Watching You(65)

Sam avoided William at school as winter turned to spring, but when there were no witnesses he would occasionally go over to his house. William’s hair had started to grow out again, and they would lock themselves in his room in the flat in the centre of Helenelund where he lived with his mum, who smelled sort of sweet and always looked stressed. Sam was struck by a mark on the door of William’s room, four impressions, as from the knuckles of a fist, but he never asked about them. William would get his watches out. He kept them in threes, and when Sam asked why he replied: ‘The Ramans do everything in threes,’ and explained that it came from Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama. Then he started to show Sam his collection, everything from big wall clocks to the one that was probably Sam’s favourite, the ring clock. It was a very small timepiece placed on a ring that would fit a woman’s finger. But then William would show him plans and photographs of the complete opposite: gigantic tower clocks with big chains and heavy cogs, big pinions and springs, axles and pins, shafts, flywheels and spindles, pendulums, clicks and weights. When William showed him the pictures from inside the clock tower in Cremona in Italy – the largest medieval clock in the world – his eyes lit up. And Sam’s probably did the same.

Then one day William said: ‘The snow’s gone now.’ Sam must have given some sort of indication that he didn’t understand, because William went on: ‘Do you want to come and look at something I’ve made?’

Sam wasn’t sure if he wanted to be seen with William, so he pulled a hesitant face.

‘You can follow at a distance,’ William said, as if he understood exactly what Sam meant.

And they cycled off. William first, on his crappy bike with the ridiculously high handlebars, Sam two hundred metres behind on his extremely staid Crescent, which he had increasingly come to loathe. Then they arrived. They left their bicycles by a bus stop that seemed to have been forgotten about and ran out into a meadow where the tall grass had been flattened by the rain, and squelched past the aspen trees until a small building came into view by the water. A boathouse among the trees, right on the shore, greenish-brown and ugly and quite wonderful.

William went up to it and said: ‘It’s been abandoned.’

‘Are you really sure?’

William nodded and went down to the door by the water’s edge. Two steps up, then a padlock that he had the key to, and then in. Old-fashioned boating equipment lay strewn about, rusty boat engines and stiffened life jackets, stranded buoys and rusty anchors, but beyond all that was something that looked far newer. Chains. Cogs. Pinions. Springs. Axles. Pins. Shafts. Flywheels. Clicks. Weights. Dripping oil. The entire mechanism was fixed to two sturdy posts that were in turn attached to the floor of the boathouse and reached all the way to the roof. And somewhere in the middle of the confusion was a clock face. When Sam looked closer he saw that the minute hand was moving the whole time, slowly, clockwise. It showed a couple of minutes to three.

William said: ‘Just wait.’

Sam waited. They waited, for what felt like a long time, but was really only two minutes. When the clock chimed a heavy weight fell from above and made a circular depression in the wooden floor.

Molly was thinking about the exams. She squinted up at the strong spring sun and thought that there was one more year. One more year of childhood, then it would be over, right there, in that big schoolyard. She had just turned fifteen, in March, and life was moving in the right direction. On the way to adulthood. She had lost all interest in the boys at school. After thinking about it for a while – a good while, to be honest – she had come to the conclusion that she was not interested in the male sex after all. There may have been the odd boy at school who was still interesting – a Micke, an Alex, a Sam, a Svante – but mainly she was focused on the future. There were other things that appealed to her. She might not have wanted to call it politics, but social issues, certainly. She had become aware of something very recently: people were so different and it really didn’t matter. Difference was a good thing; interest in things we didn’t know about was what helped us to develop as people. She’d heard that somewhere in the world there was a big investigation into human genes, and it was unclear if you could actually speak about the human race, or if we ought instead to be talking about many races, several races, the way racism always had. Perhaps something was going on, a scientific investigation that could prove that we all – all five billion of us – belonged to exactly the same human race, in spite of minor variations in colour and culture. It was incredibly interesting that there had actually been human races that had become extinct. What were they called? Neanderthals, Java Man? Once they too had migrated from Africa and had their own civilisations, or at least tribal societies, and they had disappeared. They had simply been wiped out; there was no trace of them left. Except bones. The important thing was that it meant the rest of us were connected, regardless of our differences. And that was precisely the sort of thing she was thinking when the big, empty schoolyard was no longer completely empty, when a figure came into view, a figure that only just looked like it belonged to the collective human race she had been dreaming of. And she managed to force a smile when William sat down on the bench beside her and said: ‘Hello! Do you want to come and see something I found?’

The early summer that prevails in a desolate, grit-covered football pitch is strangely remorseless, no wind, the air laced with dust, the sun sharp and prickly. Sam sees a group of people at the other end of the pitch, by the far goal. He sees that they’re girls, lots of girls; he can hear their shrill voices but can’t make out any words. The emptiness above the dusty grit seems to filter out everything resembling language. Sam has become a different person; time has changed. It feels as if he’s aged a couple of years in just a few weeks. These days he avoids this sort of gathering. He can feel that he has become a loner. But there’s something about the unarticulated yelling that draws him in. Against all his instincts he is drawn in that direction, and sees the back of one girl after another. They’re wearing summery clothes, dresses, skirts, and the merciless sun makes their long hair shine in all manner of hues. The dust swirls around them, and as they move Sam can see that they aren’t alone. Behind them a taller head rises up. Anton’s, and it’s moving. It disappears behind the curtain of girls, reappears, still moving. Then the curtain parts a little more, and against the goalpost, tied to the post, stands a figure. Its long blond hair hangs like another curtain in front of the figure’s face. His trousers have been pulled down, the lower half of his body exposed, and Sam turns abruptly and leaves before William has a chance to see him. All Sam can think, over and over again, manically, is: It’s almost the summer holidays. All this crap will soon be over.