Puppet by David Almond

Author:David Almond [David Almond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529515701
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2024-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Time moved on. Fleur cracked on. Silvester and Antonia ate sandwiches and cheese and more cakes and they drank tea and lemonade. Fleur grabbed things to quickly eat and drink but she cracked on, cracked on.

The day passed by. Silvester gazed into the garden, this strange stage. There were puppets everywhere. They dangled from branches; they lay on the grass, in the undergrowth, among the flowers, against the walls. Some looked like strange new forms of life or like beings from other worlds. Some blended with the fallen branches that they came from. Some were already falling apart, coming loose from their strings. Legs and arms had become detached. Heads had dropped. Some puppets had become sticks and fallen twigs again.

The sturdiest survived, and looked as if they could start to move, to walk. Puppet wandered among these new cousins of his. He inspected them. He lifted some up and held them as if they might walk like he did. He turned his ear to them, as if they were about to break into speech or song. He whispered his own words into their little wooden ears.

“Jak! Jam! Hell-o.”

Light started falling. Darkness was coming on. Shadows under the trees deepened. The sky reddened beyond the trees and above the garden wall.

Silvester suddenly felt tired.

“We should go soon,” he said to Antonia.

“Shall we do a show before you leave?” suggested Fleur. “We could all join in.”

“All of us?” said Silvester.

“Yes! We’ll make a show of puppets and people all together.”

Her face was shining, pale like the moon.

“Please,” she said. “Just a little one.”

How could he refuse?

“I’ll make masks for the humans!” she said.

She quickly scribbled faces onto pieces of card big enough to cover human heads. Made bands from string and card to go around the heads. She poked in eyeholes. She gave two masks to Silvester and Antonia and took one for herself.

“Put the masks on,” she ordered. “Turn into puppet people. And you, Kenneth,” she said to Puppet. “Should you have a mask too so that you can pretend to be a puppet?”

“Jam!”

She laughed. “Maybe not.”

Fleur’s mum switched on the lamps in the cottage, and shafts of light shone into the garden through the windows and the open door. A bright crescent moon rose over the roof and shone down onto the wilderness.

Silvester, Antonia and Fleur moved deeper into the garden, into the shadows beneath the trees.

“How do we begin, puppet master?” Fleur asked Silvester.

He smiled at her. “This show is yours. What story shall we do?”

Fleur pondered. “How about a simple story that we can all just make up as we go along?”

“What’s its name?” said Silvester.

She pondered some more. “Ah! It’s called The Day We Created Puppets in the Ancient Garden.”

“An excellent title!” said Silvester.

“The performance is very free-form,” Fleur added.

Silvester laughed. “Have you got a trumpet? Belinda and I would always blow a trumpet before we performed.”

Fleur frowned.

“It calls the audience,” Silvester explained. “It wakes everybody up. We used to say it woke the puppets up, too.

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