Watch

What she loved was the watch.

Well, there were many things that she loved in that old workshop, out the back of the shop where it was musty and dusty and the air was always thick with the smells from the café up above, or the laundry just across the road.  When her grandfather was sleeping, she would creep down there – she knew where he kept his key – and she would move around in the dust, gazing at the dust mites caught in sunbeams, taking her time to pick things up and examine them, to get a feel of them inside her skin. She found a beautiful doll in that old workshop once, a creature with dark, curly hair, thick lashes, eyes that closed when she was tipped backwards to sleep. She was dressed in a deep purple velvet with little pretend pearls looping around her collar, along her sleeves, fanning out onto the soft, deep fabric of the dress itself.

“Yes, they are fake,” her grandfather would tell her, sitting her on his knee, “she’d be worth a great deal more if they pearls were real. Her name is Bettina, she belonged to your grandmother.”

Rebecca asked what was wrong with her.

“A broken joint in this arm, right here. As soon as I fix her, she’ll be as good as new.”

He never did though. All the things that gathered dust and history in that workshop. She never saw one of them fixed. Not the penny-farthing bicycle – with it’s gaping, absent farthing – or the book with gold-edged pages, held together with soft leather, but only barely, the spine having come away, and the pages just holding on.

But it was the watch that really fascinated her.  She found it one day, beneath some sheets, beneath some blankets, in a wooden box where clothes pegs and needles were also stored. What caught her attention was the fact that it worked. Well, maybe not at first: at first it was the intricate metalwork that covered it in vines of gold, silver and bronze, all of them snaking in and out of each other, clustering here and there to birth a little knot of barely coloured flowers.

But when she opened it, she saw that it wasn’t still. Not like all the others treasures in the workshop. This one moved. It turned and danced. There were so many tiny little cogs inside the watch, more than she could count, so small that she could barely see them. And it seemed to Rebecca that they went down into a tiny abyss, more and more cogs, deeper and deeper, so that it seemed like she could stare into a deep, distant past. It was so easy just to watch them moving, interlocking, reaching for each other, and then sliding apart like dancers.

She heard her name being called, but at first it didn’t register.

Then it got louder and louder. She could hear a franticness in her mother’s voice as she called out for her, running around, her breath pumping.

“Down here!” she called.

And her mother came bursting in. Her hair was a mess, and her cardigan inside-out. She ran over to Rebecca and embraced her in a hug.

“What….?” she started to say.

“Where have you been, girl? What’s the matter with you?”

“I’ve been here.”

“We’ve been searching for you. For goodness’ sake! The police were called. How are we supposed to explain all this to them?”

“But I was right here.”

Her grandfather had followed her mother downstairs, and now there was a sparking of emotion that ran between the two of them. Her grandfather looked contrite, concerned – something else as well – and her mother seemed full of indignation. “What have I been telling you about these things…?!”

“Well, that one – look, I barely remembered that I even have, it I don’t know how she came across it…”

“Well, she did!”

“It doesn’t seem to have done any harm.”

“She’s been missing since Tuesday.”

Rebecca’s head turned, startled. “….Tuesday…”

“It’s Thursday night, child.”

“It is?”

Mother glaring straight at grandfather, straight through him. “See, what I’m trying to tell you?!”

“All right. All right. I’d forgotten about the watch.” Her grandfather strode over to her and took the treasure out of her hands. “Come on girl, we’ll get you some hot chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate….” Her mother was shaking her head.

“The girl’s fine Jasmine.”

“That’s not the point…”

“It can be. At least for now.”

#

In the night her mother came into her room, leaving the light off, coming to sit next to her bed. She was a half-seen presence, a shape, more than a person. And she took her time, controlling her breath, squaring her shoulders before she spoke. She said, “We both love your grandfather an awful lot, don’t we?”

“…. Yes….”

“He’s my father. I grew up around his workshop, and all his little wonders.  I have a doll once, she was my mothers, and I found her there. She was with me all the time. I took her everywhere. I loved her. It seemed fine.”

“I think I’ve seen her.”

“Of course. He’ll never throw anything out. But look, I felt happy, I felt as if I was like a little mother with her own little baby, mine to feed, mine to hold and rock and reassure. And the way her eyes…. the way they looked at me, I didn’t feel as if there was anything wrong. But looking back, I can see it now, I was trapped in her. She became my world, I would spend more and more time walking her in her little pram, taking her down to the river, into the woods, making daisy chains for her. I was gone overnight, this one time, making us a shelter, a little house, a future, taking care of her. Do you understand?”

Rebecca wasn’t sure she did, and yet at the same time…

“Your grandfather is a remarkable man, and I would never take his treasures away from him. He’s earned them, and I suppose they’ve earned him. But you have to be careful around them, few of them are entirely what they seem. Beautiful things can have a little bit of darkness hiding away in them sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I worried everyone today.”

“Oh, I know you didn’t mean to. You just need to be careful.”

“All right. I promise.”

A kiss on her forehead that lingered a few seconds. “You’re a good girl.”

#

She apologised to her grandfather too, afraid that she’d gotten him into some sort of trouble.

He just shook his head, “Ah, that’s nothing I can’t handle.”

She sat up with him in the shop, or in the apartment, talking, reading books. She showed him the trick she’d learned at school. He showed her some of his old schoolbooks from way way back. But he would still sleep sometimes, and she still knew where he kept his key. She’d been afraid that the watch might not be there any more, that he would have moved it, or locked it up. But she found it right where she’d last seen it – like he wanted to her to see it again – and she opened it up to look at it, at the way the gears moved and twisted, how they seemed to be dance in a way that wasn’t quite logical for their form and function. She could do this, she told herself, come down here sometimes, look at it for a little while. Just so long as it wasn’t for too long.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work