Raising A City
The pocket watch had been sitting in a box of odds and ends at the church jumble sale, priced at fifty pence and clearly nobody’s idea of a bargain. Nadia bought it anyway, mostly because of the engraving on the back – a looping, old-fashioned letter N – and because when she held it to her ear, it ticked with a strange, unhurried confidence, as though it knew something the rest of the world didn’t.
It was three days before she noticed the fault. Whatever time she set the watch to, and however carefully she wound it, it settled – always, without fail – six minutes behind the clock on her bedroom wall. She reset it every morning. Every evening, it had slipped back the same six minutes, as if time itself refused to run any faster for this particular watch. Irritated, on the fourth evening, Nadia gripped the little winding crown and turned it firmly backwards instead, muttering that if the watch wanted to lose time, she would help it along.
The room did not so much go dark as go soft at the edges, colours bleeding gently into one another like a photograph left out in the rain. When it cleared, Nadia was standing in exactly the same spot – except the biscuit she had just eaten was somehow back on the plate, whole and untouched, and her little brother was saying, word for word, something he had already said six minutes earlier. She understood, with a lurch somewhere beneath her ribs, exactly what had happened, several seconds before she was able to believe it.
She tested it cautiously over the following days, always turning the crown backwards at quiet, unremarkable moments. She caught a glass before her brother knocked it from the table. She remembered, on the second pass, exactly which answer their teacher wanted for a question she’d fumbled the first time. Small things bent easily to a second attempt. It was, she began to realise with mounting frustration, only the small things that did.
The real test came on a Tuesday, in the school corridor, when she said something cruel and thoughtless to her friend Priya – a joke about Priya forgetting her lines in the school play the week before, blurted out in front of half their class, that landed nothing like a joke at all, and left Priya’s face falling in a way Nadia would replay for the rest of the day even without the watch’s help. She turned the crown back the moment she was alone. The corridor reassembled itself. Priya approached again, exactly as before. And Nadia, throat tight, opened her mouth – and heard herself say almost the same unkind thing, only slightly softer, as though some current beneath the moment was determined to carry her back to the same place regardless of how hard she swam against it.
She tried four more times. Four more times, some version of the same careless words came out, whatever she intended beforehand. It was only on the fifth attempt, when she stopped trying to simply avoid the moment and instead properly imagined how Priya must have felt hearing it the first time, that different words finally arrived – an apology, awkward and real, offered before the joke could even begin to form.
The watch stopped losing its six minutes after that, keeping perfect time for the first time since Nadia had owned it, and she never worked out whether the fault had somehow fixed itself, or whether she simply stopped needing it to. She kept it anyway, in the bottom of her school bag, no longer as a way of undoing what she’d already done, but as a small, ticking reminder that some things cannot be rewound – they can only be done properly, the first time you get the chance.
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