The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times

by Xan Brooks

  The Scarecrow says, “You’ve had that bottle long enough. Pass it over here for once.”

  Absently Toto does so. His thoughts are all elsewhere. He says, just how lucky was Reggie Cooper? Well, one time they were all sitting around and having a drink, much the same as tonight, and they were burning waste material on a brazier to keep warm. Toto was watching him, this Reggie Cooper, and he was perched on a packing crate smoking a cigarette and when the cigarette was finished he hops up to cadge another off a fellow standing by and in the moment he was up a private called Fitzpatrick sat down on the crate. What nobody knew, of course, was that the waste on the brazier contained a live bullet too. When the bullet ignited it went straight through Private Fitzpatrick’s eye. It was a stupid, pointless accident; the war was riddled with them. But it could have happened to Reggie, and by rights it should have happened to Reggie. He had been sitting in the exact same spot not ten seconds before.

  Anyway, says Toto, one night four men were sent out to strengthen the wire and they came under shelling and three of them were killed. Back in the trench we could hear the fourth man screaming and he couldn’t get back. So Reggie being Reggie said that he would go and fetch him. And everyone agreed that this was a terrific idea because they knew that Reggie was lucky and they knew they were not. So off sets Reggie, bold as brass, shimmying along on his belly through the mud and barbed wire and bits of dead bodies. And he’s about fifty yards out when he hears the sound of an incoming shell, like gravel rattling inside an old tin can. And he thinks ‘So what?’ because he has the sparkle, you see? But then he realises he’s been hit and that his right arm has been torn and that he’s been filleted all up under his ribs and he thinks, ‘Well now, what’s this? This wasn’t in the script’. So he crawls and rolls a bit more and decides that he had better take shelter under this burnt-out blasted tank. He can still hear the fourth fellow screaming for help and he reckons that once he’s got his breath back he can start calling out too. And this would normally have been a sensible plan. Except that no sooner has he dragged himself under the tank when another shell hits and this takes out the tread on one side of the vehicle and makes the undercarriage drop so that it sits good and snug upon Reggie’s legs. And when he tries to call out he is a bit shocked to find he can barely make any noise because what with the arm, legs and ribs he never even noticed that his face has been nicked too. And all at once, clear as day, Reggie Cooper knows that he’s not lucky at all and that there is no luck and there is no sparkle and all there is is the accident. For two whole days he lies there trapped under that tank, every now and then sucking water from a puddle and retying the suture at his shoulder to stop himself bleeding into his drinking water and he thinks, ‘There is no luck, only accident’.

  The bottle has come to Winifred. “What happened to him then? Reggie Cooper?”

  Toto laughs shortly. “Do I have to spell it out, kid? He died of course.”

  They sit for a spell, each chasing the tail of their own thoughts. Lucy attempts to smile at Toto and catch his eye but the yard is dark and he will not look up. Presently the Tin Woodman says that he has been mulling over what Toto was saying about accident and that while he supposes it’s true he would still rather reject it. He thinks it’s a bitter pill to have to swallow. He points out that he was raised Catholic and that the idea of a moral universe has been drummed into him, although obviously he has strayed from the path, bloody hell how he’s strayed. But he says that it is hard to shake, the whole idea. Sin and repentance. Divine retribution. A man has to hold to some higher power because if that isn’t there then, shit, what is?

  “Nothing’s there,” Toto says. “Isn’t that what I’ve just been telling you?”

  But the exchange has jogged the Tin Woodman’s memory of a chap he was on passing terms with who went by the name of Alan Hughes. He explains that while he did on occasion knock about with this Hughes, he is not about to defend the man. The sad truth was that this Hughes was an incorrigible rogue and a bounder. He drank to excess and fucked too many girls without a thought for his wife. In fact, whenever he was able, he beat a path to an Abbeville brothel where for a few drunken hours he could indulge all his whims. Hughes wasn’t the sort of chap you’d care to meet on a dark night – as will soon become apparent.

  The Abbeville brothel was situated on a long, crooked street called the Rue Mathieu. A blue light had been rigged above the door, but the blue light meant that the house and the beds and the prettiest girls had all been set aside for officer use. The common soldier had to move on a few paces and look for the red lantern, which directed him to the back of the building and a set of stone barns. Naturally the girls in the barn were not nearly so fine, but they would do at a push provided a man was not fussy. Alan Hughes prided himself on the fact that he had never been fussy.

  On the night in question, however, he arrived to find that the queue for the barns extended across the yard and past the house where it doglegged into the road itself. This, it goes without saying, was nothing short of an outright disaster. Hughes had no wish to stand in line until dawn, by which point the raddled lovelies in the barn would no doubt be too fatigued to meet his requirements. First he decided to knock on the door beneath the blue lantern and plead for clemency and a little human understanding. He said that he was more than happy to pay whatever the officers paid, but this cut no ice with the peasant thug on the step who ordered Hughes in mangled English to rejoin the others or risk spending the remainder of the night gathering his teeth on the street. Next he hurried around the yard as though embarked on an urgent errand and merrily insinuated himself near the head of the line. On this occasion several punches were thrown and although Hughes was able to deliver a few decent blows in return, he was eventually knocked down and dragged off and found himself out on the Rue Mathieu with the line even longer than it had been when he came.

  It is important, you see, to understand his state of mind at this time. He had arrived at Abbeville in anticipation of a night of revelry. He had, moreover, been looking forward to it all week. And for his trouble he had been bellowed at and abused and made to feel second-rate. He had been cuffed and kicked and dragged over concrete by his heels while perhaps as many as forty men jeered and hooted and told him he was scum. And to top the evening off, it had started to rain.

  The Tin Man pauses for a good while and then noisily draws a breath.

  Moving swiftly on to the nub of the matter, let us picture our hero walking back up the road in quite the high temper. The rain’s falling heavily and he has nowhere to go besides back to his barracks. He turns onto another street that is more crooked, more rustic, and passes a cottage with a barn tucked in beside. A young woman has emerged from the cottage and is engaged with securing the catch on one of the downstairs shutters. Let’s assume that the screws have come loose and the shutter has been rattling. Whatever it is, it‘s kept her awake.

  Hughes carries a knife in his pocket and he uses this knife to direct the young woman across to the barn. He has no intention of hurting her, he would simply prefer her not to cause a scene and he is confident he will not inconvenience her for long, he just needs what he needs, every man will understand. When he opens her gown he sees that the woman is wearing a cross and this is very nearly enough to make him stay his hand. But by then he has come so far that it is easier to complete the task than to set about unpicking the damage, and a few seconds later it is over and done with. On departing the barn he tells the woman he’s desolate, which is as close as he can get to the French word for sorry. And this is true – he is desolate. He knows right off the bat that there is no excuse for what he’s done. Afterwards it will strike him as somehow doubly dreadful that he did not know the woman’s name or anything of her life and was not even able to see her face clearly between the dark of the street and the pitch-black of the barn. At least with the red lantern whores, he would always ask them their names.

  The Tin Man pauses once
more to gather his thoughts. He says, rest assured that this ugly tale has a happy ending of sorts. Alan Hughes’ punishment was already in the post and it arrived two days later. Out in the field he stooped like an idiot to clear some wreckage from his path and when he put his palms on the wreckage it became an inferno. It obliterated his hands and took a chunk from his leg. It lifted his features clean off of the bone.

  “Fucking hell,” says Winifred.

  “Exactly,” the Tin Man says.

  At the field hospital, in the bed next to Hughes, there lay a second soldier who was even worse off than him. This soldier’s head was swaddled in bandages and he lay so still and silent that Hughes assumed he was dead. Days drifted by and the soldier never moved. One morning the medic sauntered up to Hughes’ bed and said he had good news and bad news and which one should come first?

  “Bad news first,” replied Hughes. “Always bad news first.”

  With apparent good cheer, the doctor said, “You’ve lost your forearms and you’ve lost your face. If you ever get up off this bed you’re going to walk with a limp. Children in the road are going to run away screaming.”

  “That is bad news,” agreed Alan Hughes.

  “The good news is that you’re not actually dead. That was the assumption. and a letter to that effect has already been sent. Your family thinks that you’re dead which means that they’re in for a lovely surprise, because here you are sitting up in bed and yakking with me.”

  At the end of this speech the man in the next bed – the other dead man in the field hospital – abruptly began laughing. He still did not move but he did start to laugh. His throat had closed from underuse and so the laughter began as a growl and then gained in pitch to rattle and shriek in a horrible way. His head was all bandaged and the life had left his limbs and yet the doctor’s good news was the best joke he’d ever heard. Hughes lay on the cot and listened to the rising, unearthly sound and in that moment was convinced that some higher power – God, if you like – had briefly descended to inhabit the corpse at his side and was using this vessel to celebrate his defeat. He thought it was God laughing to see him so roundly punished for the abject, sinful life he had led and for what he had done to the girl in the barn.

  “Fucking hell,” says Winifred again.

  The Tin Man chuckles and shrugs and inclines his bronze face. “Your turn now, Scarecrow.”

  “Please not another war story,” Lucy puts in hastily. “Those two were just awful.”

  The Scarecrow says, “I can’t think of any at the moment. So I’ll tell a story from before the war.”

  He reaches for the bottle to fortify himself, although he assures them this story won’t take much time to tell. He says that one hundred miles from here lived a man named Bertram Connors, Bram for short, who fell deeply in love with a local woman called Audrey and discovered to his delight that Audrey liked him in return. On the day after their wedding they went for a walk in the woods beyond town. They wandered along the river where the wheels of the mill stirred the still brown water, and finally up a steep embankment and out onto the single gauge line that the quarry trains used.

  “Can I get the bottle? I’m parched like a pheasant.”

  “Shut up, Fred,” Lucy says.

  “Desert, I mean. Parched like a desert.”

  Just at the point where the track went into a bend, a man lay unconscious. His head rested on the rail and he had turned himself sideways so that one arm lay across it and one foot hooked beneath it. The man was a vagrant and had probably stumbled because he was drunk. The smell of cheap whisky clung to his clothes and his hair. Somewhere along the way he had lost his jacket and shirt. His bare torso was spattered with grit from the track.

  The newly-weds shook the man by the shoulder. He groaned at length but would not wake. And then, inevitably, as Bram stood leaning down he became aware of a thrumming on the rails that signalled the approach of a train. The quarry cargoes do not travel fast but the driver is perched high up in the cab, which restricts his vision. The forest was thick and the bend was a tight one. There was no doubt at all that he would run the man over.

  Audrey and Bram tugged hard at the man but his foot was securely hooked about the rail’s underside and his heel had dug itself a nest in the gravel and although they were able to swing him out onto the verge it still seemed that the weight of the train would bear down on the track hard enough to cut him off at the ankle. Audrey half-stood, meaning to run ahead around the bend and attempt to flag down the driver, but by this point the chances of success had grown slim. The train was approaching more swiftly than usual.

  They redoubled their efforts to free the trapped man. Audrey got herself on the ground and began working her fingers into the dense nest of gravel. Bram took the fellow under his arms and proceeded to swing him vigorously from side to side and at the very instant the train sprang out of the trees – as heavy and clamorous as a New Year’s Day hangover – the foot left the rail like a cork leaves a bottle and all at once all three figures were rolling and tumbling down the embankment to safety.

  Fred says, “Hurrah, hurrah. I’ll drink to that.”

  The escapade had roused the victim sufficiently to cause him to open his eyes and briefly remonstrate with his rescuers. This completed, he tottered into the woods and settled himself to continue his nap. The day was chill and the man’s chest was bare and so Bram took it upon himself to remove his own coat and fit the fellow’s arms into the sleeves and button the thing all the way to the neck. There was a small sum of money in the coat pocket, but he figured he might as well leave that there as well.

  Please remember that we are dealing with newly-weds here. Allowances must be made. And on this, the first full day of their marriage, they should perhaps be forgiven for feeling sentimental, sanctimonious, and somewhat in love with the notion of their being in love. Walking home through the woods, Audrey and her husband came to the conclusion that what had transpired was the best wedding gift of all. It was true what they said: it was better to give than receive. Furthermore, the greatest good deeds do not draw attention to themselves. On their first outing together they had saved a man’s life and nobody would ever know except themselves. Even the man they had rescued would eventually wake none the wiser – left only with the mystery of how he had acquired a coat with ready cash in the pocket. For some foolish reason they began referring to the vagrant as Sir Lancelot Coombs. They devised a whole history for him. They said he was a noble who had been cheated of his birthright and framed for the murder of his brother’s champion race horse. Foolish stuff. Lovers’ talk. But crucially they made a vow that their good deed would stay between them. It was their personal treasure, the act that bound them together, more so even than the ceremony inside the church of St Peter. They swore they would never mention it to anyone else for as long as they lived.

  “Never told it to anyone,” Toto says in a murmur.

  “Never told it to anyone.” The Scarecrow smiles. “Although I suppose they must have told it to me.”

  Inside the cottage she readies herself for bed. She sheds her outerwear and slips under the blanket and is almost asleep when Winifred steals in to explain that she will probably have to spend the rest of the night in Toto’s room. She says that the dwarf has had a good deal to drink and that the more he has mulled on the stories, the more they have upset him. He has worked himself into a right old lather; she has never seen him like this before. He has requested she stay and so what can she do?

  “All right,” says Lucy muddily. She counts it as a blessing to have the single bed to herself. Guiltily she wishes that Toto would work up a lather more often. But afterwards she will regret the fact that Winifred was not there – because this is the night she is visited by the Devil.

  Her sleep is not restful. It is tacky, loose and ill-fitting, like the linoleum at the Griffin. Dreams scurry across its surface and it seems to her that each drea
m drags with it the mangled remains of the stories from the yard. In one, her brother Tom is trapped beneath an upturned steam wagon. When she pulls at his hands he implores her to stop, because his face has come loose.

  “Your face is fine, silly. I’m looking at it right now.”

  “Please stop,” says Tom. “If you pull me out from the wagon it will slide clean off of the bone.”

  An hour or two before dawn she wakes with the sense that somebody has just very quietly crept into the room. She thinks it must be Winifred and then she thinks that she must be mistaken. The room is perfectly dark and entirely still. Under the blanket, the only sound she discerns is the metronome pulse of the vein behind her ear. She wonders whether she might need to be sick. After mentally assessing the damage she decides she can hang on until morning.

  Lucy is about to roll over and resettle when her attention is caught by the very faintest of movements. No, she thinks, I was right. Unless she is still dreaming there is something in the room. By now her eyes have adjusted enough to make out a concentration of darkness. It is away in the corner by the little ladder-backed chair.

  She props herself on her elbows. “Who’s that?” she asks.

  “Who do you think it is?” replies the concentration of darkness.

  The voice is pitched low; it is barely a murmur. But she knows it’s not Fred.

  “Tinny?” she says, but the shape makes no sound.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t like it. What do you want?”

  The shape says, “I have come to see where the bad girls play. I’ve come to see where they play with monsters.”

  “Who are you?” demands Lucy. “I don’t like this at all.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I am the Devil.”

  “Nonsense.” Thank heavens her eyes have adjusted, her vision has marginally sharpened. A hunched, shortish man has positioned himself on the chair, not five feet from her bed, close enough to reach out and pinch her toes through the blanket if he chose to do so. She considers crying out – or would that put her in more danger?