The Horologist

TW: death

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It is the old pocket watch on the counter to his right that Alistair can hear the loudest. The one he has just fixed.

It was a problem with the balance wheel. He had:

*Removed the back of the watch

*Identified the problem: a bend in the balance wheel

*Taken the balance wheel out to re-stake it back into alignment

*Fixed the broken hairspring

*Returned the hairspring and the balance wheel to the watch and replaced the casing

The balance wheel had been a little tricky. It’s a delicate piece of equipment. One of Alistair’s favourite pieces of the clock. Its ‘beating heart’. Sometimes it’s called the ‘unrest’. By oscillating back and forth, it controls the release of energy from the mainspring. The balance wheel makes the watch tick. It divides up time into neat, clear intervals.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

This one was difficult because the warped balance wheel meant that the hairspring – the fine spring coiled up inside the wheel – had all bunched up on one side. On the other, it had unfurled. From above it looked like a broken ripple, the spools huddled tightly together on one side, and arcing away from each other on the other. Alistair took great pleasure in fixing it. Slowly, methodically he re-coiled the spring, putting time back in its proper place.

Now it is working perfectly.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It is part of a soft, relentless mechanical chorus that sounds throughout Alistair’s workshop. When he began this work 40 years ago, the shopfront was sparse. Faces as they passed looked in on shelves containing one or two clocks. A single grandfather clock in the corner. An empty workbench cratered and exposed to the light, like the full moon.

But over the years he has accumulated many things:

*Clockfaces

*Standing clocks

*Carriage clocks

*Mantlepiece clocks

*Watches

*Barometers

Tick. Tick. Tick.

There is more, of course. Some of the items are antique, some are not. Each clock is listed on the inventory which Alistair keeps in his desk. Everything that has ever passed through his shop is listed in here. It has grown steadily over the years. Alistair has barely registered its growing weight, so slight has the change been from one month to the next, so gradual the accumulation of time.

Each timepiece that he currently owns rests in its allotted place in the shop. Grandfather clocks stand behind the counter to his right. Clockfaces are arranged on the wall in ascending size order. On the workbench where he sits now, a series of boxes where his tools are packed away. Beneath his hands are arrayed the internal workings of another pocket watch. Organs under his practised, surgical hands.

The watches are by the shop window, nestled in padded velvet. Alistair keeps all of his timepieces meticulously clean. The watches glint pleasantly in the afternoon sun. When passers-by lean in to look through the glass – at a certain time of day – shivering circles of light sometimes dance across their faces.

Despite his careful attention to order and cleanliness, Alistair has not changed the padding itself for some time. When he lifts a watch from its place, it leaves a small dent – darker, where the surrounding fabric has been bleached by the sun.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

There have been times when the sheer amount of clocks in the shop bothered him. Their sounds punctuating one another, overlapping and interweaving. After some time, however, it became its own unified sound. A single rhythm. Each different tick synchronised with the next. It measured out Alistair’s evenings, mornings, afternoons. Each day he sits in his shop and the ticking sounds carry him – neatly, unobtrusively – from one moment to the next.

There are other sounds too. The shop bell that marks the opening and closing of the day, the arrival of a customer. The smart clack of his soles on the pavement as he travels to and from work. There is the canned laughter from the TV each evening. He liked to watch re-runs of 90s sitcoms. He particularly likes re-watching episodes he already knows very well, feeling events play out along their predetermined grooves. The satisfaction of knowing, in the moment of catastrophe, exactly how it is going to be resolved.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Sometimes he stands outside in the mornings and listens to the birds.

Sundays are the quietest days. There is something like an inhalation. People huddle together in pubs, cafes and houses. He can hear the muffled voices of his neighbours through the thin walls of his terraced house: Sunday lunch. On these days he often puts the radio on and listens to the faraway voices as he goes from room to room.

Today has been a busy day in the shop. There had been an antiques-seller looking for new pieces. A woman who wanted her mother’s watch fixed. A man looking for an anniversary present for his wife. He exchanged few words with any of them. Alistair likes to think that his excellent craftsmanship speaks for itself.

Now they have all gone, although the street outside is still busy. It must be because of the sun. It’s particularly bright today. The end of May is moving into the beginning of June. Springtime is hardening into something hotter. More fierce.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Alistair is completely absorbed in the pocket watch he is fixing. The casing has somehow become fused on. He is struggling to remove it. When he hears a very near thunk.

The interruption to the steady ticking of his workshop is jarring. There is a judder which goes through his whole body. He drops the watch, just as he had started to pry it open. But he stays perfectly still. Where his worktable faces the wall, his back is to the room.

He hears it again. Thunk.

Now he begins to understand the sound. It is glass. Something hitting against the glass shopfront window.

Turning now, he can see a hand pressed up against the pane. Pressed so tightly against it that even from here – a few paces away – he can make out the lines on the palm. He sees where the curves of the fingertips are pressed flat with the pressure. The hand is clinging on, or trying to get in.

Attached to the hand is a person. A man. He is bent over with a hand clutched to his chest. On his face is a look true terror.

Tick.

Alistair watches as the man slowly sinks, as if crumpling. His hand makes a squeaking sound as it drags down the glass, leaving a smear in its wake. His other hand stays over his chest, like he is trying to hold something in.

The man is sat on the pavement outside his shop. The side of his head is now pressed against the window. He sobs softly with pain. Alistair can almost feel the reverberations as they travel through the glass.

Alistair watches from his seat at his workbench.

Tick.

He also watches as people walk by. Like a stream parting around a rock they continue on, oblivious – or at least pretending to be.

No one is helping him.

Tick.

The man is dying and no one is helping.

Tick.

Alistair rocks back and forth on his seat, caught between stillness and movement.

Indignation burns at the pit of his stomach. The world beyond that window – where the man’s heart is sputtering – is not his responsibility. He cannot control it. Does not ask anything of it. It should demand nothing of him. He does not know this man.

Tick.

Alistair surges forward, paces across the room, the watches and grandfather clocks whirling past, he is so quick now, he wrenches open the door, hears the bell on the door jangling furiously, and he sees himself stepping out onto the pavement, rounding on this man. He will help. He will help. He will set his heart ticking again.

Tick.

But in the few seconds it took for him to get there, a woman has stopped already. She has crouched down. Next to the man. She is talking loudly to him. Someone behind her is calling an ambulance.

Tick.

Abruptly, the woman stops stalking. Alistair leans closer, so he can see around the woman. See the man’s face.

He is dead. His eyes are wide open. They are filled with blue sky.

How awful, to die on a day like this.

Alistair withdraws. Quickly, cleanly, He returns into his shop, back to his seat at his workbench.

He keeps his back turned over the next hour, as the ambulance comes to pick up the body. But he knows when it arrives, because the blue lights flash across the shop, bouncing off the display cases and clock faces. They didn’t turn the sirens on.

But after the ambulance has gone, the rhythm of his afternoon resumes. He fixes the pocket watch; orders some new parts; serves a customer – a young man wanting his watch repaired.

But for the rest of the day, there is something wrong. Off-beat. It rises in Alistair like a queasiness. Across the hours it takes shape, grows edges. Among the relentless mechanical ticking of Alistair’s shop, there is a new sound. Wet. Deep. Erratic.

It is the beating of his own heart.