knees for the finale, it’s just hopeless: they all burst out laughing. Every single time, I mess up my surprise effects because my ticktock rings out loud and clear. So the customers know exactly when I’m supposed to scare them, and some regulars even laugh ahead of time. Méliès thinks I’m far too much in love to frighten people properly.
Occasionally, Miss Acacia comes for a ride on the Ghost Train. My clock always tick-tocks more loudly when I see her settling her bird’s bottom into a carriage. I slip her a few intimations of ardour, as a precursor to our nocturnal encounters.
Come, my blossoming tree, this evening we’ll turn out the light and I’ll lay your spectacles to rest on two swelling buds that promise to bring forth leaves. You’ll score the celestial vault with the tips of your branches, and shake your invisible trunk as it props up the moon. New dreams will fall back down like warm snow at our feet. You’ll plant your high-heeled roots firmly in the earth. Let me climb over your bamboo heart, I want to sleep by your side.
Midnight chimes. I notice a few wood shavings on my bed; my clock is crumbling. Miss Acacia arrives without her glasses, but her eyes look focused as if we were due to have a business meeting.
‘You were behaving oddly yesterday evening,’ she says. ‘You even let me go without saying goodbye – no kiss, nothing. You were tinkering with your clock, hypnotised. I was frightened you’d cut yourself on those pointy arrows.’
‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to try out an experiment to make you stay a little longer, but it didn’t work.’
‘No, it didn’t. Don’t play that game with me. I love you, but you know I can’t stay until morning.’
‘I know, I know . . . that’s why I was trying to . . .’
‘And while we’re on the subject, why don’t you take off your clock when we’re together? I get bruises from our making—’
‘Take off my clock? But I can’t!’
‘Of course you can! I don’t keep my stage make-up on to join you under the sheets, do I?’
‘Yes, you do sometimes! And you’re very beautiful when you’re naked with painted eyes.’
A gentle twinkle flashes beneath her eyelashes.
‘The point is I could never remove my clock. It’s not an accessory.’
Her luscious lips pout, as if to say: I don’t even believe seventy per cent of what you’re saying.
‘You know what, it’s great that you believe in your dreams, but you’ve got to come down off your cloud every once in a while and grow up. You can’t go through life with your clock hands sticking out of your coat,’ she says, sounding like a teacher.
I may be in the same room as her, but not since our first encounter have I been so far away from her embrace.
‘Sorry,’ I tell her, ‘but yes I can. That really is how I function. This clock is a vital part of me. It’s what makes my heart beat. There’s no getting away from it. I draw on who I am to overcome my situation, to feel alive. It’s just like you on stage; when you sing, it’s the same thing.’
‘It’s not the same thing, you naughty boy!’ she says, sliding her fingernails over my dial.
That she could even think my clock might just be an ‘accessory’ makes my blood run cold. I couldn’t love her if I thought her heart was a fake, whether it was made of glass or flesh or eggshell.
‘Well, keep it on if you like, but be careful with your clock hands . . .’
‘Do you believe in me one hundred per cent?’
‘I’d say seventy per cent, for the time being. It’s up to you to get me all the way to a hundred per cent, Little Jack . . .’
‘Why am I thirty per cent short?’
‘Because I know what men are like.’
‘I’m not like the others.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You’re a born cheat! Even your heart is a cheat.’
‘The only real thing I have is my heart.’
‘You see, you always land on your feet. But that’s what I love about you.’
‘I don’t want there to be things you “love about me”, I want you to love “all of me”.’
Her eyelids are like black parasols, blinking in time to the tick-tock of my heart. Her lips, which I haven’t kissed for too long, betray amusement and doubt. The palpitations speed up under my dial. A familiar tingling.
She starts the drum roll as