The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart Read online

  The spectators in the front row turn towards me, annoyed by the increasingly audible racket my clock is making. Méliès responds with his cat-like smile. Three girls burst out laughing and say something in Spanish, presumably along the lines of: ‘those two just escaped from the freakshow’. It’s true our clothes could do with a good ironing.

  The little singer walks on stage, clicking her yellow high heels along the platform. She launches into her bird dance and my clock hands become windmill blades once again: I’m flying! Her voice echoes like a slender nightingale, sounding even more beautiful than in my dreams. I want to take the time to watch her calmly, to adjust my heart to her presence.

  Miss Acacia arches the small of her back and her lips part a little, as if being kissed by a ghost. She closes her large eyes as she claps her raised hands like castanets.

  During a particularly intimate song, my cuckoo whirrs into action. I’m more embarrassed than ever. The twinkle in Méliès’ eyes helps to calm me down.

  We’re in such a rundown place, yet the little singer transcends our surroundings. You’d think she was lighting her own Olympic flame in a plastic model stadium.

  At the end of the show, she’s mobbed by all sorts of people wanting to exchange a word or get her autograph. I have to queue like everybody else, even though I’m not asking for an autograph, just the moon. The two of us curled up in its crescent. Méliès tips me off:

  ‘Her dressing-room door is open and there’s nobody inside!’

  I slip in like a burglar.

  Closing the door of the tiny dressing room behind me, I take a moment to study her make-up, her sequined ankle boots and her wardrobe – Tinkerbell would have approved. I’m embarrassed to be looking at her personal belongings, but it’s delicious to be this close to her. As I perch on her chaise-longue, her delicate perfume intoxicates me. I wait.

  The door bursts open and the little singer enters like a hurricane in a skirt. Her yellow shoes go flying. Hairpins rain down. She sits in front of her dressing table. I am more silent than the deadest of corpses.

  She starts taking off her make-up, as delicately as a pink snake might shed its skin, and then puts on a pair of glasses. She sees my reflection in the mirror.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ she demands.

  Please forgive this intrusion. Ever since I heard you singing some years ago, my only dream has been to find you again. I’ve crossed half of Europe to get here. I’ve had eggs smashed on my head. And I’ve nearly had my guts ripped out by a man who only fell in love with dead women. There’s no doubt about it, I’m handicapped by my great love. My makeshift heart isn’t strong enough to resist the emotional earthquake I feel when I see you, but here it is, bursting for you. That’s what I’m desperate to say. Instead I’m silent as an orchestra of tombstones.

  ‘How did you manage to get in?’

  She’s furious, but shock seems to dilute her anger. She discreetly removes her glasses and I can tell she’s curious now.

  ‘Be careful,’ Méliès had warned me. ‘She’s a singer, she’s pretty, you won’t be the first to feel this way about her . . . The master-stroke of your seduction must be to create the illusion that you’re not trying to seduce her.’

  I’m flustered. I don’t know what to say. ‘I leaned against your door and it wasn’t closed properly, so I landed on your dressing-room sofa,’ I finally tell her, realising how ridiculous it sounds.

  ‘Do you make a habit of landing in the dressing rooms of girls who need to get changed?’

  ‘No, no, not often.’

  Each word I say is monumentally important, emerging with difficulty, syllable by syllable; I can feel the full weight of the dream I’m carrying.

  ‘Where do you normally show up? In the bed or the bath?’

  ‘I don’t normally show up anywhere.’

  I try to remember the lesson in rose-tinted magic that Méliès taught me, for romance: Show her who you really are, make her laugh or cry, but pretend you want to be her friend. Be interested in her, not just her derrière. We don’t hold a candle to someone for as long when we’re only after their derrière, do we?

  Which is true, but now that I’ve seen how her derrière moves, I rather fancy it, which complicates matters.

  ‘Weren’t you the one who made that devil of a racket with your tick-tock during the concert? In fact, don’t I recognise you . . .’

  ‘Recognise me?’

  ‘Look, what do you want from me?’

  I take a deep breath, using up all the air that’s left in my lungs.

  ‘I wanted to give you something. It’s not flowers, and it’s not chocolate either . . .’

  ‘So what is it?’

  I produce the bunch of spectacles from my bag, trying not to tremble as I hold the frames out to her. But I can’t help it, the makeshift bouquet clinks and rattles.

  Miss Acacia makes a face like a sulky doll. Her expression could be disguising laughter or anger, and I don’t know what to make of it. The bunch of glasses weighs a ton. I’m going to get cramp, plus I look ridiculous.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A bouquet of glasses.’

  ‘They’re not my favourite flowers.’ On the edge of the world, somewhere between her chin and the parting of her lips, a microscopic smile glimmers.

  ‘Thank you, but I’d like to get dressed in peace now.’

  She opens the door for me, the light from the street lamp dazzles her. I position my hands between the street lamp and her eyes. I see her forehead unfurrow. It’s a moment of delicious turmoil.

  ‘I don’t like wearing glasses. I’ve got a small head and they make me look like a fly.’

  ‘That’s fine by me.’

  Mentioning the fly is her ploy to defuse that delicious turmoil; but my answer reactivates it. The brief silence that follows is as tender as a rainstorm of daisies.

  ‘Could we see each other again, with or without the spectacles?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In which Little Jack spends his first night in the Extraordinarium, and encounters an ostrich in an extremely bad mood

  Miss Acacia’s tiny ‘yes’ could have emerged from a fledgeling’s beak, but for me, it’s a surge of heroic energy. The romantic thrills have begun; my tick-tock sounds like the beads of a necklace clinking between her fingers. Nothing can dent my mood.

  ‘She accepted your bouquet of twisted glasses?’ asks Méliès. ‘So she likes you! She must like you! No one would accept such a pathetic present if they didn’t have feelings for you,’ he beams.

  After regaling Méliès with every detail of our first impromptu encounter, and once my euphoria has subsided, I ask him to check on my clock, because I’ve never felt such intense emotions. Madeleine, how furious you’d be . . . Méliès smiles his big mustachioed grin and then gently starts to manipulate my gears.

  ‘Does it hurt anywhere?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Your gears are rather hot, but not unusually so. Otherwise everything’s in perfect working order. Come on, let’s go. Affairs of the heart are all very well, but we need a good bath and somewhere to sleep!’

  After exploring the Extraordinarium, we settle into an abandoned stall for the night. Despite our dilapidated surroundings and our growling stomachs, we sleep like babies.

  At dawn, my mind is made up: I’ve got to find a job so that I can stay here.

  But all the jobs have been taken at the Extraordinarium. All the jobs except one that is, in the Ghost Train, where they need someone to scare the passengers. Sheer persistence gets me an interview with the manager for the following evening.

  Seeing as he’s got nothing better to do, Méliès performs a few old tricks at the entrance with his set of hoax cards. He’s a hit, especially with the ladies. His belles, as he likes to call them, form a huddle around his table and marvel at his every sleight of hand. He tells them that he plans to create a story in motion, a sort of photographic book that will spring to life.
He knows how to capture the imagination of his belles.

  This morning, I saw him collecting cardboard boxes and cutting rockets out of them. I think he still hopes to win back his fiancée. He’s even started talking about the voyage to the moon again. His dream machine is gently revving into action.

  It’s six o’clock when I arrive at the great stone entrance to the Ghost Train. I’m greeted by the manager, a shrivelled old lady who answers to the name of Brigitte Heim.

  Her face is so tight that you’d think she was gripping a knife between her teeth. She’s wearing big sad shoes – nun’s sandals – that are ideal for trampling on dreams.

  ‘So, you want to work on the Ghost Train do you, dwarf?’

  Her voice reminds me of an ostrich, an ostrich in an extremely bad mood. She has the knack of inducing a sickening sense of panic the moment you meet her.

  Jack the Ripper’s last words echo in my head: ‘You’ll soon learn how to survive by frightening others!’

  I unbutton my shirt and turn the key in my lock to make the cuckoo sing. Brigitte Heim watches me with the same disdain as the clockmaker in Paris.

  ‘You’re not going to earn us a fortune with that! But I haven’t got anybody else, so I’ll take you.’

  Desperate for the work, I swallow my pride.

  My new boss embarks on a tour of her premises.

  ‘I have an agreement with the cemetery: I collect the skulls and bones of the dead whose families can no longer pay for their burial plot,’ she says, proudly showing me around. ‘They make rather good decorations for a ghost train, don’t you think? And anyway, if I didn’t collect them, they’d be tossed on to the rubbish heap!’ she declares, in a voice that’s creaky and hysterical.

  Skulls and spiders’ webs have been methodically arranged to filter the light from the candelabras. There’s not a speck of dust anywhere else, and nothing out of place. I wonder what extra-terrestrial emptiness makes this woman spend her life cleaning catacombs.

  ‘Do you have children?’ I ask, turning towards her.

  ‘What kind of a question is that? No, I have a dog, and I’m very happy with my dog.’

  If I end up growing old one day and I’m lucky enough to have children, and why not grandchildren too, I’d like to build houses full of little people chasing each other, laughing and shouting. But if I don’t have offspring, then houses full of nothing won’t be for me.

  ‘Touching the décor is strictly forbidden,’ she tells me, showing me around. ‘If you walk on a skull and break it, you have to pay!’

  Pay, her favourite word.

  She wants to know my reason for coming to Granada. I rattle off my story. Or rather I try to, but she keeps cutting me off.

  ‘I don’t believe in this clockwork heart business, or in your love story full stop. I wonder who made you fall for such nonsense? I suppose you think you’ll work wonders with this trinket? Well, mark my words, you may be short but you’ll fall from a great height! People don’t stray far; they don’t like anything that’s different. And even if they enjoy the show, it’s because of a voyeuristic pleasure. To them, going to see the woman with two heads is the same as witnessing an accident. I’ve known many men applaud, but not one fall in love. It’ll be the same for you. People might be fascinated by your wounded heart, but that won’t make them love you for who you are. Do you really think a pretty young girl like the one you’ve just described to me would want to get involved with a boy who’s got a prosthesis instead of a heart? Personally, I’d have found it a complete turn-off . . . But enough of that: as long as you can frighten my customers, everyone’s happy.’

  The ghastly Brigitte Heim rejoins her coven of doom-sayers. But she has no idea what a thick shell of dreams I’ve been building ever since I was small. As I head off into the night to gobble the moon, which looks like a phosphorescent pancake, I’m dreaming of Miss Acacia. Heim can stalk me with her living-dead rictus all she likes, but she’ll never steal anything from me.

  Ten o’clock. I turn up for my first evening’s work. The train is half full and I’ve got to be on stage in half an hour. It’s time to try my hand as a Scareperson. The thing is, I’m a bit terrified myself, because I need to hold on to this job if I want to remain the little singer’s official neighbour.

  I get my heart ready, transforming it into a terrifying instrument. Up on top of the mountain at Dr Madeleine’s, I used to have fun stuffing all sorts of things inside my clock: pebbles, newspaper, marbles . . . The gears would start screeching, the tick-tock became chaotic and the cuckoo impersonated a miniature bulldozer lumbering around my lungs. It used to horrify Madeleine.

  Half-past ten. I’m glued to the wall of the last carriage, like a Red Indian ready to attack a stagecoach. Brigitte Heim watches me out of the corner of her menacing eye. Imagine my surprise when I notice Miss Acacia calmly sitting in one of the Ghost Train carriages. My stage fright intensifies, making my tick-tock sputter.

  The train sets off, I leap from carriage to carriage, and there she is – my conquest of the Amorous West. I’ve got to put in a consummate performance. My life is at stake. I hurl myself against the carriage walls, my cuckoo clock rattling inside me like a popcorn machine. I glide my icy hour hand against the customers’ backs, and think of Arthur as I start to sing ‘Oh When the Saints.’ A few people shout: ‘What can you do to scare us?’ I just want to escape my own body and project sunlight on to the walls for her to see, so she warms up and yearns for my arms. But instead, as a kind of finale, I appear in the white light for a few seconds, thrusting out my chest in exaggerated fashion. I open my shirt, so people can see the gears moving beneath my skin with each heartbeat. My performance is greeted by an astonishing goat’s shriek from a lady of mature years, and three rounds of fake applause littered with laughter.

  I watch Miss Acacia, hoping that somehow I might have pleased her.

  She smiles like a mischievous sweet-snatcher.

  ‘Is it over? . . . Ah, very good, I didn’t see a thing, but everybody seemed to think it was highly entertaining, congratulations! I didn’t know it was you, but bravo!’

  ‘Thank you . . . and what about the glasses, have you tried them on?’

  ‘Yes. But they’re all bent or broken . . .’

  ‘I chose them like that, so you could wear them without worrying about breaking them!’

  ‘You think I don’t wear glasses because I’m worried about breaking them?’

  ‘No . . .’

  She has this gentle way of laughing, as light as beads tumbling over a xylophone.

  ‘Last stop, everybody off!’ screeches the ostrich in charge.

  The little singer gets up and waves at me discreetly. Her curly hair ripples over her curvy shadow. I wish I could have scared her just a teeny bit, but I’m relieved she didn’t get to see what my heart looks like. It doesn’t matter that I’m a shining sun when I dream at night, old Brigitte has woken my old demons. The toughest carapace in the world sometimes softens in the grip of insomnia.

  In the distance, Miss Acacia’s high heels tinkle rhythmic ally. I relish their sound until I hear my little singer crashing into the exit door. Everybody laughs and nobody helps her. She totters like a well-dressed soak, then disappears.

  Meanwhile, Brigitte Heim has launched into a critique of my performance that goes right over my head, but I think at one point she does utter the words ‘pay you’.

  I can’t wait to catch up with Méliès and tell him all about it. Thrusting my hand into my pockets as I head off, I discover a scrap of paper rolled up into a ball.

  I don’t need glasses to see how accomplished your performance is. Your appointments diary must run to several volumes . . . Will you be able to find the page where you wrote my name?

  I make the conjurer who tends to my heart read the message, between two rounds of cards.

  ‘Hmm, I see . . . your Miss Acacia isn’t like the other singers I’ve known, she’s not self-centred. That means she’s not entirely aware of
her seductive powers – which is no doubt part of her charm. Then again, she spotted your act. It’s all or nothing now, you don’t have anything to lose. And remember, she doesn’t realise how desirable she is. Use that to your advantage!’

  I head over to her dressing room and slide a note under her door:

  On the stroke of midnight behind the Ghost Train, wait for me, and wear your glasses so you don’t bump into the moon. I promise I’ll give you enough time to take them off before I look at you.

  ‘¡Anda hombre! ¡Anda! It’s time to show her your heart!’ says Méliès again.

  ‘I’m worried about frightening her with my clock hands. I don’t know what I’ll do if she rejects me. Do you realise how long I’ve been dreaming of this moment?’

  ‘Remember what I told you, show her your real heart. That’s the only magic you can perform. If she sees your real heart, your clock won’t frighten her, believe me!’

  While I’m waiting for midnight like a lover impatient for Christmas, Luna’s battered pigeon lands on my shoulder. This time, the letter hasn’t got lost. I unfold it in great excitement.

  My Little Jack,

  We trust you’re coping well and taking good care of yourself. You’ll have to wait a while longer before coming back to the house because of the police.

  Lovingly,

  Dr Madeleine

  I’m overjoyed at the arrival of the pigeon, but the contents of the letter he’s carried all this way are ever so frustrating. There’s something odd about that signature: Dr Madeleine. And I’d have expected her to be more chatty. She probably wanted to spare her messenger. Still, I feel a twinge of guilt. If Madeleine knew what I was up to tonight, how furious she’d be . . . I send the bird straight back:

  Send me some long letters by normal post, I may stay here for some time. I miss you. I want to read more than a few words attached to a pigeon’s leg. Everything’s going well over here, I’ve got a job and am friends with a clockmaker-conjurer who makes sure my heart is working properly. You can send your letters to his workshop – he always knows where to find me. Are the police leaving you alone? Write back quickly!