The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart - Mathias Malzieu & Sarah Ardizzone
Author’s Note
My character Georges Méliès is inspired by the original Méliès (1861–1938, the first cinematographic director, father of special effects), who himself was heavily influenced by Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871) – a remarkable man with an extraordinary gift for invention. He was a clockmaker and illusionist, and inventor of, amongst other things, the kilometric counter and ophthalmo logical equipment. He established a theatre where he made clocks embellished with singing birds and other examples of mechanical prowess. The infamous magician ‘Houdini’ chose his patronymic in honour of his forerunner.
Chapter ONE
In which Little Jack is born on the coldest day on earth and miraculously resuscitated
It’s snowing over Edinburgh on this 16th day of April, 1874. An eerie, freezing cold gridlocks the city. Old people wonder whether this might be the coldest day on earth. The sun seems to have disappeared for good. There’s a biting wind, snowflakes lighter than air. WHITE! WHITE! WHITE! A muffled explosion. This is all we can see. Houses resemble steam engines, as the grey smoke exhaled by their chimneys sparkles in the steel sky.
Edinburgh and its steep streets are being transformed. Fountains metamorphose, one by one, into bouquets of ice. The old river, usually so serious, is disguised as an icing sugar lake that stretches all the way to the sea. The din of the surf rings out like the sound of windows smashing. Miraculously, the hoarfrost stitches sequins on to cats’ bodies. The trees stretch their arms, like fat fairies in white nightshirts yawning at the moon, as they watch the carriages sliding over the cobblestone ice rink. It is so cold that birds freeze in mid-flight before crashing to the ground. The noise as they drop out of the sky is uncannily soft for a corpse.
This is the coldest day on earth. And I’m getting ready to be born.
The scene is an old house perched on top of the highest hill in Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat; that King’s remains are supposed to lie at the top of this sleeping volcano set in blue quartz. The roof of the house is ingeniously pitched and pointy. The chimney, shaped like a butcher’s knife, underscores the stars. The moon sharpens its quarters here. There’s nobody around, just trees.
Inside, everything is made of wood, as if the house had been carved from an enormous pine tree. It’s like walking into a log cabin: ruggedly exposed beams, tiny windows rescued from the train scrapyard, and a low table hewn from a single stump. Woollen cushions stuffed with dead leaves complete the nest-like atmosphere. Numerous clandestine births are carried out in this house.
Here lives strange Dr Madeleine, the midwife – otherwise known as ‘that mad-wife’ by the city’s residents – who is on the pretty side for an old lady. She still has a glint in her eye, but her smile is just a twitch, betraying a loose connection in her facial wiring.
Dr Madeleine brings into the world the children of prostitutes and abandoned women, who are too young or too unfaithful to give birth the conventional way. As well as helping with new life, Dr Madeleine loves mending people. She specialises in the mechanical prosthetic, the glass eye, the wooden leg . . . There’s nothing you won’t find in her workshop.
As this nineteenth century draws to a close, it takes scarcely more to be suspected of witchcraft. In town, people say that Madeleine kills newborns to model slaves from ectoplasm, and that she sleeps with all sorts of birds to conceive monsters.
During her long labour, my mother watches distractedly as snowflakes and birds silently smash their faces against the window. She’s very young, like a child playing at being pregnant. Her mood is gloomy; she knows she won’t keep me. She can scarcely bring herself to look down at her belly, which is ready to burst. As I threaten to arrive, her eyelids close without tensing. Her skin merges with the sheets: as if the bed is sucking her up, as if she’s melting.
She was already weeping on the climb up the hill to get here. Her frozen tears bounced off the ground, like beads from a broken necklace. As she walked, a carpet of glittering ball bearings sprang up under her feet. She began to skate, then found she couldn’t stop. The cadence of her steps became too quick. Her heels got caught, her ankles lurched and she went sprawling. Inside her, I made a noise like a broken piggybank.
Dr Madeleine is my first sighting. Her fingers grab my olive-shaped skull – a miniature rugby ball – and then we snuggle up peacefully.
My mother prefers to look away. In any case, her eyelids no longer want to function. ‘Open your eyes! Look at this miniature snowflake you’ve made!’
Madeleine says I look like a white bird with big feet. My mother replies that if she’s not looking at me, then the last thing she wants is a description.
‘I don’t want to see, and I don’t want to know!’
But the doctor seems preoccupied. She keeps palpating my tiny torso. The smile disappears from her face.
‘His heart is very hard. I think it’s frozen.’
‘Mine too. There’s no need to make a fuss.’
‘But his heart really is frozen!’
She shakes me from top to bottom, and I make the same noise as someone rummaging in a toolbox.
Dr Madeleine busies herself in front of her worktop. My mother waits, sitting on her bed. She’s trembling now and, this time, it has nothing to do with the cold. She’s like a porcelain doll that escaped from the toyshop.
Outside, the snow is falling more thickly. Silver ivy climbs over the rooftops. Translucent roses bend towards windows, lighting up the streets. Cats become gargoyles, their claws stuck in the gutter.
Fish are pulling faces in the river, frozen mid-swim. The whole city is in the clutches of a glass-blower, who exhales an ear-biting cold. In a matter of seconds, the few brave people who dare to head outside are paralysed, you’d think some deity had just taken their photograph. Carried along by the momentum of their own scurrying, some start gliding to the rhythm of a final dance. They almost look handsome, each assuming his or her own style, twisted angels with their scarves sticking up in the sky, music-box dancers at the close of their performance, slowing down to the bars of their very last breath.
Everywhere, passers-by already frozen – or on their way to freezing – impale themselves on the rose garden of fountains. Only the clocks continue to make the heart of the city beat, as if none of this were out of the ordinary.
They warned me not to climb to the top of Arthur’s Seat. Everyone said the old lady was mad, thinks my mother. The poor girl looks like she’s dying of cold. If the doctor manages to mend my own heart, I reckon she’ll have an even bigger job with my mother’s . . . Here I am, lying stark naked, waiting on the workbench next to the worktop, my chest clamped in a metal vice. And I’m starting to feel seriously cold.
An ancient black cat, with a servile manner, is perched on a kitchen table. The doctor has made him a pair of glasses. Green frames to match his eyes – stylish. Nonchalantly, he watches the scene, all he’s missing is a financial newspaper and a cigar.
Dr Madeleine starts scouring the shelf of wind-up clocks. She removes a number of different models: severe-looking angular ones, round ones, wooden ones and metal ones, showing off to the tips of their clock hands. With one ear she listens to my defective heart, with the other to the ticktocks of the clocks. She scrunches her eyes, apparently unsatisfied. She’s like one of those dreadful old ladies who takes quarter of an hour to choose a tomato at the market. All of a sudden, her face lights up. ‘This one!’ she shrieks, stroking the gears of an old cuckoo clock.
The clock measures approximately four centimetres by eight, and is made entirely from wood with the exception of its mechanical parts, dial and handles. The finish is rather rustic, ‘sturdy’, thinks the doctor out loud. The cuckoo, tall as my little finger bone, is red with black eyes. Its beak, fixed open, gives it the air of a dead bird.
‘You’ll have a good heart with this clock! And it’ll be an excellent match for your bird-like head,’ Dr Madeleine says to me.
I’m not so keen on this bird business. That said, she is trying to save my life, so I don’t quibble.
Dr Madeleine puts on a white apron. This time I’m sure she’s going to set to work cooking. I feel like the grilled chicken they forgot to kill. She hunts around in a salad bowl, chooses a pair of welder’s glasses and covers her face with a handkerchief. I can’t see her smiling any more. She leans over and forces me to breathe in the ether. My eyelids close, surrendering like shutters on a summer’s evening somewhere far away from here. I don’t want to call out any more. I watch her, then sleep slowly overcomes me. Everything about her is curved: her eyes, her cheeks wrinkled as Cox’s Orange Pippins, her bosom. She’s made for wrapping around you. I’ll pretend to be hungry even when I’m not, just to tuck into her breasts.
Madeleine snips through the skin on my chest using a large pair of scissors with serrated edges. The touch of their little teeth tickles. She slides the clock under my skin and begins to connect the gears to the arteries of my heart. It’s a delicate process; nothing can afford to be damaged. She uses an ultra-fine, solid steel wire to make a dozen miniature knots. The heart beats from time to time, but only a feeble quantity of blood is pumped into the arteries. ‘How white he is!’ she whispers.
It’s the hour of truth. Dr Madeleine sets the clock to dead on midnight . . . Nothing happens. The clockwork apparatus doesn’t seem powerful enough to stimulate the heart. I’ve had no heartbeat for a dangerously long time. My head is spinning, in an exhausting dream. The doctor presses down gently on the gears to set things in motion. Tick-tock, goes the clock. Bo-boom, the heart replies, and the arteries run red. Little by little, the tick-tock gets faster, and so too does the bo-boom. Tick-tock. Bo-boom. Tick-tock. Bo-boom. My heart is almost beating at normal speed. Dr Madeleine gently removes her fingers from the gears. The clock slows down. She restarts the device; but as soon as she takes her fingers away, the heartbeat grows weaker. She’s like someone cuddling a bomb, wondering when it’ll explode.
Tick-tock. Bo-boom. Tick-tock. Bo-boom.
The first rays of light bounce off the snow and sneak in through the shutters. Dr Madeleine is exhausted. As for me, I’ve fallen asleep; perhaps I’m dead, because my heart stopped for too long.
Just then, a cuckoo sings so loudly in my chest that I cough in surprise. Eyes wide open, I spot Dr Madeleine with her arms in the air, like she’s just scored a penalty in a World Cup final.
She starts stitching my chest with the skill of an accomplished tailor; I’m not exactly battered but my skin looks old, with wrinkles like Charles Bronson. Stylish. The dial is protected by an enormous bandage.
Every morning, I need to be wound up with the key. Otherwise I risk drifting off to sleep for ever.
My mother says I look like a big snowflake with clock hands sticking out. Madeleine replies that it’s a good system for finding me again in a snowstorm.
It is midday and the doctor, with her warm habit of smiling in the midst of catastrophes, escorts this wisp of a girl to the door. My young mother walks slowly. Her lips tremble.
Off she heads into the distance, a dejected old woman in the body of a teenager. As she merges with the mist, she becomes a porcelain ghost. I will never set eyes on her again after this strange and miraculous day.