Noah Barleywater Runs Away (4 page)

‘The old man’s son is also a friend, of course,’ continued the dachshund. ‘An excellent fellow too. He lived here as a boy, then disappeared out of all our lives for a very long time. But he came back in the end and he lives there still. WOOF! But my own father told me how the old man planted a seed and it turned into a sapling, and the sapling soon developed into a trunk that sprouted branches, and the branches sprung leaves, and before anyone on the town council had a chance to vote on it, this tremendous tree stood in the centre of our village.’

‘It looks like it’s been there for centuries,’ said Noah.

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ said the dachshund. ‘But it’s not quite as old as that.’

‘Still, that’s not such an unusual story,’ said Noah. ‘That’s just nature. I mean, I learned all about nature at school, and there’s nothing very strange about how well it has grown. The soil might just be very rich. Or they might have been fast-growing seeds. Or someone might have been pouring Miracle-Gro on them once a week. My mum does
that, and once she found me pouring it on my head so I could grow taller, and she made me take all my clothes off and hosed me down in the back garden where anyone could see me. Although I was much younger then,’ he added, ‘and I didn’t have much sense.’

‘What a charming story,’ said the donkey with a sniff that suggested he had no interest in it at all.

‘And who said there was anything unusual about my story anyway?’ asked the dachshund, offended again.

‘Well, you did,’ said Noah. ‘You said there was something special about it.’

‘Ah, but you haven’t heard the best of it,’ he replied, trotting in a circle around Noah now in his excitement. ‘It’s the most curious thing. Every few days something very strange occurs around that tree. The entire village goes to sleep and it looks exactly as it does now. And the next morning when we wake up, some of the branches have been stripped from it in the night, but there’s no sign of any fallen wood. And a day or two later, they’ve all grown back! It’s astonishing. I mean, it’s the type of thing that happens in —’ Here he named the second village Noah had passed through earlier that morning, before shivering a little, as if even the name of that terrible place left a sour taste on his tongue. ‘But it’s not the sort of thing we go in for here at all.’

‘How extraordinary!’ said the boy.

‘Isn’t it? WOOF!’

‘And the shop. It’s very colourful.’

‘Well, of course it is. WOOF! It’s a toy shop.’

The boy’s eyes opened wide. ‘A toy shop!’ he said, gasping. ‘My three favourite words!’

‘Not mine,’ said the dachshund. ‘I like “a” very much, but I’ve never been much of a one for “toy shop”. I’ve always quite liked the word “resilient” myself. An ability to weather trouble without succumbing. I feel that’s a word you might think about a little, young man.’

‘I like “fresh fruit flan”,’ said the donkey. ‘Three excellent words.’

‘I don’t have one,’ said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in surprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even be considering eating him.

‘I can see that I’ve lost your attention,’ said the dachshund after a minute, sounding offended again as he tightened the scarf around his neck with his teeth, for the wind had picked up very suddenly and it was starting to grow cold. ‘And we won’t detain you any longer if that’s the case. We shall be on our way. Good day to you, sir.’

‘Yes, good day,’ said the donkey, turning away with a sigh.

Noah offered a goodbye in return but it was less than it might have been, considering all the help the dachshund (and, to a lesser extent, the hungry
donkey) had offered him, and a few moments later he found himself walking across the street. He stopped at the tree and reached out to touch it, but before his fingers could make contact with the bark, he thought he heard it growling at him, so he pulled away in fright. This wasn’t the gentle whisper of the apple tree from the first village; it was something far more aggressive, like the snarl of a tiger protecting her cubs.

For a moment – for a very brief moment – he thought of his parents at home and how worried they would be when they discovered he had run away, which they surely would have by now. They wouldn’t understand, of course. They would think him selfish. But the idea of staying … and watching … He shivered, knowing that he shouldn’t think about such things.

He turned away from the tree now, trying to push his father and mother out of his mind entirely, and focused all his attention on the toy shop instead.

And the front door.

And the handle.

And without really intending to, he found his hand stretching out, grasping it, turning it, opening it, and before he knew it he was inside the shop and the door had closed firmly behind him.

Stepping inside the toy shop had not been Noah’s original intention. All he really wanted to do at first was take a look in the window and see what was on display. He didn’t have any money to buy anything, of course, but it didn’t do any harm to take a look at what he couldn’t afford. He also wanted to make sure that there were not too many customers milling around in case they realized he didn’t belong there and called the village police.

But somehow he felt as if he had been sucked inside the shop without his making any decision at all, as if the whole thing had all been entirely outside of his control. Of course, this was most unexpected, but he felt that now he was here, the best thing to do was simply take a look around and see what the shop was like.

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always
strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren’t sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn’t silence at all.

But here, inside the shop, things were very different. Here the quiet wasn’t just quiet; it was a total absence of sound.

Noah had been inside a lot of toy shops in his life. Whenever his family went shopping for the day he made a point of being on his best behaviour, because if he was good, then he knew that he would be taken to one before they went home again. And if he was
very
good, there was even a chance that his parents might buy him a special treat, even if he was eating them out of house and home and they had no money to spend on luxuries. So it didn’t matter if his mother insisted on his trying on every pair of school trousers in the shop before choosing the first pair she’d taken off the rack seven hours earlier, he still kept a cheerful smile on his face, as if shopping for clothes was quite the most exciting thing that an eight-year-old boy could do, and not something that made him want to scream at the top of his voice, so loudly that the walls of the shopping centre would break apart and every shopper, salesperson, cash register, rack, shirt, tie, pants and pair of socks would disappear off into the furthest regions of the solar system and never be heard from again.

But this shop was very unlike all the others he had ever visited in his life. He looked around, trying to understand what made it so different, and at first he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

And then he did.

The difference between this toy shop and all the others was that in this one there was absolutely no plastic to be seen anywhere. In fact, every toy he saw was made of wood.

There were train sets laid out along shelves, long, rolling carriages and tracks that stretched from corner to corner – all made of wood.

There were marching armies making their way forward to new countries and fresh adventures, and these were spread across counter tops – all made of wood too.

There were houses and villages, boats and trucks, every conceivable toy that an interested mind like his could dream of – and every one of them was made of a solid, dark wood which seemed to give off a glow of richness and, yes, even a sort of distant hum.

In fact, they didn’t seem like toys at all, but like something far more important than that. Everything he saw on display was very new and different, and Noah had a sense that this might be the only shop in the world where these particular toys were sold.

Almost everything was painted carefully – and not with just any old colours either, like the toys he
had at home, which had surfaces that cracked and peeled if he so much as looked at them for too long. These were colours he’d never even seen before; ones he couldn’t possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well, not green exactly, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden pencil holder, was a wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.

But as curious as all this was, as surprising and unusual as all this felt to Noah’s eyes, it was as nothing compared to those toys that dominated the walls of the shop in such numbers.

The puppets.

There were dozens of them. No, not dozens, scores. Not even scores, but hundreds, perhaps more than a person could count in one day, even with the help of one of the multi-coloured wooden abacuses that were placed on a nearby counter top. They were crafted in different shapes and sizes, varying heights and widths, dissimilar colours and shapes, but every single one was made of wood and
painted with bright colours that filled them with life and energy and a sense that they were fully alive.

They don’t look like puppets at all
, thought Noah.
They look too real for that.

They hung in rows along the walls of the shop, wires fastened to their backs to keep them all in their places. And they weren’t just puppets of people either; there were animals and vehicles and all sorts of unexpected objects. But they all had strings attached to them to allow their different parts to move.

‘How extraordinary!’ muttered Noah under his breath, and as he looked around, he began to experience a curious sensation that the puppets’ eyes were following him wherever he went, keeping a close watch on his every movement just in case he picked something up and broke it, or tried to run off with a toy that didn’t belong to him in his back pocket.

An incident just like that had happened a few months earlier when his mother had taken him on another of her unexpected days out – something she had started doing with such a sense of urgency that they should spend time together that Noah had found it all a little confusing. On that occasion, a pack of magic playing cards had mysteriously found its way into his pocket while they were walking through a shop together, but how it had happened was anyone’s guess because he certainly hadn’t stolen them. In fact, he couldn’t even remember
having seen them on display in the first place. But just as they were leaving the shop, a rather large, rather heavy, rather sweaty man in a pale blue uniform approached them and asked in a very serious voice whether they could come with him please.

‘Why?’ Noah’s mother had asked. ‘What’s the problem here?’

‘Madam,’ said the security guard, using a word that made Noah wonder whether they had suddenly upped sticks and moved to France, ‘I have reason to believe that your little boy might be leaving the shop with an item that has not been paid for.’

Noah had looked up at the man with a mixture of indignation and contempt. Indignation because he was many things – many things, indeed – but he was not a thief. And contempt because there was nothing that annoyed him more than grown-ups referring to him as a little boy, particularly when he was standing right there in front of them.

‘Why, that’s ridiculous,’ his mother said, shaking her head dismissively. ‘My son would never do such a thing.’

‘Madam, if you could just check his back pocket,’ said the security guard, and sure enough, when Noah put his hand round to check, the pack of magic playing cards had somehow found its way in there.

‘Well,
I
didn’t steal them,’ insisted Noah, staring at them in surprise, the picture on the front of the box – the Ace of Spades – winking back at him in delight.

‘Then perhaps you can explain what you’re doing with them,’ said the security guard with a sigh.

‘If you have questions, you can address them to me,’ snapped Noah’s mother, glaring at the security guard, her voice rising a little now in indignation. ‘My son would never steal a pack of cards. We have dozens of the things at home. I’m teaching him to cheat at poker so he can make his fortune before he’s eighteen.’

The guard opened his eyes wide and stared at her. He was accustomed to parents turning furiously on their children at moments like this and shaking them until their teeth fell out to get at the truth, but Noah’s mother did not look like the type of woman who would do something like that. She looked like the type of mother who might actually believe her son when he answered her questions, and that was something you didn’t see every day.

‘You didn’t steal these cards, did you,’ she asked, turning to him a moment later and phrasing it more as a statement than a question.

‘Of course not,’ said Noah, which was the truth, because he hadn’t.

‘Well, then,’ said his mother, turning back to the guard again and shrugging her shoulders, ‘there’s nothing more to be said on the subject. An apology will do for now, but I think you should make a donation to a charity of my choice as recompense for your wrongful accusations. Something to do with animals, I think. Small furry ones
as they’re my favourite kind.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, madam,’ insisted the guard. ‘The fact remains that the cards were in your son’s pocket. And
someone
must have put them there.’