“The Trench Coat Clock Shop,” Lisa said.
“Exactly. We’ll sell the stamp, take the bus to the airport, buy tickets on the next flight to Paris, check in and, presto, we’re there.”
Lisa chewed on her lower lip as she considered what Nilly had said. Presto this and presto that, she thought. When Nilly talked he had this way of making things that were actually very complex seem so simple.
“So?” Nilly said. “What do you say?”
Lisa looked down at the jar in her hand. The strawberry-coloured powder sparkled, beautiful and mysterious, in the moonlight. Disappeared in time? Time soap? French nose clips? This was all too weird.
“I think it would be best if we showed the postcard to my dad after all,” she said hesitantly.
“Best?” Nilly asked. “If that were best, Doctor Proctor would have suggested it in his card!”
“I know that, but be a little realistic, Nilly. Look at us! What are we? Two kids.”
Nilly sighed heavily. Then he put a hand on Lisa’s shoulder and gave her a serious look. Then he took a deep breath and proclaimed in an unctuous voice, “Listen, Lisa. We’re a team. And we don’t care if everyone else thinks we’re a pathetic minor-league team. Because we know something they don’t know.” Nilly was now so full of emotion that his voice had started to tremble a little. “We know, my dear Lisa . . . we know . . . we . . . uh, what was that again?”
“We know,” Lisa took over, “that when friends promise never to stop helping each other, one plus one plus one is much more than three.”
“Exactly!” Nilly said. “So, what do you say? Yes or no?”
Lisa looked at Nilly for a long time. Then she said one word: “Poncho.”
“Poncho?” Nilly repeated, confused.
“I’m bringing my rain poncho. You said we can pack things that start with P and from what I’ve heard Paris is crawling with wet platypuses these days. I do not want to be soaked with platypus spray every time one climbs out of the Seine and shakes itself off.”
Nilly blinked a couple of times. Then he finally understood that she was agreeing to go.
“Yippee!” he cheered and started jumping up and down. “We’re going to Paris. Cancan dancers! Croissants! Crêpes! Crème brûlée! The Champs-Élysées!”
Nilly continued to rattle off Parisian things that started with C until Lisa finally told him enough already, it was time for bed.
AFTER LISA SAID good night to her parents and her father shut her bedroom door, she sat in her bed like she usually did and looked over at the yellow house on the other side of Cannon Avenue, at the grey curtains on the first floor. She knew that soon a reading light would turn on in there, be pointed at the curtains and then Nilly would start his evening shadow play, with Lisa as his only audience. This night his tiny fingers made shadows that turned into a line of kicking cancan dancers on the curtain fabric. And while Lisa watched the shadows she thought about the story Doctor Proctor had told them about Juliette’s mysterious disappearance so many years ago. The strange story had gone more or less like this:
JULIETTE AND DOCTOR Proctor met each other in Paris and fell in love. One night, after they had been dating for a few weeks, Juliette came and knocked on his door and just came right out and asked him if he wanted to get married. Doctor Proctor was thrilled, but he was also surprised, since she wanted them to get on his motorcycle right then, that very night, drive all the way to Rome and get married there as soon as possible. Juliette wouldn’t give any explanation for why she was in such a hurry, so the professor packed his only suit and started up the motorcycle without another word.
He actually had an inkling of what was going on. Juliette’s father was a baron. And even though it had been a long time since the family of Baron Margarine had been rich, the baron did not think that a relatively unsuccessful Norwegian inventor was good enough for his Baronette Juliette. But now Juliette and Proctor were driving through the night, through France, on their way to get married. They had just filled up with petrol in a village by the Italian border when they came to a bridge. That was where it happened. Exactly what had happened, Proctor never actually found out. Everything went black and when he woke up again, he was lying on the asphalt and his throat hurt. A tearful Juliette was bending over him, and behind her he saw a black limousine approaching. Juliette said it was her father the baron’s car and that she had to go and talk to her father alone. She told Proctor to drive across the bridge to the other side of the border and wait for her there. Proctor, shaken and discombobulated as he was, did as she asked without protesting. But when he turned his motorcycle around at the other end of the bridge, he saw Juliette climbing into the limousine, which then backed up over the bridge the way it had come and, once it was off the bridge, turned around and drove off. And that was the last Doctor Proctor saw of Juliette.
Lisa sighed. The rest of the professor’s story about his early romance had been just as sad.
After he had waited for Juliette on the other side of the border for three days, Proctor tried calling her at home from a payphone at a café. The baron himself had answered the phone and explained that Juliette had come to her senses and realised that it would be quite unsuitable for her to marry Proctor. That she was sorry, but that the whole situation was so awkward that she’d rather not talk to him – and certainly didn’t want to see him again. That that would be best.
Broken-hearted and exhausted, Doctor Proctor had driven his motorcycle back to Paris, but when he finally walked into the lobby of his hotel there was a policeman there waiting for him. He handed Proctor a letter and curtly asked him to read it. The letter said that Doctor Proctor had been expelled both from his university and the country of France on suspicion of terrorism and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. The suspicion stemmed from an experiment in the university’s chemistry lab in which Proctor and another Norwegian student had almost blown up the entire university.
Proctor had explained to the policeman that it had just been one of those things that happen when you’re trying to invent travelling powder for a time machine, which is what they had been working on. And that it really had just been “an ever so teensy-weensy gigantic explosion”. Somehow his explanation didn’t help at all and the policeman ordered Proctor up to his room to pack his bags. Proctor was pretty sure Baron Margarine was behind the expulsion, but he didn’t really have much choice.
So, late one night many years ago, a young man, weighed down by a broken heart, arrived in Oslo and eventually moved into the crooked, secluded house at the end of Cannon Avenue. Mostly because it was cheap, didn’t have a phone and had actually never been visited by anyone. It was perfect for someone who didn’t want to talk to anyone other than himself anymore, and otherwise just spend his time inventing stuff.
From her own red house, Lisa looked over at the professor’s blue house and wondered if everything that was happening now might actually be her fault. After all, she’d been the one who had insisted that Doctor Proctor go back to Paris to try to find Juliette Margarine, hadn’t she? Yessirree. She had sent him right into trouble, whatever type of trouble it turned out to be.
Nilly’s finger shadows across the street finished their dance and took a bow. Then they did their normal good-night signal, two rabbit ears that waved up and down, and then the light went out.
Lisa sighed.
She didn’t sleep much that night. She lay there thinking about cellars that were much too dark, Peruvian spiders that were much too hairy, cities that were much too big and all the things that would surely go wrong.
MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE street, Nilly had one of the best nights of sleep he’d ever had, dreaming happily about flying through the air powered by farts, breaking mysterious codes, rescuing brilliant professors and all the things that would most definitely – at least almost definitely – go right. But, most of all, he dreamed that he was dancing the cancan on the stage at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, where an enthusiastic audience and all the dancing girls w
ere clapping to the beat and yelling, “Nil-ly! Nil-ly!”
Trench Coat Clock Shop
MRS STROBE’S EYES peered down her unusually long nose, through her unusually thick glasses that sat on the very tip of her nose and focused on the little beings in front of her in the classroom and latched on to the smallest of them all:
“Mister Nilly!” Her voice crashed down like a whip.
“Mrs Strobe!” the response came crashing back from the tiny student. “How can I be of service to you on this unusually beautiful Friday morning, a morning whose beauty is exceeded only, my teacher and supplier of intellectual sustenance, by your own magnificent face?”
As usual, Nilly’s answer irritated Mrs Strobe. His answers irritated her because they made her feel guilty. And also a tiny bit flattered.
“First of all, you can stop whistling that ridiculous tune . . .” she began.
“Not so loud, Mrs Strobe!” Nilly whispered, his eyes wide with shock. “That’s the Marseillaise. Aren’t we studying French history this month? If anyone from their embassy were to hear you call the French national anthem a ridiculous tune, no doubt they would immediately report you to the president, who would declare war on Norway on the spot. French men love to go to war, even though they’re not particularly good at it. For example, have you ever heard of the Hundred Years’ War they fought against England, Mrs Strobe?”
The whole class laughed while Mrs Strobe drummed her nails against her desk and contemplated the strange little boy who had been in her class since the spring.
“If you had been paying attention instead of whistling, you would realise that the Hundred Years’ War in France is exactly what I’ve been talking about, Mr Nilly. For example, what did I just say about Joan of Arc?”
“Joan of Arc,” Nilly repeated, scratching the sideburns by his left ear thoughtfully. “Hm, sounds familiar. A woman, right?”
“Yes.”
“A famous cancan dancer?”
“Nilly!”
“Okay, okay. Can you narrow it down for me a little?”
Mrs Strobe sighed. “Joan of Arc was a nice, pious village girl. As a young girl she received a mysterious message to find the French crown prince, who was hiding somewhere in France, and help him.”
“Sounds very familiar,” Nilly said. “She didn’t by any chance get the message on a postcard from Paris with a rare stamp on it from 1888, did she?”
“What are you talking about? Joan of Arc’s message came from angels talking inside her head!”
“Sorry, Mrs Strobe, just a short circuit in my tiny, and yet very complex, brain.”
Nilly glanced over at Lisa, who had her head down on her desk and her hands over her head again.
“It won’t happen again, Mrs Strobe,” Nilly said. “So, what happened to this Joan of Arc?”
Mrs Strobe leaned over her desk.
“That is precisely what I was about to tell you. Joan of Arc found the crown prince and they fought the English together. That young teenage girl put on armour, learned to use a sword like a master and led the French troops into battle. To this day, she remains the great national heroine of France. Write that down, everyone!”
“Wonderful!” Nilly exclaimed. “The good girl won. I love a story with a happy ending!”
Mrs Strobe lowered her long, protruding nose so that it almost touched her desk and peered at the class over the top of her glasses.
“Well, there are happy endings and there are happy endings. She was taken prisoner and sold to the English, who sentenced her to death for witchcraft. Then they invited all the inhabitants of Rouen to come to the Old Market Square, where they tied her to a stake, tossed wood on a bonfire, lit it . . .”
There was a high-pitched, almost plaintive outcry from somewhere in the classroom, “. . . but then, just in the nick of time, the crown prince rescued her!”
Everyone turned to look at Lisa, who was holding her hands over her mouth in horror. No one – not even Lisa – was used to Lisa having an outburst like that.
“Look closely at the picture in your history book, Lisa,” Mrs Strobe said. “You can see the flames reaching all the way up to the top of Joan of Arc’s white dress. Does it look like she got rescued?”
“No!” the class shouted in unison.
“And she didn’t,” Mrs Strobe said. “She burned to death and they tossed her charred body into the river. Joan of Arc was nineteen years old.”
Lisa looked at the illustration in her history book. The girl’s face reminded her of another face in another picture. The young Juliette Margarine in the sidecar of Doctor Proctor’s motorcycle. Lisa’s eyes teared up at the thought of the awful thing that had happened.
“Of course the girl died,” Nilly said.
Mrs Strobe took off her glasses. “Why do you say that, Nilly?”
“To be a real hero, you have to be really dead.”
The class laughed, but Mrs Strobe nodded at this. “Maybe so,” she mumbled. “Maybe so.”
And, with that, the bell rang and even before Mrs Strobe got to the h in “have a good weekend”, the first student was out of the door. Because this was the last class on a Friday and now they were all free.
Lisa was putting on her jacket out in the hallway when she overheard some of the other girls talking excitedly about some party or other that it seemed like they’d all been invited to. Except for her. And Nilly, of course. She’d heard them whispering about him too. That he was so little and strange and said and did such crazy things that they didn’t really understand.
“Hi!”
Nilly jumped up onto the bench next to her so he could reach his coat, which was hanging from a coat hook on the wall.
The other girls huddled together, whispering and snickering. Then the bravest one turned to face Lisa and Nilly, while the others hid behind her and laughed.
“So, do you two turtledoves have anything exciting planned for the weekend?”
“First of all, my dear girl, you have no idea what turtledoves are,” Nilly said, buttoning up his jacket, which he did quickly since there was room for only two buttons on it. “But, if you do have space in your brain, you can of course try to store the information that turtledoves are owl-like doves with turtle shells that live by scratching out the eyes of their own young. Second of all, we were invited to some horrifically boring party here in town that we just can’t be bothered to attend. Oslo is such a boring little city,” Nilly yawned.
“Boring like you,” the girl said, lowering her hands, but it didn’t seem like she quite knew what else to say. So she said, “Hello!”
“Yeah, HELLO!” the other girls repeated behind her back. But one of them just couldn’t stop herself from asking, “So . . . so what are you guys going to do then?”
“We . . .” Nilly said, hopping down off the bench to stand next to Lisa, “are going to the Moulin Rouge in Paris to dance the cancan. Have an exciting weekend here in town, kids.”
Lisa didn’t look at them, but she knew that the girls were standing there gaping as she and Nilly turned their backs and walked out into the glittering autumn sunlight.
NILLY AND LISA walked over to the bus stop and caught the number seventeen to Oslo City Hall. There they got off and found their way to Rosenkrantz Street, which is a heavily trafficked and rather narrow street with lots of shops and plenty of people on the pavements. On one of the narrowest stretches of Rosenkrantz Street, above a door painted bright red, there was a little display window crammed full of clocks and, sure enough, a sign hanging out front that read TRENCH COAT CLOCK SHOP.
It turned out that the springs in the closing mechanism on the front door were so tight that they had to push against them with their full weight. And, even then, they only just barely managed to force the door open. The springs squeaked in protest, as if they really had no desire to let Nilly and Lisa in. Once the two had finally made it inside and let go of the door, it slammed shut behind them with an angry bang. In an instant all the noise from the s
treet behind them was gone and all that could be heard were clocks ticking. Tick-tock-tick et cetera. They looked around. Although the sun was shining outside, it was strangely dark inside the deserted shop. It was as if they’d suddenly walked into a different world. There seemed to be hundreds of clocks in here! They were everywhere – on the walls, on shelves and tables.
“Hello?” Nilly called.
No one answered.
“These clocks all look so old,” Lisa whispered. “And so strange. Look at that one over there, the one with the second hand. It’s running . . . backwards.”
Just then, a groaning, screeching squeak, like from an ungreased wheel, became audible through the ticking.
Nilly and Lisa both stared in the direction the sound was coming from, the other end of the shop, where there was an orange curtain with an elephant on it.
“What’s—” Lisa started to whisper, but just then the curtain was yanked aside.
Lisa and Nilly gasped. A figure came careening towards them. It was a tall woman – taller than either of them had ever seen before – and everything about her was thin, elongated and sharp. Apart from her hairdo, which looked like one of those tumble-weeds that rolls around in the desert and takes root wherever the wind blows it. This specific tumbleweed had taken root over a face whose skin was stretched so tight it was impossible to say how old it was. The face was also decorated with plenty of black make-up and bright red lipstick covering its thin lips. The woman was wearing a floor-length, shiny black leather trench coat, which was unbuttoned, thus revealing the cause of both the grating, squeaking noise and her speed. She had a wooden leg and on the end of her wooden leg she wore a roller skate that was obviously in need of a little oil. With her other foot she kicked herself towards them, stopping all of a sudden, glaring down at them and saying in a voice so hoarse and whispery that it sounded like wind whistling through an old shack, “You’re in the wrong place, kids. Out you go.”