The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  ‘I’m just tired, then. I’ll be OK tomorrow.’ He looks at me properly for the first time since the crying started. ‘Really. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  He gives my arm a squeeze. ‘Yeah. Come on. They’ll be sending out search parties before long.’

  We stand up. Jamie goes across to the fountain and dips his hands in the water; I see him splash it on his face. He straightens up, his back to me, staring at the water falling into the pool for a long while. Then he turns, and gives me a kind of half-grin which looks, strangely, very brave. We don’t say anything more on the way back to the hotel.

  * * *

  Anna looks at me steadily. ‘So – what was he crying about, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I’ve told her everything about last night. I need her to help me make sense of it. After a while, she says, ‘I don’t think he’s OK, Alex.’

  ‘No. Me neither.’

  ‘You’ve met this guy – Paul?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s nice. I liked him, anyway. He was kind of cool.’

  ‘What about Jamie? How’s he feel?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said he cared more about the music.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I just wish he’d talk more. I know there’s stuff he’s not telling me. Sometimes I think he’s – trying to protect me, somehow. As if knowing him better would be – bad for me. But I want to. You know what I mean?’

  She nods. ‘I think so.’

  ‘I just wish he’d talk to me more.’

  ‘Maybe he will. Maybe he just needs time. It must all be pretty weird for him, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So maybe he’ll talk to you when he’s ready. You’re his friend, Alex. He’s not going to abandon you, you know.’

  I smile. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Now, what was the other thing?’

  I have to think for a second to remember. ‘Oh, that. Someone saw us, when we were – talking, you know. So now everyone’s saying how we had our hands all over each other, that kind of thing.’

  Anna’s face twists with distaste. ‘Wankers,’ she says. ‘What’s Jamie say?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m not sure he knows, actually. He’s – he’s kind of distant right now. I don’t think he’s taking much in. You know what I mean?’

  She nods. ‘Yeah. So you’re getting all the flak?’

  ‘It’s not so much.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘Well – I mean I can handle it. I just don’t know what to say.’

  ‘What, haven’t any of your lot put their arm round a friend?’ Anna says.

  ‘They’re not my lot,’ I say.

  ‘Whatever. You should have listened to me, you know. If we’d pretended like I said, none of this would have happened, would it?’

  Her voice is joking, but I can’t tell whether she means it or not. I shrug.

  ‘Look, Alex, forget it. It’ll be over in a week. They’ll get bored.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But this kind of thing – I mean, how am I supposed to go around with Jamie if everyone thinks we’re – you know—’ I stumble awkwardly.

  ‘What, lovers?’

  ‘Christ, Anna.’

  ‘Well, that’s what you meant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘This is really a problem for you, isn’t it?’ she says.

  ‘I – yeah.’

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.’

  The scenes fade through one another: static, but with the sense that there is potential movement packed into them, just below the surface, if only you could reach it. Here is Anna at the airport, at a distance, not yet seeing me. Her bags and suitcases are clustered around her. Here is when we meet – when I’m hugging her, and I can’t see anything much but the arrivals and departures boards on the wall behind her. Pisa is a small airport, and the trains are right outside; I’m picking up her cases now, starting to head for the exit, when she stops me.

  The cases are on the floor again, grouped around me: hers and mine. Anna is heading away from me towards the door to the loos, her shoulder bag with its stickers slung across her back. I stand and wait by a pillar, guarding the luggage, daydreaming about where we’ll go and what we’ll see; the conversations we’ll have. My gaze, unfocused, rests on the wall to one side of the door to the lavatories.

  There is something here; I’m sure of it. I just can’t see it.

  And then I do.

  It’s only a glimpse. I have my eyes fixed on the wall, so it’s by chance that I see her as she comes out of the same door through which Anna has gone in, only a minute before. In the corner of my eye she’s still clear enough: a young woman with red streaks in her hair. The same I’ve seen later on the street outside the club, at a distance, watching us. Following us.

  I feel a surge of panic, and the image on the paper threatens to shred and tear. I fight the emotions down because I have to know this, have to see it properly. I can tell now that it’s much, much more important than I’ve realized.

  Then Anna is coming out of the loos, seeing me, smiling, walking briskly towards me. She looks happy, excited.

  I try to put the pieces together. A woman I’ve never seen before brushes through my field of vision in an airport. Perhaps she’s just come into the country. Anna and I have just come into the country too. Nothing so far; there are plenty of people at airports, and they’ve all come from somewhere, or are about to go. But then there is a jazz bar where Anna and I are sitting and drinking and talking. Outside, on the street, I have caught a glimpse of a woman: the same woman that has been in the airport with us. There’s just enough time to spark the hazy blur of a recollection before she’s gone; but for that second or so, I have been convinced that she is watching us.

  Anna and I are intending to stay longer in the bar. I even buy more beer. But by chance we leave: and shortly after that, the room is swept by the blast of an explosion.

  Set out like this – I can almost see the links on the paper in front of me – it becomes horribly clear to me that Anna has been wrong. The hermit isn’t gone. The unsettling dreams I’ve had, hearing his voice, have been trying to tell me something, and I haven’t been listening properly. For some reason, despite lying dormant these past sixteen years, what happened in the chapel in our childhood has come back. Someone is trying to hurt us.

  Thinking of you.

  The words come into my head unbidden.

  It’s not a – you know. It’s not to scare us. It’s just a reminder.

  I can feel my heart thudding in me, and my breath is quick and sharp. I want to run after Anna, find her, warn her; except there’s still something else here, something I haven’t understood yet. The luggage: the bags. There has been something there all along, and I realize that now. But this – glimpsing the woman – isn’t the same thing. She’s another part of it, maybe; but it was Anna’s luggage that was the first thing to needle at me. If I could understand that, perhaps other things would become clearer too.

  Trying to breathe evenly and calmly, I bend my head back over the blank sheet of paper, and let my eyes focus just below its placid surface.

  It’s lunchtime on our last day, and the other boys are all in the restaurant across the street where Mr Dalton has arranged cheap meals for us. Anna is sitting on the edge of my bed. We don’t have much longer; I’m trying to say something, something that’s always somehow been left unsaid since I’ve first known her. Always mundanities get in the way. I’ve told myself that this week in Florence I will say it – I’ll get it out, finally – but now it’s almost time to leave, and still it hasn’t happened. I don’t know why not. Every time, it seems to slide by me.

  I say, ‘Do you remember—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once, you said something about how good it would be if we all shared a house together. We were going to get some pla
ce and just live there for ever. You remember that?’

  She laughs, sounding delighted, and shakes her head. ‘No. Did I say that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I grin.

  ‘God. I must’ve been off my head. Can you imagine? I mean, what on earth would that be like?’ She shakes her head again, still laughing. I watch her, and it’s like something is draining out of me as I do so. ‘God,’ she says again. ‘You remember the strangest things. Where’d you dig that one up from?’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ I say. ‘Ages.’

  ‘It must’ve been. Sometimes I think I was just the weirdest kid ever.’

  I try to laugh and go along with it. ‘Yeah, sometimes. You were going to be a hermit, too, at one point.’

  ‘I was?’

  ‘Yeah. You were going to live alone and write a book.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, her eyes twinkling, ‘who knows? That’s pretty much what university’s going to be all about. Well, essays, treatises, not a book. Maybe I was right.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say. Then, ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘What, like a steady guy? No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Too much hassle,’ she says. ‘No, Alex, steer clear of all that, trust me. Maybe when I’m older. Someone rich and very, very old.’

  I manage a weak grin. From down the hall comes the sound of a door slamming, and voices.

  ‘Is that them?’ Anna says.

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘Right,’ she says, jumping up off the bed and running to the door. ‘I’ll see you before the plane, OK? By the Duomo, like before. Tell Jamie.’

  ‘I will,’ I say. ‘Hey – what are you doing?’

  ‘Disinformation,’ she says.

  She’s pulled her arms in through the sleeves of her T-shirt, and I watch in astonishment as, reaching behind her back, she unhooks something; a second later, she’s tugging her bra out the bottom of the shirt. ‘There,’ she says, throwing it on my bed. ‘Trophy.’

  The voices are closer down the hall now, and she grins at me quickly. ‘See you later,’ she whispers, and then to my amazement she hoists the T-shirt up to her shoulders. I have a moment’s glimpse of small, pale breasts before she has the door to the room open and is out in the hall. She’s shrugging the T-shirt back down as she goes, but anyone in the corridor outside must have seen much what I have. Anna’s still looking back into the room, though, and I see her wink as she says – not quietly – ‘God, I needed that. Thanks, Alex.’

  The door’s closed behind her before I realize she’s spoken in English, not Italian. I stare after her – my eyes tracking across the plaster of the wall opposite as I imagine her progress down the passage outside. The voices out there have gone silent. Finally there’s the slam of the main door closing, and then an excited, incredulous buzz from outside.

  I sit back against the headboard of my bed and shake my head, hardly able to believe how she can do things like this – how she can shock me and surprise me and upset me and affect me so much, even after so many years. It seems to get worse each time I see her.

  The door bursts open and Eddie and Jonas and several others are there, mouths open in disbelief. Across the end of the bed is Anna’s bra.

  ‘Black,’ Eddie says. ‘I knew she’d wear black. Jesus Christ, Alex, you fucking bastard. You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I say, truthfully.

  ‘Oh, bollocks. Dalton’s still downstairs. Go on, tell us.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ I say. ‘That’s the truth.’ I snatch up the bra and stuff it deep in my suitcase. ‘Nothing. OK?’

  Eddie lets out a kind of low moan of despair. ‘Oh, you bastard,’ he says. ‘You awful, awful bastard. How could you?’

  He goes over to his bed and flops down on it. When he looks up at me again, he’s grinning.

  ‘Bastard,’ he says. ‘Good for you.’

  It’s difficult to concentrate properly, now that I know I’ve seen her in both places. I have a couple of false starts before I can get back to the last thing I saw: that glimpse of her walking away through the airport. For a few frustrating minutes I get almost random things coming up on the paper – scenes from my childhood, moments from the past week, stuff like that. It’s because of the sense of panic and confusion that’s still inside, no matter how much I try to press it down.

  Finally, the airport is back in front of me. Children running beside parents; people going past in both directions. The woman with the red streaks in her hair is gone, out of my field of vision, only to return days later on a night street near a bar. And now the door to the loos swings open, and Anna’s coming out. The part of me that’s detached – an observer – realizes with a lurch that they must have passed each other with only minutes to spare. If we had been a fraction earlier reaching that point, they would have seen each other.

  But apart from that, everything’s the same. Anna’s got her bag over her shoulder. I pick up my holdall and her suitcases and she grins at me – a quick, excited grin that I take to mean she’s also eager for us to be on our way. Here, and we’re outside in the sunshine, piling our luggage on the platform as the train draws into sight.

  My fingers, gripping the sketch pad, suddenly tighten; the fingertips are white with pressure. And my body goes cold, just like that – despite the mild, sunny day, and the sunlight just starting to come in from the window to the street. Now I can see it: everything. I was right; it was the bag.

  The bag is different. It’s the same make, the same kind of bag; there are the same stickers of cities and place-names and countries on it. It looks the same – almost.

  The pattern of the stickers is wrong. It’s not the same pattern that was on the bag to begin with, when Anna came through the arrivals gate and flung her arms around me. I must have glimpsed the bag twenty or a hundred times, one way and another, between the arrivals gate and the moment she goes out of sight through the loo door. The brightly coloured stickers draw the eye, and besides, I have found it almost impossible to take my eyes off her. It’s as though, if I stop looking at her, she might suddenly vanish again: I have to try to keep her locked down with my eyes. And through that brief minute or so, between first seeing her and her saying she needs to stop for a pee, the shoulder bag has seeped inevitably into my visual memory, along with her clothes and the shape of her face and the way she’s cut her hair.

  It’s not the same bag.

  The stickers are worn and while some are bright, some are faded and uneven round the edges; just the same as Anna’s. You couldn’t pull them off and reposition them without tearing them. They’re the same as Anna’s, but this isn’t Anna’s bag. The pattern – the join-the-dots of the stickers – is different.

  Christ, I think suddenly. The city did move. All the cities moved.

  Something’s wrong – terribly wrong – and at last I can see what it is.

  The only thought going through my head is that Anna is in danger. The hermit hasn’t gone, not really; Jamie was right. We were never safe, and now, it’s catching us up. Whoever this woman is – the woman with the red streaks in her hair – she’s done something to Anna’s bag. No, not done something to it, just switched it – changed it for another one, almost alike but not quite. And Anna hasn’t noticed. And that means—

  ‘Christ,’ I whisper; and the pad, which has bent and warped along its edges where I’ve held it too tightly, drops to the floor as I get up. My legs feel numb, wobbly; but I get them under some kind of control.

  On the writing-desk is a flier for the lecture. It has the address on the front. I could still be in time. I say it to myself over and over: You could still be in time.

  Jamie would have made it twice as fast as I can; but once I’m out in the street, legs pounding on the pavement, there’s no time to think of that any more. I just have to run, and hope, and keep the refrain going: There’s still time. You just have to warn her.
Still time.

  I tell myself I believe it, as my sides ache and my lungs and throat burn with gasping in the air. Jamie would have been twice as fast, the thought comes again; but there’s only me now. Me and Anna and, somewhere on the periphery of what we can see and understand, the hermit.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It takes me a while to come fully to myself; but when I do, it is to find things nearly finished. The floor is strewn with tools and brushes, and debris, but the house itself – well; the walls are painted, the woodwork and plaster mended; everything is back the way it was. The whole house, as I walk through it, has migrated into its own past, become again what it ought to be; what it was.

  There are little dabs and spatters of paint on the photographs that ring the living room and tie them, like a cord, to the picture that has grown and grown and is now also nearly finished in the centre of the wall. There are thumbprints in paint where the photographs have been taken down and the walls behind them painted, and then later put back again. I know still that the order is not right, that I am missing some way of articulating them with their position; but it’s becoming harder to think clearly about that. There’s so much else – in different places and times – that’s pulling at me, that needs to be attended to first.

  It is so nearly done. Everything except one last detail – the part I have saved for last. I have what I need: a tin of paint, blue, so dark it is almost black; a smaller tin of metallic silver. Two brushes: one larger, one small. A pencil for marking in the positions. I won’t need a chart this time, like we needed before; I know that when I start, it will all come back to me perfectly.

  I don’t know what day it is, but it’s a fine, clear morning as I start up the stairs with these materials, to put the last touch to the finished house.

  After that summer with the hermit, other summers come and go. Each time the coach stirs its great dust-trail down from the hills, and then rumbles out of the square leaving her standing behind, it is the signal that the holiday has started in earnest: Anna is here, and now things can properly begin.

  I am eight when I first know Anna, in the summer of the hermit and the chapel and the gun in its case and the hidden cache of rifle shells; I am eight and she is ten. As the years pass and our ages change, the thing that is always constant is the way we understand each other: the way we can pick up conversations where they left off ten months before; the way the same old jokes make us laugh; the way we tease each other in the same ways and about the same things. Jamie still beats Anna when they run races – nearly all the time, at least. And Anna is still as full of that mysterious aliveness that has captured me from the start, though turning it now in one direction and now in another. The start of a summer is a magical time. It is as though, for the greater part of the year, I am only two-thirds a whole person, but that with the arrival of the holidays and Anna, I become complete, fully alive, fully me.