Lily finishes her tea, slips a flask of precious water into a pouch she has made by sewing bits of material together, and sets off crawling down Highway One for the cemetery, leaving Mr Rathbone and his dwindling cheques behind. She turns into Highway Three which takes a sharp turn downward, suggesting that under the thick layers of children’s toys and ancient legal briefs there may be stairs. Lily does not know precisely how many rooms she occupies or how many corridors and floors her domain encompasses, nor exactly how many thousands of soft toys, legal papers and professional magazines fill all but narrow passages, tunnels, and occasional clearings in those rooms and floors. Should a bomb ever hit the rathouse, blowing away its poor inhabitants, teddies and bunnies and dollies and stuffed animals of all kinds, and their attendant limbs, would spill from its innards onto the street like a jack-in-the-box of nursery rhymes, and children would come from miles around to loot and play. Just like the real Day of Delight.
Lily sometimes likes to imagine this, and the looks on the faces of those urchin bombers eager to destroy the Rathouse, but this morning she has more important, urgent things to think about. Highway 1 leads her to Courtroom Junction where sit three Barbie dolls with pretty, short skirts hemmed in lace and legal wigs, named Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil, Speak-no-evil. Their judgements are occasional but awesome. They adjudicate on weighty matters such as the exact shade of crimson nail polish suitable for a platinum blonde who wants to wear yellow, to the appropriate length of a woman’s thighbone. Leading off from Courtroom Junction are several passages, some them now disused. One is Highway 3 from which exudes a familiar, almost homely smell.
Highway 3 takes her to a region where there is no illumination, and she crawls on in the dark, knowing the tunnel can only take her to one place. She knows it when she gets there by the feel and smell of it, for this is the only place in her dominion where a concrete floor is exposed.
In the middle of this cleared area there is a candle whose holder is in the shape of a slim tower like those found on Gothic cathedrals. When she lights the candle, and the wax starts dripping onto the tower, the effect is such that the Spanish architect Gaudi might have dreamed. The tower and its flickery light is perfect in its setting at least, which is a graveyard about a metre square, the gravestones consisting of painted matchboxes and the like propped up on a few inches of soil. Here and there lumpy nodes of concrete extrude like bare rock. An ancient black Tinker Toy hearse with a coffin in the back sits at the gate, which she has constructed out of headless matches, ready for the funeral. There is a gateman too, who started out life as a farmer sitting behind a Fergusson tractor and now sits in a little box to one side of the gate, peering out at the hearse through a cellophane window with a fixed, official expression.
There are mourners too, in long dark coats and neat tight black dresses clustered around an open grave. Her favourite is a woman with a black veil made of fine spun plastic, her hands clasped before her, her head inclined at a saintly angle. This must surely stand for Imogen, her sister, the tallest and stateliest of them all, and the most beautiful in mourning. For her niece, Spring Morning, she’s had to make do with a small Cindy doll, rather poorly dressed in an oversized Barbie jacket and trousers. She looks best sitting down, although this is not exactly funeral protocol. To one side, set apart from the mourners, is a slim figure in harlequin dress playing a flute. Looking like a joker from the card deck, he is somewhat out of place here, amid the sombery of mourning, but not entirely so, since Lily knows that Harlequin, or the Fool, is an honoured guest at the festival of death. Beside it she has placed another small figure that does not belong either, a little white dog trying to jump into the air, restrained by the plastic blobs that hold it to its base. She thinks of it as the spirit, straining for release.
Standing off a respectful distance, like a guard of honour, are a group of Dwarves from the world of Warhammer. Their ferocity wards off any evil spirits that might be tempted to claim the souls of the dear departed one.
She takes the plastic cypress tree and the figurines from her pocket and places the tree in the cemetery by the gatehouse, which seems just the place for it. She inspects her figurines critically, hoping to see a potential Uncle Ben or Aunty Alison, who would certainly want to attend. In fact, although her rooms, however many there are, are packed from floor to ceiling with oddments, she is very short of good mourners. The size is the main problem. Too big, like even the smallest teddies – who don’t care for funerals much anyway – who would loom grotesquely over the other mourners and the matchbox tombstones; or too small, like the tiny inhabitants of Lego City, dwarfed by the tombstones, who end up worshiping at the shrine of massive death – which is not Lily’s intention at all.
At one time, when both she and the toy collection were younger, she would have known where to find figures the size she needed, just where to dig; now, however, with the lineage of each pile having grown long and complicated, large chunks of knowledge have fallen away, rendering many of the piles inscrutable. Whereas once she crawled through areas rich in association and memory, rich in their own history, now she has to guess and pretend, tell herself the same stories about different piles, reliant on random chance or luck to provide what she wants.
Somewhere, she knows, there will be a secret cache of mourners, lying stiffly in coffins of their own or jumbled together in oblivion’s sack. Sometimes she dreams of finding them in the course of some routine exploration, sees them taking pious steps out of hiding and through the cemetery gates to take up their rightful places around the graveyard. There would be Uncles and Aunts galore, and distant relatives and hangers-on, everybody that knew or was connected with Mother. The men all dressed in dark suits with black ties and hats, and the women all veiled with real miniature veils made of Indian silk and demure black crimplene dresses.
In her dreams of the perfect funeral the most important find is that of an exquisitely made little girl, maybe four years old, with a dark pink dress and a black ribbon tied in her hair. This little girl is a key figure for the funeral, since every funeral should boast at least one little girl, and Lily has been searching for her for a long time, dreaming of her so often that she’s become convinced such a little girl exists, buried somewhere in her toy pile.
Looking down at the two figures she’s retrieved from her office drawer, she feels the inevitable stab of disappointment. One is a plastic soldier, who, with some twisting, could be fitted out as a passer-by. The other is a spaceman with a ray gun and a cylinder of oxygen over his back. Neither of these have much to offer as mourners.
She is just putting them aside when she notices what appears to be a movement in the wall. This wall is itself a graveyard of sorts, a mass vertical grave of toy elephants of all shapes and sizes from large granddaddies with sagacious trunks to little pip-squeaks with silly Dumbo smiles. Some are facing outward, head sticking forward like poachers’ trophies; others are facing inward, their rumps to the air as if frozen in the act of running away. Some are squeezed together in copulation, while others are jammed in sideways and appear to be swimming through the bodies of their fellows.
But whatever shape, size or form, whether facing inward, into the darkness of their own forms, or outwards into the flickering candlelight of the cemetery cave, none of them should be moving. Theirs is a frozen orgy. Movement suggests only one thing: rats, and rats are her greatest fear since they can eat out her kingdom from within, leave a trail of stuffing and severed limbs where there had been a press of comfortably sleeping toys. Once, before their stink drove her to get rid of them, she possessed cats. These demanding, imperious animals amused themselves with the rats, but did as much damage to the toys with their irascible claws as the latter did with their teeth.
She suspects that the rodents have a highway system of their own through her kingdom. Exits and entrances, holes in walls, floors and broken windows; nests, hidey-holes and graveyards – a veritable rodent city hidden in and among the soft press of toys and papers. Sometimes she’s heard distant muffled squeaks, scratching, scrabbling and fighting; she sometimes dreams about them, big heavy brutes rushing through black tunnels. Sometimes she gets a whiff of old blood, rich and purple. More than once she has discovered soft toys with their bodies eaten out from the inside, or their patchpants blackened with dried blood. She has found caches of the tiny bones of baby rats – and has speculated as to their fate.
Thirst, most likely.
She manoeuvres around the cemetery and examines the section of the pile where she thought she saw the movement. The flickering candlelight with its shadows bouncing across the still wall of toy elephant forms gives the illusion of movement everywhere, twitching tales and rolling trunks. She is drawn to one elephant, a pink velvet soft toy with aristocratic pretensions but a heart of kitsch, placed sideways in the wall at kneeling height, trunk and half the body free of the mass. While she is looking it happens again, a quick movement, as if an impatient child were tugging at the toy from behind.
“That’s all right,” she says aloud, as if still talking to Mr Rath-bone on the telephone.
Sighing, for there is nothing she’d like better than to forget this and turn back to the funeral, she takes hold of the pink elephant and pulls gently. It comes away easily revealing a dark tunnel behind, a secret passage. By pulling away a few more toys she widens the opening. The passage that is disclosed is larger than a rats’ tunnel, she decides, and might even be one of her own old highways long since walled up, but if this is the case she has completely forgotten it, or where it might lead.
It takes her only a moment to decide what to do, and, like the Alice who followed a white rabbit, Lily climbs into the hole and begins to crawl, quickly leaving the flickering candlelight and the silent funeral behind.