Attica (17 page)

Krishna hopped away, towards one of the stripy Punch and Judy tents which stood about the place, and disappeared inside.

Chloe asked, ‘Why hasn’t he got his own tent – a Bali tent?’

‘They don’t have them, you know,’ explained Punch. ‘Shadow-puppets are worked behind these white screens. I don’t think there are many puppets who have their own tents, like Judy and I. We Punch-and-Judy sets have to share with other puppets. The big fellows – the ventriloquists’ dummies – they have a hard job fitting inside one of our tall tents, but what can they do? Live in a suitcase? I think not. Space inside luggage is even more limited. Ah, here we are, home sweet home.’

Punch threw back the flap and called for Judy, telling her to ‘bring some eggs for visitors’. After calling to his wife he said to the children, ‘I’d invite you in, but there’s not room for the two of you.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Chloe, who had been having misgivings about Punch ever since she had met him. ‘We’re quite happy to wait outside.’

Chloe felt that Punch was being too nice. The attic
had made her a very suspicious person. What, she asked herself, if this was an elaborate trap? Most of the creatures in the attic had proved to be antagonistic, if not downright hostile to them. Why should puppets be any different? Surely they had been abused too at times, and held resentment towards the humans that had mistreated them? Chloe was determined to remain on her guard, just in case.

A policeman puppet came out of the tent, trailing his skirts.

‘Hello, children, eh? Jolly good. Jolly good. Judy’s coming out in a bit. She’s dusting herself off at the moment. So, where are you from?’

‘Winchester at the moment,’ replied Alex. ‘We’ve just moved there.’

‘Winchester, eh? Have we done Winchester, Punch? I’m sure we have at some time. I remember a statue of King Alfred.’

‘That’s right,’ cried Alex eagerly. ‘In the square.’

‘Yes. Yes, we’ve done Winchester all right.’ He tipped his helmet back on his head with his truncheon. ‘Was it a good audience though?’

Here it comes, thought Chloe. Now we get the blame for all the bad audiences they’ve ever had.

‘I do believe it was,’ interrupted
Punch. ‘A
very
good audience. But when did we not get a good reception from our own kind? Small children are easily pleased. We don’t have to try very hard, now, do we? Oh, I should like to think of us as brilliant actors, but in truth it’s just a bit of slapstick.’

‘Slapstick’s not
that
easy,’ replied the policeman. ‘You have to be able to convince them.’

‘Well, that’s true also.’

Chloe relaxed a little.

Alex said, ‘You said earlier,
people like us
…’

The policeman looked at Punch, who frowned.

The policeman said, ‘Puppets are people too.’

Chloe saw that the situation was about to deteriorate and she jumped in with, ‘Oh, he didn’t mean
you
. He meant
us
. I mean, my brother has always felt inferior around puppets. I mean, you’re so lively and animated. You’re so famous. We don’t often meet great celebrities like you. We’re certainly not in your class.’ She laughed. ‘We’re very ordinary.’

Punch’s expression cleared immediately.

‘Oh,
that
. You don’t want to worry about that. We like mixing with the general public, don’t we, policeman? They’re our bread and butter – or were. Where’s my darling Judy? I must go and chivvy her up. Won’t be a sec.’ He disappeared into the tent.

Chloe said to the policeman, ‘He’s a very kind Punch – are they all like that?’

‘Oh yes. Up here we can be ourselves,’ he replied, ‘but to tell you the truth, this Punch is rather special. He believes in acting the Good Samaritan whenever he gets the chance.’ He leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner and murmured, ‘This one’s very
pious
, very religious. It’s said that one of his hands is made from a piece of the True Cross.’

The wooden Good Samaritan eventually emerged again.

A buxom red-cheeked Judy in a mob cap and wearing an apron came out of the striped tent with Punch. She beamed at the children, holding the apron out in front of her by its two bottom corners. In the hollow were about thirty birds’ eggs: probably pigeons’ eggs by the size of them.

‘Well, how nice,’ she said, clearly
very pleased. ‘Alex and Chloe. What nice names. Punch said you would like some eggs? I’ve got some here …’

She sat down on the floor. The others joined her. Judy handed one egg to Alex and one to Chloe. Alex went to peel his straight away and was dismayed when it came apart in his fingers. Yolk and white dribbled to the floor. The egg was raw. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Not cooked.’

Disappointment showed on the faces of the puppets.

‘But we can soon cook them, Alex, on your little stove,’ said Chloe.

The puppets looked at each other in alarm.

‘Not with fire, I hope,’ said the policeman. ‘Fire in an attic, you know, is not a good thing.’

‘Oh, of course,’ replied Alex. ‘You’re right, I wasn’t thinking.’

He then took a handkerchief out of his pocket, took the eggs from Judy and placed them in it, tying the corners carefully.

‘We’ll eat them later,’ he said for the benefit of the puppets. ‘Raw, naturally.’

‘Now that we’ve met some – some
real
people,’ Chloe said earnestly to the puppets, ‘perhaps you can help us?’

‘Certainly, of course we can,’ replied Judy. She turned to Punch. ‘Can’t we, dear?’

‘Naturally, my love, we always try to assist our own kind.’

Chloe had to be very careful in the way she phrased her questions.

‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘that in the attic, things talk that normally
don’t
? Like, er – like masks, for instance – can talk. Alex has a mask – the one hanging on his back – which talks all the time. Yet there are other objects that stay as they are, and don’t walk or talk.’

‘Perfectly reasonable question,’ answered
Punch, with the policeman and Judy nodding at each other. ‘You see, my dear, the attic is like – how shall I put it – like a continent. It is vast. And not only that, it’s an invisible vortex – do you know that word? Good! Very bright children,’ he said in an aside to Judy and the policeman. ‘Without being able to help yourselves you are drawn into the middle, into the very centre of the maelstrom – that’s a foreign word for whirlpool which clever children like you need to know.

‘As you leave the edges and are pulled further into the middle of the attic, things get more peculiar. Anyway, the long and short of it is all sorts of inanimate objects come to life, can move and talk, even think in a way. Just as we do,’ he added quickly. ‘Others, as you say, remain
in
animate, unmoving. The attic’s not consistent you know. That’s what makes it so interesting. One day you might approach a statue and nothing happens, the next day it leaves its pedestal and runs after you. I
love
that side of the attic, the quirky, unpredictable side. Anything can happen. One thing is certain: you should stay out of the middle and away from the eaves.’

Middle? Eaves? What was left? The in-between areas?

Alex said, ‘Why, only yesterday we were right up against the eaves. It’s hard not to be near the eaves.’

‘Ah,’ interrupted Judy, ‘that’s because the roof isn’t just an up and down triangular roof. It’s
lots
of rooftops, all fitted together. If you were to go up there, outside – God forbid,’ she crossed herself, her wooden hand making hollow wooden sounds on her breast, ‘you’d be in something like a desert with sharp dunes, if you know what I mean. It goes up and down like wild waves on a stormy ocean, if that isn’t mixing my metaphors.’

‘I think it is, my dear,’ admonished her husband gently, his hooked nose bobbing up and down, ‘but you’re entitled. It’s not easy to describe our roof with just a single simile or metaphor.’

‘So keep away from the centre of the attic
and the edges?’

‘Precisely,’ replied the policeman to Alex. ‘You’d make a good witness, you know. You catch on quickly.’

‘But why are some of the creatures we’ve met so strange?’ asked Chloe. ‘I mean, like the villagers.’

‘Ah,’ explained Punch, ‘that’s because there are insiders and outsiders. The villagers are insiders, they’re
of
the attic, so to speak. They belong here. They are indigenous – I can tell by your expression you know what that means – while we are not. Of course, many of the creatures in the attic are immigrants, like us. Some of us came here by accident or design – like yourselves – others were banished here, exiled. Like us. You are people and as such will come up against a lot of hostility from things that used to be inanimate and now have life of a sort. Objects which were mistreated in the real world – or simply
felt
they were mistreated.’

‘The villagers acted very peculiarly,’ said Chloe, involuntarily copying Punch’s manner of speech. ‘Very peculiarly.’

‘That’s because they see you as phantoms. In their eyes you have a certain translucency. They can’t see
right
through you – as through something transparent, like a window – but you have – now what’s a good simile? – yes – you’re like a jellyfish to them. They think you want pictures of your ancestors. Did they give you any photo albums? Yes? There you are then. They think that’s what you’re after.’

‘Oh. That’s why they sort of jumped back in fright when they came across us? That explains it. But I’ve got another question. A very important one. You can’t tell us where we can find any watches, can you? We’re looking for a special pocket-watch that belongs to a neighbour of ours.’

‘No, I can’t, I’m afraid. You need
a map for that. There’s a map not far from here. Watches? That sounds like something a board-comber would look for. It’s my guess most of the watches in the attic have been collected at some time. You need to find the whole collection.’

‘Where?’

Punch shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, have you?’ he asked his wife and the policeman. They shook their wooden heads. ‘Maybe beyond the Great Water Tank, which is close to the centre of the attic. None of us have been over the Great Water Tank. None of us ever wanted to go there.’

Alex said, ‘What about trapdoors? We don’t seem to see any of those any more.’

Punch said, ‘There
are
trapdoors, though where they lead is anyone’s guess. You’ll find them if you look, mostly in the dark corners. But be careful if you go down them. You might find yourself in an even stranger place than the one you’re in now. Chinese boxes within boxes, so to speak. If you have to come back up again, it might not even be here, but somewhere else. And the further away you get from your original entry point, the more difficult it’s going to be to find your way back. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ replied Alex. ‘Yes. Don’t go down.’

‘It’s probably best not to,’ Judy confirmed. ‘You could find yourselves in all sorts of trouble.’

‘By the way,’ asked Punch, ‘did you go round or come over the mountain of weapons?’

Alex said, ‘Over.’

‘So you met our monster?’

‘You mean Katerfelto,’ said Alex. ‘I sorted him out all right, with – well, I sorted him.’

‘How very brave,’ murmured Judy. ‘He’s terrifying, isn’t he? It’s all those weapons collected in one place. They’ve seen death, you know.’

‘Dispensed death, my dear,’ said Punch, patting
his wife’s wooden hand with a
clunking
sound. ‘Dispensed death in anger. One weapon on its own has very little power, but so many gathered in one place … The dark spirits of gun, sword and shell seep out, mingle like gases, and become Katerfelto. An evil cocktail of terrible spirits. You can’t experience such horrors as they have seen and made – yes, they have made horror – and come away without absorbing something very dark.’

Chloe said, ‘You mentioned
board-combers
a little while ago. What are they?’

‘Oh,’ Punch laughed, wooden head dipping in mirth, ‘yes, of course, you probably haven’t seen anything of them, though they’re bound to have been around. They’re masters at camouflage, the board-combers. They melt into the environment. It’s more than a disguise – they’re chameleons, those board-combers. And they often follow newcomers around, hoping they’ll lead them to whatever it is they’re collecting. Board-combers are collectors, you see. They collect the thing that interests them most.’

‘Why board-combers?’

Judy explained. ‘Rather like beach-combers, only they search the attic strand. It’s like a fever, an obsession. Collecting sometimes can be. With some of them it’s mirrors, with others it’s masks, or toy cars, or watches. Once they’ve got too many to carry, they gather them in one place and go out on forays, searching for more. The melancholic board-comber who collected the weapons, God rest his morbid soul’ – the puppets crossed themselves, producing that drumming noise again – ‘succumbed in the end to his very own collection. I believe he was frightened to death by Katerfelto. Very tragic, but I wonder what he expected?’

‘How dreadful,’ agreed Chloe. ‘And are these board-combers native to the attic?’

‘No,’ replied Punch
gravely, ‘they’re from down below. They often carry a friend with them. An attic creature of some kind. A mouse. A bird. A very large hairy spider with long front legs.’ He shuddered a little, before continuing with, ‘You know the way pirates always have a parrot on their shoulder? Board-combers carry live creatures much in the same way, for company.’

Chloe suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all.

‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I’d like to get a little rest now. I’m exhausted. What about you, Alex?’

Alex shrugged inside his greatcoat. ‘Yeah – if you like.’ He got to his feet.

‘Where are you staying?’ asked Punch.

Chloe was still unsure about the situation and remained a little suspicious of the puppets’ intentions, so she waved vaguely at the gloaming beyond.

‘Oh – out there.’ She got to her feet. ‘Thank you for your kindness, and your explanations. We hope to see you again.’

‘We hope so too, don’t we my dear?’ said Punch, nodding at Judy.