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
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
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 Melies’ 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 Melies 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,
