The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  ‘Yeah. And sometimes people from the town will come to ask the hermit’s advice on something.’

  ‘And what’ll you do with the rest of your time?’ Jamie says. ‘You’d have a lot of time.’

  ‘You can play,’ I say.

  Anna shakes her head. ‘No. I’d write a book.’

  ‘A book?’ Jamie sounds intrigued. ‘About what?’

  ‘About being a hermit, of course,’ Anna says, with a brilliant, mischievous grin. ‘So everyone would know how to do it. And perhaps one day everyone in the valley would decide to be hermits too, and they’d all have chapels and caves in the hills, and there’d be no-one left in the town at all. And all through the valley there’d be hermits, singing and watching and drawing and looking at each other from their belltowers.’

  We all stand silent, picturing Anna’s valley of hermits. Then she digs in the pocket of her jeans and brings out the postcard.

  ‘We have to promise,’ she says. ‘You both have to.’

  ‘Promise what?’ Jamie says.

  She puts the postcard down on a piece of stone among the pine needles, and takes out a box of matches. We watch as she lights one, and sets it to the corner of the postcard, and waits until it has burnt away to ash on the flat surface of the stone. When the last bright crescent of red spark has wandered across the charcoal and died, she kicks the ash to dust with one trainer, stamping it into the ground.

  ‘You have to promise never to tell,’ she says. ‘Not to say anything to anyone, ever. If we keep our promise, he’ll keep his.’

  ‘What’s his promise?’ Jamie says.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, shaking her head impatiently. ‘Come on. We don’t have a lot of time. You have to promise never to say anything, ever.’ She looks at me, and her eyes are frowning and hard and very serious.

  I say, ‘I promise.’

  ‘Say, “I swear by the dandelion clock.”’

  I glance up instinctively at the blank face staring down at us, at the twelve hours ranged around it, but with no time passing through them, like sand frozen solid in an hourglass. The air under the stone pines here is suddenly chilly. I say, ‘I swear by the dandelion clock I’ll never tell.’

  ‘Jamie?’

  Jamie twists one foot in the pine needles, not meeting her eye.

  ‘You have to,’ she says. ‘You have to swear. Please.’

  He looks up, at last, and says, ‘All right.’

  ‘Say it properly.’

  ‘I swear by the dandelion clock I won’t tell.’

  Anna smiles at him quickly. Then she says, ‘I swear by the dandelion clock I will never tell.’

  We’re quiet for a moment. It feels like something very important, what we’ve just done, but I’m not sure why. I was never going to tell anyone in any case.

  Jamie says, ‘We ought to go.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’ She’s not looking at us; she’s looking at the chapel, and then beyond it to the trees and the hills. She says, ‘You guys go on. I’ll catch you up.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Jamie says.

  ‘Yeah. Really.’

  ‘All right.’

  He and I climb the fence and cut down through the vegetation to the river. I look back at one point. Anna is still standing there, staring away into the distance.

  ‘Do you think she’ll come?’ I say, as our feet slap through the mud.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She’s not going to really do it, then?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Become a hermit, like she said.’

  Jamie laughs. ‘No. That was just a story.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like a story.’

  ‘She’s not going to become a hermit, Alex.’

  He’s right. It’s only a couple of minutes before we hear Anna splashing and slapping down the river behind us. We turn to watch her, but as she gets close she doesn’t slow. She tears past us, grinning like mad, spattering red mud as she goes.

  ‘Race you!’ she shouts over her shoulder.

  ‘Shit!’ Jamie says, a lopsided grin on his face too. Then he shouts, ‘Come on, Alex! After her! She must not escape!’

  We sprint after Anna, slithering and sliding in the inches-deep sediment. By the time we get halfway home, we’re all out of breath and have to stop, gasping and snorting with laughter. Anna and Jamie are covered with mud – little dots and splashes of it are all over them. I realize after a moment that they’re all over me, too. We look like we’ve caught some awful mud disease, and broken out in a rash.

  ‘Look – look at you,’ Anna manages, hugging her sides.

  ‘Shit,’ Jamie says. ‘What’re – what’re we going to say? They’ll be furious.’

  ‘Doesn’t – doesn’t matter,’ Anna says, still grinning. ‘Screw them. What’re they going to do? I’ll – I’ll say it was my fault.’

  ‘No,’ Jamie says. ‘No. They might not let you come again if you get in real trouble. We’ll say it was my fault. Alex and I started it, teasing you. OK?’

  She thinks for a moment, and then says, soberly, ‘Yeah, you’re right. OK.’ She bends down and scoops up a handful of sludge from beside her foot.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Jamie says.

  ‘Well, if it’s going to be your fault, we might as well enjoy ourselves,’ she says. She prances a couple of yards away and hurls the mud straight at Jamie, and it bursts across his T-shirt with a wonderful slopping sound.

  ‘Shit!’ Jamie shouts. ‘What the hell are you – wait—’

  Anna’s got another mud-ball. I find giggles welling up in me, and in a second I’ve snatched a handful myself and hurled it wildly at Anna.

  ‘C’mon, Jamie!’ I shriek.

  He only hesitates a fraction of a second. Then, with a whoop, he ducks out of the way of a handful Anna has thrown, and scoops up one of his own. ‘You’re going to die!’ he shouts.

  Anna is laughing so hard she can hardly speak.

  ‘You – you should know better – than to tease girls!’ she shouts. ‘Ow – balls!’

  ‘Get her, Alex!’

  ‘No, Alex – get him! Be on my side!’

  I can’t stop laughing. We pelt each other with mud all the way down the valley. It’s in our hair and mouths and ears by the time, tired and weak from running and laughing, we reach the track that leads to the road. When we get to the driveway of Jamie’s house, we look at each other again, and more giggles overwhelm us.

  ‘We can’t let them see us like this,’ Anna says at last. ‘I mean—’

  ‘I know,’ Jamie grins tiredly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get the hose.’

  We wave and wave until the bus is out of sight; long after we must have become invisible to Anna from her seat in the back. Still, neither of us wants to be the first one to stop.

  I can hear thunder grumbling somewhere up the coast. It’s going to be another storm. The summer is dying, and school is just round the corner.

  We’re in trouble because of the soaked clothing and the huge pool of river mud which, no matter how much we try to hose it away, now stains Jamie’s back lawn. But it doesn’t matter. Neither Jamie nor I would have done it differently.

  The hermit is gone. There’s nothing left of him now except a promise; no postcard, no gun, nothing in the chapel. Well, I remind myself, not quite nothing. But the three bullets are my secret, not anyone else’s; and for all I care they can stay in their hiding place until they rust away to nothing. I don’t want them back, and I don’t need a promise to know that I’ll never talk of them to anyone.

  Anna will be back next year. It seems like an impossible time to endure, but I know it will pass, somehow. She’ll be back next year. Meanwhile, there are still comics and stars and stories and all the things that we had before; perhaps they’ll still make sense to us even after everything that’s happened. And one day, summer will creep up on us, and it’ll be time for birthdays and holidays and swimming at the beach, and Anna will come back.

  Chapter T
wenty-one

  ‘I always imagine you in your big English school with all the old buildings, and classrooms with panels on the walls and stuff,’ Anna is saying. ‘And now you tell me it’s not like that?’

  ‘Well – not all of it,’ Jamie says. ‘Some of it’s quite modern.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to hear.’ She takes another drink and shakes her head. It’s amazing how easily we’ve all fallen together again, back into the old way of conversation and companionship. Except for the wine glasses between us on the table, and the changes of phrasing, and the city around us, it could all be six years ago. And the way Anna looks now, I add mentally. I glance at her: she’s still speaking.

  ‘I like my version better. All of you in rows, and a teacher with a cane at the front.’

  ‘Christ,’ I say. ‘Can you imagine Dalton with a cane?’

  ‘Is he the guy in charge? I’ve seen him,’ she says.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sometimes he comes and looks at your drawings and tells you stuff about them,’ she says. ‘Don’t look like that, Alex. I wasn’t spying on you. I was just in a café and some of your lot were drawing in the square there.’

  ‘Some of our lot,’ Jamie says, slightly morosely. ‘God. As if there is any “our lot”.’

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Anna says.

  ‘Sorry. Nothing. I’m just – nothing.’

  She shrugs. ‘Well, I’ve seen him. I’ve probably seen everyone in your group now.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘You go around in little groups. There are little groups of sketching boys all over the city. You keep bumping into them. And they look English.’

  ‘What’s English look like, then?’ I say.

  ‘Sort of – different. You don’t dress the same way. It’s not a bad thing,’ she adds. ‘I quite like it. You’d think you’d all look the same, going to an old school and all that. But in fact, when you see you lot next to Italians, it’s them that look all the same. Like they’ve got more of a uniform than you have.’

  Jamie’s nodding. ‘Blue denim,’ he says. ‘They’re all wearing blue denim this year. Trousers or jacket or shirt or something.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Anna says. ‘That’s what I mean. Whereas you lot wear – different things.’

  ‘Just naturally free thinkers,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe.’ She grins. ‘What’s it like, being in a school with no girls?’

  ‘Weird,’ I say. Jamie nods.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s wrong, I think. I think they should all go mixed.’

  ‘Will they?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Half your lot look like they’ve never seen a girl before,’ she says.

  ‘You shouldn’t stir them up so much,’ Jamie says. ‘You do it on purpose. And don’t call them “our lot”, OK?’

  ‘All right. And I don’t stir them up. Well, not much. It would have been more fun if Alex had played along.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Jamie says.

  I say, ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘I told Alex to say I was his girlfriend – just for fun, you know? But he went and ruined it all. It would have been cool. Never mind.’

  Jamie says, ‘I’m pissed, I think.’

  ‘Are you? Yeah, you probably are.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Late. We should be going.’

  ‘Balls,’ Anna says. ‘Stay for another.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, we really should. We have to be back by eleven.’

  ‘Back by eleven,’ Jamie says. ‘What lives we lead.’

  Anna says, ‘Well, I’m staying.’

  ‘Really, Anna. We can’t.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ She glances around the bar. ‘Plenty of men here who’d buy a nice girl a drink.’

  Jamie says, getting up, ‘Yeah, sure. But you’d have to supply a nice girl first.’

  She grins. ‘Vaffanculo, loser.’

  ‘Night to you too.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ I say, wishing she hadn’t said that thing about letting someone else buy her a drink. I don’t know if she means it, probably not. Probably it’s a joke – a kind of tease. But I don’t know for sure. At the door, we turn and wave, and she raises her glass in a kind of mock salute; and then we’re out into the cool night air.

  There are still plenty of people in the streets; once, we even glimpse three of the boys from Jamie’s year down a side-street. They seem to be heading back also, and are passing a straw-wrapped Chianti bottle between them. Jamie sees them, and grins at me.

  ‘The English abroad,’ he says.

  ‘You’re the one that’s pissed,’ I say.

  ‘A bit. Not badly.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘God, Anna drinks a lot, doesn’t she?’

  Jamie considers this, and then nods. ‘Yeah. And she looks sober at the end of it, too.’

  ‘I mean, she drank more than you did.’

  ‘I know.’ He’s quiet for a while, and the street opens out into a little piazza before he speaks again. ‘You want to stop for a bit?’

  ‘We’re going to be late.’

  ‘Not for long. Come on, just for a bit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just want a rest, OK?’

  I look at him, curious. I know Jamie, and I know he’s not really very drunk. ‘OK,’ I say.

  There’s a fountain at one end of the little square, water splashing down into a wide, shallow pool; and to one side of it there is a building with an impressive, pillared façade and a long tier of stone steps reaching down to the square itself. We sit on the fourth step, facing the water, and I wait for Jamie to speak. It’s a long wait; he just sits in silence for several minutes, staring at the fountain. In the distance, I can hear laughter and the sound of voices in the streets, but this place is all but deserted.

  At last he says, ‘I wish I hadn’t come.’

  ‘What? Here? Why not?’

  He takes a breath, and lets it out in a kind of quiet sigh. ‘I don’t know. It feels like a mistake, that’s all. It just – reminds me of stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘I’ve done everything wrong,’ he says. ‘All of it. I shouldn’t have gone away in the first place.’

  ‘That wasn’t your fault,’ I say. ‘Your parents moved, remember? You had to.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He’s quiet again. Then he says, ‘What about you? Why on earth did you go to England?’

  I blink. ‘To be with you, of course.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well – you know that, don’t you? That’s why I made my parents put me in for the school and everything. You remember.’

  ‘I remember all that,’ he says slowly. ‘But I thought – I thought maybe you’d changed your mind, but it was too late and they wouldn’t let you.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ I say.

  He just stares at me. At last he says, ‘You still wanted to, then?’

  ‘Of course I did.’ I try to smile. ‘You were my best friend, stupid. Of course I did.’

  ‘Oh.’ He’s quiet again for a long time. I see that he’s shivering slightly, though I don’t find the air so very cold. At last he says, ‘I feel like everything’s – everything’s going wrong. Like I haven’t found a place to be. Sometimes all I can think is that ever since that summer – I mean, if we hadn’t left Italy, everything would be OK still.’

  ‘And it’s really not?’

  ‘No.’

  I cast about for something to say. ‘What about London? You look – you look like that’s somewhere you feel at home. I mean, the band you’re in – that’s good, isn’t it?’

  The ghost of a smile appears briefly on his face. ‘That’s the only thing I’ve got,’ he says. ‘I think I live for that. Everything else feels hollow.’

  ‘And you’ve made new friends there,’ I say, carefully. ‘Paul, I mean. He’s – he’s good news, isn’t he?’

  Jamie looks up at me; his hair is hanging over his eyes
the way it does, but I can see them all the same. ‘He’s OK,’ he says.

  ‘What, just OK? I thought – well, this summer and everything—’

  Another smile that’s gone almost as fast as it appears. ‘We – get on well, if that’s what you mean. He’s nice. He’s very kind, and there’s the music, too. But I think I care about the music more.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I hadn’t – I didn’t know you knew. About Paul, I mean.’

  ‘Well – kind of. I kind of guessed.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  I want to say something more. ‘I like him,’ I say. ‘I thought he was nice.’

  Jamie doesn’t reply. For a while I think he’s just gone into another one of his long silences, and I wait for him to decide what to say next; but when I look at him, his face is turned away, and the slight trembling in his shoulders has become more like a shudder.

  ‘Jamie?’

  I realize, shocked, that he’s crying.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. Don’t be – it’s all right.’ I put my arm round his shoulder and pull him towards me, and hold him while he sobs. I don’t know what it is that’s started it. I think of how he keeps talking about wishing he’d never left Italy. Perhaps it’s just the shock of being back here again. I hold him as if trying to squeeze the sobbing back inside, but it breaks out of him anyway, on and on. ‘It’s OK,’ I keep saying. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t be sad. It’s all OK.’ But he has his head buried in the crook of his arm, and I can’t even be sure that he hears me.

  Finally it seems to go out of him. His breath hitches a little, but the shuddering stops and he’s quiet for a while. Then he sniffs and digs around in his pocket for a hanky. He’s still trying to keep his face turned away from me, but I can see the smears on his cheeks and his eyes are still bright with tears in the glow of the streetlights. He blows his nose, and sighs, and rubs one hand over his face until it’s patchily dry again.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s OK.’

  He looks at his watch. ‘We’re late,’ he says, sounding tired. ‘We’d better get back.’

  ‘Jamie—’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Please. I’m all right. It was just – I’m just pissed or something.’

  ‘You’re not pissed.’