A Thief in the House of Memory Read online

  A Thief in the House of Memory

  A Thief in the House of Memory

  Tim Wynne-Jones

  Copyright © 2004 by Tim Wynne-Jones

  New format paperback edition published in 2006

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

  The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Maddy Wynne-Jones and Mira Goldberg-Poch, who read the manuscript in earlier drafts, and Taya Ford, who was of inestimable help in preparing the final draft.

  The publisher acknowledges for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wynne-Jones, Tim

  A thief in the house of memory / by Tim Wynne-Jones.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-742-5 — ISBN-10: 0-88899-742-6

  I. Title.

  PS8595.Y59T54 2006 jC813’.54 C2005-907540-6

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  This book is for Xan,

  who would rather play jungle than house

  Une maison où je vais seul en appelant

  Un nom que le silence et les murs me renvoient

  Une étrange maison qui se tient dans ma voix

  Et qu’habite le vent.

  — Pierre Seghers

  (A house where I go alone calling

  A name that silence and the walls give back to me

  A strange house contained in my voice

  Inhabited by the wind.)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Sleepless in Camelot

  The Big House

  The Water-Haulage Man

  Open and Shut

  Hide and Seek

  I-Less

  The Water is Wide

  Juno Beach

  If the House Fits

  On the Courthouse Steps

  Shut Out

  The Wildcat

  Psycho

  The Price of Fame

  Alarm

  Future Perfect

  The House of Stone

  The Hole in the Wall

  Stealing Back the Past

  A Boat Full of Nails

  The Queen of the Pumpkin Patch

  The Super Excavator

  A Full Moon Night

  A Late-Night Call

  A Turn of the Tide

  The Lie of the Room

  Home to Roost

  Birdie Sings

  What I Can

  Watch

  A Poem for Deaglan

  Pick-up Sticks

  Legs

  Prologue

  PICTURE A BOY’S ROOM. There is a bed shaped like an enormous red running shoe. The comforter is a golden map of the world. The curtains match the comforter but have faded. Time does that; fades things. The windows are deep, with cushions. A place to curl up with a comic book or a thought you need to think.

  This boy is a builder. Models hang from invisible threads, ready to dive-bomb his dreams. A Lego skyscraper sits on a low table. Action figures patrol a nearby shelf — transformers in various states of transformation.

  He is a dreamer. Above the bed is a framed picture of a house the boy drew when he was not even nine. A dream house. There is a book open on the bedside table. He might have just stepped out to get a glass of water.

  Where is he? What’s keeping him?

  The curtains flutter. It’s an April night. One window is open just a crack.

  Listen. Someone is outside, someone walking too close to the shrubbery, checking a window latch, checking a door handle. There is silence again and then, suddenly, the splintering of wood. The sound is muffled, over in a second. Above the bed a Super Star Destroyer clicks against the Millennium Falcon.

  Reach up and still the starships. Look at your fingers. They are black with dust. Run your finger over the jacket of the book. See the picture brighten under your touch? The boy hasn’t slept in this room for four years.

  No one has slept in this house for four years. There is no one at home. No one to hear a stranger break in, a thief with this whole, vast house to himself. Listen at the bedroom door. Open it. Quietly. The lights are out but there is a thin, wavering beam of light in the grand entrance hallway below.

  Something has caught his interest. It is not easy to reach, by the sound of it. He seems to be struggling. He goes, returns. Now it sounds as if he is climbing. And then there is a rumbling sound, a furious shout, a thundering crash. A tremor runs through the old place. You can feel it buzzing in the bones in your feet.

  Maybe this is how it all started — what stirred up the memory. For memories are like dust, in a way. They settle over time, almost invisible, but still there. Waiting.

  Sleepless in Camelot

  THIS IS WHAT appears to Declan Steeple out of the darkness of sleep: a river of molten glass. It seeps from the cracks and crevices of his imagination. Eerily glowing, gathering speed, the river surges toward a clifftop where it spills like rainbow-coloured syrup, plunging to the sea below. Then, suddenly, it freezes in midair. It hangs there, shimmering before his mind’s eye like ice, but not ice, because ice doesn’t have a pulse, does it?

  Something is throbbing at the heart of all that glass. It starts to expand, inflate, as though an invisible glassblower — Dec himself — is filling that glittering mass with air, shaping it, making rooms inside it.

  It is a glass house by an ocean, glowing in the setting sun. But even as he admires his handiwork, he senses trouble, knows that such beauty cannot last. And he is right. In the space of a heart-beat, it explodes.

  Dec awoke, sweating, breathing hard. It was difficult work filling a house with air. He rubbed his eyes and propped him self up. Three A.M. He struggled out from under his duvet and sat groggy and lightheaded on the edge of his bed.

  What had happened?

  There had been a noise. He looked towards the window. It was open a crack. Even though it was April and chilly, he loved to hear the peepers down in the swamp, the sound of spring coming.

  He looked across the lawn. The lights were on in his father’s workshop. His eyes strayed to the looming hill beyond the shop, to the woods made alive with wind, high up on the hill. There was just a fingernail of moon snagged in the skeletal branches of a maple.

  He found his sketchbook and pencil case on the floor beside the bed and cleared a space on his desk. The dream image of the glass house had shattered, but the idea of it was still alive inside him. Could he draw it? He squinted at the dazzling emptiness of the page until his eyes hurt. Nothing. He tried to summon back the dream. The cliff was all he got. It was still there, solid, imperturbable. He had seen it before and now he remembered where.

  There was a nightlight on in the hallway. Noiselessly, he made his way to the stairs. With an act of will he carried the splintered remnants of the wonderful glass house through this most ordinary of houses.

  Camelot: a split-level done up to look like a Tudor manor. An English country house plunked southwest of nowhere in the rough-and-tumble countryside of eastern Ontario.

  Camelot. That was
the name of the model in the House & Garden magazine, which was where Birdie found it. She had seen it there and pointed at it and said, “This one, honey.” And so his father built it for her. She wasn’t going to live up on the hill, she said. She wasn’t going to live in a drafty museum filled with memories that were not her own. She wanted a House & Garden Camelot. And Bernard Steeple wanted his Birdie to have her nest.

  Dec made his way to the bookcase in the living room. He turned on a lamp and pulled out an issue of National Geographic. He knew most of them by heart. There had been an article about Highway One, the legendary coastal road that wound its way like a serpent along the whole length of California. Here it was. And here was the very cliff he was looking for, the one in his dream.

  He stared at the picture — the sweep of mountain, the swath of orange poppies, the dun-coloured cliff, the pounding surf. Beautiful and empty. The perfect setting for a dream house.

  The contest in Architectural Record magazine was for “students only.” It didn’t specify architecture students. It didn’t specify an age. “The Shape of Things to Come” — that was the title of the challenge.

  His thoughts drifted. He laid aside the magazine and reached for another, Vol. 191, No. 6. Heiata was on the cover — the most beautiful woman in the world, with tropical flowers woven into her raven hair and a strand of black pearls around her neck. Someday he would build a house for Heiata. Being from Tahiti, she would want to live by the sea.

  He yawned. Birdie would be getting him up for the school bus in less than three hours. Birdie — her morning voice like Chewbakka — at his bedroom door. “Hit the deck, Dec.” The same tired joke, day in and day out. He hugged the open magazine to his chest and closed his eyes.

  Then Sunny started to cry.

  He heard footsteps and turned. It was the Wookie herself, Birdie, clumping down the stairs in her quilted nightgown, her arms wrapped around herself under her substantial bosom.

  She saw him and frowned.

  “What is going on in this mad house?” she said.

  “I heard something,” said Dec.

  She looked at the volume in his lap. “You heard a magazine?”

  “I got to thinking,” he said.

  She made a face, as if thinking was something that should be confined to reasonable hours if indulged in at all.

  “Don’t go asking for the day off,” she said, then ran her hands through her great mane of hair and headed into the kitchen.

  He closed the book on his dreams. As if he’d ever missed a day of school. School was how you got out of here.

  He turned off the light and followed Birdie into the kitchen. She was standing in the dark, outlined by the light from the hall. Her head drooped as she leaned against the counter. In the lighted window of the microwave, a Minnie Mouse cup went around and around.

  “Ear bothering her again?” asked Dec.

  She nodded. “Lemon and honey for Little Miss Sunshine,” she said.

  The timer dinged.

  Dec looked out the window. “Dad left the lights on.”

  Birdie shook her head, yawning as she stirred a pouch of cold remedy into the heated water. “He’s still out there,” she said.

  Dec remembered thinking that a noise had woken him. He looked again towards the shop, wondering if something had happened to his father. Then he saw him walk past a window. He was all right. Of course. Nothing much ever happened to his father.

  “Had to get the war started,” said Birdie.

  “What war is it this time?”

  She held up two fingers.

  “The Second World War?”

  She nodded.

  “All of it?”

  Birdie glanced at him wearily. “Just D-Day.” She tasted Sunny’s drink. Too hot. She poured some into the sink and topped up Minnie with cold water.

  “My ear hurts.” It was Sunny’s voice, all wobbly, drifting down from her room.

  “As if D-Day weren’t enough,” said Birdie. She joined Dec at the window. “It’s three in the morning, and your father is out there in his shop happily building some beach in Normandy. Go figure.”

  She sounded kind of proud, as if only a special kind of guy stayed up late playing with model armies.

  “D-Day,” said Dec. “That’s a long way from the Greeks taking out the Persians at Marathon.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Your old man finally joins the twentieth century. You’re always grousing about him being stuck in the past.”

  Dec was just about to remind her it was now the twenty-first century when Sunny called out again. “Mommy?”

  “Coming,” said Birdie.

  And Dec bit his lip the way he always did when he heard his sister call Birdie Mommy. Even after so long.

  Alone in the dark of the kitchen he looked towards his father’s workshop.

  “Bernard Steeple arrives in the twentieth century,” he murmured. “Alert the press.”

  Just then, as if his father had heard him, the lights in the shed went off. And in the new darkness Dec thought he saw, far up on the very top of the hill, another light. He stared. Must have been a shard of moonlight shining on a window in the big house. Where they used to live when his real mother was still around.

  The Big House

  “WAKE UP, gearbox, you’re home.”

  The voice cut through the music in Dec’s head. A horse-faced boy brayed at him, reeking of Hot Rods and vinegar chips.

  Dec stood as if in a trance at the foot of his driveway as the school bus rumbled away. Half-Handed Cloud was in his earphones. Something Ezra Harlow had downloaded for his immediate attention.

  Camelot looked even drearier than it had that morning. Fake half-timbering and fake shutters and fake diamondpaned windows. Birdie had been working up the soil in the garden but it was too early for planting. There was only a garden gnome to greet him, and from the sneer on his face, Dec could imagine what he was thinking. “Welcome home, gearbox.”

  Sunny was standing in the bay window, all five years, nine months of her. She was still in her nightie, having fussed all night. There was a cardboard box in her arms. Behind the sheer curtains her face looked ghostly in its corona of red hair. Their mother’s hair.

  Dec pushed his own hair out of his eyes, just a mangy shade of his mother’s glory.

  “It’s time for my Polly Pockets to go to the Big House,” she said, greeting him at the door. He could barely hear her over the music blaring out of his MP3: “Can’t Even Breathe on My Own Two Feet.” She held up the box. He looked at the assorted pastel-coloured toys: Fifi, Midge, Suki…all the tiny gals of Pollyville.

  “I thought you were sick,” he said.

  “Daddy says I need Air.”

  Dec shrugged off his backpack and crouched down to Sunny’s level. “So why doesn’t Daddy take you?” he said, too loudly, pitching his voice above the clamour in his ears.

  She stared at his headphones. “What are you Listening to?” she shouted, leaning close to his face. Clearing away her uncombed hair, he placed the earphones on her head. She jerked away and made a face. “Ezra music,” she said.

  He switched it off.

  “Daddy says he’s had Enough of me for One Day. He couldn’t do Nothing More.”

  “Anything.”

  “Not even Anything,” she said.

  “I can imagine,” muttered Dec. “D-Day will seem like a holiday.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Can’t you wait for Birdie to get home?”

  “It’s Friday.”

  Which meant that Birdie wouldn’t be home until ten. Dec sighed. Sunny was a force of nature. There was no way out.

  “Just let me get something to eat,” he said wearily. Her face lit up. “Go put on some clothes,” he added.

  “I’m going to put the Polly Pockets on the pink dresser. They can keep Princess Jasmine company.”

  “Lucky Princess Jasmine,” he said, as his sist
er galloped up the stairs to her room. Her interest in the old family home was new. She had been a baby when they left so she had no memories of it, good or bad. For Sunny it was a giant fun-house. The fun had long since drained out of the place for Dec.

  He heated up a slice of pizza in the microwave and found himself growing edgy at the prospect of going up there. He wasn’t sure why. When they first moved he went up all the time. Then the emptiness had got to him. Emptiness? That was rich. Steeple Hall was a monstrous time capsule, a house so big you didn’t need to throw anything away, just close the door on one room’s worth of memories and start in on another. It was his father’s monument to the Steeple clan. There were over a hundred years of history up there, but the place still felt empty to Dec. It was like the shed snakeskin you found sometimes in the woodpile, beautiful but lifeless.

  The timer dinged for his pizza, and there was Sunny. She wore a bright yellow slicker over her nightie, yellow gum-boots and an impatient frown.

  So they set off, Sunny chattering away like a spring-high stream about Midge’s flower shop and Suki’s teahouse. Dec swallowed a bite of pizza and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to part with those Polly doodles?” he asked.

  “Polly Pockets. And I’m not Parting with them. They’re just going to live at the Big House from Now On.” She talked like that, in capitals.

  They slogged through the gumbo of a low stretch of road. The big house was a game to her. Their father encouraged it. On her last birthday he had said to her, “The past is what happens when the present has no future in it anymore.” She had hugged the doll she was holding fiercely, as if he were going to snatch it from her.

  “Hurry, Deckly Speckly.”

  The hill grew steep. From County Road 10, you wouldn’t know there was a driveway there at all, the grass was so thick. More a cow path than a grand entrance. Bernard didn’t like the way to the big house to be well defined. No need to go advertising the house’s whereabouts.