The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  ‘What’s that for?’ I say.

  He moves his head to look at me. His movements are slightly uncertain, and sometimes his voice slurs a little, like some of the men in town when they’ve been drinking beer in the afternoon. He says, ‘This is to stop the blood. If you keep it tight, not so much can get into the leg. But you mustn’t have it too tight, or not enough blood will come down and the leg will die.’ He tries a smile, but it looks sickly. ‘That wouldn’t be good, would it?’

  I shake my head. The idea of the leg dying while still attached to the hermit makes me feel very queasy.

  ‘So, little Alex, you will have to hold on here.’ He shows me the end of the belt. ‘Just hold on, all right? Don’t pull. But if suddenly there is a lot of blood – new blood – then pull it tight, you see? Try to stop it. And when it’s stopped, let it go slowly until it’s like it is now again. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

  Anna says, ‘So we wash it, and then put the cream on, and then bandage it up?’

  The hermit’s gaze has drifted again. He looks at Anna, and it seems like it is a big effort to do so. ‘What?’

  ‘We cut the trousers, then we wash it, and put on the cream, and bandage it up?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘Where’s the cut?’ she says, peering at the dark fabric. ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘Up here,’ the man says, pointing. He pauses for a second, and then takes a breath. ‘There will be another one, too. On the other side.’

  ‘What?’ Anna says.

  ‘At the back of the leg. Another – cut. But maybe worse than the one at the front. I think the one at the front will be – quite small.’

  Anna nods, though she looks puzzled.

  ‘You will need to turn me, to get at the cut at the back,’ the hermit says. ‘That may be difficult. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it may be that I lose consciousness. If that happens, don’t worry. Just get the leg cleaned and bandaged. All right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna says. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You’re sure you remember everything?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna says.

  ‘All right.’ He leans back, exhausted, and closes his eyes. Anna turns to me.

  ‘Get hold of the belt, then,’ she says. I nod and take the end of the belt that the hermit has shown me firmly in both hands. I can see the buckle now, deep in a fold of cloth. It looks like it must be quite tight. I think of winding threads of cotton round my thumb, watching the tip turn pink and then darkly red. I understand what the hermit meant.

  Steadily, Anna starts to cut up the trouser leg from the ankle. The scissors make a neat little sound as they bite through the cloth, and it reminds me of Lena on sunny afternoons, sewing in the kitchen. I am careful not to let myself slip away, though; Anna and the hermit need me to be right here, all the time, in case I have to pull on the belt. Jamie has come closer as well, holding the torch so Anna can see more clearly what she’s doing.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Now we need to cut round.’

  Sometimes, when she is concentrating hard, the tip of her tongue pokes slightly out of the corner of her mouth. She cuts round the outside of the hermit’s thigh, and then looks up at Jamie and me.

  ‘We’ll have to move him a little,’ she says. ‘I can’t get the scissors underneath.’

  I have thought that the hermit has fallen asleep, but when Anna puts her hands under his knee and gently lifts it, he draws in a ragged, painful breath. His eyes stay closed, though.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she says after a moment. Her hands are small, and she’s able to reach underneath now and continue cutting. She has to crouch down low against the floor to see properly. Then she changes hands with the scissors and finishes the job, cutting down the inside of the thigh. The cloth flaps away to either side and she pulls it clear. ‘Get the pillowcase,’ she says. Jamie passes it to her and she puts it on the floor under the leg.

  We can see the leg properly now. It’s covered in old blood, turned dark and almost black in places. Halfway up the thigh is a small, round hole, so small it looks like I wouldn’t get my little finger in it. The place around it looks swollen and blotchy. There is fresh blood here, trickling down the side of the leg. I steady my grip on the belt.

  ‘It’s so small,’ Jamie says in wonder.

  ‘Let’s get it clean,’ Anna says.

  We have the bottles of mineral water ready, and Anna takes pieces of the cotton wool we’ve bought and wets them. She works slowly and methodically, cleaning the blood from the skin, working gradually towards the wound itself. The way her hands are when she’s working remind me a lot of Jamie; there is the same precision and competence there. Her movements are gentle but definite, with no hesitation or uncertainty. When she gets very close to the wound itself, the hermit grits his teeth and his breath comes more quickly. Anna glances up.

  ‘Is it all right?’ she says.

  ‘Keep – going,’ the hermit says, forcing the words out. Anna nods to herself and bends back to the work.

  Soon the whole of the top of the leg is clean, and we can all see the little round hole much more clearly. It’s hardly bleeding at all now. I try to keep my tension on the belt as gentle as possible, reminding myself of the horrible possibility that I might kill the hermit’s leg by pulling too hard, but my hands have cramped up into clenched fists, and it is difficult to control how hard they pull. I am shivering slightly, which is strange, because I don’t feel cold.

  ‘There,’ Anna says at last. She blinks, and stretches, and puts the cotton wool she’s been using onto the little pile of blood-soaked rubbish that is growing beside her. ‘That’s the top. We need to turn him now.’

  ‘Onto his front?’ Jamie says.

  ‘Just onto his side, I think,’ she says. We all wait a second for the hermit to confirm this, but he is silent, his breath shallow and quick.

  ‘He looks really hot,’ Jamie says.

  ‘I know. But we have to turn him now.’

  ‘OK.’

  It is difficult, turning the hermit. He is a fully grown man, and he weighs a lot more than any of us would have guessed. Jamie takes his shoulders and Anna takes his knee, and I try to hang onto the belt and push a little at his hip. Jamie counts softly to three, and we all heave. The hermit’s body turns, and then he lets out a huge cry of pain. It startles us all so much that we jump back.

  ‘Shit!’ Anna gasps.

  The hermit crashes back into place, his face white and sweating. I have lost my grip on the belt, and suddenly there is more blood on the leg – a lot more.

  ‘Alex!’ Anna snaps. I seize the end of the strap and pull on it hard, and keep pulling. The hermit is breathing very quickly now.

  ‘Shit,’ Jamie says. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We do it again,’ Anna says. She sounds furious, and I wonder if she’ll tell me or Jamie off for letting go. But she doesn’t. After a while I remember that she let go as well; perhaps she is angry at herself too. ‘Let me clean this first,’ she says, and she wipes away the fresh blood from the leg. Her hands and arms are streaked with blood. She throws the used cotton wool onto the pile and looks up at both of us.

  ‘All right. Again. And don’t stop this time, no matter what he does.’ She sounds fierce. Jamie and I nod instinctively.

  ‘One. Two. Three. Now.’

  We turn the hermit onto his side. He doesn’t shout this time. His head is still rested against the end of the pew.

  Anna says, ‘Get the sheet for a pillow.’

  ‘What sheet?’

  ‘The one I brought. It’s over there.’ Jamie nods.

  To make a theatre. Anna’s note feels like it comes from years and years ago.

  I keep holding onto the end of the belt while Anna starts cleaning the back of the leg. ‘I can’t see,’ she complains after a while. ‘Can you get the torch round here?’

  Jamie, who has done
his best to prop the hermit more comfortably, comes round. He shines the torch where Anna is working.

  ‘Christ,’ she says softly. ‘Can you see this?’

  ‘Yuk,’ I say faintly. I look away. The candles dance and jump excitedly around us, their flames twitched by the moving air we are all stirring up as we move and breathe. I stare at them, watching the way they make shadows leap on the walls of the chapel.

  The back of the hermit’s leg is a mess. It is nothing like the neat hole, only as wide as a pencil, which is at the front. It looks like something has been torn out of him. There are flaps of flesh there. I stare at the candles and breathe in and out.

  Anna is still swabbing old blood away. I can see her moving out of the corner of my eye. Jamie’s hand is trembling on the torch – I can see the beam shaking – but Anna doesn’t say anything. Every so often she turns to drop another used ball of cotton wool onto the pile.

  It feels like a week passes before she says, ‘There. That’s it, I think.’ She straightens for a moment, and then says, ‘How much water is there left?’

  ‘Most of a bottle,’ Jamie says.

  ‘Give it here.’

  She sloshes the bottle over the wound. The hermit doesn’t make a sound; he is lying completely still. For a second I can’t hear him breathing, and I panic – am about to shout out – but then I see his mouth move a little. Anna keeps sloshing water over the leg. I swallow, and take a quick look at what she’s doing. The water runs out of the wound slightly pink. The floor around where she is kneeling is slick, shiny.

  ‘OK,’ she says at last. She puts the bottle down and gets more cotton wool. ‘We have to dry it now.’ She pats carefully, working round the area like she did when she was cleaning it. She dabs the leg dry on both sides. When she’s happy with it, Jamie hands her the tube of graze cream. She squeezes lots of it onto both sides of the leg, all around the wounds.

  ‘Pass me the bandage stuff, then.’

  The hermit has explained to us how to make a bandage. Anna rinses her hands with the last of the water, and then tears open one of our packets of gauze.

  ‘Jamie?’

  Jamie holds the leg at the knee, keeping it up enough that Anna can wind the gauze round and round. The gauze quickly turns red where it touches the wounds. I strengthen my grip, but it makes no difference. Anna goes round and round until the first pack of gauze is all used up.

  ‘How much cotton wool is there?’

  ‘Some,’ Jamie says.

  She opens the other pack of gauze. She makes thick pads of the remaining cotton wool and puts them over the two wounds, and she binds them in place with the rest of the gauze. By the time she’s finished, the hermit’s thigh is all wrapped up for about six inches, and there are two bulges, one front and one back, where the cotton pads are pressed into place.

  ‘Get me some plasters. The big ones,’ she says.

  Jamie cuts her off a strip of plaster from a thick roll of it that has come from his house. Anna uses it like sticky tape, to fix the loose end of the gauze in place. Then, blinking slightly, she sits back on her haunches.

  ‘There,’ she says. ‘That’s got it.’

  ‘Is it all done?’ Jamie asks.

  ‘I think so. How is he?’

  Jamie is quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t know. His breathing’s funny. He feels hot still.’

  Anna stands up, her knees cracking. ‘Maybe he’ll get better now it’s bandaged,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I let go now?’ I say.

  Anna looks at me as if noticing me for the first time in ages. She says, ‘Oh. Yes, I think so. Gently, though. Just a bit at a time.’

  I do so. My hands are numb where they’ve been gripping the leather.

  Jamie says, ‘Should we turn him back the way he was?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might start him bleeding more.’

  ‘He doesn’t look very comfortable like he is.’

  Anna thinks. Then she says, ‘You’re right. Let’s turn him back. It won’t be so hard this way.’

  For the last time, we take hold of the hermit and roll him as gently as possible back. His face is ashen, and his mouth hangs open a little. I can hear him breathing again, though, which is a relief. Even though the breaths are fast and so light that they’re hardly there, it means he’s still alive.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Jamie says.

  We all stare at the hermit, sleeping now in the middle of his ring of candles.

  ‘I like this one,’ Mr Dalton is saying. ‘The way the lights ring the figure like this. Interesting use of light on the face, too.’ He looks closer at the picture. ‘Kind of Christ-like, isn’t he?’ he says.

  ‘I suppose,’ I say.

  ‘Is that intentional?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I first thought of when I saw it,’ he says. ‘You see how the edges of the lights take on a spikiness when you paint them with a cubist sensibility? Well, I saw this man, looking a bit like a kind of Renaissance Christ, ringed round with spikes, and I thought “Crown of thorns”. Or is that pushing the symbolism too much?’ He looks at me, smiling mischievously.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be a crown of thorns.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s the trouble with putting your stuff up on a wall,’ he says, standing back and surveying the collection of drawings and paintings. ‘Once you do that, you see, it stops being entirely your property. Oh, I know you painted them and all that, and they’re yours for as long as you don’t let anyone else see them. But the moment you go public, everyone has their own idea of what you meant and what the pictures mean, and everyone’s filtering what they see through their own ideas and experiences. Who’s to say you’re right and they’re wrong, eh?’

  ‘Well – I did do them,’ I say.

  ‘Sure. But you’re giving them away when you let other people see them. You have to.’

  ‘I never thought of it like that,’ I say.

  The Art department around us is dark, only this little gallery lit. The whole wall in front of us is my work, the papers and canvases spread out linearly, labelled neatly. Two other walls have other boys’ work on them, but they are both sixth-formers, and I am just a fourth-former. This is my first proper display of work – almost an exhibition, I tell myself – set up here in readiness for the school’s annual open day. Tomorrow, there will be parents and old boys of the school, with their school ties and tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows. I have seen this all happen before, last year, but this is the first time I have been properly – involved. People will be in this room tomorrow, with glasses of white wine supplied by the department, and canapés, nodding and talking and looking out for the work of boys they know – sons or nephews or grandsons. And my work is up here on the wall – a great spread of it.

  The pictures are dark: night scenes, and scenes by candlelight, with heavy shadows and deep wells of darkness behind the figures that inhabit them. It is difficult to see who the figures are; often they are indistinct, lost in the shadows that flood in from the corners of the pictures. But sometimes you catch a clearer glimpse. Mr Dalton turns to one where a girl’s face is just visible, lit with strange, dull, bold colours: red and blue and gold.

  After a moment, he says, ‘Well. It’s late. Enough art for one day. Have we finished here?’

  I look around. Everything is labelled, properly mounted, properly hung. ‘I think so,’ I say.

  ‘We’d better lock up, then. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  It’s late when I get back to house. All around, people are tired but excited. I am not the only person preparing for tomorrow; there will be cricket matches, and displays of shooting and fencing and karate, and rowing and sculling on the river, and concerts by the School Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra and the Jazz Band.

  Jamie will be playing. Perhaps I’ll see him, and be able to wish him luck; bu
t probably I won’t.

  The valley below us is asleep; I can see moonlight on the water far down in the bay. It is very quiet in the belltower. Above us, in the rafters, there come the occasional soft sounds of the roosting birds there.

  Jamie says, ‘What time is it?’

  Anna looks at her watch. ‘Half-past one.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I say.

  Anna drags the case out from the wall and sits down on it. Jamie leans against one of the stone sills. He says, ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ll do it in shifts. And we’re going to need more stuff. The book says you have to change bandages, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So we’ll need bandage stuff. And more water, cos we’ve used it all up.’

  ‘I’m worried that he’s so hot,’ Jamie says.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Is there anything-we can do about that?’

  I say, ‘Lena puts a wet flannel on my head when I’m ill, sometimes.’

  ‘We could do that,’ Jamie says. Anna nods.

  ‘Yeah. That’s good. Maybe we can find other things too.’ She thinks for a while longer. ‘We ought to get stuff to make him a bed. You know, blankets and so on. It’s not good where he is at the moment.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jamie turns and glances out the window, down the valley. ‘We need to have a system,’ he says quietly.

  ‘What kind of system?’ Anna says.

  ‘I don’t think we can stay here all the time,’ he says. I can tell from his voice that he’s thinking aloud. ‘They’d notice. We’ll have to be there in the morning, and at lunch, and at dinner and bedtime. Maybe we can pretend to be one place or the other sometimes, but it won’t work every day.’

  ‘Mm,’ Anna says. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So we’ll have to have a system. If one of us is here, the other two can cover. Sometimes we can all come up – like in the afternoons. Nobody cares what we do then.’ His tone is more animated as he gets to grips with the problem. ‘The real thing is nights. We’ll have to go to bed, and then get out later when they’re asleep …’

  For a moment I find myself caught up in the idea of adventure and midnight meetings, but then I remember that it will mean walking through the valley at night, and being alone in the chapel with the hermit. Suddenly I am scared by the idea.