David was a good boy from a good home. He had no legs, which made him an object of endless ridicule at school. The other children called him 'David's got no legs', and 'Wheely not very good', as he got around using a shiny wheelchair. David didn't show any emotion at these taunts, he just escaped into his inner world of clocks. The first clock David ever saw was his mother, he supposed. It seemed that this must have been so. What with it being her name. Possibly his father was the second clock. The first real and actual clock-clock would probably have been the one on the dashboard of the Escort, though there was no real way of knowing if that was true.

His first memory of a clock was that of a trip to the local garden centre. David's parents used to take him along when he was still in a push chair, and leave him alone outside in the drizzle amongst the potted hedges. The clock had been hung from a tree by an old woman shopping for rose cuttings, and was quite large. She had turned to look at David in his push chair and had begun to rap, ornamenting her words using all the hand gestures of the day. David realised several years later that the old woman must have been modelling her behaviour on Flavor Flav, the popular rapping artist.

His love of clocks blossomed from that moment on. Such an exciting world of mystery and enchantment. His parents wouldn't allow him near clocks, however, as they thought that being named Clock and having an interest in clocks was just a little morsel strange. They were quite right of course, but having no legs and being called David Clock was already a suitably strange path to be set upon in life, reasoned David, and they soon gave in to his incessant shrieking by buying him a shed with clocks in it. David Clock had reasonable parents. David spent most of his spare time out in the shed, which had clocks in it.

The older David grew the more he devoted more and more and more of his waking hours to the pursuit of looking at clocks more. More clocks. He would wheel himself around into a comfortable angle to view the largest number of clocks in one glance, and just sit there in his special chair with his fingers templed and mouth agape. Some of the clocks ticked noisily, in unison or at odds with one another. A sound which most people would have found quite maddening, but one that David found very soothing in a way. Tick-tock.

He sat in his shed, grinning, in the close afternoons of summer, whispering 'clock' 'clock' 'clock' in time with the loudest of ticks. David didn't go to school anymore, his teachers preferred him not to. His mother brought him Marmite sandwiches and orange juice on a tray at about 7:30 each evening, but soon he argued that she distracted him from his clocks and so a small letterbox sized flap was installed in the door to the shed by his father. In this manner, food, messages and more clocks could be passed to David without interruption. It was David's dream that one day he might be the president of the biggest clock factory in the world, at which he could commission and build his own special clocks and torture pilots. He never realised that dream, however, as he slid sideways into quicksand on a rare day out from his shed, when he was twelve, and never was seen again. His shed was condemned and buried at sea. By the police.