Gauge Read Free Page B

minute,” he hurred. He glanced at what she’d written. He didn’t look impressed.
    Lucy wrote the words ‘stock cubes’ underneath ‘bacon’. According to her mother, stock cubes were good with everything. Rice pudding? she wondered. Would they work with milky desserts?

    She sighed. This was ridiculous. Her life was now a series of silly thoughts. But as she glanced at Gauge again and saw the willingness to be helpful in his violet eyes (a quality that every special dragon possessed) suddenly an idea came to her.
    “Can you mend clocks?” she asked.
    Gauge tilted his head.
    “You know, can you take them apart and put them back together and make them, y’know, tick properly again? Or bong?”
    Gauge tapped his foot. He wasn’t sure, he said – especially about the bonging. He wasn’t meant to be a fixing dragon.
    “But you could try,” said Lucy. “If I took you to the clock tower you might be able to make it properly chime again. Then we wouldn’t have to do the protest, would we?”
    Before Gauge could answer, the doorbell rang and Liz let Henry Bacon into the house. Lucy heard Henry saying that Liz might be interested to know that tomorrow afternoon, in the library, a Mr Trustable of the Scrubbley Town Council was going to present the new plans for the improved clock tower, and would she like to attend? Liz said she would definitely like to attend. Lucy gulped. She felt the end of her pencil snap. She knew exactly what her mother was thinking.
    Then Henry said, “Can you help with this, Mrs P? Trying to get a battery into my pocket watch. Very fiddly. Fingers a bit shaky.”
    “Oh, Lucy’s the expert at that kind of thing,” Liz said.
    Hardly had she called upstairs before Lucy was in the kitchen, panting, “I’ll do it!” She shot back up with the watch and the battery before Liz had had time to switch the kettle on.
    “There,” she said to Gauge, putting it at his feet. “Practise on that.”
    Gauge looked at it doubtfully. It was a beautiful old watch. It had a cream-coloured face with golden numerals. He didn’t want to break it, he said.
    Lucy tutted and turned the watch over. Henry had already removed the back plate and flipped the old battery out of its housing. “Just look,” she said. “It works off one of these.” She broke open the new battery packet. “I expect the library clock’s just got…a bigger battery, that’s all. Here.” She handed it to him.

    Gauge took it between his paws. The battery immediately began to crackle and an arc of blue light sparked between his ear tips. A puff of smoke came out of his nostrils. The end of his tail began to jiggle.
    “Are you all right?” asked Lucy.
    Gauge nodded and put the battery down. Gwendolen, Lucy’s own special dragon, who sat in the shadow of her bedside lamp, asked if she might have a go at holding it. Lucy said no and tapped the watch again.
    Gauge peered at the workings. He could see two metal wheels with zigzagging teeth all around their perimeters. The wheels were meshed together. Neither wheel was moving, but it was obvious to Gauge that they would do if this energy cell that Lucy called a battery was to power them. He drummed his claws. He felt sure there were more workings underneath the wheels and pointed to another circle of metal that had a straight groove cut across it. There were lots of these, of different sizes, all over the back of the watch.
    “They’re called screws,” said Lucy. “If you turn them, they sort of open.”
    Gauge’s eyes lit up in wonder. This was a far more interesting timing machine than the clock in the kitchen. He pointed to the screws again, one by one, and to his amazement they began to unwind by themselves.
    “Wow, that’s clever,” gasped Lucy.
    Now Gauge grew bolder still. As the screws fell out of their holes, he flipped aside the covering they’d been holding in place to reveal an assembly of wheels and cogs and levers and springs.
    Before long, it was all in pieces