Tanglewreck
Jeanette Winterson
To Eleanor and Cara Shearer with love
30 Spooky Action at a Distance
At six forty-five one summer morning, a red London bus was crossing Waterloo Bridge.
A group of school children, sitting at the back, were copying each other’s homework and fighting, when one of them looked out of the window, across the river to Cleopatra’s Needle, and saw something very strange.
The boy elbowed his friend. The dark finger of ancient Egypt was pointing towards the sky as it always did, but today the tip of the obelisk was glowing bright red, as it had when it was new and painted and glorious, four thousand years ago, in the Temple of the Sun.
‘Look,’ said the boy, ‘look!’
Riding the river as though it were a road was a phalanx of chariots and horsemen.
The white horses were pulled up on their haunches; the nodding ostrich plumes on their head-collars rose and fell; the fan bearers came forward, the troops stood at ease, and above the kneeling priests was the Pharaoh himself, inspecting his new monument from a burnished car.
Other people turned to stare at the mirage, and the bus
driver slowed down, though he did not quite stop; he seemed to be hovering over Time.
In the slowed-down silence no one spoke and nothing moved – except for the river, which to all observation was running backwards.
Then, from downstream, there was a sudden terrible crack, like the sky breaking. A cone of wind hit the bus, knocking it sideways over the bridge and shattering glass across the seats where the children were sitting.
The bus should have crashed down into the river, but instead the wind whirled through the punched-in windows and lifted the bus high above the bridge and out towards the obelisk.
A great wave of water swelled up against the stone piers of the bridge, battering the concrete underside with such force that part of the supporting wall was torn away.
As the tidal wave slammed back down on to the water, the river resumed its normal flow. At the same second the bus spun crazily into the line of chariots. On impact, bus, chariots and horsemen vanished, leaving nothing behind but traces of red-gold sun on the surface of the water.
Big Ben struck seven.
A few days later police found an exercise book floating on the Thames; the name printed in the front of the book identified it as belonging to one of the boys on the bus. The pages had thickened to parchment, and the writing inside was not English, but signs of long-legged birds and half-turned
figures under the eye of the great god Ra.
The bus and its passengers were never found.
It was the first of the Time Tornadoes.
At 4:30 p.m. precisely, Abel Darkwater drove his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud through the gates of the great house called Tanglewreck.
Abel Darkwater was never late – unless he intended to be; and his watch was never wrong – unless he wanted it to be.
Some people are always short of time, but Abel Darkwater had all the time in the world – well, nearly all of it – and it was the
nearly
that was the problem, and the reason why he had come to Tanglewreck.
He steered the big car up the long ragged driveway. He glanced at the round green dials on the dashboard. The speedometer told him he was travelling at precisely 10mph. The rev counter registered 30 revs per minute. The luminous clock assured him that he was punctual, and the Age-Gauge steadied its hands at 1588, the year Tanglewreck had been built.
Abel Darkwater had invented and fitted the Age-Gauge himself. In town it computed the age of the houses. In open countryside it could calculate the date of the limestone or the shale or the clay, and he knew what dinosaurs would have roamed there once, or what desperate hunters had leaned over rain-driven ledges to drop a boulder on a boar.
The Age-Gauge worked on radioactive emissions – faint but traceable echoes of time. Abel Darkwater knew that all time is always present, but buried layer by layer under what people call Now. Today lies on top of yesterday, and yesterday lies on top of the day before, and so on down the layers of history, until the layers are so thick that the voices underneath are muffled to whispers. Abel Darkwater listened to those whispers and he understood what they said.
Now he was at Tanglewreck, and the house was telling him the beginning of its own past – the day when it was a young house new-made. When Now was Then and Then was Now. He was curious to hear more, but he had come here today on business, and he must not keep that business waiting.
He pulled up outside the black and white timbered house, and switched off the engine. The dials fell back to zero. He heaved himself slowly out of his car, and consulted his heavy gold pocket watch: the hour hand marked four. The minute hand thirty-five past the hour. The second hand moved swiftly from forty to fifty. The fourth hand, in red, like a warning, pointed towards eleven o’clock. Abel Darkwater looked up, following the direction of his watch. Sure enough, there was a face at the window. It drew back. He smiled, though you would not call such a smile pleasure or kindness, and then he raised the door-knocker in the shape of an angel.
Silver drew back from the window. She knew why he had come.
From below she could hear Mrs Rokabye bawling from the hall.
‘Silver! Get down here at once, this split second of the minute.’
‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye.’
Silver ran down the stairs to the closed arms of Mrs Rokabye, her mouth open like a crater, the words steaming out.
‘Look at the state of you!’
Silver looked at the state of her in the big mirror in the hall. Her hair was orange and curly and it stood on end unless she plaited it. Her eyes were green. Her nose was straight. Her face was freckled and she was small. Small and untidy; it is hard to be tidy when you are doing jobs all day.
‘Get down into the cellar and stoke the furnace with coal. Do you expect me to do it myself?’
‘No, Mrs Rokabye.’
‘No indeed! I am slaving for our future. Without ME, there will be no future!! Without me, YOU would have to go into a children’s home. Would you like that?’
‘No, Mrs Rokabye.’
‘No indeed! When I think what I gave up to come here and look after you. Why, I gave up a whole life. It was all goodness on my part, and it has been all ingratitude on your part. Do you think I like being here?’
‘No, Mrs Rokabye.’
‘Great, draughty, crumbling monstrosity. I had a lovely home in Manchester with carpets and central heating and
Darts Nights with all my friends, and now I live on a windswept hill in this ruin, with YOU.’
‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye.’
‘Mr Darkwater – you remember him? He proved a very good friend to us after the … er, tragedy, accident, misfortune. We sold him the clock and some watches to pay off your father’s debts.’
‘Yes – he took my secret night-clock.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a baby – we lived on that money for a year.’
‘
You
did …’
‘What was that?’
Mrs Rokabye was looking at Silver with eyes as narrow as arrowheads. There was going to be trouble – but then there was a knocking at the door, and Mrs Rokabye smoothed her pinned-back hair and whipped out her compact to powder her nose. It was like dust settling on a rock.
‘Here he is! Quick, quick, now get downstairs into the cellar and don’t come out until I tell you. Bigamist will be watching.’
‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye.’
My name is Silver and I have lived at Tanglewreck all of my life, which is to say, eleven years
.
I live here with Mrs Rokabye: my father’s sister and my legal guardian
.
My parents and my older sister Buddleia disappeared in a railway accident, one Friday, four years ago, when I was seven. Then,
after it had all been written about in the newspaper, and there was talk of what to do with me, Mrs Rokabye appeared, all in black, which is normal, I suppose, after a tragedy, but then she never took off the black tragedy clothes. She always wears black, and I think her soul is black too
.
My father had never talked about his sister, my aunt, but she signed all the papers and everything is legal. I’d rather live by myself, but it’s not allowed
.
Mrs Rokabye has a pet rabbit called Bigamist, on account of his habits. The house is full of small-scale Bigamists, so that wherever you go, there’s a pair of yellow eyes watching you, and a black nose twitching, and an ear cocked at your business, and a scut just hiding under a chair as you come into a room. They’re all her spies, but Bigamist is the worst. He tells her everything I do
.
Today, I’ve been trying to sneak into the kitchen and find the cake intended for Abel Darkwater. But Bigamist is following me and I haven’t got a carrot to throw him off the scent
.
The cellar is black and filthy and lit by a dusty electric 25-watt bulb. We’re on an economy drive here at Tanglewreck – at least the house is, and I am. Mrs Rokabye eats fish and chips and puddings and chocolate bars, and then she keeps her 100-watt bulb on all night watching television. She sleeps until eleven o’clock, and then she takes a taxi to go shopping. She comes back laden with ready-chopped carrots and fresh washed lettuce for Bigamist, and Fast Fish ’n’ Chips Ahoy! for herself. And slabs of chocolate the size of rafts
. Family size
it says, but as we’re not a family, I don’t get any of this
.
I eat soup most days, and I make it from what I grow in our vegetable garden. Tonight I’m having dandelion, nettle and cabbage. I shut my eyes when I eat it, but that doesn’t make it taste any better
.
Still, I tell myself, tasty or nasty, it’s better than what Mrs Rokabye would give me – which is next to nothing
.