The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart Read online

  ‘Well, don’t take too long about it . . . You’ve already lost her once by hiding your past. Otherwise she’ll bury her head in your chest, only to discover there’s another clock in place of the old one. Speaking of which, why don’t I get rid of it once and for all?’

  ‘Look, we will get rid of it, but I need more time. It was Dr Madeleine’s masterpiece, after all. Let’s just wait until I’m feeling a bit better, all right?’

  ‘You’re feeling better already . . . How about I cut your hair and shave off that prehistoric beard of yours?’

  ‘No, not yet. By the way, you don’t happen to have one of Méliès’ old suits still hanging around?’

  Every now and then, I position myself in a key spot, not far from the Ghost Train. That way, we can run into each other, as if by chance. The rapport we strike up resembles what we used to have so closely that I don’t know if I’m laughing or crying. Sometimes, during our silences, I tell myself that she knows but isn’t saying anything. Except that’s not her style.

  I’m careful not to harass Miss Acacia. I’ve learned my lesson from my first accident in love. Instinctively, I still want to push things, but the pain slows me down; or at any rate stops me being in such a rush.

  I’m starting to manipulate the truth again. But I’m enjoying nibbling the crumbs of her presence from the safety of my new identity, and the thought of ending all this makes my stomach lurch.

  This game has been going on for more than two months and Joe doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. Méliès’ shoes are starting to hurt my feet now. As for his suit, I look like I’m going fishing disguised as a magician. Jehanne, my nurse, thinks this metamorphosis is a result of my long coma. My bones are trying to make up for lost time after being compacted like springs for three years. As a result, I’ve got curvature of the spine which affects my whole body. Even my face is changing. My jaw is more thickset, and my cheekbones more prominent.

  ‘Here comes Mr Neander-Cute dressed up in his brand new suit,’ Miss Acacia calls out when she sees me coming. ‘All you need is a trip to the hairdresser’s and we’ll have you back to being a fully civilised man,’ she tells me today.

  ‘If you call me Mr Neander-Cute, I’ll never shave my beard off again.’

  It came out just like that, dragando piano, as Méliès might whisper.

  ‘You could shave it off, and I’d still call you Mr Neander-Cute, if you’d like . . .’

  So we’re back to these deliciously confused emotions. I can’t savour them fully but it’s already a lot better than being apart from her.

  ‘You remind me of an old lover I once had.’

  ‘More of the “old” or the “lover”?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Did he have a beard?’

  ‘No, but he was a mysterious figure like you. He believed in his lies, or rather his dreams. I thought it was just to impress me, but he really did believe in them.’

  ‘Perhaps he believed in them and wanted to impress you at the same time.’

  ‘Perhaps . . . I don’t know. He died a few years back.’

  ‘Died?’

  ‘Yes, I laid flowers on his grave again this morning.’

  ‘And what if he only died to impress you, to get you to believe in him?’

  ‘Oh, he’d have been perfectly capable of something like that, but he wouldn’t have waited three years to come back.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘That’s a mystery. Some people saw him struggling with a horse, others say that he died in a fire which he accidentally started. As for me, I’m afraid he died in a fit of anger after our final argument. It was a terrible row. All I know for sure is that he’s dead, because they buried him. And anyway if he was alive, he’d be here. With me.’

  A ghost hiding behind his beard, that’s what I’ve become.

  ‘Did he love you too much?’

  ‘You can never love someone too much.’

  ‘Did he love you badly?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . But let me tell you this: encouraging me to talk about my first love, who died three years ago, isn’t the best way of flirting with me.’

  ‘What is the best way of flirting with you, then?’

  ‘Not to flirt with me.’

  ‘I knew it. That’s exactly why I haven’t been flirting with you!’

  She smiled.

  I nearly, so nearly, told her everything. With my old heart, it would have popped out all by itself . . . but now, everything’s different.

  I went back to the workshop just as a vampire reclaims his coffin – ashamed of having bitten a magnificent neck.

  You’ll never be the same again, Méliès told me before the operation. Regrets and remorse press against a stormy gulf. Only a few months have gone by and I’m already fed up with my life in its muted version. I’ve finished convalescing now, and want to return to the heat of the fire without this mask of a beard and bushy hair. I don’t mind growing up a bit, and I’ve got to turn this false reunion around.

  Tonight, when I go to bed, I’m eager to rummage among the memories and dreams that lie in passion’s dustbin. I want to see what’s left of my old heart, the one that let me fall in love last time.

  My new clock hardly makes any noise, but I’m no less of an insomniac. The old one is tidied away on a shelf, in a cardboard box. Perhaps if I repaired it, everything would be just as it was before. No Joe, no knife between the clock hands. To travel back in time to that period when I loved guilelessly, when I forged my way, head down, without worrying about bumping into my dreams. Bring back those days when I wasn’t afraid of anything; when I could climb on board love’s rose-tinted rocket without fastening my safety belt. I’m older, today, and more sensible too; but as a result, I no longer dare leap towards the woman who’ll always make me feel like I’m ten years old. My old heart will continue to make me dream more than the new one, even though it’s battered and outside my body now. It’s the ‘real thing’; it’s mine. And like a fool, I went and smashed it. What have I become? My own impostor? A see-through shadow?

  I grab the cardboard box and carefully take out the clock, putting it down on my bed. Curls of dust rise up. I slide my fingers inside my former gears. Pain, or the memory of that pain, is instantly revived; followed by a surprisingly comforting feeling.

  After a few seconds, the clock goes clickety-clack, like a skeleton learning to walk again, then it stops. My rapture transports me from the top of Arthur’s Seat into the tender arms of Miss Acacia. I tie the clock hands back in position with two pieces of string; it’s not a very sturdy arrangement.

  I spend the night trying to repair my old wooden heart; but being the pathetic tinkerer I am, I don’t have any luck. If only Madeleine were here, to flash that twitch of a smile before expertly manipulating my clock gears. Or Méliès, with all his sound advice. But by dawn, I’ve made up my own mind. I’m going to find Miss Acacia to tell her the whole truth. I’ve put my old clock back in the box. It’s a present for someone who has become a great singer. I won’t just give her the key this time, I’ll give her the whole heart too, in the hope that she might once again decide to tinker at love with me.

  I walk down the main avenue in the Extraordinarium, like someone condemned to die. I cross paths with Joe, and our eyes meet as if we’re fighting a duel in a western, in slow motion.

  But I’m not afraid any more. For the first time in my life, I imagine what it must be like to be in his shoes. Today I’m in a position to win back Miss Acacia, just as he was when he took on the job at the Ghost Train. I think about how much he must have hated me at school when I couldn’t stop talking about her, not realising that he was in agony because she’d gone away and never come back. This great tall fellow and I almost have something in common. I watch him stride off until he disappears out of sight.

  Up on the Ghost Train walkway, Brigitte Heim appears. When I catch sight of her hairstyle, identical to the bristles on a broom, I turn back. She’s like a sallow w
itch who reeks of loneliness; and as unhappy as those piles of old stones she collects. I could have tried talking calmly to her, now that she no longer recognises me. But just the idea of her spitting spiteful remarks makes me feel tired.

  Miss Acacia, or the gift of ensuring things never work out quite as they were planned . . .

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to carry on . . . Oh, you’ve got a present for me? What’s inside the box?’

  ‘A heart in a thousand pieces. Mine . . .’

  ‘You’re pretty single-minded, for somebody who’s not meant to be flirting with me.’

  ‘Forget about the impostor you saw yesterday. I want to tell you the whole truth now.’

  ‘The truth is you never stop trying to flirt, with your unkempt appearance and that suit you wear. And I’ll admit it works for me . . . a tiny bit.’

  I grab her cheeks between my fingers. They’ve lost none of their glow. I place my lips on hers without saying a word. The softness of her lips makes me momentarily forget my best intentions. I wonder if I didn’t just hear a clickety-clack from inside the box. The kiss leaves me with an aftertaste of red peppers. A second kiss takes over from the first. We press harder this time, plugging back into electric memories, reconnecting with treasures buried deep beneath the skin. Robber! Impostor! hisses the right side of my brain. Wait! Let’s talk about it later, my body answers. My heart is being tugged in opposite directions; it beats wildly with all its might. I’m intoxicated by the pure and simple joy of rediscovering her, despite the nasty feeling that I’m also cuckolding myself. This kind of simultaneous happiness and suffering is too much. I’m used to rain after fine weather. But right now, flashes of lightning are streaking across the bluest sky in the world.

  ‘I asked to speak first . . .’ she tells me sadly, extricating herself from my embrace. ‘I don’t want to carry on seeing you. I know we’ve been circling around each other for months now, but I’m in love with someone else, and have been for a long time. It would be crazy to start a new relationship, I’m really sorry. But I’m still in love . . .’

  ‘With Joe, I know.’

  ‘No, with Jack, the old lover I told you about, the one you remind me of sometimes.’

  A big bang of sensations wreaks havoc with my emotional connections. Tears come without warning, hot and long, impossible to hold back.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hurt you, but I’ve already married someone I’m not in love with. I can’t start all over again,’ she says, putting her slim arms around me.

  My eyelashes must be spitting rainbows.

  ‘I can’t accept a present from you. I’m really sorry. Don’t make things any more complicated than they already are.’

  I take my courage in both hands as I grab hold of the parcel containing my clockwork heart. ‘Open it anyway, it’s a present intended for you alone. If you don’t take it, nobody else can use it.’

  She accepts, visibly embarrassed. Her carefully painted pretty little fingers tear off the paper. She feigns a smile. It’s a precious moment. Giving your heart wrapped up in a box to the woman of your life is no small undertaking.

  She shakes the box, going through the motions of guessing its contents.

  ‘Is it fragile?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fragile.’

  Her discomfort is palpable. Gently, she lifts the lid. Her hands dive to the bottom of the box and grab hold of my old clockwork heart. The top of the dial appears in the daylight, then the centre of the clock and its clock hands that have been stuck together again.

  She looks at it. Not a word. She rummages nervously in her handbag, gets out a pair of glasses, which she clumsily perches on her tiny nose. Her eyes scrutinise every detail. She makes the clock hands turn clockwise and then anti-clockwise. Her spectacles mist up on the outside. She shakes her head slowly. Her lenses mist up on the inside too. Her hands are trembling; they’re attached to the inside of my chest. My body registers their seismic movements and reproduces them even though, technically speaking, she’s not touching me. My clocks ring out inside me, shaken by the trembling that grows stronger all the time.

  Miss Acacia gently puts my heart down on the low wall that we snuggled up against so many times. Finally, she raises her head in my direction.

  Her lips part and whisper:

  ‘Every day, I went there every single day. I’ve been laying flowers on your bloody grave for three years. From the day you were buried until this morning. I was there again only just now. But that was the last time . . . Because from now on, as far as I’m concerned, you no longer exist . . .’

  She turns on her heel for good and steps slowly over the wall. My clockwork heart is still lying on top of it, clock hands pointing to the ground. Miss Acacia’s gaze passes right through me. She doesn’t even look angry; it really is as if I don’t exist any more. Her gaze is like a sad bird, hovering for a moment over the cardboard box, then flying off towards skies I’ll never know. The pitter-patter of her footsteps fades. Soon, I’ll no longer be able to see her voluptuous derrière rolling in a velvet backwash. The swish of her skirt will have vanished; and only a hint of her soft tread will linger on. She’ll be just ten centimetres tall. Nine centimetres, six, scarcely the size of an empty matchbox. Five, four, three, two . . .

  This time, I’ll never, ever see her again.

  Epilogue

  Dr Madeleine’s clockwork heart continued its journey outside our hero’s body, if we can call him a hero.

  Brigitte Heim was the first to notice it. On a low wall, the cuckoo-clock heart looked like a toy offered to the dead. She picked it up, to add to her collection of unusual objects. And so the clock lay for a while between two ancient skulls, on the floor of the Ghost Train.

  On the day that Joe recognised it, he lost his powers as a Scareperson. One night, after his performance, he decided to get rid of it. He took the road towards the cemetery of San Felipe, with the clock under his arm. Whether as a mark of respect or whether out of pure superstition we’ll never know, but he laid the clock down on Little Jack’s untended grave.

  Miss Acacia left the Extraordinarium during the month of October 1892. On that same day in October, the clock disappeared from the cemetery of San Felipe. Joe continued with his Ghost Train career, haunted to the end of his days by the loss of Miss Acacia.

  Performing under her grandmother’s name, Miss Acacia went on to set hearts alight in cabarets across Europe. Ten years later, when she came to Paris, she could have been spotted in a cinema that was screening Voyage to the Moon by one Georges Méliès, who had become cinema’s greatest precursor, its inventor par excellence. Had they met, they would have conversed in hushed tones for a few minutes after the screening. He would have given her a copy of The Man Who Was No Hoax.

  A week later, the clock resurfaced on the doormat of an old Edinburgh house. It was wrapped in a shroud, as if a stork (or a pigeon) had just dropped it off.

  The heart remained on the doormat for several hours before being picked up by Anna and Luna – who had reoccupied the deserted house, founding a different sort of orphanage that looked after older children too, such as Arthur. After Madeleine’s death, rust had invaded Arthur’s spine. The slightest movement made him creak. He grew afraid of the cold and the rain. The clock came to the end of its journey on his bedside table, together with the book that was tucked inside the parcel.

  Jehanne d’Ancy, Little Jack’s nurse in Granada, never saw that clock again, but eventually found the way to Méliès’ heart. They spent the rest of their days together, running a shop specialising in pranks and hoaxes close to Montparnasse station. The world had forgotten about Méliès by then, but Jehanne continued to listen passionately to his stories about the man with the cuckoo-clock heart and other shadowy monsters.

  As for our ‘hero’, he grew taller and taller. But he never got over the loss of Miss Acacia. He went out every night, only at
night, to roam the outskirts of the Extraordinarium, in the shadow of its fairground attractions. But the half-ghost that he had become never crossed its threshold.

  Then he retraced his own boyish footsteps all the way back to Edinburgh. The city was exactly as he remembered it; time seemed to have stood still there. He climbed Arthur’s Seat, just as he had as a child. Great big snowflakes landed on his shoulders, heavy as corpses. The wind licked the old volcano from head to toe, its frozen tongue goring the mist. It wasn’t the coldest day on earth, but it wasn’t far off either. Deep inside the blizzard, the pitter-patter of footsteps rang out. On the right-hand side of the volcano, he thought he recognised a familiar figure. He saw wind-tousled hair, and that distinctive strut of a proud doll prone to bumping into things. Just another dream I’ve got muddled with reality, he said to himself.

  When he pushed open the door of his childhood home, all of Madeleine’s clocks were silent. Anna and Luna, his two garishly dressed aunts, had great difficulty in recognising this person who could no longer properly be called ‘Little Jack’. He had to sing a few notes of ‘Oh When the Saints’ before they opened their skinny arms. Although he already knew the story, Luna gently explained to him how Méliès had written to ‘Dr Madeleine’, informing her of Little Jack’s coma, only to receive a reply from Arthur instead. In it, the bed-bound former tramp laid out the details of his original letter, the one that had never reached Jack, but which Méliès would include in The Man Who Was No Hoax. And Luna also owned up to the fact that the other letters sent by bird had been written by her and Anna. Before the silence could make the walls explode, Anna took Jack’s hand very firmly in hers and led him to Arthur’s bedside.

  The old man revealed the secret of Little Jack’s life to him:

  ‘Without Madeleine’s clock, ye would never have survived the coldest day on earth. But after a few months, yer flesh and blood heart was strong enough. She could have removed the clock, as expertly as she removed stitches. That’s what she should have done. Ye ken what I mean?