Puppet

1
Silvester woke from his dreams. He climbed the steep stairs to his attic. He hadn’t been up here for years. An owl hooted somewhere nearby. There was nighttime traffic, not too far away. The moon shone brightly through the window to the sky.
   There were posters on the walls from ancient times. Posters that told of performances by Silvester’s Magical Puppet Theatre all around the globe.
   Silvester was the puppet master who hadn’t put on a puppet show for years, who thought he’d been forgotten by the world. But in the past few weeks, everything had begun to change.
   He sat down at his workbench, brushed away some dust, and cleared the cobwebs. He switched on the little lamp there and sat for a while, his hands in its pool of light.
   He seemed to be thinking hard, or maybe he was still dreaming.
   On the workbench, bits of puppet lay in the dust. There was a box of half-made upper legs and lower legs, a box of half-made arms. Bits of wood that had turned into nothing yet. Dark wood, pale wood, heavy wood, light wood. Half-carved hands, a few misshapen feet. Lumpy torsos, skinny torsos. A few unfinished heads dangled on strings from the ceiling. There were old tubes of paint and pots of glue. Tweezers and needles and drills and bits of sandpaper and tiny saws. Curls of wire and lengths of string. A box full of clothes.
   Just bits and pieces. Fragments.
   Silvester sighed. How wonderful to be among these things again, to be in his attic again, to be at his bench again.
   It was like coming to life again.
   Spiders spun on strings in the moonlight and woodlice crawled over the bench. Down by the skirting board, a little mouse squeaked.
   “Hello, spiders,” said Silvester. “Hello, woodlice. Hello, little mouse.” He let a spider run across his hand, and he smiled at the tiny tickling it made.
   “Hello, owl,” he said to the owl that hooted outside once more.
   Somewhere a baby started to cry and then was calmed again.
   “Night-night,” Silvester whispered. “Sweet dreams, little one.”
   He stared into the moonlight, then set to work.
   He used thin wire and tweezers to put together a leg and then another leg. One was longer than the other; one had a very wobbly knee joint. One was dark wood; one was light. He added feet: one with a black boot, one with a brown. He found a pair of arms, one of them with powerful-looking muscles. One hand had the full four fingers, the other only three. He found a skinny torso and wired the arms and legs to it. He took one of the dangling heads from its string. It was pine wood, yellowy brown. He attached it to the body.
   His hands moved swiftly.
   “Be brave,” he whispered to himself. “Be as good as you ever were.”
   He laughed at the puppet taking shape in his hands.
   “What a funny-looking thing you are!” he said.
   He sandpapered its cheeks, then waxed them. He colored its eyes green. He glued a few strands of black wool to the head for hair. Much tidier!
   He stared into its eyes.
   “Hello, Puppet,” he said.
   Inside him, memories were moving. He had made his first puppets long, long ago, when he was just a little boy, living just a few streets away. He made them from clothes pegs and ribbons, from sticks and stones, from folded paper, from buttons and thread.
   He used to give them names and make them move, and he had conversations with them. He used to make up stories where the puppets flew to the moon or battled with dragons or travelled through time.
   He used to take them to his mam and say, “Look at the thing I made, Mam!” He made them talk to her.
  “Hello, madam,” they said if they were being polite.
 “Hello, you nitwit!” if they weren’t.
   Mam would join in. She’d pretend to be delighted or mortally offended. And she’d always say, “Silvester, what a clever lad you are!”
   He smiled to imagine himself as a boy again, to hear her voice again.
   “Was it really so long ago?” he whispered to himself.
   He took a green shirt and a pair of brown trousers from the box of clothes, and he dressed the puppet. He put a little brown cap on its head.
   He held the puppet up before him. It was as tall as a young child.
   He held the puppet’s arms out wide.
   “I wonder,” he said, “what strange kind of story you might be in?”
   He moved the puppet back and forth across the bench.
   He made it march; he made it leap; he made it fly.
   He made it roar as if it were angry or wild.
   He made it sing and giggle and laugh.
   “A very serious story,” he said in a very serious voice.
   “A very silly story,” he said in a very silly voice.
   “Maybe a tale where you fall in love,” he said, “or a tale filled with perilous adventures. Or maybe you’ll fly to Mars, or get eaten by tigers, or . . .”
   He laughed and laughed to himself.
   How wonderful it was to be making a puppet.
   He looked into the puppet’s eyes again. “Hello, Puppet,” he said.
   And the puppet said, “E-O.”
   Silvester stared.
   Puppet stared back at him with green eyes that were flat and empty.
   Ah, it was just a dream. It had to be.
   “Hello,” Silvester said again.
   No answer.
   “Silly Silvester,” he said to himself.
   He laid the puppet in the dust and gently touched its cheek. He yawned. It was very late. Time to sleep.
   “Night-night,” he whispered. “See you in the morning.”
   He switched off the light and went back down the steep stairs.
   Yes, he needed to sleep.
 
2
The past weeks had been rather busy, rather strange. It started with a letter from a museum. It seemed Silvester hadn’t been forgotten after all. They wanted to make an exhibition of his work. His puppets, his costumes, and his stages would be displayed for all the world to see. And of course Silvester said yes. He’d be so proud to have his work on display forevermore. So it was all arranged. And one morning when Silvester was in his kitchen having breakfast, there came a knock at the door.
   Two men were standing there.
   “Hello, Silvester,” said one. “My name is Francis, and this is Sol. I think you’re expecting us.”
   Silvester smiled and stepped aside and welcomed them in.
   Francis and Sol had a load of boxes and bags and packing cases and labels. They hauled them inside.
   “You’re hard to find!” said Sol. “I didn’t even know this lane existed.”
   Then he stood dead still and gasped in amazement.
   “Goodness gracious me!” said Francis.
   There it all was, spread around the living room, the remnants of Silvester’s Magical Puppet Theatre. There were dozens of puppets, some of them as big as a child, some no bigger than a toddler’s hand, some as small as a finger. They were lying on the sofa and sitting on the chairs. They hung on strings from the walls. There were kings and queens and witches and wizards and ghosts and demons and wide-eyed little girls and boys. Animals and dragons and monsters and fairies.
   Scenery and costumes and curtains were laid out on the furniture and spread out across the carpet.
   “A lifetime’s work,” Silvester said.
   For a time, the men from the museum just looked at these things in wonder.
   When they set to work, they were nervous, and Silvester saw that they were worried about how he was feeling.
   “It’s all right,” he told them gently. “Do what you have to do.”
   The men relaxed, but they were careful and gentle with everything. They kept saying how beautiful it all was, how wonderfully well made.
   “I saw you,” said Sol. “I saw your show.”
   Silvester smiled. “You did?”
   “Yes. When I was a boy. You came to our school in South Shields. It was . . .” He suddenly reached out and lifted a particular puppet and laughed out loud. “And he was in it!” he exclaimed. “It was a play about the dark, dark forest!”
   “Aha!” said Silvester. “How wonderful! This is Jack, and that was one of his very best shows.”
   “It was fantastic! I remember him tiptoeing deeper and deeper into the dark!”
   “And do you remember how he ended up?” asked Silvester.
   Sol chewed his lips and closed his eyes and remembered.
   “Yes! Oh heck, the wolf got him. The wolf got you, Jack! You were eaten up by the wolf!”
   Silvester nodded. “That’s right! But he came back out again, didn’t he?”
   “Yes,” said Sol. “I was just a little boy—I was scared stiff! You came back out again, Jack, and I laughed my head off!” He held the puppet up before his eyes. “Hello again, Jack,” he said. “Remember me?”
   The puppet said nothing, of course.
   “I really believed you got eaten up!” Sol said. “I saw it happen! The wolf got you, its jaws opened . . . and gulp! Down you went.”
   He mimed being the wolf. He mimed eating up Jack.
   “How on earth did you do it?” he asked Silvester.
   Silvester laughed and shrugged. “Years of practice.”
   “It was magic,” Sol told him. “It was like the puppets were really alive!”
   Silvester smiled again. “That’s what everyone said. Magic. But it was just hard work and clever tricks.”
   He touched Jack’s wooden brow. “Everybody wanted it to be real, didn’t they, Jack?” he said softly. “That’s what made it easy to fool them.”
   “I guess that’s right,” said Sol. He started to wrap Jack in tissue paper. “Sorry, Jack,” he whispered. “Got to be done.”
   “Goodbye, my friend,” said Silvester. “Thanks for all the shivers and the laughs. See you in the museum.”
   Sol laid Jack in his box.
   He carefully wrapped more puppets. He handled them tenderly, as if each one were alive.
   “Goodbye, my friend,” whispered Silvester to each and every one. “Thank you, old pal.”
   “No kids to pass it all on to?” asked Francis.
   “Sorry?” said Silvester.
   “You’ve got no children to take over the puppet theatre?”
   “Ah, no.” Silvester shook his head. “There was just me and my Belinda, and now she’s gone.” He pointed to a photograph on the wall. “There she is,” he said.
   And there she was, his wife, looking at them, smiling at them from years ago when she was young.
 
***

Francis and Sol stayed all day.
   They put the puppets into their boxes.
   They folded costumes and slipped them into bags.
   They wrapped sheets of scenery in Bubble Wrap.
   They folded curtains and laid them into cases.
   Everything was carefully labelled.
   Much of it was worse for wear, faded, snapped, cracked.
   Francis said there were experts at the museum who would clean and restore what they could. But Silvester also heard him whisper to Sol that some of it might just have to be chucked away.
   When everything was packed up, they left Silvester on his own again.
   They said they’d be back with their van later in the week.