This day is the pattern of his life. He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. Foolishness.
He considers himself, the wrong side of thirty-five and no closer to being who he wanted to be, if he ever knew who that was.
The stricture of Joe Spork is indecision, a departing girlfriend once told him. He fears she was wrong. There is no stricture to him, no core. No substance. Just a dozen conflicting drives which average out, producing nothing. Be a gangster. Be an honest man. Be Daniel, be Mathew, be Joe. Make something of yourself, but don’t stand out too much. Find a girl, but avoid the wrong girl. Mend the clocks, keep the old firm going. Sell up and run, leave London and head to a beach somewhere. Be someone. Be no one. Be yourself. Be happy—but how?
He has no idea.
He is a nowhere man, caught in between.
Down in the caves, beneath the cliffs, the water surges and ebbs. A curious circle of white foam and crested water sits in the midst of the bight, where the sea swirls around a pattern of rocks. Up above him, indifferent clouds are gathering, and the rain is starting to fall. It’s not yet four, but already it feels like the onset of night. He realises there’s water running from his eyes, and is not sure if the wind is causing it.
“Damn,” he says, a bit plaintively, and then with mounting anger, “Damn, damn, damn.” The sea wind takes the words away, so that his voice sounds hollow and small, even inside his own head.
Well. To be honest, it always does.
He turns, and finds himself staring full into a fierce, angry face, inches from his own. He yells and stumbles back.
“Who the hell’re you?” The man has white stubble and opium fiend’s eyes which glare out of a sou’wester’s grimy hood. “What’re you doing here? This is my land! Private land! It’s not some bloody tourist attraction! It’s private, for me, and them! It’s a grave!” The voice is northern underneath, but the pattern of words is coloured by decades spent down here, and the vowels have acquired a rounded burr.
“A grave?”
The man pushes him, sharply, on the shoulders; a stabbing of fingers to propel him back, but there’s very little weight behind it because Joe Spork is a big man and the other may be tall, but he is not heavy.
“Full fathom, aye, grave and serious, cut in the rock, dead like winter, dead like silence, and what do you think of that, ey? The soil is bones and the sky is skin, and everything is rotting and so am I and so are you. Now go away. It’s a shame, you coming here. You ought to be sorry, but you ain’t.”
“I am. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to trespass. I have a package for the people at the house. This is the address. I didn’t realise it was gone.”
“The old house went into the sea. Ground went an’ collapsed underneath it. Gawpers come in summer, looking for a little thrill. Time to kill. The dead went out to sea, down and down and down into the dark, and isn’t that just the way it is? Ghosts like starlings, pitter-patter on my greenhouse roof. Ghosts in the ivy and the gorse. Choking the greenhouse, choking the hope, little fingers around your neck. Ivy drags you down like water… Have you ever cut ivy?” This last in a curious, conversational tone.
“No,” Joe says carefully, “I haven’t.”
“You see the hands then, little fingers clasping. Ivy’s a slow death, years in the making. Gorse is quicker, but it’s not so cruel. I burn the gorse sometimes, but you can’t burn ivy or you lose everything. Ivy’s a metaphor. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return, and down to dust your house will come with you, down with ivy. I knew a girl called Ivy once. God knows what happened to her, down in the dark beneath the sea. Choked, I shouldn’t wonder, leaves and hands and creeping through your window. Can’t say as I hold much with God any more, though. Bugger ’im. Rigged the game and left the place to rot, hasn’t he?”
“I never thought about it.”
“She came here.”
“God?”
“She came every day, for a while, and looked down into the sea. There’s a standing wave.” He points out at the ring of water.
“What is it? The rocks?”
“More complicated. It’s a wave that never ends. Never moves, never dies. Just changes. Water hits rock, washes back, meets water… always a wave, always in a ring. It rises and falls and changes, but it never goes away. Not just a wave. The soul of an ocean. The physics is quite interesting.”
Joe looks at him again. When he isn’t furious, he seems… teacherish. A heart of books with the skin of a tramp.
The man nods to himself once, sharply. “Who are you, then?”
“Joe Spork.” He smiles uncertainly, and sees or imagines a distant flicker in the hooded eyes.
“I’m Ted Sholt,” the man says.
“Hello, Mr. Sholt.”
“Oh, call me Ted. Or Keeper.” He nods. “Ted’s better. No one calls me the other any more.” As if reassuring himself.
“Hello, Ted.”
“Joe Spork. Joe Spork. Spork, Joe. You’re out of season for a hippy and too poor for a developer. Might be a scout, though. Smuggler? Lovelorn suicide? Poet? Police?” It is unclear which of these he holds in lowest regard.
“Clockworker.”
“Spork the Clock! Yes, of course you are! Spork the Clock and Frankie, in a tree. Gone now, of course. Spork the ticktock Clock… Wait for the day, she told me. Wait for the day. The machine changes everything. The Book is the secrets, all in a row. Death has the secrets, she said. Death bangs the drum, and his carriage never stops.”
Joe stares at him. “What did you say?”
“Ticktock?” Glazed eyes wander across Joe’s face, on their way to somewhere else he can’t see.
“No, after that. ‘Wait for the day’?”
“Breakers in a cauldron, the ocean in a box. Bees make angels. Book of changes.” Sholt smiles benignly. “You know all that, don’t you, Spork the Clock?”
“No,” Joe Spork says carefully, “I don’t.”
“Oh, yes. Time is ivy and death is gorse and the turning sets us free. You look younger than you did, Spork the Clock. You were older when we met.”
“Ted?”
“Yes?”
“What does it all look like?”
“Candle, book, and bell. For the exorcism of ghosts. No Heaven, no judgement. Just the Book, and pages like for a music box.”
Joe Spork stares at him. Yes. That’s the job. This old loony is the client. The endgame. Not too late, at all. Just lost upon the road.
God, I sound like him.
“Ted, I have a package for you.”
“I don’t get packages. I live in the greenhouse with the bees, and I cut the gorse and chop the ivy and that’s all. When they say ‘postal’ these days they mean ‘mad.’ It’s cruel, I think.”
“Yes, it is. But look, here’s the destination address, see? I wrote it down.”
Ted Sholt’s eyes fix very sharply, a moment of focus in the fog. “‘Destiny’ is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what’s life? Consciousness without volition. We’d all be passengers, no more real than model trains.” He shrugs, and the sudden acuity is gone. “The enemy was transcribed, not transmigrated. Left himself lying around like an unexploded bomb. Don’t let the Khan take you! Never!” He seems ready to flee, and then relaxes. “But he’s dead, long ago. Safe enough. Did you say you had a cake?”