The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  I am different from what my parents want, and it makes them sad. I am slow and bad at reading, but there are worse things than this. Now that I am slow, they are sad; but before, when I was a liar, they were angry, and that was worse.

  ‘Where have you been, Alex?’ My father’s voice is tense, clipped. ‘Your mother and I have been looking everywhere for you.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say at once.

  ‘It’s all very well being sorry, but where were you?’

  ‘With Lena,’ I say. ‘We went down the road to town and bought sausage.’ The afternoon has been bright and sunny. Lena and I sing songs on our way, ones she has taught me. When Lena and I are together, we talk differently from the way we talk with my parents, and because I have been told, I am aware of the difference between Italian and English. Lena and I talk in Italian, and our songs are Italian, and the people of the town and the children who go to the school there all talk the same way. My father can talk like this, too, but his voice sounds funny – strange – when he does, as though he can’t get the sound quite right. My mother is even worse. When my parents and I are alone, we talk the other way – the English way – which they prefer. It’s a part of the way my life works which I sometimes find puzzling. It’s to do with being foreign.

  In the piglet shop – which Lena calls il macellàio to anyone else, but which between us we call the piglet shop, because of the three stuffed piglets which sit outside it in the sun, dark and bristly and wearing glasses – we buy a string of sausage and a whole ham. The ham will hang in the corner of the kitchen for a week, growing smaller and smaller as Lena shaves pieces off it. It is a good afternoon – one of my favourites.

  I look at my parents, and I can see the displeasure grow tighter on their faces.

  ‘Alex, you know this is Lena’s day off,’ my mother says. ‘Tell the truth.’

  The words of Lena’s song are still sounding in my mind, and my mother’s words – English words – feel surprising and confusing, as if they’ve been dropped into the middle of a place they don’t belong. I fumble around in my head for the right thing to say, but I can’t.

  ‘Alex,’ my father says, a sharp warning note in the word.

  ‘With Lena,’ I blurt out, knowing it is the wrong thing to say, but not knowing how else to fill the silence. My father, who has been standing rigidly by the mantelpiece of the living room, suddenly strides towards me. His movements are jerky, like a clockwork toy whose mechanism has been wound too tight.

  ‘Right,’ he says, in that same harsh voice. ‘You’ll see what comes of lying, my boy.’

  ‘John,’ my mother says faintly, but she does not get up from her chair.

  It happens a few more times, and each time I see the disappointment in their faces before the storm of anger actually breaks. After one row, my mother and I are alone. My father always seems upset afterwards, and disappears, as if he’s feeling ill.

  My mother says, ‘Why do you do it, Alex? Why do you lie to us?’ She sounds very sad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say miserably. ‘I don’t mean to. I don’t know.’

  It is late, and I have been put to bed, but I creep down from my room to the kitchen for a glass of milk. I am allowed milk after I’ve done my teeth. In the passage at the foot of the stairs, I hear my parents’ voices, quiet, from the living room. They are talking about me.

  ‘I’m worried about him, John,’ my mother is saying, and I hear my father grunt a little in reply. There is the smell of my father’s pipe in the air. She goes on, ‘I’ve been watching him. Have you noticed how he sits by himself? Sometimes for hours at a time, just sitting and staring into space. It’s not normal.’

  ‘Maybe it’s his age,’ my father says. He sounds bored.

  ‘Well – maybe. But other children don’t do that, do they? They’re all running about and playing games and – doing things. Alex just sits and stares.’

  ‘That’s not so hard to understand, though, is it? They’re Italian and he’s English. He’ll settle in, given time.’

  ‘But he’s had time,’ my mother says patiently. ‘He’s had three years.’ There is a pause. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ my father says, and I hear the faint clink as he lays his pipe down in the ashtray.

  ‘These stories he tells.’

  ‘You mean when he lies,’ my father says, a little brutally.

  ‘Yes. Well – on Sunday. You remember?’

  My father grunts again. I stand in the passage, my body frozen against the wall there as I listen.

  ‘He said that he’d been drawing a picture of the garden, and you asked to see it, and then – well, you remember.’

  ‘He didn’t have it, because he hadn’t been drawing at all.’

  ‘Well,’ my mother says, rather slowly, ‘it came to me afterwards that I saw him drawing something last week. He had his colouring pencils out and some paper Lena had given him, and he was sitting here – by the window – looking out. At the garden. And then later – Tuesday, maybe – I found it in the kitchen. It was just a scrawl – you know how children’s pictures are – and he’d obviously forgotten all about it, so I threw it away. I think Lena sometimes pins them up for him on the walls, but she gets rid of them after a while.’

  She says this last part as if she’s guilty about something. In the hall, I shake my head to myself; Lena doesn’t get rid of my drawings. She keeps them in my special drawer in the kitchen. I can look at them there any time I want.

  ‘What are you getting at?’ my father asks.

  ‘It was just scribble,’ my mother says, ‘but I suppose it could have been a picture of the garden, like he said. So maybe he just got muddled.’

  ‘How can you get muddled between “this afternoon” and “last week”?’ my father demands. ‘That’s absurd.’ My father likes this word. People talking on the radio are sometimes absurd. So are the political views of the left in the newspapers.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not absurd for Alex,’ my mother says. There is another pause, a longer one this time.

  She goes on, ‘You know what he’s like. The silences, staring at nothing. And learning to talk so late, too. Maybe he doesn’t lie – not deliberately. Maybe he doesn’t remember things properly; like when, exactly, he did something.’

  ‘He is sometimes a little – slow, I grant you,’ my father says, thoughtfully. ‘But he’s a sound enough boy. You make him sound as though …’

  His voice tails off. I press my hands against the plaster of the wall and wait.

  Eventually my father says, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe he doesn’t mean it. But he has to learn, doesn’t he? He won’t get any better if he doesn’t exercise what he’s got.’ There is another muted clink as he takes his pipe up again.

  Time passes, and there are changes in our house. My parents are trying to stimulate my mind. I know this because I hear my mother tell Lena one morning. Lena promises to try to stimulate my mind as well, but though I keep watching for it, she never seems to do anything different from the way she always does.

  My parents do, though. They set me little puzzles, ask me questions, take more of an interest in me than they have before. It is difficult and awkward and it makes us all sad. My father takes it upon himself to teach me to read, because I am nearly six now and should know. Our stories happen almost every morning.

  I am gradually realizing something, though: I have begun to understand how to talk to adults. When my father asks me ‘Where have you been?’ now, I say, ‘Just around,’ and he tells me off for playing out of sight of the house and not coming in when he calls. But there are no more beatings for not telling the truth.

  In the end I stop being a liar. Now I am just rather slow, dreamy, a bit of a loner. When my mother asks me what I’ve done all day and I say ‘Nothing,’ she ruffles my hair with her hand and says ‘Oh, Alex,’ to herself in a soft, sad way – but this is better than before.

  * * *

  A part of me rages at this – at th
e complete lack of understanding, the expanse of ground between us that we never quite manage to cover. It is a problem of world views. In my parents’ world, you draw a picture once and once only. What happens last week is locked away somehow and can never come back. What you do each day is the same as someone watching you would say you did. I struggle through my childhood with none of these things holding true for me, and – not realizing – my parents drive me deeper into my own confusion. They stop me being a liar. They try to stimulate my mind, crowding it with even more whirling complexities. And with what seems, later, a painful irony, they tell me about rosemary and remembrance, so that on the day my mother is planting what will become huge bushes of rosemary, I sit inside with my father, clutching a sprig of it in my hand: to help me remember.

  They never understand. But for years, nobody does – except Jamie, of course. Jamie tells me to keep the strangeness inside me a secret. Jamie orchestrates the miracle when I am six and a half. Jamie, who calls me ‘Mad Alex’, but who loves me more than anyone else. Jamie—

  But it’s not him; and she turns, and I see her clearly – the kitten still playing in the dry grass – and her face—

  Frozen in the doorway – not seeing for a long moment as our eyes accept the darkness – half-light – and the man she’s holding in her arms—

  Jamie – Anna – the hermit – all of them, all my childhood—

  The rain has stopped. There is weak sunlight coming through the leaves – evening sunlight. I have no idea how long I have been standing here, in the driveway, staring at the house, seeing nothing but fragments of nothing: my mother planting rosemary and lavender.

  It overwhelmed me in an instant. Something as intangible as the smell of the garden in the rain has swept me up with itself. For however long I have stood here, it has been as it always was back then, in my childhood: when I could spend an afternoon walking into town with Lena to buy sausage whenever I wanted, always the same, always as bright and real, no matter when or where I was.

  But nothing like this has happened to me for – well, for nearly forty years. I had thought it had finished for ever. I had thought there was a distance between me and the past, the same as there is for anyone else.

  My shoulder is stiff and painful where the strap of my suitcase is cutting into it, an old scar there burning dully. I take the thing off, carrying it awkwardly in my other hand. My neck is stiff, too; the cold, and the rain, seem to have set the tendons in place. I must have been standing absolutely motionless.

  ‘Mad Alex,’ I mutter to myself, and the words come out in a croak.

  I stand for a time, and it feels like I’m working up courage. Then, shuffling a little to get the sensation back into my legs, I am able to go on.

  The lawn at the back of the house is matted and patchy. I glimpse a movement in the corner of the garden and, glancing with a start, see a slim grey cat jump up onto the wall, run along for a little way, and then jump down out of sight on the other side. I wonder which of us has been more startled by the other.

  The little verandah which my mother insisted on having built is still standing, though the corners of it are thick with fallen leaves. At the far end, the little pot-bellied stove still squats comfortably. I go up to the French windows and, cupping my hands around my face, peer inside.

  What happens next isn’t intentional. It just happens: like everything that has brought me back to this place, it just happens. It’s late and I should be getting back to find the guest house where I have a room – a little soggiorno in a side-street of the town – but now I think to myself that I will go inside, maybe look round, maybe change into dry clothes from my suitcase before the walk back. These are the only thoughts in my head as I unlock the door. It feels like such a simple thing to do.

  I step inside, and the full realization strikes me. It is a physical sensation – a kind of vertigo – the moment I am in the house, and I have to struggle to overcome it. I feel for a second as though I could become lost, adrift in a flat sea of things not really here – becalmed, stranded. I have to battle it down. When at last I can look around me almost calmly, I tell myself it is just a reflex, like the sense of panic that gripped me from nowhere on the road; just the ghosts of things long gone. But then I think of what has happened in the garden—

  No. It’s a reflex, that’s all. Seeing this room, this house, must have triggered some spasm of memory from long ago, and given me back for a moment something lost long ago, in childhood. It won’t happen again. I won’t let it. I have only a short time here, and so much to do that has nothing to do with my life back then: the pictures, the exhibition, things that are part of my adult life – my present. These little flashes of the past are distractions I will have to do without.

  I tell myself I should leave, get to the boarding house, get some distance. I really try to do it – to walk back out as easily as I walked in. But I don’t seem to be able to. The house draws me in. I can almost feel them – my parents and Lena, the hermit, Jamie, Anna – all of them here in this empty house, as if they have been waiting for me. As if the blank, implacable stare of the dandelion clock has caught me in its gaze and frozen me to the bare boards. After a while, I realize that there is nothing I can do.

  Chapter Two

  I go into Altesa early the next morning and call Max. The sky has cleared from the rainstorm, but the valley is still steeped in moisture that the sun hasn’t yet parched away. Down beyond the clustered houses, wave-crests dance brightly in the shallow bay, but further out, the deeper waters of the Mediterranean glower green and brown, still sullen from the force of the wind and rain.

  ‘It’s Alex,’ I say.

  ‘Alex. How’s Italy?’ His voice sounds very far away; a bad connection, perhaps.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘And the house and so on? Everything sorted out all right?’

  ‘Well—’ I say. ‘Not yet. I mean, there’s—’

  ‘Is it legal stuff?’ he breaks in. ‘You don’t need to worry about that kind of thing. You’ve seen the attorney there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I got the key from him yesterday. I was going to call in again on my way back. But it’s not that. It’s – the place is really run down, Max.’ I grope for a way to explain it to him. ‘I mean, it’s a terrible mess. I don’t think anyone would touch it the way it is at the moment.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yes. I see. Are there structural problems?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, the verandah – the one my mother had – well, that’s all rotted at one end. And the chimney’s broken loose. From the stove. I think a storm did that. I’ve hardly had a proper look – I’m going to do that today. There are bound to be other things as well. I mean, there’s a window broken in the room where I slept, and the garden’s – the garden’s awful. It needs work doing on it, that’s all. It’s mostly small things.’

  ‘You slept there?’ he says, sounding incredulous.

  ‘Yes, of course. It was too late by the time I’d – when I’d finished looking round.’

  ‘Well, at least it doesn’t sound like it’s falling down,’ he says cautiously. ‘You’d expect a little work to be necessary after – how long has it been?’

  ‘Eight years,’ I say.

  ‘Well, quite.’ There’s a pause. Then he says, ‘Oh, listen, Alex. There’s something I meant to say to you before you left. You know Julia Connell?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  ‘She’s got this idea for the catalogue; a kind of overview of your work in conversation with the artist. She wants to meet up and talk to you about some of the paintings – hang on – I have it right here—’

  ‘Max?’ I say. ‘Max, can you hear me?’

  There’s a moment’s pause, and then, ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Have you got a bad line?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You just sound – very distant.’

  ‘Oh. I’ll try to speak up. Yes – it says here that she wants to cover themes in you
r work, and she’s listed a few. She wanted me to ask you if you can think these over and come up with some ideas – you know, why they feature, what significance they have for you, symbolism, all that. Then she’ll talk to you and turn it all into some kind of stream-of-consciousness thing. I think – yes, she says she wants to run it along the bottom third of some of the catalogue pages, with the pictures and the notes on them above. Can you visualize that? Alex?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It sounds fine.’

  ‘OK. There are a few things on this list, but the main ones – do you have a pen?’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ I say.

  ‘All right. First – intersections of form and surface. That’s a principal element, apparently. She also writes: transgressions of boundaries; crossing edges; intrusions of one form into another. Is this making sense to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, slowly. ‘Yes, I know what she means.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Then we’ve got group-of-three motifs: groupings of forms in arrangements of three; similar forms repeated three times, ungrouped but within the same work; trilaterally symmetrical forms or forms divided into three.’ He pauses. ‘Are you sure you can remember all this?’

  ‘You have to concentrate, Alex,’ my father is saying. ‘How can you remember things if you don’t concentrate?’

  ‘I try,’ I say.

  ‘Well, try trying a bit harder.’

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ I say again.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter if you don’t. I can give you a copy on Thursday. Did you know there were trilaterally symmetrical forms in your paintings?’ I can tell he’s joking.