The Dandelion Clock

by Guy Burt

  I say, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hey. Don’t be sad.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She gets down from the stool and looks at me, concerned. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I’m OK. I just – I miss him already. And you.’

  ‘Hey. But we’ll do something, you’ll see. We’ll get together somehow.’

  I smile bravely. ‘Yeah. Of course.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll get to go to school there, too.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

  I think of it: how it would make me closer to Jamie; and how it might make me further away from Anna. Italy – Altesa – the valley – this is our place, where we’re supposed to be. We’re supposed to drink Cokes at Toni’s, and dive from the spur at the cove, and watch the water in the lion’s-mouth fountain, and remember other things: a clock with no hands, and an empty chapel, and a big old white house on a hillside looking over everything from behind its high walls. I try to imagine the three of us some other place – England, maybe; anywhere – and I can’t do it. This is where we’re supposed to be. Going with Jamie is the only thing I can think to do, but in some awful way it feels like it will tear us apart just the same.

  She seems to understand instinctively what I’m feeling. She says, ‘I’ll be OK. Don’t worry about me. I’m used to looking after myself.’

  ‘But I—’ My mouth falters, and I don’t know what to say. Something like, I’ll miss you. Or maybe something else. In the end, all I can manage is, ‘I won’t forget anything. Jamie won’t either, but I won’t. Not anything. I promise.’ Suddenly, I want to pour out everything: how she’s locked in my head for ever – grinning at a joke, hair plastered back with seawater, tightening a bandage in the murky dimness of the chapel, shrieking as Jamie hurls mud at her, climbing trees in the lemon grove, peering over the high white wall of Signor Ferucci’s estate – everything from the moment I first see her, sitting under a tree watching a kitten in the dry grass, through to the way she bites her lower lip slightly as she lines in the positions of the stars on my ceiling. She’s there for ever, and all I have to do is let my eyes and mind drift, and I can see her again. All at once, I don’t know why I haven’t explained all this to her before. I should have. It was Jamie’s idea not to, but I think now he was wrong; that Anna needs to know too. And I have half opened my mouth to say it – to tell her everything – to try to put into words the feelings I’ve always had about her, and which although they’re changing now are still the same, really – when the door opens and Jamie comes in.

  ‘You got it?’ Anna says.

  ‘Yeah. It’s all here.’ He lifts the paper bag he’s got under one arm.

  ‘Great,’ she says. ‘We can get started right away, if you like. Alex?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, numbly. ‘Yeah. Let’s do it.’

  We start at the door and work our way towards the window, taking it in turns to stand on the stool. If you load the brush only a little, the paint doesn’t drip or spatter too badly; we learn quickly what’s the right amount to use. Gradually, a wave of darkness spreads across the room: blue so dark it is almost black, and which looks deep as the sky. We work steadily and carefully, leaving little areas of white unpainted where the stars will be. The ceiling slants down from the door to the window, and to begin with, only Anna can reach it properly; but then Jamie can take over halfway, and by the time we’re three-quarters done, I can take my place on the stool. It makes my arms ache, all this reaching up, but when you sit back down on the floor and see how it’s starting to look, it’s worth it.

  When the blue’s done, we sit and wait for it to dry, reading comics and talking and laughing. The whole room has the heady and exciting smell of fresh paint, even with the window wide open. Then, at last, it’s time to start on the silver: the smaller pot that Jamie’s bought, which we shake up vigorously before beginning. We have a special small brush for this, too.

  The small stars are just a dot of paint, but the large ones we make bigger. Slowly, a scattered pattern of silver starts to take shape over the spread of the ceiling, replacing the plain white with glittering constellations. Anna’s hands move smoothly and confidently, the paintbrush eight inches above her nose as she gets closer to the window. Then it’s Jamie’s turn, and mine. We’re sure to keep our stars the right sizes for their different magnitudes, and when there’s any doubt, Jamie checks the chart to make certain.

  And then it’s finished. We lie on the paint-spattered newspaper, our hands behind our heads, staring at what we’ve done. It looks like the top of the room has been lifted off and the universe left clear. The silver paint winks and shines and glimmers in the blue-black, and although I have been reaching up to paint it myself just a few minutes before, the ceiling now looks terribly far away, as though you could never touch it no matter how high you stretched.

  Anna says, ‘Hey. Not bad.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I say. ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jamie says. ‘It’s pretty good.’ He sounds impressed. I stare around my personal sky, and am amazed at what has been done with only paint and brushes and an afternoon. It hardly seems possible.

  ‘I wonder how it’ll look at night.’

  ‘You know what?’ Anna says. ‘You need to keep a candle burning so that they twinkle. Like real stars. Just one candle should do it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, imagining how that would look. ‘Yeah, that would be good.’

  ‘I’d like to see that,’ Jamie says.

  ‘We should,’ Anna says. ‘We can sleep over tonight, can’t we, Alex?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Then we’ll try it together,’ she says.

  We lie on the floor of my room. The newspaper’s cleared away and my bed’s back, and my books and small amount of clutter. We don’t see any of that, though. The room is dark: it’s one in the morning. The rest of the valley is asleep, but in some strange way this time – this middle-of-the-night time – is almost more ours than the bright afternoons at the beach or the mornings down in the town. We’ve made it ours. We’ve covered the valley from one end to the other in these early morning hours, and seen its hills and fields by moonlight and starlight. None of us is scared of the night any more.

  Like Anna has said, a single candle flickers and trembles in the slight breeze from the open window. Above us, the ceiling of stars catches its light in its silver paint, glittering and shimmering; and the blue soaks the rest away into itself. By candlelight, the blue is deeper and further away than ever.

  ‘Hey,’ Anna says, pointing. ‘Shooting star.’ And for a moment, I believe her.

  ‘Have you asked your parents, then?’ she says.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘But I will.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jamie’s in town on an errand, and Anna and I are in the lemon grove. The lemons are fat and ripe in the trees, and Anna reaches up and picks one down, scratching the skin of it with her thumbnail and holding it out for me to sniff.

  ‘Nice,’ I say.

  ‘Hot lemons,’ Anna says, smelling it herself. The lemons get warmed up in the sun and it seems to waken the smell of them somehow. She bounces it in her hand. ‘Like a scent grenade,’ she says, with a grin, and hurls the lemon off into the undergrowth. ‘Blam! There it goes.’

  I laugh at the image.

  She says, ‘If you go to England—’

  ‘Yeah?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ She kicks her feet through the dust as she walks.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If I go to England, I’ll write to you. Lots. OK?’

  She smiles. ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Thanks for my ceiling,’ I say. ‘I really – I mean, it’s good. Really good. I – I really like it.’

  She stops walking and turns to look at me. I stop, too. ‘You really like it?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah. It’s the best ceiling I’ve ever h
ad.’

  She throws her head back and laughs at that, while I stand there watching her, pleased at having made her laugh. It’s her last day, and she’s been quiet and a little withdrawn all morning.

  ‘You know something?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re quite cute sometimes.’

  I don’t know what to say to this. I can tell I’m blushing. I can’t decide whether being cute is good or bad.

  Anna says, ‘Here.’ She puts one hand to my face, and leans in, and kisses me quickly on the mouth. It’s only a moment: I feel her lips touch mine, and then an instant of pressure, and a kind of tingle as they pull away again. I feel my mouth come open in surprise. Suddenly, my whole body feels lighter, as if it might float.

  Anna bites her lip for a moment, still looking at me. Then she grins.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘Didn’t you like it?’

  ‘No! – I mean, yes. Yes,’ I say, flustered.

  ‘Hey, you’re blushing.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She isn’t. I say, ‘What was that for?’

  ‘Wasn’t for anything. I just felt like it.’ She pulls another lemon from a branch above us. ‘Doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything.’

  ‘Oh. Well,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe Jamie’s back now,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We could go and look.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Let’s.’ But I don’t move. There’s always the chance that she’ll do it again. If she does, I think my feet might actually lift off the ground. It’s weird. It’s not the kiss itself, it’s what it does to you inside. I wait to see what will happen.

  Anna trots past me. ‘Well, come on, then,’ she calls over her shoulder.

  It takes me a moment to get my co-ordination together enough to run after her.

  Jamie sets the suitcases down on the pavement at the side of the square and looks at his watch. ‘Not long,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got a book to read?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got two.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  We lapse into an uncertain and awkward silence. Every so often I think I can hear the rumble of the bus, but minutes pass and it doesn’t come.

  Anna says, ‘When’s school start?’

  ‘In a week.’

  ‘When do you fly out, then?’

  ‘Six days. You have to be there early, to settle in.’

  ‘You taking your telescope?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll be nice. It might be nice. You never know.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true.’

  It won’t be nice. We all know that.

  ‘Alex’ll be in the top class now,’ Jamie says. ‘You get to do some stuff you don’t get in the other classes.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  I hear something, and strain my ears to catch it; it might be the bus, or it might just be a car in one of the other streets. Or it might be nothing at all.

  I say, ‘You’ll come and see us next year, though?’

  Anna opens her mouth to reply, and then shuts it again. Her lip trembles for a moment, and I realize – shocked – that she’s trying not to cry. I’ve never seen Anna cry before. It’s peculiarly distressing: I cry sometimes, and sometimes Jamie does, but Anna’s older and stronger than us, and things don’t hurt or upset her the same way. She’s never scared of the things I’m scared of.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  There’s a squeal of brakes, and the bus turns the corner into the square.

  ‘It’s here,’ Jamie says, unnecessarily. He picks up Anna’s suitcases as the bus grinds to a stop beside us.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I say. Anna nods, and rubs her face quickly, and sniffs.

  Jamie hands the cases to the driver, who stows them in the big baggage hold. Then it’s time for Anna to go.

  She grabs Jamie and hugs him, and I hear her murmur something that I don’t quite catch. Then she grabs and hugs me, too, and says, ‘Bye, Alex. Be careful, OK?’

  ‘You too,’ I say. ‘I – Anna, I—’ But whatever it is, I can’t make it work out right. Instead I hear myself say, ‘Don’t get sick on the bus.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Then she’s climbing the steps, and we see her thread her way down the central aisle to her seat at the back. And we watch as the bus pulls away, turning round across the square and then climbing back past us. I can see Anna in the window, and as the bus comes by on its way out of the square again she lifts a hand and waves, and Jamie and I wave back. I’m sure I can see tears on her face, and I can’t understand why she is suddenly so sad. We’ll see each other again. It’s not as if this is the last time we’ll be together.

  The bus is gone now, and Jamie and I start slowly back along the road to home. Anna’s gone, too; it’s just the two of us left. And in a week – in six days – Jamie will go, and I’ll be alone. And as we walk, I start to realize what it is that’s made Anna cry; until I can feel hot tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, too, and have to blink them away in the haze of dust left by the passage of the bus over the hot asphalt of the road.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Do you know when he left?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But you’ve known this has been going on?’

  I don’t know what to say to that. I stare at the carpet between my feet. It’s some time in the middle of the night, and I’m standing in slippers and pyjamas and dressing-gown in my housemaster’s study. I’ve known all along that something like this would happen eventually; it had felt inevitable from the start, right from when Jamie first took me into his confidence. It’s six months since we came back from Florence, and, if anything, seeing Italy again seems to have spurred Jamie to even more flagrant night-time absences. It has to be noticed in the end – it’s just a matter of time. This time, it seems, his luck has run out.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  I shrug helplessly. Since the first thudding knock on my bedroom door, I’ve known what it would all come down to: being asked to betray Jamie. But there’s nothing to betray: there’s nothing I can tell them they don’t know already. Jamie’s gone. He’ll be back, I expect, some time. There’s nothing more I can say or do. I don’t know, in all honesty, where he is, though I could of course guess at a few places. But I won’t say them. I stick to the absolute truth, which is that I don’t know when he left, where he’s gone, how long he’ll be away – anything. It’s all I can do, shivering slightly.

  Dr Cooper rubs a hand wearily across his eyes. I can guess he’s more worried than I am, because he doesn’t know that Jamie is capable of looking after himself. I have no worries. With a sudden spark of insight, I realize that he’s afraid, too; afraid of what this means for Jamie, for him, for the house and the school. It’s too bad, I think to myself. His fears don’t mean anything much to me.

  ‘Alex,’ he says, trying to keep his voice conversational yet serious. ‘We know he’s done this before. He’s your friend. It’s very important that we find where he is, and get him back. This is a matter of the greatest seriousness. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  I nod. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You must tell me right now if you have any idea where he might be.’

  I say, ‘I think he goes to London.’ They can search London all they like.

  ‘Why? To do what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It might be any one of a number of things.

  ‘Alex – answer this truthfully, now. Do you think Jamie’s taking drugs?’

  It’s so incongruous I actually laugh aloud. Dr Cooper’s face flushes, and hastily I try to compose myself, get control again.

  ‘No, sir. I don’t think he’d do that.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  I can feel giggles welling up inside m
e, and I have to force them down. ‘It’s not really his style, sir.’

  ‘Not – his – style,’ Dr Cooper says slowly, meditatively, as if the words are in a language foreign to him. Then, ‘I hope you’re right.’

  I glance at the clock on the wall. It’s twenty-past three. I wonder how long all this will last.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jamie’s back.’ The monitor sees my questioning glance, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. I think it’s pretty bad. He missed all Saturday school. I mean, there’s no way he wasn’t going to get caught. Fucking stupid.’

  It’s Sunday morning. Jamie has been gone since some time Friday night. During the past thirty-six hours, the whole school has come to know of what’s happened: it’s the only subject of conversation wherever you go. I’ve heard that he’s skipped school to go to a disco; that he’s had a nervous breakdown and gone home; that he’s run off with a girl from the nearby town. This last one makes me smile for a moment before I remember how bad it’s all going to be for Jamie. Not just pretty bad, like the monitor says; very bad.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘Cooper’s seeing him now. They were shouting down there when I went by.’ He sounds impressed; people don’t usually shout at Dr Cooper. ‘Christ. Some weekend, yeah?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I say. I don’t want to talk about it – gossip about it. I want to know what’s happened to Jamie, if he’s all right. But there will be more phone calls to his parents, and to the headmaster, and more rows and shouting in the study downstairs before any real information will leak its way to me. I lie back on my bed and close my eyes, and wait.

  In the end, it’s not information that makes its way to me in my room: it’s Jamie.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  I sit up. ‘Shit, what’re you doing here? Have they let you off?’

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Hang on. No, it’s not like that.’ He comes in, closes the door behind him. He’s wearing the jacket and jeans I’ve seen him wear to play the clubs, and his hair looks tousled, as though he might have slept on the train. He paces up and down the room.