Free Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones Page B

really happen, not just as a figure of speech, that all my Christmases came at once. There was still just time for me to die spoiled, now that the damage it would do to my character didn’t matter so much.

Mellow fraud
     
    There was a record that Jim gave along with the gramophone that Christmas which we played again and again. It may have been a present for Mum, but it stayed in my room with the gramophone. This was a strange piece of music, it seemed to me, with at its centre a sound that was grotesquely rounded, obscenely comforting. I was told that it was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and I’m sure it’s a masterpiece from first to last. And I liked the advantage it gave me, later in life, of knowing it was Con-chair-toe without being told, rather than Consirtoe . But it soaked up too much of the hysterical mood of that Christmas, all that terrible going-on-as-normal while things were falling apart. Whenever people came near me, I got electric shocks from their fear, though they seemed to imagine they were reassuring me.
    I’ve never really taken to the clarinet as an instrument – all that mellowness is a fraud, as far as I’m concerned. The first person to pick up a clarinet sucked up a syrup of lies right up into the mouthpiece, and from then on no one’s been able to get a truthful note out of it.
    The watch, though, was marvellous. I had plenty of time to get to know it in detail during the weeks after Christmas. Below the twelve o’clock mark on the dial it said RELIDE, with a swash ‘R’ which travels as an underline through ELIDE to the end. Then in small caps it said WATERPROOF and under that INCABLOC , also small caps. Then above the 6 it said AUTOMATIC , also small caps. On the left side of the 6 below it said SWISS and on its right MADE . Best of all, best till last, it said 25 JEWELS in red small caps, below AUTOMATIC and above the 6.
    This bit was utter magic. Mum said the best watches were Swiss, and they had real jewel bearings. I imagined diamonds, rubies and sapphires spinning away under the bonnet of the machine, winking as they worked. It was also such a clever present for Jim to give. I couldn’t say ‘I like your hands’ to Jim, but I could think it, and he had read my mind and made his reply by giving me jewels.
    The grown-up watch looked funny on my wrist, with a new hole made in the strap a long way from the ones punched in it when it was made. I didn’t mind the way it looked. Most things were either too big or too small or too high or too low or too hard or too soft for me, which was partly why I loved the story of the Three Bears. In real life something exactly the right size for me would actually have looked wrong.
    Another way in which it was a really clever present was the AUTOMATIC bit. You had to shake it to wind it. When you shook it and listened really carefully you could hear a tiny rasping sound. The watch thrilled me, and it seduced Mum into over-ruling herself twice. First when she let me keep it, and then when she said I must keep it well wound, entirely forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to move at all.
    To start with I had to take the watch off and pull the winder out with my teeth if I wanted to change the time. The winder was a little stiff in the beginning, but I spent so much time playing with it that it loosened soon enough. I wore the watch on my left wrist, because the right elbow still had a bit of play in it and I wanted the freedom to fiddle with it, but this arrangement had a practical flaw. There wasn’t enough motion in my left wrist to keep it charged. Without movement from the elbow I couldn’t get a decent wrist-flick going. The watch was only properly self-winding when it was on the arm with the decent range of movement, so every day I would have it swapped to the other wrist for some gentle shaking to prevent it dying in the night, when its presence and its ticking were most comforting . On my abnormally restricted wrist the automatic winding