WATCH

WATCH
My granddad was a watchmaker and I’ve been fascinated by watches since childhood. I learned everything I could about watches and joined gramp at his repair shop when I turned 20, after doing a BA in Literature. When gramp retired I took over the business. A few years later a mall appeared in our town and I moved into a tiny shop on the main artery of the mall. I sat in front of the shop facade and repaired watches, pocket watches, and the odd grandfather clock. I was a kind of living exhibit at the mall as people watched me repair watches and I watched people or read books when I had nothing to repair.
Gramp died when I was 26 and I took over his house with its huge garden. I was prone to neatness, because of my profession, but the garden inspired me to remove all straight beds and right angles, plant wildflowers and crooked bushes. My controlling instincts, though, made me create a Bonsai corner. The garden was a refuge for me, butterflies and birds. I spent my Sundays in it, my thoughts flying off in directions they never did the other six days of the week.
On Saturday evenings after the Mall closed, some of us went over to a bar next door. My only experiences with women originated from this. Once in awhile someone would take me home with them, through boredom, horniness, to fill in the time between romances, because of a broken heart…… you take your pick, I was grateful, never asked for their motives. I was never tempted to enter into a long-term relationship with any of these women.
I was busy in patches as there wasn’t a great deal of work repairing watches in these days of digital and throwaway electronics. I did put in a lot of new batteries in modern watches and repaired the odd old-fashioned watch. I had a low rent and had inherited enough money not to be reliant on my watchmaker income. I love reading and had a shelf above my workbench filled with books. This was visible through my window and I made certain the spines faced outwards, so passersby could read the titles.
The shop was an anachronism, as out of touch with the times as the watches brought in for repair and those on display. This made it a bit of a magnet for discerning or bored window shoppers who studied the watches and clocks, and often the titles of my books. Sometimes they would just drop in for a chat or to talk about a book they too had read. I have an eclectic taste in music, and always had something playing softly, this too elicited remarks and led to conversations with customers and browsers.
One afternoon while I was repairing an old pocket watch, a figure caught the corner of my eye and though couldn’t raise my head and I had my eyepiece on, I got a clear feeling that this figure was different to any I had encountered. It took me 12 more minutes to finish the delicate work I was doing and when I looked out nobody was there. I was disappointed, overwhelmed by an empty feeling and with no clue as to why this was happening, and then SHE was there, outside my window. Billie Holiday started singing “It had to be you” in the background on my CD player and all my watches and clocks stopped ticking.
A figure both tense and totally at ease with herself, she reminded me of a cross between Mona Lisa and a Jaguar and I longed to be the prey. She met my eyes, a faint smile flitted across her face; she examined the shop and spent time looking at my books. I opened the door and she entered, her heady scent wafting into my brain, and strolled around my tiny shop taking everything in while I took her in. She ran her fingers over my books, took some of them off the shelf and glanced at them and at me. My legs turned to jelly and I had to lean against a wall and tried to look casual. My legs were trembling so much that I dared not move away from the wall. I pretended that I was shaking my legs to the music, which was not convincing, as a Strauss waltz was now playing and my legs were doing a very fast jitterbug. Her scouting done, she turned around looked at me and her eyes filled with merriment at my obvious predicament. I was standing next to the door in my narrow shop but could not move enough to open the door as she moved toward it. She brushed against me quite firmly and opened the door. She kept her body against mine and looked up at my face with a grin, then exited and walked toward the exit.
On shaking legs I managed to wobble to my chair and sit down. Looking through my window I realized that she’d stopped, turned round and was looking at me with that grin. She gave me a small wave and walked out, slowly.
The rest of that day I could not do any work, my mind was in turmoil, my body consumed by an ague that made any watchmaking impossible. The rest of the week was a daze. I played one opera after the other attempting to instill courage in me, and tackle Mona Lisa Jaguar as she walked past my shop with that “big cat swallowed a huge canary” smile and a come hither look that would have moved glaciers from the North Pole to Antarctica in minutes. But not I, rooted to my chair I shook each time she appeared, made strangled noises and her arched questioning eyebrows served only to heighten my helplessness.
In an attempt to focus on the essentials, I only played the Italian operas which drip romance in every note and finally imagining Callas singing to me I managed to totter to the door and open it when she was outside. She looked at me with a dazzling smile and all I could do was emit a choking sound and support myself against the door post. This annoyed her and wrinkles appeared on her forehead. For some reason, these wrinkles fascinated me and I stared at her forehead. She snorted, wheeled around and undulated away from me clearly exasperated. I was crushed, felt totally inadequate and descended into a black hole. The next four days were sheer misery.
On the fifth day I was so drained by a lack of sleep and a total loss of appetite that I had turned into a Zombie. I did not bother to look at the mall and spent the day with my back to the facade. I heard the door open but didn’t turn around immediately,
and heard a voice that sounded like a cat purring ask “You are open, aren’t you?” Listlessly, I turned around and all my misery vanished. She stood before me and a smile lit my face, which she reciprocated.
Turning businesslike she opened her handbag and extracted an old pocket watch. “Can you repair this?” My professionalism kicked in and I examined the watch with hands that gradually lost their tremor. It looked in bad shape externally, and when I opened it my worst fears were confirmed. It was definitely in the worst condition of any watch I’d ever seen and it was only because is was the Jaguar that I agreed to repair it, and said “I’ll repair it, but it will take time.” She said she’d come by and monitor my progress, then meandered through my shop making my body tremble again, so I leaned against a wall until she left the shop.
I had a purpose in life again. I took the watch apart, the brush strokes to clean it were sensual as I dreamed of the Jaguar’s figure. I then set about finding spare parts, ordering those I did not have and making those that were unavailable. It was a labour of love and lust.
The Jaguar came by the next week on Wednesday. She said that she was away for the rest of the week but needed the watch on Sunday. Dismayed, I explained that I could finish it by Saturday but the mall was closed on Sundays.
“ Give me your address and I’ll come by on Sunday afternoon” she said. With trembling hands I wrote my address down and handed it to her, the paper fluttering wildly, as was my heart.
I spent my evenings after work cleaning my already spotless house, rearranging the furniture, weeding the few beds that did not have wildflowers and generally being obsessive.
I tossed and turned most of Saturday night and got out of bed early on Sunday. I placed the watch, now a gleaming Phoenix, artfully, in a velvet lined case with the lid open. I was too jittery to eat much for lunch and paced through the house waiting for her to arrive.
At 2 o’clock a car pulled up in front of my driveway and the Jaguar emerged in a summer dress, transparent enough so that one could have read her thoughts. On seeing her standing on my lawn, the Sun’s rays teasing through the gossamer cloth, i was incapable of thought myself. I stood on the porch, transfixed.
She meandered through the garden, pausing to sniff flowers and spent a long time with the Bonsai, gently touching the foliage and stroking the trunks. This made me lose the last vestiges of self control and my legs turned to jelly. She finally approached the porch, stopped a couple of yards from me and smiled. Mesmerised I walked toward her, forgot the porch steps and fell before her. She laughed with a melodious burble and helped me to my feet, something I could not have done unaided.
Stepping past me she walked up the steps and entered the house with me following on shaky legs. The house got a thorough inspection, room by room, shelves and cupboards; the refrigerator was looked through with care. Finally she came back into the front room where the watch lay. I picked up the case and proudly handed it to her.
Taking the case casually, she went into the bedroom and threw the case with the watch out of the window. I was shocked. Kicking off her sandals she pushed the straps holding up her dress off her shoulder. It slid to the floor; she turned her face toward me and asked “ Are you just going to watch?”

