You Cannot Set a Clock with a Telephone
Two people, one dusty tower, and an entire afternoon spent looking for something in the world that could tell them what time it actually was.
Behind the curtain+
The front page today was full of gauges that have stopped measuring: a fridge display that reports the number you set rather than the number in the box, a classifier that emits a confidence score with nothing behind it, an executive who declines the reading and asks only for the setpoint, a targeting system trusted past its competence. Against those sat a man in a clock tower with his hand on an 1877 mechanism, which is the only kind of checking that was ever really checking. I chose the stories that let those two halves sit in one room.
The reversal is the point and it needed a body to happen to. "The instrument is lying" is a thesis anyone can state in a sentence; "you cannot check a gauge from inside the machine" only lands if you watch two people spend three hours failing to find anywhere outside it to stand. So: one afternoon, one location, invented characters, no headers, no section per source. The fridge and the classifier share a breath of Nadia's attention and the prose never connects them out loud. Roy declines the details in dialogue rather than by citation. The clock keeps perfect time while she is touching it. The worst thing in the piece gets two sentences and then the dog barks.
The ladder into the clock room at Ardmoy went up through a hatch roughly the width of a coffin lid, and Nadia made a sound on the seventh rung that she would later deny making.
“All right?” Roy called up.
“Fine.”
“Only you made a sort of noise.”
“That was the ladder.”
Roy had been up twice already that morning and had acquired the swagger of a man who has been somewhere twice. He came up behind her with a thermos wedged in his jacket and a crowbar he had not been able to justify but had brought anyway. At the bottom, Bramble sat in a parallelogram of light from the propped door and declined to climb, on principle, and communicated by sighing that he had not been fed since the reign of Victoria. Bramble was not really a labrador. Roy said this about him frequently, in a tone suggesting it had been looked into.
The clock room was nine feet square and had not been swept since the building stopped being a police station. Dust lay on every horizontal surface in a soft grey nap, and in the bars of sun coming through the louvres it hung in the air in a way that was beautiful and, Nadia thought, probably not great. The mechanism sat in the middle on its cast-iron frame with ARDMOY 1877 raised on the side in letters an inch deep, the way people used to sign things.
She put her hand flat on the frame before she did anything else. Habit. You touch the thing first.
“So the plan,” said Roy, “is that at Halloween it strikes thirteen.”
“The plan is that it strikes four at four.”
“That’s this afternoon’s plan. I’m talking about the arc.”
Nadia had calibrated instruments for nineteen years, which had made her tiresome at parties. She kept a certified reference thermometer in the glovebox of her car, traceable through a chain of other thermometers all the way back to a room in Teddington where the definition of hot lives. She had once used it on a friend’s oven during a dinner party and had not been invited back for eleven months. She understood what she was. She had made a kind of peace with it.
The going train was in reasonable order. Somebody in the eighties had put an electric rewind motor on it, which meant nobody had to climb up here weekly with a crank any more and also meant that the pawl now fought you if you tried to move the hands by hand. Roy held a torch at the wrong angle for four minutes while she found the linkage, and then at the right angle for eleven seconds, and then at the wrong angle again.
“Torch.”
“It is on.”
“It’s on the wall, Roy.”
The pawl came off its seat and the shaft turned, and through the back of the dial she watched the hands sweep smoothly and unmistakably anticlockwise, and felt the specific cold that arrives when a thing you have just touched begins going wrong in a way you cannot explain.
Roy watched her face.
“You’re reading it from behind,” he said.
She stood there for a second with her hand on the shaft.
“Yes.”
“You’ve gone a colour.”
“I’m aware.”
That, she thought, going back to the linkage, ought to be on a card that people carry. The mechanism had been fine the entire time. The instrument had looked wrong because of where she was standing, and there was no position in that room from which she could see both the face and what drove it.
“Right,” said Roy, a man restored. “What time is it?”
Nadia looked at her phone. “Two oh six.”
“Mine says the same.”
“Of course it does.”
“Well then.”
“No. Not well then.” She wiped her hands on her jeans and left two grey prints there. “That isn’t two clocks agreeing. That’s one clock, read twice.”
Roy considered this the way you consider a man who has told you the pub is closed.
“There’s the church,” he said, brightening. “St Ninian’s. Lovely clock. And here’s a thing you’ll like: it was set from this one. Nineteen oh four. It’s in the minutes.”
“So it’s this clock, three times.”
“It’s a heritage asset.”
“It’s a photocopy.”
He tried the car radio next, which was his own idea and which he was pleased with. They stood in the lane in the sun and waited a long while for the top of the hour, and the pips came, and Nadia said, “Those are about seven seconds late,” and Roy said, “They’re the pips,” and she said, “They’re the pips after they’ve been through a digital transmitter, a buffer and your Vauxhall,” and Roy went quiet in a way that meant he was rebuilding his whole afternoon.
There was a microwave in the kitchen downstairs. It said 11:48. It had said 11:48 for some time.
Back up the ladder. Bramble, below, produced a sigh with real production values.
Upstairs Nadia waited on the minute hand with her thumbnail against the tooth of the wheel, and had nothing to do for two minutes but think, which she did not enjoy.
She had bought her own fridge for the display. That had been the deciding feature in the shop, a small blue readout on the door that told you what it was actually doing in there. It had read 4 since the day it was plugged in. It had read 4 in the shop. It read 4 nine seconds after power-on, before the compressor had drawn breath, before the air inside had formed any opinion at all. It was not a thermometer. It was a receipt for a decision she had made with a button.
The thing the vendor brought into the lab in August could tell you how confident it was. That was the pitch, delivered twice, with a slide. Nadia had sat through the demo with a board-game die in her pocket, and afterwards she rolled it four hundred times and photographed each roll and asked the thing which face was up, and four hundred times it said face one, eighty-three percent. It was right sixty-nine of those times, which is roughly what you get by saying face one and never looking.
“Two minutes,” said Roy, “and I’m having a sandwich.”
The chime side was worse. Screwed to the wall beside the hatch was a beige steel box with a Dymo label reading CHIME, put there in 2001 by a constable called Docherty who, Roy said, had also written the station’s entire shift rota as a program that the council was apparently still running somewhere, inside something that pretended to be a computer from 1998, inside something else. Nadia opened the lid. A green LED blinked in the dark: long, long, short, short, short. Pause. Long, long, short, short, short.
“It’s counting,” said Roy.
“It’s not counting.”
“It’s counting something.”
She copied the pattern into her notebook, in case. The board smelled faintly of hot dust. The main chip had a date code from 1994 and a part number she half recognised from a machine her father had owned, the sort of chip that turns up in a bell controller in 2001 because somebody had a drawer of them and a Saturday. There were two buttons, unlabelled. Pressing one did nothing. Holding it for six seconds made the bell strike once, magnificently, directly above their heads, and Roy said a word that the building would not have permitted in its previous role.
They got there in the end, the way you do: by pressing things in an order nobody would ever write down.
And then the clock started misbehaving, which is to say it started behaving beautifully.
She would set it, check it against the hand count, watch the escapement for a minute, and it would be immaculate. Then they would go down for the thermos and come back up forty minutes later and it would be four minutes out. So she would set it again and stand there with her hand on the frame watching it, and it would keep time like something in a museum case. Twice more. Same both times.
“It’s fine when you’re here,” said Roy, delighted.
“That,” said Nadia, “is the worst sentence anyone has said to me this year.”
Because there are only two explanations, and one of them is that some linkage up here is sensitive to load and her hand on the frame is changing it, which is bad, and the other is that the clock is not being measured at all when she is not measuring it, and that the forty-minute drift has been happening every forty minutes since 1877, quietly, in an empty room, above four hundred people who looked up at the face on their way to work and believed it.
There had been a number that summer, in a different building, with nothing behind it, and it had gone up through a great many people who each assumed that someone further down had put a hand on the frame. It came back down as a missile, onto a school.
Bramble barked once, far below, at a pigeon or at the general situation.
“Load on the frame,” Nadia said, and got the torch off Roy, and took the cover off the motion work, and found a shim that somebody had cut out of a biscuit tin at some point in the last century and which was now doing a job nobody had designed it to do. She explained this to Roy for approximately nine seconds.
“I don’t want the details,” said Roy, not unkindly, holding the thermos cup out to her. “I want to know it’ll be right at four.”
And there it was again. The same shape as the fridge, the same shape as eighty-three percent, the same shape as every gauge she had ever condemned: a man who wanted the number and not the thing, who would be perfectly happy for the rest of his life with a display that showed him what he had asked for. She looked at him holding out the cup, and took it, and thought: he has been up that ladder three times today for a clock he owns no part of except legally, and he is going to spend the winter learning Morse code for a bell. It is not the same shape at all. It is only the same sentence.
“It’ll be right at four,” she said.
At two minutes to, they stood out in the lane with Bramble and looked up. The lime render, the black hands, the gold numerals going green at the edges. A woman came along the far pavement with two bags of shopping.
The bell went four times, and it was tremendous, and every pigeon in Ardmoy left the building at once.
The woman with the shopping looked up at the face, adjusted nothing, and kept walking. That was the whole of it. She now believed it was four o’clock, and so did Roy, and so did Nadia, and within about a minute so did everyone within earshot.
The clock was not correct. Nadia knew almost exactly how incorrect, which is more than most people ever know about anything, and she knew that by Tuesday it would be a minute out and by Christmas rather more, and that in a hundred and forty-nine years it had probably never once been correct, not for a whole second, not really. But that had never been the job. The job was to make four hundred people wrong in precisely the same direction at precisely the same moment, so that they could find each other. Accuracy is a relationship between an instrument and the world. This was a relationship between people, and it was not the lesser one. The trains got met. The shifts got handed over. Everyone stood outside the Anchor at seven and everyone was there.
They went to the Anchor, which is where they were always going to go.
“Thirteen,” said Roy, into his pint. “At Halloween.”
“You’d need the board.”
“I’ll learn the board.”
“It’s blinking at you in a language, Roy.”
“Then I’ll learn the language,” said Roy, who would not, and who would instead phone her in October, and who knew it, and who was already ordering chips for a dog that was not really a labrador.