The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  At the same time that talk around the school has let Jamie in on what has been happening in my life, so I have been hearing about him. I have heard, straight off, Mr Dalton say Musician, isn’t he? when he sees Jamie’s face in my picture; and from this I know that even people who are not musicians themselves know who Jamie is, and what he does. It doesn’t surprise me. I can remember how good he used to be on his clarinet, and I assume that he’s got better.

  He has; but there’s more than just the clarinet, though. One afternoon, he shows me: a saxophone, bright and heavy and cold in its case. He takes it out, fits the pieces together, softens the reed for a while in his mouth, and plays for me. The sound is so different to what I’m used to from the clarinet that it takes me a minute or two to realize what should have been obvious right from the start: that he’s captivating. The sound swoops and murmurs, is sometimes husky, sometimes strident and wailing. I can’t believe how he can be so good at this so fast. There’s something else, too, which it takes me longer to figure out. While he was always good at the clarinet, I can now hear something in the music that was missing before. I decide it’s passion, love. He loves this instrument in a way he never really loved the clarinet.

  ‘You’ve only been playing a year?’ I say, incredulous.

  He nods. His face is lit up, grinning, alive with excitement. ‘I know. It’s amazing. I mean – it’s surprised me too. But this is it. This is what I’m good at.’

  ‘Do you practice a lot?’

  Another nod, emphatic. ‘Sure. All the time. Well – two, three hours a day, most days. But it’s not like practising, it’s like – well, it’s not work, you know?’

  I think of losing myself in painting, and I nod. ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘I thought you would.’

  A thought strikes me, and I am puzzled. ‘How come I haven’t heard you before? I mean, in the orchestra or something.’

  ‘They need me on clarinet in the orchestra,’ he says. ‘There’s a guy in the sixth form who’s OK on sax.’

  ‘What about the Jazz Band, then?’

  A slight shadow crosses his face, as if he’s not sure what to say. Then he shrugs, and the look lifts. ‘It’s weird. I don’t want to play it in a band or in the orchestra. My teacher wants me to enter this competition next term, but I don’t want to do that either.’

  ‘Why not? You’re good enough, I bet.’

  ‘I know. But – it feels like something I want to keep for me, not for the school. They can have the clarinet if they like.’

  I try to understand what he means, but it’s difficult. ‘So who do you play to?’

  ‘Nobody. You, if you like. Just to myself, really.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘I love it,’ he says. He’s looking out the window of the room, not at me, not at the sax which he’s laid back into its case. ‘It’s like I forget where I am and – and everything – when I’m playing.’

  ‘How do you find time for all that practise?’

  ‘How do you find time for all that painting?’ he says, looking back at me, with a grin.

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘You know something?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to be good at this.’

  ‘You are already,’ I say.

  ‘No. I mean really good. I’m going to make something of this.’

  I look at him, and at the certainty on his face. ‘I know,’ I say.

  Later – much later – I realize that Jamie has said something which, if I examine it properly, surprises me. I know, after all, that I am an outsider in this place; I feel it deep in myself. It is only in the Art department and sometimes in the music schools that I feel I fit. Belonging is something I have to earn, by being good at drawing so that people will admire me; by bringing credit to the house in Art festivals and competitions the way some boys do on the sports pitches. But Jamie has never had to work to be accepted or liked, and it’s the same here as it was back in Altesa when we were six or seven. Everyone knows him by name, and everyone likes him. The confidence that I see in him at first – the confidence that comes from having been at the place a year longer than I have – stays with him, until I just assume that it is the way he is. But when he looks out of the window at the trees there and says, It’s like I forget where I am and – and everything, there is something hidden in his face and voice that I don’t understand – hardly notice – at the time. It is to do with being an outsider.

  The quickness with which Jamie seems to understand my own worries about fitting in is no surprise to me, because Jamie has always understood me better than anyone else. It never occurs to me until much later that his empathy might come from something more central than just having known me a long time; that he, too, might be feeling alone.

  The bells of the town are distantly audible as I sit out on the verandah with my lunch. I have bought myself some proper food. The garden is warm; there is the smell of summer properly in the air now: of hot lavender and the resin from the big pines, and rock dust, and melting asphalt. I tear bread and salami and make a crude sandwich, and while I am watching the end of the garden, a stealthy movement catches my eye.

  It is a grey cat, slender, moving between the bushes low down by the wall. The sun casts a thin sliver of shadow here, and the cat is keeping to it, head turning slightly from side to side. I remember it; it is the same cat I saw jump up onto and over the wall when I first saw the garden again. I wonder if it belongs to someone, or if it is wild.

  I whistle gently between my teeth and the cat’s head snaps round. It watches me warily for a long second, but doesn’t run. I take a piece of the salami and throw it a little way out onto the grass – away from me, but not all the way down the lawn. The cat follows the movement, and I see its ears strain forward and its body tense as it stares at the scrap of meat. Then, always watching, it comes out of the shadow and across the grass, picking its way delicately, sometimes looking up at me to check what I’m doing. I sit still, and whistle occasionally, quietly, just to let it know I’m here.

  It sniffs the piece of sausage discerningly, and then glances at me. The glance looks accusing, as if it doesn’t approve of my taste in salami. But it eats it nonetheless, and I find myself smiling. I tear off another little piece, and throw that, this time slightly nearer. The cat stares at me with eyes whose pupils, in the bright sun, are hardly more than black lines in the green, and then it pads up and takes this second offering.

  ‘Do you live round here, then?’ I say quietly. The cat’s ears twitch at the sound of my voice, and it seems to consider the question. ‘You look familiar,’ I tell it. Its tail waves slightly, and then it sits down on its haunches and begins to lick one paw clean.

  I wonder if it is some distant descendant of the cat I saw playing in the grass, the day that Anna was under the lemon tree. There must be a whole tribe of wild or half-wild cats in the valley, living off scraps and what’s left out in the dustbins, and lizards, and whatever else they can catch. But this one does, I tell myself, have something about the narrow shape of its head that I seem to remember.

  A grasshopper whirrs past the cat, and it stops its cleaning for a moment to watch; but the grasshopper doesn’t interest it. It turns back to me, watching me steadily. I prepare to give it something else to eat.

  * * *

  It is nearly six o’clock in the morning when I finally crawl through my bedroom window and take off my clothes.

  Anna arrives to relieve me at just before five. She brings a message from Jamie that he agrees about the lunar sand, and she’s clearly nettled that he has refused to explain to her what this means. I give in and tell her, but she doesn’t seem to get the same sense of satisfaction from the comparison that Jamie has. I tell myself it’s probably because she doesn’t read as much about the moon and space as Jamie does.

  We check the hermit together, but he is asleep again. Anna looks at the bottle of water that’s been knocked over, and then at me; I read the qu
estion in her face.

  ‘I gave him some, and then he knocked the bottle over,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll have to get some more.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll tell Jamie.’

  She is looking at the hermit, concentrating, her eyes focused tightly on him. She looks like she is trying to make him well again by sheer force of will.

  In my room, I turn the events of the night round and round in my head. Outside it is getting light now; I watch conscientiously until I just discern Anna’s signal from the belltower, and then I get into bed. My eyes are already half-closed, which surprises me; I have thought, walking back, that I feel remarkably lively and awake. Now I find, all of a sudden, that I’m not. Instead, the cool pillow and comforting blankets drag me down into sleep. I am trying to decide what I think of the hermit, now that I have understood what the gun really means; but the thoughts are heavy and difficult to move about. It is too much effort.

  Jamie and I arrive at the chapel at nine, having managed to obscure Anna’s absence with a good deal of running between households and shouting and generally making enough noise and commotion for three. The scant two hours’ sleep I’ve managed after getting back makes me a bit groggy to start with, but after breakfast and some of Lena’s lemonade I start to feel brighter. Jamie, meanwhile, secures more water for the hermit, this time in a big, plastic bottle that used to hold Coke.

  Anna is there to meet us.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘About the car. Someone’s going to see it sooner or later.’

  We are outside, in the shadow of the belltower. The hermit is sleeping, though Anna says he has been awake for at least some parts of the night. We are keeping away from him so our voices don’t disturb him.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do about that,’ Jamie says.

  ‘We can hide it,’ she says. ‘I told you I’d been thinking. It’s in all those bushes, right?’

  ‘Mm,’ Jamie says. I can see he’s thinking now as well; and his thoughts race ahead to catch up with where Anna already is. ‘Yeah, we could use them. Branches and stuff.’

  ‘It’s quite a stone-coloured car, anyway,’ Anna says, echoing something I’ve already thought. ‘If we cover it up a bit it won’t show nearly as much.’

  ‘Yeah. OK. Who stays here?’

  ‘It’s your turn,’ she says. ‘Alex and I can do it.’

  ‘You sure?’ Jamie doesn’t look very certain.

  I say, ‘Of course we can do it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Anna says with a grin.

  ‘Well, OK. But be back by twelve cos his bandage will need changing.’

  She nods. ‘Of course. See you then.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jamie watches, rather disconsolately, as we run across the churchyard and start up the valley. I know how he feels; on a day like this, I’d rather be outside in the sun than inside with the hermit.

  When we hit the roadway along which the hermit’s car has crashed, Anna says, ‘Last night—’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Was the hermit asleep all the time?’ she says. ‘Or did he – you know – talk to you and stuff?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, a bit. He asked for water and he knocked the bottle over.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Yeah, you said.’

  ‘And then he went back to sleep.’

  ‘So he’s mostly been asleep?’ She seems very focused on this point.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Why? Did he wake up when you were there?’

  She is scanning the road ahead. There’s no traffic, no pedestrians. Everything is quiet. She says, ‘Sometimes. He didn’t seem very – you know. Like he wasn’t sure where he was.’

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘But yeah, he woke up sometimes.’ She skips off to the other side of the road and picks up a long piece of stick, which she swishes through the air. She clearly finds the sound it makes satisfying. She comes back to my side with the stick still in her hand.

  ‘What did he say to you?’ I ask, wondering if the hermit has started making more sense after I have left him.

  ‘Not much,’ she says vaguely. Then, ‘I wonder what actually happened?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘With the hermit. I mean, what the real story is.’

  I say, ‘I think he shot someone. Like an assassin, on a roof or something.’ This is how I picture it. ‘But then someone shot him back, and got him in the leg. That’s where the bullet went through, that hole. And then he drove here, cos it happened somewhere else, somewhere – a long way away. And that’s why there’s blood in the car, from where he was driving.’ I think for a moment, and faint voices come and go in my head and the world blurs over briefly. ‘Oh, and I think he shot two people. One of them died. And the other one’s –’ I concentrate ‘– in intensive care, where his condition remains critical.’ I nod to myself, pleased at having caught these fragments; the voices have been very faint, heard only down the hall as I approach the door to the living room.

  I have walked on a few paces before I realize Anna isn’t with me. I stop and look round. She’s standing in the road, staring at me, her mouth slightly open. She doesn’t move.

  I say, ‘What is it?’

  She shuts her mouth, then opens it as if to say something, then shuts it again. At last she says, ‘How do you know all that?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ I say. ‘I had a look at the hermit’s gun. It’s like an assassin’s gun, isn’t it? With telescopic sights and everything. And I heard something on the radio, too.’ I can’t quite read her expression. ‘Don’t you think that’s what happened?’

  After a moment, she nods. ‘Yeah. I think you might be right.’ She shakes her head as if a fly is bothering her, and then walks to catch me up. ‘Yeah. You know, I—’ She pauses.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t think you knew any of that.’

  ‘I was thinking last night,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That is what you think, isn’t it?’

  ‘You say he shot two people?’ she says.

  ‘I think so. I mean, there were two people on the news. And there are only three bullets left. So perhaps he shot three people.’

  ‘What? Which three bullets?’

  ‘In the case. There’s room for six, but there’s only three there.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I didn’t notice that.’

  ‘So I was thinking maybe he shot several people, but then one of them shot him back. And that’s what happened to his leg.’ I glance at her to see if she agrees with this. ‘Do you think that’s right?’

  She says, ‘Yeah, Alex, OK. I think that’s right.’ She thinks to herself for a second, and then adds, ‘You mustn’t tell anyone any of this. You know that, don’t you?’

  She’s speaking to me as if I were a little kid or something. I say, irritated, ‘Of course not. I know that.’

  ‘Well, it’s just—’ She shakes her head again. ‘How come you know all this stuff?’ she says, not really asking the question, just saying it because it’s bothering her.

  ‘I told you, I was—’

  ‘You were thinking. Yeah, I know.’ She sniffs. ‘You say there was something on the news?’

  ‘I heard a bit of it. One man dead and another where his condition remains critical.’ I hesitate. ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Does that mean he might die?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Perhaps the hermit’s condition remains critical too,’ I say, secretly quite pleased with the heavy importance of the words.

  Anna says, ‘So he drove all the way here.’ She looks at me again. ‘Where from? Did the radio say where it all happened?’

  I concentrate.

  ‘Alex?’

  There’s only the sound of voices – radio voices – this far back down the hall. I can’t make out what they’re saying until I get closer to the doorway.

  ‘Alex? Are you OK?’

  ‘Mm,’ I say. �
��No, I can’t remember.’

  Anna is looking at me curiously. ‘What were you doing there?’ she asks.

  I say, ‘Just thinking. Trying to remember.’

  ‘Oh. Your eyes were funny.’

  ‘Jamie says I go dreamy sometimes,’ I say carefully.

  ‘Yeah, I heard him say that. So. He came from somewhere else …’

  ‘A long way away,’ I say. ‘All the way with a bullet in his leg.’

  ‘I don’t think the bullet’s in his leg any more,’ Anna says. ‘I think it went right through. That’s what the hole at the back is.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Of course.’ I knew this really.

  Anna says, ‘I wonder why he came here?’

  This is obvious, so I tell her. ‘To see Signor Ferucci,’ I say.

  Anna stops dead a second time. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Yeah, that’s right. That’s what he said. But he might have been lying …’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘He wanted us to go and get him, remember?’

  ‘That’s right. He did.’ I can see she’s thinking hard now. She says, ‘Then Signor Ferucci must know.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the hermit.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. I wonder exactly what she means by this.

  ‘Look,’ she says. ‘There it is.’

  We’ve been thinking so hard that I’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to be looking for the hermit’s car. Anna points off the road to where it’s lodged, and again I’m struck by how easy it is to miss. We jump down into the rain gully and scramble down the incline, kicking up big swirls of dust.