Striking Twelve in Phnom Penh

So there’s this grandfather clock that had never struck twelve. Not when I was three and first became aware of its doleful chimes from a nook in my grandmother’s house.

Not when I was thirty and the clock took up residence in my father’s house after his mother’s funeral.

Not as centre-piece of my Phnom Penh apartment, the clock passing to me after my father’s funeral.

My father, dab hand at fixing things, couldn’t fix it. The twelfth chime eluded even him and his many attempts at rectification with screwdrivers, pliers and probes.

Ten the clock chimed at ten. Eleven at eleven. Then, oh dear, eleven at twelve. And, heaven be praised, one at one. Day after day, year after year, century after century.

Two centuries actually. My father had stuck a Post-It note - still there - on the inside of the mahogany door:
“circa 1800, made by Jonathan White, Lincoln”

Though good at Post-It notes, my father failed at chimes. As had, apparently, his father, my grandfather; his grandfather, my great-grandfather; all the way back to – who knows? Maybe Jonathan White was a prankster-clockmaker, determined to torment his customers – in this case great-great-great-great-etc-grandfather Robinson - with slumberless nights, waiting for a chime that never came.

Roll of drums, raise the curtain and enter – Puthea Chin, Cambodian, at 19 never having seen a grandfather clock in his life.

Puthea works wonders as a designer for my film company. He conjures illusions out of nothing and weeny budgets, enhancing and repairing what exists already. Fixing, in other words.

Fixing! What took me so long to put two and twelve together?

For three days, bits spread around him as if from an explosion, Puthea toiled while the clock tolled – eleven, eleven, always damned eleven.

For three days he smiled enigmatically, delicate fingers calmly filing, oiling, massaging Jonathan's jigsaw. Eleven, eleven, always damned …

... twelve! On the fourth day, twelve. Not just once, again and again as the clock hands coincided at the apogee.

Separated by two centuries, Jonathan White and Puthea Chin, prankster and perfectionist, Lincolnshire clockmaker and Cambodian genius, had been as firmly united as me and my slumber.

***