Object Lesson

Sensitive content: suicide and assisted dying.

A tear pricking the corner of her left eye, Fiona pressed the cool, disproportionately heavy metal-and-glass object into Rosemary’s palm. “Thank you, Rosemary,” she said, quietly, as both watched the mechanical, numerical display on the beautifully crafted, nineteenth-century timepiece click rapidly down from seven to zero, just as they had both known it would.

Reclining into the capsule’s super-comfortable, ergonomically sculpted, reclined seat, Rosemary smiled up at Fiona. “I should be the one thanking you. No tears,” she said, matter-of-factly, her voice weak yet filled with the authority one might expect from her forty-plus years as a classroom teacher. “This is the best outcome for us both. I just ask that you remember me. Please take this. Farewell.”

Fiona accepted the small printed photo the dear, near-dead Rosemary held out. Now the tears coursed down both Fiona’s cheeks as she watched her new best friend - their friendship had been so cruelly short - pull down the capsule’s  polycarbonate lid, the air-tight seal mating snugly with the lid’s surround. Dimly, through the reflected glare of the transparent visor, Fiona could make out Rosemary’s hands starting hurriedly to operate the controls.

One hundred and sixty-eight days earlier, on the fifth day of April, 2024, Fiona Trelawney sat on the edge of her bed in room 3011 at the Hotel des Ventes in Nantes, western France. On the floor around her lay a compact box of carpenter’s nails, a pair of sneakers that were too big for her but whose garish lime-lemon pattern would have precluded her wearing them if they had fit, and a dried snake skin that was creeping her out and she would flush down the can as soon as she could find the courage. On her lap was a plain cardboard box, around six inches by three by three, which clunked heavily she shook it. “Here, we go, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” she said. “You’re my only remaining hope.”

Fiona had come over from London for a long weekend, after an intriguing coffee chat with an employee. Fiona, CEO of A1 Cybersec Consultancy, based in London, believed in connecting with everyone who worked for her, on a rotating basis. Gina Crompton, a code analyst who knew her onions and had done more than a little to protect the UK government against numerous Russian cyber attacks, had thanked Fiona for her latte, then drawn her boss’s attention to an Apple News article on her smartphone, about a French post office scheme to sell of old, undelivered parcels, from Amazon, UPS, DHL and whoever, at a flat rate of fifteen euro per kilogramme. The piece had been on Gina’s phone screen between a headline declaring Prince Andrew’s imminent house move from Royal Lodge to Frogmore Cottage, and another about some new kind of euthanasia device known as a Sarco.

Fiona’s interest had been piqued by Gina’s revelation that she had snagged the iPhone 15 Pro Max on which they were reading the article for, effectively, seventy-five euro. Gina had taken the EuroStar over to Paris, then travelled onward to Nantes on the TGV for just nineteen euro. There, she had been shown a room full of plain cardboard parcels, and been given twenty minutes to select the ones she wanted to buy. Gina had asked the straight-faced female official, there to supervise her selection, if there was any information available about the contents of the boxes. In surprisingly fluent English, with perhaps a hint of an American accent that Gina had found incongruous, the officer had reiterated that all of the parcels were undelivered orders that had been repackaged in plain outers, and all buyers must pick their box and take their chance. A randomly selected box might contain a priceless jewel, or a lump of coal. The asking price per kilo was the same. Gina had taken her chance and had scored her spanking new smartphone.

Due a few days’ leave and welcoming an excuse to go for a long weekend on the continent, Fiona had duly followed in her underling’s footsteps and had been shown into that very same room full of parcels, in the basement beneath the hotel, though she had no way of knowing whether the uniformed, chisel-featured official was the same one who had chaperoned Gina on her visit. Now, Fiona surveyed the neatly arranged cartons, sorted, it appeared, by size, stacked in pyramidal piles on square pallets around two metres on a side, under the harsh glare of unshaded day-white LED floodlights, in what had perhaps been designed as a basement garage. Like most French cities, Nantes had gone largely traffic free, with abundant public transport and no need for hotels to offer guest parking.

After delivering Carrie Fisher’s famous line, Fiona had begun to tear at the packaging. Almost air-light, it surely didn’t hold a state-of-the-art smartphone like Gina’s, but Fiona clung on to her hope that it might be a smart watch of some kind. These parcels had never reached their original destination, perhaps because a fraudulent purchase had been rumbled after dispatch, yet wasn’t economically worth tracing and recalling. Or maybe, Fiona thought darkly, something had happened to the person who had placed the order…. Could dead people’s spirits, desperately seeking an anchor point to their past, earthly existence, home in on objects they had been connected to while alive? Was it asking for trouble to sift among the possessions of the departed, like Howard Carter unleashing the mummy’s ancient curse as he had trespassed in the dark among the dusty, soon-to-be-plundered worldly goods of long-dead King Tutankhamun? Carter had opened the king’s outer sarcophagus, housing a Russian doll array of coffins and inner coffins, until he had exposed the mummy of the king himself, his life cut short at eighteen years old, perhaps in a chariot racing accident. Light had fallen on the dead king’s eyes for the first time in three thousand years. Some said that terrible things had happened, because of that.

Reaching the core of the package, Fiona pulled out a small roll of corrugated cardboard. Within that, she found a bubble-wrapped object, quite heavy to the touch. Something made of metal, for sure. Here was no Cupertino carbon-neutral Apple box packaging, no titanium-chassis Ultra 2. “Ah well,” Fiona thought, “let’s see what I’ve trawled up.”

Conquering the bubble wrap and another layer of environmentally unfriendly transparent polythene reminiscent of a sandwich bag, Fiona held in her hand a small, exquisitely beautiful pocket timepiece, about an inch and a half in diameter. Its case was fashioned of a polished, dull metal that looked like a combination of steel and aluminium. Fiona made a mental note to look up the date of the first use of aluminium in the production of personal metal items. For this was no modern watch. It was obviously at least a century old, probably more. The second hand ticked delicately and neatly around a white face marked precisely with conventional Arabic numerals. There was an inscription on the watch’s white face, just south of the central boss, that read, TEMPUS RETRO PROPERAT. Fiona knew that ‘tempus’ meant time, and everyone knew that ‘retro’ meant backward of from a bygone era. As for ‘properat’, what was that?

Then Fiona noticed. The sweeping hand that counted the seconds was moving not clockwise, as a watch or clock should, but anti-clockwise. In the minute or so that she’d been looking at it, the minute hand had moved in a retrograde direction, making it look like the watch was running backwards. Puzzled, she looked more closely at the watch’s face, and noticed a small window, rather like the date display on a conventional wind-up Rolex or Omega. Except, this one had three figures, and was showing the number 175.

Fiona gazed at her windfall for some minutes, enjoying the craftsmanship, and the precision with which the hands ticked round, albeit in the wrong direction. She yawned, conscious suddenly of the hour’s lateness. Hurriedly kicking the ripped cardboard and unwanted items toward her room’s trash can, Fiona cleared her bed of detritus and placed the one prized item of her day’s search in the bedside drawer.

As she did so, the time in the city of Nantes crossed midnight. Unseen by any human eye, the number displayed in the pocket watch’s window clicked down to 174. 

Back in her London apartment, travel bag unpacked, revelling in that still-on-holiday transition time between arriving back from a vacation and sinking back into the workaday routine, Fiona Trelawney thought upon the vintage timepiece she’d acquired in Nantes.

First, how had it been running when she’d unboxed it? Unboxed. Pure Apple-speak, perhaps a relic of her pious desire for a latest-model smartwatch at a knockdown price. When she’d unwrapped it, then. The timepiece, a 19th-century novelty retrograde watch of a type popular among wealthy Victorians, according to Google, was at least one hundred and fifty years old. It was powered by a clockwork mechanism driven by a hand-wound mainspring. It had been ticking when Fiona unpacked it. Watches like that had to be wound daily. That meant it must have shipped almost as Fiona was leaving her flat to travel to Nantes. But the French post office officials had said the sale-by-weight pot-luck items were undelivered, abandoned parcels. Pretty fast turnaround, she thought.

And what of the mechanical window that had shown 175? When Fiona had arrived back at her flat, the number had decreased to 172. It was exactly three days since she’d plundered - no, opened - the package. 175 minus 3 equals 172. Coincidence again. Yet, if the number dropped by one every day, surely it wasn’t coincidence at all. Three days was three days, however you counted it.

The next days ran on uneventfully, for all who knew Fiona Trelawney. In her own mind, however, those days were far from routine.

Every day, the number on the watch face decreased by one. 171, then 170… Chiding herself for conceding to a childish, fanciful fear, Fiona Googled the future date, 170 days from now. The search engine came up with Friday, 27th September, 2024. What was special about that date?

The retrograde watch continued to run, winding down anticlockwise, counting the seconds, until what? Fiona Googled everything she could about the date 27th September. Nothing special, except it was the 270th day of the year, which felt like a kind of coincidence. No notable births nor deaths, nor momentous world events.

It dawned on Fiona, in a moment that made her sit bolt upright, fortunately at a time when no-one else was present in her luxuriously appointed office, that she had never once wound the Victorian novelty retrograde watch, yet it was still running, ticking down the seconds, clicking down its displayed window number by one at every midnight. She began to wish she had never found it; it was becoming an obsession. Frantically, she Googled repairers and restorers of old mechanical timepieces, and she came up with Francis Gerald Tomlinson of Fetter Lane.

The street was narrow, a tributary of Fetter Lane, that north-south street that connected Holborn and Fleet Street. Outside the glossy green street door, Fiona read the brass plates until she found the one she wanted, Francis G Tomlinson, watchmaker and repairer of timepieces. She pressed the button and waited. There was a click; the door swung inward and she made her way upward to the first floor, as per Google Maps, up an uncarpeted stairway, after first ensuring the green door was secured behind her.

Tomlinson, a nondescript, shortish, slim man in heavy black-framed spectacles and a dark suit, rose as she entered. “Ms Trelawney. Charmed, I am sure. Please sit down. I believe you have a timepiece you’d like me to look at.”

Fiona shook Tomlinson’s proffered hand and said she was pleased to meet him. Without undue delay, she took the watch from her handbag and passed it to Tomlinson, across his desk.

The effect was immediate, and disturbing. Taking one look at the timepiece, Tomlinson blanched, then reached suddenly  for his wastepaper basket and vomited noisily into it. Afterward, mopping his face with his handkerchief, he apologised to his visitor, regretting that he could not help her and would she please leave immediately.

Fiona stood her ground, perplexed. Without invitation, she dropped into the green-upholstered armchair that faced Tomlinson’s desk. “Mr Tomlinson, I came here to find out why my watch is still going, despite the fact I got it from an unseen parcel in France several day ago and haven’t wound it.”

Francis Tomlinson swallowed, recovering his composure.

“Ms Trelawney,” he began, “your timepiece is extremely rare. Retrograde watches were quite common among the bourgeoisie of the Victorian era. As you know, they count the time backwards, with hands that rotate anti-clockwise. That creates the impression that they are counting downward to some predetermined date, upon which some… event will occur.”

There was a moment’s silence. Tomlinson swallowed. Unblinking, Fiona continued. “What event, Mr Trelawney? Is my watch trying to predict something that is going to befall me?”

Tomlinson retched again, clamping his handkerchief to his mouth. He dinged the bell on his desk, several times. His PA swept into the room and swept Fiona out of it, with cold, practised efficiency.

When Tomlinson had recovered, his PA showed Fiona back into the room. Tomlinson explained the significance of a 19th-century engraving in his possession, specifically concerning retrograde watches of the type Fiona had acquired. Opening a leather-bound notebook, he began to read aloud.

Forsake all men, this piece be thine,

Be loath to tarry, lest thy time

Count down, in seconds rearward tick’d

At zero, thou be cruelly trick’d.

Thy timepiece, thou mayst cwic unload,

Ere zero bar thy onward road

Upon one yet to happen here

In this fell task, pray wax sincere.

On completing the last line, Tomlinson had been seized by yet another bilious attack, and Fiona had left at his PA’s bidding.

This time, back at home, Fiona’s Googling was focused and intense. A small number of retrograde watches, surrounded by rumours of supernatural powers, had been made and sold between 1600 and 1850. Only one such watch had ever been opened by a repairer, one Josef Heisl of Salzburg, in 1854. His body had been found at his desk, time of death estimated by the pathologist to have been around 5pm the day before. A retrograde pocket watch with its back plate removed had been recovered from the green baize mat on his desk, the hour and minute hands pointed upward to the 12-o’clock position, and the number on a rotary window in the middle of the front face reading zero.

Back in her flat, Fiona decided what she must do. The watch she had inadvertently let into her life was counting down the days to her death. Laconically, she recalled a Jehovah’s Witness school friend remarking on the futility of celebrating birthdays. ‘You pass your death day every year without even knowing,” the girl had said, “so why waste time celebrating your birthday?”

The memory set Fiona thinking. It was a good point. People couldn’t know the day they would die. Unless, that is, they had already decided on the date they would leave this world.

A few minutes’ keyboard-bashing yielded the contact details of Exit, the voluntary euthanasia society. Not caring about the international call rates, Fiona dialled and was soon connected. The retired Australian doctor who headed up the organisation explained that he couldn’t give Fiona the names of patients who wanted, with good reason, to end their lives, but he could, if Fiona agreed, give her contact details to such patients, who might or might not choose to contact her. Fiona agreed.

By the end of their half-hour phone conversation, Fiona felt she had known Rosemary Grant for years. Rosemary was a victim of metastasised stage four ovarian cancer, with no hope of recovery. Her doctor had told her she could only offer pain management and palliative care until nature took its course. For a woman with only days to live, Rosemary had sounded remarkably normal.

On Friday, 20th September, 2024, Fiona and Rosemary had their first and last meeting. Over the five months of their telephone relationship, Fiona came to know every detail of Rosemary’s illness, the ups and downs, the roller coaster of desolation and hope, and the final acceptance of the inevitable.

The fateful conversation happened in a nondescript branch of Starbucks in central London. Fiona and Rosemary had sat at a round wooden table, surrounded by those oblivious of their co-customer’s dire situation, equally reticent of whatever problems they themselves were navigating. Rosemary had spoken of her daily, unrelenting pain. Fiona had disclosed her privileged access, as CEO of a cyber security firm, through a client in Switzerland, to the access codes for the newly-invented Sarco suicide capsule, which allowed terminally ill patients to end their lives painlessly and quickly, by flooding a small capsule with nitrogen gas. They would fall asleep and pass away without further suffering, losing consciousness in seconds, dead within minutes.

From her last conversation with Francis Tomlinson about the haunted retrograde watch, it was clear to Fiona that she was on borrowed time. The rhyme Tomlinson had read to her indicated that her only option was to palm the watch off onto someone else. Really, there was only one candidate who had nothing to lose.

Rosemary agreed straight away, embracing Fiona, their tears wetting each other’s cheeks. Fiona gave Rosemary the information she needed, and the deal was sealed.

Fiona Trelawney lived to be ninety-four years old. For the rest of her days, she never removed Rosemary’s picture from beneath her pillow.