Mr Toppit Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Darkwood Ltd.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd, London.

  Other Press edition 2010

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:

  Elton, Charles.

  Mr. Toppit / Charles Elton. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-391-0 1. Families—Fiction. 2. Children’s literature—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6105.L76M78 2010

  823′.92—dc22

  2009053885

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  FOR LOTTE ELTON AND ABRAHAM ELTON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Luke

  Arthur

  Laurie

  Luke

  Laurie

  Luke

  Laurie

  Arthur and Martha

  Laurie

  Luke

  Part Two

  Luke

  Laurie

  Luke

  Rachel

  Luke

  Luke

  Laurie

  Rick

  Luke

  Part One

  Luke

  And out of the Darkwood Mr. Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.

  It had taken Mr. Toppit a very long time to arrive, and while the wait itself was not a problem, the brevity of his appearance clearly was for the small coven of dissenters who felt, frankly, shortchanged by the fact that when he did turn up, it was only in the last sentence of what turned out to be the last book of my father’s Hayseed Chronicles. But what I think is that the majority of the Hayseed faithful were secretly rather relieved not to have to face the almost certain anticlimax of a more definitive appearance by Mr. Toppit. At any rate, there has never been any shortage of people telling me in numbing detail which side of this particular fence they sit, Mr. Toppit-wise. In fact, I firmly believe that, throughout the world, wherever people gather to communicate and converse, from the Kaffeeklatschen of Vienna to the boardrooms of Wall Street to the rock churches of Ethiopia, someone somewhere will be discussing what the last sentence of the last book actually means. Personally, I have no idea.

  If I could remember a time before Hayseed, I think it would seem so golden to me that I could only presume I must have imagined it. The truth is that there is no Before. Although it was only some years after his death that my father was elected to the sainthood of children’s authors, the sales of the books had always been steady, though modest, and the name of Luke Hayseed not unknown among more progressive parents, who felt their children should not be shielded from the cruelties and uncertainties of life—the very cruelties and uncertainties that were the stock-in-trade of the Hayseed books. But what is undeniable is that I was not, at that time, accosted by complete strangers in restaurants or pinned up against walls during cocktail parties by people telling me how I had ruined their childhood or—much, much worse—how I had been an inspiration to them.

  Our mother, Martha Hayman, always maintained that anybody could have known something extraordinary was going to happen. While the efficacy of Martha’s dark powers was never in question, I doubt whether even she could have predicted that Laurie’s spontaneous decision to add the “Hayseed Half Hour” to her radio broadcasts in Modesto, California, would have been the catalyst for what subsequently happened.

  But by the time Laurie had graduated from radio to television—still talking about The Hayseed Chronicles—not only the books themselves were all over the place but also a book about the books. When Hayseed Karma, originally published by a small press in Modesto whose biggest seller to date had been a guide to the bicycle trails of Stanislaus County, had sat on the New York Times best-seller list for forty-seven weeks, it was clear that it was time for the extant members of the Hayman family to acknowledge that something extraordinary had indeed happened.

  I don’t keep a complete set—why would I? I was there at the beginning. I was the beginning—but if you trawl book shops and gift shops and computer shops and duty-free shops and mail-order catalogues, and ads in this magazine or that magazine, and special offers on the back of certain cereal packets, you will find some of the following: the original five paperbacks (of course), the boxed set of the original five paperbacks, the activity book for older readers, the hardback deluxe compendium edition with the colored (or colorized—the originals were black-and-white) illustrations, the board game (“A throw of the dice decides which entrance you take into the Darkwood”), the PlayStation Hayseed game (“Do you dare to be Mr. Toppit?”), the Royal Doulton cereal-bowl set, the eggcups, the porcelain figurines of Luke, the DayGlo rucksacks, the pencil boxes, the notepaper, the Christmas cards, the T-shirts with “My brother went to the Darkwood and all Mr. Toppit allowed him to bring back was this lousy T-shirt” emblazoned on the back (unauthorized, I suspect—I’ll get the lawyers on it), the baseball caps, and the keyrings.

  For me, it is a slow descent into merchandise hell, and whenever I find myself there, I think of Lila, for it was her drawings that had trapped me in it, those simple pen drawings she had done for love. The publishers had paid her a flat fee and, in signing whatever contract they had flashed before her, she had passed the copyright to them. It was a small price to pay to secure her position in the Hayseed Hall of Fame and, though I still find it hard to believe, she appears to feel no resentment even though so much money has been made by everyone other than her. What she feels, as she tells everyone she meets—now mostly television repairmen as she’s waiting for her second hip—is simple happiness that she could be “a small part of it all,” ein kleiner Teil des Ganzen.

  The Hayseed drawings and her life with the Hayman family are all the fuel she needs to keep her warm at night, to get her through the day. Her flat, which my sister Rachel and I called “the shrine,” does contain every piece of merchandise, jostling alongside scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs in silver frames. She should break and tear and grind into dust every single one for what the books did to her. Now I can almost forgive her for pinning me down like a fly in aspic, trapping me on the page (on the mug, on the teacup, on the pencil box) dressed in those ridiculous pantaloons, secured almost up to my armpits with the cord from Mr. Toppit’s dressing gown, the gardener’s boots on my feet and a battered straw hat on my head.

  She only added those details later—the drawings for the first book were much simpler, before my father had really created the world of the Darkwood. At the beginning, she kept me still on the chair in the kitchen with her legendary child skills: “If you do not stop fidgeting, I shall draw you with only one eye and no hair, and when you wake up in the morning that is what you shall look like.” I kept still. Her pen scratched, her eyes darted back and forth from the sketchpad to me.


  From behind me Rachel would shout, “Is it my turn next? Is it me now?”

  And Lila never let me look. When I leaned over, she cupped her hands around the paper. I only knew the next morning how she had drawn me as I stared at myself in the mirror, touching my eyes, counting my fingers.

  After the first book, she needed me less and less. She had created the template and she spun Luke Hayseed off in a direction of her own, taking him away from me (taking me away from me) and creating the likeness of a boy who would stride manfully up the path to the Darkwood. He would always be eager to return to his quest to find Mr. Toppit, to flush him out, even though—as Luke knew to his cost—Mr. Toppit could be cruel and capricious, and never really did, despite the last sentence of the book, reveal himself, and even though the Darkwood, every leaf and branch and stone of which Mr. Toppit inhabited, was a dank, terrifying place.

  You wouldn’t have caught me dead doing that.

  When you were young, or maybe not so long ago, not very far from where you live, or perhaps a little closer, Luke Hayseed lived in a big old house. The woods behind the house were called the Darkwood and Luke Hayseed thought he owned them, that they were his, that they were in his blood. If trees and leaves and brown earth could travel through veins, they did so through Luke’s. But if he thought he was the only one to have them in his blood, he was very wrong, as wrong as it was possible to be.

  Listen: there are some rules. It isn’t that I object to my childhood being ransacked, my past being vandalized, my name being stolen—not only stolen but worse: diminished, scaled down—but there should be some sense of fair play.

  First, the books should have sprung out of bedtime stories. Yes, that’s the way it ought to be done—a story created to soothe a frightened child in a thunderstorm, say, or a fantastical tale woven round a favorite toy, or a fanciful explanation of why certain things in the world are as they are. These stories, simple but full of meaning, unstructured but truthful, quite clearly hit such a nerve in the child (the crying child, the wide-eyed child, the enchanted child) that their weaver knows that children all round the world will respond in the same way.

  Or what about this? Some modest note at the beginning, some disingenuous foreword implying that, despite the writer’s natural diffidence, his children’s lusty cries for “More, please!” impelled him, reluctantly, of course, and with no great hope of success, to offer these humble scribblings to other children in the vain hope that perhaps they, too, would find some small pleasure in them.

  Second, there should be some truth in the stories, some little nugget (at least) that rings true. The fact is, Luke Hayseed, c’est moi, and even I do not know where it all comes from, all that stuff in the books. I’m not saying precisely that nothing is truthful. I’m saying I don’t understand the connections, and it is these connections, or whatever you want to call them—the links, the adapters, the conduits, the funnels, the transformers—that constitute the lie that became The Hayseed Chronicles, the lie that turned Luke into Luke.

  For instance: when we were children there was a particular lavender bush by the corner of the house. In the summer the flowers were covered with bees, circling and humming and landing. I spent hours watching them, and there came a moment when I realized something important.

  What I knew was this: they did not want to be there and they could not help themselves. What I did was this: I moved them from the bush and put them under the shade of a tree in another part of the garden. I picked them up, I held their wings together between thumb and forefinger and I laid them on my palm and carried them through the garden to put them under the particular tree I had chosen, which I knew, with unerring certainty, the kind of certainty I would kill for today, was where they wanted to be. And I was never stung.

  In the second book, Garden Green, in which Mr. Toppit’s influence begins to be felt, this is what happens:

  Luke Hayseed was not sure if night was drawing to a close or if day was drawing to an open. At any rate, he sat bolt upright in bed. He knew that Mr. Toppit had been in his room.

  Mr. Toppit had not come through the window. Luke had left the window closed—he always did, not that Mr. Toppit would ever have been so obvious as to come through the window. But he had been in the room—Luke knew that. He knew it because of the bee. On Luke’s bedside table, beside the goose-necked lamp, was a dead bee with one wing off, its body curled up, its zebra-striped fur looking dull and dusty. Now, there were often dead insects lying casually around the house without a care in the world—flies or woodlice or silverfish or earwigs or sometimes even butterflies. But this particular bee did not have the air of not having a care in the world. It had a curious preciseness. Not for this insect was there the spontaneity of lying down and dying where it felt like it. This bee had been positioned for effect.

  With Mr. Toppit nothing was ever simple, and normally there was more than one clue to what he wanted. Luke got out of bed. The room was cold, and in his pajamas he felt rather exposed, even though he knew that clothes alone were no particular protection against Mr. Toppit.

  The giveaway—not that Mr. Toppit ever precisely gave anything away—lay in the doorway and Luke found it in a second. Too easy, he was already thinking, but he could not help bending down and picking up the sprig of lavender that lay on the carpet. He brought it up to his nose, and smelled what was left of its smell, which was nothing much.

  It clearly purported to have been lying there for some time, as if it had dropped casually from a vase of old flowers that was being cleared out of his room. Except there were never flowers in his room—actually, there were never flowers in the house, even though the garden was full of them. The flowers did not seem to travel well, certainly not into the house. The garden was a different world, and too close—for Luke’s liking—to Mr. Toppit’s domain of the Darkwood.

  But Luke knew what he must do, for by this time he had begun to know what Mr. Toppit wanted from him, even though he did not always know why. He knew what the connection between the bee and the lavender was. It came to him, as he stood in his pajamas, as he stood in the doorway, as he stood knowing what danger he was in.

  Actually, this is one of the most famous moments in the books—one that defines the warm glow of collective memory, particularly when shared between strangers on long-haul flights unfortunate enough to be hijacked by terrorists. “Hayseed Kept Us Sane, Say Plane Hostage Survivors,” one headline ran, after the plane that had languished on the runway of a disused military airstrip in the desert for three days had finally been liberated. And on the news the two survivors in question, a vet from Portsmouth and a lay preacher in a Seventh-Day Adventist church, their faces shiny with relief, told the camera crew how they had coped with their ordeal.

  “Christ, I thought we were done for,” the vet whoops, his face blurring as the cameraman tries to hold focus. The Seventh-Day Adventist composes himself amid the airport pandemonium and just manages to check a little grimace at the use of “Christ,” although I imagine being stuck on a plane for three days alongside 280 other passengers in ninety-degree heat with four clogged lavatories would be enough to test the faith of any preacher, lay or otherwise.

  “When Mustapha—that’s what we called the head guy, the one with the big gun and the orange mask—took the old woman and shot her in the cockpit, we thought it was over for all of us. Everyone was screaming and Jonathan,” he nudged his new friend, so we would know who he was talking about, “Jonathan turned to me, we hadn’t talked much, nobody had talked much since … you know, and he said, ‘Do you remember Luke Hayseed and the bees?’ and it kind of broke the ice and we both laughed. It was just the way he said it.”

  Jonathan, anxious for his moment in the sun, cuts in here: “Whenever I’m tested, I think of that moment when he’s crossing the lawn with the bees in his hand”—the vet’s head bobbing up and down, “Yeah, yeah”—“and somehow things don’t seem so …” What, Jonathan, what? I need to know this, but at that very moment a stretc
her, carried by a gang of medics, crashes into the frame at some speed, almost knocking the two men over.

  You can’t hear what the interviewer says next, even though the boom is hovering at the top of the frame like a mangy cat. The vet leaps into action: “My family, my kids, see my mum and dad. Have a bath. And I’m going to get that video—show my kids.” Then Jonathan and the vet beam at each other, friends for life, linked by their shared recollection of brave Luke and the Bees.

  I watched gobsmacked: while it was true that the bee sequence in the television series was frightening—much more so than in the book—it seems to me, as the one who did the transporting, that, in perspective terms at least, a group of terrorists strutting up and down the aisle of the stranded plane brandishing a prodigious amount of firepower, which they had not hesitated to use, both on the old lady in the cockpit and on two hapless Dutchmen whose bodies had been dispatched through the emergency doors, marginally had the edge over the bees.

  But what do I know? I’m only Luke Hayseed—and it’s true that when the video of the TV series was first released, there had been a brief flurry of excitement when a national newspaper had taken up a crusading teacher’s campaign to ban any videos that contained sequences disturbing to children. Her blacklist included the Hayseed videos, at which her anger was particularly directed because her six-year-old son had apparently been stung by a bee while actually watching that episode. The absurd coincidence of this seemed to escape her, but the boy now screamed uncontrollably if he saw a television set because who knew what beast might come out of it next and attack him? “This could happen to any child,” she told an afternoon chat-show host, her voice trembling with indignation.

  I loved it. Lila, our self-appointed archivist, scanned the papers daily for all references to this extraordinary debate and Xeroxed them in quadruplicate: a copy each for Martha, Rachel, me, and one—most importantly—for what Lila called “The Big Book of Hayseed,” leatherbound and stored always in her apartment. I basked in a warm glow: at last, some justice in the world—years of expensive therapy for a generation of children weaned on the video, hands over their eyes, just a crack open between their pudgy fingers, screaming, “They’re going to sting him! They’re going to sting him!” as the buzzing reaches a crescendo on the soundtrack, if not in the very room they are sitting in.