on the spot and are ordered to take long deep breaths; in one-two, out one-two. Breathing is numbers – time is numbers. Grown-ups seem to know the time within themselves. They are always announcing it – time for bed, time for dinner, time for chores. Clocks, young Harry thinks, are reminding devices for when people forget, or when they wake up from sleeping and have not been paying attention to the ins and outs of their lungs. Harry believes that by breathing faster he can make the four minutes in front of the cuckoo clock go quicker. He sniffs and sniffs, gets a little air-drunk and has to sit on the edge of one of the velvet chairs. The clock ticks on and on. Finally he hears the whirr and grind of the clock’s gears running through their pre-call machinations. Then the miniature stable doors – more suited really to a horse than a bird – jerk open and the wooden bird shoots out on its zigzagged arm.
The bird’s head is perfectly round so it looks babyish, a mere chick. Its triangular beak opens and closes. There are two wheezy blasts of sound. A pause then it starts again, the splitting beak, the two-tone call. Harry strains upwards to get a closer look at the cuckoo – but this takes him further away from the sound. He realises that the sound isn’t coming from the bird at all, but from somewhere below, inside the case of the clock, or further back even, inside the wall. He pushes one of the wicker chairs over to the mantelpiece and using all the strength in his arms lifts the heavy clock from the wall. He places it carefully on the hearth rug and opens the latch at the back of the case. There’s a bronze pendulum the size of a soup spoon and underneath it layers of interconnected cogs and springs. At the very bottom of the clock case, in each corner, is a leather bellows. Harry pushes one of them with his finger and it makes the second half of the cuckoo sound, but with a puffed sigh at the end. The lungs of the cuckoo bird are not inside the bird itself. They are just a mechanism within the clock. The cuckoo clock is an act of ventriloquism; a callous device – the mute bird skewered to the thrusting arm – forced hour after hour to repeat its trick. Harry is unable to lift the clock back up to its hook on the wall. He closes the case. The pendulum has detached and at least two springs have gotten away and bounced under the china cabinet. He turns the clock the right side up, so the bird can get out if the doors open again, but he doubts they will.
He’s not sure how much time has gone by now and how long it will be before his mother and his aunt come home. His legs are heavy as he goes out into the garden to finish the weeding. It’s getting hot. He crouches so low in the grass a swarm of rubbishy gnats fly into his face. He can feel the tears concentrating inside him, rising in a thick wad, and the smell of bleach that goes with them. He thinks he might as well cry now, the crying will have to come. There will be the disappointment on his mother’s face and his shame at that. But there’s something more, too. He feels like he has lost something. He tries to slow his breathing now, to slow everything down, to give himself more time, but the tears have made his nose run and he’s having to suck great gulps of air in. He’s the cause of the trouble and he’s bringing it on himself fast.
Harry takes Michael out behind the dairy where a few stray clumps of phalaris have self-seeded in the boosted soil. Michael’s hands are balled in his pockets; he scuffs the soil with the toe of his boot.
‘Come on in, lad. Get a look-see.’ Harry kneels down in front of a small plant. Sip darts in and licks his beard. Harry shoulders her aside. Three or four long seed heads have sprouted from within the tight mound of tangled stemlets. Harry takes his penknife, cuts the long stems and tosses them aside. The shorn plant with its even fleece instantly has the look of an animal about it.
Michael moves up behind Harry. He looks over his shoulder