When his Aunt Joyce visited she took his chin in her hand and told him how quickly time passed.
‘The year has flown by,’ she said, examining his face. ‘Here we are in September already, and the trees are starting to turn. What do you want to be when you grow up, Patrick?’
‘A clockmaker,’ he said, because it was the first thing that sprang to mind. ‘I want to be an horologist.’ And Aunt Joyce turned to his mother and said how wonderful, Doreen, a doctor in the family.
After that, Patrick felt obliged to borrow library books about clocks. He studied pictures of the Glockenspiel in Munich, with its feasting aristocrats and its jousting knights, and the Peacock Clock, with its chirping cricket and singing owl, and the Torre dell’Orologio in Venice, with its two bronze giants who struck the bell on the hour. His favourite, though, was the Strasbourg Cathedral clock, which was as tall as a three-storey building. Its parade of figures included the three wise men, who bowed before the Virgin Mary every hour, Jesus, who appeared regularly to bless the twelve apostles, and a metal rooster which crowed and flapped it wings at noon. Patrick saw pictures of birdcage clocks and coffin clocks and clocks that showed the phases of the moon. He saw the metal weights used to regulate time, and he learned how it was once measured by sun and by shadow, by the wastage of lamp oil, the burning of candles. He learned how fire clocks gauged the hour by the ashes produced, how the Chinese added mercury to their water clocks to stop time freezing. The first mechanical clocks were believed to describe the movements of the universe, the workings of God; they were toys for the rich, who had the least reason, in Patrick’s opinion, to keep track of their days. Clocks could indicate the feast days of saints, the positions of stars; clocks could predict eclipses. Galileo, Patrick discovered, conceived of a pendulum by watching a cathedral lamp swaying and timing it by his own pulse. A French man called de Villayer used his sense of taste to tell the time at night: when he reached for the hour hand in the dark, his fingertip found one of twelve different spices positioned on the dial in place of numbers. At the end of the eighteenth century, Patrick read, an exporter sold defective cuckoo clocks to China. When the deceitful vendor arrived with a second cargo, he convinced his furious customers that the clocks were indeed in working order, and that the cuckoo was a very unusual bird which sang only at certain times of the year. When the season was right, he assured them, every cuckoo in every clock would open its throat and sing.
Then Patrick’s friend Andrew was given a set of Meccano for his birthday, and Patrick was invited round to see it. The finest hobby in the world for boys, said the instruction manual. Try building models entirely of your own design. In doing this you will feel the real thrill of the engineer and the inventor.
‘Mine makes five hundred and forty-seven models,’ said Andrew. ‘More, if you count the ones I invent myself.’ And he told Patrick about a Belgian boy, Marcel de Wilde, who had constructed a model of the Barendrecht Lift Bridge in Holland.
‘He’d never even seen it,’ said Andrew. ‘Only in photographs. It took eight thousand pieces of Meccano.’ In the picture he showed Patrick, Marcel de Wilde was crouching beside the towering model, adding the finishing touches. He was wearing shorts, and a sleeveless pullover which did not look home-knitted.
‘I’ve decided to make a clock,’ Andrew announced a few days later. ‘And I’ve joined the Meccano Guild. If I can get someone else to join, I’ll be presented with a Recruiting Medallion.’ He showed Patrick the Guild information in the manual. Its primary object is to bring boys together, and to make them feel that they are all members of a great brotherhood, each trying to help others to get the very best out of life.
‘Well?’ said Andrew.
‘I’ll have to ask my father,’ mumbled Patrick.
Day by day, after school, the clock took shape. Andrew did most of the construction himself, but now and then he let Patrick help. When it was finished it would work just like a real one, Andrew said, and he showed Patrick an article about a Meccano clock made in France. It was nearly twice as tall as the man standing proudly beside it in the picture, and it displayed the movements of the planets, the time in all parts of the Earth, the day of the year. Inside there was one wheel, said Andrew, which made a complete turn once every two thousand, five hundred years. ‘He got the idea from the clock at Strasbourg Cathedral,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the most famous clocks in the world.’ And he began telling Patrick about the bowing wise men, and the crowing metal rooster, and Patrick said nothing. He opened the instruction manual and read while Andrew talked and talked.
If you are ever in difficulty with your models, or you want advice on anything connected with this great hobby, write to us. We receive every day hundreds of letters from boys in all parts of the world, and each of these is answered personally by one of our staff of experts. Whatever your problem may be, write to us about it.
‘There’s nothing new about Meccano,’ Patrick’s father said that night. ‘It’s been around for years. I used to play with it myself. Terrible waste of time.’
‘But it’s the finest hobby in the world for boys,’ said Patrick. ‘And if you come up with your own models, you feel the real thrill of the engineer and the inventor.’
His father, however, refused to buy any.
It didn’t take long to convert the house. To speed things up, Malcolm did a lot of the simpler work himself, after the builders had finished each day. He hardly had time to eat dinner. Ruth tried not to watch as he peeled off layers of wallpaper, the patterns as familiar as old photographs.
‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ he said, sanding away cracked paint. ‘We’ll probably get students in. I should be finished in a few weeks.’
They lived upstairs for the first fortnight, while the bottom storey was done, then moved downstairs so the rest could be completed. They had to shift the Christmas tree, and the ornaments shook and fell as they carried it, leaving a trail of stars and bells and angels and snowflakes on the stairs. Daniel didn’t mind the disruption; for him, whose memory was so short, it was an adventure, a camping holiday. The rooms filled with dust. It was astonishing, Ruth thought, how quickly a place could be divided in two.
In the new year, the day before they moved, Malcolm arrived home to find his wife kneeling in the hall, pulling the tape off sealed cartons. Their possessions surrounded her in unsteady piles: books, linen, newspaper-wrapped china. Malcolm had to pick his way through them to get to her.
‘I thought we were meant to be packing,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek.
‘Where’s Laura’s bear, have you seen Laura’s bear?’ Ruth dragged a new carton to herself and plucked at the tape with her fingernails.
‘I saw Daniel with it the other day. I thought you’d given it to him to play with.’ Ruth stared at him. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I thought you’d given it to him. It was a nice idea, I thought.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me? You know how hard he is on toys. How rough he can be,’
Malcolm smoothed the end of the tape back down. ‘He wasn’t doing anything to it.’
‘Remember what he did to the truck Mum gave him? And the koala Phil sent over?’
‘I thought it was nice he had something of Laura’s. He doesn’t have anything of hers at all.’
Malcolm reached for his wife, but Ruth was rising to her feet and his fingers slipped down her back and into air. She strode towards Daniel’s room, brushing a pile of crockery with her foot as she passed. A teacup teetered to the floor. The handle broke away and spun across the polished wood like a question mark. Ruth didn’t stop.
‘Daniel,’ she said, very slowly, ‘Mummy wants to find Laura’s bear and I think you might know where he is.’
Daniel didn’t look up from his colouring book. He was gripping an orange crayon in his fist and scribbling over outlines of houses, dogs, beach scenes. Everything was orange today; there were pages of it.
‘Bear, bear, bear,’ he said, co
louring an ice-cream cone orange.
‘Sweetheart,’ said Ruth. ‘Listen to me. What have you done with Laura’s bear?’
Daniel stopped colouring. He studied the crayon, dug his thumbnail into the wax.
‘Mummy will be very upset if he’s gone missing. We’re moving tomorrow, we have to find him. Do you know where he might be hiding?’
He shook his head.
Ruth crouched slowly down to the floor and took the crayon from him. ‘Lying is a very, very bad thing to do,’ she said, ‘and you’ll always be found out in the end.’ She stroked Daniel’s hair. He tore a corner off the ice-cream page and pressed it into a tiny, tight ball. ‘Mummy knows when you’re not telling the truth, sweetheart.’
Daniel rolled and rolled the paper pellet between his finger and thumb. ‘He was all dirty,’ he said. ‘He needed a bath.’
Ruth swallowed. ‘A bath.’
‘His ears were dirty. And his tummy. I washed him.’
Laura’s bear was balanced on the edge of the bath. A pool of water had trickled down the side and spread across the floor. The bear slouched, heavy with water.
‘Oh,’ whispered Ruth. ‘Oh, oh no.’ She knelt to the floor, touched the wet fur.
‘Mummy, your knees are getting wet,’ said Daniel.
Ruth didn’t answer. The more she touched the bear, the more he curled in on himself. He couldn’t even hold up his head.
‘He’s just a little kid,’ shouted Malcolm. And you tell me often enough that he’s different, that we need to be patient with him.’
‘It’s the dishonesty that bothers me,’ said Ruth. ‘The sneakiness. He wasn’t going to tell me, you know.’
‘It was an accident,’ said Malcolm. ‘Accidents happen.’
And Ruth was quiet then, because she didn’t want to talk about accidents with Malcolm, not with Daniel so near by.
It was an accident, the man told himself. The girl shouldn’t have offered him a ride if she didn’t want company. She shouldn’t have come inside for a coffee, giggling and flicking her hair, licking chocolate-cake icing from her fingers. She shouldn’t have sat so close to him on the couch.
‘Let go,’ she whined, ‘you’re hurting me.’
‘Hey,’ he told her, ‘I was only being friendly’
‘That’s okay’ she said, without looking at him, ‘but I really need to get going. I’m meeting a friend, we’re playing tennis. My boyfriend.’
‘It’s bad manners,’ said the man, ‘not to finish your cake.’
Stories survive. Details survive. The colour of a jacket, threads of conversation or song, the aroma of a meal—such details can survive years. But Colette had no recollection of Patrick, despite searching her memories of overseas again and again. There was no evidence of him in her photo albums, nothing in her address book. At her new flat, which she’d found advertised on the library noticeboard right after New Year, she examined the pages where old addresses had been erased and new ones written in. Here and there under the glow of the naked bulb she could make out lost acquaintances, discarded friends, their indentations still visible. There was nothing to suggest a Patrick Mercer. How, she wondered, could he have left no impression? How could there be no trace?
When she was little, when Dominic was reading his survival books, his amazing stories of endurance, Colette wrote letters. She collected pen-pals all over the world—France, Italy, Australia, Fiji, Japan—and every few weeks she received news about pets, holidays, favourite colours. Twice a year, she also heard from her father, who never had much to say. His letters consisted of questions rather than news: was Colette doing well at school, did she like her new bike, how tall was she now. Writing back felt like homework. If a father leaves a mother and flies to Australia when his daughter is five and his son is six, how old will they be by the time he returns? The letters she looked forward to most came from America, from her cousin Nina. When Colette saw photos of her, she imagined herself wearing Nina’s clothes, walking Nina’s dog, playing Nina’s piano. She saw herself in the Rocky Mountains, at the Grand Canyon. Nina had been born in America. Colette’s Aunt Pam had married a Californian entrepreneur and had never been back to New Zealand.
‘We’re too boring for her now,’ said Colette’s mother. ‘We’re too ordinary.’
Every year, on her Christmas card—always a winter scene—Pam wrote that they would all be more than welcome to come and stay.
‘She always likes to rub it in,’ said Colette’s mother. ‘She knows we could never afford a trip like that. Not now,’
Although Colette had never spoken to her cousin, she imagined they would be instant best friends if they met. Nina sent her hologram stickers and bubblegum cards and instructions for magic tricks, which Colette performed for Dominic; usually her mother was too tired to watch. Once Colette received a letter from Nina that was blank apart from a handwritten note at the very bottom saying Iron Me. When Colette did so, writing appeared; words the colour of dead leaves covered the page. For a while she and Nina corresponded in lemon juice, composing acid little notes about the shortcomings of other friends, parents, siblings. Colette enjoyed deciphering Nina’s invisible messages. There was nothing wrong with having secrets.
She hadn’t stayed in touch with any of her pen-pals; she couldn’t even remember their names. Nina had stopped writing too, or Colette had, she couldn’t remember which. The only news of her came at Christmas, on Pam’s snowy cards: Nina was dating a Swiss boy, Nina had been accepted for law school, Nina was seeing a lovely young dentist.
It was possible, Colette supposed, that Patrick was an old penpal. She wondered what he looked like.
She inspected her new, empty bedroom. The only piece of furniture in it was an oak wardrobe which was there when she moved in. She rather liked its leadlight windows, its iron key which turned almost silently. Not that she would ever lock it; to a burglar, a lock signalled valuables, and the door would most likely be smashed open. Colette had heard of too many antique boxes and cabinets and desks being destroyed in break-ins. She stretched out on her sleeping bag and admired the ornate white ceiling. She didn’t mind that her things were still at Dominic’s, that she had been sleeping on the floor for the past three nights. It was interesting, she thought, how little was necessary in order to survive. She ran her hand over the carpet. She could see where pieces of furniture had stood, where the pile had been thinned by bare feet.
‘It’s quite a find,’ she told her mother. ‘Dominic said I wouldn’t find anything better. Well, he was probably keen to get rid of me.’
‘And is it in a good part of town?’
‘It’s close to university and it’s cheap, which is the main thing. I still haven’t found any work.’
‘And your flatmates, what are they like?’
‘Nathan. He seems nice. He works most nights, so I haven’t seen much of him.’
‘And it’s just the two of you, is it?’
‘There’s a downstairs flat as well, with three or four students. It’s really very safe.’
During her first few days there, when Nathan was out, Colette explored the place, picking up objects that weren’t hers and turning them over and over. Nathan, she decided, had reasonably good taste. He had chosen sensible spots for his furniture, arranged the kitchen intelligently. She read the bottoms of plates and bowls, where the maker’s name was stamped into the clay, or painted on in delicate gold code. She opened the fridge and stared at the contents: frosted bottles, meats wrapped in foil, a jar of olives with garish red centres, a bowl of cold plums. She felt the chill from the open door pouring over her legs and her feet like ice water, like thawed snow, and eventually the fridge shuddered and hummed and she closed it again, her fingertips leaving misty prints on the chrome. She examined the contents of drawers, tugged at stiff handles. Unvarnished sections of the kitchen floor suggested the removal of peculiar, obsolete fittings. The flat was the upstairs half of a turn-of-the-century home, and in the lounge, a modern cupboard covered wh
at must have been the internal staircase. The bathroom was immaculate: matching toilet, bath and hand-basin, streamlined cabinets, a border of pale shells stencilled just below the ceiling. In other rooms, though, fire surrounds had been covered with green and pink bricks, and at some stage the chimneys themselves had been sealed over. Colette considered the various casualties they might contain—spiders, mice, perhaps the bones of a bird.
Nathan had taken the best room: a circular turret that watched the harbour. His was the only view of water; the other rooms faced into the bush, suffusing the flat with a faint green light. It reminded Colette of a neglected aquarium. Outside her bay window, tree ferns and flax lapped at the glass. This was exactly the type of flat she’d been looking for, she told herself. Sometimes, though, when she traced the patterns on the high ceilings, the plaster scrolls and flowers, they seemed heavy enough to fall. She couldn’t wait for her lectures to start.
When the rest of her things arrived from Dominic’s, Nathan helped carry them down the track to the house.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Bones have been broken coming down here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Look how steep it is. There must have been accidents.’
They piled the boxes in a corner of her room. Already it was looking cluttered. She could hear Nathan running up the track again, fetching more boxes, his footsteps thudding the damp earth. Things would be fine, she told herself, once she was unpacked and settled. She would get used to flatting. The rent was cheap; she was paying less than Nathan. Still, she envied him his round room, his unencumbered view of the sea. She pressed herself into a corner between the oak wardrobe and the wall. Every now and then, she discovered, when the wind blew enough to move the trees, she could make out a triangle of ocean. And for some reason, although she had never lived by the sea, this comforted her.
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