Ник Харкуэй: Angelmaker

He cringes a bit, inwardly. Joe Spork—new and improved and all grown-up—doesn’t think that way. Not any more. There was a boy once, who did—a kid who picked pockets and stood lookout; who tumbled through the tunnels of the Tosher’s Beat in search of pirate treasure, in the certain knowledge that there actually was some; whose nefarious uncles nipped up a drainpipe in the blinding dusk to relieve a duchess of her jewels, while Mathew Spork charmed and smiled and kept her on the hook and his one begotten son leaned against a wall and yoyo’d and kept an eye out for the Lily, as in Lily Law, as in Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police—but Joe had imagined that person no longer existed. He had no idea he could summon the pattern so easily.

Mr. Cummerbund closes his book, and glances at his partner.

“I’m quite sure,” Mr. Titwhistle murmurs, “that some accommodation could be reached for the full collection.”

“I’m so glad. Your good fortune, of course, is that I’ve begun to assemble it all. Mine is that now I have someone suitable to sell it to.”

“We should greatly prefer to avoid anything like an auction.”

You don’t care in the slightest. This is another test. Why is everyone testing me? I don’t have anything you want. Except, somehow, I clearly do.

Mathew is bubbling in Joe’s brain, commenting and advising:

Don’t sell. Not yet. If you make it easy, they’ll see through you .

To what?

To whatever you’re actually going to do .

Am I not selling, then?

Apparently not .

Cover. Conceal. Hide. Deceive.

A day of ghosts, most unwelcome and unawaited.

“Then I shall expect your pre-emptive offer to be quite striking. I’m sure it would have been anyway! And if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, gentlemen, I have another client appointment—on an unrelated matter, I assure you—at ten-thirty, and I really need to go. Shall we say, same time on Monday?”

There is a long pause. Jesus, Joe thinks, are they actually going to jump me? And then:

“Ideal,” Mr. Titwhistle says. He reaches into his jacket and produces, between two meagre fingers, a crisp white business card. “Do call if you have any trouble—the Museum has a good many friends. We can help in all sorts of ways.”

Yes. I’m sure you can.

Joe watches them walk away down the road. Neither one looks back. No car stops to pick them up. They seem entirely rapt in conversation, and yet somehow he feels observed, spied upon.

Fine. Then I’m very boring, aren’t I? I do boring things. I live a boring life and no one can say I don’t. I deal in antiques and curiosities, and I don’t do surprises. I’m recently single and I’m about to leave the 25–34 demographic for evermore. I like Chelsea buns the way they don’t make them these days and I fall in love with waifish, angry women who don’t think I’m funny.

I wind clocks like Daniel.

And I won’t turn into Mathew.

“Billy, it’s Joe. Call me, please. We’ve got something to discuss.”

He sighs, feeling the need for some consolation and knowing that he has no one from whom he can easily require a hug, and goes back to work.

Joe winds the clocks every day after lunch. He does not, as is the practice of many in his trade, set them all to different times so that there is always one about to chime. He gets his clients by appointment, by referral. Spork & Co. is what is known in these days when everything is studied and taxonomised as a “destination business.” His customers, for the most part, already know what they want when they come, and they are unlikely to be soothed or cozened into buying something else just because it goes bong while they’re having a quiet cup of tea and a jam tart with the owner. What they want is splendour and authenticity and a sense of craft. They are buying perhaps most of all a handshake with the past.

And the past is here, caught by the crook of the Thames and the endless whispering of ratchets and pendulums, the busy susurrus of oiled mechanical technology. If he is lucky, or when he can schedule an appointment with reference to the tide chart and the radio set he keeps against the waterside wall, the fog will come in and waves will lap against the brick, and some mournful barge will creak down the river or even hoot into the mist, and as the whole place slips loose in time, his client will tumble nose-first into the magic of it and buy that item they came for even though, inevitably, they came expecting to get it at half the asking price. He sometimes has to turn down considerable offers on the building itself. He jokes on such occasions that if one of them owns the other, it is almost certainly the warehouse, with his grandfather’s patient ghost and his father’s restless, relentless magnanimity, which holds the freehold to the man.

Joe winds the clocks. The winders are on a small trolley—a keychain would rattle and scratch against the casements, a bag would mean rummaging through each time for the right key. He pushes it around and tries not to feel like the nurse who wheels the gurney of the dead. Clink, clank, I’m so sorry, it was his time .

In the last year or so he has taken to playing BBC Radio 4 while he winds. The gentle burble of news and artistic wrangling makes a pleasant backdrop, and every so often there’s the forecast for shipping, with its soothing litany of places he need never go. Flemish Cap, seven, gusting nine. Recently, Radio 4 has betrayed him somewhat, because current affairs are a bit tense. Alongside assorted climatic woes, the world is even now passing what is apparently called “peak oil”—the moment after which oil will only ever be harder to get hold of and hence more expensive and ultimately unavailable—and in consequence the latest meeting of the G-whatever-it-is has become tense. Joe hopes this does not mean the sort of tense which prefigures bombing someone. He does not find angry South American diplomats, resentful Irish aviation bosses and fatuously confident Canadian oilmen very restful, so today the radio is silent on its shelf.

And really, that’s the most important thing he does with his days. It’s a small, measurable success, in the face of diminishing sales and an empty double bed and a set of skills which were marketable one hundred years ago, but now look quaint and even sad. Every afternoon for the last six months he has been fighting an uneven battle with himself not to overturn the trolley with its many keys, and scatter them across the room. His better nature has won only because the image of himself on his knees, remorsefully gathering them again, repairing scratched case clocks and whispering apologies to the ghost of his grandfather—and for strange and different reasons also his father—is more than he can bear.

The chimes clink over the door, and he glances up.

The figure in the doorway is tall. It must be, because the top of its head is not so far short of the frame. It is silhouetted by the day outside, but even allowing for that, it must be wearing black. It has long arms and long legs, and wears a strange, cumbersome garment like a dress or robe. Miss Havisham . He wonders if the wearer is unpleasantly scarred. He cannot tell. Over its head, the visitor wears a piece of black gauze or linen, so that the face is quite invisible. The cloth is not cinched; it hangs down over the wearer’s head, so that the top is a smooth curve. There’s just the barest bulge of a nose. Other than that, the head is as blank and featureless as an egg. Vampire. Alien . And then, more shamefully, suicide bomber .