Tide of Stone Read online

  “I’m going to the Club tomorrow.”

  He’d been telling me for years about the place.

  “You—are?

  “I am. I’m going in as keeper in a month.”

  He was almost animated.

  “Good.—Proud.”

  He said it as if he was my father.

  “I’m not sure I can last a year,” I said.

  “A—year—is—right.—Any—less—means—too—much—change—in—the—Tower.—Any—more—and—there—can—be—damage—done—to—you.”

  I thought he was exaggerating. I’d never known a keeper to come back worse off, even those who didn’t fill the year, or who were there a little longer.

  “Bye,—superstar,” Burnett said. “Take—every—advantage—you—can.—You—will—be—famous.”

  I left him. He wasn’t being sarcastic. Stupid to let that make me feel good, but it did.

  I want that. I want exactly that. To be a different person. Stronger, smarter, actually brilliant.

  I’d always wanted to be a great, a star, known, and somehow the Time Ball Tower helped people succeed. I knew it would help me to become famous, at least. Burnett had been telling me that all my life.

  I’ll be famous for always having a camera, if nothing else.

  I had most of the staff and patients photographed. Only a few to go.

  

  I usually slept well, but with the Time Ball Tower looming over me, the year I would spend there, each night I struggled to calm my brain enough to drift into that space. Not sleeping worried me. I had a clean bill of health, physically and mentally, and didn’t want to lose it. Worrying about not sleeping made me sleep badly.

  “Why don’t you take a nap?” my mother said most afternoons, and she showed me articles about sleep deprivation, hallucinations and degradation. She slept a very particular ten hours a night because she was as scared of oversleeping and missing something as much as she was of not getting enough sleep.

  Tempuston was a sleepy town in every sense of the word. I knew no one who slept less than ten hours.

  I lay in bed, mind racing. I knew that people would be still up partying in town. I was tempted to join them, but instead got up and sat on my small balcony, looking out over the water.

  In the distance, the Time Ball Tower stood, a long shadow on this moonlit night. I waved and laughed at myself for thinking the preserved prisoners out there could see me. That they could somehow look out, see me on my balcony and be thinking that I was going to be great, the best Time Ball Tower keeper they’d ever had.

  Stupid thoughts.

  The yellow flag was raised, as it should be. It meant bravery, sacrifice and strength. Yellow was my color. That flag would stay raised until I changed it, if I ever did.

  I picked up my camera and clicked some shots, trying to capture the shadows that shifted and fell below.

  I wanted to be alert, bright, for my visit to the Club. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but knew I’d be under scrutiny. It wasn’t just that I was a woman. All new keepers were looked at this way.

  The sun was coming up, but I felt not in the least sleepy. I called Renata, got her to drop in on her way home from the hospital. She seemed elated, for someone who’d done a night shift. She said, “What are you up to today? Wanna do something? I was thinking of driving down the coast for a surf.”

  “I’m going to the Club tonight. I’m too nervous to do much of anything but panic.”

  “Yeah? Tell those fuckers I’m waiting for them. They’ll be old before long and I’ll be here.” Her family hated the keepers. If we were lovers, Renata and I would be like Romeo and Juliet.

  What caused the difference? That goes way back. While my family are keepers for generations, her family has been fighting against the tower and the process of mortification for almost as long. They’re fighting for the wrong side, though. They have more reason to hate than most of us do. More reason than many to wish criminals into the tower.

  Renata’s grandmother was known as the Curse Bringer. The Witch.

  Renata’s grandmother had been out to the Time Ball Tower, although not as a keeper. The curse of that unofficial visit caused the school to burn down and all sorts of other terrible happenings. Every little thing was blamed on her. She came back pregnant (or it happened soon after, no one knows) and she tried to abort, and it failed, and the baby is Renata’s mum. Her mum’s got one withered arm and is deaf in one ear. But she’s living a life. Sort of. She’s got Renata; they’ve got each other. No one knows who Renata’s father is.

  So yeah, they could have a lot of hate against the prisoners, but they’re against the tower and all it stands for, and me, dead set on being a keeper since I was about seven. That could have made me and Renata mortal enemies, but it never bothered us.

  “Why do you defend the prisoners? Men like them destroyed your life, and your mother’s,” I asked Renata’s mum once. I was a teenager then and you know how mothers are desperate for teenagers to talk to them.

  “God has shown me that all life is precious. Even those lives out there. Some are meant to live, and some are meant to die, but we all die in the end.”

  One of her ancestors was out there. But it still didn’t make sense.

  

  I went for a swim. You can feel so beautifully alone, under the water.

  The water was so salty, my eyes stung. As it dried, I felt my skin tighten. I could sell beauty treatments like this. Salt water swims for good muscle and skin tone. I’d take the before and after photos myself.

  I didn’t bother to dry off for the walk home; I’d be dry in minutes, anyway.

  The Ball dropped.

  We all paused, as ever, even the people with places to go, like work or school or college.

  I hadn’t told anyone yet that I’d flunked my course at Technical College. It seemed such a ridiculous failure. A ridiculous endeavor to begin with. I’d hated it there. So much noise, and too many people with too many places to go.

  I was looking forward to the Time Ball Tower and its finite space.

  I jogged home, tiredness starting to hit. Showered. Ate some leftover pizza. Then fell asleep on the couch, one of those beautiful instant sleeps where no thoughts nag at you.

  

  I woke up when the weather changed, and the air was damp. I showered again, then agonized for an hour over what to wear to the Club. I asked Mum, locked in her room.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go,” she said.

  If Dad was home he’d say, “You always look beautiful,” when he hasn’t looked at me in years. Unless we’re talking about sex; he’s obsessed with giving us a “normal attitude.” He failed medical school so can’t even be a gyno, but he’s a sex therapist and he doesn’t want any of us ending up screwed up. He reckons, “So long as you’re making your own decisions, anything is acceptable.”

  Long skirt, old lady blouse?

  Short cute dress with cleavage?

  Jeans and a funny T-shirt?

  I borrowed a Chanel rip-off suit from Mum. She hadn’t worn it in years.

  

  The Club stood like a box on the outskirts of town. The size of a small house, it had no windows. People thought that was for privacy, but Burnett told me it was because none of them wanted to look at the Time Ball Tower. The buildings around it were all like mirrors, and the Club reflected back, all wall, in them. There used to be workers homes in the streets surrounding the Club, but they all collapsed. Shoddy work? Shows how they valued the working class.

  I walked up the three steps that led to the front door, feigning nonchalance. All my life I’d known of this place. My friends and I had imagined wonderful things inside. fairy floss machines and a bowling alley. A swimming pool. An elevator that moved around the outside of the building, invisible to the naked eye. Sex shows, the boys had said when they were teenagers. Live sex shows and all the keepers reading and naked and waiting. The image made us laugh. Burnett tol
d me very little beyond, “You will love it. It’s a very special place,” although he’d only been inside once or twice. My father always came back from the Club blind drunk. Drinks were cheap, and someone drove him home. My mother didn’t go. “It’s nice inside, but there are too many mirrors on the way there.”

  Mum called anything that she could see her reflection in “mirror.” This included windows, still water, shiny metal. She hates mirrors. Hates the sight of herself. The photos I took of her are the only ones in existence. The fact she let me take them is a sign of…love? Pride? Or exhaustion. She says she can’t bear to look back at herself, because she’ll never be that person again.

  I was supposed to be at the Club at 7pm, but I got there early, so waited around the corner until five past.

  I knocked because there was no doorknob. Over the door was a sign saying, “Never Forget.”

  Tyson Keeney, 1992, the local projectionist, answered the door. Rarely seen in the daylight, he stood, blinking, his nose twitching.

  “Phillipa Muskett! Welcome to the Club.”

  He looked over my shoulder sharply, and I turned, expecting to see somebody there. No one. Nothing.

  Suddenly nervous, I wished I’d brought a friend. Not Renata. She hated everything to do with the Time Ball Tower. I lifted my camera, glad to have that.

  “Come in! Have a look around. We’ve got lots to show you.” He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his shoulder, as if blocking something he didn’t want to see.

  It felt momentous, walking inside. A goal achieved.

  It was dark. The carpet was burgundy and very soft. The walls were burgundy velvet, the hall furniture dark wood. And so quiet. Muffled. I said loudly, “Nice place,” to find out if my words echoed.

  No need to sign in. I liked that.

  He pushed open a large wooden door and led me into the bar. Lit by a dozen or more bankers’ lights, it had an odd green glow.

  There was little to indicate this club was connected with the Time Ball Tower or the water that surrounded it. It wasn’t a seaside club or a sailor’s club. No sea pictures, no anchors, no ship wheels, no netting with fake fish. No Time Ball Tower models. It was more like a sports club. Photos of footballers, cricketers, tennis players. Some were labeled with keeper names, others seemed to have been cut from sporting magazines.

  The walls were lined with solid, full bookcases. “Does anyone read all those?”

  “Yeah, sure. Crime and punishment, most of them, as you’d expect. We’ve got the world’s biggest collection on penal systems.”

  “Really?”

  “Dunno. Check the Guinness Book of World Records. We’ve got a bunch of those, too.”

  There were portraits of many of the keepers. Some women: my mother and grandmother included. My mother’s eyes looked bluer, and clear. Her face unlined.

  I recognized most; many of them no longer lived in town, but I knew them from the news and from magazines. They were designers, writers, financiers, CEOS. There was an honor roll of the famous.

  There was one of William Bunting, 1932. I knew this keeper. He’d become a successful politician. Used the experience in the tower (learning patience, he said) as fuel for the future. His kids were lawyers, politicians, talkers. Two of them had been keepers. They are that kind of family. He was one of those people kept away from, though. One of the men my mother warned me about.

  There was one of the keeper of 1921, Ambrose McCarty. This man had died within five weeks of returning from the Time Ball Tower.

  Under his portrait was a newspaper article. It was almost pornographic in its delight. Man’s Rectum Pierced in Freak Accident, it said.

  Seriously. This poor guy. Fucking in an open top car and a god damn branch flies up his arse.

  How can you not laugh at that?

  There was the keeper from 1872, Tristram Barton (somehow related to me, I think), with his massive dark beard. On a table under his portrait sat a small collection of items. A wedding ring, a silver plate, a bowl.

  “What are those?”

  “Just some symbolic things. Meaning lost for us, but they meant a lot to him.”

  And on another wall, pictures of the prisoners, on sentencing.

  “That’s the one they call Wee Willie Winkie. You’ll meet him in there. He’s even worse off than Burnett. Should see him.” The portrait showed a handsome young man, hair tousled. His face was badly bruised, his eyes not looking at the artist but sideways, as if seeking escape. “He’s not so pretty now.”

  My father wore the same aftershave every day of his life and I could smell it here, as if it were being pumped through the vents. Dad used it to cover the stink of booze, which oozed out of his pores day and night.

  There were ten or twelve people in the room. I knew them all on sight or in person.

  We walked past Leo Adler, 1972, a tall man, hunched over the bar, whiskey in his hand, more drinks lined up as if he couldn’t bear to wait. He spoke to no one but the keepers, and even then he was selective.

  “Tell him anything; he won’t whisper a word,” Tyson Keeney said. “He’s like the wailing wall. Come on. It’s dinner.”

  Tyson Keeney had been dying of cancer for years. Most people thought he didn’t really have it.

  We walked down a short hallway lined with more photos to a solid oak door.

  The music was so bland there might as well have been silence. I thought they might play Peter Mosse, keeper 2011. He’s amazing, especially his Long Life Mix. The prisoners breathing. Whining. And that incredible trumpet. It’s a huge seller, his most successful work. Phillipa was already thinking of ways she could capture something similar. The menu in the Club was pretty plain, he warned me. “Our members aren’t big on spicy food.”

  “Remember, fellas? What it was like back then? When we could eat anything we wanted?”

  “That’s all right, I usually take my own chili.” I held up a small jar.

  “Might be the last spicy food you want,” 1981, Louis La Rocca said.

  I knew I’d always love spicy food. No way that would change.

  The food was simple, and fresh, and they all seemed to enjoy it. A bright green spinach soup that tasted almost sweet. A mild curry chicken. An Asian-style salad, full of herbs grown, they told me, in planters in the courtyard. Huge bowls of steamed vegetables also provided, and for dessert, platters of fruit. It wasn’t “plain” at all.

  “We all come back craving fresh fruit and vegetables. That never goes,” Louis La Rocca said. “You’ll want them forever.” An old man, keeper 1940, Kim Adler winced. Was he Leo’s father? They didn’t look at each other. Kim gave “the face.” I called it “old people’s whinge face.” They pig out, drink so much booze they fall over, then complain about digestion as if they haven’t brought it on themselves. Seriously, how bad could it be?

  During the meal, a number of them burped, and tapped at their chests. It made me laugh, and I had to comment. “My mother does the same thing.” She was in the Tower in 1973. Dad in 1970.

  “Heartburn. Most of us have it. It’s how you know who’s been out there. Odd, isn’t it? Could be the crap we end up eating out there.”

  “And the painkillers eating the stomach lining.”

  “Why painkillers?”

  “Headaches. For some reason. Air pressure or something. Might avoid it if you’re lucky.”

  I asked about the prisoners, wanting some warning of what, of who, to expect.

  “The evil man’s heart is like stone,” Dale de Feo, 1974, said. I wondered why the others turned silent, and why he shrugged and turned away, red in the face.

  “He’s drunk. Rambling,” another man said. My dad wasn’t the only one, then, who coped like this. I wasn’t going to let the tower, the isolation, get me that way.

  “You know who should be out there?” Kate Hoff, 2010, said.

  “The heinous, the unrepentant, the undeniably guilty,” four or five of them said together, and that set off a long discussion about the latest
crimes, the latest evil.

  “There’s plenty of space out there. We should be cramming more in,” Michael Todd, 2005, said.

  “We could stack ’em in boxes, fit hundreds that way. Little peep holes they can see out of. Maybe we poke a candle in there.” Luke Harcourt, 1998, smiled as he spoke.

  “Who’s the worst one out there?” I asked.

  They exchanged glances.

  Louis La Rocca said, “That’ll be for you to decide. Some things we can’t tell you and it’s best to go in not knowing.”

  “I’ve heard that Hitler is there, and Hess and all sorts.”

  “Conspiracy theories, that’s all.” Michael said it, but they all agreed. “You’ll go through many moments of doubt. A year is a long time for a young person, but it’s over so soon,” Michael said. “Even if you never work again, you’ll be able to get by on the money you’ve earned if you invest it sensibly. Of course, we’re all far too ambitious to simply want to “get by.”

  “So, no regrets? No wishing you didn’t go out there?”

  David Costello, 1988, the boatman who’d row me over shook his head. “Never. Best thing I ever did.”

  They murmured agreement.

  I hoped that wouldn’t be true. If I did the best thing I’d ever do at this age, it meant an unfulfilling life ahead.

  “The only thing you’ll ever regret is if you listen to those mongrels. They’re unrepentant liars. Manipulators,” Louis La Rocca said. “We might call them Preserved, but most of them are anything but.”

  “They go through the phases, every time, don’t they? Claiming innocence, then admitting guilt, then begging for mercy, then they get furious, deny guilt again. Or say they’ve paid for it. Whine whine whine whine whine whine,” Costello said.

  They all got into this, whining, “I’m innocent. I didn’t do it.”

  It struck me how annoying these voices would be. Listening to them day after day, no other conversations. And I wondered if that was part of it for my parents. They tried to escape the voices but couldn’t, so took to booze and fear of the outdoors instead.

  “You have to stand firm through all of it.” David Costello held up a fist; solidarity, I guessed.