The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times

by Xan Brooks

  He thinks of his home by the stream and of his job at the printworks. He thinks of his wife and he thinks of his son. But he does all this with great effort, as though dredging for a dream. He is not the man he was before.

  Glory, glory hallelujah. God’s terrible swift sword.

  During his months in the flying corps, Lieutenant Bram Connors has flown over numerous muddy fields in northern Europe – too many to count and more than enough to know that it is unwise to be caught trespassing in the wrong sort of field. Some fields are good and some fields are bad. To put it bluntly, he does not know which side he has landed on. In the time between being struck and coming down, he estimates that he may have travelled a little more than a mile, but there is no way of telling the direction he was pointed. He decides to strike off in the opposite direction, cross his fingers and hope for the best.

  Connors’ legs hold him up and he is able to walk. Now his arms are the issue. It is clear that he has been winged on both flanks, one evidently worse than the other; he cannot lift the left limb at all. He also finds that his face or head keeps dripping fluid onto the front of his coat. Some of the fluid is mud, but he concedes that it is not exclusively mud.

  He clumps and squelches his way out of one field and then crosses another. The hedgerows stand shattered and the trees have been so brutalised that they barely qualify as trees. He walks past indeterminate bits of the Camel, still smoking and creaking, not quite laid to rest. What he initially takes for a section of plough turns out to be one his propellers poking up from the ground.

  But he is feeling good; adrenalin holds him upright. Spying the straight edge of a rooftop, he adjusts his line and comes skidding down a slope towards a distempered farmhouse, shuttered and abandoned. The tap in the forecourt is useless, but there is a fishing lake tucked close behind and a row of horse chestnuts which are still in leaf. All at once he is ravenously thirsty; he could drink the lake dry. The breath booms and catches against his eardrums. His respiration sounds like tidal swells.

  His right arm is heavy but it does what it’s told. Fresh blood has run down his wrist to pool in his palm. Yet aside from the thirst, he is still feeling quite well. He skirts the building and heads across to the lake, thinking he will remove his clothes and wash off the worst of the mud. He might splash some water on his face, to at least moisten his mouth and his eyes, which have turned so gummy that his lids stick when he blinks.

  The world has been grey but now the sun’s broken through. The lake laps and glistens; it is a steely bright blue. Connors steps out onto the short wooden jetty and when he looks down to judge the depth, he is startled by the sight of men’s faces staring back at him. “Oh,” he croaks. “Hello to you.” He feels that the world has turned upside down and that it is him in the water, looking up at the land.

  The fishing lake is crowded with corpses. Some are uniformed. The majority are naked. He counts nine bodies in the immediate shallows surrounding the jetty although he identifies other bobbing shapes a little further afield. The men have been submerged for some time because they have bloated and their complexions have turned as white as fish bellies. The hair on their heads is buoyant and mossy. Their sloshing genitalia make him think of kelp.

  Beneath the surface, the mermen stir. They regard the figure on the jetty with a placid disinterest. For an instant he is tempted to unbutton his clothes and clamber down among them.

  His thoughts slide out in all directions. Time skips like a needle on vinyl. And now, incredibly, he is padding along a country lane, hemmed in by hawthorn, following the print of a caterpillar tread. How long has he been on the caterpillar’s trail? Surely not very long, although his face has stopped dripping and he senses his features have stiffened. How much further can he walk? Each time he falls over, it becomes more awkward to stand. His stupid arms won’t play ball; he has to do the work with his legs. To top it all, he appears to have acquired a stone in one boot, which jabs and nags with every step. He would like to attend to it but his arms are asleep. He would like to check whether he still has his cigarettes, but he can’t do that either because his arms are asleep.

  “I’m Lieutenant Bram Connors, 70 Squadron,” he tells the hawthorn – although what he’s actually doing is telling himself. In the course of his travels he has mislaid his ID disc and is dimly aware that this may be a problem. At some point somebody is bound to demand to know who he is. When that happens he wants to be able to give the information straight out: “I am Lieutenant Bram Connors, 70 Squadron”. But that won’t be possible if his thoughts grow more foggy, or if he keeps sinking to his knees and struggling to get up.

  “Ask the men from the lake,” he mutters. “They know who I am.”

  He is a tired shape on a country lane. He’s pursuing a caterpillar. He can see its tread at his feet. He can see a church steeple at some distant point up ahead. He is a tired shape with a stone in his boot, but not long ago he had a name and a rank. And not long before that he was something else again: a West Country printer, good with machines. They had put him in charge of the reel-fed rotary press, which the older workers were scared of; they had nicknamed it the Dreadnought. Except that he liked the Dreadnought. He also liked the Camel. It was his skill with the Dreadnought that had landed him first with the engineers. Were it not for the Dreadnought, he would never have flown planes.

  When he peers ahead, his eyes gumming, he sees that the lane and the hedgerow appear to have turned onto their sides. Yet when he looks some time later, they are reassuringly upright again.

  His thoughts are bleeding out. It has become hard to focus. And before the man was a printer, he must have been something else. Some outraged toddler, shouting for its mother, moving on unsteady legs. And before that something else. A creature unable to speak, squirming on its belly, soiling itself, ignorant of its name. And before that, of course, he was nothing at all.

  When Private Harris opens the door without knocking, Captain Jack Bailey of the Canadian Corps is standing on one leg, attempting to balance a rifle upon his raised foot. He has found that if he lifts his toes just a little he creates a natural gully. The rifle can remain there butt-down for as much as a minute or more while he stands, leg outstretched, like some clownish ballerina. Some men would be embarrassed to be caught in such a task. Captain Bailey, for his part, reckons that people can catch him any way they damn please.

  He says, “Landsakes, Harris, you went and broke my concentration.”

  “Sir,” says Private Harris. “There is a dead airman spotted over by the church.”

  Unhurriedly, Bailey stoops to lift his rifle from the floor. “Good one or bad?”

  “Bad,” says Harris. “Good. By which I mean it’s one of ours.”

  Bailey nods. “By which you mean it’s one of yours.” The captain is Canadian. Most of his soldiers are not. It is Jack Bailey’s fate to find himself playing overseas uncle to a company of Brits.

  “Well, OK then,” he says. Straightening up makes his aging back crack. “I guess that what we do now is that we go check it out.”

  They swing out of HQ and trudge across to the church. The town square is a mess of craters and sludge, like some lunar landscape, not fit to be seen. There is a burnt, useless Austin outside the Mairie, a family of feral cats occupying the stone steps up ahead. Bailey says that this is because the French have no civic pride. Why, if this town was in Ontario, it would be treated quite different. It would have fresh macadam laid and the houses brightly painted and flowers blooming in every window box. The town’s got potential; it could be passably pretty if someone made an effort. Still, that’s the French for you – bone idle.

  He shoots the private a sideways glance. “That’s a joke, by the way.”

  “Yes sir, I know.”

  “Good God,” he says. “I’m hilarious.”

  The Catholic church stands to the north of the square. It is heavyset and functional, as white a
s a bone and very nearly as fetching. The dead airman is sat on a wooden bench in the yard. He has first sagged and then stiffened, he might have been left there for months. His face is so burned it looks as though it has been turned inside out. Blood has matted and crusted up the length of one sleeve. Few things in this world appear as reassuringly dead as this man. And yet it seems that Private Harris has been misinformed. The sound of their feet on the gravel is such that at the very last second the corpse cracks open one eye. Private Harris can’t help it; he skips aside in alarm.

  “God’s terrible swift sword,” the dead airman informs him.

  “Oh dear.”

  The captain barely flinches. Balancing the rifle has helped fine-tune his composure. He asks, “Is that how you respond when one of your fellows ain’t dead? ‘Oh dear, what a shame’.”

  “No sir. Of course not.”

  “I don’t believe I’m ever going to understand you people.”

  “Our people, sir. The men of the Canadian Corps.”

  “Damn right,” says Captain Bailey. “All of us raised on a diet of maple syrup and beef.”

  As though pausing for breath in the midst of a summer stroll, he plops himself on the bench beside the burnt airman. The man is nine-tenths in the grave; Bailey doesn’t think much of his chances. But there’s no point being downcast, so he pats the fellow companionably on the knee and asks just where he sprang from: did he drop out of the sky and land right there on this bench? The airman makes no reply. He is sat very still, staring straight ahead out of his one crusted eye.

  “OK then. Next order of business. I need your name, rank and squadron.”

  The figure clears his throat. “You see, I don‘t know. I think I might have forgotten.” He lifts his right arm to scratch distractedly at his scalp.

  “Don’t do that,” the captain says sharply.

  With a bewildered half-smile, the man lowers his arm.

  All this while, callow Private Harris has been kicking his heels, staring at the ground, looking as sick as a dog. He has not fully recovered; he appears to be keeping his distance. Bailey rounds on the kid with something close to rage. “Hell’s bells, private, you waiting for a bus?”

  “No sir. Awaiting instruction, sir.”

  “Then go get a medic. There’s your instruction.”

  As a child his parents had run an unsuccessful smallholding two hours’ ride from the market at Brampton. They sold root, grain and berries. What little livestock they possessed became like family members to him. When a cow was sick he would sit watch in the shed. When an animal died it hit him hard. It occurs to him that he has spent a goodly portion of his life watching animals die. Some go out noisy. Some go out quiet.

  The unnamed airman draws a ragged breath. He doesn’t have very long; the fellow is absenting himself by degrees. Sat on the bench, Bailey decides to at least see how long he can keep the fellow conscious. If they can each hold out until the medics arrive, well then, he will consider that to have been some kind of achievement. It’s like his game with the rifle, except this time with a man.

  He says, “Here we are, soldier, you’ve got to pay attention to me. Are you getting all this? Are you with us or not?”

  Slight twitch of the head. This shows he is listening.

  “OK, here’s the plan. I’m going to talk your ear off until the doctor arrives. What happens after that is between you and him. Nothing to do with me anymore.”

  “Talk my ear off,” No Name echoes. The wind moves in the trees. Brown leaves surf the gravel. Bailey estimates that they have approximately five minutes before the medic shows up.

  He pats again at old No Name’s knee, perhaps the one part of his body that is not burnt or torn. He says, “That’s right, that’s good. But I warn you, it’s not going to be as easy as all that because sat beside you today is an extremely dull individual. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you. Even my wife falls asleep at the sound of my voice. So I can’t tell a lie, it’s going to be mighty hard. But you have to stay focused. Can you do that for me?”

  “I’ll try my best,” says old No Name and attempts another half-smile.

  So Captain Bailey of the Canadian Corps sits on the bench in thin sunlight and tells the airman war stories. He tells of ill-starred Bill Jenkins who suffered a serious head injury and regained consciousness to find himself speaking with a crisp German accent. He tells of how alarmed this had made his fellow sharp-shooters and how he, Captain Bailey, had taken it upon himself to explain that it was not Jenkins’ fault, it was still old Bill Jenkins and not some hun impostor and that he was on no account to be bayoneted in his bed. Which was what was being discussed, he had no doubt about it.

  Then he tells of the cavalry charge, outside Passchendaele, where the riders were picked off one by one only for their horses to continue ploughing forward, hell for leather, as though they were carrying phantoms. Six horses, tails swishing, pouring unscathed through the lines and how he had stood on the ridge with field glasses and watched them keep going. Deep into enemy country; no reason to stop. He leans in, clicks his fingers beneath the man’s ruined nose. “Are you following this?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, good work, keep it up.” He casts about, wondering where that damned Harris has got to. Time is running short. The man is fading. The balanced rifle drifts out in a gyre; you have to chase it with your foot to coax it back into line. He says, “I’ve seen some cock-eyed sights in this part of the planet over this past mess of months. Some real cock-eyed sights, soldier. And then there’s you.”

  11

  Lucy arrives home reeking of rum and cigarettes and on the stairs is overcome by a swell of sentimentality. She turns into Tom’s room and embraces her brother until he wakes with a start.

  “You stink,” Tom says. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”

  She says, “I’ve been far away. I’ve been to a magical forest. I met the funny men out of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

  “Is that really true or are you telling a story?”

  “That’s for you to say. Maybe a bit of both?”

  “I think it’s true,” he says after a judicious pause. “But The Wizard of Oz is a story.”

  The smell of tobacco rolls off her in waves. Her speech is muddy; she has had too much to drink. “The funny men live very deep in the forest. The Scarecrow can be grumpy, but we all know he’s nice. The Tin Man is charming, but he can be quite sad as well because he’s more metal than man. The Lion is so scared that he’d rather run away than shake hands. And Toto is bossy, but that’s because he’s the boss.”

  The boy turns his cheek to the pillow. Lucy runs a hand through his hair.

  “At first the funny men are more scary than funny. They all look very strange. That’s why they have to live in the forest. They need our help and that’s why we go there. But they aren’t scary really. They just want to be friends.”

  “There’s a witch as well,” the boy points out.

  “Inside voice, Tom.”

  “But there is. There’s a witch.”

  “Not in this story. There are no witches in this story.”

  “But there has to be. There’s a wicked old witch and there’s the Wizard of Oz.”

  “No,” says Lucy. “This story’s different. There’s no witch and no wizard and there isn’t a tornado. There’s just the lorry that takes us out to the woods and brings us home in time for bed, like right now. There’s a lorry and there’s me and there are the strange, funny men. It isn’t The Wizard of Oz. It’s a different story I’m telling.”

  The boy reluctantly accepts this. “But what do you do when you’re out in the forest?”

  “Well,” says the girl. “We have adventures, of course. We explore and have picnics. Sometimes we fly a kite and play football. We learn the names of the trees and make a camp in the woods and you have to know the password before yo
u’re allowed to come in.”

  Tom burrows into the pillow, arranging himself for sleep. Drowsily he asks, “What happens in the end?”

  “They all live happily ever after.”

  The summer term’s over, which means she has finished with school. She has hardly been anyway; there have been too many demands on her time. And nobody seems to have cared; so many other children are in the same boat. She attends class on the final day then exits the gate with a skip in her step. She posts her report card, unread, into a drain on the street.

  Her school days are behind her, but what exactly comes next? She supposes she’ll stay on at the Griffin for as long as it lasts, after which she can move to wherever Grandad finds his next job. So she empties the ashtrays, swabs the toilet, takes the barrels for a walk. She serves the few customers who take a wrong turn into the saloon bar, but the time weighs heavy on her hands to the point where she asks whether she might be needed on other nights in the forest. Nan says, “Oh bless her, so hard-working”, but no more comes of this plan. It appears that the travels are booked for Sunday evenings only.

  When her hours are free she reads newspapers with a frowning concentration, familiarising herself with an adult world of labour disputes and unemployment statistics. The nation is experiencing hard times, it appears, and this suggests that there must have been a time when it wasn’t. At the library she borrows Sherlock Holmes and Three Men in a Boat and The Old Curiosity Shop, which she devours in chunks, conscious of her heart racing. Poor Nell and her grandad. That horrible, horrible Snipe. She re-reads The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and is relieved to be reminded that it does all end happily.

  One afternoon Brinley drops by in a welter of bashfulness and invites her to accompany him to the pictures that night – his treat, of course. Overcoming vague qualms, she eases the floral-print dress out of the camphor-wood chest. But outside on the street she finds herself regretting the choice. It feels somehow disloyal and the dress is so lovely – it should not be wasted on Brinley, who has plastered his hair with too much pomade and smoked too many Mitchell’s Prize Crops to calm the butterflies in his gut. When they sit down in their seats he immediately snakes an arm in behind, except this makes her start, which in turn makes him start, and the pair of them jumping sends the evening off on a tangent from which it never entirely recovers.