‘Made any discoveries?’ His mother’s voice dragged him from his reverie. ‘We were beginning to think the spiders had got the better of you.’
‘Over there, next to the wood, there’s a walled garden full of statues.’ Max pointed towards the stone enclosure and his mother leaned out of the window.
‘I can barely see a thing. It’s getting dark. Your father and I are heading into town to get something for dinner, at least enough to keep us going until we can do a proper shop tomorrow. You’ll be on your own so keep an eye on Irina.’
Max nodded. His mother gave him a peck on the cheek and set off down the stairs. Max peered again at the statues in the walled garden, their outlines slowly fading into the evening mist. The breeze had grown cooler. Max closed the window and went off to finish the spider hunt in the other rooms. Irina met him in the hallway.
‘Were they big?’ she asked, fascinated.
Max hesitated for a second.
‘The spiders, Max. Were they big?’
‘As big as my fist,’ Max replied solemnly.
3
THE FOLLOWING DAY, SHORTLY BEFORE sunrise, Max heard a figure wrapped in the nocturnal haze whispering in his ear. He jumped up, gasping, his heart racing. He was alone in his room. The image he had dreamed of, that dark shape murmuring in the shadows, had vanished. He stretched out a hand towards the bedside table and turned on the lamp his father had repaired the day before.
Through the window, he saw dawn breaking over the forest. A thick mist was moving slowly across the field of wild grass but now and then the breeze opened up gaps through which he could just about make out the silhouettes of the statues in the walled garden. Max took his pocket watch from the bedside table and opened it. The smiling moons shone like plates of gold. It was six minutes to six.
Max dressed quietly and crept down the stairs, hoping he wouldn’t wake the rest of the family. He went into the kitchen, where the remains of last night’s dinner still lay on the wooden table, then opened the door to the backyard and stepped outside. The cold, damp air of early morning nipped at his skin. Making no sound, Max crossed the yard, went through the gate in the fence, closing it behind him, then made his way through the mist towards the walled garden.
*
The path turned out to be longer than he’d expected. From his bedroom window he’d estimated that the walled garden was about a hundred metres from the house, but as he walked through the wild grass Max felt as if he’d covered at least three times that distance when, suddenly, the gate with the spearheads emerged out of the mist.
A rusty chain was fastened around the blackened metal bars, with a corroded old padlock which time had stained a deathly hue. Max pressed his face against the bars and looked inside. The weeds had been gaining ground for years, so that the enclosure now looked like a neglected greenhouse. Nobody had set foot in that place for ages, thought Max, and whoever the guardian once was, he had long since disappeared.
He looked around and found a stone the size of his hand next to the garden wall. He picked it up and pounded at the padlock that linked the two ends of the chain, until at last the old lock snapped open. The chain broke loose, swaying across the bars like a braid of metal hair. Max pushed hard until gradually the two sides of the gate began to give way. When the gap was wide enough for him to get through, Max rested for a moment, then went inside.
The garden was larger than he’d thought. At a glance, he could have sworn there were almost twenty statues half-hidden among the vegetation. He took a few steps forward. The figures seemed to be arranged in concentric circles and Max realised that they were all facing west. They appeared to form part of something resembling a circus troupe. As he walked among the statues, Max recognised the figure of a lion tamer, a turbaned fakir with a hooked nose, a female contortionist, a strongman and a whole gallery of other ghostly characters.
In the middle of the garden, resting on a pedestal, stood the imposing figure of a clown. He had one arm outstretched, as if attempting to punch something with his fist, and he wore a glove that was disproportionately large. By the clown’s feet, Max noticed a paving stone that seemed to have some kind of design etched on it. He knelt down and pulled back the weeds covering the surface to reveal the outline of a six-pointed star within a circle. Max recognised the symbol: it was identical to the one above the spearheads on the gate.
As he examined the star, Max realised that while at first he had thought the statues were spaced out in concentric rings, they were in fact positioned in a way that mirrored the design of the star, each of the figures standing at an intersection of the lines that formed the shape. Max stood up and gazed at the eerie landscape around him. He looked at the statues in turn, each one swathed in greenery that trembled in the wind, until his eyes rested again on the clown. A shudder ran through his body and he took a step back: the hand of the figure, which seconds earlier had appeared to be clenched in a fist, now lay open, its palm stretched out invitingly. For a moment the cold morning air burned Max’s throat and he could feel a throbbing in his temples.
Slowly, almost fearing he might wake the statues from their eternal sleep, he made his way back to the gate of the enclosure, looking behind him at every step. Once he’d slipped through the gate, he began to run and this time he didn’t look back until he reached the fence guarding the backyard. When he did look, the garden of statues was once again buried in mist.
*
The smell of buttered toast filled the kitchen. Alicia was staring at her breakfast unenthusiastically and Irina was pouring milk into a saucer for her cat, which it was refusing to touch. Max observed the scene, suspecting that the cat’s eating habits were somewhat unusual and more exotic, as he had discovered the day before. Maximilian Carver held a cup of steaming coffee in his hands and gazed euphorically at his family.
‘This morning, I’ve been conducting some exploratory research in the garden shed,’ he began, adopting the ‘here comes the mystery’ tone he used when he desperately wanted someone to ask him what he’d discovered.
Max was so familiar with the watchmaker’s ways that he sometimes wondered which one of them was the father and which one the son.
‘And what have you found?’ Max conceded.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ replied his father – although Max thought, ‘I bet I will’ – ‘A couple of bicycles.’
Max raised his eyebrows.
‘They’re quite old, but with a bit of grease on the chains they’ll go like a bat out of hell,’ Mr Carver explained. ‘And there was something else. I bet you don’t know what else I found in the shed?’
‘An aardvark,’ mumbled Irina, still petting her feline friend. Though she was only eight, the youngest of the Carvers had developed a crushing ability at undermining her father’s morale.
‘No,’ replied the watchmaker, visibly annoyed. ‘Is nobody else going to have a guess?’
Max noticed that his mother had been watching the scene and, realising that nobody seemed interested in her husband’s detective skills, she now came to the rescue.
‘A photograph album?’ Andrea Carver suggested in her sweetest tone.
‘You’re getting warmer,’ replied the watchmaker, feeling encouraged once more. ‘Max?’
His mother cast him a sidelong glance. Max nodded.
‘I don’t know. A diary?’
‘No. Alicia?’
‘I give up,’ replied Alicia.
‘All right, prepare yourselves,’ said Mr Carver. ‘What I’ve found is a projector. A film projector. And a box full of films.’
‘What sort of films?’ Irina butted in, turning her eyes away from her cat for the first time.
Maximilian Carver shrugged.
‘I don’t know. Just films. Isn’t it fascinating? We can have our own private cinema.’
‘That’s if the projector works,’ said Alicia.
‘Thanks for those words of encouragement, dearest, but let me remind you that your father earns
his living mending broken things. The machines and I, we share a secret language.’
Andrea Carver placed her hands on her husband’s shoulders. ‘I’m glad to hear that, Mr Carver,’ she said, ‘because someone should be having a serious conversation with the boiler in the basement.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ replied the watchmaker, standing up and leaving the table.
Alicia followed suit.
‘Sit down, miss,’ said Mrs Carver quickly. ‘Breakfast first. You haven’t touched it.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ll eat it,’ volunteered Irina.
Andrea Carver disallowed this proposal.
‘She doesn’t want to get fat,’ Irina hissed at her cat, pointing at Alicia.
‘I can’t eat with that thing waving its tail around the place and shedding hair everywhere,’ snapped Alicia.
Irina and the creature looked at her with disdain.
‘What a princess,’ Irina grumbled, as she went out to the backyard taking the animal with her.
Alicia turned to her mother, red-faced.
‘Why do you always let her do what she wants? When I was her age you didn’t let me get away with half the things she does,’ Alicia protested.
‘Are we going to go over that again?’ said Andrea Carver in a calm voice.
‘I wasn’t the one who started it,’ replied her elder daughter.
‘All right. I’m sorry.’ Andrea Carver gently stroked Alicia’s long hair; Alicia tilted her head, avoiding the conciliatory gesture. ‘But finish your breakfast. Please. Or at least try to start it.’
At that moment a metallic bang sounded beneath their feet. They looked at one another.
‘Your father in action,’ their mother commented ironically, as she downed her coffee. Then she glanced at her son, intrigued.
‘You’re unusually quiet this morning, Max. Something the matter?’
‘Uh?’
Alicia smiled to herself slyly as she pretended to munch on a piece of toast, while Max tried not to think about the extended hand and the bulging eyes of the clown, as it grinned through the mist of the walled garden.
4
THE BICYCLES MAXIMILIAN CARVER HAD rescued from their exile in the garden shed were in much better shape than Max had imagined. He had expected two wiry, rusty skeletons when in fact they looked as if they’d hardly been used. Aided by a couple of dusters and a special liquid for cleaning metal his mother always used, Max discovered that beneath the layers of grime both bicycles looked almost new. With his father’s help he greased the chains and the sprockets and pumped up the tyres.
‘We’ll probably have to change the inner tubes at some point,’ Mr Carver explained, ‘but for the time being they’ll do.’
One of the bicycles was smaller than the other, and as he cleaned them Max couldn’t help thinking about the house’s previous owners. He asked himself whether Dr Fleischmann had bought the bicycles years ago, hoping to go for rides with his son Jacob along the beach road. Maximilian Carver saw a shadow of guilt in his son’s eyes.
‘I’m sure the old doctor would have wanted you to use the bike.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Max muttered. ‘Why did they leave them here?’
‘Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go – you don’t need to take them with you,’ Mr Carver replied. ‘I suppose nobody ever used them. Get on. Let’s try them out.’
Max adjusted the height of his seat and checked the tension of his brake cables.
‘We’d better put some more oil on the brakes,’ Max suggested.
‘Just what I thought,’ the watchmaker agreed and got down to work. ‘Listen, Max …’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘Don’t worry too much about the bikes, OK? What happened to that poor family has nothing to do with us. I probably shouldn’t have told you the story,’ he added, worry clouding his face.
‘It’s no big deal.’ Max tightened the brake again. ‘Now it’s perfect.’
‘Off you go, then.’
‘Aren’t you coming with me?’ asked Max.
‘I’d love to, but I have to see someone called Fred at ten, in the town. He’s going to rent me some premises for my shop. Got to think about the business. But if you’re still up for it, maybe tomorrow I’ll give you a hammering you’ll never forget.’
‘In your dreams.’
‘I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.’
‘Deal.’
Maximilian Carver began gathering up the tools and cleaning his hands with one of the rags. Max watched his father and wondered what he’d been like at his age. People always said that the two of them were alike, but they also said that Irina was like Andrea Carver. Max couldn’t see the resemblance for all the tea in China. It seemed like another of those silly things that whole hordes of unbearable relatives who turned up for Christmas loved to repeat year after year like parrots. Which was a pity, because he wanted it to be true. He wanted to resemble his father.
‘Max in one of his trances,’ Mr Carver observed with a smile.
‘Did you know that there’s a walled garden full of statues behind the house, near the wood?’ Max asked, surprising even himself with the question.
‘I suppose there are a lot of things around here that we still haven’t seen. The garden shed is full of boxes and the basement looks like a museum. If we sold all the junk in this house to an antique dealer I wouldn’t even have to open a shop; we could live off the profits.’
Maximilian Carver threw his son an inquisitive glance.
‘Listen. If you don’t try it out, that bike will get covered in filth again and turn into a fossil.’
‘It already is,’ said Max, leaping onto the bicycle Jacob Fleischmann had never had the chance to use.
Max pedalled towards the town along the beach road, with its long row of houses similar to the Carvers’ new home. The road led straight to the entrance of the small bay, and the harbour used by fishermen. There were only four or five boats moored along the ancient docks, mostly small wooden rowing boats, no more than four metres long, which the local fishermen used, casting their old nets into the sea about a hundred metres from the coastline.
Max dodged through the maze of boats being repaired on the dock and the piles of wooden crates from the local fish market. With his eyes fixed on the beacon at the end, he set off along the breakwater that curved around the port like a half-moon. When he got there, he left the bike leaning against the side of the beacon and sat down to rest on one of the boulders on the seaward side of the breakwater that was eroded by the force of the waves. From there he could gaze at the dazzling light of the ocean spreading out before him towards eternity.
He’d only been sitting there a few moments when he saw another bicycle approaching along the quay. It was ridden by a tall, slim boy who, Max reckoned, must be sixteen or seventeen. He pedalled up to the beacon and left his bike next to Max’s. Then he pushed a shock of hair away from his face and walked over to where Max was sitting.
‘Hello there. Have you just moved into the house at the end of the beach?’
Max nodded. ‘I’m Max.’
The boy had deeply tanned skin and penetrating green eyes. He held out his hand.
‘Roland. Welcome to Boring-on-Sea.’
Max smiled and shook Roland’s hand.
‘How’s the house? Do you like it?’ asked the boy.
‘Opinion is divided. My father loves it. The rest of the family don’t see it that way,’ Max explained.
‘I met your father a few months ago, when he came to the town,’ said Roland. ‘He seemed like good fun. A watchmaker, isn’t that right?’
Max nodded again. ‘Yes, he is good fun…sometimes. Other times he gets silly ideas into his head, like moving here.’
‘Why did you move?’ asked Roland.
‘The war,’ replied Max. ‘My father thinks it isn’t a good time to be living in the city. I suppose he’s right.’
‘The war,?
?? Roland repeated, his eyes downcast. ‘I’ll be called up in September.’
Max was lost for words. Noticing his silence, Roland smiled.
‘It has its plus side,’ he added. ‘This could be the last summer I have to spend in this place.’
Max smiled back timidly, thinking that in a few years’ time, if the war hadn’t ended, he would also have to enlist. Even on a radiant day such as this, the spectre of war shrouded the future in darkness.
‘I suppose you haven’t seen the town yet,’ said Roland.
Max shook his head.
‘Right, new boy. Get on your bike. I’m giving you the guided tour.’
*
Max had to struggle to keep up with Roland. They’d only pedalled about two hundred metres from the end of the breakwater and already he could feel sweat sliding down his forehead and his body. Roland turned and gave him a teasing grin.
‘Lack of practice, eh? Life in the big city has knocked you out of shape?’ he shouted without slowing down.
Max followed Roland along the promenade and into the streets of the town. When Max began to flag, Roland reduced his speed and stopped in the middle of a square by a large stone fountain from which fresh water gushed invitingly.
‘I wouldn’t recommend a drink,’ said Roland, reading his thoughts. ‘Stitch.’
Max took a deep breath and dipped his head under the jet of cold water.
‘We’ll go slower,’ Roland conceded.
Max kept his head immersed in the basin for a few seconds, then straightened up, water dripping down his head and onto his clothes.
‘I didn’t think you’d even last that long, to tell you the truth. This,’ he said pointing around him, ‘is the centre of town. The main square containing the town hall. That building over there is the court but it’s not used any more. There’s a market here on Sundays. And on summer evenings, they show films on the wall of the town hall. Usually old movies with the reels all jumbled up.’