The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  ‘It’s the organ!’ I shout, delighted one second by my sudden understanding, and then cowed the next when my voice shudders and echoes through the building. Much more quietly, I add, ‘That’s where the organ went. That’s where it is in town, in Father Antonio’s church.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Anna says. ‘Yeah, I think you’re right.’

  The window is casting big blurry panels of colour onto the wall up here. As Anna and Jamie walk slowly along the gallery their faces are caught and lit and changed: Jamie a deep blue like the blue of the sea on a still day, Anna blazing gold like fire. The blue seems to pool up in Jamie’s eyes and in the shadow of his mouth, which is slightly open as he stares around him. Anna’s hair, as she turns away from me, is rimmed with gold like a halo. Dust, disturbed by our feet, shifts and eddies around her, catching the light, glittering like stars.

  Then she passes out of the light. ‘There’s another door here,’ she calls from the far end of the balcony.

  ‘Where?’

  Jamie and I hurry along. The door Anna has found is another small, recessed one, like the one that brought us up here to begin with.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Jamie says.

  Anna pushes the door open, and there is a rush of light and noise. Anna jumps and gives a little shriek; Jamie and I start with fright and surprise. Then suddenly, Anna is laughing, holding her hand to her mouth as if guilty about something.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’ Jamie says.

  ‘Sorry,’ Anna says, through the laughter. ‘God. Sorry.’

  She pushes the door fully wide and light – daylight – spills through. We troop through into the little room that is revealed. There is at once more of the heat of the valley in here; I can feel it pouring down onto me in languid waves. The room is small, half the size of my bedroom back home. The light and heat are coming in from open arches high above us. There is a wooden platform up there, too, and a little set of stairs – hardly more than a ladder, really – leading up to it. The floor is wooden boards, and the part not sheltered from above by the platform is scattered with bird shit and feathers and, in one or two places, fragments of eggshell. A few feathers drift lazily in the air as we stand staring, and I suddenly understand what the rush of noise that so startled us must have been.

  ‘You know what this is?’ Jamie says.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘It’s the belltower. Look.’ In the middle of the little room hangs a thick, heavy-looking rope.

  ‘Accidenti!’ Anna exclaims, delighted. She grabs the rope and tugs down on it. Jamie clutches her arm.

  ‘No! Stop it. Someone’ll hear.’ There’s no noise, but a drift of dust and more feathers sifts down onto us from somewhere above. Jamie says, ‘We’d get into trouble. Really.’

  Reluctantly, Anna nods. ‘Yeah.’

  I say, ‘Is the bell up there?’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ Anna says.

  ‘I hope it’s safe,’ Jamie says, looking uncertainly at the wooden steps.

  ‘Of course it is.’ Again, it is Anna who leads the way, and we file cautiously up the stairway to the little wooden platform.

  ‘This is great!’

  I stand, amazed, looking round. The bell – huge and dark – is hung in the middle of the tower here, the rope leading off from a long wooden arm. But it isn’t the bell that grabs us deep in our stomachs: it is what we can see from the four arches that open out onto the valley. Enthralled, we huddle in close to fit ourselves at one of the apertures.

  ‘We’re really high up,’ Jamie says, with wonder in his voice.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  The whole of the valley is spread out below us, from the patchwork of fields and farm tracks up here near the chapel right down to the cluster of buildings that is Altesa. The sea twinkles and shimmers in the afternoon light, and I can see boats out from the shore. A string of birds turns in the sky away to one side of us, and finally settles in a stand of trees there; I wonder if they are the same birds we have frightened off from their roost here. We are entranced, seeing this place that we know so well in a way we have never seen it before.

  Jamie says, ‘Alex – is that our houses?’

  He points to the side of the valley, just outside the limits of the town.

  Anna says, ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘There’s the wall. And you can see the trees. And Signora Bartolomeo Cassi’s laundry is out.’

  ‘This is brilliant,’ Jamie says. ‘You can see everything from here.’

  ‘We can spy on people.’ A wonderful idea comes to me. ‘You could bring your telescope!’

  Jamie’s eyes go wide. ‘Yeah.’

  Anna says, ‘Better than a tree house.’

  I haven’t thought of that. I say, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jamie says.

  ‘Nobody else knows about this?’ Anna asks.

  ‘Well – lots of people know about it,’ Jamie says. ‘But no-one comes here. I mean, you saw how it was all locked up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Anna says. ‘Nobody’s been here for years and years, I bet. Just birds.’

  ‘And us,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah.’

  We stare down the valley at the little white-and-ochre buildings and the curve of the bay and the openness of the sea.

  ‘We should come again tomorrow,’ I say.

  This seems to remind Jamie of something. ‘We ought to be getting back,’ he says. ‘Really. It’s late.’

  He’s right; the sun is low in the sky over the water. Far away, down in the town, comes the faint sound of a bell ringing.

  ‘But we’ll come back?’ Anna says, not moving.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Now we know where it is.’

  She grins a little. ‘But you guys come here all the time,’ she says.

  ‘Well—’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s OK. I was only teasing. You’re right, we’d better go.’

  Still, she waits a moment longer, staring down the valley, arms resting on the hot tile that forms the sill of the arch. Then she seems satisfied, and we climb down the ladder, and go across to the little door, along the balcony with its great panels of coloured light still stretched on the wall, and make our way carefully down into the dense darkness of the chapel. We stumble a little in the gloom, and I hear Anna giggle as she trips and grabs Jamie for support. I steal one last look at the figure of Christ where he is leant against the wall, and then we are out into the sunlight. After the cool of the air in the chapel, and the still, silent darkness, the valley feels like an oven – and full of sound.

  Jamie makes a decent attempt at putting the lock back the way it was. Anna says, ‘There’s no need. No-one ever comes here.’ Jamie just shrugs.

  As we are leaving the little churchyard, heading back the way we came towards the uneven line of the fence, Anna stops.

  ‘Look.’

  We follow where she is pointing. On the end wall of the chapel, high up, there is a clockface – a dark colour which I think might be the same metal as the lion’s head in the square. We can make out the old-fashioned Roman numerals embossed around its edge.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Jamie says. ‘It hasn’t got any hands.’

  ‘Maybe they took them off when they shut the place up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be anyone to wind it, would there? Maybe they thought it would look strange if it only showed one time.’

  ‘It looks stranger like it is,’ Jamie says. I don’t say anything, but I agree with him: there is something spooky about the way the clock looks. It makes me want to shiver, even with the hot afternoon sun on my face.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, and we leave the chapel with its fallen Christ and blank clockface behind us.

  On the walk back down the empty river, I am pleased to see that the footsteps we made in the dust on our way up are still there: crisp little indentations patterned with the treads of our shoes. Jamie is telling stories and jokes and I am only half listening, bec
ause I’ve heard most of them before. At the back of my mind is a vague disappointment that the interior of the chapel hadn’t been anything like how I’d imagined it with Lena; there have been no stalactites or phosphorescent pools of water, no piles of bones or animal skins. At the same time, though, I am relieved. The reality of the chapel hasn’t been as exciting as my fantasy, but it hasn’t been as frightening either.

  ‘Hey, Alex,’ Jamie says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want to hear a joke?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you call a clock without hands?’ he asks.

  ‘What did you say?’ Anna says, and after a moment I realize Jamie has asked the question in English.

  ‘Tell it in Italian,’ I say. ‘So Anna can hear.’

  He frowns. ‘It doesn’t work in Italian,’ he says. ‘I tried. Listen. What do you call a clock with no hands?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A dandelion clock.’ He grins.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘You know dandelion clocks, right?’ he says, reverting to Italian.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You know dandelion seeds?’

  I nod.

  ‘Well, they’re called clocks in English.’

  ‘Why?’ Anna asks.

  ‘You blow them to find out the time,’ Jamie says. ‘You have to see how many times you blow it before all the seeds are gone, and the number of times you blow is the hours o’clock it is.’

  Anna and I look at him, puzzled.

  ‘Don’t you know that?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say again.

  ‘Does it work?’ Anna says.

  ‘Sometimes. Usually,’ Jamie says. ‘If we find one, I’ll show you.’

  We keep a lookout for the next hundred yards, but it is the wrong time of year, and there aren’t any seed-heads like the kind we need. After a while, I say, ‘That’s a weird joke.’

  ‘No it’s not. You just have to know what a dandelion clock is, that’s all.’

  ‘Dandelion clocks and chapel clocks,’ I say to myself. ‘Clocks without hands.’

  ‘That’s why I thought of it,’ Jamie says.

  Later that night, when I’ve done my teeth and it’s dark outside, I am sitting reading in bed when I catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. Going to the window, I can make out by the dim light of the night sky the outline of Jamie’s house. Suddenly, a little point of green light winks on and off in one of the windows. I am startled for a moment, until I remember Jamie’s torch with the different colours. A second later, the light winks again, red this time. I grin and wave, but can’t tell if they can see me from that far away. Then an inspiration strikes, and I run to the doorway and flick the room lights on and off and on and off. Dashing back to the window, I can see the torch – green again – flickering on and off in response. Then it stops. I grin again, feeling warm inside that they’ve remembered me. For a moment I feel a pang of sadness that I am alone in my room while Jamie and Anna are in rooms right across from one another; they will probably stay up playing and talking and reading comics for as long as they want. But at least they’ve thought of me.

  I curl up in bed with the smile still on my face, and fall asleep wondering what the three of us will do tomorrow.

  There are so many possibilities. Jamie and I could have gone looking for trees for tree houses, and rock pools, and never seen the church. Anna could have come to stay another year, and we might still have become friends, might still have ended up in Florence together in the spring, though a different Florence, and a different spring. We could have been children, reading comics and playing on the beaches and telling stupid jokes.

  And the truth of it is that we were those things as well.

  Time goes past. The heat lies like lead in the valley, pressing down the grass by the roadsides and making the earth among the lemon trees shrink until it cracks. It looks like all of Altesa is on the beaches, except for the waiters keeping out of the sun under their awnings and surveying their collections of pavement tables. The three of us are almost constantly in each other’s company. We are earning our parents the reputation of having let us run wild.

  Time goes past. The days blur by in a haze of heat and red dust from the fields.

  We keep returning to the chapel. The first few times, we just explore the building, and invent games to play in the seclusion of its cool half-light. We watch the valley from the belltower. We play hide-and-seek until we know all the hiding places, and then we make things up. We are a secret society – the Band of Three – and this is our meeting-place.

  It is Anna’s idea never to speak of the chapel by name. Jamie is worried that, if anyone finds out where we have been going, we might be forbidden from playing there. Although we are sure the building is safe, adults are bound to think of reasons why it might not be; and perhaps there is something inherently wrong with running and shouting in a church, even an old and forgotten one.

  So from then on, we talk only of going to the dandelion clock, until the phrase is so worn into our minds that the reason for it – Jamie’s original joke – is almost forgotten. The clock itself is always there, of course, staring blindly from its vantage point on the wall, but we hardly notice it.

  It is an afternoon in early August. Anna has been with us for just over a month, and our lives have settled into an easy, happy pattern. Everything feels safe and comfortable.

  Jamie and I come back from getting shopping for Lena and sweets for ourselves to find Anna gone. We look in all the rooms for her before spotting the note she’s left:

  Gone to the dandelion clock. Got an idea to make a theatre so I’ve taken a sheet. Come and meet me.

  ‘What does she mean, a theatre?’ I ask.

  Jamie shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she means she’s going to use the sheet as a curtain.’

  ‘That’s not bad,’ I say. ‘We could hang it from the bit where the organ was.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jamie says, starting to see how it can be done. ‘And use the place in front of the doors like a stage. That’s cool. We could put on plays.’

  ‘Batman,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. Or anything.’

  ‘We’d better hurry and catch her up,’ I say, struck with the terrible sense that I might be missing out on something fun.

  We make it up the valley in record time, sometimes running until I am out of breath and then breaking back into a walk. Our footprints are still in the dust from several days before; it is only after a long time that the breeze rubs them out. Once or twice a lizard skitters out of our way, but otherwise the valley seems deserted. The riverbed marks its lowest point throughout its length, and looking up you can catch a glimpse from the corners of your eyes of hills, almost all around, like a bowl. Only behind us, where the sea is, does the sky remain unbroken.

  We climb the fence and skirt the building as we have so many times before. Something makes me look up at the clockface as we pass it: it is still the same, still eerily incomplete. I wink at it, as if trying to make it wink back, but of course it doesn’t.

  ‘Anna!’ Jamie calls as we round the corner of the chapel. The side door is slightly ajar, the hasp of the lock hanging loose. There is no reply.

  ‘Maybe she’s hiding,’ I say. Jamie pulls the door open and takes a step into the gloom before he freezes. I almost run into him, it’s so sudden.

  He blocks my view of the altar end of the chapel, but it isn’t there that he is looking. I follow his gaze into the shadows down towards the organ-loft, and for a moment I can’t understand exactly what it is that I’m seeing. The only adult figure we’ve ever seen in the chapel is the big wooden Christ; but he’s still there on his cross in the shadows. The man Jamie’s looking at – the man Anna is holding – is someone else. He is lying in the dusty half-dark back there among the pews, propped up slightly against the end of one of them, and Anna is kneeling beside him.

  She look
s up, staring as though seeing us for the first time. ‘Come in and shut the door,’ she says. There is something funny in her voice when she speaks.

  Jamie says, ‘Who is it?’ His voice sounds strange, too.

  ‘I don’t know. He’s hurt.’

  I look again at the figure at Anna’s side. In a flash I know who it is, and why he’s here.

  ‘It’s the hermit,’ I say. ‘He came back.’

  Chapter Eight

  It’s a tentative movement – cautious – exploring. I reach out with the brush and run a thin line down the slightly uneven plaster of the wall, and the faint, half-understood image that is forming there is reinforced in some way. I see it more clearly now: the underside of an arm, raised above the head; the shallow inward curve of the belly; some hint of a leg bending a little at the knee, tension running through the muscles, the whole figure caught in the moment of preparation.

  Touching the brush to the wall, it feels like the plaster might give way in front of me and leave me – stranded somewhere. I don’t know. It’s moonlight, and the shapes of waves low under the curve of the land. The house around me – its walls and boards and joists – feels terribly fragile, like a soap bubble. The coarse bristles of this ungainly brush might punch right through it, puncture the illusion.

  Where am I?

  I do it again: a hesitant lining-in of the form which is hardly there at all, but which I’ve nevertheless seen as being there. I’m starting to wonder now whether it was my imagination all along: whether the scrawl of marks on the wall was just that – a random scrawling; whether what I’ve told myself was there was not just something – imagined. In my head.

  Going places in your head.

  It’s too late now anyway. The new marks I’ve made define things: they mark boundaries, areas of space, distinctions between one thing and another. There is no longer the darker wall and the paler paint. Now there is a boy in moonlight. I let the hand that carries the brush drop to my side, and stare at what I’ve done as if at a dream.

  We huddle together at one end of the chapel, talking in whispers.