Chapter 20 #2
‘Incredible.’ Alice thought of all the nurses she’d met, and the caring and dedication they gave. The love. They didn’t do it for the money, that was for sure.
‘“You called and we came,”’ Cary said. ‘That’s what she always said about her decision.’ A damp glaze came over his eyes, a quiet pride.
Alice gave him time. She turned the key to open the clock case and the door creaked open.
‘We need to work on that too,’ he said. ‘It’s creaky.’
‘So would you be if you were… how old?’
‘Grandad built the case in nineteen seventy. See?’ He pointed to the date engraved on the inside lip of the door casing.
‘Your gran’s second husband?’
Cary nodded. Alice didn’t ask the question aloud, only hoping he could intuit her interest, which, of course, he did. He had a way of reading her that was both alarming and reassuring.
‘What happened to her first husband, right?’
‘Right,’ she said softly.
Cary tapped at the brassy pendulum inside the case and it swung, knocking the chains and ropes, weights and other things Alice didn’t know how to interpret.
‘They’d only been married for a few months.
Never had time to have kids. She emigrated first, he was meant to follow a few months later; he was just waiting for paperwork while Gran had a nursing position all ready.
When she arrived here, she and her sister got straight to work and… she never heard from Trevor again.’
‘What? No!’
Cary nodded that it was true. ‘This clock dial and its mechanism arrived at her door in a crate one day, along with some of their wedding gifts, and there was a note from his mother. He’d passed away shortly after she left.’
Alice felt her heart sink for the woman. ‘She must have been devastated. Widowed and in a totally new country.’
Cary let her feel it. She liked that about him. He didn’t crowd her feelings out with his. He gave her space and he stayed contained in his space too.
‘What were their names again?’ she asked.
‘Gloria and Trevor,’ he said. ‘Then she married Grandad Dennis. Glo Glo didn’t want us kids to know what had happened. She didn’t want us feeling sorry for her, I guess, or she hated the idea of us being sad about Trevor, like she was. So she made up a story…’
Alice had her eyes fixed upon him now. She loved the sound of Gloria, or Glo Glo. She wondered if that had been baby Cary’s name for her. Little could she know that pet name had been amongst the first sounds he’d made when he’d begun to find his way to speaking out loud as a seven-year-old.
‘She told us kids that she came through the clock,’ Cary said.
Alice started in surprise. ‘What?’
‘She’d have us all crowded around her, me and my little cousins, and she’d tell us how one minute she was in the Barbados sunshine, the next she’d jumped through the clock and appeared in the Scottish rain.’
‘Hah!’
‘Yeah. And the clock came with her. This was before we understood anything about Grandad Dennis making the case or how tough things had been.’
‘You thought your granny was magic!’
‘No. We thought the clock was magic.’ He laughed.
‘We just thought Glo Glo was lovely. Anyway, she told us that Grandpa Trevor, who we’d never met, had tried to get here inside the clock too, but it hadn’t worked and he’d gone somewhere else, somewhere warm, with turquoise water and lots of colourful fishes.
’ He wasn’t laughing now. He was lost in the memories.
‘All so we didn’t have to know about things like death, so we could enjoy the magic of being kids for a little longer. That’s just what she was like.’
Alice watched him tapping the pendulum, making it rock. ‘I wish I could hear this old thing’s heartbeat. It would be like having some of the magic back. My childhood with Glo Glo and Grandad Dennis, and my mum.’
‘Your mum, she’s… um…?’ Alice knew she was prying, but she wanted to know this man better, now that he was opening up. She had a horrible feeling this might be the only time this happened, her only chance.
‘Mum’s in Glasgow still. She’s getting older. Doesn’t get up here as much. I visit as often as I can. It was her who sent me the clock as soon as I mentioned we had the new horologist coming, to see if it could be mended.’
‘So you used to live with her in Glasgow, but you moved here?’
‘I did, about ten years ago. Wanted a quiet life.’
‘It sounds like you’ve made a nice life.’
Cary seemed to weigh this up for a second before saying, ‘Sometimes I’ve thought it might be time to go home to Glasgow.’
He fell quiet again and this news passed like a lightning bolt through Alice, who wanted to say, ‘Don’t do that! I’ll lose my only friend,’ but she didn’t.
‘If you swing the pendulum it moves the escapement,’ Cary deflected, ‘and you can make the clock tick.’
‘Escapement?’ The word seemed fitting given Cary’s grandmother’s story.
‘That’s just one of the moving parts of the clock, it regulates the timekeeping.’
Alice followed his lead, moving closer to the case. Cary pressed his cheek to the dial casing, but she didn’t dare get that close to his time machine. It wasn’t hers to mess with.
She scrunched her eyes to drown out the intruding hubbub in the repair shed and listened.
She felt Cary moving his arm, and the clock made one heavy noise inside.
‘Tung!’ it went, woody and echoing, and she heard the accompanying sound of the minute hand progressing before all its sounds resonated away into nothing and the shed was loud again. Too loud.
Cary, who’d been so close she had felt his gentle breath on the top of her head, had moved away once more.
‘You don’t really want to leave Cairn Dhu?’ she said, in a wobbly voice that had come unprompted from nowhere. Why had she asked that?
Cary was staring at her, saying nothing.
A horrible racket started up from somewhere behind the plastic sheeting in the very depths of the shed.
A bright light came on back there too, casting shadows on the sheet like a cinema screen.
Boots clomped, voices lifted, and silhouetted pulleys hauled something from the ground up into the air.
Someone was hammering on something metallic, and then a machine started up, some noisy engine.
Everyone in the repair shop was exclaiming at once at the sound. A toddler started crying.
‘What are that lot playin’ at?’ yelled one of the elder repairers, who marched past in his blue work overalls.
From the embroidered name badge across his chest pocket she could tell his name was McIntyre, and had she been thinking straight she might have concluded he was probably Murray’s dad.
‘Can you curb your din!’ the man called in a heavy Highland accent, and was greeted with apologies in English and she thought, maybe, Dutch?
The workmens’ noises settled back down, while teaspoons clattered and the volume of people talking rose once more, the murmuring voices seeming to bounce off the metal roof above.
Alice’s head hurt with the cacophony. It made her rapidly flush with heat. The overalls man apologised to her as he made his way past. ‘Sorry, lass, I mean, Doc. They’re no’ supposed to be working on the build on repair Saturdays. At least, no’ on the noisy stuff!’
‘No worries,’ she tried to say through sudden dizziness, as the man walked back into the milling crowd.
She hooked a finger inside the collar of her t-shirt which felt suddenly restrictive, and turned back to where Cary had stood seconds before.
He was gone.
She looked around. Still he was gone. The clock case was gaping open like a mouth, the pendulum and ropes swinging.
He’s gone through the clock, the troublesome part of her brain told her. To the time where he’s really from. She knew this was nonsense but she couldn’t shake the curious feeling of loss. It winded her.
She put her hands to her knees. Keep the blood flowing. Take deep breaths.
The dreamy part of her that couldn’t distinguish playful thoughts from nightmarish scenario-making wouldn’t shut up now.
Cary Anderson’s too gentle to stay here in this noisy, violent, peaceless world, it said, and even though she knew how silly that was, it made perfect sense in that moment as the void inside the clock called to her like the places she went to when she dreamed at night, where nothing could be relied upon, least of all her own brain.
She hauled a breath into tight lungs. It was happening again and she couldn’t stop it. The room seemed to rotate around her and all the while the void inside the clock seemed to expand outwards, swallowing everything in darkness.
‘Are you all right?’ a voice was saying.
Cary?
Suddenly he was beside her.
‘Where did you go?’ she gasped, gripping at his arms. He was solidly real, and looking at her like she was mad.
Her vision blurred. Cary’s face was telescoping close then far away. That’s when she understood that it was her that was at risk of disappearing, falling back down the rabbit hole.
‘Do you need to sit down?’ he asked.
Cary guided her across the barn, dodging the too many people standing around like this was a drinks party. Some were laughing. It sounded horrible to her ears. There were no vacant chairs in the café corner.
‘Over here,’ one of the ladies in aprons was saying, looking at Alice with alarm and producing a chair from behind the café counter. ‘Come and sit yourself down.’
The woman cleared a path, shooing people out the way in a not very customer-service-focused manner, and, pushing Alice’s shoulders, plonked her down in the seat right in front of the flaming stove fire.
Alice still felt too vague to wonder if she was making a scene or how many people had noticed she was unwell, and in public this time. She’d always been able to save it until she was safely alone and out of sight, but not this time.
She still couldn’t seem to hear very clearly; everything had reduced to a buzz of noisy static.
‘You too, Cary Anderson,’ the woman was saying over the hum, and somehow Cary was shoved into a chair that had also been produced from nowhere.