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Bron’s heart sank a little at her heartfelt speech. Mrs. Flanders interrupted to sing the same tune as she had done upon his last visit, saying, much like before, how he reminded her of her own child. She brought out the same photographs again, said how proud she was of her son’s going to Oxford, that she missed him dearly, hadn’t heard from him in years. “I wonder what he is up to these days. If he is safe.”
“He?” Ada turned to Bron with a quizzical look. “I thought Ellie was a girl now. Isn’t that what you said, Bron? In the taxi here?”
“Yes,” he said. “I did say that.”
She looked back at Mrs. Flanders. “But you just called her a ‘he.’ She’s not a ‘he,’ right?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Flanders nodded. “But Ellie will always be my son.”
“Oh, okay. But maybe that’s why she left?”
His palms quivered as he sipped his tea, embarrassment clinging to him as the leaves did to his mug. What was he to say? He knew exactly what she meant, would in any other circumstance have been proud of her—wasproud of her—but the pressure to be polite, and the look on Mrs. Flanders’s face as it dropped, pulled at him.
“I don’t know why he left, little one.”
“See, you just called her ‘he’ again.” Ada looked up at him for reassurance, and then back at Mrs. Flanders.
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Mrs. Flanders.
“Yes it is—”
“That’s enough now, Ada,” he said, thinking it best to end the conversation here. She looked up at him again. “We are guests—let’s not be so impolite. Say you’re sorry to Mrs. Flanders.”
“Why should I?” she spat, standing up.
“Hey, come on, Ada.”
“No!” she shouted, stamping her foot and screaming at once that she wanted to go home.
Bron was dismayed by the ferocity in her voice, by the way she ran from the room, and after following her, he found her crying in a corner of the hallway, arms crossed against her face and leaning against the door. When she turned around and wrapped herself around his waist, he saw the grief in her eyes, felt it in the way she clutched at him. This little person, who’d endured so much, had lost her only parent.
“I’m so sorry about that,” he said softly to Mrs. Flanders once they’d gathered their things. “We’ve had a difficult few days. I’m sure you understand.”
“No,” Mrs. Flanders said, “the little girl is right.” Unsteadily, she crouched to her knees. Ada tucked herself away and hung on his leg. “I am always looking at what was, ignoring what is rightthere in front of me.” She pulled a five-pound note from her purse and folded it into Ada’s coat pocket. “For your gelato.”
They were standing at the junction of Bene’t Street and Trumpington, on the corner of the Corpus Christi clock. Ada, having settled her crying in the taxi ride, was eating her cookie-dough gelato, and Bron was admiring the clock of twenty-four-carat gold and the locust’s metal sculpture that arched upon it. The chamber glowed pink in the twilight.
He’d passed the clock many times before, but had never really stopped to look at it, to admire the way it functioned. It didn’t appear to tell the time at all, not accurately at least, or in any way he could make sense of. The pendulum would stick in place for a second and then start up again at speed, trying to catch up, and the blue LED lights would dance around in a circle of its own ring. The locust climbed, open-mouthed, every thirty seconds.
“It’s eating time,” he heard a tour guide explain to a group who huddled to take photos of it. “The time-eater is a symbol that reminds us that once time has passed, it is eaten, it is gone, and something we can never have again. The clock’s inaccuracy is a symbol of life’s irregularity, that time plays tricks on us.”
This, inevitably, led Bron to thinking about time and what a construct it was. It didn’t matter if the pendulum stopped or if it ticked along accurately. No matter how time was measured, still he would be standing there, for however long he would. Whether it be a second, a minute, or even an hour in length, it was the moment itself that counted.
Time is eaten, it is gone.He thought he disagreed with this statement. As he watched the locust open its mouth to eat the thirty seconds, close its mouth upon the minute only to open itself again, he thought instead how time is consumed, how it doesn’t just pass or disappear. That the past lives on inside us, forms the way we speak, think, and feel. That Mrs. Flanders loved her daughter, loved her son, and continued to battle andlearn from her mistakes. That our past never leaves us. We are always evolving into better people, into our truest forms.
He looked at Ada, his youngest ally, who would grow up to change the world, make it an easier and safer place for people like him. And then, at himself: he was not just a person standing on a street corner; he was a person with twenty-two years of moments—and more than that too. He was the lives of countless others he had brought with him. He was a nineteenth-century governess and a twenty-first-century au pair. He was gender queer, gender fluid, nonbinary to some, a cross-dresser, a kink, to others. A period drama set in 1800 but watched today was both a vision of the past and the present: he couldn’t help but bring his own twenty-first-century life to these nostalgic views of the world, and equally he was unable to emerge from the film untouched, bringing this nostalgic lens of life into the outside world today.
And then, almost as if he were in a time-induced stupor, he sawhim. Or at least, he thought he did.
The sky behind the rim of the building blocks was a deep inky blue. His eyes panned along the cobbled street and fixed onto a man’s hunched back, fussing with the bike attached to the railing, slipping a helmet onto his head.
He didn’t really think about it before he called out—
“Harry!” He was completely certain it was him, and then at once not so certain. “Harry?” The man did not turn.
The street was white noise in his ears, but still he heard the unchaining of the bike’s lock, the man’s laugh as he reached for another man’s outstretched hand, and pulled him into a kiss. “See ya,” he said in an American voice, like the one Bron heard in his dreams.
These two men who fit together so well, who looked almosttoonatural together.It is him, it is him, it is him,and then againIt is not, it is not, it is not. It cannot be.
