Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott Page B

sake!
– was rubbish; the ramblings of some sort of dementia.
    And yet, how could he have known about the boat in the fog? Gordon would have died before he would have told anyone about that. And something had happened in the room.
    He became aware that as he stood there the green man had come and gone. He roused himself from his reverie and when the lights changed again he strode off.
    It was a crisp autumn evening, and from George Street he could see the city strung with lights all the way to the Firth of Forth. He continued down the long slope towards home, turning along Northumberland Street with its tall houses. He always liked to glance in at the windows as he passed. Lots of folk never seemed to draw their curtains nowadays and he loved that snapshot of other people’s lives. He looked in at kitchens, playrooms and sitting rooms, and some that were definitely drawing rooms. There were families eating or talking or watching television, and one household was having some sort of mock-Victorian evening, with a piano and costumes and everything.
    He stopped dead, looking at the gaslights flickering in the drawing room, and the half a dozen men and women gathered round the piano.
    This room wasn’t like this!
    He knew this street, played his spying game here two or three times a week. Everything about this room was wrong: the heavy curtains, the fire, the lights, even the paintings.
    I will not panic.
    He forced himself to close his eyes, counted to ten and opened them. A man turned the music for the woman playing the piano. Gordon turned away and walked as fast as he could without running to the end of the street, and stood at the corner taking in cars and electric street lamps and normally dressed people.
    You can only deny the truth for so long.

LIES
    David was drowning in sleep. Every night now, he went to bed yawning ostentatiously as early as he reasonably could, and every morning he shut his ears to the sound of the alarm clock.
    His days were increasingly focused on the moment when he could lie down in bed, switch off the light and launch himself willingly into the void of the dream.
    He’d stopped being afraid of the Lightning Man; now he was little more than a distraction. He was there each night, sometimes on the lake, at other times already sitting on the shore. He would talk to David for a few minutes, mostly asking him questions for which he had no answers, about what it was like to live in a world in which time was so constrained. David replied as best he could, but all the time he was waiting for the sounds that told him his mother was approaching.
    For the first few days he’d done little more than hold her, unable to stop the tears that slid down his face, but gradually he began to believe that she would be there the next night, and the next, and to talk to her. She asked questions as well, and these he had no trouble answering: they were about his dad and school and Kate and his other friends. She wanted to know about his life since she’d gone.
    Time passed at a different rate in this dream world,where lightning coiled upwards like smoke from the man who sat silent, white teeth showing, watching and listening through the constant growl of his own thunder. He knew he slept for hours and never woke before the alarm forced him, but although he felt as though the dream had lasted all night, he never felt he’d had more than an hour or so with his mother.
    It wasn’t enough.
    He found it hard to be enthusiastic about school, or football practice. Nothing seemed very important compared with the time he spent with his mother. He’d missed her so much and for so long, without realising quite how deep the tear in his heart was. Now by some miracle he had her back every night.
    He should have rushed to thank Mr Flowerdew for giving him the courage to look up, but something he couldn’t put into words stopped him. He told no one, not even Kate, what was going on.
    She had asked, of course, as soon as she