Gauge (4 page)

“How long?” she said to Gauge.

“One more Earth minute,” he hurred. He glanced at what she’d written. He didn’t look impressed.

Lucy wrote the words ‘stock cubes’ underneath ‘bacon’. According to her mother, stock cubes were good with everything.
Rice pudding?
she wondered.
Would they work with milky desserts?

She sighed. This was ridiculous. Her life was now a series of silly thoughts. But as she glanced at Gauge again and saw the willingness to be helpful in his violet eyes (a quality that every special dragon possessed) suddenly an idea came to her.

“Can you mend clocks?” she asked.

Gauge tilted his head.

“You know, can you take them apart and put them back together and make them, y’know, tick properly again? Or bong?”

Gauge tapped his foot. He wasn’t sure, he said – especially about the bonging. He wasn’t meant to be a fixing dragon.

“But you could try,” said Lucy. “If I took you to the clock tower you might be able to make it properly chime again. Then we wouldn’t have to do the protest, would we?”

Before Gauge could answer, the doorbell rang and Liz let Henry Bacon into the house. Lucy heard Henry saying that Liz might be interested to know that tomorrow afternoon, in the library, a Mr Trustable of the Scrubbley Town Council was going to present the new plans for the improved clock tower, and would she like to attend? Liz said she would definitely like to attend. Lucy gulped. She felt the end of her pencil snap. She knew exactly what her mother was thinking.

Then Henry said, “Can you help with this, Mrs P? Trying to get a battery into my pocket watch. Very fiddly. Fingers a bit shaky.”

“Oh, Lucy’s the expert at that kind of thing,” Liz said.

Hardly had she called upstairs before Lucy was in the kitchen, panting, “I’ll do it!” She shot back up with the watch and the battery before Liz had had time to switch the kettle on.

“There,” she said to Gauge, putting it at his feet. “Practise on that.”

Gauge looked at it doubtfully. It was a beautiful old watch. It had a cream-coloured face with golden numerals. He didn’t want to break it, he said.

Lucy tutted and turned the watch over. Henry had already removed the back plate and flipped the old battery out of its housing. “Just look,” she said. “It works off one of these.” She broke open the new battery packet. “I expect the library clock’s just got…a bigger battery, that’s all. Here.” She handed it to him.

Gauge took it between his paws. The battery immediately began to crackle and an arc of blue light sparked between his ear tips. A puff of smoke came out of his nostrils. The end of his tail began to jiggle.

“Are you all right?” asked Lucy.

Gauge nodded and put the battery down. Gwendolen, Lucy’s own special dragon, who sat in the shadow of her bedside lamp, asked if she might have a go at holding it. Lucy said no and tapped the watch again.

Gauge peered at the workings. He could see two metal wheels with zigzagging teeth all around their perimeters. The wheels were meshed together. Neither wheel was moving, but it was obvious to Gauge that they would do if this energy cell that Lucy called a battery was to power them. He drummed his claws. He felt sure there were more workings underneath the wheels and pointed to another circle of metal that had a straight groove cut across it. There were lots of these, of different sizes, all over the back of the watch.

“They’re called screws,” said Lucy. “If you turn them, they sort of open.”

Gauge’s eyes lit up in wonder. This was a far more interesting timing machine than the clock in the kitchen. He pointed to the screws again, one by one, and to his amazement they began to unwind by themselves.

“Wow, that’s clever,” gasped Lucy.

Now Gauge grew bolder still. As the screws fell out of their holes, he flipped aside the covering they’d been holding in place to reveal an assembly of wheels and cogs and levers and springs.

Before long, it was all in pieces on Lucy’s table.

Suddenly, Liz’s voice came drifting up the stairs.

“Lucy, how are you doing with that watch?”

“Nearly done!” Lucy called back. But she was nervous now. “Erm, you can put it back together, can’t you?” she asked.

Gauge asked if he could he have a few more Earth minutes to study it.

“No,” hissed Lucy. “Stick it all back. Now!”

Gauge frowned in dismay and quickly did as he’d been told.

As soon as the back plate went on Lucy hurried downstairs and handed the watch to Mr Bacon.

“Thank you, child,” he said. His eyebrows knotted. “Erm, doesn’t appear to be going.” He shook it and held it to his ear and looked again. “Dead as a doughnut.”

Lucy’s cheeks began to flush.

“Must be another duff battery,” said Liz.

Mr Bacon sniffed. “You did put the right one in, didn’t you, child?”

“Yes!” snapped Lucy, though she remembered the sparks around Gauge’s ears and wondered if he might have drained its power.

Just then, Gauge fluttered into the kitchen and landed on the fridge top, looking a bit embarrassed. This time he turned solid as Henry looked around.

Liz didn’t even glance at him. But Lucy did. As her mother saw Henry to the door, Lucy gritted her teeth and scowled.

Gauge was holding a watch wheel in his right paw.

The following afternoon, the grey skies produced a fine drizzle over Scrubbley. It would be enough, Lucy hoped, to put her mother off any daft ideas about marching up and down the library precinct. But Liz was determined. She made Lucy put on her hooded yellow coat. Then she drove them both into town.

The protest sign was by now taped onto a stiff piece of card, which in turn had been tacked, none too securely, to a long wooden stick. Liz sloped it against her shoulder and proudly marched the short distance from the car park to the precinct, chanting her rhyme loudly for all of Scrubbley to hear.

Lucy didn’t know where to look. But she did her job, handing out the leaflets her mother had prepared, and was surprised to hear people clapping and saying, “Good on you!” This brought her some cheer. Hopefully it meant they would at least have some visitors when they were hauled off to jail.

If Lucy had expected the precinct to be deserted, she was wrong. A generous crowd had gathered by the library doors. They cheered as Liz trooped down the precinct. One of them dashed forward. To Lucy’s dismay, she saw it was her teacher, the barmy Miss Baxter.

“Excellent work!” Miss Baxter gushed, eyeing up Liz’s sign. “Hello, Lucy!”

“Hello, Miss,” Lucy muttered from deep within her hood.

“Couldn’t have come at a better moment,” said Miss Baxter. “We’ve just heard that Councillor Trustable is going to make a short speech out here – for the cameras!”

“Cameras?!” Lucy pushed back her hood. To her horror she saw a film crew. The camera was already pointing at the crowd of protesters.

“They’re from the regional TV news,” said Miss Baxter.

“Wonderful,” said Liz.

“I’m going home,” said Lucy.

“No, no,” said Miss Baxter, drawing her forward. “It’s very important for people to see that the children of the town are just as willing to preserve the old clock as the adults are.”

“But I’m the only ‘children’ here!” Lucy wailed.

“Then perhaps they’ll interview you!” Miss Baxter said.

Interview? Lucy’s cheeks turned as pale as the white library walls.

Just then, a round of booing began. Lucy looked up to see a handsome man in a long dark overcoat come strolling purposefully out of the library. He was waving a hand as though people were really cheering, not booing. Beside him was another, shorter man, who looked like some kind of guard.

The handsome man smiled. He had teeth like a run of white piano keys. He stepped onto a small podium. The TV camera swished towards him.

“Ladies and gentlemen—” he began.

“—And children!” cried Miss Baxter, yanking up Lucy’s hand.

“And children,” he said, with a smarmy sort of nod. “My name is Roger Trustable, your local elected councillor—”

“I didn’t vote for you!” someone shouted.

“And this is my companion, Mr Higson.” He gestured to the shorter man who rolled his beefy shoulders and sniffed. “We are here today to tell you of a wonderful redevelopment plan for your library.”