The Imaginary (11 page)

It was like walking into a cartoon after spending a day in a subtitled black and white French film, Rudger thought. The dinosaur, with its startling colour, wasn't the only oddity there.

In the middle of the library, where the bookcases gave way to tables and chairs, ‘people' were gathered. Rudger used the word ‘people' loosely as he looked at them, and left the word ‘real' out of his thoughts entirely.

He was in a room full of
imaginary
people. There were some who looked like ordinary kids, like he did, and there were others who didn't. There was a person-sized teddy bear and there was a clown and there was a man who looked like a Victorian schoolmaster, lean and pale and severe. There was a drifting patch of colour the exact shade of a summer's sky and there was a tiny gnomish fellow hiding behind another tiny gnomish fellow who was trying to hide behind the first one and there was a ragdoll slumped in a chair (which Rudger learnt later was just a ragdoll some kid had lost in the library earlier that day).

Even
the gramophone from which the music drifted was an imaginary person. It had short arms and legs sticking out of it and a pair of eyes that span round on the record, blinking each time they went under the stylus. When it saw Rudger the music crackled to a halt. It coughed politely, lifted its stylus arm up and blinked several times.

For a moment Rudger just stared at them all. He'd only ever seen one imaginary person before, and she'd tried to drag him out of the window and feed him to Mr Bunting. Now he was faced by a throng of them he felt overwhelmed.

‘You look lost,' said a teenage girl.

She was wearing dungarees. Rudger had never seen dungarees before. He was very good and didn't giggle.

‘He's just come in,' said the dinosaur, turning round with difficulty under the low ceiling. ‘He came in from the Corridor.'

‘Come over here,' said the girl, taking his elbow and walking him away from all the others. ‘Have a seat. You're probably confused. Your first time here?'

‘Yes,' said Rudger, sitting on a sofa next to a rack of children's picture books. ‘Where am I? Who are all those…um…people?'

‘We call it the Agency,' she said sitting down next to him. ‘And who are
they
?' She spread her hands to indicate the whole lot of them. ‘I guess you could say they're your family. Welcome home!'

The
girl was called Emily.

‘Do you want a cup of tea, or a hot chocolate, or something like that?' she asked.

The teddy bear pushed a trolley brimming with drinks and cakes over towards them. One of the wheels squeaked.

‘Um, hot chocolate, please,' Rudger said.

‘Here you go,' said the bear, handing him a steaming mug. ‘Cake?'

Rudger was surprised how hungry he was. He didn't normally eat much. Amanda kindly finished off whatever he left and she usually encouraged him to leave the lot. It had become a habit.

‘Can I have one of those?' he asked, pointing at a little cupcake.

The bear handed it to him, with a napkin. He picked a few strands of fur off the icing and took a bite.

‘Good, now you've got yourself a cake,' Emily said, ‘I'd best give you The Talk.'

‘The Talk?' Rudger asked, spitting crumbs.

The teddy bear trundled the squeaking trolley away as Emily wiped crumbs off the bib of her dungarees.

‘Yeah, The Talk. It's what everyone gets when they come through that door for the first time. You're frightened, you're scared, you've been forgotten, you've been Fading and then, just before you blow away on the wind, you find a magic door and next thing you know you're being stared at by Snowflake.'

‘Snowflake?'

Emily
pointed at the pink dinosaur, who was playing cards with some other imaginary friends. It was having difficulty seeing what cards it had in its hand. The tip of its tail was tapping the bookcase behind it in annoyance.

‘Of course, not everyone gets stared at by Snowflake. Depends who's around at the time. We do try to be friendly.'

‘What
is
this place?'

‘This, Rudge,' she said, shortening his name annoyingly, ‘is a place for people like us to hang out between jobs.'

‘Jobs?'

Emily took a deep breath before launching into the explanation. ‘Here's how it is,' she said. ‘Some kids have big imaginations and they dream us up. They make us and we're best chums and that's all good and proper, and then they get older and they lose interest and we get forgotten. That's when we start to Fade. Normally that's the end, your job's done, you turn to smoke and blow away on the wind. But if
we
find you before that happens, or if one of our colleagues spots you, we can get you in here, where you'll be safe.'

‘Why here?' Rudger asked.

Emily held her hands up and pointed to the shelves that surrounded them. ‘You and me, Rudge, we're imagined. Look around, this place is like an oasis: it's
made
of imagination. Course, it's not
fresh
, but it's enough to keep you going for a few weeks.'

‘Then what?'

‘Then you've gotta go to work.'

‘
Work?'

Emily stood up.

Rudger stood up too. He put the cupcake wrapper in his pocket and held his half-empty hot chocolate mug warm in his hands.

‘Come with me,' Emily said.

They walked through the maze of bookcases until they came to an open space at the front of the library. Here was the desk where the real people checked out their borrowed books during the day. In front of it was a sleeping dog. An imaginary sleeping dog, Rudger noticed. (Or a sleeping imaginary dog; he wasn't sure how the adjectives fitted.) There were a pair of glass doors that looked out onto the high street.

It was dark outside. The orange of a streetlight lit the pavement and a few people walked past under umbrellas. It was raining again.

The woman Rudger had seen pushing the trolley and shelving the books a little earlier unlocked the doors and went out, locking them behind her.

‘That's the last of the reals gone home now,' Emily said. ‘It's all ours until morning.'

On the wall at their side was a notice board, filled with the things library notice boards are usually filled with: adverts for book groups and babysitters; coffee mornings and art courses. As Rudger looked, though, something happened to them.

‘That's it,' Emily said, ‘you've just gotta relax and let your eyes see what they need to see.'

From
behind all the flyers and posters, or maybe from in front of them, photographs began to appear. It was as if they had been hidden by a mist that was now being blown away by a wind he couldn't feel. Soon the board was covered with them.

‘These are the children,' Emily said, pointing at the photos, ‘who need Friends, or who want Friends, but who don't have enough imagination to dream one up. It's a rare kid who can do that, it takes a
really
sparky one.'

‘Like Amanda?'

Emily nodded slowly.

‘It's tough when they begin to forget, Rudge,' she said, ‘but…'

‘Oh, she's not forgotten me,' Rudger interrupted. ‘It's just there was this accident. I'm going to find her and—'

‘Rudge,' Emily said, before he could say any more. ‘Slow down. Look, I'm sorry. I know it's hard, but I gotta tell it to you straight. You ain't gonna find her again. It don't work like that. I don't make the rules, but there
are
rules. This is just how it works. You get forgotten; then you pick a new one. There's no going back.'

Rudger didn't believe her, but he kept his mouth shut. He could tell he wasn't going to convince her, not there and then. Not tonight. (And besides, all the same, there was a voice flickering at the back of his mind, a little voice that said, ‘But maybe she's right.')

There was a whimpering sound from behind them. Rudger turned and saw that the old sheepdog was dreaming. It gave a little snort and its feet twitched as if it were chasing a squirrel behind its eyelids.

‘
Don't mind him,' Emily said. Her voice softened as she talked about the dog, as if remembering good times long gone. ‘He's waiting for his last job. Too old for his own good, he says. Says he's looking for something
really
special. Waits out here most of the time so as not to miss it when it turns up.'

‘When what turns up?'

‘Whatever kid it is he's looking for. I dunno. To be honest, he misses a lot of them by keeping watch while snoring, if you get my drift.'

Rudger looked at the old dog, chuckled nervously for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on and then turned back to the notice board.

Emily carried on with The Talk.

‘So you come down here in the morning,' she said, ‘and you pick a kid you like the look of, and then you go up the Corridor and that's all there is to it.'

‘That's all there is to it?'

‘Yep, that's it.'

‘How does it work?'

‘Dunno,' Emily said with a shrug. ‘It just does.' She paused before coughing and putting on an official-sounding voice, ‘So, Rudge. You've had The Talk, as best as I can do it and now you're in the Imaginary business. Welcome aboard.' She raised an imaginary glass in an empty hand. ‘Here's to loads of good jobs for years to come, eh? Let's go introduce you to the others.'

Later that evening Rudger was sitting beside a campfire in the middle of the library.

At first he'd been worried by this, fire and books not being best friends, but he saw that the fire was the sort of thing Amanda would have dreamt up. It was imagined. The library was in no danger of burning down, no books were being burnt, but still the imagined people sitting around it felt warm and looked kindly in the flickering firelight.

‘It's the right thing for the evening,' Emily had said. ‘It's what you're supposed to do. Toast a marshmallow and tell some ghost stories.'