Ode to my Father

I am right to worry because my mother is Yara West, nee Atkinson. Her daughters, my sisters, are Zara and Zelda. An even more impressive line coming from the women of the family. But I worry about my sisters. They are the last in the line of girls, although I wonder how they manage to get so far ahead in the game. There must have been some very disappointed fathers in the family. Or clever ones, if I may say.

I pray my sisters find their own solution.

In this story, the names do not matter. Only a non viviparous person we referred to as O'Clocky. Life is full of mysteries. Why do we say a cat is alive, but not a rock? Is it because life found a way to infuse itself into an object and we called this object, Cat? One thing I know for a fact, is that life does not ask for our opinion. It comes as it goes. So what if it had decided to give that same elixir away, secretly?

I will call it a person. Yes, one person. This person lived with us. Though, how he came to be does not involve my mother giving birth, or any other mother for that matter.

This story revolves around time. My father, Mr Mason West, needs to know the time. He needs to know the time all the time. How do you tell the time? You need a clock. He had clocks, so he knew the time too well. He is the type of man who would often answer the question, “What time is it?” with an answer such as, “It is a quarter past the hour.”

Note, that in answering he omitted an important part of the telling of time. The hour. Can you guess what the hour is from his answer? No, you can't. In that convoluted sentence, there are seven words. A whole seven of them, yet seven is not the hour. A quarter? Yes, if we recall our fractions, we know that a quarter is not code for twenty-five as in when you divide one hundred into quarters. It is merely fifteen as in dividing an hour of sixty minutes into quarters. Good, seven words conveyed that very well. But where is the hour? Nowhere to be seen.

He knew the time all the time.

You see, my father is a conversational man. If he told you the hour, then what is there left to say? You asked a question, he answered, you would thank him and be on your way. Some don't even bother to thank, as if it was their right to know the time. But Mr Mason West expects every interaction to turn into a conversation.

My father assumed that everyone always checked the time. Well, he was generous in thinking that they didn't check every minute, but at least once an hour. In his world, everyone always knew what hour it was. They only asked to know how many minutes had passed within the hour.

Time was an obsession for him.

Let me describe our house, the one I tasked you to imagine earlier. The moment you open the door, you are presented with a wall clock. It is not too big to stand out, but one thing you can be sure of is that when the door opens, you can tell the time. You may tell yourself “I have arrived at three twenty-two.”

Close the door, turn around and look up. What do you see? Yes, before I opened the door for you, I checked the time of your arrival. How? Well, because you will be looking at the largest of the wall clocks. This one plays a melody for every hour. This clock is my father's pride. He had another one hanging there in its place before. That one also sang every hour. And it sang morning, evening, and night. A clock that sings a one minute song every hour loses its novelty fairly quickly. We had to collect six votes to have it removed. Mr West still cast his vote against us, but we live in a democracy.

The new wall clock also sang every hour, but this one had a catch. When the light went out, so did the sound. You could still hear a faint whisper at night. It's not loud enough to disturb your sleep, but it was a reminder that a father is not a democratically elected figure.

We had two living rooms opposite of one another. Each side ended with a wall clock that ticked away synchronously and told the time. The dining room sat between the living rooms. Here a beautiful picture of Mister and Misses Mason West hung on the wall. Right under the ornate frame, the needles ticked time away. Take the stairs, walk to the corridor that leads to the three bedrooms, and surprise! You are greeted by a wall clock that tells you exactly what time it was.

The master bedroom was silent. Not a clock dared make a sound in the presence of the ultimate ruler of the house. Lady Yara, of house West. But time was still present in the room. Here my father satisfied his obsession with a compromise. At first he was reluctant. But in time, he grew fond of it. He placed digital clocks. One to cover every possible head turn.

The girls' room was spared. Mrs Yara West, mother of three boys and two girls, used the power behind twenty five generations of women to spare Zara and Zelda, my sisters, from father time. Not a single clock on the walls. Though, they were always last to get up for school.

The boys however, Nathan, Nigel, Negan, I am Negan. We were not spared. In fact we were the experiment. When a new clock entered the house, it was first fitted in our room to test it out. As soon as we got used to it, he removed it and placed it somewhere in the house. Where exactly? I don't know.

In our room, he took the liberty to place more than two clocks on the same wall. It was his laboratory.

“I just want to see how it looks.” He would tell Yara West, my mother. Here she had no power, and we were too many generations behind to be of any help.

So now that you know about the house, if I were to ask you what is the most common thing in the West household. How would you answer?

If anyone were to describe our house, they would not fail to mention the clocks. Every time I hear friends tell a story that has taken place in our house, they usually start by telling the time.

“I don't remember what day it was,” they would start. “But it was three twenty-six, in the afternoon...”

Now I'm having a hard time remembering the sound of the clocks ticking. No, it's not because I am a man now and my hearing is not as good as it used to be. I am not that old by the way, just old enough to be called a man and not a boy. Although I am not sure when the transition occurred. Let's put it like this.

If everyone is moving, no one is moving. If everyone is happy, no one is happy. If every clock is ticking, then we might as well say that no clock is ticking. But what happens when a clock is not ticking?

My father, again with him, one day he came back from work and he was ticking. Being a little boy, I overlooked all his flaws. He was my hero, and I greeted him with a solemn embrace. But then I heard: Tic tac tic tac.

“Remember when father came home with the small clock in his pocket?” Nigel asked.

“Which clock? He always came home with a clock,” I added. I am Negan.

“Right. O'Clocky. I sure wish we had put that clock to the test.” Nathan answered.

Out of his pocket my father, Mr Mason West, handed me the little clock. Usually clocks came in big boxes and he treated them with care. But this one was small and could fit in a pocket, and he handed it like one would give a piece of candy. As a boy, which I was then, I had never known that my father had a problem. It's only when Nathan came home for the summer break that he started implanting ideas in my mind.

“I remember that clock.” I said.

In our bedroom, we had a wall closet. There were clocks on the walls sometimes, mind you. But when you woke up for school in the morning and headed to the closet to pick up your school uniform, it would be nice to know the exact time, wouldn't it? For that, you needed a clock in the closet.

This was a small clock with a refractive pink acrylic frame. The needles were tipped with a green glowing material that shone in the dark. Even in the darkest of nights, when you opened that closet, you could tell the time. Except, this little clock was not very good at keeping the time. It was always off by an hour or two.

“I'm the one that first noticed it”, Nathan said proudly.

“When you open the closet, you hear nothing. You don't even notice it. It's only when you realise that the sun is up, and the clock is set to two Ante Meridiem that you realise that it has stopped. But right before you want to check if the battery is depleted, you hear: tic, tac, tic, tac”

It was an unusual clock. Sometimes, my father would remove all the wall clocks in our bedroom walls, for an unscheduled maintenance I suppose. He was obsessed with clocks, I don't know what he was doing with them. Anyway, on those nights, the only sound in the room would be the ticking inside the closet, and my brother Nathan telling stories.

Nathan's stories always started well, but then they were interrupted.

“Henry's brother came back from uni last week.” he would start. “Henry says, he said it was the most amazing experience he ever had. I can't wait to finish school so I can get out of here. I hear they have a different teacher for everything. If you want to learn Math, there is a Math teacher. If you want to learn physics there is a physics teacher. There's even a football teacher, and a basketball teacher. Even for a bathroom they have a toilet tea..”

“Shoosh!”, Nigel interrupted. Nathan stopped talking. There was complete silence. Not because all the clocks were ticking together. My father had removed the clocks on the wall. The silence was, well, silence.

Nathan took his post by the light switch and waited. Nigel and I stood in front of the closet like spy soldiers and waited.

“On three.” Nathan commanded, placing his finger on the trigger. “One, two, three!”

He switched the light on, Nigel and I yanked the closet doors open at the same time and pointed laser focused eyes into the abyss.

“So! Is it ticking?” Nathan asked. Nigel and I looked at the clock dead in the eyes. Well, it didn't have eyes but the green glow at the tip of each needle did look like eyes.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

And suddenly, “Tic tac tic tac tic tac.”

The little clock ticked vigorously, as if it had just remembered that urgent matter concerning clocks.

This was not an isolated event. Close the closet's door, turn off the lights and the clock would stop ticking. Come back later, then as if startled from its sleep, it would start ticking. Sometimes it ticked a little too fast as if it was trying to make up for the lost time.

We repeated our scientific experiment many times. Even our friends witnessed it, though they didn't seem to care. We even tried to tell Zara and Zelda, my sisters, but they showed no genuine interest. They never stopped talking while we did our little show of tricking O'Clocky. They cheered forcefully in the end not really understanding what had happened or was supposed to happen that did or didn't.

Among the boys, we started joking that there were little people living inside the clock. The years wore away and the little acrylic clock continued to skip an hour or two here and there. We decided it was not little people, but the clock itself was a people. A lazy little clock. O'Clocky, the lazy little clock.

“By the way, we did put it to the test,” Nigel said.

“What? wait... what? When?” Nathan asked, surprised.

“When you went to uni. Negan and I put it to the test.” Nigel continued. Nathan's eyes grew wide. I could see a terror disguised as a straight face on him. He was not a boy when we had this conversation. He was a fully matured grown man with a university degree and a beard to prove it.

The test was something we spoke of often when we were kids but never got around to try. One day, in the midst of time, I told Nigel. “I think it's time we put O'Clocky to the test.”

A silence followed. The house was always silent now, for one or two reasons.

Deep down we were all afraid to do the test. The test was simple. Remove O'Clocky's batteries, wait for night-time when it would have forgotten and then startle him. Maybe, just maybe, O'Clocky would forget we had removed his batteries and start ticking.

That evening, I removed the battery and the little clock stopped ticking. I placed it in the closet. It was just Nigel and I in the room and he is a much better storyteller than Nathan. His voice filled the room as he retold old stories that drowned the silence.

I interrupted. It must have been midnight. I couldn't tell. No clocks were ticking.

“I think it's late enough, and quiet enough.” I said. Nigel went silent. The room felt hot and heavy. I felt uneasy. This was the moment we were going to get an answer. We would finally know if O'Clocky was a defective clock, or a lazy person who suffered a bad spell that turned him into a clock.

We decided to turn open the closet door together. I turned the light on and we went into position.

“And? And then what happened?” Nathan asked. He was holding a cup of tea and I could feel his struggle to keep his hands from trembling. The ripples betrayed him.

“On three,” Nigel said. But then he was quiet. He didn't start the count. I looked at him and I could see the fear in his eyes. Now I started to wonder. Where did father find this clock? Of all the clocks that once lived on the walls of this house, why was this one different?

“OK, OK, yes, On three,” he said again.

“One!” A pearl of sweat appeared on my forehead.

“Two!” His voice had turned falsetto.

We waited. We waited for the right time. We knew there were no batteries inside the little clock. If we can look at both a cat and a rock and decide that the former is alive, it's because life, although it has created them both, it never placed a battery inside the rock.

If there was a transition, a single moment in a boy's life where he must take the leap and turn into a man, then this must be it. So I did my part.

“It's time to end this madness. Three!” we violently opened the closet's doors.

Have you guessed the answer? The most common object in the West house?

Batteries! It's batteries.

It takes a tremendous amount of batteries to power all the West house clocks. In fact, by listening to the tics I could tell you which clock would soon need a new battery. When I hugged my father and heard that ticking, I knew the battery was depleted. Mr West was very proud of my talent.

There was complete silence.

We both looked at O'Clocky as one. O'Clocky looked back at us. My heart was beating out loud. Nigel's heart was beating out loud. Nathan, listening to the story many years later, his heart was beating out loud.

A second passed.

Two seconds passed.

Three.

“So?” Nathan asked. “Did he pass?”

“Yes... He passed away.” I answered. Day became night. Ambience became silence. I hear that whispering in the air. That faint voice that sings in the night to call for midnight. An old memory. Love, courage, gratitude.

We must have reached private thoughts. Please allow my family and I a moment to mourn in peace.