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 â ISBN-10: 0-88899-742-6
I. Title.
PS8595.Y59T54 2006Â Â jC813'.54Â Â 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
.
â 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.)
The Queen of the Pumpkin Patch
P
ICTURE 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 â 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 â what stirred up the memory. For memories are like dust, in a way. They settle over time, almost invisible, but still there. Waiting.
T
HIS 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 â Dec himself â 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 â 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” â 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 â 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 â her morning voice like Chewbakka â 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.