The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  ‘Oh,’ I say, surprised. ‘Why not?’

  ‘She says she likes it here.’

  ‘What do your parents say?’

  ‘We haven’t told them yet. She asked me first.’

  ‘Would they mind, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. What about you, though? I mean, she’d be here all summer. Would you mind?’

  I know what he means. With Anna here, there will be three of us. The things Jamie and I do – the comfortable way we are together, almost knowing what the other is thinking sometimes – that will all change. It might be weird. We might not want to play together. We might argue. Anna might turn out to be bossy or boring or clingy or irritating. It could ruin the whole summer. And besides, she’s a girl.

  All of this goes through my head, but I hardly hesitate at all. ‘I think it would be good,’ I say.

  Jamie shrugs. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I mean, I don’t mind. I think she’s all right. You’re sure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I like her.’

  He looks at me, slightly curiously, as if he’s intrigued that I’m so certain. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘We can go and tell her, then. And we can ask my parents. They’ll have to phone and ask her parents, too.’

  ‘Her parents,’ I say, half to myself. Jamie has explained about how cousins work: Anna’s mother is the sister of Jamie’s mother. Anna lives up in the north, where – I remember – Jamie’s mother comes from. I have tentatively put together in my head that Anna’s mother must have stayed when Jamie’s mother left to come south. Sometimes I keep all this straight, and sometimes there seem to be too many mothers involved, and it gets confusing. I think for a moment. ‘Will they let her stay?’ I ask Jamie, a little anxiously.

  Again Jamie looks at me for a second before he replies. ‘Yeah, sure. Course they will. Come on, then.’

  Part of me feels that I ought to try to explain it to him, but I hardly understand it myself. It’s something about seeing her up there, high in the shadow of the cliff: and the expression of fulfilment as she stares at the sky at the end. The smoothness of her body in the sunlight gives me a warm feeling inside – warm enough almost to forget the climb or the horrible hesitancy of her body in free fall. It’s something to do with all this; but I can’t explain it properly even to myself, and so I say nothing to Jamie. Together, we go to find Anna, to tell her that we’ll be spending the summer together.

  I snuff the last of the candles I’ve lit in the living room, and feel my way to the bed. Lying in the darkness, staring at a ceiling which I can’t see, I can imagine I’m in my bedroom upstairs, glimpsing by moonlight the glimmers of a ceiling strewn with stars.

  At the time, it is impossible for me to understand. The way she climbs the cliff face – the eager, almost greedy way she seizes the chance to put herself on the edge of a danger that would have numbed me, frozen me to the rock – I can’t reconcile it with the calm, frail figure turning slowly in the sunlight of the beach when it’s all over. It is beyond my ability to make sense of what she does – of who she is.

  I should have known, though. I should still have known.

  Jamie is under the lemon tree, and there is a cat playing in the tinder-dry grass a little way off. The afternoon buzzes with crickets and cicadas as I creep up on him. I am ready to run – ready to shout – when something stops me. Something is wrong; something has changed; is different.

  Alone on the path, I walk slowly towards town, hoping Anna will catch me up; and I think of her searching the beach for her watch, and something makes me stop. It is as if imagining her makes something glitter in the back of my mind. I frown to myself; something here is wrong. I struggle to see what it is.

  The sounds of the shower in the bathroom come and go at the edge of my mind, and I stare around the room. Anna’s things are on her bed: old suitcases and a shoulder bag and other bits of luggage. Her clothes are there, too; jeans and a loose shirt by the pillow. Her bra. I look away.

  There is something about her suitcases which feels – strange. As if something is not right. As if something has changed; is wrong.

  And I laugh at myself, thinking all the while that my mind is playing tricks on me, distracting me from what is really bothering me.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Max? It’s Me.’

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘How are things?’

  ‘Things are fine – except we don’t have an artist.’ He laughs, but it sounds forced, and I’m sure he hears it as well as I do.

  ‘I’m sorry, Max. I’m having some – complications at this end. It may take some time to sort out.’

  ‘You might have to leave it, you know. Deal with it once the show’s over.’

  ‘Well – it’s not that easy.’ I wonder what I can say to him that will make it clearer for him. ‘There’s just – so much – to be done. I mean, I’m thinking about what you said – about what Julia asked. It’s fascinating, Max. She’s right. There are themes in the work like – like strata in rocks, and the critics have only found the first few. I hardly realized it myself. But – groups of three, I mean, that’s an obvious one, isn’t it? How come people didn’t notice?’ I stop myself, afraid I am saying too much, babbling.

  ‘Alex. Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you.’

  ‘Oh. I’m – I’m still staying up at the house. There isn’t a phone. I never really – got to the place I was supposed to be staying.’

  There is a long pause. ‘Alex. What is it that you’re doing up there?’

  I blink. ‘Well, it’s – I can’t explain now. I’m low on money. But – Max. You know the exhibition?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice is obviously patient.

  ‘The hanging order. It’s chronological, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Alex. It’s a retrospective exhibition – an overview. Of course it’s chronological.’

  ‘It’s just—’

  ‘Alex. What is it?’

  ‘The hanging order. I mean, I know it makes sense, I know it’s logical, I just can’t help thinking maybe we’re – I don’t know, looking for the logic in the wrong place. Like maybe the paintings won’t make sense like that. Don’t you ever get the feeling that there’s something – missing? Like something’s been left out, and we haven’t noticed?’

  There’s a long silence. Then, ‘When are you going to be back?’

  The display clicks down to the last few lire on the card. ‘Shit, Max, I’m out of money. I don’t know. Look, I’ll call you—’

  But he isn’t there any more.

  ‘Shit.’

  The call hasn’t gone the way I planned it. I stare at the phone for a time, running his words and mine back. I’ve made a mess of this. I start to walk back, wondering what I could have said differently, how better I could have explained things. But how could Max ever understand about Anna and Jamie and me? I was trying to communicate without a language. Even trying to tell him about the paintings – about my doubts – was no good.

  I’m bound to be finished here before the exhibition opens. Bound to be. Max will just have to hold on as best he can.

  In the living room, the scrawl of paint on the wall is framed in morning light. Sometimes it just looks like a scrawl, and sometimes it looks like something quite different: like the start of something. I hesitate to look at it square-on, and so it catches me at the periphery of my vision, in glimpses.

  Mr Dalton lets me come into the Art department whenever I want. It isn’t long before I am spending every free hour there. There are more still lives to be copied down – mushrooms and toadstools one day, with their big vari-coloured caps splayed open and cracking at the edges, gills the colour of cream and liver and wine. And another day flowers, and another, pieces of moss-encrusted bark stripped from a dead tree. Gradually I come to understand how the different materials work together: how to use the grain of the paper against a pastel or a stick of Conté, how
to soften an edge, to sponge back a wash of ink or watercolour, to use a putty rubber to draw out a highlight. The process of it all enthrals me, grips my brain tight. I love the smell of the linseed and turpentine, but also of printing ink and chalk dust and fresh watercolour paper. I learn how to draw at speed: how to catch the impression of something in a few lines put down almost casually. I feel there is a lifetime of learning to cram into these grey afternoons, with the rain coming down outside the brightly lit building.

  After the still lives there comes life drawing: an old man in a dark suit one week, a woman with long hair and a parasol, like something from a nineteenth-century French painting, the next. We each have a big portfolio in a rack with our name stencilled on it. Mine swells and thickens and is soon too full to fit in its place, and the drawings and paintings spill out of the department and into my study. Here, they fill up the blank cream-coloured walls, taking the places of those posters whose memory is still blutacked in place. But the pictures that come back here, to my room, aren’t still lives or life drawings or exercises in acrylic or oil. They are pictures of home; they are my memory made real and put up all around me.

  I can’t do it any more, of course: can’t slip away like I used to. The avalanche in my head has finished all that. The past has receded from me, gained a distance, and though with an effort of will I can force it down onto paper and hold it there, I can’t let myself fall into it the way I once did. It is as if a heavy curtain has come down between me and that time before – between me and Altesa – and I can only glimpse what happens on the other side of it by screwing my face up, squinting, straining my eyes.

  But the effort is worth it. I hold the images long enough to commit them to paper, and before long my room is a jumble of the past. The cream paint of my walls is covered and all there is now is Red Ochre and Raw Umber and Burnt Sienna for the earth and the pan-tiles, and Flake White and China White for the walls, and Cerulean Blue in the skies, and sea colours, and the colours of olive groves and lemon trees and big, dark cypresses and stone pines by the coast.

  Also in the pictures come faces – sometimes almost by accident, like that first time, and sometimes deliberately. Lena is there, making pasta and sweet rolls at the big table in the kitchen; and Anna is there top. I don’t draw Jamie, not after that first time, and I keep the picture with his face in it hidden away. I am afraid he would not understand. So Anna and Lena keep me company; but it is only Anna that the other boys ask about, when they come, intrigued, to look at the room without posters.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She your girlfriend?’

  I say, ‘No. She’s just a girl I knew.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fourteen, there. She’s sixteen now.’

  ‘Christ. I wouldn’t mind meeting her. How about it, Alex? Ask her round.’

  ‘She doesn’t live here.’

  ‘Shit. Cos she’s not bad. Not bad at all.’

  I am embarrassed, watching them watching her; it feels wrong. I want to tell them to stop looking at her, but I can’t.

  And then someone says, ‘You can really draw, can’t you?’

  And there is a little chorus of, ‘Yeah, you can, you know. These are brilliant.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  And when they’re gone again, one boy hesitates, hangs around until he’s left back from the rest.

  ‘What’s she like?’ he says. Out of the company of the group, he doesn’t sound the same; the conventional lust has been replaced by something like wistfulness.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean – what’s she like? Is she nice?’

  I think about that. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She looks nice,’ he says, and then hurriedly he goes as well, head down, as if ashamed of letting something slip.

  I stare at Anna’s face on the wall, and run through what the boys have said, and what the boy has said. In this picture she is smiling a little, and her eyes looking back at me from the paper seem to be amused at what she sees. I keep her picture in front of me when I write to her; and I console myself by staring at it in the spreading silence when she doesn’t write back.

  ‘What shall we do, then?’

  It’s agreed now. Anna’s staying for the summer. I’m pleased, and a little surprised, at how easy it’s been to arrange: Mrs Anderson calls Anna’s home, and talks for twenty minutes or so, and it’s all settled.

  ‘We could go to the beach,’ Jamie says.

  ‘Or to the rock pools,’ I remind him.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘The other way from the cove. We were going to explore that way,’ I say, remembering all the plans Jamie and I have made for the summer. ‘And we were going to build a tree house, too.’

  ‘Really?’ Her eyes light with interest. ‘Where?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ Jamie says. ‘We’re still looking. Somewhere up the valley, perhaps. People don’t go there so much. We need to find the right kind of tree.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, seriously. ‘Let’s do that, then – look for a place, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve got some toffees,’ Jamie says. ‘I’ll get them.’

  So it is then, ten minutes later, we have left the four houses that my mother has called a little colonial outpost behind us, and are walking down one of the farm tracks that Lena and I sometimes visit. There is the smell of early summer in the air. It is not yet the thick, heavy heat of August, but you can still tell that that is just a few weeks away. Hunting-wasps weave delicately in and out of the grasses growing by the roadside wall, and there is the constant, sharp scritching of crickets. Unless you concentrate you hardly notice the cicadas: the sound is a constant backdrop to everything, and our ears have long since learnt to filter them out. Once in a while, one stops suddenly as we come close to it, and the unexpected cessation of sound is like a hole opening up in the air.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Jamie asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Mummy says I can stay as long as you’ll let me.’

  ‘Bene,’ I say.

  ‘Won’t you get homesick?’ Jamie asks.

  Anna skips on a few paces and then, without turning round, says, ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  We walk further and further from the edge of the town. The trees we pass are all wrong; cypresses and green oaks and trees too small to be suitable. A half-hour passes.

  ‘Where are we anyway?’ Jamie says. ‘I don’t recognize this bit.’

  ‘Are we lost?’ Anna says. ‘I thought you knew all the valley.’

  ‘Well – not all of it,’ Jamie says. ‘A lot. Mostly down that way.’ He indicates the coast.

  ‘But there’s loads of stuff further up,’ Anna says. ‘Aren’t you allowed up there?’

  I feel at once that the question is barbed. Jamie glances at her. ‘Of course we are. We’re allowed anywhere.’

  ‘But you don’t go there.’

  ‘We do. Sometimes. We’ve been all over.’

  This isn’t true. The emptiness of the valley is sometimes a bit frightening, even if you’re with someone else, and Jamie and I tend to stick to the beach and the places we know. The network of little tracks up here is disorienting, and I have had an apprehension in the past that you could walk for days without seeing anyone, or recognizing a landmark, or finding your way home.

  But the valley is our valley, and Anna is our guest and a newcomer. None of these truths can be admitted, and both Jamie and I know this.

  Anna says, ‘Well how far have you been, then?’

  ‘I told you. All over.’ I can see Jamie becoming more and more uncomfortable.

  Anna says, ‘I bet you haven’t. Tell me one place you’ve been that’s further on than here.’

  As she’s saying this, I see something up ahead in the road that sparks an idea off the edge of another, different, afternoon. Before Jamie can answer, I say, ‘We’ve been all the way up to the end. There’s a chapel there. We’ve been all the way to it.’ I pause.
Jamie is looking at me with surprise – and, perhaps, a little admiration. I go on, more confidently, ‘A hermit used to live there, once.’

  ‘Balls,’ Anna says; and then, ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I say, nodding. ‘There’s a river in front of us there and you can walk on it all the way to the end of the valley.’ I am amazed by my sudden eloquence. I find I am half believing what I am saying.

  ‘You can’t walk on a river,’ Anna says. ‘On the banks, you mean.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s a special river. You’ll see.’

  I am right – to my huge relief. The bridge I have spotted ahead of us in the path isn’t the one Lena and I have stopped at, but my guess that the dust river under it will be the same turns out to be correct. Anna runs across the bridge, searching for a way down. Jamie and I stand looking up the valley. Jamie keeps looking at me. At last he says, ‘I didn’t know you came here.’

  I say, ‘Only before you were here. With Lena. She told me about the hermit. It was – ages ago. I’ve never actually been to the chapel,’ I confess. ‘I just saw it.’

  ‘It sounds like fun,’ Jamie says. ‘Maybe we could get to it – like you said.’

  ‘I think we could.’ I stare up the valley, but from some fold of land or stand of trees the chapel itself is hidden from view. I blink, and let my eyes go steady on what I can see.

  Lena is beside me as I focus on the tiny, distant building. I follow the track of the river up the valley, and I can see – just see – how close it comes to that little white-and-rust structure. It passes right beside it. In a moment Lena will tell me the story she’s promised, about the hermit. But I can’t stay for that; I have to let it go.

  Jamie says, ‘Were you – doing it? Just then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. I am getting better at just dipping into the places in my head without becoming stranded in them for hours. ‘It looks like it’s right up close to the river. I bet we could get to it.’

  ‘How long would it take?’

  ‘I don’t know. Quite a long time.’

  Jamie shakes his head, smiling. ‘You’re weird,’ he says.