CLOCKS DON'T LIE

Just a few thoughts...

The old clock ticked in the hall.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, it clucked to itself.

And Mary Princeworthy stood there and listened to it. She had to listen because she couldn’t see, having been blind as the proverbial bat since her seventy birthday, when a group of friends had clubbed together and bought her this clock.

But now she was ninety. Or thereabouts. She rather thought she might be approaching ninety one, but who was bothered? She most certainly wasn’t. One year was so much like every other year these days that it wasn’t worth trying to worry them apart.

So for twenty years there had been one constancy. Tick tock, tick tock, tick.

But though she couldn’t see the clock she loved it. She had loved it when they had given it to her, those thoughtful friends of hers.

“Here’s a secret about time,” old Ernie had said, Ernie with the little fat tummy, Ernie with the florid face, Ernie who sure as sixpence didn’t have long left in the world himself.

“A secret?” she had asked, her seventy year old birthday eyes alight with joy.

“It knows, does this clock, how quickly the years pass by,” he had said, almost seriously, “it can tell when a soul’s alive and sure as hell it can tell when that soul is dead.”

And with that he took his tool kit out, the one his grandfather had owned and barely used, and bolted the clock to the wall for her.

It was all rubbish, of course. The clock didn’t stop or chime all wrong or do anything like that when Ernie died a week or so after that. It just kept on ticking like it always had.

But it did fall off the wall where Ernie had screwed it the next day, and it fell right onto her head making one hell of a lot of jingly noise, it had knocked her unconscious as it did, and when she was found by the daily nurse and soothed back to life she found she couldn’t see a blasted thing. She was blind as a bat. A proverbial bat. But she could hear the clock ticking because the mercy was that it still worked, and Mary Princeworthy loved that sound.

And the years passed. Every week she wound it up, on a Sunday, which was the only reason she knew for sure when Sunday came because it was so important that the clock was kept going.

Then, every Monday (or maybe Tuesday or Wednesday if she had something better to do) she would pass her duster over the clock, careful not to shift its hands, and make sure it was absolutely clean and free from dust.

“Dust,” she had been taught as a young child during the pre-war years, “is mostly human skin, all dead and turned to flakes.”

Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but she had to make sure it didn’t get ingrained into the shiny wood casing of her clock, even if she couldn’t see it.

Her bedroom was close enough to where the clock was hung that she could hear it when it chimed, if she left the bedroom door open, and she did that every night just so she could hear the time chiming if she chanced to be awake.

If she wasn’t awake she was sure it entered her dreams, chiming the hour and donging a single dong for the half hour. Maybe it had become the template of adventures for her sleeping mind to enjoy, or maybe the tales it encouraged were dark and dangerous. Whatever they were, the clock was providing them.

So for a hundred and one reasons she loved that clock.

She even loved it when it told her she was going to die that day.

It happened like this.

On her way to bed in the evening, with a Braille book in her hand, a murder mystery because she loved murder mysteries, especially if she could work out the solution before the author told her what it was, the clock went twang like it had never done before, just as she walked passed it.

She paused by the clock, and listened, shocked by the sudden loud and rather offensive noise it had made. She couldn’t see it, of course, but she could tell quite easily that it had stopped ticking.

She stood there for ages, frowning, but there was no tick and no tock. Nothing. Just a sudden and very unnatural silence.

When she finally climbed into bed she was uncomfortably cold. After all, it was January and there was snow on the ground outside.

And, for once, she couldn’t get warm like she usually did. And with the silence of the clock eating into her brain she found, much to her surprise, that she was suddenly walking on a sunny day in clover, soft clover under her naked feet, and far away, so far it might have been in another Universe, a clock was chiming the hours like a whispering gong on the warm summer breeze in winter.

And she knew, at that very moment, that she was dead. The clock had told her so, and it must be true. Clocks don’t lie, do they?

© Peter Rogerson 29.12.20