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Yet even these had collectors willing to pay for the experience—some people would collect anything.
    The great alluvial plains of the Waikato were once more submerged, this time with salt. The view from the Kaimai Ranges was no longer dairy farms but deforested ridges where sheep wandered, flexible hooves skittering over steep slopes, staring with vacant eyes over misty water. A calm surface on which to boat, the layered plains buried beneath while waves rolled in green chimes overhead. On clear days, when the air and the water were at their most still, shadowed remnants of drowned towns could be seen beneath—their gridded streets clogged with sand and spires reaching towards the sun. It was a popular place for diving, and Rosemary had swum there herself, clad in a sucking black suit and hearing her blood pulse, her heart beating like the ticking of a clock. A grandfather clock, with brass gongs kept free from seaweed and salt air, salt blood.
    There was once such a clock in her mother’s house; a clock that had been navigated through the northern islands, bodies fitted carefully around it in the carriage, hauling it all the way from the old home to the new.
    “I’ve always wanted a clock like that,” her mother had said in satisfaction, the trade concluded. And then the awkward trip home, balancing and maneuvering, the clock wrapped in blankets to keep it from blunting, from chipping, while the vertebrae of those around it stiffened and suffered.
    Rosemary’s childhood had been one of geometries. The placement of furniture in a too-small room; the packaging of dining suites in the shed where chairs bred in dark corners and waited to be rotated into service whenever their wood came into favor. “I’ve had enough of oak, but did you see that walnut?” The constant puzzle of fitting clocks and mirrors, old gramophones and rocking chairs into vehicles where they didn’t really fit, their new owner squashed around them, roping struts and awkward corners into place. Then the unwrapping and the cleaning, the smell of waxy polish and acidic brass cleaner, and the small itch of broken cobwebs in the air. They tickled Rosemary’s nose until even the thought of more furniture made her want to scratch.
    The possibility of mice and nursery rhymes, a vivid memory: when one wet night the cat found a nest of baby mice and brought them half dead, half drowned into the house to dry themselves on curtains and the dark carpet under the beds. Brought them in one by one and then left them to scatter, until days later scratching and skitterings unearthed them from new nests. All but one, who from distant scratching and muffled squeaks, was lost in the latest clock.
    “At least there’s a bright side,” said Rosemary, as the clock was left to wind down. (They were mindful of toothed and grinding wheels and what they could do to a small furry body trapped in the machinery with dangling tail and twitching whiskers. The clock could strike two at once, and no mouse would run down from it. Better to let it come out in its own time than to have to take everything out and clean it of gore gummed up in the cogs.)
    “It’s running behind as it is,” her mother complained. “I’d never get it going properly again.” Suspicious. “I’m sure it wasn’t like this when we bought it.”
    “At least it’s quiet now,” said Rosemary, of the clock. It had ridiculously high-pitched chimes, totally unsuited to the broad solidity of the casing, a half-meter wide and taller than she was. People sniggered when they heard it, and Rosemary, for the first time in her life, was willing victory to a rodent. Perhaps it could damage the innards beyond repair, turn the clock into a blessedly silent shell that loomed in the corner, wafting linseed and lanolin.
    “That bloody cat,” said her mother, bitterly, and the cat was banished from the house at night. There were no chimes, and no pitter-patter of small animal feet and no surprising finds of