Time Stops For No One

tw for implied domestic abuse

All the clocks stop but not a single one melts. No, what happens to time is more reminiscent of freezing than of any kind of thaw, the hours congealing into something to wade through, and the tide of minutes suspended – how embarrassing for it – like a cresting wave.

But all that’s later: for now, there’s only me and Trouble.

Trouble, if I may introduce her, is three years older than me and claims that I was her first wish, memory, and word. The last one is a lie – her first word was ‘dad’, and she was one year old at the time – and the first one is a maybe because how would she know that she wished for me if the first thing she can remember is me already there?  

You’ve got it all wrong, she told me once inside a fort that we’d built from carpets for lack of anything more pliable in the house. You were already there when I wished for you. Do you get it? I loved you so much that I wished for you even though you were already there.

It’s a long-standing tradition of ours that Trouble wakes me up with a ‘once upon a time’ every Christmas Eve (an out-of-bed-time story, she calls it) but, this time, she whispers a ‘once’ in my ear and stops.

That’s my first clue.

Trouble always wakes me early even though I need a lot of sleep for all the growing (up) I’ve still got ahead of me, but I forgive her because Christmas Eve is our day of gorging on nicked happinesses and we’ll need to gobble up as many hours of the day as possible to sustain us for Christmas. As long as our stomachs don’t start rumbling before the end of the holy days, we’ll be safe, the indigestion of festive indulgence notwithstanding.

“What time is it?” I mumble drowsily as Trouble nestles at my side, where the springs of my mattress know better than to refuse to accommodate her.  

“The laziest we’ve had yet,” she says as she smiles into the half of my pillow that I always save for her. “It’s been six-oh-three for ages.”

Trouble always gets up at six, and my second and last clue is this: the grandfather clock – he of shabby, scratched surfaces, exiled to my room in punishment for its failure to match our house’s oak furniture – is not ticking.

“I’ll show you,” Trouble whispers as she ushers me out of bed. There’s no need to whisper, not anymore, but we’re both of the opinion that whispering does to speech what cream does to tea. Trouble pulls a sock on my left foot while I’m still stuck on the right one to hurry me up and then she takes me by the hand like puberty’s still around the corner and not behind us and takes me on a tour of broken clocks.

First, there’s the electric one in her room, blinking 6:03 at us in neon green once we’ve trudged our way through the barbed trenches of Trouble’s stockings, hair clips, and uncapped pens.

Next, there is the one downstairs, inside what we call the drawing room even though no one’s ever drawn a thing here save for the window drapes, maybe because ‘the living room’ would have been even less reflective of what we use the space for. This clock – more of an elegant grandmother – is an antique, heavy enough to be used as a murder weapon and pretty enough to revive the victim, and even its hands, stuck at 6:03, must be valuable because everything in the room is. Here’s to hoping that if a fire ever breaks out in the house, it won’t start here.

Finally, there is the kitchen clock, plastic and practical. Trouble felt sorry for it and, tortured by secondhand embarrassment at its uninterrupted roundness and premature baldness, knitted it a hat three and a half winters ago. Our father allowed it, most likely because, being a proud watch-wearer, he’s yet to notice.

Outside the kitchen window, dawn is already peering in with its nose pressed to the window, and, by now, it’s close enough for me to make out the bare trees that surround our house like a stockade and spear the sky with their sharpened tips. We had the idea to release the sky once, Trouble and me – take it down, tend to its wounds, that sort of thing – but we didn’t know how to go about reaching it: piggyback wouldn’t do, we didn’t have an airplane or a pilot license, and we weren’t brave enough to try climbing one of those trees because we’re just a couple of kids, all right?

“I say we start with gingerbread girls,” Trouble says as she rolls up her sleeves. “It’s baking time.”

(If Trouble rolled her sleeves up even higher, they’d reveal a cluster of fading bruises on her upper arm. It’s a five-petalled thing but it lacks the symmetry of flowers. They crop up on our skin every now and then, these marks, and if they are flowers, their blooming is an erratic affair that does not seem to correspond to any seasons we know.)

When baking, we give thanks for everything from milk through eggs to our only whisk; it’s not a God thing so much as an us thing. We make sure to stick to toil during our cake morning but we indulge in a little trouble, too, because Christmas Eve – one of the few days in the year we get the house all to ourselves, with our father at work and no school – would get offended and stop visiting if we didn’t spend at least some of it making flour angels on the floor and then scooping it up in our hands and using egg whites to form it into balls during winters too warm for snow. Later, we take the inevitable flour-ball fight outside and chase each other around the house, but we miss every single time, partly because we’re both terrible at aiming, and partly because we’re too soft-hearted to hit each other even if it’s all play. No, really, have a feel if you don’t believe me about our hearts but I swear, even our cookie dough is harder.

We don’t hit any hours either, not between their shoulder blades and not where their knees dimple, because, today, the hours are sleeping through the day and we, like the delay collaborators that we are, decide to let them. We appreciate this rare leniency and unwrap the gift of laziness with care: we sit down to enjoy a hot chocolate and leave the washing-up for later, determined to ignore the complicated architecture and, by this point, maybe even ecology of the kitchen sink.

“What are we waiting for?” I ask when Trouble hesitates before pouring the warmed-up milk into our gold-rimmed cups.

“Time waits for no one,” she sing-songs, “but today, Time waits on us.”

Only Time is shy, so we both bury our heads in our arms and pretend to sleep. I fake-snore, Trouble counts to ten, and when we open our eyes, the hot chocolate is already steaming in the cups. We clink ours with the third we’ve prepared, and we smack our lips as loudly as we can so Mom will know we’re enjoying the drink. She’s sitting on the stove, busy loving us to pieces. She’ll join us in a moment, but, for now, she’s too preoccupied with watching us like we’re a picture she’d like to frame.

Mom is the only ghost we believe in. We were supposed to grow out of her years ago, but we decided to keep her instead, and, to this day, we shush each other about her all the time since our father would never let her stay if he discovered that she’s still around.

Once we’re done with the hot chocolate, Trouble treats herself to wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater because Christmas Eve is for rule-breaking. The one about neatness snaps with a loud cracking noise, but it’s all right, the sweater’s for early retirement come spring anyway. After years of use and misuse, it’s so stretched that if I was fairy-sized, I could easily climb it, use the gaps for footholds, the neckline for a hammock, and the sleeve for a hidey-hole. Maybe then Trouble could take me with her when she leaves, which is soon. College is taking her away from me in less than a year and I’m already making preparations. For months now, I’ve been assembling the troops of my love to be ready to let her go and putting our best memories only in those pockets that I’d checked for holes because, once she’s gone, I’m going to need to ration our humble earnings.

I will be sad when Trouble goes but I’ve made up my mind not to say a word. No peep out of me about it, no sir, because maybe college is where Trouble will finally make some friends. Kids don’t like her at school; she’s too much of an acquired taste: a chronic fretter and a habitual hummer, a hypersensitive hypochondriac and a hopeless hoper, a barefoot goody-two-shoes and all trousers with no mouth, a patron saint of all those in need of patronage who never rebels without a cause. She won’t let you copy her test answers but, later, she’ll insist on tutoring you in the subject and mark your homework, mercilessly, in red, but with smiley faces dotted all over it – if you’re me, you’ll treasure them, but if you aren’t, which, of course, you’re not, you’ll likely mistake them for mockery. She’s a misunderstood artist, Trouble, except she has kindness for a paintbrush, and maybe they’ll appreciate her late, but I’ll always have the satisfaction of having appreciated her early. It might have started way back, when she taught me how to tie my shoelaces, but I've kept the gratitude going like a Vestal watching over a sacred fire because it wouldn’t do to take her daily miracles for granted just because she manufactures so many. Six impossible things before breakfast? Please. Trouble can do twelve, easily. Let’s start with how she gets up early every day to prepare lunch for me and our father and manages to spread sunlight on our sandwich bread instead of margarine even though, most of the time, the sun’s not even there to borrow from yet. Let’s not continue because there are some things that I’d like to keep to myself if that’s all right with you. I’ll have to share Trouble with the world soon, so I think I’m entitled to a little hoarding.

Trouble smiles at me, and I pocket that, too.

“I think it’s time we wrapped Dad’s gift,” she says and this I don’t pocket. This, I won’t need come September.

Here’s the thing: Mum nicknamed us Toil and Trouble because of a joke she wouldn’t repeat to us, and our father keeps calling us that because he’s a disciple of routine and all things familiar, but we’re good kids, okay? Okay.

So we wrap the expensive tie that looks like old-fashioned upholstery and cost us our combined pocket money as well as the contents of Trouble’s old piggy bank, God rest its soul. Wrap it up like the good kids we are.

“There,” Trouble says once it’s done, and we both smile as the house itself seems to exhale in relief. Over the next who-knows-how-long, we take advantage of the temporal napping and take our time dressing up our tree and cleaning up our mess. For once, we don’t rush mending the socks we glided threadbare or decorating the cookies we managed not to burn. There’s no walking into furniture corners and knocking things over in the haste to get everything ready on time. There are no pricked fingers, stubbed toes, or scalded tongues. When a bird perches on the kitchen windowsill, we feed it, and when it sticks around, we coo at it. The day could move in, and it wouldn’t be overstaying its welcome, that’s how pleasant its company is.

But the day is not moving in. The day is going to move on.

There are words I abhor, such as ‘inevitable’, ‘tomorrow’, and ‘over’. I could try and build a spell – tear the right pages out of the dictionary and feed them to flames, whisper each of the words three times in front of a mirror before biting my finger to blood, say them backward, one by one – but I might be too old for magic just like I’m too old for strawberry toothpaste, temper tantrums, and dreams come true. When we were younger, we used to play hide-and-seek, me and Trouble: every spot that was too small to provide shelter for both of us was no good and when we ran out of spots, we started playing the game inside our heads until playing turned into something more like planning. We would hide on the Moon and in the Marianas Trench, on undiscovered planets and in undiscovered depths, in a kingdom far away and in a kingdom even farther than that. We would find a world without circuses or cardboard boxes or locks or cages, we would de-crucify the sky free and we would take it with us unless it refused to tag along.

We would move out and get a place, just the two of us – Trouble would work, I would grow, and we’d never have to eat joy out of a tin on Christmas Day again.

Over the years, I tried wishing on everything: I wished on stars, both falling and attached, wished on rainbows and on eyelashes, wished on wishbones and searched fields for four-leafed clovers, rubbed lamps and pressed seashells to my ears in hope of receiving secret instructions from fate. Hell, I even prayed.

The problem is, Time may nap, but it doesn’t sleep. The future is breathing down our necks, already fumbling for our collars, and that’s why when Trouble was busy trying to trick the present into a prolonged sojourn, I made plans. On the day of Trouble’s exodus, I will get up early, prepare lunch for her, and iron my best smile. Later, I’ll dress myself in I’m fines and It’s all rights and I’ll be okays and send her off in my Sunday shoes even though – I’ve checked – it’ll probably be a Wednesday. I won’t leave the bus station until the exhaust fumes dissipate; only then will I trudge my way back home, which will be home no longer, and lock myself in the bunker built out of all the days we did have. I’ll padlock the door from the inside, and, just in case, I’ll even swallow the key. Hopefully, it won’t hurt my throat on the way down.

That’s all I want, actually: for it not to hurt my throat too much on the way down.

So make no mistake. I’ll cry a little (a lot) and I’ll be sad sometimes (always), but I’ll weather Trouble’s absence just like, in her pre-memory days, she weathered mine. Which is why, when it gets dark outside and when we turn the lights on, I sit her down in front of the fireplace and put my hands on my hips.

By now, our father will be checking his watch and putting his things in the briefcase we got him last Christmas, by now, he’ll be heading home.

“Stopping the clocks is all well and good,” I tell Trouble, “but he’s just going to restart them when he gets back, you know.”

“I know,” my sister – my sister who got up at six and attempted to murder Time just for my sake even though she’d never so much as swatted a fly before – says, all sheepish. “That’s why I did this when you were in the shower earlier.”

She reaches into her pocket and produces a handful of clock hands with a guilty smile. I blink at them, surprised, and then sigh. Every year, I try to guess what Trouble got me for Christmas. I’m yet to succeed.

“Should we hide them?” I suggest as Mum smiles approvingly from where she’s still sipping the hot chocolate at the kitchen table. You see, for her, it never gets cold.

(My sister, who can stir hot chocolate without having the spoon clink once.)

“Hide them? Where?” Trouble asks with a quizzical look. “On the Moon? On Pluto?”

But I shake my head because any of the hiding spots we’ve outgrown will suffice.

Later, when the front door creaks open, we don’t cry about it, because Today wanted us to attend its funeral laughing. Already braced for the future, I postpone my mourning for another time and smile at Trouble across the room. We’ve been busy collecting delight like worker bees, and it’s true – inevitable, even – that later, there’ll be hunger, but, for now, I’m so full of happiness that my stomach might well not rumble till New Year’s. The scissor blades of the past and the future try to corner me the whole evening, but I sneak away every time and manage to keep them at a distance without spilling a single drop of the present imperfect that I poured myself into a cup.

Here’s to Time!