an announcement in the silence.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Sim opened his mouth to protest, but the concert immediately started up again. By the time the music came to an end, Maya and Sim had already been asleep for a while. Toby thanked the Asseldors.

  The next day, all three of them set off together.

  They made it back up to the top in seven days.

  It was an excruciating journey.

  Not that they suffered from exhaustion, however, nor the dull rain that made everything damp at the start of this September. In fact, they moved as energetically as Leo Blue’s boomerang, setting out quickly to get back quickly. No, the pain they felt on their climb back up to the Treetop was sparked by the landscape unfolding on either side of them.

  Sim had foreseen things accurately, and the Tree was in a pitiful state. Six years had gone by, and a lot of sawdust since they’d last seen the Heights, which they no longer recognised. Every area of the wood was staked out, and it looked as worm-ridden as a wafer. Pale heads popped out of the holes to watch the passers-by.