The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

  ‘He’s called Katsu.’

  ‘I see?’

  The watchmaker looked around. ‘It’s only clockwork. It’s not some strange fetish.’

  ‘No, no. It was, you know, unexpected. It’s good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, placated. He inclined his head at the octopus, which mirrored him. ‘That said, I suppose it’s not much of a mystery why I can’t rent out the room.’

  Thaniel watched the octopus too. It was hypnotic. The mechanical joints moved as fluidly as the water, glinting with the warped colours of the kitchen. It took him a little while to realise that it was watching him back, or it looked as if it was. He straightened up, feeling caught out. ‘Have I told you my name yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s Steepleton. Nathaniel, but Thaniel if you like. I know it’s a bit … but my father was Nat.’

  ‘I’ll stick to Mr Steepleton, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In Japan, first names are only for who you’re married to, or if you’re being rude,’ the watchmaker explained. ‘It sounds wrong to me.’

  Japan. Thaniel couldn’t remember where it was. ‘Can we negotiate down to Steepleton? Mr Steepleton makes me sound like a bank manager.’

  ‘No,’ said the watchmaker.

  Thaniel laughed, then touched the back of his neck awkwardly when it occurred to him the man might not have meant to be funny. ‘So I shouldn’t ask your first name?’

  But the watchmaker was smiling again. ‘It’s Keita.’

  ‘Sorry, what … ?’ It was a simple sound, but knowing that it was Japanese and therefore difficult, his brain had refused to hear it properly.

  The watchmaker spelled it for him. ‘Rhymes with later,’ he added, and, unoffended, poured them both some more tea.

  The spare room was crooked, as though it had planned to be L-shaped but changed its mind at the last minute. In one wall was a diamond-paned window, warped into a wave; under it was a bed with fresh sheets, and under that, floorboards bleached into a diamond cross-hatch pattern by the sun. Once the watchmaker had lit the lamp, he left the door open on his way out. His bedroom was only a few feet away across the landing. Thaniel sat down on the edge of the bed to check the bandage on his arm, and faced that way. The two doors made a double frame around the other room, where the watchmaker sat on his own bed in a pool of lamplight and wrote in a diary. His hand moved up and down the page, right to left. As he shifted the book over his knee to start the next page, the previous one fell down into view. The writing was all tiny calligraphy pictures. The watchmaker lifted his eyes and, realising that he was in fact spying on a man writing a diary, even if it happened not to be a language he knew, Thaniel eased the door closed, and turned off the lamp. Although he moved slowly, his joints were stiff and grinding. He had to undress without bending much. When he got into bed, he stayed kneeling, working up the courage to move his spine and knowing it would hurt that nerve in the back of his neck again when he did.

  Despite the thunderheads, the night was light now, and silver light cross-hatched itself across the floor. He leaned on the windowsill, resting his cheek against the wall. Below him was a garden, quite long, where he could make out the rough shapes of bushes and trees through the rain. Off to the left were the city lights, but beyond the garden there must have been some kind of heath, maybe even Hyde Park – he had lost his sense of direction – because everything that way was black.

  A swarm of lights sparked into life in the garden. Frowning, he found the latch, old but well oiled, and pushed the window open. He couldn’t see what the lights were, only that they were floating above the grass. He flicked a farthing at them, but they didn’t scatter. Suddenly they all went out. Nothing moved but the rain.

  FIVE

  Katsu was an octopus. Still half asleep, Thaniel tried to remember how he knew that and why he had thought of it. After some false starts, his mind coughed up a memory of a foreigner and a medieval house full of clockwork. He curled on to his side and heard the scratch of stubble against the cotton pillowcase, then of his lashes as he opened his eyes. The room was gold in the morning. He had thought that he had dreamed it all, but the crooked floor was still crooked, and his skin still smelled of lemon soap. The watchmaker’s footsteps went back down the uncreaking stairs. He had been on the landing, and talking, because as he went, so did the gold in the air, and gave way to ordinary sunlight. Thaniel watched it fade. It was the wrong shade for English.

  Somewhere, a clock struck eight. Eight already. He sat up in a heap and shrugged into yesterday’s borrowed shirt, then swore when the dry blood on his arm caught on the bandage. He turned the sleeve back, carefully, and unwrapped the bandage to see. It was no worse than the things that had befallen his knees when he was a boy. He got himself used to the idea, ignored the ringing inside his ears, and looked around for his socks.

  He was putting them on when the first strains of piano music sang up the stairs. It was a morning song. The key was cut glass with prism colours around the edges. Distracted, he almost didn’t notice when the top drawer of the dresser opened by itself.

  The clockwork octopus came out. It extended a tentacle with a clicking of metal joints. Around it was looped the chain of his watch. He hesitated, but took it. The chain skittered over the metal tentacle with a high, thin pitch like incoming sea. It was quite a coincidence for a mechanical sea creature and he was speculating whether it could possibly have been done on purpose when Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopused out of the open door and slid down the banister.

  He exclaimed at it, was ignored, and then went after it just in time to see it disappear into the parlour. It was climbing up the leg of the piano stool when he caught up. The watchmaker confiscated the sock and threw it over his shoulder to Thaniel, who caught it with the tips of his fingers. The octopus settled in his lap.

  ‘Thank you for finding him,’ he said. Against the piano keys, his hands were too warmly coloured for the watery morning. ‘I was looking for him earlier. He plays hide and seek.’

  ‘Don’t you suppose that it would be easier to find a permanent tenant if you could persuade it not to do that?’ said Thaniel, narrowing his eyes at the thing as it looked at him over the watchmaker’s hip.

  ‘I’ve tried. No, you can keep that,’ he said when Thaniel tried to give him the watch.

  Thaniel stopped. ‘What? No, I can’t. I’ll only break it—’

  ‘You won’t break it, it’s elephant-proof. I’ve tested it at the zoo. How is your arm?’

  ‘Much better, thank you. Sorry, at the zoo?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the watchmaker.

  Thaniel stood for a second, but no elaboration was forthcoming. There was no furniture in the room, except for the piano and a low table by the hearth. He sat down on the floor so that he could put on his second sock. In front of him, the watchmaker was bothering with only one pedal; whenever he leaned on it, the piano bumped gently and notes came up through the floor. The heels of his brown boots were imprinted with the mark of a Japanese manufacturer in their dense pictographic writing.

  Thaniel frowned. Chinamen were not rare in London and God knew what George had seen. If he wasn’t very careful, he was going to start jumping at imaginary ghosts. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life staring at everyone’s shoes. The ringing noise from yesterday started up again. He closed his eyes but still saw white spots.

  ‘Mr … Mori, am I saying that correctly?’ he said, probably more loudly than he should have.

  ‘Morey.’

  Thaniel nodded. ‘Thank you for letting me stay. You’ve been very kind, but I ought to get to work now.’

  The watchmaker turned his head to the side as a token backward look, though he didn’t twist to see over his shoulder. ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘It won’t matter. I work at Whitehall. Everyone will be expected to go.’

  ‘Rubbish, you were
almost killed. They don’t know you haven’t a terrible concussion.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘But you’re not fighting fit either, are you.’ He took his hands from the keys and the last cadence hung for a while, foggily. ‘I’m going out for breakfast. Why don’t you come with me?’

  Thaniel’s mind stopped working for a second, tumbled by the friendliness. ‘I’ll have a day taken from my pay.’

  ‘Is it governmentally necessary that you go?’ the watchmaker asked, without any trace of irony. It was a real question, and he was waiting for a real answer.

  ‘No, I’m just a clerk. But I need the money,’ he said, feebly.

  The watchmaker stood up. ‘In that case, the most efficient use of your time would be to go later and then faint over your desk. That would be considered a heroic effort, they wouldn’t dock your pay, and you would only have been for five minutes. But not if you can’t act,’ he added, just as serious as before.

  ‘Er … all right,’ Thaniel said. He smiled. He was beginning to think that losing a day’s pay would be worth it. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  When the watchmaker gave him his hand, he was unexpectedly strong.

  Yesterday’s storm had left long puddles in the road, and they made islands of the taller cobblestones. Some of the water had condensed overnight into a mist thick enough to obscure the leaning houses. The washing lines strung between the nearer windows were empty and dripped into the puddles. Because it was still early, the shop-fronts were dark, all except the watchmaker’s own. Small lights hidden in the displays glowed on as they passed and sparked over the tiny model of London: among the church spires and the familiar government buildings were strange glass towers. He only saw them for a second before they took themselves apart again and became ruins. The watchmaker made a disapproving sound at the cold. Now that they were walking side by side, he was taller than he had seemed last night, but still small.

  ‘Mr Mori, are you half English?’ Thaniel asked as they turned from Filigree Street on to Knightsbridge. The mist furled in the wakes of the cabs and rang with disembodied whistles as cyclists rounded corners. There was a halo of bright light coming from the other direction. When he looked at it hard, he saw that it had ‘Harrods’ written down the middle. An electric sign. Pimlico it was not. He felt perversely glad to have been forced to stay out for the night. He had been running on tracks between home and the office for months, unvaried. If he had parachuted into his thoughts now not knowing the context, he would have assumed he was seeing a day when he was just coming out of a long, long fever. He could think again.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Your hair is light.’

  ‘It’s dyed. I like being a foreigner, but not one who’s identifiable at a hundred yards. No one in England has black hair.’

  ‘They do,’ Thaniel protested.

  ‘That’s brown,’ he said firmly.

  Thaniel smiled. ‘What’s Japan like?’

  The watchmaker gave it some thought. ‘Very similar to England,’ he said at last. ‘People have their factories and their politics and their preoccupation with tea. But you’ll see.’

  Thaniel was about to ask how when they passed under a gaunt red gate and came out in the middle of Tokyo.

  Paper lamps lit the way through the fog. They hung from wooden frames above little shops where sliding doors were already open for business. Kneeling on the floor beside coal braziers, artisans worked on the porches. One nodded to them, then turned his attention back to a spidery wooden framework of indefinite purpose. Thaniel slowed down to watch him. His hands were so swarthy that it was hard to see if he was dirty or tanned, and he held his tools in an awkward way, but he worked unfalteringly and the wooden framework soon resolved itself into the skeleton of a parasol.

  ‘Three shillings,’ the man said, having seen him watching. His English was slurred but decipherable. Thaniel shook his head, wishing he did have three shillings. Annabel would have loved a real oriental parasol, although she would have been hard pressed to use one in Edinburgh.

  Beyond the parasol shop was a potter finishing the enamel on a tall vase. He had laid out his colours in rough bowls, but the painting was glossy and perfect. A tailor nearby spoke in broken English to a white woman dressed in the plain style of a governess. There were no other occidentals there. Thaniel jumped when he heard a bump, and the ringing in his ears came back, but it was only a woman sliding open the door of a tearoom. She saw him looking and bowed. As she turned away, the hem of her green dress brushed the ground. She had stuck a closed fan in the back of her belt.

  ‘But this is—’ he began.

  ‘All imported from Japan,’ the watchmaker explained. ‘It’s part of an exhibition. It opened last week. They serve an English breakfast in the tearoom there.’

  ‘Does it really look like Japan?’ Thaniel asked as they went by a shrine housing a painted figure that might have been a god, or something that ate gods. A little boy put a coin in its bowl and rang the bell inside.

  The watchmaker nodded. ‘Near enough. The weather is better in Japan, and it would be difficult to find English food. But I think they do draw the line here at brown tea.’

  Thaniel could smell the bitterness of green tea now. ‘What’s wrong with brown?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  He snorted and let the watchmaker lead the way.

  A group of men sat beneath the tearoom’s bamboo portico. They were passing round some sort of magazine, which was making them smirk. Some of them glanced up, and when they saw Thaniel, they stared at him. He slowed. They looked rough. All of them wore their sleeves tucked up despite the morning cold, showing brown, muscular arms and powerful hands. Cross-legged and angled forward, they seemed to take up far more space than they really occupied.

  ‘Morning,’ the watchmaker said to the men. It was the same tone that he would have directed at somebody dressed up as Shakespeare. The ones blocking the way in moved aside more readily than Thaniel had thought they would.

  The step up into the teahouse was steep. It had sliding doors like the other shops, and the paper had been inked with a picture of two cranes wading through a river, waxed waterproof. China cups clinked inside. The woman in the pale green dress glided up to them and bowed a little, her hands flat to her thighs and her fingers pressed together. Past her shoulder, he could see that the teashop had its own piano, a rickety thing with silver candleholders built into the music stand. The case was up.

  ‘Good morning, Mori-sama. Would you like the table by the window?’

  ‘Please,’ said the watchmaker.

  She smiled and led them across to the table. The windows were more like the sliding doors than the usual sort, but their panels were glass rather than paper. Just beyond the small steps down to the grass outside, there was a flooded patch, and six small herons lined up in a shabby row. Living so close to the river Thaniel was used to the gloomy fishing birds and the black coots, but the watchmaker shifted to see a seventh land, less close. The girl did too, and the strength of their interest made Thaniel look again. For a fraction of a second, he saw how strange seven herons were. The two of them were stranger. With her black hair and her spring-coloured clothes, it should have been difficult to see that the girl was from the same country as the watchmaker, but in the bright light, their eyes were the same, and their fragile bones made them look like children.

  ‘Mrs Nakamura is cooking breakfast,’ the girl continued, seeing that he was watching her and mistaking it for impatience, ‘but she is not very good. Would you still like to try?’

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘And tea? She is better at tea.’

  He nodded and watched her go, and noticed that the watchmaker didn’t. ‘Is there a Mrs Mori in Japan?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ the watchmaker said. ‘Women think that making clockwork leads to an attic full of model trains.’

  ‘It mainly does,’ Thaniel pointed out.

  ‘Actually mine is full of clock
work pears. Although I suppose that sticks to the broad principle,’ he admitted.

  ‘Pears, why?’

  His shoulders went back. ‘My old tutor was a botanist, so I started making them for one of his birthdays a while ago and then couldn’t stop. It’s like those origami swans.’

  Thaniel narrowed his eyes at the salt cellar, worried that origami was word he ought to know. ‘What swans?’ he said eventually.

  ‘You haven’t … ?’ He made one out of the paper napkin and scooted it gently across the table to Thaniel, who had to take it apart to see how he had done it. The tea arrived while he was trying one of his own. It came out more like a duck. The watchmaker laughed when he slid open the window a fraction and sailed them both along the puddle, toward the wary herons.

  ‘Oh,’ the watchmaker said, and leaned forward and caught the balled-up newspaper that would have hit Thaniel’s shoulder. He did it slowly, as if he were taking a money-spider from the air, and Thaniel didn’t understand where it had come from until he saw the boy in the doorway.

  He was staring straight at them. He wore the same clothes as the men on the porch – traditional robes in bleak colours, the sleeves pushed up – but he was different. While the men had made a show of being surly, the boy’s eyes were flat and expressionless. A prickle crawled down the back of Thaniel’s neck. The eyes of pike had that dead shine when they were hung outside the fishmonger’s. The boy was shredding the edge of another newspaper page between his fingertips, slow, perfectly spaced tears of uniform length.

  ‘Missed,’ the watchmaker said to him.

  The boy snapped something back in Japanese. Thaniel didn’t understand, but it came with a sharp nod in his own direction.

  ‘This is England. You’ll find there are a lot of foreigners here. I think your father was looking for you, Yuki-kun, you’d better find him.’

  ‘Yuki-san.’

  ‘You’re only fifteen. It’s no use growing up too fast; you can’t get away with half as much,’ the watchmaker told him. He had the schoolmaster trick of sounding benign over a warning. It made Thaniel look at him again, because he had assumed he was young, and now he didn’t think so.