Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

If anything it was all getting worse. Michael was now further than ever from being able to build up enough stock to run his stall again at Walcot Market, further away now even than he had been on the day last year when everything had been nicked from the back of the van. True, the van doors had been held together only with twine and a twisted coat hanger, but Michael had thought that he had tied enough elaborate knots to put anyone off having a go. Since then he had not made enough on any deal to buy stuff to get the stall going again. He was managing, badly, from one deal to the next. That meant he had to take whatever Mr David offered him, and it was clear from how very little he did offer that Mr David was well aware of this.

Michael had more or less promised him the alabaster figures, and Mr David had more or less promised to give him five hundred for them. That would have been enough for Michael to clear a few debts and start getting some stock together again, so that by Easter he might have the stall back and be well placed for the summer. But he had not got the alabaster figures. And meanwhile, the last mouthful of soup was stone cold, and even if he did get them another day, supposing he dared put himself through all that again, Mr David would sell them on for at least two, possibly three thousand. He tried not to think too hard about that. Mr David had contacts, and you needed the contacts. Contacts of the right sort were just another of the many things that Michael did not have. With this thought he dropped his empty soup mug on the floor, settled under the bedclothes and pulled them around himself.

When he woke it was already after six o’clock, and pitch dark. At least he was now warm enough. If he was lucky he would soon fall asleep again and not wake up until tomorrow.

In the Kiddies’ Korner at the back of the beer garden next to the car park of The Masons Arms, Jace was about to hit Steph. There were no kiddies around to see him, it being half past six on a Wednesday night in January; there was nobody to see him at all, a fact that Jace knew perfectly well, and that was worrying Steph. She had miscalculated again. It would have been smarter to head straight for the car and wait while the sight of it calmed Jace down; he loved his stupid Renault 5 Turbo with the stupid alloy wheels and the stupid paint job, and once he was driving along with the sound system thumping he wouldn’t hit her. But instead she had run off across the car park and ended up here. The trouble was that when she was pregnant her mind didn’t work that way, thinking things out in advance- she just did things, or just came out with them. It was no good trying to tell Jace that, though. He wouldn’t know a hormone if it jumped up and bit him on the leg. He was so mad with her for ‘showing him up’ he had started shouting even before they got outside. He was still shouting at her. Now it appeared he was angry with her not just for ‘showing him up’, but also for getting him angry. He was definitely working up to something, and since it was she who had made him angry, it would be her fault if he did give her a slap. Steph calculated that it would probably be just the one. But it would be a further miscalculation, she remembered in time, to try to stop him by saying he shouldn’t hit a pregnant woman, because reminding him about the baby was never a good idea. It was the baby that had made Jace inclined to hit her in the first place. It was the baby’s first kick that ten minutes ago had caused Steph to clutch her belly and squeal out in the public bar Oh! Oh bloody hell Jace I just felt it! It just kicked me! And if it hadn’t been for the barmaid getting sentimental about the time she had her first, and three complete strangers laughing and going on about it, asking when it was due, Steph thought Jace might have let it pass with a grunt. But he had blushed with fury and embarrassment, picked up his car keys and told her to get outside.

She was standing next to a plump, lavishly graffitied, moulded resin elephant whose hollow insides were filled with cans and empty crisp packets that someone at some time had tried to start a fire with. She looked away, and with her head lowered she scraped with one fingernail at some peeling grey paint on one of the elephant’s ears, finding that she was managing to turn the growing bare patch into a very good likeness of Marge Simpson. She could draw a pretty good Marge Simpson, and an excellent Homer. She had thought at one time of being a cartoonist, until her art teacher had told her cartoonists have to create original characters and not just copy things. She had actually come up with one or two quite good characters of her own, but then found that they refused to cooperate. They just looked at her from the paper. She had not been able to make them say or do anything.

Are you listening to me, you two-ton cow? As she looked up, Jace’s hand cracked off the side of her head, which hit the grey elephant wall like a sounding gong. It was such a weird noise, so unexpectedly deep and grand that Steph, leaning against the vibrating elephant’s side as the sound died and the singing in her ears became an echo, wondered about laughing. Instead she lowered her head once more and made her way over to the car, where she waited at the passenger side while Jace unlocked the doors with a single, bad-tempered click of his keys in mid-air. Steph understood that he intended only to unlock the driver’s door for himself. She understood that it was nothing to him if the click happened to unlock the other doors at the same time because (and it made no difference to him) she could get in or stay out; she could spend the whole night inside the kiddies’ elephant with the fag ends and crisp packets for all he cared. She got in.

It took me a day or two to get over the trip. Not for a moment did I feel sorry I’d done it, of course not. What took it out of me was having to be out there again, I mean on the outside, where nobody knew who I was. It made me feel angry that nobody was able to see that inside I had become so much more myself.

I was angry in the way I was when Father died. Father and his clock that became my clock, and the anger I felt apparently towards him but really, even before I found out he wasn’t to blame, towards myself. I haven’t gone over the clock business in my mind for such a long time. When I do think of it, I tend to remember the way Father would sometimes give me one of his kind looks when Mother was not in the room, and nod towards the dining room and the direction of the ticking and say never you mind, that clock’s yours when I go and I would look upset and then he’d say you’re not to mind selling it. It’s to see you through college, you sort yourself out and you be a teacher, now. Like your Dad. He had been an English teacher, I think not a very good one. It was another of the things Mother kept ready in her mouth, seldom said but ready to sting him with, how hopeless he was not to have made it even to head of department, let alone headmaster. I thought I would like to teach history.

So he always meant me to sell the clock, to see me through university. I think that’s why he never really explained to me how beautiful it was, how wonderfully it was made. He never showed me its workings or pointed out what made it so rare, so fine and valuable, for fear that he would not be able to hide from me how much it meant to him. If only he had! If only he had given me eyes to see his clock for what it was, and the words to understand it. I wouldn’t have been so deceived over it later if he had just let me see it as he did. I wouldn’t have spent so long cursing his memory and thinking he was as big a cheat as Mother.

After I went on the bus to Bath that day to do all that was necessary to place the advertisement, I resolved not to go out again. How it rained in the week that followed! But on the next fine day I found some paraffin and made a bonfire at the side of the orchard. I burned my old navy coat, and then all my other old clothes. Standing out there watching the clothes go up in flames I went on thinking about Father and the clock, and I remembered another of the things he would sometimes say if Mother was not in the room. I suppose it was the nearest he came to letting me see the clock as he did. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but it was something about time passing painfully- so this must have been in his last year, then, though by some trick of memory it seems to me that he said it at times all through my life, even if time had to pass painfully, even if your minutes and hours offered up nothing but indiscriminate and bigger doses of pain, it was still consoling in a way to have time measured so beautifully, on a clock like his.