The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

dancing on clock hands . . .

The terrified screams of Miss Acacia finally rouse me from my trance. I raise my head and look up at her. I’ve got two broken clock hands in my palms. The sadness and anger in her gaze have given way to fear. Her cheeks are hollow; her eyebrows punctuate her forehead like two circumflex accents. Yesterday her eyes were filled with love; today they’re leaky cauldrons. I feel as though I’m being stared at by a pretty corpse. A sense of shame overwhelms me, as the rage I feel towards myself outstrips even the fury Joe provokes in me.

Miss Acacia walks out of her dressing room. The door slams like a gunshot. A bird shakes itself on my hat; Melies must have forgotten to remove it. I’m feeling cold, so cold. This has to be the coldest night on earth. I’d be more relaxed if somebody was knitting my heart with icy pokers.

She walks past me without looking back, and disappears into the dark like a sad comet. I hear the sound of her bumping into a lamppost, followed by swearing in Spanish. My brain orders up a smile from my memories, but the message gets lost along the way.

A few metres above the stage, lightning rips across the sky. Umbrellas open like funeral flowers; I’m rather tired of dying all the time.

I hold my clock in place with the flat of my hand. Blood on the gears. My head is spinning, I don’t know how to make my legs work any more. When I try walking, I’m as knock-kneed as a first-time skier.

My cuckoo coughs with each of my spasms, leaving wood chippings all around. Heavy sleep overcomes me. I melt into the mist with Jack the Ripper on my mind. Will I end up like him, only successful in relationships with dead women?

Everything I did, I did for Miss Acacia. But my dreams – and my reality – haven’t worked out. I wanted it to work, wanted it so badly, probably too much. I thought I could do anything for her, crumbling the moon to make her eyelids sparkle; never sleeping before the sound of birds yawning at dawn; going to the ends of the earth to find her . . . Is this what it’s all come to?

A flash of lightning slaloms between the trees, ending its journey in silence on the beach. The sea lights up for a moment. Perhaps Miss Acacia still has something to say to me?

Then the foam retreats and Marbella switches back into darkness. The spectators bolt from the rain like rabbits into a warren. It’s time for me to pack up my suitcase of dreams.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In which Little Jack has a change of heart and a gigantic hangover

It takes Melies two days to drag my carcass from Marbella back to Granada. When we finally reach the city’s outskirts, the Alhambra looms like an elephants’ graveyard. Its fortifications glint in the darkness, ready to butcher me.

‘Get up! Get up!’ whispers Melies, ‘don’t give in, don’t leave me!’

Everything’s coming apart inside me. I squint over the stumps of my clock hands. It’s a terrifying sight that reminds me of when I was born.

Nothing makes sense any more. As a newly fledged adult, I used to want to look after my clock, so I would last long enough to realise my dream of having a family of my own: but all that has dissolved like snowflakes in the flames. What rose-tinted nonsense love is! Madeleine had warned me, of course, but I wanted to follow my heart.

I’m dragging myself along with painstaking slowness. A huge fire rages inside my chest, but I feel anaesthetized. I wouldn’t notice if an aeroplane flew straight between my eyes.

I’d give anything to see Arthur’s Seat rise up before me. Oh Madeleine, if only! I’d dive straight into my bed. There must be a few childhood dreams still hidden under my pillow. I’d do my best not to crush them, heavy though my head is with grown-up worries. I’d go to sleep thinking I’d never wake up again; which is a strangely comforting idea. The next morning I’d have a hard time coming to, knocked out like a failed boxer. But Madeleine would lavish her attentions on me, restoring me to how I was before. Just because the post never came doesn’t stop me from talking to my midwife-mother in my head . . .

Back in his workshop, Melies tucks me up in his bed. Blood spreads across the white sheets. Snow-roses reappearing, twirling. Bloody hell, I’m staining the sheets, I think in a flash of consciousness. My head weighs a ton, and my brain is as tired of being trapped inside my head as my heart is under my clock dial.

‘I want to change my heart. Make me different, I don’t want to be me any more. Don’t you see, I’ve had enough of this wooden heart; it’s like a dead weight that keeps cracking all the time.’

Melies watches over me, concerned.

‘Your problem goes much deeper than your wooden clock, you know.’

‘I feel as if a giant Acacia tree is growing between my lungs. This evening, I saw Joe carrying Miss Acacia in his arms and it was like being stabbed. I’d never have believed it could be so hard. And when she slammed the door and left, it was harder still.’

‘You knew the risks, my boy, when you gave a shooting star the keys to your heart.’

‘I want you to fit me with a new heart and set the counter back to zero. I never want to fall in love again.’

Noticing the mad suicidal glimmer in my eyes, Melies realises there’s no point in arguing. He lays me out on the workbench, the way Madeleine used to in the old days, and gets me to wait.