children passed by the village warily, encountering the same strange looks they had been used to with the wardrobe people. Not wanting to antagonise the washtubbers as well, they thought it best to get out of the area as quickly as possible. It seemed easy to upset these people, especially when you didn’t know what was expected of you. As Chloe pointed out, this was an unknown culture. They might well have been Marco Polos, travelling through China in a bygone century.
‘These people are probably from abroad,’ said Chloe, warming to Jordy’s theory that ‘travellers’ had been allowed to use the attic of the house below during inclement weather, ‘with a culture quite different from ours. We must have done something that was insulting to them, in some way, without realising it. That’s what’s upsetting them.’
Jordy said, ‘Never mind them, have you seen any trapdoors lately?’
‘I haven’t seen a trapdoor since we left the forest,’ replied Alex. ‘Not since you mentioned your watch was going backwards.’
It was true: the long and level boards stretched far away, both behind them and ahead, with not a trapdoor to be seen. The long lean boards were light-grey with age, like flattened days, and seemed endless. It was as if infinity had been pieced together and placed before them, to become eternity. Time and place were one, a single entity. The grey days were planks, the grey planks were days. A whole section of boards made a month. Several sections were a year. A region turned into a century. A cluster of regions became a millennium. Square supporting timbers embedded in the millennia, beams and rafters, angled buttresses held up a whole history and prehistory, time on the shoulders of place, until the millions of plank-days, plank-months, plank-years curved away into unknown futures and pasts.
‘We must come to the end of the attic soon,’ muttered Jordy. ‘Even if we’ve got a furniture warehouse below us. I mean, I’ve seen them from the motorway, these big storage depots, and they’re massive. How we managed to wander from our house into one of those I don’t know, but that’s what it’s got to be. Maybe there was an industrial estate behind the trees of our back garden? I haven’t looked properly, have you?’
The other two didn’t answer him.
He had to admit to himself that the horizons stretched far and wide on all sides, vanishing into the gloom of recessed corners and niches. Above them there was a sky full of triangulated rafters, and high, high above the rafters the occasional dirty square sun which let in the light of the outside world. Bright golden light full of golden flecks of dust. Magical really. To Jordy they looked like teleportation shafts that could transport you to a golden world, but of course when he stood in one nothing happened. They were just sunlight and dancing dust motes piercing the gloom.
He had to admit his warehouse theory was unlikely too. Were the largest warehouse in Britain below them, it was improbable that it could support such a huge attic. Yet Jordy reminded himself that, when you were in a house without furniture, an open space such as one might find in the attic of a massive storage depot, it always appeared bigger than it was.
Yet wherever he looked, there appeared to be no end to this attic: it seemed to go on for ever.
Moving out on to the wooden-plank plain, beyond the villages, Jordy, Chloe and Alex left the edges of the attic for the central desert. Here previous wanderers had placed upside-down umbrellas and parasols, open to the heavens, their spikes in the cracks between planks. These seemed to be situated under leaks from the roof, which dripped into their ‘bowls’ whenever it rained in the real world outside. Thus the children had the benefit of these oases, as they crossed the flat, wooden, arid areas of the attic, where even the spiders were scarce. Occasionally, above them, a bat flew in the darker regions, flashing across one of the dirty skylight windows. On the floor were some beetles on their backs, having fallen from a great height somewhere up in the sloping lanes of the roof.
Jordy said, ‘I wonder what this place is called?’
‘Attica,’ said Chloe. ‘I call it Attica.’
When she received no reply, she added, ‘The word “attic” comes from Attica, a region in Ancient Greece. Athens was the capital.’
‘You’re such a damn swot,’ grumbled Jordy.
‘No, I just like literature and language. I’m not as