‘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?
