The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (16 page)

‘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.

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?

No family dared adopt ye because of that tick-tock contraption sticking out of yer left rib. Over time, she grew attached. Madeleine saw you as a tiny fragile thing, a wee bairn to be protected at all costs, linked to her by an umbilical cord in the form of a cuckoo clock.

Ach, she was terribly afraid o’ the day when ye’d become an adult. She tried to adjust yer heart so that she could always keep ye close to her. She promised us she’d try and get used to the idea ye might also suffer in love one day, because that’s how life is. Ye ken what I mean?

But she never did.’

My character Georges Méliès is inspired by the original Méliès (1861–1938, the first cinematographic director, father of special effects), who himself was heavily influenced by Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871) – a remarkable man with an extraordinary gift for invention. He was a clockmaker and illusionist, and inventor of, amongst other things, the kilometric counter and ophthalmo logical equipment. He established a theatre where he made clocks embellished with singing birds and other examples of mechanical prowess. The infamous magician ‘Houdini’ chose his patronymic in honour of his forerunner.

For the upkeep, fine-tuning and wonderful turns of the key given to the clockwork heart of this book, thanks to Olivia de Dieuleveult and Olivia Ruiz.