by Xan Brooks
THE CLOCKS IN THIS HOUSE ALL TELL DIFFERENT TIMES
XAN BROOKS
Xan Brook’s highly anticipated debut novel is a dark social-realist fairy tale, spotlighting the shadowy underside of 1920s England: a land of broken families, fake spiritualists, and war heroes turned into monsters
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Summer 1923. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of an old army truck and is whisked away to meet the ‘funny men’ in the woods. Named after characters from The Wizard of Oz – the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, Toto and the Lion – are in fact horribly damaged war heroes.
But when these mysterious encounters in the woods come to an abrupt end, Lucy seizes upon the chance to leave her grandparent’s failing North London pub behind for stately Grantwood House. But the handsome prince she meets there might just be ugly inside and the man with fire at his fingertips will prove most dangerous of all. But, if Lucy can avoid all the hazards on the path, she may just survive into a bright new tomorrow.
Xan Brooks’ stunning debut is heartbreaking, disturbing and redemptive. The novel was inspired by the true story of Brooks’ great-aunt who was sent on nightmarish errands into Epping Forest during the interwar period.
About the author
Xan Brooks is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He was part of the founding editorial team of the Big Issue magazine and is now associate editor at the Guardian, specialising in film. He lives in Bristol.
Praise for this book
‘The assurance and skill with which Xan Brooks tells his tale in The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times makes it difficult to believe that this is a first novel. By turns funny and tragic, awful and lovely, terrifying and warming, it’s a book told with rare elegance and narrative zest. Its twisted humour and dark satire reminded me above all of Graham Greene, and that is not a comparison one makes lightly. I absolutely loved it.’ —LLOYD SHEPHERD
Meet the new faces of fiction for 2017: ‘The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times looks set to be widely read: it is a bold, ambitious, weird novel with a lot of foliage to get lost in.’ —HANNAH BECKERMANN, Observer
The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times
XAN BROOKS is a writer and broadcaster specialising in film. He was an associate editor at the Guardian and, before that, a writer and editor at the Big Issue magazine. This is his first novel.
Published by Salt Publishing Ltd
12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX
All rights reserved
Copyright © Xan Brooks, 2017
The right of Xan Brooks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.
Salt Publishing 2017
Created by Salt Publishing Ltd
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ISBN 978-1-78463-094-2 electronic
THE FOREST
1
Sunday evening, after tea, she travels out of town and through the woods to visit with the funny men. According to Nan, the trip has only just been arranged, which means there is not a moment to waste. Chop-chop, shake a leg and save your questions for later. Her grandparents are like that, they can rarely be doing with questions. Whether it’s a treat or a chore, they want everything done right away. At least Nan can be nice. Grandad is the worst. When Grandad says jump, you only ask him how high.
It’s obviously an honour, being invited to the woods. That much is plain even when nothing else is. She can tell by the painstaking way that Nan plaits her hair and by the sight of the floral-print dress from the camphor-wood chest.
“There now, you’ll suffice. I dare say I’ve seen worse.”
“You’ve seen worse every Friday night in the taproom.”
The old woman laughs shortly. “Indeed I have,” she says. “Some of those who come in, we ought to be putting straw down.”
At first Lucy had hoped she might go to the woods in a painted charabanc, like the one they took up to Frinton-on-Sea, with parents and offspring lined up on wooden benches, everyone singing and passing around sandwiches. Instead the journeys are made inside Coach’s rusting, decommissioned old Maudslay, which she quickly decides is just as good. She grows to love the retired army truck – its pitch and its rattle; its constant clanging vibrations. She can sit in the back and watch the streets scooting by, or lie full-length to observe summer clouds overhead. The truck bed contains grit, soil and straw. But if her grandmother worries about the floral-print dress getting dirty, it seems she’s much too kind to complain.
On the landing, in the dark. Hours beyond her regular bedtime. “Oh look, here she is, just when I was starting to worry. Did you behave yourself?”
“Yes thanks, Nan. They were all very nice.”
“Well then, there we are.” Nan’s head bobs in relief. “What a nice thing to happen. What a stroke of good fortune.” Behind the door at their backs, her grandfather is snoring.
The first visit is apparently deemed to have been a success because Lucy is invited again on the following Sunday – then again and again on the Sundays after that, through June and July and deep into August. After a spell she takes her inclusion for granted and clambers up eagerly to join Winifred, Edith and John. As befits her junior status, she is always the last to be gathered and the first to be dropped, but once on the road the children become equals. The girl feels happy, exalted; one of a band of unsecured bodies in the back of the truck.
The skies are clear and the air is warm. They ride out in daylight and are brought home after dark. She sees the squirt and spatter of stars, which the city keeps hidden. She can make out the Plough and Orion’s Belt, too, but the rest of the spread is a mystery to her, like hieroglyphics from the time before Christ, or the Russian alphabet with its upside-down letters. Each star is a sun and each sun, Lucy thinks, must therefore be surrounded by invisible planets in perpetual rotation. Exactly how many stars can she see from her berth in Coach’s truck? Why, surely hundreds and hundreds and then a few hundred more. Looking at the stars, she feels impossibly small.
Winifred stirs, half-asleep at her side. “What were you saying again?”
“The stars. Up there. There are too many stars.”
“What rubbish. You say silly things, Luce. It’s not us that are small, it’s the stars. I could reach out my hand and pick a thousand like daisies.”
“Do it,” says Edith. “Reach out and pick Lucy a big bunch of stars.”
Galaxies joggle and reel above their heads. They only begin to fade out when the truck rolls under the street lamps of the city.
“My mum and dad might be there on one of those stars.”
Winifred cackles. “Your old man’
s in the ground, don’t get fancy ideas. Probably right next to mine. Probably right next to Edith’s and John’s, come to that.”
“Her mum might be though,” Edith allows, sleepily.
More often than not she is home by midnight. She carries a key in her sock and lets herself in to find the public bar empty and the cigarette haze hanging and the Labrador dozing on the floor. Her grandmother has retired for the night, although she keeps half an ear open to ensure all is well. The girl brushes her teeth and climbs the stairs. She douses the landing light and gropes to locate her bed in the eaves. Sleep steals quickly upon her and it is a good sleep, deep and replenishing, the kind that only innocent children are permitted to have. All the same, these late nights take a toll. No matter how deeply she sleeps, she falls into Monday feeling utterly spent.
On her first trip to the forest, Lucy had imagined the funny men as something like a circus troupe, or a band of wild gypsies, given to dancing and tricks. But that isn’t it; they are not that way at all. What they remind her of more than anything are her cousin Jo’s dolls, which had been picked up second-hand or passed down from her mother. The dolls were delightful but each one had seen better days. You could play with them quite roughly because they’d all been broken before.
Coach heaves his truck off the main road and rides it up Turpentine Lane. Then he turns off the lane onto a lane that’s smaller still, almost a track, with a long line of grass sprouting up its middle. Finally, after a jolting, bone-shaking five minutes of this, the vehicle veers to its left and completes the journey on a narrow bridleway, its steel sides scratched by brambles, its belly scraping the uneven ground. Lucy barks her knee and bites down on her tongue. When she clings on to the side, twigs stab at her hands.
The truck lurches to a halt. The birds are all singing. They have come to rest in a wide woodland clearing, roughly the size of a football pitch, which ends abruptly against a hard line of trees. “Here we are, bang on time. Here’s my lorry-load of little helpers.” For an instant, still getting her bearings, she assumes Coach is shouting behind him to the passengers in the bed. Then she realises that he is calling out to the funny men.
The funny men are a curious bunch. Nothing could have prepared her. She wants to stare but she doesn’t mean to be rude, except that maybe staring is expected because what else can you do? The world is home to outlandish creatures. But she has never seen men as outlandish as these.
Coach steps out of the cab to help her climb down. Then he gives the girl’s shoulder a squeeze and tips her a wink so swift and conspiratorial it all but passes her by. “Tonight we’re extra blessed because we have ourselves a brand new helper. Her name’s Lucy Marsh and I can vouch for her manners. So please be sure to mind your Ps and Qs. We’ll have us no blue talk tonight.”
She turns to face them but it is all too much. They are too fabulous; she cannot hold her gaze steady. Is that a red-checked tablecloth laid out on the grass? A forest picnic has been run up in readiness. They have brought biscuits and cake and what appears to be a trifle inside a glass bowl. The girl had not reckoned on food but now she’s seen it her stomach is growling. Still staring at the trifle, she says, “Hello, pleased to meet you. My name’s Lucy Marsh. Pleased to meet you. Glad to make your acquaintance.”
“Charmed and delighted,” replies the man in the copper mask.
The funny men have each been named for Dorothy’s companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Either that or Dorothy’s companions have been named after them. When they emerge from the shade, she can study them more closely. She sees the bedraggled Scarecrow, who possesses a tanned, tangled head, and the hearty Tin Woodman with his immobile copper face. She catches sight of the handsome Cowardly Lion, who fears human contact and appears to trust only Fred. And sat bright-eyed among them is Toto the dwarf, who is not truly a dwarf but is simply missing both legs. Toto has enthroned himself in a wheeled wicker chair. He is the king of the group, the gathering’s grandstanding leader. Even Coach, it seems, is prepared to bend at the knee when the dwarf requires attention.
“Wotcha, cocks,” Toto says.
Edith isn’t shy, she has been out here before. “Is that trifle in the bowl?”
The Tin Woodman says, “It is indeed. Made specially for you.”
“I was going to eat it,” says Toto. “You’re very lucky I didn’t.”
Seen on a map, Epping Forest is not very large and quite close at hand. And yet each of these bouncing, clanging trips is like a journey back to the distant past. The truck pulls out from the kerb and trundles for a spell through the modern world of Edmonton, with its surging traffic of motorbikes and automobiles and horses and trams. These are the streets that the girl has lived on for years. They pass the twin-gabled school she will be departing soon. Over there is the park where she fell and chipped a tooth.
But with every passing mile, the world regresses, grows younger. Coach’s truck runs out of her neighbourhood and into an industrial fringe of corroded factories, railway sidings and enormous brick warehouses. This is the landscape from a future that has already been and gone.
London slides away beneath the Maudslay’s tyres. It protests its departure with a ringing percussion and is suddenly behind them: the children sit up in the bed and watch the city recede. Then here come the suburbs, which are still under construction, so that the buildings sit rude and raw on strips of freshly-laid turf. The suburbs are new but they have been designed to look old; the houses whitewashed and timbered in antique Tudor style. The suburbs annoy her. They make no sense at all.
Go faster. Coach stamps the pedal, defying the speed limit because who’s going to stop him? Out here the traffic turns lighter; the land is practically rural. At intervals Coach honks his horn and swerves to overtake a horse-and-cart, and when this occurs, the horse flinches and the farmer braces his shoulders as though anticipating a blow. The children wave merrily as the truck thunders by. But only once in all of their visits does a farmer wave back, at which point they are so astounded they don’t know how to respond. Their hands drop in unison and they gawp at him like idiots.
The people out here lead primitive lives. Coach ploughs past tumbledown cottages, Norman churches blotchy with lichen, and overgrown cemeteries filled with drunken headstones. Now faster, still faster. The engine is screaming, the day draws to an end and the towering trees come crowding in all around. Then finally, with a grind of gears and a left-turn so violent it feels more akin to a leap, they leave civilisation and enter the fantastical forest, where anything can happen.
And maybe this, beyond obedience and politeness, is the real reason she goes. Maybe this, were she ever called upon to explain her actions, would be her chief line of defence. Your honour, she would say, I went back because the forest is fantastic, which is another way of saying that anything can happen. This is why she climbs into the truck every Sunday. And this is why, as long as she lives, she will never completely regret her trips to the forest, in spite of the trouble they cause and the horrors that follow. Try as she might, she will never forget the thrill that she feels on turning off Turpentine Lane and into the trees.
The forest is ancient. It exists outside time. It sprang up when the planet was freshly cooked and still cooling. It remains, even today, a place of possibilities. Under the trees it is easy to believe that the deer might talk and that owls might fly backwards and that an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl – the kind of girl people rarely pay much attention to – could sit down on the grass and picnic among beasts. She might shake hands with a ghost or dance alongside a lion or spoon trifle into the mouth of a storybook dwarf.
Toto is as uncoordinated as a baby. His hands have a palsy. The condensed milk and tinned fruit have got all over his front and it doesn’t help that he is laughing so hard. Coach claims that if John eats any more trifle he’ll wind up looking like trifle and this has reminded Toto of a little tree up the path that is the spitting-image of Edit
h; how none of them could believe it the first time they saw it. The Tin Man says Toto wants his eyes tested, the tree looks like a tree, same as all the rest. But the dwarf is adamant. He insists that it’s Edith in profile, the resemblance is uncanny. The new girl, he adds, will vouch for him as an expert witness. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Lucy Marsh, sir.”
“Lucy Marsh, so it is. One way to settle this. Come and have a look for yourself.”
“Toto, for God’s sake, give it a rest.”
Edith rolls her eyes. “Lucy, I’ve seen it. It’s really doesn’t look a bit like me.” And now everybody appears to be at least laughing a little.
“Nothing else for it, I’m going to show you this tree.” The glass bowl has been emptied but the dwarf does not mind. He peers at the girl and his smile is lovely, like the last ray of daylight. It shows how his face would have looked before it was scarred, before anything happened. He says, “Miss Marsh, come along, our adventure together starts here.”
2
Give him half a chance and Grandad will tell his favourite story again – about the mighty old Griffin that first flourished then failed on the western side of Ermine Street. What a sight it once was and just look at it now: its cream trim all blistered and its net curtains gone yellow. Then again the whole street is failing, so there’s nobody to see it, aside from the other stragglers who are all failing too. Grandad says it’s the council’s fault: the council picked up a pen and caused all of this ruin. They should have brought in the caterpillars and put us out of our misery. Why not flatten the buildings while you’re about it? No point starting a job if you’re going to leave it half-done.