The child on the roof has their hands in prayer, they face not quite to the front. A chimney cowl and pot, a brass roof, four corners, a slit so narrow it’s a wonder coins were that slim. The front of the building, five windows and a large brass door, BANK is moulded above the lintel. Yet the sides are like church windows, I imagined them stained glass, while the back is as if it were a bird cage or prison, diamond holes in a pattern, enough to curl your fingers through if you were small. All of it sits on a wooden plinth with steps from the grand entrance to the table where it is beside me this morning, moved from its normal windowsill place because lately when I’ve visited the land of parts and allies, the fairy story unfolding, I’ve seen the walls of the tall, cold house in London collapsing like this child’s toy. Untwist the child with hands in prayer and you’ll see. Turn them anticlockwise, lay them aside. Lift the cowl, take the chimney pot with it, be ready when you dislodge the roof. CRASH the clang of the walls falling would thrill and worry me and I would repeat it over and over even though to put it together again was the fiddliest of businesses, I needed six hands and I only had two. Yesterday I showed Sophie and Blake, what’s that? as I brought it from library to kitchen, and why? because this is what’s been happening in the other place. Do you remember where we left off? In the hall of the tall, cold house in London where candles circled the Silver Woman turned Dragon, and a terrible gash to its wing was a wound as if someone had taken an axe to it. We were singing. The Angel in whose arms the baby has lain put out its great hand, the Dragon suddenly small, scampered like a child’s toy, melted into the baby and they became one. Onto the shoulder of the Angel it clambered, silver wings spread, silver claws gripping, and the Angel stood, and we rose with It, and the roof dissolved in light. Rosie in her jeans astride the clack-clack Griffin, the Green Woman upon a winged horse, the Fairy Sprite fluttering easily; so many wings! I thought yesterday as I watched them rise from hallway, and the air was pierced bright and the roof came off and the walls fell CLANG in flat concordance smack upon the ground and I kept thinking, what does that remind me of? and then I remembered. This child’s toy my godmother gave me when I was small. She has a shop that is a cornucopia of treasures. It’s under siege by developers who cannot understand that they will be destroying a universe. I will write about it tomorrow.
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I once spent a very stressful couple of minutes trying to assembles this house after i accidentally destroyed it
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