by Nina Allan
He looked down at the clock approvingly, his face registering the sort of personal pride that suggested that even if he had not made the clock himself it was people like him, people with money and influence, that made such things possible, and I glimpsed for a moment the man who for twenty years had been on the directorial board of a successful multinational company.
“Who is Owen Andrews?” I said. I knew little about clocks and their makers, just as I knew little of furniture or scrimshaw or glass. I had never counted myself as an antiques expert. I was an estate agent who indulged in a little antiques trading on the side. I counted my successes as luck, and the willingness to let myself be guided by instinct rather than knowledge.
“Owen Andrews makes alchemical clocks,” Usher said. “More popularly known as time machines.”
It was my turn to laugh, a trifle uneasily. “You’re not serious?” I said. “You don’t believe in such nonsense, surely?”
I had watched several TV documentaries on the subject of the new physics but I had never taken any of it seriously. It was my wife Miranda who was interested. Miranda had been like that, fascinated by the unknown and always wanting to believe in the impossible. It was this openness to experience that had convinced her she could help her father, even when his doctors had warned her that his illness had made him unpredictable and possibly dangerous. Her faith in the possibility of miracles was one of the things I loved most about her. I wondered if Usher was trying to set me up in some way, trying to make the clock seem more valuable by spinning an elaborate yarn around it. Why he would do this when he seemed willing to more or less give away the other items I had no idea. I glanced at the clock again, its case gleaming with a bronze lustre. It was only a small thing, and quite plain, but the more I gazed at it the more I wanted to buy it. I had already made up my mind not to sell it, to keep it for myself. But if Usher named some ridiculous price then the game was over.
Usher shrugged. “I think they’re all deluded,” he said. “I happen to believe that time is like water pouring out of a tap, that once it’s been spilled there’s no calling it back again, not for love nor money nor any of these newfangled gadgets they’re dreaming up now. The man who gave me that clock offered it to me because he thought it was valuable but I accepted it because I liked it. I thought it was beautifully made.”
“But surely he can’t have believed it was a time machine? It looks like an ordinary carriage clock to me.”
Usher smiled. “What else is a clock if not a time machine?” He narrowed his eyes, locking them on mine for a moment as if challenging me to a duel, then glanced off to one side, shaking his head. “But in the way you mean, no, it’s not a time machine. From what I gather it’s one of his ‘dry’ clocks, designed to tell the time and nothing more. It’s accurate of course and rather lovely but the case is brass, not gold, and in today’s market that makes it practically worthless. If you like it that much you can have it for nothing. The deal you just did on the house has solved a lot of problems. Call it a little extra bonus on top of your fee.”
My heart leapt. I had to concentrate hard to stop myself snatching the clock right off the shelf there and then, just so I could feel its weight in my hand.
“Is the maker still alive, this Owen Andrews?” I said instead.
“I have no idea,” said Usher. “I know nothing about him other than what I’ve told you.”
I think it was in that moment that I made my decision, that I would seek out Owen Andrews and discover the truth about him. I told myself that this was because the little brass clock had been the only thing to excite my interest since my wife died. There was more to it than that though. Somewhere deep inside me I was nursing the crazy hope that Owen Andrews was a man who could turn back time.
* * *
“I don’t think you should get involved with this guy, Martin,” Dora said. “I think he’s under surveillance.” She dragged on her cigarette, leaning to one side to knock the ash into the chipped Meissen saucer she kept permanently at her elbow for this purpose. I had long since given up going on at her about her smoking. Like Samsara perfume and the fake leopard-skin coat she wore, it was simply a part of her. She was wry and canny, with the kind of piercing, analytical intelligence that had sometimes caused me to wonder why she had left her job with the Home Office. The freelance legal work she did now earned her a steady and fairly comfortable income but it was hardly a fortune and only a fraction of what she was really worth. Once in the early days of our friendship, when for a brief while I imagined there might be the possibility of romance between us, I got drunk and asked her about it.
“I can’t work for those thugs any more,” she said. “I don’t believe in doing deals with the devil.” She laughed, a brisk ‘ha,’ then changed the subject. Later that same evening I found out she was married to a chap called Ray Levine, an ex-airline pilot who now grubbed around for work shuttling government ministers to and from their various conferences and crisis summits.
“Ray’s a bit of an arsehole, I suppose,” Dora said. “But we’ve known each other since we were kids. We used to smoke rollups together behind the boys’ toilets. That’s something you can’t replace. I don’t care what he does on those trips of his, just so long as he doesn’t bring it home with him. I learned a long time ago that trust is a lot more important than sexual fidelity.”
I first met Dora when I sold her her flat, a three-room conversion in Westcombe Park occupying part of what had once been a private nursing home. It was an attractive property, with high windows, a stained-glass fanlight, and solid oak parquet flooring, but it had serious disadvantages, most crucially the access, which was via a fire escape belonging to the neighbouring property. I knew this could pose legal problems if she ever wanted to sell, and because I found myself liking her I broke all the usual rules of the business and told her so. The forthrightness of her reaction surprised me but as I came to know her better I realised it was typical of her.
“I can’t make a decision to buy something based on whether I might want to get rid of it later,” she said. “This is about a home, not a business investment. This is where I want to live.”
Then she smiled and told me she was a lawyer. She knew all about flying freehold and compromised access but she was adamant she wanted the flat, as she was adamant about a lot of things. After she moved in I took the liberty of contacting her and asking if she was interested in doing some freelance contract work. Within a year she was working two full days a week for me, clarifying the deadlocks and stalemates that occasionally threatened to upset some of our more lucrative sales. She had a genius for finding a loophole, or for finding anything, really. It was for this reason that I asked her if she could help me track down Owen Andrews. I didn’t go into any details and Dora being Dora she didn’t ask. A couple of days later she called me at home and asked me if I could come round to her place.
“I have some material to show you,” she said. “But it’s not the kind of stuff I want to bring into the office.”
She opened the door to me dressed in a pair of Ray’s old camo pants held up with elastic braces. “Andrews is alive and well and living in Shooter’s Hill,” she said. “Would you like a drink?” She poured Glenlivet and wafted Samsara, the kind of luxury items that were often difficult to find on open sale but readily available if you had the right contacts. I supposed the whisky and the perfume came via Ray. Levine himself was rarely at the flat. Dora said he spent most of his nights on airbases or in the bed of whichever woman he was currently trying to impress.
“It’s like being married to your own younger brother,” she said. “But to be honest I think I’d kill him if he was here all the time.”
I occasionally wondered what would happen if I tried to spend the night with her. The prospect was tantalising, but in the end I valued our friendship, not to mention our business relationship, too highly to risk ruining it through some misconceived blunder. Also she had liked Miranda.
She handed me my dri
nk then pushed a small stack of papers towards me across the table.
“Here,” she said. “Have a look at these.”
The documents comprised a mixture of photocopies and computer printouts, with markings and annotations everywhere in Dora’s spiky black script. There were copies of a civil service entrance exam and a standard ID card, together with a passport-sized photograph and a printout of an article from a magazine I had never heard of called Purple Cloud. The photograph showed a dark-haired, rather handsome man with a high forehead and heavy brows. It was just a head shot, and offered no clue to his stature, but his ID gave his height as 4’10”, with the note that between the ages of nine and fourteen he had undergone four major operations to try and correct a curvature of his spine. His address was at Shooter’s Hill, just a couple of miles east of where we were sitting, but with its reputation for violence and the strict imposition of the night-time curfew it might as well have been half a world away. In his civil service entrance test Andrews had scored ninety-eight percent.
“This is incredible,” I said. “How on earth did you find this?”
“There’s more,” Dora said. She pulled some papers from the stack and riffled quickly through them until she found what she wanted. “He worked for the MoD on classified projects. That means they could have wiped his whole ID if they’d wanted to, or altered it in some way – anything. What’s really strange is that he was dismissed from his post but left alone afterwards. That never happens. Normally they slam you in jail, at least until the work you’re involved in is no longer relevant. The fact that Andrews is still out there means he must still be valuable to the MoD in some way. Either that or he’s a spy. The very fact that he was working for them at all is suspicious. Owen Andrews is a dwarf – for that read non-person. It’s getting harder for people like him even to be granted a work permit.” She paused and stubbed out her cigarette. I caught the sweet reek of Marlboro tobacco. “The thing is, his bosses or ex-bosses or whatever are bound to be watching. If you so much as say hello to him they’ll be watching you, too. You don’t want to get blacklisted.”
“I want to ask him about his work, that’s all. What harm can it do?”
“On the face of it, none whatsoever. But I’ve read that article in Purple Cloud, all that stuff about time travel. What’s this about really?”
“It’s not about anything. I have a clock he made and I’m curious about it. Is that so hard to believe?”
“Well, you know what they say about curiosity killing the cat.”
We sat side by side at the table, sipping our drinks. I wanted to reassure her in some way, to at least thank her for what she had done for me, but neither of these things seemed possible. I realised we were on new ground, the unstable territory that springs into being whenever the conversation between two people begins to trespass beyond its usual limits. Politics was something that didn’t get discussed much, not even in private.
“Can I take all these papers with me?” I said in the end.
“Please do. I don’t want them. I had to use my old Home Office passwords to gain access to some of those accounts. I’d be traceable instantly, if anyone had a mind to go looking. It’s a ridiculous risk to take. God knows what I was thinking.” She ran her hands through her hair, making it stand out about her head like a stiff black halo. “I have to admit it was fun, though. Beats the shit out of verifying leasehold clauses.”
She smiled, and I knew we were back on safe ground. I knew also that the subject of Owen Andrews was closed between us, that whatever fleeting thrill she had gained from hacking into classified files, her involvement stopped here. Doubtless she had her reasons. I had no wish to know what these were, just as she had no real wish to know what had prompted my interest in Owen Andrews. I walked home the long way round, skirting the boundary of Greenwich Park, which was kept locked after sundown and was sometimes closed to the public for months at a time. The captive trees made me think of Shooter’s Hill, an outpost of an imaginary realm shrouded in a rough twilight. I wondered what Andrews was doing at that precise moment, and the strangeness of it all made my heart turn over. One thing I had noticed and not mentioned to Dora while glancing through his papers was that several of the documents gave contradictory information about his birth date. Neither was it simply a matter of a couple of days – his birth certificate made him a whole fifteen years younger than his ID card, while his medical records showed him as ten years older. I guessed that bureaucratic errors like this must happen constantly, but still, it was peculiar.
When I got home I read the article Dora had copied from Purple Cloud. It was an essay about how the previous government had allegedly made use of what the writer called ‘time-bridge technology’ to try and alter the course of the war in the Middle East. It had the smack of conspiracy theory and sensationalism I associated with the kind of magazine that specialises in UFOs and the so-called paranormal and I found myself not believing a word of it. According to the article Owen Andrews was significant as the pioneer of something called the Silver Wind, a quantum time-stabiliser that certain military scientists had subverted to their own purposes. Apparently Andrews also had connections with the German firm of Lange und Söhne, who had made watches for everyone from Adolf Hitler to Albert Einstein, as well as being pioneers in the field of atomic engineering.
I knew I had to see him, to talk to him. After reading the flimsy bit of theorising in Purple Cloud my doubts about the new physics were stronger than ever, but my fascination with Andrews himself remained undiminished. A non-person who was somehow immune to political reality. The three different birthdays. His insistence on living in a place rumoured to be populated by the outlawed and the desperate. I felt as if I had tripped over a loose paving stone, only to discover that it was in fact the secret entrance to an underground city.
It sounds insane to say it, but I had never really questioned the world I grew up in. I remembered the hung parliaments, the power shortages, the forced deportations of millions of blacks and Asians to the so-called ‘home-states’ of Nigeria, Botswana and the near-uninhabitable wastelands of the exhausted Niger Delta. I remembered the fire on board the Anubis, mostly because I happened to know one of the three thousand deportees who died in the blaze. Kwella Cousens taught Business French for a time at the college where I was studying but lost her work permit during the tax revisions and so was forced to take a place on one of the transports. I remembered these things, as generations before me might have remembered the moon landings or the Kennedy assassination, as news flashes and photographic images. They happened when I was in my late teens, busy with college work and desperate to lose my virginity.
The truth was, I remembered them as things that had happened to other people. The new employment laws affected mostly black people and immigrants. If you were white and had a UK ID card you could mostly go on with your life as if nothing had changed. I had seen what happened to people who made a fuss: the small number of students from my college who joined the demonstrations and the dock pickets, the pamphleteers who for a time had littered the streets of the major cities with their samizdat scandal sheets had all spent nights in jail and some of them had had their grants suspended. One young man who chained himself to the railings of Buckingham Palace even had his national insurance number revoked. They bundled him off to Niger with all the other deportees. I remember thinking what a fool he was, to throw away his future over something that didn’t concern him.
Up until now the biggest risk I had ever taken was to ask Miranda to marry me. As I went to bed that night I realised I was on the verge of taking actions that could affect my life in ways I could not know about until it was too late. I lay in bed, listening to the steady ticking of Owen Andrews’s clock on my bedside table and the distant phut-phutting of the wind-powered generators across the river on the Isle of Dogs, and as I drifted off to sleep it seemed to me that the clock and the generators had combined forces to form one vast machine, a silver wheel, its shafts and spokes catching
the moonlight and casting its radiance in a hundred different directions.
* * *
The bus was ancient, its wheel arches pitted with rust. The bus was also full of soldiers. Their rambunctious, raucous presence made me nervous, although I realised this was illogical, that there was nothing unusual or sinister in their behaviour, that the presence of forces personnel was entirely to be expected. Shooter’s Hill was a restricted zone. Civilians could enter, and the shops and small businesses that had serviced the area prior to its closure were allowed to keep running as usual, at least partly for the benefit of the new influx of military. But after sundown any movement into and out of the village was strictly prohibited. There was a military checkpoint, and it was said that the woods behind the old hospital were alive with snipers, that the turf battles between the military and the carjack gangs that used Oxleas Forest as a hideout had taken on the dimensions of guerrilla warfare.
Officially the place was a shooting range and assault course, like Dartmoor and Romney Marsh, but everyone knew there was more to it than that. There were rumours that the run-down hospital buildings had been turned over to one of the specialist divisions as a testing laboratory for biological weapons. I had always thought the idea was far-fetched, but as the bus pulled further up Maze Hill I began to wonder. Passing into the forest felt strange, almost like crossing the border into another country. The starkly open expanse of Blackheath Common gave way abruptly to massed ranks of oak and ash and beech, the trees growing so closely together that it was as if we had entered a tunnel. The lowest branches scraped the roof of the bus, linking their gnarled green fingers above our heads. Rough tarmac and dirt tracks branched off from the road at regular intervals, and between the trees I could make out the rectangular masses of houses and old apartment blocks. I wondered who would choose to live out here. I knew that much of the housing in the vicinity of the hospital had been demolished by order of the government.