Текст книги "The Bone Clocks"

Автор книги: David Mitchell

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 40 страниц)

Probably.

“HELP YOURSELF TO the shower,” she says round the door, and I call back, “Thanks,” in a neutral tone to match. Normally I admire uncommitted matter-of-factness the morning after, but with this wooden stake called “Love” whacked through my heart, I want proof of intimacy and have to ignore a strong urge to go and kiss Holly. What if it’s a no? Don’t force it. I have a skin-scalding shower, change into fresh clothes—what do fugitives do for clean laundry?—and go to the kitchenette, where I find a note:

Hugo—I’m a coward about goodbyes, so I’ve gone to Le Croc to start the cleaning. If you want to stay over tonight, bring me breakfast and I’ll find you a feather duster and a frilly apron. If you don’t show up, then such is life, and good luck with your metamorphisis (is that how you spell it?). H.

Not a love letter, but this note of Holly’s is more precious than any piece of correspondence I’ve ever owned, bar none. That Zorro-like three-stroke His both intimate and runic. Her handwriting’s not girly, it’s a bit of train wreck, really, calligraphically speaking, but it’s legible if you squint and it’s hers. Discoveries. I fold the note into my wallet, grab my coat, clatter down the stairs, and I’m out, treading in Holly’s ten-minutes-old footsteps through knee-deep snow in the courtyard, where the morning cold is a plunging cold; but the blue sky’s blue as Earth from space, and the warmth from the sun’s a lover’s breath; and icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls; the kids are glad to be alive and snowballs fly from curb to curb; I raise my hands and say, “Je me rends!” but a snowball scores a direct hit; I turn to find the little shit and clutch my heart—pretend to die—“Il est mort! Il est mort!” the snipers cry, but when I resurrect myself they fly away like fallen leaves; around the corner here’s the square, my favorite square in Switzerland, if not the world; Hфtel Le Sud, the gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; the crкpeman’s setting up his stall across from the patisserie where yesterday this all began; “I’m Not in Love,” claim 10cc but, au contraire, I know Iam; the crкpeman looks as if he knows that Holly’s face is all I see on every surface, there transposed; plus nape, lips, jaw, hair, and clothes; I hear her “Sort of,” “Bull shit,” “This is true”; recall her slightly elfish ears; her softnesses; her flattish nose; her guarded eyes of strato-blue; Body Shop tea tree oil shampoo; she’s nearer now with every step; I wonder what she’s thinking … Wondering if I’ll really show? The traffic’s moving pretty slowly, but I’ll wait until the man turns green …

A slush-spattered cream-colored Land Cruiser draws level with where I stand. Before I can feel miffed at having to walk around it, the mirrored window of the driver’s door slides down, and I assume it’ll be a tourist after directions. But, no, I’m wrong. I know this stocky, swarthy driver in a fisherman’s sweater. “G’day, Hugo. You look like a man with a song in his heart.”

His New Zealand accent gives it away. “Elijah D’Arnoq, king of the Cambridge Sharpshooters.” There’s somebody else in the back of the car, but I’m not introduced.

“Your lack of surprise,” I tell D’Arnoq, “suggests this isn’t a chance encounter.”

“Bang on. Miss Constantin sends you her regards.”

I understand. I get to choose between two metamorphoses. One is labeled “Holly Sykes” while the other is … What, exactly?

Elijah D’Arnoq slaps the side of the Land Cruiser. “Hop aboard. Find out what this is all about, or die wondering. Now or never.”

Past the patisserie, down the alley, I can see the crocodile pub sign hanging over Gьnter’s bar. Fifty paces away? “Get the girl!” counsels the love-drunk, reformed-Scrooge Me. “Imagine her face as you walk in!” The soberer Me folds his arms and looks at D’Arnoq and wonders, “What then?” Well, we’ll eat breakfast; I’ll help Holly clean up the bar; lie low in her place until my fellow Humberites have flown home; we’ll hump like rabbits until we can hardly walk; and while our breaths are coming hard and fast, I’ll blurt out “I love you” and mean it and she’ll blurt out “I love you too, Hugo” and mean it just as much, right then, right there. Then what? I’ll phone the registrar at Humber College to say I’ve suffered a minor breakdown and would like to put my final year on hold. I’ll tell my family—something, no idea what, but I’ll think of something—and buy Holly a telescope. Then what? I find I’m no longer thinking about her every waking moment. Her way of saying “Sort of” or “This is true” begins to grate, and the day comes when we understand that “All You Need Is Love” is rather less than the whole truth. Then what? By now Detective Sheila Young has tracked me down, and her colleagues in Switzerland interview me at the station and only allow me back to Holly’s flat if I surrender my passport. “What’s this about, Poshboy?” Then I’ll have to confess either to stealing an Alzheimer victim’s valuable stamp collection, or luring a fellow student at Humber so deeply into debt that he drove himself off a cliff. Or possibly both, it hardly matters, because Holly will give me back the telescope and get the locks changed. Then what? Agree to go back to London to be interviewed but pick up Marcus Anyder’s passport and book a cheap flight to the Far East or Central America? Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences. Then what? Eke out Anyder’s money until I succumb to the inevitable, open a bar for gap-year kids and turn into Gьnter. I notice a silver parka on the passenger seat next to D’Arnoq. “Can I just ask for an outline—”

“Doesn’t work like that. You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”

All around us life goes on, oblivious to my quandary.

“But I’ll tell you this,” says the New Zealander. “We’ve all been headhunted, except for our founder.” D’Arnoq jerks with his head to the unseen man in the compartment behind. “So I know what you’re feeling right now, Hugo. That space there, between the curb and this car, it’s a chasm. But you’ve been vetted and profiled, and if you cross that chasm, you’ll thrive here. You’ll matter. Whatever you want, now and always, you’ll get.”

I ask him, “Would you make the same choice again?”

“Knowing what I now know, I’d killto get into this car, if I had to. I’d kill. What you’ve seen Miss Constantin do—that pause button of time at King’s College, or the puppeteering of the homeless guy—that’s just the prelude to lesson one. There’s so much more, Hugo.”

I remember holding Holly in my arms, earlier.

But it’s the feelingof love that we love, not the person.

It’s that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now.

The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about.

It’s pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.

So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered.

I almost smile. Fausttends not to have happy endings.

But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s?

He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family.

If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it.

When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?

Nothing. No one. We’d never have heard of him. Quinn.

Dominic Fitzsimmons. Yet another clever postgrad.

Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.

The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.

THE MAN—THE FOUNDER—IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.

There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnиs. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution—the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.

“We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”

Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”

“Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.

The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”

“We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”

“Do you work for the security services?”

Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”

“So you have no political agenda?”

“As long as we are left alone, none.”

D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.

Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”

“We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”

“I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”

His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”

“Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”

“To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”

“And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”

Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”

Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.

“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”

Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”

“There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”

So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”

Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”

Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “ Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”

“Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”

D’Arnoq protests: “ Ididn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”

“We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.

“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”

“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.

“Its lesserdisciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”

A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.

Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”

“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”

“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—

·   ·   ·

–BLINK, AND THE Land Cruiser is gone, and I find myself on a wide, long rocky shelf on a steep mountainside in high-altitude sunshine. The only reason I don’t fall over is that I’m already sitting on a cold stone block. I huff a few times in panicky shock; my huffs hang there, like vague, blank speech bubbles. How did I get here? Where is here? Around me are the roofless ruins of what might once have been a chapel. Perhaps a monastery—there are more walls farther away. Knee-deep snow covers the ground; the shelf ends at a low wall, a few feet ahead. Behind the ruins a sheer rock face rears up. I’m in my ski jacket, and my face and ears are throbbing and warm, as if I’ve just undergone hard exertion. All these details are nothing alongside this central, gigantic fact: Just now I was in the back of a car with Mr. Pfenninger. D’Arnoq was driving. And now … now …

“Welcome back,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, to my right.

I gasp, “Christ!”and jump up, slip over, jump up, and crouch in fight-or-flight mode.

“Cool it, Lamb! It’s freaky, I know”—he’s seated and unscrewing a Thermos flask—“but you’re safe.” His silver parka gleams in the light. “As long as you don’t run over the edge, like a headless chicken.”

“D’Arnoq, where … What happened and where are we?”

“Where it all began,” says Pfenninger, and I whirl the other way, fending off a second heart attack. He’s wearing a Russian fur hat and snow boots. “The Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass. What’s left of it.” He kicks through the snow to the low wall and gazes out. “You’d believe in the divine if you lived out your life up here …”

They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?

And how? I drank nothing and ate nothing in the Toyota.

Hypnotism? Pfenninger was staring at me as I went under.

No. Hypnotism’s a cheap twist in crap films. Too stupid.

Then I remember Miss Constantin and King’s College Chapel. What if she caused my zone-out—like Pfenninger just did?

“We hiatused you, Mr. Anyder,” says Pfenninger, “to search you for stowaways. It’s intrusive, but we can’t be too careful.”

If that makes sense to him or to D’Arnoq, it makes none to me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’d be worried if you did, at this stage.”

I touch my head for signs of damage. “How long was I under?”

Pfenninger produces a copy of Die Zeitand hands it to me. On the front page Helmut Kohl is shaking hands with the Sheikh of Saudi Arabia. So what? Don’t tell me the German chancellor is mixed up in this. “The date, Mr. Anyder. Examine the date.”

There, under the masthead: 4. Januar 1992.

Which cannot be right: today is 2 January 1992.

Pfenninger told me to remember it, in the car. Just now.

Just now. Yet still Die Zeitinsists today is 4 January 1992.

I feel like I’m falling. Unconscious for two days? No, it’s more likely the newspaper’s a fake. I rustle through its pages, desperate to find evidence that things aren’t what they appear to be.

“It couldbe a fake,” Pfenninger concedes, “but why construct a falsehood that could be readily demolished?”

I’m head-smashed and, I realize, ravenously hungry. I check my stubble. I shaved this morning, at Holly’s. It’s grown. I stagger back, afraid of Elijah D’Arnoq and this Mr. Pfenninger, these … paranormal … Whateverthefuck they are, I have to get away to—to …

… to where? Our tracks in the snow disappear around a bend. Maybe there’s a car park with a visitor’s center and telephones just out of sight, or maybe it’s thirty kilometers of glacier and crevasses. Back the other way, the narrow mountain shelf on which we stand narrows to a stubborn clump of firs, then it’s near-vertical ice and rock. Pfenninger is studying me, while D’Arnoq is pouring a lumpy liquid into the Thermos cup. I want to scream, “A picnic?”I squeeze the sides of my skull. Get a grip and calm down. It’s late in the afternoon. Clouds are smeared across the sky, beginning to turn metallic. My watch—I left it in Holly’s bathroom. I walk to the low wall, a few paces from Pfenninger, and the ground swoops down fifty meters to a road. There’s an ugly modern bridge over a deep crevasse, and a road sign that I can’t read at this range. The road climbs to the bridge from half a kilometer away, twisting up from slopes dunked in shadow. Beyond the bridge, the road disappears behind a shoulder of the mountain we stand on, near a glassy waterfall that textures the profound silence. Us, the sign, the bridge, and the road surface: there are no other signs of the twentieth century. I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”

“It seems apt,” says Pfenninger, “since we’re in Switzerland, anyway. But first line your stomach: You’ve eaten nothing since Tuesday.” D’Arnoq’s next to me with a steaming cup. I smell chicken and sage and my stomach groans. “Don’t burn your tongue.”

I blow on it and sip it cautiously. It’s good. “Thanks.”

“I’ll let you have the recipe.”

“Being moved under hiatus is a double hand grenade in the brain, but”—Pfenninger clears the snow off the low wall and motions for me to sit down next to him—“a quarantine period was necessary before we let you into our realm. You’ve been in a chalet near Oberwald since noon of the second, not far from here, and we brought you here this morning. This peak is Galmihorn; that one is Leckihorn; over there, we have Sidelhorn.”

I ask him, “Are you from here, Mr. Pfenninger?”

Pfenninger watches me. “The same canton. I was born in Martigny, in 1758. Yes, 1758. I trained as an engineer, and in spring 1799, in the employ of the Helvetica Republic, I came here to oversee repairs to an ancestor of that bridge, spanning the chasm below.”

Now, if Pfenninger believes that, he’s insane. I turn to D’Arnoq, hoping for supportive sanity.

“Born in 1897, me,” says D’Arnoq, drolly, “as a veryfar-flung subject of Queen Victoria, in a stone-and-turf house out on Pitt Island—three hundred klicks east of New Zealand. Aged eighteen, I went on the sheep boat to Christchurch with my cousin. First time on the mainland, first time in a brothel, and first time in a recruiting office. Signed up for the Anzacs—it was either foreign adventures for king and empire or sixty years of sheep, rain, and incest on Pitt Island. I arrived in Gallipoli, and you know your history, so you’ll know what was waiting for me there. Mr. Pfenninger found me in a hospital outside Lyme Regis, after the war. I became an Anchorite at twenty-eight, hence my eternal boyish good looks. But I’m ninety-four years old next week. So, hey. The lunatics have you surrounded, Lamb.”

I look at Pfenninger. At D’Arnoq. At Pfenninger. The telepathy, the hiatuses, and the Yeti merely ask me to redefine what the mind can do, but this claim violates a more fundamental law. “Are you saying—”

“Yes,” says Pfenninger.

“That Anchorites—”

“Yes,” says D’Arnoq.

“Don’t die?”

“No,”frowns Pfenninger. “Of course we die—if we’re attacked, or in accidents. But what we don’t do is age. Anatomically, anyway.”

I look away at the waterfall. They’re mad, or liars, or—most disturbing of all—neither. My head’s too hot so I remove my hat. Something’s cutting into my wrist—Holly’s thin black hair-band. I take it off. “Gentlemen,” I address the view, “I have no idea what to think or say.”

“Far wiser,” says Pfenninger, “to defer judgement than rush to the wrong one. “Let us show you the Dusk Chapel.”

I look around for another building. “Where is it?”

“Not far,” says Pfenninger. “See that broken archway? Watch.”

Elijah D’Arnoq notices my anxiety. “We won’t put you to sleep again. Scout’s honor.”

The broken archway frames a view of a pine tree, virgin snowy ground, and a steep rock face. Moments hop by, birdlike. The sky’s blue as a high note and the mountains nearly transparent. Hear the waterfall’s skiff, spatter, and rumble. I glance at D’Arnoq, whose eyes are fixed where mine should be. “Watch.” So I obey, and notice an optical illusion. The view through the archway begins to sway, as if it were only printed on a drape, caught by a breeze, and now pulled aside by an elegant white hand in a trim Prussian-blue sleeve. Miss Constantin, bone-white and golden, looks out, flinching at the sudden bright cold. “The Aperture,” murmurs Elijah D’Arnoq. “Ours.”

I surrender. Portals appear in thin air. People have pause buttons. Telepathy is as real as telephones.

The impossible is negotiable.

What is possible ismalleable.

Miss Constantin asks me, “Are you joining us, Mr. Anyder?”

April 16

“IF YOU’RE ASKING whether I’m a war junkie,” I tell Brendan, “then the answer’s no, I am not.” I sound pissed off. I am, I suppose.

“Not you, Ed!” My virtual brother-in-law disguises his backped-aling behind a Tony Blairish suavity. Brendan looks like, and is, a workaholic property developer in his midforties having a rare weekend off. “We know youaren’t a war junkie. Obviously. I mean, you flew all the way back to England for Sharon’s wedding. No, I was only asking if it ever happens that a war reporter gets sort of hooked on the adrenaline of life in war zones. That’s all.”

“Some do, yes,” I concede, rubbing my eye and thinking of Big Mac. “But I’m not in any danger of that. The symptoms are pretty obvious.” I ask a passing teenage waitress for one more Glenfiddich. She says she’ll bring it right over.

“What are the symptoms?” Sharon’s four years younger than Holly and rounder in the face. “Just out of curiosity.”

I’m feeling cornered, but Holly’s hand finds mine on the bench and squeezes it. “The symptoms of war-zone addiction. Well. The same as the clichйs of the foreign correspondent, I guess. Rocky marriages; estrangement from family life; a dissatisfaction with civilian life. Alcohol abuse.”

“Not Glenfiddich, I trust?” Dave Sykes, Holly’s mild-mannered dad, lightens the mood a little.

“Let’s hope not, Dave.” Let’s hope the subject goes away.

“You must see some pretty hard-core, full-on stuff, Ed,” says Pete Webber, accountant, keen cyclist, and tomorrow’s groom. Pete’s bat-eared and his hairline’s beating a hasty retreat, but Sharon’s marrying him for love, not hair follicles. “Sharon was saying you’ve covered Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Baghdad. Places most people try to get away from.”

“Some journos carve a career in the business pages, others out of the plastic surgery of the stars. I’ve made mine out of war.”

Pete hesitates. “And you’ve never wondered, ‘Why war?’ ”

“Guess I’m immune to the charms of silicone.”

The waitress brings me my Glenfiddich. I look at Pete, Sharon, Brendan and his wife Ruth, Dave, and Kath, Holly’s ever-vigorous Irish mum. They’re still waiting for me to say something profound about my journalistic motives. The Sykeses aren’t without their scars—Holly’s youngest brother, Jacko, went missing in 1984 and his body was never found—but the loss I see, work with, has been on an industrial scale. This makes me different. I doubt this difference is explicable. I doubt even I understand it.

“Do you write to bring the world’s attention to the vulnerable?” asks Pete.

“God no.” I think of Paul White, on my first assignment in Sarajevo, lying dead in a puddle because he wanted to Make a Difference. “The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment.”

“Then to play the devil’s avocado,” says Brendan, “why risk your neck to write articles that won’t change anything?”

I fabricate a smile for Brendan. “First, I don’t really risk my neck; I’m rigorous about taking precautions. Second, I—”

“What precautions can you take,” Brendan interrupts, “to stop a massive car bomb going off outside your hotel?”

I look at Brendan and blink three times to make him vanish. Damn. Maybe next time. “I’ll be moving into the Green Zone when I go back to Baghdad. Second, if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, iswritten about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there.”

“So you’re a sort of archivist for the future,” says Ruth.

“Sounds pretty good, Ruth. I’ll take that.” I rub my eye.

“Are you going to miss it all,” asks Brendan, “after July?”

“After June,” says Holly, cheerfully.

No one sees me squirm. I hope. “When it happens,” I tell Brendan, “I’ll let you know how I feel.”

“So have you got anything lined up, workwise?” asks Dave.

“Ed’s got a lot of strings to his bow, Dad,” says Holly. “Maybe with the print media, or the BBC, and the Internet’s really shaking up the news world. One of Ed’s ex-editors at the FTis lecturing at UCL, now.”

“Well, I think it’s greatyou’ll be settling in London for good, Ed,” says Kath. “We do worry, when you’re away. I’ve seen pictures of this Fallujah place—those bodies they strung up on the bridge! Shocking. And baffling. I thought the Americans won, months ago. I thought the Iraqis hated Saddam. I thought he was a monster.”

“Iraq’s a lot more complicated than the Masters of War realized, Kath. Or wanted to realize.”

Dave claps his hands. “Now we’ve got the chitchat out of the way, let’s get down to the serious stuff: Ed, are you joining us on Pete’s stag do tonight? Kath’ll babysit for Aoife, so you’ve got no excuse.”

Pete tells me, “A few mates from work are meeting me at the Cricketers—a lovely pub, just round the corner. Then—”

“I’d rather stay blissfully ignorant about ‘then,’ ” says Sharon.

“Oh, right,” says Brendan, “as if the hens are going to play Scrabble all evening.” In a stage whisper he tells me, “Male strippers at the Brighton Pavilion followed by a crack den at the end of the pier.”

Ruth play-cuffs him: “You slanderer, Brendan Sykes!”

“Too right,” says Holly. “You wouldn’t catch respectable ladies like us going anywhere near a Scrabble board.”

“Remind me what you’re really up to again,” says Dave.

“A sedate wine tasting,” replies Sharon, “with tapas, at a bar owned by one of Pete’s oldest friends.”

“Wine-tasting session,” scoffs Brendan. “Back in Gravesend they call a piss-up a piss-up. So how about it, Ed?”

Holly’s giving me a go-ahead face, but I’d better start proving what a great father I am while Holly’s still talking to me. “No offense, Pete, but I’m going to wuss out. The jet lag’s catching up with me, and it’ll be nice to spend time with Aoife. Even if she will be fast asleep. That way Kath can join the wine-tasting session, too.”

“Oh, I don’t mind babysitting, pet,” says Kath. “I’ve got to watch my blood pressure, anyway.”

“No, really, Kath.” I finish my Scotch, enjoying the blast-off. “You spend as much time as you can with your relatives from Cork—and I’ll grab an early night, otherwise I’ll be one giant yawn-in-a-suit at the church today. I mean tomorrow. God, see what I mean?”

“All right, then,” says Kath. “If you’re really sure …”

“Absolutely sure,” I tell her, rubbing my itchy eye.

“Don’t rub it, Ed,” Holly tells me. “You’ll make it worse.”

ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT night, and all’s well, kind of, for now. Olive Sun wants me flying out again by Thursday at the latest, so I’ll have to tell Holly soon. Tonight, really, so she doesn’t make plans for the three of us next week. Fallujah is the biggest deployment of marines since the battle for Hue City in Vietnam, and I’m stuck here on the Sussex coast. Holly’ll hit the frigging roof, but I’d better get it over and done with, and she’ll have to calm down for Sharon’s wedding tomorrow. Aoife’s asleep in the single bed in the corner of our hotel room. I only got here after her bedtime, so I still haven’t said hi to my daughter, but the First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child. I wonder how Nasser’s girls are sleeping tonight, with dogs barking and gunfire crackling and marines kicking down doors. CNN’s on the flat-screen TV with the sound down, showing footage of marines under fire on rooftops in Fallujah. I’ve seen it five times or more and even the pundits can’t think of anything fresh to say until the news cycle starts up again in a few hours, when Iraq begins a new day. Holly texted a quarter of an hour ago to say she and the other hens’ll be heading back to the hotel soon. “Soon” could mean anything in the context of a wine bar, though. I switch off the TV, to prove I’m no war junkie, and go to the window. Brighton Pier’s all lit up like Fairyland on Friday night, and pop music booms from the fairground at the far end. By English standards it’s a warm spring evening, and the restaurants and bars on the promenade are at the end of a busy evening. Couples walk hand in hand. Night buses trundle. Traffic obeys the traffic laws, by and large. I don’t knock a peaceful and well-functioning society. I enjoy it, for a few days, weeks, even. But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager. Which isn’t the same as saying I’m addicted to war zones, as Brendan helpfully implied earlier. That’s as ridiculous as accusing David Beckham of being addicted to playing soccer. Just as soccer is Beckham’s art and his craft, reporting from hot spots is my art and my craft. I wish I’d said that to the clan earlier.

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