Free Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson Page B

opaquely.
    ‘Well, what are we to do now?’
    ‘Wait,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and see.’
    He got up and left the room. Mrs Rokabye had the distinct feeling that she was being left out of something important. She poured herself more hot chocolate and brooded.
    As she brooded and sipped, and sipped and brooded, there was a horrible howling from the landing, and Sniveller came tumbling through the door, with blood pouring from his nose.
    ‘What on earth?’
    ‘He’s beating me again, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no.’ Snivellerfell into a chair. ‘It’s the prophecy.’
    ‘What prophecy?’
    ‘You don’t think he wants the bloody clock, tick-tock to tell the time, do you?’
    ‘I have no idea why he wants it,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘All I know is that he will pay me a magnificent sum of money when he finds it.’
    ‘If he finds it. He’s been looking for it all his life and never had a wife.’
    ‘What nonsense you talk. Tell me in plain English why he wants this clock.’
    Sniveller spat out a blood-stained sentence. It was all he could manage, and anyway, he didn’t rightly understand it all himself.
    ‘Whoever controls the Timekeeper controls Time.’
    Mrs Rokabye pricked up her ears. If she could get it she would never have to wait for the bus again.
    ‘But only the Child with the Golden Face can bring the Clock to its Rightful Place.’
    ‘You can’t mean Silver?’
    Sniveller nodded and mopped his face with his neckerchief. ‘And now we’ve lost her like a penny down the floorboards.’
    ‘But she has no idea where the Timekeeper is, I am quite sure of that.’
    ‘Yes, Master knows that now, but Master says …’ Sniveller lowered his voice. Mrs Rokabye’s eyes grew wide, but before Sniveller could finish his snivelling sentence, AbelDarkwater had burst into the room, his round face excited.
    ‘It is of great importance that you stay in the house today, Mrs Rokabye. I can feel faint changes in the surface of the Earth. There is a Time Tornado approaching us.’
    ‘A Time Tornado!’
    ‘Yes indeed, oh yes indeed!’
    ‘I think I had better go back to Tanglewreck,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who never thought she would hear herself say such words. ‘This London living is very bad for my nerves.’
    ‘You cannot go anywhere,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘unless you want to run the risk of being swept up in Time and deposited who knows where?’
    ‘Why does no one here speak plain English?’
    ‘Madam, it is very simple. Since the Industrial Revolution, which you will recall began with the invention of the steam engine, our world has been moving faster and faster. For most of his evolutionary life, a man could go no quicker than his legs or his horse could carry him. Now he may travel in a jet plane across the world in a matter of hours. His factories churn out more goods per hour than an artisan could make in his entire lifetime. We have no more interest in the slow round of the seasons; we grow our food by artificial light, and our hens lay eggs all year because they do not know when it is winter. Children are given Easter eggs, but they do not know it is because Easter is the Spring point of the Equinox, when hens would begin to lay again as the light from the sun increased.
    ‘It is strange, but the machine age and the computer ageboth promised to give mere mortals more time in their lives, but less time is what it seems we have. We are using up Time too fast, just as we are using up all the other resources of the Earth.
    ‘Human beings do not understand Time, but they have tampered with it. In consequence, Time is not what it used to be. Time is becoming unreliable.’
    ‘But what is going to happen?’
    ‘That remains to be seen,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘Hark!’
    Mrs Rokabye heard a terrible noise, like an air-raid siren.
    ‘That is the warning! You are quite safe in this house, but under no circumstances should you do more than look out of the window, and do not try and interfere, whatever it