Tanglewreck

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘But have we gone backwards?’ asked Mrs Rokabye.

  ‘No,’ said the guard, ‘and praise the Heavens for that or I’d have to get out of bed all over again. We haven’t gone backwards, but we haven’t gone forwards either, which for a train is a misfortune.’

  ‘I should say it is!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘So how long do we wait?’

  ‘Until your watch starts again,’ said the guard. ‘You will notice that your watch stopped ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Something should be done.’

  Silver looked out of the window. Everything seemed normal, except that the train was at a standstill and so was the little wristwatch her father had given her. He would know what to do, if only he were here, and then she wondered if he too had got jammed in Time somewhere. After all, he had been on a train, and none of them had ever been found, even though there had been a funeral. Perhaps if she could find the Timekeeper …

  ‘Are we getting older while we’re sitting here?’ Silver asked the guard.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the guard. ‘You will be older when you get to your next birthday, but if Time stands still, you won’t get there and so you won’t be any older.’

  ‘Well, what if we stayed on the train for the rest of our lives?’ asked Silver.

  ‘Impossible,’ said the guard. ‘Time or no time, the buffet closes at six o’clock, and that’s that.’

  ‘I want to get off the train!’ shouted Mrs Rokabye suddenly. ‘I shall get off the train and on to a bus.’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, it’s against company policy to let anyone off the train while it’s in a Time Trap. We do not know what is happening out there, and we can’t be responsible for your safety. If you leave the train you might be stuck on this section of track for ever.’

  ‘FOR EVER??’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Outside Macclesfield for ever?’

  ‘Regrettably, yes,’ said the guard.

  Silver was fidgeting with her hands in her pockets and wishing she had a hard-boiled egg to eat, when she felt something sharp at the bottom of the torn lining in her old duffle coat. She felt round the edges of it with her fingers, and she realised it was the pin or whatever it was that she had found on the floor of the cellar the day she had been shovelling coal for Abel Darkwater.

  Maybe if I point it towards London, we’ll get there quicker, she thought, and she turned the pointed arrow tip South, and closed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could.

  Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all, in fact that was just the point; the nothingness of what was happening was so intense that it was like waiting for a thunderstorm to break. And then it did.

  Silver opened her eyes just as Mrs Rokabye’s sweets and magazines came flying past her ear.

  ‘Hold on!’ shouted the guard, as the train roared forward.

  It was like being in a rocket. Silver felt herself forced back against her seat, and she heard a noise like something whirling round her head. She held on tightly, as the other people in the carriage screamed with panic. Mrs Rokabye was lying across the table in a dead faint.

  Silver was scared but she tried to notice what was really happening, and what was happening was that the hands on her watch were going round and round faster and faster, and everything outside the train had gone dark. Then there was a terrific thud, and she heard announcements coming over the tannoy system.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have now arrived at London King’s Cross. Please take all your belongings with you when you leave the train.’

  ‘What time is it?’ said Silver, as the guard got up from under the table.

  ‘An hour earlier than it should be,’ he said, consulting his pocket watch, ‘if that means anything to you.’

  ‘I want my money back,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘This journey has taken years off my life.’

  Silver hoped this was true. She picked up her little bag and followed Mrs Rokabye off the train.

  London was a bewildering place, full of roars and noises and dust, and bright red buses and black taxis with yellow lights on top like lit-up wasps.

  They got into a black taxi and Mrs Rokabye gave the driver the address on a piece of paper.

  ‘Just visiting, are you?’ said the cabbie. ‘You come to the wrong place here, Missus. This place has gone barmy. Don’t know if it’s the Little Green Men or the hole in the Ozone Layer, but Time ain’t wot it used to be.’

  ‘I blame mobile phones,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who had said this before and was not one to change her mind.

  ‘I think it’s our own fault,’ said the cabbie. ‘We’re all going so fast that we’re taking Time with us. Nobody’s got any time nowadays, rush, rush, rush. Well, here we are, and there’s no time left. I reckon Time’s running out like everything else on the planet – like oil and water and all that.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who was bored rigid, but Silver thought it was very interesting, and she decided that if she had to spend two days with Abel Darkwater she would find out all she could about Time. After all, if she knew a bit more about Time, she might get to know something about the Timekeeper.

  Suddenly they drove into a huge crowd of people waving banners.

  ‘What’s all this?’ demanded Mrs Rokabye.

  ‘Demonstrations against the Time Tornadoes an’ all that. People want the Government to do something – but it says there’s nothing it can do. Time is like the weather, you can’t control it, can you?’

  ‘There was an item on last night’s news,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Very worrying for all of you, I’m sure. Look out!’

  The taxi had slid to a stop in front of a woman on a bicycle waving a banner that said, ‘Time is not Money.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ snorted Mrs Rokabye, who would have sold all the time in the world if only she owned it.

  ‘Civil unrest,’ said the cabbie. ‘We’re heading for big trouble, I tell you.’

  Silver watched out of the window as the taxi moved through the modern streets and into an older part of the city where the houses were tall, with square-paned windows.

  ‘Spitalfields,’ said the cabbie. ‘Old part of town, this, used to be outside the City walls in the days when London had walls all the way round it. Leper colony used to be here, and mad houses and slums and rats the size of Scottie dogs and just as black.’

  Mrs Rokabye was not looking impressed. Nobody in her Beautiful Homes magazine lived anywhere like this.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ said the cabbie, as they pulled up outside an old brown shop, its windows full of clocks and watches.

  ‘Tempus Fugit,’ read Silver, looking at the peeling sign over the door. ‘And in the window there’s a golden chariot with wings, and there is –’

  Her heart sank because she didn’t like him.

  There was Abel Darkwater standing in the doorway waiting to greet them.

  Tempus Fugit

  A bel Darkwater was a round man.

  He had a round face, and a round body, and round rings on his round fingers. The gold loops of his pocket-watch chain were round, and when he drew out his watch, which he did as the taxi pulled up at his door, his watch was round and fat and gold.

  ‘Early,’ he observed.

  ‘It was the train,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘First it hardly moved at all, then it shot down here at the speed of light.’

  ‘Are you speaking loosely or accurately?’ asked Darkwater. ‘Did you actually travel at 300,000 kilometres per second?’

  ‘No,’ said Silver, ‘but we didn’t get any older – the guard said so.’

  ‘He was a ridiculous man,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘I am quite exhausted.’

  ‘And then there was a demonstration in the street,’ said Silver.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and this is only the beginning.’

  The beginning of what? thought Silver, but Mrs Rokabye was dragging the bags out of the taxi and complaining about her trials.

  ‘Come in, come in,’
said Abel Darkwater. ‘This is a treat, an outing, an expedition, no one shall be exhausted, we shall all be happy, oh yes.’

  The house was a tall wide house with a broad doorway into the hall, and a flight of stairs at the far end of the hall. The way into the shop was off this hallway, and Abel Darkwater’s private apartments were upstairs. The shop was lit by electric light, and looked bright and welcoming, but as the four of them went slowly up the stairs into the house, the only light was from an oil lamp burning on the window ledge. The other rooms were lit with candles.

  Mrs Rokabye did not look at all pleased; she had hoped for central heating and plasma-screen TV and thick carpets and leather sofas and one of those fridges that beeped when you were out of milk. Abel Darkwater was very rich, so why did he live in a house that didn’t even have electricity?

  ‘I haven’t done much to the house since it was built,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘Time passes so quickly, as you discovered on the train.’

  Mrs Rokabye sniffed. ‘I thought you lived in luxury!’

  ‘Oh, I do, Mrs Rokabye. I live in the luxury of time, and how many of us can say that?’

  ‘When was this house built?’ asked Silver, looking at the wooden panelling that lined the rooms, and the heavy shutters folded back on either side of the windows.

  ‘1720,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘I – that is, my forebears – moved here in 1738. It has hardly been altered since.’

  ‘Like Tanglewreck,’ said Silver, ‘but not so old.’

  Abel Darkwater smiled, Mrs Rokabye glowered. Why did everyone she knew live in horrible old houses? She longed for a white settee and a glass coffee table and one of those plastic palm trees you didn’t have to water.

  ‘Where is the bathroom, please?’ she said.

  ‘It hasn’t been put in yet,’ replied Darkwater. ‘There was some talk of it in 1952, but the plumber never came back. I must telephone him soon. For now, dear lady, please use the commode in your bedroom. Sniveller will show you the way.’

  ‘Sniveller?’

  ‘My manservant.’

  Abel Darkwater took a bell from his pocket and rang it loudly. There was a sniffing sound from somewhere downstairs in the shop, and then the man Sniveller appeared. He was a short wiry man with no hair at all on his head, and black bunches of it protruding from his bright red nose. He bowed to Mrs Rokabye and begged her to follow him up the stairs. Very dubiously she did so.

  ‘Ah, my dear child. Now we are alone, oh yes, and I have tea ready for us in my study.’

  ‘It’s not tea-time,’ said Silver.

  ‘Time is what we make it,’ said Abel Darkwater, leading the way, ‘and in my opinion, there is always time for a piece of chocolate cake, oh yes.’

  What a place it was, Abel Darkwater’s study!

  The floorboards were painted with a circular sundial that told the hour as the light fell through the window.

  There was a grandfather clock on one wall, its pendulum tick-ticking from side to side.

  Around the window that overlooked the street were more clocks than Silver could count, and each one told a different time, with its place in the world written underneath it – New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sydney, the North Pole.

  There were other names too, ones she had never heard of, with little pictures of stars beneath them.

  ‘Where’s Alpha Centauri?’ she asked.

  ‘It is the star nearest to ours. It is four light years away. If you were invited to tea on Alpha Centauri in four years’ time, you would have to set off now and travel at the speed of light if you wanted to get there before all the cake had been eaten. Fortunately, you are here today, and there is plenty of cake left.’

  Abel Darkwater smiled. He was better at smiling than Mrs Rokabye, but Silver had the feeling he had just been practising for longer.

  The bookshelves were stuffed with old leather-bound books about clocks and watches. The table was covered in diagrams of cross-sections of old mechanisms. A chronometer lay in pieces in a box on the floor.

  Silver looked up at the ceiling; a clock like a children’s mobile was gentle swinging round and round.

  Everything in the study was ticking, even the two of them, their hearts beating like human clocks.

  Silver had a feeling that they were sitting inside Time, and then she wondered, though she knew it was silly, if she could ever climb outside Time?

  The second that she had the thought, Abel Darkwater glanced at her.

  He’s reading my mind, she said to herself, and immediately forced herself to think about cabbage.

  Abel Darkwater gave Silver homemade lemonade, with the lemons still floating about in it, and chocolate cake thick as a mattress.

  ‘After tea I will show you my shop,’ he said. ‘People come from all over the world to buy and sell clocks and watches here. That’s how I became acquainted with your dear departed father; he was coming to visit me about the, er, Timekeeper.’ He said this last word very quickly, watching Silver’s face with his shiny round eyes.

  Cabbage, thought Silver, cabbage, cabbage, cabbage.

  Darkwater frowned and continued, ‘Yes, sadly, he was trying to put that remarkable object into my care. It would be safe here, you see, oh yes, safe, and such a thing should be in safe hands, not left alone or neglected or used as a plaything, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t know where it is,’ said Silver. ‘Don’t ask me because I don’t know. Mrs Rokabye asks me every day.’

  Abel Darkwater smiled again, and continued.

  ‘You don’t like Mrs Rokabye, do you? I can’t say that I am surprised. I do not like her myself. If I had the Timekeeper, we – that is you – could be rid of Mrs Rokabye for ever.’

  ‘She’s my aunt,’ said Silver. ‘She’s signed all the papers. It’s legal.’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘You could be cared for at Tanglewreck until you are old enough to do as you please. If you were to sell me the Timekeeper, I would arrange everything on your behalf.’

  ‘I don’t know where it is! I’ve never even seen it,’ said Silver. ‘I’ll just have to wait to grow up, that’s all.’

  ‘It might be too late by then,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘The world is changing. Time is running out.’

  He stood up and went over to a cabinet and took out what looked like a golden egg-timer, except that it was about a foot tall. He turned it upside down and the sand began to run through it.

  He paused, watching the sand and rocking back and forward on his heels, like a clock pendulum himself.

  ‘I will tell you a story,’ he said, ‘because children like stories.’ He paused for effect, and began.

  ‘Long ago, in the pyramids of Egypt, the great god Ra, the Sun God, told his people that one day the Earth would roll up like a scroll, taking Time with it. The Pharaohs consulted their best magicians, and the magicians told them that before the End of Time there would be one chance left for the world to save itself.

  ‘What chance? To imagine and design and set in motion a device that could regulate Time. Look at all the clocks on the wall telling me the time in every part of the world – and look at those other clocks, that tell me the time in different parts of the universe!

  ‘On Earth, a second in Tokyo is the same length as a second in London, but a second on Jupiter is not the same length as a second on Earth. A clock in a rocket ship runs slower than a clock on Earth. Time is the most mysterious force in the Universe, and the most powerful, oh yes, and whoever controls Time will control the Universe.’

  As he said this, his round eyes grew wide as two orbs, and he seemed to float a few inches above the floor. The sound of the clocks ticking was deafening and Silver put her hands over her ears. Abel Darkwater continued to talk.

  ‘In our world, Time is becoming unruly. Some seconds, some minutes, some hours, last longer than others. Some are shorter. We do not know how this is happening, but it is happening.

  ‘The fabric of Time is beginning to tear, a
nd when it tears, the past pokes through, and sometimes the future too. You have heard of the Time Tornadoes that have struck this city, and today you were caught in a Time Trap. So far these things are small enough, but they are signs, signs that, as the great god Ra predicted, Time as we know it may be coming to an end.’

  Abel Darkwater went and tapped his hourglass.

  ‘When Time comes to an end, you too will come to an end. I am sure you don’t want that to happen.’

  There was a knock on the door and Sniveller stood outside with Mrs Rokabye, who was wearing a pair of bright pink earmuffs and complaining about the cold.

  ‘Let me take you down to the shop,’ said Abel Darkwater cheerfully, his eyes returning to their normal marble-size. ‘The shop has underfloor heating of the most up-to-date kind – for the watches, you know. In the meantime Sniveller will light the fires in all of your rooms, and you will soon be quite warm.’

  ‘Quite warm,’ said Mrs Rokabye, ‘is not warm enough.’

  They went downstairs to the shop. There was a polished glass counter filled with beautiful wristwatches lying on deep red velvet. Clocks lined the walls, and in the corner was a twelve-feet-tall stuffed black bear, his whole body pinned with military and naval operational watches – watches that were also compasses and depth-meters.

  In the front window was a golden chariot with wings.

  ‘The emblem of Tempus Fugit,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘which I am sure you know means “Time Flies”.’

  ‘I told her that,’ said Mrs Rokabye, wondering if she could steal a very particular lady’s jewelled wristwatch she liked the look of.

  ‘But why is it a chariot with wings?’ asked Silver.

  ‘Ah,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘it is from a poem written in the sixteenth century by a member of our Society, for we are a Society, you know. Tempus Fugit has a very distinguished history. We are Collectors, and everything here is a Collector’s Item. You might say that we collect Time …’

  ‘The chariot …’ said Silver, who knew that grown-ups can never remember what it was you asked them only five seconds ago.