by Ashly Graham
Above the twin holes for the winding key on either side of the centre of the dial with its ornamental finely graven hour and minute hands, a crescent aperture like a downturned mouth contained a wheel displaying the date. Beneath it the clockmaker’s name and town were inscribed in Gothic Minuscule. The waist of the clock was topped with cove moulding over banded inlay, and supported by a matching base on straight bracket feet.
In between, the rectangular door that enclosed the weights and pendulum was also inlaid with marquetry, and there was a lock and key, which had to be turned to keep the door from swinging open. Inside, the eight-day movement comprised brass plates and wheels, cut pinions, double-hung iron weights, a seconds pendulum with calibrating screw, anchor-recoil escapement, and a rack-and-snail striker on a bell.
Four minutes prior to striking the hour, the ticking slurred, as if the clock were clearing its throat prior to saying something important.
As with the mechanism in the Exeat Institute’s tower, the grandfather clock was wound once a week; and it was understood that Laszlo’s pre-numeric father, as head of the family, should be the one to do the job…though it was more of a ceremony. Although the movement would have run a day longer, it was understood that the weights ought not to be allowed to get too low, so as to avoid putting excessive strain on the cogs. Of course, it could have been rewound at any time, haphazardly when the thought occurred; such inconsistency, however, would have been disrespectful of the piece’s predictory function, and Mr Laszlo reciprocated with a similar regularity of performance, on Saturday mornings. Now that the working week was over, and his family had been provided with the bare essentials and spared serious affliction for another seven days, it was incumbent on all parties to gather strength for the next hebdomadal stretch.
When his father died, young Laszlo inherited the clock and the responsibility of keeping it going. Only then did he truly become aware of the significance it had in his life, so long taken for granted; and the role that his father, who in body and spirit had been as upright and dependable as the tree that furnished the wood to make the piece, had shouldered on his behalf.
The tock of this same clock had ticked off Laszlo’s nativity and childhood; and the sound of the second hand and hourly striking were so familiar to him, so deeply ingrained in his consciousness and psyche, that he had difficulty hearing them even when he tried, as every eleven hours, fifty nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds the clock repeated its few simple words from the lexicon of sequentiality, as a story that would forever bear retelling.
On the one occasion when Laszlo forgot to wind the clock, the silence was audible and awful, and came as the worst kind of accusation: that he had broken his family’s tradition of procedural rectitude. As he remorsefully raised the weights again from the base of the case on their fully extended wires, his eyes pricked with tears at their greater than usual heaviness. It was as if he were hauling a sinfully laden bucket from the dark depths of the well of his soul. When the job was done, and it reached the top and daylight, young Laszlo knew that he had received a gift of forgiveness, of renewal; of being granted retirement to a point before certain mistakes had been made, so that he might behave more wisely in the future. Thereafter he remained as convinced as a Quaker that, were the day to come when the pendulum ceased to swing of its own accord, and the temporal heartbeat stopped, the greatest tragedy must have befallen him, or who or what he held most dear.
Were he to be delinquent again, and the faithful clock were to run down entirely and stop, possibly the world would have come to an end.
Ratcheting back the cogs of the Exeat Institute’s clock with the crank-handle called for the full exertion of Laszlo’s strength, to the extent that he was embarrassed to be seen jacketless with his tell-tale overdeveloped shoulder and arm muscles. As each tooth made its laconic and irreversible clack towards completing the process, he was comforted by…nothing so grandly definitive as the separation of past and present…the segmentation and preservation of whatever good might have taken place in his life, and there was precious little of that these days, from whatever was bad that might follow.
The pleasurable fragments of Laszlo’s early life lay strewn like remnants of stone antiquities in his mind. Which was why, feeling cowardly and ridden with guilt at having submitted to Central’s rule like a beast of burden to the yoke or bridle—sometimes he felt it would be a far, far better thing to rebel by jumping off the tower, than do as he was ordered any longer—he oiled the clock’s components as much to ease his mind as the mechanism.
There was a bit more to it than that. Whenever Laszlo traced the forty-five steps from his office to the foot of the tower, and went up the winding stairs, everything that grated upon and jarred his sense and sensibility, was left behind. The corkscrew climb was a penetration into air bottled from a bygone age. It was as if he were an Aladdin, ascending to a small dark room that contained nothing but a tarnished oil lamp on a table, from which, when he rubbed it, a jinni or genie streamed from the spout in a pillar of smoke, folded his arms and asked, “What is your command, Master?”
Chapter Two
‘Ho!’
It was the Exeat Institute’s Director, Hugo Bonvilian 4285D, resplendent in authority at thirty-three years of age, and the time would have been nine o’clock in the morning.
Preceded by two orderlies who threw open the bars of the double doors for him and stood smartly aside, 4285D strode into Ward One. Several paces behind him, in delta formation, was a team comprising Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M and two dumpling staff nurses, Bridget Clott 1473T and Ivana Pipette 5749T. The nurses were wearing navy and white striped tunics, and the sister was in a navy blue dress with white piping. Nurse Clott’s hair was short, Nurse Pipette’s was in a bun with a needle sticking through it, and Sister Mundy’s was loose. It hung to her shoulders, and was shaded somewhere between light and medium brown.
As if it were admiring it from various angles, the light caught 2042M’s hair so many different ways that, however often Bonvilian swept his gaze across it en route to some more official destination, he could not make up his mind as to its real or even predominant colour.
The accommodation of patients who were to be dispatched in the cause of science—not coaxed back to health, for they had not been ill when they were admitted—was the purpose of Ward One. It was a male-only environment: although the Director said that men were more genetically viable subjects for his experiments, the truth was that he was squeamish about operating on women, and in awe of the sex, to which he had had very limited exposure. No patient had ever been known to leave the ward except on the meat wagon with a toe-tag and a rictus of agony on his face. There were no drugged or speedy quittances, and rather than being immediately consigned post mortem to the incinerator, each bed occupant embarked on a pathological afterlife of dissection and analysis.
The scientific end of Bonvilian 4285D’s experimentation was to be his contribution to “The Project”, as Central had named it, which mandated that Mankind should have no other projects than the Project. The Project was the era’s foremost undertaking. It involved extracting from the microcosm of the human body the secret of all Creation, from the nuts and bolts of geophysics and morphology, to the constituents and flavouring of the soup of life, and everything in between and surrounding. When the Project was no longer a project but an accomplishment, Mahomet’s assertion that he could call the hill to him, just as easily as Mahomet could trickle over to the hill if he felt like it, would be proven correct, and Central’s present monopoly of political and social governance and regulation would be extended into absolute control of every thought, word, and deed.
In order to accomplish his great task, 4285D first needed to determine how to stall the human ageing process. For although great advances had been made over the years in selectively prolonging life, most notably by experimenting with peptides, and developing the Clotho gene, no one had yet established a route to the indefinite extension of mortality. Once the key
to eternal life had been discovered, after all the data had been collated and subjected to any number of complex algorithms, the As, Bs, and Cs would be assured of unlimited tenure in their positions; and the inconvenience and expense of having to replace State-registered citizens in their respective roles within the Project, as and when they became incapacitated or died, would be eliminated.
When the Director abruptly halted, both for effect and to survey his domain, like carriages behind a locomotive so did Sister Gloria Mundy 2042M, and Nurses Bridget Clott 1473T and Ivana Pipette 5749T. Sister Gloria moved gracefully when she was at liberty, with the fluid self-generating gait of a giraffe; but at present she was pushing a steel trolley, the Euthacart of drugs with which the farewell crowd of patients on the ward were dosed to regulate their conditions. The right fore-wheel of the trolley squeaked, either for lack of a drop of oil or in protest at its distasteful mission. Only when Sister Gloria straightened was it apparent that she was nearly a foot taller than the Director, who was shy of medium height; he was acutely conscious of this, and she was conscious of his consciousness. Coolly 2042M, who was not afraid of him but knew better than to show it, relaxed her spine to minimize her advantage, leaned forward a little more, and reviewed the contents of the trolley. The two nurses looked at their feet.
On top of the cart, surrounded by a thin steel rail with ball joints at the corners, were dozens of small glass bottles. They were similar to the miniature ones containing spirits that smiling stewardesses used to dispense to aeroplane passengers, before they stopped smiling and dispensing. But, as 2042M pushed the cart over the black and white squares of linoleum, the little glass prima donnas chinked as if they were giggling at the deadly cocktails that they contained. The innocent-looking bottles were in a graded range of sharp pretty colours, and plugged with tiny corks instead of having screw-tops. Beneath the rack on the lower trays was an array of kidney bowls, syringes, and hypodermic needles in various sizes and lengths, larger bottles of clear liquid, beakers, and gleaming surgical tools.
The Exeat Institute’s Ward One was the largest in the former Greenwich Hospital, which had been a world-famous institution dedicated to the saving of sick and injured children’s lives, and curing of their diseases and illnesses. It had a high half ceiling that opened into a vast stained-glass dome, or oculus, a carapace even grander than Louis Comfort Tiffany’s creation at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
The dome seemed to float rather than rely upon structural support. It was filled with a soft filtration of coloured light that did much to improve the atmosphere, despite the best efforts of the latter-day fluorescent strip lighting and flood and spot lights lower down, which had been installed to illuminate those Bonvilian’s endeavours that were so antithetical to those of the Greenwich, to purge or quell or disperse it.
4285D regarded the dome as his fierce competitor, and his ‘Ho!’ing upon entering was intended as a challenge. By inflating the room with his commanding presence and voice, he imagined himself shouldering the vault as Hercules had assumed the weight of the world from the Titan Atlas; and, by raising the half giant Antaeus, son of Poseidon and Gaia, the Earth Mother, from the ground deprived him of his strength.
Today the Director decided that a single ‘Ho!’ was not enough. The torpor of the bodies before him, though understandable given their condition, seemed more than usually insubordinate in failing to come to and salute him, before lying at ease on his order. So the Director filled his lungs again, relaxed his throat and,
‘Ho-o!’. This time it was a roar as, like a lion on the African veldt, 4285D declared himself lord of his domain.
From above the two lines of dozens of corpses-in-waiting that were lined against the walls down the length of the ward—Bonvilian thought of the Persian army drawn up at the battle of Marathon, and pictured himself assuming the position of the brilliant Greek general Miltiades—to the three mullioned windows that reached from floor to ceiling at the end, a slight echo was returned from the empyrean of the opulent dome. Then silence thudded.
The ward was spartanly furnished: here there were none of the inappropriate gifts that once were common to hospital wards, of spore-laden flowers, and overripe bananas, and boxes of chocolate-coated cracknels, caramels, and nuts that were brought for the Nil-By-Mouths and Do-Not-Resuscitates by their families and friends. Nor were there any visitors, for on Ward One outsiders were forbidden, and would have been arrested at the main gates had they sought entrance, and interrogated to within an inch or less of their lives.
“Life’s not short enough” was the motto that 4285D had created for his “Impatients”, as he called them. It was a play on the Latin word for patience, patientia, meaning suffering, alluding to the almost unseemly speed with which, with Bonvilian’s earnest assistance, they shuffled off their mortal coils in the cause of the Project.
The weather being fine and warm, in the absence of air-conditioning the small fans on each bedside table were ineffective in keeping the air circulating. Near the great windows, across which iron stanchions had been affixed from wall to wall, to foil any who might be overcome with an urge to throw a chair through the mullion lights and leap out, the floor was zebraed with stripes of sunlight. Bonvilian’s attention had been drawn earlier to the clement conditions, both by the light and the twittering of birds that seeped through the small triple-glazed hermetically sealed apertures in his office on the top floor, and he was irked by their attempts to warm and brighten the shady coolth of his fell purpose.
The occupants of the ward, who might have been solaced by the musical intrusion, did not heed the sounds of the birds. They were inconsolable in their grief. One of the most unfortunate consequences of their situation was that every pleasurable appeal to the senses was accompanied by pain: not a dull pain, but an exacerbated version of the pins and needles one experiences as circulation returns to a deadened limb. As “Impatients”—a liking for black humour was the only trait that the occupants of the ward shared with the Director—they had adopted the nickname with the same ironic enthusiasm as regiments of the British Army had those of the Desert Rats, and the Donkey Wallopers, the Ladies from Hell, the Vein Openers, the Yeller Bellies, the Blind Half-Hundred, the Dirty Shirts, the Saucy Sixth, the Mutton Lancers, and Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard.
Emptiness squatted, toadlike, in the middle of the ward.
Fearing jeers as 4285D always did, irrationally, but hearing them always in his mind, the wait was uncomfortable. But he was soon relieved by the hush, like that which used to fall, in the days when marriage was permitted, in churches, when there were churches, when the priest asked whether there were any who might know of any just cause or impediment why he should not join a couple in Holy, when belief in a god was permitted, Matrimony. Satisfied that no answer or sound would be forthcoming from the scourged and mortifying flesh before him, the Director’s posture slackened with relief; and he half turned to Sister 2042M, as if he were a child seeking approval from his mother, in the days when domestic alliance with a parent was permitted.
Bonvilian recognized immediately the display of weakness, and his upper lip writhed, the more because the pitch of the first ‘Ho!’ had been a little high. Tomorrow he would take a deeper breath and express it from lower down, from the diaphragm as would an opera singer, in the day when public entertainment was allowed.
Undetected by 4285D, the orderlies, and the two nurses, but picked up by Sister Gloria, a communal sigh of exhalation circled the ward and exited through a ventilator. A faint harmonious hum powdered the air around Impatients Squamous, Squint, Smegma, Squeamish, and Spleen, who were nearest the windows along the wall to the left, and was answered by a low groan from Smallpiece, Softstool, Scrotum, Spittle, and Snot, opposite.
In from Squamous’s group, with four on each side, were Sweeney, Syndrome, Smallpox, Sarco, Sick, Scum, and Sphincter; and a young person, the only youth on the ward because Bonvilian preferred his meat well hung: Sorias, a recent arrival.
The
name Sorias was a contraction of psoriasis.
‘Here he comes,’ said Squamous under his breath to the next bed, ‘the Minotaur wants his breakfast. He’s dead on time and time it is that we be dead. Squint, old boy, in the words of the poet Donne, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;”—I feel in my bones that it’s your turn today—“It tolls for thee.”’
‘Squamous,’ deliberately lisped Squint (he pronounced it ‘Thkwameth’ to avoid a more audible sibilance, like a Special Forces operative on an undercover nocturnal recce; ‘a man who treasures a relationship he had with a mule. I think it’s going to be you. But let’s be charitable: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.”…continueth Donne—you’re not the only literary snob on the block.’
‘Was involved. It was a horse, not a mule, no spavined nag but a proven winner over the sticks. I owned it, you didn’t bet on it. Not my fault.’
The source of all Impatient wardniks was the S Class, or Slave category. Slaves provided the exclusively meaty diet of the Minotaur, Hugo Bonvilian 4285D, on Ward One at the Exeat Institute. Bonvilian quipped that the essential part that his Slaves took in the scientific portion of the Project was much appreciated; and he assured them as he did his rounds that in consideration of their having qualified for…he preferred the word “donation” to that of “sacrifice”…of their still-living bodies to his endeavours, their grateful executor would make every corpuscle count. For each former person, or S-Class un-person, was a scientific guinea-pig: while mice had worked well in laboratories for a hundred years, when it came to a project as big as the Project, the only good Cavia porcellus…“tailless dumpy rodent” in the Oxford English Dictionary…was a human one.
Upon being designated as a Slave every male was given, in place of the registration number and alphabetical suffix denoting his former State ranking—the Ss were specially chosen transfers from other Classes—that had been appended to his former name, which had been given up, a single informal appellation beginning with the letter S. That the nicknames, for they were unofficial and used only within the confines of the Exeat Institute, were intended to be pejorative was understood because it was the Director himself who assigned them. Inspired by the sentiment of the discredited biblic preacher formerly known as Ecclesiastes, “Vanitas vanitatum…et omnia vanitas”, Bonvilian mulled the application of each label in his office late at night, as a businessman in a first-class railway carriage on his way to work might once have pondered a crossword clue in The Times.
