Gauge

by Chris D'Lacey

  “What other time is there?” Lucy asked, wrinkling her nose. She was finding this dragon very puzzling indeed.

  Liz just smiled and said, “What time is it, Gauge?”

  Gauge stretched his arms and held his paws at the 11:27 position. Perfect, according to the clock.

  “Do three o’clock,” said Lucy, just to test him.

  His paws swept into the correct places.

  “Quarter to seven?”

  He was spot on again.

  “Midnight?”

  He clapped his paws together, high above his head.

  Lucy made a slight hmph. She put her hands behind her back and leaned forward until her nose was almost touching Gauge’s snout. “Try…my bedtime,” she grinned.

  Gauge frowned and looked sideways at Liz.

  “That’s not fair. He can’t know that,” said Liz. “Mind you…” She paused a moment and tapped her chin. “Lucy’s bedtime is half past eight in the evening, Gauge. And she’s supposed to be asleep no later than nine.”

  The little dragon sat up and blinked his eyes twice, making a sound like a cash register.

  “Why did he do that?” asked Lucy. “Why did he make that noise when he blinked?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Liz said, trying to stop a crafty smile from showing on her face. “Maybe we’ll find out later, eh? Now, what are we going to do about the library clock?”

  “Who cares about the silly library clock?”

  “I do. I think we ought to stage a protest.”

  Lucy didn’t like the sound of that. At school, Miss Baxter had once told the class about a group of women who had chained themselves to railings because they weren’t allowed to vote in elections. When Lucy had asked, “What happens when you want to go to the toilet, Miss?” her teacher had said with a flourish, “You just go where you are, my dear!” It was all part of the protest, apparently.

  “I’m not being chained to any railings,” said Lucy. What if a fly was to land on her nose? Or squirrels hopped up and nipped her ankles? There were lots of squirrels in the gardens next to the library. Besides, if her friends saw her, they would laugh.

  “Don’t be silly,” Liz said. “You can hand out leaflets while I walk up and down the library precinct with a sign.”

  “It’s Sunday,” Lucy pointed out. “No one will be there, Mum. Anyway, it’s raining.”

  Lucy was right about that. The sky had turned a dull grey colour and raindrops were already spattering the windows.

  “More time for us to prepare, then,” Liz said.

  “Time?” Gauge said, pricking his ears.

  “Thirteen o’clock,” said Lucy.

  “Don’t tease him,” Liz warned her. “You might regret it.”

  “How?” Lucy snorted. “I’m not frightened of a dragon who times things.”

  But Liz was right. Later, Lucy did come to regret her words. As the day crept into evening and the time approached 8:30, she was sitting in the lounge reading a comic when Gauge jumped onto her knee and hurred.

  “What?” she asked.

  He pointed to the ceiling.

  “It’s your bedtime,” Liz muttered. “Thank you, Gauge.”

  “I haven’t finished my story,” Lucy said grumpily. She lifted her comic again.

  Gauge spiked her gently with his tail.

  “Ow!” she protested.

  “Bedtime,” her mother repeated. She hadn’t even looked up from the book she was reading. “Go on. I’ll be up shortly to tuck you in. And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

  Lucy put down her comic and stomped upstairs.

  When the door had closed Liz said to Gauge, “Teeth cleaning – two whole minutes.”

  Gauge blinked and made the cashing sound. He flew upstairs.

  He kept Lucy at the sink until the toothpaste was practically foaming from her mouth. He made certain that she brushed, flossed and swilled out – all of which took precisely two minutes. At nine on the dot, he switched off her light. At eight the next morning, he woke her with a hrrr inside her left ear. At breakfast, he timed the perfect boiled egg (three minutes and fifty-eight seconds) and made Lucy chew every mouthful of cornflakes thirty-two times, so that she would not suffer indigestion.

  It was driving her mad. “Mum, he’s getting on my nerves,” she said. “I’m going to chain myself to…the toilet if he doesn’t stop timing me!”

  “He’s just doing his job,” Liz said. “There, what do you think about that?” She turned round a large sheet of paper. On it was a rhyme:

  TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK,

  SAVE THE SCRUBBLEY LIBRARY CLOCK!

  IF YOU CARE ABOUT OUR TOWN,

  JOIN OUR PROTEST!

  JOIN IT NOW!

  “Yeah, Mum. Dead impressive.”

  “I thought so, too,” Liz beamed. “I bet lots of people will join in.”

  Lucy chewed her cornflakes. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. She took another spoonful. “Then what?”

  Liz’s green eyes sparkled with a hint of mischief. “When we’ve got enough people on our side, we’ll take over the library, sit on the floor and lock ourselves in.”

  “What?!”

  A spit of milk landed on Gauge’s snout. He licked it off with one quick sweep of his tongue.

  “Mum, have you gone barmy?”

  “It’s important to protect Scrubbley’s traditions, Lucy.”

  “But we’ll be arrested! We’ll be in the papers!”

  “Mmm, with any luck,” Liz said brightly. “We’ll probably make the front page. Goodness, I’d better go and brush my hair!”

  Chapter Five

  Lucy could not believe it. She was going to be a criminal – at the age of nine! She had been to a police station once before when she was four and she had lost her bike. The police officers had been very kind, then, and given her a lollipop because she had cried. But if her mother’s plans to storm the town library were successful, the police officers would be sure to take a much dimmer view. She would be put into a prison cell and made to eat porridge. Porridge! Yuk! It was horrible stuff. And they would take her photograph – from her worst side! And make her do inky fingerprints. They might even march her off to court. She would have to see a judge and try not to laugh at his funny wig. It was hopeless. She might be sent to prison for years. All for the sake of a silly clock!

  She frowned at Gauge. He was sitting on her bedroom table in front of her, timing her doing her homework. She was supposed to spend half an hour at the weekend on her school cookery project. This week it was a recipe for soup. Lucy had come up with the idea of bacon soup, because she blamed Mr Bacon for telling her mother about the library clock in the first place. The project wasn’t going well. She looked at Miss Baxter’s notes. Your soup should make the taste buds tingle whilst still being nutritious. Do not be afraid to experiment with your ingredients! So far, Lucy’s list of ingredients were water and bacon. It didn’t sound very tingling at all.

  “How long?” she said to Gauge.

  “One more Earth minute,” he hurred. He glanced at what she’d written. He didn’t look impressed.

  Lucy wrote the words ‘stock cubes’ underneath ‘bacon’. According to her mother, stock cubes were good with everything. Rice pudding? she wondered. Would they work with milky desserts?

  She sighed. This was ridiculous. Her life was now a series of silly thoughts. But as she glanced at Gauge again and saw the willingness to be helpful in his violet eyes (a quality that every special dragon possessed) suddenly an idea came to her.

  “Can you mend clocks?” she asked.

  Gauge tilted his head.

  “You know, can you take them apart and put them back together and make them, y’know, tick properly again? Or bong?”

  Gauge tapped his foot. He wasn’t sure, he said – especially about the bonging. He wasn’t meant to be a fixing dragon.

  “But you could try,” said Lucy. “If I took you to the clock tower you might be able to make it properly chime again. Then
we wouldn’t have to do the protest, would we?”

  Before Gauge could answer, the doorbell rang and Liz let Henry Bacon into the house. Lucy heard Henry saying that Liz might be interested to know that tomorrow afternoon, in the library, a Mr Trustable of the Scrubbley Town Council was going to present the new plans for the improved clock tower, and would she like to attend? Liz said she would definitely like to attend. Lucy gulped. She felt the end of her pencil snap. She knew exactly what her mother was thinking.

  Then Henry said, “Can you help with this, Mrs P? Trying to get a battery into my pocket watch. Very fiddly. Fingers a bit shaky.”

  “Oh, Lucy’s the expert at that kind of thing,” Liz said.

  Hardly had she called upstairs before Lucy was in the kitchen, panting, “I’ll do it!” She shot back up with the watch and the battery before Liz had had time to switch the kettle on.

  “There,” she said to Gauge, putting it at his feet. “Practise on that.”

  Gauge looked at it doubtfully. It was a beautiful old watch. It had a cream-coloured face with golden numerals. He didn’t want to break it, he said.

  Lucy tutted and turned the watch over. Henry had already removed the back plate and flipped the old battery out of its housing. “Just look,” she said. “It works off one of these.” She broke open the new battery packet. “I expect the library clock’s just got…a bigger battery, that’s all. Here.” She handed it to him.

  Gauge took it between his paws. The battery immediately began to crackle and an arc of blue light sparked between his ear tips. A puff of smoke came out of his nostrils. The end of his tail began to jiggle.

  “Are you all right?” asked Lucy.

  Gauge nodded and put the battery down. Gwendolen, Lucy’s own special dragon, who sat in the shadow of her bedside lamp, asked if she might have a go at holding it. Lucy said no and tapped the watch again.

  Gauge peered at the workings. He could see two metal wheels with zigzagging teeth all around their perimeters. The wheels were meshed together. Neither wheel was moving, but it was obvious to Gauge that they would do if this energy cell that Lucy called a battery was to power them. He drummed his claws. He felt sure there were more workings underneath the wheels and pointed to another circle of metal that had a straight groove cut across it. There were lots of these, of different sizes, all over the back of the watch.

  “They’re called screws,” said Lucy. “If you turn them, they sort of open.”

  Gauge’s eyes lit up in wonder. This was a far more interesting timing machine than the clock in the kitchen. He pointed to the screws again, one by one, and to his amazement they began to unwind by themselves.

  “Wow, that’s clever,” gasped Lucy.

  Now Gauge grew bolder still. As the screws fell out of their holes, he flipped aside the covering they’d been holding in place to reveal an assembly of wheels and cogs and levers and springs.

  Before long, it was all in pieces on Lucy’s table.

  Suddenly, Liz’s voice came drifting up the stairs.

  “Lucy, how are you doing with that watch?”

  “Nearly done!” Lucy called back. But she was nervous now. “Erm, you can put it back together, can’t you?” she asked.

  Gauge asked if he could he have a few more Earth minutes to study it.

  “No,” hissed Lucy. “Stick it all back. Now!”

  Gauge frowned in dismay and quickly did as he’d been told.

  As soon as the back plate went on Lucy hurried downstairs and handed the watch to Mr Bacon.

  “Thank you, child,” he said. His eyebrows knotted. “Erm, doesn’t appear to be going.” He shook it and held it to his ear and looked again. “Dead as a doughnut.”

  Lucy’s cheeks began to flush.

  “Must be another duff battery,” said Liz.

  Mr Bacon sniffed. “You did put the right one in, didn’t you, child?”

  “Yes!” snapped Lucy, though she remembered the sparks around Gauge’s ears and wondered if he might have drained its power.

  Just then, Gauge fluttered into the kitchen and landed on the fridge top, looking a bit embarrassed. This time he turned solid as Henry looked around.

  Liz didn’t even glance at him. But Lucy did. As her mother saw Henry to the door, Lucy gritted her teeth and scowled.

  Gauge was holding a watch wheel in his right paw.

  Chapter Six

  The following afternoon, the grey skies produced a fine drizzle over Scrubbley. It would be enough, Lucy hoped, to put her mother off any daft ideas about marching up and down the library precinct. But Liz was determined. She made Lucy put on her hooded yellow coat. Then she drove them both into town.

  The protest sign was by now taped onto a stiff piece of card, which in turn had been tacked, none too securely, to a long wooden stick. Liz sloped it against her shoulder and proudly marched the short distance from the car park to the precinct, chanting her rhyme loudly for all of Scrubbley to hear.

  Lucy didn’t know where to look. But she did her job, handing out the leaflets her mother had prepared, and was surprised to hear people clapping and saying, “Good on you!” This brought her some cheer. Hopefully it meant they would at least have some visitors when they were hauled off to jail.

  If Lucy had expected the precinct to be deserted, she was wrong. A generous crowd had gathered by the library doors. They cheered as Liz trooped down the precinct. One of them dashed forward. To Lucy’s dismay, she saw it was her teacher, the barmy Miss Baxter.

  “Excellent work!” Miss Baxter gushed, eyeing up Liz’s sign. “Hello, Lucy!”

  “Hello, Miss,” Lucy muttered from deep within her hood.

  “Couldn’t have come at a better moment,” said Miss Baxter. “We’ve just heard that Councillor Trustable is going to make a short speech out here – for the cameras!”

  “Cameras?!” Lucy pushed back her hood. To her horror she saw a film crew. The camera was already pointing at the crowd of protesters.

  “They’re from the regional TV news,” said Miss Baxter.

  “Wonderful,” said Liz.

  “I’m going home,” said Lucy.

  “No, no,” said Miss Baxter, drawing her forward. “It’s very important for people to see that the children of the town are just as willing to preserve the old clock as the adults are.”

  “But I’m the only ‘children’ here!” Lucy wailed.

  “Then perhaps they’ll interview you!” Miss Baxter said.

  Interview? Lucy’s cheeks turned as pale as the white library walls.

  Just then, a round of booing began. Lucy looked up to see a handsome man in a long dark overcoat come strolling purposefully out of the library. He was waving a hand as though people were really cheering, not booing. Beside him was another, shorter man, who looked like some kind of guard.

  The handsome man smiled. He had teeth like a run of white piano keys. He stepped onto a small podium. The TV camera swished towards him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—” he began.

  “—And children!” cried Miss Baxter, yanking up Lucy’s hand.

  “And children,” he said, with a smarmy sort of nod. “My name is Roger Trustable, your local elected councillor—”

  “I didn’t vote for you!” someone shouted.

  “And this is my companion, Mr Higson.” He gestured to the shorter man who rolled his beefy shoulders and sniffed. “We are here today to tell you of a wonderful redevelopment plan for your library.”

  “Save our clock!” Miss Baxter shouted. The crowd cheered. The camera turned towards them again. (Lucy immediately hid her face.)

  Roger Trustable raised an important finger. “The hour beckons and time marches on—”

  “Not if you have your way,” said Henry Bacon. He was standing, arms folded, by the library doors.

  “—Progress must be made.”

  “Boo!” went Liz.

  Lucy gritted her teeth. “Mum,” she hissed. The camera was squarely on her mother now. They were going t
o be on the news!

  Liz would not be stopped. “We don’t want progress of the kind you’re talking about! We want history! We want our clock restored!”

  “Save our clock! Save our clock!” the crowd began to chant.

  Councillor Trustable jiggled his tie. “Our reports indicate that the existing clock cannot be repaired—”

  “Pah!” Miss Baxter expostulated. “You’re just too mean to spend money on it, that’s all!”

  The Councillor laughed. “If you look at our record over the past two years, madam, you’ll see that we’ve been—”

  “Playing the same one!” a heckler shouted.

  Lucy did not understand this remark, but it caused a great ripple of laughter all the same. She looked at Councillor Trustable. His cheeks had flushed. He seemed a little annoyed.

  “Perhaps if you were to come into the library and view the Council’s plans?” he suggested.

  “Oh, we will!” said Liz. And she thrust her stick forward so hard that the cardboard sign came off and struck Councillor Trustable in the chest.

  The crowd cheered and surged towards the library doors. Lucy squirmed. The dreaded ‘sit-in’ had started. Worse still, she could see a police car pulling up on the High Street. All the protesters were now heading for the library, leaving just her, Henry Bacon, the film crew, Councillor Trustable and his guard, Mr Higson, behind. This was it. Her life of crime had begun.

  The Councillor stepped down off his podium. His expression was very harsh. He waved the camera away then whispered something snappy to Mr Higson. Higson gave a curt nod and went into the library. He brushed hard past Lucy’s shoulder, spinning her round. She turned to find herself in the eye of the camera.

  “Want to say something, kid?”

  The reporter, a young woman with flyaway hair and very tight blue jeans, thrust a microphone under Lucy’s nose.

  Lucy gulped. Two policemen strolled past, behind her. In about one minute from now, they would probably come back the other way, carrying her mother kicking and screaming to their waiting car.