Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

by Peter Dickinson

  George had piled all right. And when he’d got all the cheeses the rods would take he’d hung things on extra. They were like a scrap-iron dealer’s dream of a Christmas tree, those weights, with anvils dangling off them, and great big iron cogs from abandoned mills, and cannon balls, and the odd bollard. An anchor even, he must have brought up from Branmouth. It’s a wonder the beams above hadn’t caved through, bringing the whole lot down, works and carousel and bells and weights and all, on to the WI cakes below.

  And the damage he must have done the old clock, bearings worn, rods buckled, levers out of true, pinions fractured, all to keep it groaning on another year because he didn’t know how to set it right!

  I didn’t say anything. The room was haunted by silence, the ghost of a slow tick not there, because the long pendulum was still and the clock was dead.

  Something scuttered across the floor above.

  “We’ve got a few mice up there,” said the Town Clerk. “They might be causing the trouble. George puts poison down, but they don’t seem to take it.”

  “Your trouble’s never mice,” I said. “Your trouble’s people.”

  THIRD ESSAY ON MICE

  The Hickorys live at Spring, the Dickorys live at Summer and the Docks live at Autumn. None of them live at Winter. I used to think this was because they were scared of the foxes—foxes eat mice—but it isn’t that. It’s because it wouldn’t be respectful to Lady Winter. I’ll come to her later.

  When Granddad carved the human figures he made them hollow, partly to save weight and partly because some of them have bits of machinery inside, so that Lady Autumn can wave her corn-dolly around and so on. They’ve all got to go out into the open once an hour, rain or shine, so he put drainage holes running down out of the hollow space through their legs and out at their heels, where you can’t see them from below. The mice use these as their front doors.

  I remember seeing Tracy Dickory when she was just out of the nest, sitting on the sill of one of the window-slits that let the bell-chimes out. She was looking at the market closing down below, her nose twitching with interest. (She’s a really bright, adventurous mouse, Tracy. In fact, she’s the heroine of this story.) Then she noticed Sebastian Dock on the sill one along. In a flash she was off and round and up next door, asking him where he was from:

  (That’s a mousehole in a heel. The wavy look makes it a question. I’m not going to have to go on explaining this every time one of the mice asks a question, am I?) Sebastian answered:

  (That’s easy. He lives in the second harvester.) So Tracy knew he must be a Dock. The Docks don’t get on with the Dickorys (or the Hickorys, come to that). The Dickorys say the Docks are snobs:

  And the Docks say the Dickorys have fleas:

  But Tracy’s not the sort of mouse to worry about things like that. In three seconds she was chatting away about home life and her brother Kevin and how only yesterday morning when they were supposed to be asleep they’d sneaked up to their look-out place in their milkmaid’s ear-hole and seen Uncle Gerald Dickory—a married mouse with great-great-grandchildren of his own—going sneaking off to meet Madeline Hickory behind the quarter-bells.

  Sebastian was fascinated. That’s not the sort of thing Docks talk about at home. Of course, like an idiot when he got back to the nest he let on what he’d been up to, and all the family insisted on searching him for fleas. He’ll learn. And it didn’t stop his Aunt Stephanie scampering round to tell her cronies what Madeline had been up to.

  (All right. I made some of that up. I don’t know exactly what Tracy and Sebastian talked about, but it would have been something like that. The rest of it’s true.)

  I’ve got a soft spot for Tracy, I admit. I must have seen her almost as soon as she was born. It was like this. I was having my first thorough look-round to see what needed doing so I could give the Town Clerk an estimate of what the job would cost. The original problem was the leading-off rods—they’re the shafts that run out through the dials to turn the hands round. Because one end is out in the weather they tend to clog and rust and become stiffer to turn, so George had been hanging his extra weights on to keep them moving. I’d need scaffolding up the tower to get at them from outside, but that apart they were no real problem. But there was no point, after George’s efforts, in just dealing with them without putting the rest to rights.

  Besides …

  That clock was a wonder, all right. It was a young man’s clock, romantic, impossible. Nobody but a young man in love with the sheer idea of time would have taken on building a clock on that scale, and knowing what I know now I don’t think anyone but Granddad would have brought it off, and set it running for getting on a hundred years with no more than a spot of grease in the obvious places and the weight-ropes renewing every now and then.

  I’d come to Branton telling myself I was going to teach them a lesson for what they’d done to Granddad, and by the time they’d finished they’d pay me what they owed him, twice over, but I hadn’t been there more than a morning before I forgot about money. All I knew was that I was going to get Granddad’s clock going again, no matter what, and set it running for another hundred years.

  It took me a good two days to make my list of what needed doing, so it was towards the second evening before I took a look inside Lady Summer. I chose her because she was nearest. She’d got to raise an arm over her head while she was twirling, so on the plans there was a set of rods and pivots to see that happened. I found the inspection hatch in the carved folds of her dress between her shoulders. It can’t have been opened for years, as the cracks had been painted over several times, but I managed to prize it loose …

  (And now, if you can’t remember what happened on page 6 you’re going to have to go back and read it again. I’m sorry. All that belongs in here, but they made me take it out and put it at the beginning. “You can’t start off with a First Essay on Mice,” they said. “Who’s going to read a First Essay on anything? You’ve got to start with an exciting bit.” Ah well, I daresay they know what they’re talking about.)

  … I inspected the cranks and pivots. They were fine, so I gave them a touch of grease and closed the hatch and left the mother mouse to it.

  It was getting late, but I opened up some of the other figures. Even the ones which didn’t move their heads or arms had good big cavities in them, and all of them except the winter group had at least one family of mice living there.

  One had a nest with babies. That mother stayed too. The other mice hid in the passage down to the entrance hole but I could see they lived there. All of the chambers had food-containers. Some had pieces of cloth on the floor, like carpets, and neat piles of bedding round the edges.

  I closed the doors, sat down on my camp stool and finished making my notes. All around me I heard, or imagined I heard, faint movements as the mice crept back into their homes. They were frightened. I could feel their shared fright—I’m sure about that, just as I’m sure that when I switched off my light and went down the stairs I could feel their relief.

  THIRD ESSAY ON CLOCKS

  This essay is really about time, because I want to explain about mouse time being different, but I’ll start with clocks.

  Look at it this way. The time a pendulum takes to swing depends on its length. Give the bathroom light-pull a gentle shove and it’ll swing, oh, a bit under once a second, depending how long it is. While it’s still swinging take hold of it a little way from the bottom, and the swing of the loose bit will speed up. It’s too light to make a proper pendulum, but if it had a decent weight on the end it would triple its speed, or more. A meter-long pendulum swings from tick to tock in half a second. The Branton Town Hall Clock has a four-meter pendulum, two seconds between tick and tock, the great, slow heartbeat that keeps it alive.

  Animal hearts are like that, too. The larger the animal the slower the beat. A vole’s heart beats twenty times as fast as an elephant’s. (I’m not
sure about the exact figures.) I’ve read somewhere that all mammals except humans live for roughly the same number of heartbeats, so an elephant lives twenty times as long as a vole. If humans were the same, twenty-seven would be a good old age for us. Perhaps it was, once, when we were still almost animals.

  Where was I?

  Oh, yes. Mouse lives seem short to us, but they aren’t to them because they pack a lot in. They live at the speed of their heartbeats. If we could see life through a mouse’s brain it would seem to whiz along like fast-forwarding a video. When I opened the back of Lady Summer I stared at Tracy’s mum for about a minute, my time. She stared at me a good fifteen in hers. Ages.

  They have babies quickly too. Healthy mice with plenty of food around can have ten litters a year. So why isn’t the world waist-deep in squeaking furry bodies? Because there isn’t enough food, and lots of them get caught and eaten by other animals, and so on.

  There’s plenty of food in Branton Market and there’s no-one to eat the Clock Mice except Juno, and they’re usually too quick for her, so why isn’t the clock tower crawling with brilliant telepathic mice?

  First, they’ve slowed their birth-rate. They have two, or sometimes three litters a year, and they start breeding a bit later than ordinary mice. I suppose the parents have more to teach and the children have more to learn and understand, but I don’t know whether this is something they’ve decided for themselves or something Nature’s arranged for them.

  Then there’s another reason. If you look at a nest of the babies just after their eyes have opened, you can see that most of them aren’t Clock Mice. There’s always one or two (I’ve never seen more than three) which have eyes with the proper depth, that something-behind-the-surface, but the rest have pebble-eyes. The parents look after them all and feed them equally and seem just as fond of them.

  Then, soon after they begin to run around, the ordinary hard-eyed ones wander off and don’t come back. It happens over two or three days. They go down to the market, and with all the food and scurry and excitement they just seem to forget about home. The parents don’t drive them away, in fact they seem sad for a bit, and then they settle down to teaching the one or two who are left about life, and the world, and Lady Winter, and how not to get caught by Juno.

  Apart from their own babies, until they leave, they won’t let ordinary mice into the tower. They’ll even gang up and drive off rats, though rats are much bigger and fiercer than they are.

  Juno is another matter.

  FIRST ESSAY ON CATS

  You can’t blame cats for killing birds and mice and baby rabbits. It’s in their nature. They don’t know the meaning of pity. I wish they wouldn’t play with them first, but that’s in their nature too.

  SECOND ESSAY ON PEOPLE

  People are different. There are plenty of things in our nature which you can still blame us for when we do them. Horrible things, sometimes, which we do to each other or to animals because the natural impulse is there, left over from before we were human. The difference is that we do know the meaning of pity. We can imagine what it’s like to have such things done to one. We know that Nature’s no excuse.

  FIRST ESSAY ON CATS (continued)

  I found out later that it was Dora McTurk who had let Juno up the stairs. It was Thursday, so the Oxfam workers were using the room at the bottom of the tower for sorting clothes. People coming to the market bring things that don’t suit them after all, or they’ve got bored with, or their children have grown out of, or their aunts have given them, and the helpers sort them into what they can sell in Oxfam shops and what they can give to charity and what can only go for recycling and so on. I don’t want to give the impression that Branton people are mean all through. They can be as generous as anyone about things they understand. Anyway, there the helpers were, all sorting away, when Jeremy Hickory tried to sneak through to the stairs.

  It was all his fault. He should have been in bed long before the helpers came in, or at least found somewhere safe and waited till nightfall.

  The fact is, he was drunk. It was a miracle he’d managed to find his way back to the tower, and now he’d got to cross this room full of helpers and piles of old jeans and wrong-size ski-pants and crazy headscarves and studded black biker jackets and so on. He was pie-eyed, reeling, smashed, and he wasn’t used to it. He was a steady young mouse, really, but he’d married Fiona Dock a week ago and they’d had their first tiff last night, about whether they had to go round to dinner with the Docks every Wednesday for the rest of their lives:

  (That’s what Fiona said about dinner with her family.)

  (And that’s what Jeremy said.) And it had finished with Jeremy scuttling out, swearing.

  As chance would have it, at the foot of the tower he’d found the broken bottom of a rum bottle with a drop of rum still in it—several stiff tots, if you’re mouse-size—and Lady Winter knows what happened after that, but he’d been in a fight all right and his left eye was bunged solid and his fur reeked of female and that wouldn’t be any of the Clock Mice. Oh, no. They were all accounted for.

  Susan Hartley saw him first. She slung the moon-boot she was holding at him and missed. He made it under the pile of anoraks. Patty Biggs heaved them aside, and there he was in the open again. Pete Wisley, who was helping his mother with the shoes, took a kick at him and sent him flying into the rack of evening dresses, but being drunk he landed without hurting himself. Janet Wisley came for him with a track-shoe but Wynnette Wynn, who can’t bear to see an animal suffer, had tipped out a bin of baby socks and was rushing to trap him under the bin, screaming, “Don’t hurt it! Don’t hurt it!” as she came. She crashed into Janet and brought the evening gowns down on both of them, and that gave Jeremy time to get his bearings and stagger off under the door at the foot of the stairs.

  The helpers sorted themselves out. Dora McTurk waited till Wynnette had gone for her usual cup of herb tea. She fetched Juno who’d been having just as wild a night as Jeremy in her own cat fashion and was sleeping it off under the stove, unlocked the door to the tower and shoved her through.

  “Go and earn your living, you lazy beast,” she said, and shut the door behind her.

  FIRST ESSAY ON BELLS

  There is something about bells. I think it’s the way they go on humming to themselves after they’ve been hit and the main note has died away, but all sorts of other notes keep faintly coming and going. With a big bell, even after it’s silent you can put your hand on the metal and feel the last tingle of vibrations, as though it were still singing to itself, private music of its own which we can’t hear.

  Maybe there’s no more to it than that. Lots of things feel like mysteries, but aren’t really. Maybe even time itself would turn out not to be mysterious at all if our minds were a different shape.

  My cousin Minnie is into bell magic. She says that the universe is built on resonance, and a bell is a focus of the universal resonance which binds the electrons round the nucleus of an atom and the stars into their courses. Sounds good, doesn’t it? A lot of nonsense sounds good, I’m afraid, but I’m fond of Minnie and she cooks great baps, so it was a good excuse to drive over to Witchwater Fell and see her when I decided that the C-sharp bell of the carillon didn’t sound right. (The carillon’s the tinkly tune before the quarters.)

  Typical of Minnie to live at a place called Witchwater Fell. It’s just a sprawl of old mining cottages up a hillside, most of them empty now. The Witchwater itself runs down a great pipe and drives turbines for electricity.

  Minnie flicked at the bell with the middle finger of her left hand and listened to its note.

  “That’s a nasty, mean little bell you’ve got there,” she said. “Lucky it isn’t a big one. It could do a lot of harm if it were a big one.”

  “I can’t see it’s cracked or anything,” I said.

  “Ah, no,” she said. “Cracked, and you can send them back to the foundry for re
-casting. There’s nothing you can do with a bell like you’ve got there. Melt it down and you’ll infect a whole chime of bells that’s cast from the one pot, and then you won’t half have trouble in some unlucky parish.”

  I didn’t snort my disbelief, but I could afford to smile, Minnie being stone blind.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ve got a sweet little C-sharp bell I’ll give you for your clock. You can have it for nothing, or nothing but this. Before the week’s out you’ll take the old bell down to Branmouth and you’ll hire a boat and get them to run you a mile out to sea—two miles would be better—and you’ll throw the bell over the side. That’s all you can do with a bell like that. Only the sea’s strong enough to take care of it. Now you can put it out of my house, right outside the garden gate, while I go and fetch you the other.”

  Still smiling at her nonsense and looking forward to my baps I took the bell out and put it on the passenger seat of the van. When I came back up the garden path she was standing in the doorway with her own bell to her ear.

  “I won’t ask you in,” she said. “You’d best be getting back. Someone’s going to need you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I don’t know, but I can hear,” she said, and handed me the bell.