Upon sighting Sabin he slowly – so slowly – held out his jewel-encrusted hands and warmly clasped his arm.

'Ah, my loyal clockwinder!' he exclaimed. 'How – how -' But here he lost the thread of this simple exercise in conversation, and his unfocussed eyes drifted up to study a lizard on the ceiling as he sought to regain his topic.

'How runs your kingdom?' prompted Sabin.

'Indeed.' The Sultan smiled vaguely. Behind him, several members of his retinue had begun to fall asleep standing up, their chins slumping on their breastplates.

'Why, this room is the heart of your kingdom, sire,' said Sabin, bowing low. 'If you would care to step upon my platform and listen carefully, you may hear its beat.'

And with that he climbed the steps and cupped his ear, bidding the Sultan to follow his example. Unaware of the impertinence, Shay-Tarrazin followed Sabin's example and listened, and came to realise that the ticking of the thousand clocks mirrored the slow, slow beat of his own weary heart, and now the concept of time that had so long eluded him became clear. For his fogged brain realised that true time was a personal thing, the measurement of each man's life on earth.

And with that, the first of the thousand clocks stopped. The Sultan and his retinue noticed nothing, but Sabin's finely tuned ear registered the absence.

Then another clock stopped.

And another.

And another.

And another.

So that the dense sound of ticking was gradually stripped away, like members of a performing orchestra laying down their instruments one after the next. The Sultan was paralysed by the phenomenon. With each stopped clock his heart grew a thousandth part weaker. After eight years, Sabin was winding the clocks so little that time's elasticity had been stretched to breaking point.

Shay-Tarrazin's eyes widened in horror as he dimly realised that his life must cease with the stopping of the final clock, and that for him, as it eventually did for everyone, time would soon terminate altogether. The ticking grew thinner and thinner as pendulums stilled, movements stopped moving, gems and sand and water ceased to pour, suns and moons no longer followed one another, and as the hands of the last clock ceased their movement around its calibrated surface, the Sultan's heartbeat demurred to the point of extinction, his body seizing into silence. He fell gently from the platform, cushioned by his saffron robes, into the great gold-filigree case of his best-loved Ormolu clock, where he lay unaided by his snoozing retinue.

As Sabin was the only man in the kingdom who had learned to master time, he assumed the responsibility of helping to bury the Sultan and attend his mourning rituals. Even the Grand Vizier (once he could be found and woken) agreed that this was appropriate and seemly.

The clocks were never wound again. The once-great empire of Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin never emerged from its reverie. Sabin Darr was finally granted the freedom of the kingdom. He resolved to return to his village, and requested the slave-girl Safieh as a reward for his unstinting loyalty to the Sultan. The Grand Vizier was happy to grant him this, and to seal good fortune on the couple's union, presented them with a golden clock.

The hands of the clock did not move. Its interior mechanism had been removed, and the case had been filled with diamonds and sapphires.

For Sabin Darr, who had lost his family and his fingers, but not his sense of time, the world started to revolve once more.

He had been gingerly attempting to unfold a copy of the Sunday Times, but the newspaper snapped apart in his hands and shattered into dozens of pieces. Kallie swore angrily as he shovelled the shards into a pile with his boot; some of the broken edges were razor-sharp. There was nothing else to read in the apartment except his father's books, but there was no way of getting them off the shelves without a blowtorch, which he figured would somewhat defeat the object. Someone had given him some old magazines, but these were now stuck fast to the kitchen table, their covers rippled together in a lurid mosaic.

Kallie wondered how much longer Bennett would be. He had gone to the shops three days ago – or was it four? Perhaps he'd run into friends and gone to stay with them. Well, good riddance. Bennett had been camping out on the sofa for over two months now. Not bad for a guy who was 'just passing through the neighbourhood'. He had supposedly called in to see how his old schoolfriend was faring, but in the last eight weeks all he had done was empty the larder and try to repair the refrigerator. The refrigerator! Why in the name of everything perverse would he want to do that? The only reason Kallie hadn't thrown it out into the hall was because it would not fit through the kitchen door, which his father had replaced after drunkenly burning the old one two years ago.

He walked over to the window and rubbed away a patch of ice with the back of his glove. Across the street was the bus depot where no buses ever ran. Not too many people passed by, either. Most had learned their lesson the hard way, leaving the comparative warmth of their homes only to become disoriented in the blizzards and stumble into snowdrifts. It didn't take long for a body to cool down in these temperatures. His father had been fond of describing a time when you could see the curving green meadow of Primrose Hill from the bedroom windows. All Kallie had ever seen was a perpetual ice-haze hanging in the air, obscuring a sun that at its best was as watery as an uncooked egg.

There seemed little point in trying to lead a normal life now. Everything conspired against it. The solution, his eternally optimistic father had always told him, was to stay busy. Edward had stayed busy right until the end, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he was slowing down, moving with ever-increasing decrepitude, like a clockwork toy at the end of its winding. Finally he had overestimated his stamina on a trip to town and had failed to make it back to safety before a storm of truly biblical proportions had set in. The blizzard lasted for over three months. When it subsided, the landscape had changed its proportions entirely, and his father had presumably become part of the great permafrost ridge that separated North London from the city centre.

Kallie realised with a shock that he was cold. Cold. Normally the word held little meaning. It was a permanent state of being, an endless dull ache in his bones, a spiteful stinging in his nerve ends, a dead sensation that dragged at his limbs, numbing his extremities, slowing his brain and thickening his blood. He forced himself to think. It was his only defence against the pervasive cold. Physical exercise brought only a temporary respite, sweat turning to icewater. He looked about the barren grey room, as uninviting as a Soviet state flat, and forced himself to think.

The only problem with Bennett not coming back was that Bennett had taken his wallet, ostensibly to buy food. The reason for deciding to trust a man who had never shown an ounce of reliability was obscure to him now. He looked over at the telephone, willing it to ring. It wouldn't, of course, even if Bennett had bothered to note the number. The mechanism was encrusted in ice, as indeed was the entire exchange, although he had heard a rumour that certain members of parliament could still operate some kind of closed circuit telecommunication system – presumably for use in emergencies.

Well, what was it now if not an emergency? The entire apartment, the entire apartment complex, the entire city, the entire country was frozen solid, and had been for twenty-two years, and with each passing year it grew a little colder, a little more still and silent, as the national heartbeat slowed to a weak and distanced blip.