Free Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

I’m afraid. The situation is very serious.”
    My voice squeaked, “But he’s just broken his leg!”
    “Among other things, yes.”
    I didn’t know what to say. The story I had constructed was slipping through my fingers. If I could just hold it together, everything would be fine. Arthur had broken his leg. He was unsteady on his legs. He was unstable. It had been pretty traumatic but it’s all right now. Well, let’s be honest, it’s been severely traumatic but he’s on the mend. Close call. Yeah, close fucking call.
    I might have kept the story in one piece, but then he said something so awful as he was leaving that I felt the blooddraining out of my face, felt myself falling down and down and down, like in an awful dream. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to be a
very
brave lad.”
    The worst thing was that it felt like my fault. What had been a simple broken leg that would take only a lick of plaster to fix had been worked up by me into something more serious so I could get out of school. If I had stayed there to face the music with Adam everything would have been all right. As it was, I had jumped out of the story in which I belonged into another story where I was not meant to be, in the process tampering with the natural order of things, the way it had all been meant to play out.
    Adam once told me about a science-fiction story he had read in which someone traveled back through time with strict instructions not to alter anything in the past. Without knowing it, he did something that seemed inconsequential, like fart or tread on an ant, and when he got back to his own time the earth was a nuclear wasteland or ruled by man-eating cats or something. I preferred to think about that because it was so absurd rather than the other example of thinking something into existence that had sprung into my mind: at the end of
Garden Growing
, the third of the Hayseed books, Luke dreams of a bird dying—
Sometimes Luke dreamed in color and sometimes he dreamed in black: different shades of black: dark black and light black and all the blacks of the rainbow. The crow in Luke’s hands was black
 … —and when he wakes up in the morning, to a silent and deserted house, he looks out of his window and sees the field that leads to the Darkwood black with the bodies of dead crows. Mr. Toppit has made his dream come true.
    The panicking Luke runs through the house trying to find his parents:
    Along the corridors, across the passages, up the stairs, through the rooms, Luke’s feet ran so fast that they were going faster than he was. He could scarcely keep up with them. They made no sound on the carpet and they made no sound on the bare floorboards. Doors slammed silently behind them, curtains flapped noiselessly in the silent breeze. Luke could hear himself shouting, but only at a distance: he was moving so quickly that his voice was always behind him. Where were his parents?
       Sometimes, deficient though they may be, they’re who you want and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to go and find Martha. I didn’t feel precisely the panic that the other Luke did, but I felt the grimmest kind of foreboding. Actually, I felt simply alone. I now realized that Martha’s nonappearance was another thing to be thrown into the murky pool in which “severe trauma” and “trying to get him stable” and “very serious” were swimming around hungrily like sharks searching for something to devour.
    In the corner of the room there was a small basin with a mirror next to it. I splashed cold water on my face before I realized there was no towel so I had to dry it on my sleeve. Then I unzipped my trousers and peed in the basin. What was nice was that it was exactly the right height, which made me feel a little better.
    When I reached the ground floor the lift doors opened with a metallic
ping
and I was back in the entrance foyer where I had started out. I went over to the boxed-in office in the corner and tapped