Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [148]
A beeping sound. Almost like…
I closed my eyes.
“Hap Thompson!” a tinny voice squealed suddenly, cutting effortlessly through the noise in the bar. Then it went back to beeping, getting louder and louder, before sirening my name again. I tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t going to go away. It never does.
Within a minute the beeping was so loud that the mariachi band began turning in my direction. Gradually they stopped playing, the instruments fading out one by one as if their players were being serially dropped off a cliff. I swore viciously and ground my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Heads turned, and a silence descended on the bar. The last person to shut up was the singing businessman. He was now standing weaving on the table with his arms outstretched. He would have looked quite like an opera singer in that moment, had his face not been more reminiscent of a super-middleweight boxer who’d thrown too many fights.
Taking a deep breath, I turned round.
A channel had cleared in the crowd behind me, and I could see straight to the bar. There, standing carefully so as to avoid the pools of spilt beer, was my alarm clock.
“Oh, hello,” it said, into the quiet. “Thought you hadn’t heard me.”
“What,” I said, “the fuck do you want?”
“It’s time to get up, Hap.”
“I am up,” I said. “I’m in a bar.”
“Oh,” said the clock, looking around. “So you are.” It paused for a moment, before surging on. “But it’s still time to get up. You can snooze me once more if you want, but you really ought to be out and about by half past nine.”
“Look, you little bastard,” I said, “I am up. It’s a quarter past nine in the evening”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve been through this.”
“I have the time as 9:17 precisely. AM.” The clock angled itself so that I—and everyone else—could read its display clearly.
“You’ve always got the time as AM!” I shouted, standing to point at it. “That’s because you’re broken you useless piece of shit.”
“Hey, man,” said one of the tourists at my table. “Little guy’s only trying to do his job. No call for language like that.” There was a low rumble of agreement from nearby tables.
“That’s right,” agreed the clock, two square inches of injured innocence on two spindly little legs. “Just trying to do my job, that’s all. Let’s see how you like it if I don’t wake you up, huh? We know what happens then, don’t we?”
“What?” asked a woman at the other side of the room, her eyes sorrowful. “Does he mistreat you?” With my jaw clamped firmly shut, I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter off the table and glared at the woman. She stared bravely back at me, and sniffed. “He looks the type.”
“He hits me. He even throws me out the window.” This was greeted by low mutters from some quarters, and I decided it was time to go. “Of moving cars…”
The crowd stirred angrily. I considered telling them that having a broken am/pm indicator was the least of this clock’s problems, that it was also prone, on a whim, to wake me up at regular intervals through the small hours and thus lose me a night’s work, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Trust the little bastard to catch up with me in the one bar in the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk towards the door feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Wait, Hap! Wait for me!”
At the sound of the clock’s little feet landing on the ground I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the short passageway outside. I clanged through the swing doors at the end, hoping one of the cops would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.
It didn’t work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I’d flung it out the window (for