Chapter 11
The Room With the Clocks
There were four hundred and eleven ticks between the first time the bell struck and the second, and Naomi counted every one.
She lay on her back on a canvas cot with her arm across her eyes and her bare feet hanging off the end, not asleep, not awake, in the gray condition between the two that she knew well from long night shifts. A thin cold light came through the window. A smell hung in the air, strange and layered and unmistakable once you'd noticed it: tar, and diesel, and wet iron, and underneath them, sweet and rotten, the ghost of old fish. Somewhere above her head a pipe ran with a slow irregular gurgle. Far off, outside, a deep note sounded, low and sad and long, like a cow lowing in a cellar. It died away. After a minute it came again.
A foghorn, she thought. We're by the sea.
She did not move. It was a thing she'd learned from the dying: that the first thing one does on waking in an unfamiliar room is to do nothing, and listen. The mind, if you give it a moment, will lay out everything it has taken in. She took stock.
She had been in a van, in the dark, for a long time. Her wrists had been zip-tied in front of her, not tightly. Ivy had been in her lap. They'd covered her head with a bag at first, but a man at the front had said, take that off her, Vance, she's a nurse, she's not going to bite, and the bag had come away. She had seen nothing. The back of the van had no windows. But she had felt it: every turn, every hill, a long straight stretch, a bridge with a rattling deck. She'd counted. She'd lost count somewhere past three hours and begun again. At some point the road had changed from asphalt to concrete, and then to cobbles, and the van had slowed, and the smell had come through the vents.
Salt, she thought. Port Merrin.
He said he'd come.
She did not let herself finish the thought.
A small hand touched her wrist. "Mom."
"I'm awake, baby."
"I counted the bells."
She lifted her arm and turned her head on the canvas. Ivy was sitting up on the other cot in the cold gray light, cross-legged, wrapped in a gray blanket with the compass round her neck, the yellow boots on her feet. Her hair stood up in a ruff. She had a smear of dirt across one cheek, and her eyes were enormous and serious and perfectly clear, and in her lap was open the small battered notebook that she had somehow, in the midst of everything, refused to be parted from. Naomi had no idea how she'd kept it. She suspected that the man called Vance had looked at the child's face and simply not had the heart.
"They aren't bells," Naomi said. "It's one bell. A big one."
"It's a clock bell. It rings the hour. I counted the ticks in between. Four hundred and eleven. It should be a thousand and eight hundred, if it's every hour, so it isn't an hour. It's seven minutes. Maybe it's the quarter. Maybe it's wrong." A frown. "Mom, I think the clock is broken."
"Maybe it is."
"Four minutes. It's off by four minutes. I checked it with the boat bell."
"What boat bell?"
"Out there." Ivy pointed at the window. "It rings when the fog comes. It's a ding ding ding, thin. It's much more regular. I did it three times." She looked up, and a flash of pure scientific indignation crossed her face. "Why would you have a clock that's wrong and not fix it?"
Naomi sat up.
The room swung. She put her hand against the wall and waited. When her head cleared, she took in her surroundings properly for the first time, with the cold attention of a woman reading a chart.
It was a long bare room on an upper floor, thirty feet by fifteen. It might once have been an office. The walls were whitewashed brick, flaking in great scabs; the floor was scarred concrete painted gray; the ceiling was low and crossed by iron beams, and from them hung, on long cables, three dead fluorescent tubes. A window ran along one wall: tall, narrow, gridded with small panes, and so thickly painted over with white lead that the light came through it like milk. At one end stood a table and two chairs. At the other, behind a rusty partition, was a toilet and a basin. A bucket. A tin of soap. There was nothing on the walls, not a picture or a calendar, only a single white clock face, very high up, its hands missing.
She stood. She went to the window. She scraped at the paint with a fingernail, and a flake came away, and she put her eye to the hole.
A yard. A broad dim concrete yard, with puddles standing in it, and stacked pallets, and a pair of rusted railway tracks running down to the water. Beyond them lay a long, low, gray wharf, and beyond that the sea: heavy, colorless, slick as oil, with the mist lying on it in sheets. There was a crane. It stood at the end of the quay like a monstrous heron, its jib hanging, its cab empty, its steel red with age. Beyond the crane, half drowned in fog, loomed a shape she could not at first make sense of, a tall dark thing like a chimney, with a single window high up, and a pale round face on its flank.
A clock.
It was a huge, round, white-faced clock, set into the side of a stone tower, with black hands that stood at eleven minutes past six. In the mist the tower seemed to float, without a base, in the air. A light was burning behind its top window. As she watched, a pigeon landed on the minute hand, and sat there, and the hand did not give.
Ivy's right, she thought. It's slow.
The old man has a clock that's wrong. And he's never fixed it.
It was such an odd thing to be certain of, standing there barefoot in a prison. But she was certain. The chill went down her spine, and settled. She'd seen it, in the dying: the ones who could not bear a loose end, who needed all the paintings straight and all the letters answered; the ones who hung on for days with their eyes fixed on a crooked picture frame and would not go until someone moved it. She knew a certain kind of man. A man who kept a flawed clock was not a man without care. He was a man who had spent his life putting things in order and had left one thing wrong on purpose, as a reminder.
Of what?
She didn't know. She turned from the window.
"Mom," said Ivy.
She was standing on the cot, balancing on the canvas, with the notebook in one hand and a stub of pencil in the other, writing. She wrote fast. She had a way of writing that Naomi had never seen in another child, a sort of fierce absorbed shorthand, with her tongue between her teeth and her eyes darting from the window to the paper. "I've done thirty-one."
"Thirty-one what?"
"Stairs. We came up thirty-one stairs. I counted from the van. There was a man holding my hand, but I counted anyway. They were iron. They went clang. There was a landing at fifteen and a door, and then another sixteen. And then a corridor. Eleven steps to this room." She looked up. "That's forty-two. I'm saying it out loud so I remember."
"Ivy..."
"And there's a smell, Mom, I wrote it. It's tar and fish and something burned. And the foghorn goes every ninety seconds, it's low, it's like a B. And I heard the ferry. It went wuuuuh at six forty. I think it's coming into a harbor, because it did a turn." She chewed the pencil. "And the guard has a mark on his hand. A blue one. A tattoo of a bird. He's young. He's scared."
Naomi stared at her.
She was twelve years old and one day. She had watched her father killing men in the dark, or had not watched, had heard it through a bathroom door, under a pillow, in a bathtub. She'd been carried out of her home in the middle of the night, and taken in a van, and locked in a room. She had not cried. She was standing on a cot in a gray blanket making notes.
"Baby," said Naomi. Her voice came out strange. "Come here."
"I'm not finished."
"Come here, please."
The child gave her a look of mild reproach, like a surgeon called away from a patient. But she jumped down. She came across the cold floor in her boots and stood in front of her mother, and Naomi took her by the shoulders, and knelt, so that their faces were level.
"I want to ask you something," she said, "and I want the truth. You won't get in trouble. All right?"
"All right."
"What did you hear?"
Ivy did not answer at once. Her eyes moved over her mother's face, and for a moment Naomi saw the whole child at once, with a dizzying vertigo: the twelve-year-old and the baby, the toddler in a road with a barking dog, the infant asleep on her chest. A tiny scab on her chin. A pink ribbon of birthday icing still in the corner of her mouth.
"I heard Dad," said Ivy.
"Tell me."
"There was a bang in the kitchen. A small one. Like a cough. And then a lot of bangs. And then a big man's voice said something, and Dad said Hollis, like he knew him." She swallowed. "And then there was a lot of noise in the bathroom. And you put the pillow on my head, and I couldn't see. But I could hear it. I heard a man scream. It was a long one." A tremor crossed her face and was mastered. "He stopped."
"Yes."
"Dad killed him."
Naomi shut her eyes.
She had a speech. She'd had it ready for nine years; she had prepared it in the dark. It began sometimes bad people, and it went on through he had to protect us, and it ended on a note of calm moral authority. Nothing in it applied. She opened her eyes and said, simply, "Yes."
"More than one."
"Yes."
"Did he want to?"
"I don't think so."
"He was crying on the dock." The child said it very quietly. "I saw him from the boat. When they were taking us. He had his hands on his face." She hesitated. "I've never seen him cry. I didn't know he could."
"Everyone can."
"Mom, is he a bad man?"
The room was cold. Outside the foghorn sounded, low and long and slow, and the pigeons on the roof shifted and murmured. Naomi looked at her daughter. She looked at the gray clear unflinching eyes, his eyes, in her own small serious face, and thought of a porch in the rain. I did some work. It wasn't good work. She thought of a man at a kitchen table with oil on his hands. She thought of a dock at night and a hand held up in the lights, five fingers spread.
"He did bad things," said Naomi. "A very long time ago. He was a bad man when he did them. And he's been trying to be a different one ever since."
"Is he?"
"Yes. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Nobody's all of anything," said Naomi. "Not even Mrs. Okafor. Not even me." She drew a breath. "But last night he did something terrible so that you could breathe. And he'd do it again. And I think that's both things. I think that's the whole truth, and it's very hard, and you're allowed to feel more than one way about it."
Ivy was silent for a long time.
"I'm not scared of him," she said at last. "Is that okay?"
"Yes."
"I thought it might be wrong. Because of the man who screamed."
"It's not wrong."
"I'm scared of the clock," said Ivy. "It's too loud. But not of Dad."
Naomi put her arms round her. The child came into them stiffly, and then all at once, like a collapsing tent, and she buried her face in her mother's neck and her whole small body began to shake. There was no sound. It was the silent crying of a girl who had been taught to count to a thousand. Naomi held her. She held her and rocked, and smoothed the stiff hair, and said nothing at all, and looked over the top of the small head at the white clock without hands, high on the wall, until the shaking stopped.
It was a long time before she allowed herself the other name.
She had been holding it behind her teeth since the van. Sofi. Her elder girl, eighteen, in a green Civic, at a bonfire on a ramp. "Ivy," she said at last, very low, when the child's breathing had slowed, "did you see Sofi? In the van? On the quay?"
"No."
"You're sure."
"I counted everybody." The small voice was muffled against her neck. "There were four men, and you, and me, and a driver. She wasn't there. If she had been, she'd have been arguing."
A small wet sound escaped Naomi, halfway between a laugh and something else. "She would."
"Do you think she's okay?"
Naomi looked at the white clock without hands. She thought of a girl in a sweatshirt three sizes too big, with her father's gray eyes behind crooked glasses and an inhaler on a string, who had never in her life thrown a punch, who counted her breaths in the car. She thought of the bonfire, the ramp, the dark.
"I think," she said carefully, "that she's the most stubborn person I know. And that she notices things. And that if there is any way at all to be alive, Sofi has found it."
She did not believe it. She said it anyway, steadily, into her daughter's hair, in the voice she used at three in the morning to the families of the dying; and she saw it go in, and hold, and was ashamed, and went on holding on.
The door opened at eight.
It opened without a knock: a clunk of bolts, a groan of hinges, a slab of gray corridor light. A young man stood in the gap with a tray.
He was perhaps twenty. He was tall and thin, with a long white nervous face and bitten nails, and the sandy beginnings of a mustache that he had not yet learned what to do with. He wore a black quilted jacket and a holstered pistol that he held away from his body as if it might bite him. On the back of his left hand, between the thumb and forefinger, was a small blue tattoo of a swallow in flight.
"Breakfast," he said. He cleared his throat. His eyes went from the tray to the woman kneeling on the floor, and the girl, and away. "Mr. Strand says you're to have everything you need. There's eggs. And tea. And I got you some juice, because the little one, because kids like juice." He halted. "I didn't know what kind. I got orange."
Ivy lifted her head from her mother's neck.
"She likes apple," said Naomi.
"Oh." The young man looked stricken. "I'll, I'll go and get apple."
"Orange is fine," said Ivy. "I'll have it. It's the thought."
He stared at her. A tide of red rose in his thin face. He set the tray on the table, very carefully, as though it contained explosives, and backed to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame.
"I'm Eli," he said. He said it fast, and low, glancing over his shoulder. "I'm, they put me on days. If you need something. Anything. You can say."
"Thank you, Eli," said Naomi.
"It's not, I don't, I'm not like the others," said the boy, in a rush. "I'm only. It's a job. They said it was a delivery service."
"I believe you."
"I wouldn't hurt a kid."
"I believe that too." She rose, slowly, with her hand on Ivy's shoulder. She looked at the swallow on his hand, at the white hair-trigger face, at the gun he held like a stranger's baby. She had spent twenty years learning to find the frightened child in the grown man, and this one was not even hiding. "How old are you, Eli?"
"Twenty."
"Do you have a mother?"
He flinched as though she'd struck him. "Yes."
"Does she know where you are?"
"No."
"Then I think," said Naomi gently, "you should call her."
The door slammed. The bolts shot. She heard his footsteps running away down the corridor, uneven, fast, a boy's, and then the iron stairs, clang, clang, clang, eleven, twelve, thirteen, receding into silence.
"Thirty-one," said Ivy, with satisfaction. "I knew it."
Naomi laughed. It came out of her like a hiccup, helpless and cracked, and she put her hand over her mouth and stood in the middle of the room with her shoulders heaving, laughing and not laughing, until the tears ran down. Her daughter looked at her with polite concern.
"What?"
"Nothing," said Naomi. "Nothing, baby. You're just the best person I've ever met."
"I know." A pause. "Are we going to eat the eggs?"
"We're going to eat everything."
"Even though they're theirs?"
"Especially," said Naomi, and wiped her face. "We're going to need our strength. I'm going to ask you to do something for me, Ivy, and it's going to be hard. I want you to be very good. I want you to be polite, and quiet, and nice to everyone who is nice to us. And I want you to notice every single thing. The stairs. The sounds. The faces. The names. The times the bell rings. The things people say when they don't think we're listening."
"That's the game."
"That's the game."
"And then what?"
"And then," said Naomi, "your father will come."
She said it with total certainty. She did not know that she believed it. But she saw it go into the child like a stitch into cloth, and hold; and from somewhere very high above them, in the huge cold gray air, the tower clock struck eight, four minutes slow, with a deep slow note that rolled across the water and shook the glass.
She counted the ticks. Ivy counted them too. And on the table the eggs went cold, and out in the mist the great bell tolled, and tolled, and in the pause between the last stroke and the silence that followed, a woman and a child held hands in a locked room and began, with the patience of the very frightened, to make a map.