Nasty fucking crew they are. I’m running the flag and fuck you all.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. They did not require bathing. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Oscar Webster
William Bunting: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1932
They can’t move far, this lot, but they can do it if they have enough time. I arrived to find them at the door, arms raised to drop a heavy object on my poor head. The effort of it meant they couldn’t move another inch, though, and I knocked them down easy.
They blamed the woman prisoner.
Of course they did.
“Her idea,” they reckoned their words so slow I could cook myself a boiled egg by the time they finished two words.
“She fucken hates you,” they said.
So I showed her.
To my future keepers: if you find a chicken bone carved like lace, think of me. But it might be you’re looking in a place you oughtn’t.
Beware. Never underestimate an opponent, even one you consider worthless, as good as dead.
They’ll judge on your look, call you Pigface. It never hurt me; not a single word of it.
Most of us get over here and before long think about helping the prisoners.
“So long ago,” they whisper. “All that happened so long ago.” Sometimes it sounds like rustling leaves. They whisper, “We can forgive. We sit here and let it wash over us. We’re a peaceful lot. Listen to the waves pounding the arse of the Time Ball Tower and let the past wash away.”
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
William Bunting
George Manning: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1933
It does seem to grow. My heart aches with longing for home. I only hope they will understand there. Otherwise, I will turn to stone.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
George Manning
Arthur Harcourt: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1934
The Time Ball Tower rarely catches the attention of the press. It’s better that way; you never know how the public will take a thing.
Sleep. Salt. Breathe well seemed to mollify the interviewers when they wanted to know Burnett’s secret. It gave them something to report and made them look like they knew something. No one believes anything without proof anymore. We were a fluff piece. A joke. “Longest lived people in Australia.” But how long has he been in the paper like this? That is proof enough. He was old, back in 1912 when they did the first story.
The subheadings, always, said: “The secret to long life? Sleep a lot.” Or, if the reporters felt they hadn’t been treated well, if they found our town annoying and unpleasant, “Be lazy.”
Sometimes they would be sidetracked by the cleverness of our clocks and watches. They loved the tiny hole in the wall shops, with people inside fixing timepieces. If they stayed the day, they’d watch the ball drop at 1:05. If they were observant, they would see the town come to pause. Our daily rest.
Sometimes people decided Burnett was interesting, until they met him. He was a dull man; everyone thought so. And meeting him, most thought he was a liar. He had no birth certificate. He did a good job of making skeptics of people.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Arthur Harcourt
Leo Heath: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1935
I’ve asked the prisoners and they say no. They can’t hear any strange noises.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Leo Heath
Max Heath: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1936
If I train the binoculars just so, I can see people coming and going from the Club. Well, not so. But I can see them turning into the street that turns into the street the Club is in. It won’t be long, and I’ll be there, settled into an armchair, a lovely glass beside me and all I ever wanted at my fingertips.
Not too long.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Max Heath
Ernest Muskett: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1937
My brother’s done well since 1927. Doctor of great renown. Some marvelous research into the things that ail us. We both have a fascination with history, especially about the physical nature of evil. He knows more than any man about Baron Ungen von Sternberg. That man said, “Did you know men can still walk when flesh and bone is separated?” He ordered grotesque killings; leaving a man naked on ice or causing him to be torn apart by wild animals or dragged behind car.
My brother’s got his eye on a wife, but he knows I’m keen on her too. Frances. She’s lovely, she is, and just right for one of us at least.
I suppose I might become a doctor, also.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Ernest Muskett
Frances Styles: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1938
Even on the boat over, I hadn’t decided if I’d be quiet or loud. Weak or strong. Act big or act small. Would it matter there? It felt quite freeing to know I could be anything. My father gave me no restraints. It was an obsession with him. I think in stark contrast to the way he held my mother, with a tight rein, until she bounded away, onto the street, into the path of a speeding truck.
He tells me she had time to gaze at me, when I was delivered there, on the street.
But I know that’s not true.
He’s just being kind.
We’d sit together gazing at the Time Ball Tower. He longed to go back. I couldn’t wait to get here.
He’d told me nothing about being a keeper. I had no idea what to expect. But that’s how they play it, isn’t it?
I’m luckier than most. I grew up without the confines of two parents. Only the one, albeit a griever who sometimes looked at me sadly because I reminded him of his great lost love, his departed darling, his wonderful Ruby.
My mother.
How do you make a girl feel bad for looking like her mother?
Will I ever have a fellow look at me that way? I know the Muskett brothers are both keen, the older and the younger. More decisions to be made on return.
I took delivery of a prisoner today.
The boatman dropped him off. “You’ll be right, mate,” he said. Like he was the stork delivering a baby.
This prisoner was skinny, lucky for me, in soft clothes that felt sticky and I wouldn’t have touched him if I didn’t have to. He snuffled at me, sniffing deeply as if getting one good one in. Reminded me of Clyde Blue
at school, who stood close without touching and you always knew he was there because of the breathing.
He arrived trussed. Confined. Some good knots there. I put him in the box for a while.
The fresh prisoners talk a lot. Everyone says so. They figure out they won’t be able to talk for long and want to get the words out. And the old prisoners are so desperate for new words, they will listen to anything.
His file came with instructions to keep him well chained.
He sniffs. He is obsessive about the way things smell. Certain scents set him off. Even a hint. But a deep lungful works better.
Smell of orange peel is one.
I put him next to Number Twenty-two, the one who kept prisoners, one in each room, and each one in a state of terrible disease or infection. Wounds rotting, and eyes dying in their heads. They say he kept a record, that it was something he thought important.
He’s here, now.
That’s good.
I set a tallow candle beside them all. The others reached as best they could, but the new one swore at me. “I don’t need a candle.”
I ignored him. Months later, I saw him in tears, his chest rising and falling. There was an awful sound. He was sucking on the tallow candle like the rest of them.
It made me ill.
I wore the scarf all my family and friends helped to knit, even the fellas. A glorious, crazy thing. Once the horrors tried to grab it, though, so I keep it on my bed, neatly folded, like a welcome mat to my only really private place.
I hated that they touched it. I would have washed it but who knows how long it would take to dry? I hate the smell of wet wool. I imagine everyone does.
I’d been my father’s daughter so long, that’s who I was. They saw something else in me, I don’t think it was really there, but they saw it anyway.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be ill nourished and of unsound mind. Prisoners’ baths a nightmare. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
This should not be normal.
Frances Styles
Robert Bunting: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1939
Frances beat out a lot of young men for the privilege of going to the Time Ball Tower. I know there were some who wanted to use the Time Ball Tower as excuse not to go to war. They are called weak and pathetic and cowardly.
She did an okay job.
Too soft, though.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Robert Bunting
Kim Adler: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1940
I’m dreaming every night of custard and stewed apple. What a sorry thing that is! But somehow it makes the pain go away.
It doesn’t keep the ghosts quiet. They whisper take me, take me, and they whisper I’ll make a lovely baby boy and I’ll love you all your life.
Thing is, we’ve been unlucky. Gilda and me. We don’t know if it’s her or me or the two of us not matching.
But we’ve always wanted them, kids. We’d love the holy hell out of them.
So I took three ghosts in a jar, captured them by leaving the lid off and a little mix of me in the bottom.
I’m going to have her breathe them in and then we’ll see. We’ll have babies chuckling within a year.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Kim Adler
George McCarty: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1941
They never warned me about the headaches.
Solid, like a living thing, like a growing creature at the back of my neck stretching up with long fingernails.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
George McCarty
Joe Madden: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1942
“No one unaccounted for in this awful display.”
I say that to them every morning and they don’t know what I’m talking about.
“Did you hear about Nikolai Yezhov?” I asked them. They call him the Bloody Dwarf. He had a million shot!
And of course, that makes them cry at the unfairness of the world. But it’s unfair to them.
They don’t care about the million dead.
And there is the monthly delivery. Oranges!
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Joe Madden
Rueben Potts: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1943
There was Number Fifteen, who’d poisoned his wife then sliced her up and fed her to school children. A dozen kids died eating her poisoned flesh. He didn’t care.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Rueben Potts
Linda Deeming: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1944
These great wastrels of space when men are dying. Men are dying, their hearts held silent and still. Men left where they lie, only a stone to mark their place.
And yet these ones sit here, safe and sound.
Fearless.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Linda Deeming
Robert Potts: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1945
While men are dying.
I am dying myself, of shame because I cannot stop looking, cannot stop, where did these magazines come from?
I’m sharing them. I’m showing them and that makes me the worst person.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Robert Potts
Lee Deeming: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1946
Shame for Richard Potts. He shouldn’t have listened to these shits, though. That was his problem. Their entire aim is to guilt you, make you feel so bad you want to die and leave them alone, give them time to get down stairs and drown their pathetic selves.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Lee Deeming
Gray Cook: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1947
Never met a snarlier bunch of bastards than this lot. I suppose it had something to do with the fact I got bitten by a fucken rat in the fucken basement when I went down to prepare the baths. Bastard got infected. Had to lift the flag. Man.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the priso
ners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners were not bathed due to rat bite. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Gray Cook
Peter Fenwick: The Time Ball Tower Keeper’s Report 1948
They delivered another woman to me. Another Black Widow. Most women that kill get called it, don’t they?
She’s feisty.
Locked her in the box and all good after that.
Doesn’t stop me jumping at the slightest sound, though.
I’m expecting to find one of them sludge one day. It happens. Someone preserved who shouldn’t have been and it went wrong.
Another doctor, Dr. Marcel Petiot, is a perfect candidate. He posed as a member of the French revolution. Had a “safe house.” Said he was immunizing people but was giving them lethal injections. Twenty-seven murdered at least, probably eighty or more. He gave hope to those arriving at his “safe house.” Then killed them.
SUMMARY OF CONDITIONS: I found the prisoners to be well nourished and of sound mind. Prisoners bathed successfully. Prisoners appeared distressed on waking and have trouble sleeping. Prisoners experienced dry skin, chronic pain and halitosis.
All normal for this report.
Peter Fenwick
Tide of Stone Page 11