Keeping Time

Carl and Violet form an unlikely friendship.

 

Keeping Time

 

Carl.

 

You’ve needed a new watch for months. The battery expires every now and then, only to wheeze back to life when you least expect it, several hours later. The Russian roulette of time keeping. You like the game. The absence of ticking leaves a gap in the air that is picked up by your ears even on the rush hour train. You slap the face with the same short sharp force you’d apply to a buzzing bluebottle. The ticking resumes but the watch face cries a lonely tear as the second hand breaks loose and meanders down to join the rest of the cheap gold detritus hiding in the bottom of the watch. Numbers lie blank, increment lines sulk hopelessly. The heart is failing.

 

This is the late train. Always is the busiest. You would have caught the 8.37 if you’d had a watch that worked. Or if she had ironed the shirt properly. Everyone looks s****y and creased today. It’s too hot to care. You’re sitting on those conscience-twisting seats, the ones with the flap that sits up when you leave. You can never relax on these seats. The entire journey is a battle of ‘Guess Their Age’, and ‘Pregnant or Fat?’ Then there’s the problem of offering the seat. There are certain rules to adhere to. You’ve got to make a move within the first minute that a women of a certain age boards, otherwise you’ve missed the boat. You half-rise onto your haunches, gesture with your hand, “Would you...” The eyes tell you everything. Tight smile, curt “No.” while she stows away her senior pass, flipping you a mental middle finger. So you slide back down onto the seat from your embarrassed crouch. Closer to tacky forgotten sweets, softened by the sweltering heat, sticking to the sole of your new loafers. Closer to the level of a screaming toddler, veins raised in exhausting wail, fat crocodile tears released at five minute intervals. You shouldn’t have missed the 8.37, Carl.

 

Late, in a crumpled shirt. You text in an excuse; can’t face Jean answering and giving you s**t for s**t’s sake. She rings you anyway.

"Jesus Christ Carl, not again.”

“Look, Jean I’m two stops away, I’m on the next train,”

“You’d better bloody be. Sprint from that station or I swear we’ll run the meeting without you”

“I’ve got time. Just please wait. I’ll be there.”

“Be here in ten. Or Linn will take your place. She’s already here. Don’t text again.” She hangs up and you exhale through your nose.

 

It’s quieter now on the train; you’re past the city centre, heading into the industrial estates. The baby has hushed its complaints and is alternating sucking on the metal hand bar with drinking from a bottle. The first whisper of an incisor clinks on the bar and flecks of yellow paint stick to it's lips with drool. The bottle is filled with a brown liquid and it takes you a moment to realize its cola. You groan inwardly and watch as the baby gulps it down and rots it’s little teeth. You look at the mother and her hair is scraped back into a greasy ponytail; there’s baby sick on her t-shirt. She pushes the kids dummy into its mouth as soon as it leaves the teat of the bottle. The baby stretches its arms looking for some reciprocation of emotion. The mother turns her face to the window with a sigh and you watch her eyes flick from periphery to periphery scanning the landscape of graffiti tracks. She looks tired and unloved and in need of another f*g.

 

Your shirt is sticking to your back. You fan your face with the clipboard meant for the board meeting. When you open your eyes back to the glare of sunlight two lads have boarded and sit opposite you with mud encrusted trainers resting on the seats. The carriage silently seethes. Everybody's thinking “What a bloody cheek”. Both are chewing gum in unison, letting it peek out of the precipice of their mouths before being drawn back in. Their eyes scan over your body brazenly, roaming over your briefcase, stopping at your watch. You glance at the CCTV camera skittishly. Their eyes smirk.

 

The train arrives at your stop. Up, out, air. Mother yanks the pram down to the platform, refusing help with vacant eyes. You walk in step with her, conscious of two figures raising their hoods behind you. The baby starts to wine and throws the dummy onto the tracks. The mother hesitates, sees that it is irretrievable, and curses loudly. The sun is burning hotter out here, no trace of a breeze. It dries the saliva in your mouth and makes your heart quicken. You know they’re behind you before they touch. One of them twists your arm up behind your back so far it almost reaches your neck and your early morning muscles cry out in indignation. But you don’t make a noise. Noise will make them do something worse. They’ll get spooked and make jerky movements, maybe fracture your wrist, tear the ligament. Better to bite through the pain, let them see that you are as weak as their expectations. The mother treads past. Sees but doesn’t see. Turns her head away. Averts her empty eyes.

“Don’t f*****g move. Over here. Slow. We’re going to let go. Do it!” he smacks his accomplice’s hand when the order isn’t followed. You’re marched over to a lonely corner of the platform carpeted with cigarette butts and crisp packets. They fish out your mobile from your trouser pocket, transferring it to their tracksuit and kick your briefcase, scuffing the leather. You wince. They smell like cheap aftershave. Body odour and f**s mixed into a heady mix.

“Open it.”

You make the smallest inclination with your head. Submit. The one with the freckles shoves you towards the wall and they both make a barricade with their bodies, hiding you from view. Your fingers are damp with sweat and they slip over the combination lock. She bought you this case last Christmas, like a child getting a new pencil case for the first day of school. She made you change the password to her birthday. Sixteenth of March. The case clicks open with a metallic chime and the two teens descend upon it, ravenously kicking the presentation notes into the dirt, leaving tread marks. Jean’s going to be pissed. You check your watch; you’re between ten and fifteen minutes late, depending on when your watch last stopped for breath. There’s no way they’ll have waited for you. Linn has immaculate blow-dried hair and pointed nails and a smile that will let her bullshit her way through your presentation. Why would they wait for you?

Freckles notices you checking your watch.

“What do we have here?” he smiles without using his eyes and runs his tongue over his teeth as he grabs your wrist and starts to unfasten the watch clasp. You can’t let this happen. You twist free out of his grasp and hold your arm rigor mortis behind your back.

“Play nice,” he warns, “or we won’t.”

“No” you hear yourself say in a wavering tone, stepping back.

They corner you amidst sniggers and hold you by your hair against the wall, the bricks grazing your cheek and making it worse the more you struggle. You feel one of their fingers slip the clasp and the weight of the watch is gone. They peer at the watch face and throw it to the ground in disgust.

“Not worth nothing. Leave it.”

Freckles watches your face closely as he places his heel on the face and grinds it into the floor until the glass splinters and caves in. You can see the ‘CA’ of your initials on the strap mangled into alien hieroglyphics. The ticking stops. He leers at your horror and spits onto the debris. The watch is dead. All broken in the dust.

 

*

Violet.

 

It fell into my hands from the sky. I had been making pies at the bottom of the garden, in the place where the rockery hits the undergrowth. My hands were dripping with earth and worms and earthy worms and it fell right in on top. Bessie from one door down would have screamed. Lord knows, I’m not Bessie. So I zip my lip and peek one eye to the beast. It was breathing, in a shallow and shaky kind of way; all the huffing and puffing was making its pokey chest go up and downaways. It’s a pretty birdie! She’s been running and chasing all her friends in the sky, and she’s fallen down on my pie hands! I half turn and check mamma isn’t at the kitchen window spying again, then I sit her down on a stone so she can look over at the daffodils. I can’t remember if I know what birds eat, so I pull out some grass from a patch in the shadow of the old tree and hold it near her beak. She shakes her beak and her belly does the Fosbury flop. Birdie’s voice gets all raspy so I stroke her feathers and tickle her behind the ears like Bessie’s tabby. It doesn’t make her perky. I climb up onto the tallest rock and hold her up, up; I want to help her fly again. Soar, go my birdie! She doesn’t want to move. She’s a big bulge of death in my hands. I don’t want her anymore. When I sit her down again her feathers look wrong, like mamma’s hair when her roots are showing three inches of black before it snaps to yellow. My hands aren’t right. I need to get the death off so I stop feeling icky. Behind the old tree runs a brook, just over on Bessie’s side. I’m not allowed over there, you need to get past the fence and mamma says that it’s not safe. But mamma wouldn’t want death all over her new cream sofas. I figure she’d blow her brains if she knew.

 

It’s tricky getting to the fence. The toes of my plimsolls go murky with rock slime, like when you mix green with black paint and it looks witchy and stains the paintbrush. I hopscotch a one, a two, a three, and a four and hold my breath because it helps me concentrate on where my feet are going. There’s a secret hole underneath the wire that I could always twist through. But I’m a bigger girl now so I have to kick the dirt to make my tummy fit through. Still my t-shirt snags on the barbs closest to the floor and a sneaky nettle grabs my ankle at that flimsy part where it makes your eyes smart. The stings make my ankle come up with little white ridges and I’m angry because mamma will know I’ve been exploring. She’ll start asking too many questions and then she’ll find my birdie and realize I’ve got death hands. I start on my haunches picking through the dirt so I can find the one with the frilly leaves that’ll make my ankle stop pricking. I’m staring at the ground and wrinkling my nose at the damp earth smell so my eyes catch his shoes first before I see all of him. They’re posh loafers with pointed fronts, like the ones you see in the window of shops we don’t go in because mamma says she hasn’t got her lipstick on today and her hair isn’t set. The shoes are crossed at the base of the tree and I think I must be camouflaged because they don’t get up and tell me I’m bad to come this side of the fence. I straighten up slowly so I don’t scare him. He doesn’t notice. His eyes are looking at somewhere I can’t see. I can tell the white part of them is red like when mamma gets too close and blows smoke in my face, and I can’t help crying but she gets cross anyway.

“Why are you sad?” I ask. Mamma tells me never to talk to strangers. Strangers are bad and little girls are good. But she talks to them, I know, always laughing with too much teeth and burning the carpet with little fat black circles when her cigarette slips through her fingers. When the words have left my mouth I wish I’d never tried to chitchat. His eyes look at me now and his face changes and now I realize it is Mr. Arthur from next door. He doesn’t answer so I figure he doesn’t like people asking questions. His mouth opens after a minute like sounds might escape, but they never do. So he smiles and takes a big drag of his cigarette and keeps the smoke in. I’ve only seen mamma take a drag this big when lots of angry letters come through the post. She’s not a smoker, she tells me so. She puffs away but this cough makes her whoop and splutter at the most inconvenient of times. Besides, women only smoke cigarettes to have something in their hands so they can show off their manicures. She tells me this but when she flashes her new colour of varnish the tips are dirty yellow. I don’t believe her. If I had yellow fingers I would hide them away in my pockets so no one would see the nasty things. I check Mr. Arthur’s fingers and they look normal and pinky. He is not showing his fingers off. His puff goes on for so long that I think the smoke will race round his body and come out of his ears like in a cartoon.

 

My stings start to twitch so I crouch down and scratch the itch. My fingernails are longer than usual because mamma said that no one would want to marry a girl who bites all her pretty nails off. They are all pointed and creeping over my fingertips. I scratch and scratch and forget what I am doing until I feel stickiness. The tops of the stings are raw and weeping with blood and the watery stuff that comes out of blisters when you pop them. It hurts more than before and I bite my lip to stop whimpering. Mr. Arthur is watching. He beckons me over. I go because it’s his brook and I don’t want to get in more trouble for not doing as I’m told.

“Come here. Your foot looks sore.” He says, cocking his head to the side to get a better look at my bad ankle. I nod and fidget with my hands because I have never spoken to Bessie’s father before. Mamma doesn’t like him. Even Bessie’s mamma doesn’t like him. He doesn’t ever come to pick Bessie up from tea. Sometimes the jangle of his keys wakes me up at night and I watch him fumble with them in the lock. He always wears a pinstripe shirt and has a briefcase that makes him look like a spy. He doesn’t look like a spy today. He looks like mamma on a Sunday morning before she has an espresso and a Marlboro.

 

He lifts my ankle up off the floor and holds it in his hands, frowning. I hold onto the tree for support. The frill of my socks has got blood and gunk on it, and he pushes it down so the stings are exposed in all their oozing glory.

“Nettles?” I nod. “Well this just won’t do.” He gets to his feet and brushes the dust from his lapels, then takes my hand in his. I cringe and hope he can’t feel the death still on them. We walk along the brook looking for dock leaves hiding from my sore ankle.

“Aha! Look here!” Mr. Arthur has found some of the magic plants, nestled on the bank of the stream. He lifts me down and lets me pick which leaf to heal my stings. He turns the inside of my ankle to the sunlight and rubs the leaf on the angry little spots until they calm and fade back to normal papery-white. Mr. Arthur must be very clever to find the enchanted leaves, and his hands are ever so careful fixing my ankle. He dabs at the sores gently like how I hold mamma’s expensive dolls in the top of the cupboard in case she slaps the back of my wrists if I get too rough.

“I need to wash my hands Mr. Arthur,” I say solemnly after my ankle has been soothed.

“So do I! Don’t want any of your ankle juice on me!” He makes a yuck face and I giggle. He takes off his shiny silver cufflinks and pops them in his jacket pocket before rolling the sleeves back to his elbows. I copy him and mime taking off my cufflinks too. He rinses his hands in the brook before taking me by my middle and holding me over the water so my feet don’t get soggy in the shallows. I scrub my hands together and they smell cleaner, like metal and earth. I can breath with all my lungs again. The death is gone.

“All better?”

“Better.”

Mr. Arthur has fixed my ankle and took the death from my hands. It is time he should see.

“I want to show you my Birdie,” I tell him, and take his damp hand.

 

Carl.

 

You had seen the girl from next door before, but never up close. You think she plays with your Bessie, but you don’t know for sure. She was certainly a rambunctious little soul, leading the way down through the scrub at the furthest end of the garden. You breathe in the air and hold it, savouring the smell of outside and space. So very different to the sweaty mildew of train carriage commutes. You’re at the fence that partitions her garden and your own. She shades the setting sun from her eyes with a dirty arm that leaks a dusty streak across her forehead. You suck your thumb and reach to smudge it from her skin, and then realize she’s not yours. Bessie is yours. But Bessie is inside, incarcerated in your middle of the range terrace, brushing her hair with long strokes and admiring how it shines in her mother’s dresser mirror. Bessie wouldn’t cross the fence at the bottom of the garden. Her nervous disposition would stop her at the patio, maximum. She never was one for nature.

 

The girl waits at the fence and you hesitate when you see that this part is sectioned with barbwire.

“My Birdie is just over there! I want you to look at her!” she is giddy with the prospect of showing you her pet. So you hold those pale limbs close and stretch her over the barbs so they don’t spoil her smooth legs. She runs amongst the tall grass while you do the less than graceful jig over the top of the fence, hopping and stumbling across the divide. You find her cross-legged on the ground next to the old oak tree that dapples her hair in the warm copper of the sunset. On her lap is a blackbird. Another step further confirms your suspicions. The bird is dead. You sit down next to her tiny frame and don’t care when the wet earth cakes your dress pants and you can feel the mud seeping onto your chill legs. The little girl is quiet, her chest rising and falling with each deep breath as her eyes well up with tears.

“I’m sorry about your birdie.” You think this will help but the tears run down her cheeks and fall on the small body in her hands regardless.

“It’s my fault! She died and I couldn’t stop her.” Her voice is grave. “I want to bury her.”

You start. Bessie had had pets, sure. The hamster with the tumor, the goldfish found bloated on the surface of the tank days after purchase. Sickly weak pets for a sickly, weak girl. They were all buried in your garden, anonymous unmarked graves, somewhere under the expanse of earth. Bessie didn’t want to watch. Her mother vehemently agreed. It had been traumatic enough; princess didn’t need anymore upset. So you dug the shallow plots far from the house so Bessie couldn’t see or hear from the window. Anything to prevent the beginnings of a shaky wail that would make your forearms sprout gooseflesh. So you nod at this girl’s suggestion. Bury the birdie. Yes.

 

Beneath the oak the earth is damp and breaks away from the roots easily. You scrape away at the dirt, trying to make space enough for her birdie. She helps and doesn’t care that the mud gets trapped underneath her fingernails and stains her cuffs a dark, peaty mahogany. The hole is big enough now. She runs and fetches a plastic sandwich container with a snap on lid.

“We can put her in my pie bowl! She’ll like that,” she says. You place it into the hollow and compact the earth around it. She doesn’t want to touch the birdie again. That’s okay. She’s been a brave girl. You pick birdie up and place her in the box. She looks almost like she’s sleeping in the trick of the dusk light. You stand with one arm around her shoulders and the other in your pocket, feeling the broken contents of your watch all bumping together. You thumb the largest chunk and dig your nail into the indents on the metal. This is right you know it. You take a big handful of the screws and shards of glass and warped metal from your trouser pocket and sprinkle it over the body of the bird.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathes. And it is. The sunset catches in the shine of the metal. The watch has turned into glitter and sequins and treasure, you can see it in her eyes. The birdie has a burial fit for a king. You both snap the lid on and pile the mud back on top. The little girl wants to mark it so she can come back and remember birdie. She collects daisies and daffodils and places them on top of the turned earth. It is finished.

You don’t talk for a while. She sits and threads daisy chains while the sunlight fades and the evening wind begins to whip her hair from her braid. Upon completion she places them beside the grave: her own little offerings. Her mother’s screeching breaks the silence between you and she jumps to her feet.

“Violet! Violet you naughty little girl! Answer me!” The girl’s eyes go glassy with fright and I squeeze her cold fingers for reassurance.

“Go home to your mother Violet. She’s worrying.” The girl nods a slow, solemn nod, and as soon as she had appeared hours earlier, she danced up the hill toward the dulcet cry of the harpy.

So you are left looking at the crude grave of a birdie and thinking; Oh if only Bessie had been named Violet, would this have made all the difference?

 

Violet.

 

Mamma is not happy with me. My shirt is dirty, my shorts are dirty, and my knickers are wet through by the time she has finished scolding. She sees my nettle stings and slaps at my ankles. I cry because it hurts, and I cry more because Mr. Arthur’s magic goes as soon as she has touched me. The pricking swells up again and I know this is because her hands are evil. I’m sent to bed with no supper after she has stripped me of my sodden clothes and had a big drag on a Marlboro. She used a lot of nasty words when she was shouting at me, words that would make Mr. Arthur gasp. I know this because when she said a bad one her mouth did this twisty thing like when you lick a lemon and her tongue curled up around the wickedness of the word. I scratch my itch and it bleeds red all over my fingernails and leaves brown pin pricks on the duvet.

 

I wonder if Mr. Arthur has went home, to Bessie and Bessie’s mamma. Or if he is there at the bottom of the garden watching over my birdie on her first night in the ground. I don’t tell mamma about him. She might think it was his fault I’m dirty. It is best this way. I think I will tell Mr. Arthur that he can be my friend tomorrow. I think I would like it if we could be best friends.

 

*

 

The next day is a Sunday and I’m glad. There’s no school on Sundays and I can spend all day making pies in the garden and mamma won’t bother me a peep. I say a prayer to Birdie and hope she’ll hear underneath all those worms and mud. She’s my gift from the sky and it’s better now she’s under there; I can’t hurt her anymore. The radio is playing some dancing music in the kitchen and notes drift down to my secret corner of the garden. I skip round and round the old tree until my head feels funny and topsy-turvy. So I walk to the place where the prickly fence is and look up at Mr. Arthur’s house. I can see a little white face in the top right bedroom window staring. Bessie. She makes me feel weird just standing their looking so I hop back into the undergrowth, holding my skirts out of the grasp of the mud. Sunday’s are long and I can’t make pies because I’m in my nice dress and mamma would shout and shake like she did last night if I make myself dirty as sin again. Sunday’s are the most boring of all. I have waited and waited but Mr. Arthur hasn’t come again in his nice shoes and shiny cufflinks. I’m sad because I’ve never had a best friend before. It felt like I did yesterday. I sigh because the garden isn’t so fun today without him here. The grave doesn’t look so good as I remembered. The corner of the pie box is sticking out the earth, like Birdie is trying to escape. I need him here so his magic can fix it. Bessie’s white face is imprinted on my brain and she’s whispering to me. The whispers are angry like when I pulled her ponytail too hard and long tendrils of gold fell out in my fist. Her white face stares and spits venom that her daddy was playing with me, and I’ve stolen him. I put my hands over my ears and shake my head until the whispers start blurring into a buzz like a bee is living in my brain. Her white face is still staring so I run all the way up to the house and cry until mamma notices.

 

Carl.

 

You catch the 8.37 today, even without a watch. The first streams of days had burnt through the curtains and pried your eyelids open. You couldn’t sleep a wink last night. Bessie had taken ill and slept in your bed with her mother. You get the couch. You don’t mind. But sleep doesn’t come, and when it does in the first rays of morning it is uneasy and filled with Violet. You dreamt of pies and Birdie and graves with your dead watch inside. The thought makes you shiver. Today the new loafers are pinching your feet so much it feels like they are splitting your toes in half. It is cooler today. Everyone looks cooler and less crumpled. But the air in the train is choking you, the smell of damp earth is missing, why is it missing? It is quiet on this train. No wail of a toddler, cackle of schoolchildren. Just rows and rows of commuters, travelling to this office or that. There’s an electronic hum in the air, a collective background noise from hundreds of iPods playing hundreds of empty songs. An army of black suits numbing morning from making you realize why you’re here and how useless this all is.

 

When the ticket collector calls you reach in your blazer and feel cold little cufflinks instead of the small square rail pass. You stare at them. A reminder of yesterday. They can’t have entered this world. Your pass isn’t there, and you laugh under your breath because this isn’t you. You aren’t the guy that fakes forgetfulness on the off chance the ticket collector will look at the coffee stain on your shirt and the two day stubble and walk on wordlessly. So you hold your hands up and take out your wallet while he sneers at your honesty in disgust. A man with a belly that is straining the buttons on his shirt sits down next to you, pinning you in the seat. He sneezes and you feel flecks of spittle and snot hit the left side of your cheek. You smile because you can’t or won’t cry. Violet would laugh a big, full laugh if you impersonated him, miming a potbelly with long ape arms, running after her like a big sneezing ogre coming to eat her up. You think you will tell Bessie over dinner, and watch as her face calves in terror as she stares at your left cheek and imagines it caked in snot. She’ll whimper and her mother will say “That’s enough” and you’ll sleep on the couch again.

 

Raindrops have left dusty tracks on the windowpane and you trace the journeys with you fingers: up and down and around. You reach your stop and squeeze past the belly in one swift motion so skin contact isn’t made. On the platform your shoes make the same click de clack as everyone else’s, tap dancing in time with the speed of the morning stride. In the lift you press the same button, floor eleven, right to the top. You drink the same watery cappuccino and wish you hadn’t. You do everything the same as yesterday, and the day before that, and days before that that you can’t remember because the conditions were identical. But somehow it isn’t the same. Somehow you’re not the same. You want to smell the earth and feel dirt wedged beneath your fingernails. You want to soothe her skin on that dainty part where her calve meets her ankle. You want to tell her that she can’t become Bessie, not ever, and rub her shoulders as the chill of evening sets in. You want to make Violet your own.

 

Tonight you will run down to the place where the fence hits the brook, and you will pray that the little girl from next door comes to play mud pies.

© Rebecca Conway 2013