Текст книги "The Bone Clocks"

Автор книги: David Mitchell

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 40 страниц)

I think I’m drunker than I realized. “But it wasn’t.”

Holly picks at her ring. “That autumn, my mum got me enrolled on an office-skills course at Gravesend Tech, so at least I could do a bit of temping. I managed it okay, but one day in the canteen, I was on my own, as usual, when … Well, all of sudden, I knewthat this girl, Rebecca Jones, who was sat chatting with friends on the table opposite, was going to knock her coffee onto the floor, in just a few seconds’ time. I just knew, Crispin, like I know … your name, or that I’ll go to sleep later. I’ve never believed in God, really, but I was praying, Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t. Then Rebecca Jones flapped out her hand to illustrate her story, it hit her coffee cup and smashed it onto the floor. Little streams and puddles of coffee everywhere.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I bloody legged it, but … the certainties chased me. I knew that round the next corner I’d see a Dalmatian cocking its leg against a lamppost. As if I’d already seen it, only I hadn’t. Round the corner, lo and behold, one Dalmatian, one lamppost, its hind leg up. A hundred yards from the railway bridge, I knewthat when I crossed the bridge, the London train’d be passing under. Right again. On and on, all the way back to the pub. Then, as I passed through the bar, a regular, Frank Sharkey, was playing darts and …” she pauses to look at the goosebumps on her forearms, “… I knew I’d never see him again. I knew, Crispin. Sure,” she winces, “I ignored it, it was nasty and morbid. Old Mr. Sharkey was as much a friend of the family as a regular. He’d watched us all grow up. I told Dad I’d come back from college ’cause of a migraine, which by now I had. Went to bed, woke up, felt tons better. It’d stopped. What’d happened was harder to dismiss as fantasy, of course; I couldn’t. But I was just glad it’d stopped and tried not to think about Mr. Sharkey. But the next day, he didn’t appear, and even then, I knew. I nagged Dad to call a neighbor who had a key. Frank Sharkey was found dead in his garden shed. He’d had a massive heart attack. The doctor said he’d have been dead before he hit the floor.”

She’s persuasive, and she’s persuaded herself, I can see. But the paranormal ispersuasive; why else does religion persist?

Holly stares sadly into her glass. “Many people need to believe in psychic powers. A lot of them latch onto my book so I get accused of milking the gullible. By people I respect, even. But s’pose it wasreal, Crispin, s’pose youhad these certainties, which can’t be altered or second-guessed—about, say, Juno or Anaпs. Would you think, Happy Days, I’m psychic?”

“Well, it depends …” I think about it. “No. At the risk of sounding like a GP, how long did all this last?”

She sucks in her lips and shakes her head. “Well … they’ve never stopped. Aged sixteen, seventeen, I’d be mugged by a bunch of facts that hadn’t happened yet, every few weeks, rush home, and bury myself in my bed with my head in a duffel bag. Told no one, apart from my great-aunt Eilнsh. What would I say? People’d just think I wanted attention. Aged eighteen, I went grape picking for the summer in Bordeaux, then worked winters in the Alps. At least if I was abroad, the certainties wouldn’t be Brendan falling downstairs or Sharon getting hit by a bus.”

“This precognition doesn’t work long distance, then?”

“Not usually, no.”

“And do you get inside info on your own future?”

“Thank Christ, no.”

I hesitate to repeat my question, but I do. “Rottnest?”

Holly rubs an eye. “That was a strong one. Occasionally I hear a certainty about the past. I’m seized by it, I sort of … Oh, Christ, I can’t avoid the terminology, however crappy it sounds: I was channeling some sentience that was lingering in the fabric of that place.”

The barman’s shaking a cocktail-maker. My friend watches with a discerning eye. “That guy knows what he’s doing.”

Again, I hesitate. “Do you know anything about Multiple Personality Disorder?”

“Yes. As a mature student, I wrote a thesis on it. It had a namechange in the 1990s to Disassociative Identity Disorder but, even by the standards of clinical psychiatry, its presentation is obscure.” Holly fingers an earring. “It may explain things like Rottnest, but what about the precognition? Old Mr. Sharkey? Or how about when Aoife was little and we were at Sharon’s wedding in Brighton and she took it into her head to run off, and a certainty spoke through methe very number of the room she’d got locked herself into? How could I have known that, Crispin? How? How could I’ve made that up?”

A group of East Asian businessmen explodes into laughter.

“What if your memory is inverting cause and effect?”

Holly looks blank, drinks her wine, and still looks blank.

“Take Rebecca Wotsit’s coffee. Normally, your brain sees the cup knocked over first, and stores the memory of that event second. What if some neural glitch causes your brain to reverse the order—so the memory of the cup smashing on the floor was stored first, beforeyour memory of the cup sitting on the edge of the table. That way, you believe in all sincerity that action B comes before A.”

Holly looks at me like I just don’t get it. “Lend us a coin.”

I fish out a two-pound coin from the international collection that lives in my wallet. She holds it in her left palm, then, with the middle finger of her right hand, touches a spot on her forehead. I ask, “What’s that in aid of?”

“Dunno, it just helps. Buddhism talks about a third eye in the forehead, but … Shush a mo.” She shuts her eyes, and tilts her head. Like a dog listening to silence. The background bar noises—low-key chat, ice cubes in glasses, Keith Jarrett’s “My Wild Irish Rose”—swell and recede. Holly hands me back the coin. “Flip it. Should be heads.”

I flip the coin. “It’s heads.” Fifty-fifty.

“Heads again,” says Holly, concentrating.

I flip the coin. “So it is.” One in four against.

“Tails this time,” says Holly. Her finger stays on her forehead.

I flip the coin: It’s tails. “Three out of three. Not bad.”

“Back to heads.”

I flip the coin: It’s heads.

“Tails,” says Holly.

I flip the coin: It’s tails. “How are you doing this?”

“Let’s try a sequence,” says Holly. “Heads, heads, heads, tails, and … tails again, but …  kneeling? Crispin, why are you kneeling?”

“As you can see, I’m sitting here, notkneeling.”

“Forget it. Three heads, two tails, in that order.”

So I flip the coin: heads. And again: heads. How’s she doing this? I rub the coin on my shirt, like a scratched disk, then flip it: heads, as predicted. “This is clever,” I say, but I feel uneasy.

She’s irritated by the adjective. “Two tails, now.”

I flip the coin: tails. Nine out of nine. On the tenth flip, I fumble the catch and the coin goes freewheeling away. I give chase, and only when I draw it out from under a chair and see it’s tails do I realize that I’m kneeling. Holly looks like someone being given the answer to a simple riddle. “Obviously. The coin runs away.”

As I retake my seat, I don’t quite trust myself to speak.

“Odds of 1,024 to 1 against a ten-digit sequence, if you’re wondering. We can increase it to 4,096 to 1 with two more throws?”

“No need.” My voice is tight. I look at Holly Sykes: Who isshe? “That kneeling thing. How …”

“Maybe your brain is mistaking memories for predictions, too.” Holly Sykes looks not at all like a magician whose ambitious trick just went perfectly, but like a tired woman who needs to gain a few pounds. “Oh, Christ, that was a mistake. You’re looking at me in that way.”

“In what way?”

“Look, Crispin, can we just forget all of this? I need my bed.”

·   ·   ·

WE WALK TO the lift lobby without much to say. A pair of terracotta warriors don’t think very much of me, judging from their expressions. “You’ve got a gazillion true believers who’d pay a year of their lives to see what you just showed me,” I tell Holly. “I’m a cynical bastard, as you well know. Why honor me with that private demonstration?”

Now Holly looks pained. “I hoped you might believe me.”

“About what? About your Radio People? Rottnest? About—”

“That evening in Hay-on-Wye, in the signing tent. We were sat a few yards away. I had a strange strong certainty. About you.”

The lift doors close, and I remember from Zoл’s flirtation with feng shui that lifts are jaws that eat good luck. “Me?”

“You. And it’s an odd one. And it’s never changed.”

“Well, what’s it saying about me, for heaven’s sake?”

She swallows. “ ‘A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man.’ ”

I wait for an explanation. None comes. “Meaning?”

Holly looks cornered. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“But you usually find out what they mean after, right?”

“Usually. Eventually. But this is a … slow-cooking certainty.”

“ ‘A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man’? What isthat? A shopping list? A dance track? A line from a sodding haiku?”

“Crispin, if I knew, I’d tell you, I swear.”

“Then it may just be random gobbledegook.”

Holly agrees too easily. “Probably, yes. Yep. Forget it.”

An elderly Chinese guy in a pink Lacoste top, fudge-brown slacks, and golf shoes steps out of the lift. Hooked onto his arm is a blond model wearing a nйgligй sewn of cobwebs and gold coins, extraplanetary makeup, and not a lot else. They go around a corner.

“Maybe she’s his daughter,” says Holly.

“What did you mean just then, ‘It’s never changed’?”

Holly, I expect, regrets having started this. “In Cartagena, at the president’s house, I heard the same certainty. Same words. At Rottnest, too, before I started channeling. And now, if I tune in. I did the coin thing so you might take the spiral-spider-one-eyed-manthing seriously, in case it’s ever …” she shrugs, “… relevant.”

The lifts hum in their turboshafts. “What’s the use of certainties,” I ask, “that are so sodding uncertain?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Crispin. I’m not a bloody oracle. If I couldstop them I would, like a bloody shot!”

These uncensored stupid words spill out: “You’ve profited from them well enough.”

Holly looks shocked, hurt, then pissed off, all in under five seconds. “ Yes, I wrote The Radio Peoplebecause stupidly, stupidly, I thought if Jacko’s alive and out there somewhere”—she sweeps an angry hand at the borderless city through the window—“he might read it, or someone who knows him might recognize him and get in touch. Fat bloody chance ’cause he’s probably dead but I had to try. But I enduremy certainties. I live despitethem. Don’t say I profit from them. Don’t darebloody say that, Crispin.”

“Yeah.” I close my eyes. “Look, it came out wrong. I …”

My crimes, my misdeeds. Where do I sodding begin?

Then I hear the lift doors close. Great. She’s gone.

AS I SHAMBLE back to my room, I send a text to Holly to apologize. I’ll phone in the morning after we’ve both had a decent night’s sleep, and we’ll meet for breakfast. I arrive at Room 2929, where I find a black bag hung over my door handle. It’s embroidered with runes in gold thread: a real labor of love. Inside is a book entitled Your Last Chanceby Soleil Moore. Never heard of her. Or him. I already know it’s dreck. No real poet would be rude enough to imagine that I’d read unsolicited sonnets, just because of a hand-embroidered bag. How did she find out my room number? We’re in China. Bribes, of course. Not at the Shanghai Mandarin, surely. Ah, who cares? I’m so—soddingly—buggeringly– tired. I just go into my room, dump the book still in its lovely bag into the deep bin with the detritus of the day, empty my grateful bladder, crawl into bed, and sleep opens up like a sink-hole …

September 17, 2019

DID YOU EVER ESPY a lonelier signpost, dear reader? North to Festap, east along the Kaldidadur Road, and west to Юingvellir, 23 kilometers. Цrvar, I recall, taught me that “Ю” is a voiced “th” as in “lathe.” Twenty-three kilometers on British back roads would be a mere twenty-minute drive, but I left the tourist center at Юingvellir an hour and a half ago. The tarmac road degenerated into a dirt track twisting its way up the escarpment and onto this rocky plateau under gunmetal mountains and churning clouds. On a whim, I pull over, kill the engine of my rented Mitsubishi, and climb up the stony hillock to sit on a boulder. Not a telephone pole, not a power line, not a tree, not a shrub, not a sheep, not a crow, not a fly, just a few tufts of coarse grass and a lone novelist. The valley in The Fall of the House of Usher. A terraforming experiment on a lesser moon of Saturn. A perfect opposite of end-of-summer Madrid, and I wonder how Carmen’s doing, then remind myself that how she’s doing is no longer my business. Driving around Iceland for a week before the Reykjavik Festival was her idea: “The Land of the Sagas! It’ll be a blast, Crispin!” Dutifully I did the research, booked the rooms and the car, and was even reading Njal’s Sagathat London evening only eight weeks ago. When the phone went, I knew it was trouble: Holly would call it a “Certainty” with a capital C. My separation from Zoл was long forecast, but Carmen’s declaration of independence came from a clear blue sky. Frantic, hurt, above all fearful, I began arguing that it’s the challenges and routines that make a relationship real but I was soon incoherent as the house seemed to collapse and the sky fell in on top.

Enough. I had two years of love from a kind woman.

Cheeseman’s on his third year in hell, and counting.

SOME TIME LATER, a convoy of 4Ч4s grinds past, coming back from the Kaldidur Road. I’m still here, sitting on my arse. A bit cold. The tourists watch me through grime-plastered windows, tires spitting stones and kicking up dust. The wind cuffs my ears, my stomach welcomes the tea and … Nothing else. Eerie. I treat the microflora to a bladderful of vintage novelist’s urine. By the signpost a cairn of stones has accumulated over the centuries. Feel free to add a stone and make a wish, Цrvar told me, but never remove one, or a spirit could slip out to curse you and your bloodline. The threat isn’t as quaint up here as it sounded down in Reykjavik. The rim of Langjцkull Glacier rises whalebone-white behind nearer mountains to the east. The few glaciers I’ve seen previously were grubby toes unworthy of the name—Langjцkull is vast … The visible skull of an ice planet smooshed onto earth. Back in Hampstead I read about characters in the sagas getting condemned to outlawry, and imagined a jolly enough Robin-Hood-in-furs setup, but in situ I can see that outlawry Iceland-style was a de facto death sentence. Better push on. I put my stone on the cairn and notice, at close range, a few coins have been left here too. Down at sea level I wouldn’t be so daft, but I find myself taking my wallet to retrieve a coin or two …

… and notice that the passport photo of me, Juno, and Anaпs is missing. Impossible. Yet the blank square of leather under the plastic sheath insists the photo is gone.

How? The photo’s been in there years now, since Zoл gave me the wallet, since our last civilized Christmas as a family. We’d taken the photo a few days earlier, at the photo booth in Notting Hill Tube station. It was just to kill a little time while waiting for Zoл, before we went to the Italian place on Moscow Road. Juno said how she’d heard tribes in the rain forest or wherever believe photography can steal a piece from your soul, and Anaпs said, “Then this picture’s got all three of our souls in it.” I’ve had it ever since. It can’t slip out. I used the wallet at the Юingvellir visitor center to buy postcards and water, and I’d have noticed if the photo was missing then. This isn’t a disaster, but it’s upsetting. That photo’s irreplaceable. It’s got our souls in it. Perhaps it’s in the car, fallen down by the handbrake, or …

As I scramble down the slope, my phone rings. CALLER UNKNOWN. I take it. “Hello?”

“Afternoon—Mr. Hershey?”

“Who’s speaking?”

“This is Nikki Barrow, Dominic Fitzsimmons’s PA at the Ministry of Justice. The minister has some news regarding Richard Cheeseman, Mr. Hershey—if now’s a convenient time?”

“Uh—yeah, yes, sure. Please.”

I’m put on hold—sodding Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire—while I sweat hot and cold. The Friends of Richard Cheeseman had thought our Whitehall ally had forgotten us. My heart’s pounding; this will be either the best news—repatriation—or the worst—an “accident” in prison. Sod it, my phone’s down to eight percent power. Hurry. It goes to seven percent. There’s a burst of “Tell him I’ll be there for the vote at five” in Fitzsimmons’s plummy tones; then it’s “Hi, Crispin, how areyou?”

“Can’t complain, Dominic. You have news, I gather?”

“I do indeed: Richard’ll be on a flight back to the U.K. on Friday. I had a call from the Colombian ambassador an hour ago—he heard from Bogotб after lunch. And because Richard’s eligible for parole under our system, he ought to be out by Christmas of next year, provided he keeps his nose clean, no tasteless pun intended.”

I feel a lot of things, but I’ll focus on the positives. “Thank Christ for that. And thank you. How definite is all of this?”

“Well, barring a major governmental tiff before Friday, it’s very definite. I’ll try to get Richard D-cat status—his mother and sister live in Bradford, so Hatfield may suit—it’s an open prison in South Yorkshire. Paradise regained compared to his current digs. After three months he’ll be eligible for weekend passes.”

“I can’t tell you how good it is to hear this.”

“Yep, it’s a decent result. The fact that I knew Richard in Cambridge meant that I kept a close eye on his case, but it also meant my hands were tied. By the same token, keep my name out of any social networking you may do, will you? Say an undersecretary got in touch. I spoke to Richard’s sister five minutes ago and made the same request. Look, got to rush—I’m due at Number Ten. My best to your committee—and top job, Crispin. Richard’s lucky to have had you fighting his corner when nobody else gave a monkey’s toss.”

WITH MY IPHONE’S last two percent I text my congratulations to Richard’s sister Maggie, who’ll phone Benedict Finch at The Piccadilly Review;Ben’s been handling the media campaign. This is what we’ve fought, connived, plotted, and prayed for, and yet, and yet, my joy’s melting away even as I touch it. I committed an inexcusable wrong against Richard Cheeseman, and nobody knows. “A perjurer,” I tell the Icelandic interior, “and a coward.” A cold wind scuffs the black dust, same as it ever did, as it ever does, as it ever will do. I was going to beg for a wish from the cairn, but the moment passed. I’ll take what luck I get. It’s all I deserve.

What was I doing when Fitzsimmons called?

Yes, the photograph. That’s a real pity. More than a pity. Losing the photo feels like losing the children again.

Down the slope I trudge to the Mitsubishi.

The photo won’t be there, or anywhere.

September 19, 2019

FORTY OR FIFTY BIPEDS EXCLAIM, “Whale!” and “Look!” and “Where?” and “Over there!” in five, six, seven languages, hurry to the port bow and hold up devices at the knobbled oval rising from the cobalt sea. A locomotive huff of steam shoots from the blowhole, which the breeze combs over the shrieking, laughing passengers. An American boy about Anaпs’s age grimaces: “Mommy, I’m drippingin whale boogers!” The parents look so glad. Decades from now they’ll say, “Do you remember that time we went whale watching in Iceland?”

From my vantage point above the bridge I can see the whale’s whole outline—not a lot shorter than our sixty-foot boat. “This is good, our patience is rewarded at the last minute,” says the grizzled guide in his carefully trodden English. “The whale is a humpback—identifiable by the humps on its back. We saw a number of so-called friendlies in this location on this morning’s tour, so I am happy that one is still hanging out here today …” My mind swims off to questions about how whales choose names for one another; whether flying feels like swimming; if they suffer from unrequited love too; and if they scream when explosive harpoons sink in and go off. Of course they must. The flippers are paler than the rest of its upper body, and as they flap I remember Juno and Anaпs floating on their backs in the swimming pool. “Don’t let go, Daddy!” Standing waist-deep in the shallow end I’d assure them I’d never let them go, not until they asked me to, and their eyes were wide and true with trust.

Phone, I think at them, in Montreal. Phone Dad. Now.

I wait. I count from one to ten. Make it twenty. Make it fifty …

… it’s sodding ringing! My daughters heard me.

No, actually. The screen reads Hyena Hal. Don’t answer.

But I have to; it’s about money. “Hal! Crispin here.”

“Afternoon, Crispin. This signal’s weird; are you on a train?”

“On a boat, actually. In the mouth of Hъsavнk Bay.”

“Hъsavнk Bay … Which is—let me guess. Alaska?”

“North coast of Iceland. I’m doing the Reykjavik Festival.”

“So you are, so you are. Top result regarding Richard Cheeseman, by the way. I heard on Monday morning.”

“Really? But the government only found out on Tuesday.”

His moniker notwithstanding, Hal’s laugh isn’t like a hyena’s; it’s a sequence of glottal stops, like the noise a body might make as it falls down wooden stairs into a basement. “Are Juno and Anaпs with you? Iceland’s kid heaven, I’m told.”

“No. Carmen was supposed to be joining me, but …”

“Ah, yes, yes. Well, fish in the sea, c’est la vie and pass the ammo—bringing us seamlessly to today’s conference call with Erebus and Bleecker Yard. A frank discussion, resulting in an Action List.”

Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, or even Dr. Aphra Booth would at this juncture toss the phone high into this clear air, and watch it plopinto the depths. “Right … Are my advances on the Action List?”

“Moot Point Numero Uno. They wereadvances, when you signed the current deal, back in 2004. Fifteen years ago. Erebus and Bleecker Yard’s view is that the new book’s now sooverdue, you’re in breach of contract. What were advances are now debts repayable.”

“Well, that’s just sodding ridiculous. Isn’t it. Isn’t it, Hal?”

“Legally, I’m afraid, they’re on tried and tested ground.”

“But they own exclusive rights to the new Crispin Hershey.”

“Moot Point Numero Dos—and there’s no sugarcoating this one, I’m afraid. Desiccated Embryossold a cool half-million, yes, but from Red Monkeyonwards, your sales have resembled a one-winged Cessna. Your name is still known, but your sales are midlist. Once upon a time, the Kingdom of Midlist wasn’t a bad place to earn a living: middling sales, middling advances, puttering along. Alas, the kingdom is no more. Erebus and Bleecker Yard want their money back morethan they want the new novel by Crispin Hershey.”

“But I can’t pay it back, Hal …” Here comes the harpoon, eviscerating my bankability, my self-esteem, my sodding pension. “I—I—I spent it. Years ago. Or Zoл spent it. Or Zoл’s lawyers spent it.”

“Yes, but they know you own property in Hampstead.”

“No sodding way! They can’t touch my house!” Disapproving faces look up from the deck—did I shout? “Can they? Hal?”

“Their lawyers are displaying worrying levels of confidence.”

“What if I handed in a new novel in … say, ten weeks?”

“They’re not bluffing, Crispin. They trulyaren’t interested.”

“Then what the sodding hell do we do? Fake my suicide?”

I meant it as gallows humor, but Hal doesn’t dismiss the option: “First they’d sue your estate, via us; then your insurers would track you down, so unless you sought political asylum in Pyongyang, you’d get three years for fraud. No, your best hope lies in selling the Australian lighthouse novel at Frankfurt for a fat enough sum to pacify Erebus and Bleecker Yard. Nobody’ll pay you a bean up front now, alas. Can you send me the first three chapters?”

“Right. Well. The new novel has … evolved.”

Hal, I imagine, mouths a silent profanity. He asks, “Evolved?”

“For one thing, the story’s now set in Shanghai.”

“Shanghai around the 1840s? Opium Wars?”

“More Shanghai in the present day, actually.”

“Right … I didn’t know you were a Sinologist as well.”

“World’s oldest culture. Workshop of the World. The Chinese Century. China’s very …  now.” Listen to me, Crispin Hershey pitching a book like a kid fresh off a creative-writing course.

“Where does the Australian lighthouse fit in?”

I take a deep breath. And another. “It doesn’t.”

Hal, I am fairly sure, is miming shooting himself.

“But this one’s got legs, Hal. A jet-lagged businessman has the mother of all breakdowns in a labyrinthine hotel in Shanghai, encounters a minister, a CEO, a cleaner, a psychic woman who hears voices”—gabbling garbling—“think Solarismeets Noam Chomsky via The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Add a dash of Twin Peaks …”

Hal is pouring himself a whisky and soda: Hear it fizz? His voice is flat and accusative: “Crispin. Are you trying to tell me that you’re writing a fantasy novel?”

“Me? Never! Or it’s only one-third fantasy. Half, at most.”

“A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant. How many pages have you got?”

“Oh, it’s humming along really well. About a hundred.”

“Crispin. This is me. How many pages have you got?”

How does he alwaysknow? “Thirty—but the rest is all mapped out, I swear.”

Hal the Hyena exhales a sawtoothed groan. “Shitting Nora.”

THE WHALE’S TAIL lifts. Water streams off the striated flukes. “All tail flukes are unique,” the guide is saying, “and researchers can recognize individuals from their patterns. Now we watch the whale dive …” The flukes slice into the water, and the visitor from another realm is gone. The passengers stare as if a friend’s gone for good. I stare as if I squandered my one and only close encounter with a cetacean on a shitty business call. The American family pass round a box of cupcakes, and the caring way they make sure they’ve all had one injects me with fifty milliliters of distilled envy. Why didn’tI invite Juno and Anaпs along on this trip, so mykids would have lifelong memories of being with their dad in Iceland, too? The boat’s engines growl into life, and the vessel turns back towards Hъsavнk. The town’s a mile away beneath a brooding fell. Harbor buildings, a fish-processing plant, a few restaurants and hotels, a wedding-cake church, one department store, steeply gabled houses painted all the shades of the color chart, WiFi masts, and whatever else 2,376 Icelanders need to get from one year to the next. One last time I look north between the muscled walls of the bay, towards the Arctic Ocean, where somewhere the whale is circling in its dark skies.

September 20, 2019

HALFWAY ALONG OUR JOURNEY to life’s end I found myself astray in a dark wood. This fork in the path, these slender birches, that mossy boulder tilted upwards, like a troll’s head. Finding oneself astray in any wood is a feat in Iceland, where even scraggy copses are rare. Zoл never let me navigate in our pre-satnav era; she said it was safer to drive with the road atlas on her lap. My tourist map of Бsbyrgi isn’t any help; the mile-wide, horseshoe-shaped, forested ravine sinks beneath the surrounding land to a hundred-meter rock face, where a river dawdles in pools … But where am I in it? The river’s vowels and the trees’ consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.

Minutes pass unnoticed as I gaze, transfixed, at the comings and goings of ants on a twig. Richard Cheeseman’s sitting between a policeman and a consular official, somewhere over the Atlantic. I remember him griping at Cartagena that the festival hadn’t flown him business class, but after three years in the Penitenciarнa Central, even the Group 4 van from Heathrow up to Yorkshire is going to feel like a trip in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

A blundering wind scatters yellowed leaves …

… and I find one, dear reader, between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Look. A little birch leaf. Sodding extraordinary. The wind’s sharp fingers snatch away the evidence. Willows stand aside to reveal the towering rock slab in the center of Бsbyrgi … Perfect for snagging the anchor of a cloud-sailed longboat, or for a mothership from Epsilon Eridani to dock alongside. A torch-through-a-sheet sun. Hal sensed my China book would be a pile of crap, and he’s right. One six-day trip to Shanghai and Beijing, and I think I can rival Nick Greek’s knowledge of the place—what in buggery’s name was I thinking? Let me write about an Icelandic road trip; a running man; backflashes galore; and slowly disclose what it is he’s running from. Bring him to Бsbyrgi; mention how the ravine was formed by a slammed-down hoof of Odin’s horse. Mention how it’s the Parliament of the Hidden Folk. Have him stare at the rock faces until the rock’s faces stare back. Breathe deep the resinous tang of the spruces. Let him meet a ghost from his past. Hear the bird, luring me in, ever deeper ever tighter circles. Where are you? There. On the toadstool-frilled tree stump.

“It’s a wren,” said Mum, turning to go.

AT MY TENTH birthday party, pass-the-parcel descended into a battle royale of half nelsons and Chinese burns. My father buggered off, leaving Mum and Nina the housekeeper to conduct riot control until Mr. Chimes the Magician showed up. Mr. Chimes was an alcoholic thesp-on-the-skids, whose real name was Arthur Hoare, upon whom Dad had taken pity. His halitosis could have melted plastic. From his magic hat, at the count of three, he produced Hermes the Magic Hamster, but Hermes had been flattened seriously enough to produce death, blood, feces, and innards. My classmates shrieked with disgust and joy. Mr. Chimes laid the rodent’s mangled corpse in an ashtray and said: “ ‘For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.’ Boys.” Mr. Chimes packed up his props. “John Donne lied, the bastard.” Kells Tufton then announced he’d swallowed one of my miniature lead figurines, so Mum had to drive him to hospital. Nina was left in charge, a less-than-ideal arrangement, as she spoke little English and had suffered from bouts of depression ever since the Argentine junta’s men had thrown her siblings from a helicopter over the South Atlantic. My classmates knew nothing and cared less about juntas and played the we’ll-repeat-what-you-say game until Nina locked herself in the third-floor flat where Dad normally wrote his screenplays. Now the blood-dimmed tide was truly loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned—until a boy called Mervyn climbed a twelve-shelved bookcase and brought it down on himself. Nina dialed 999. The paramedic said Mervyn needed immediate attention, so Nina went off with the ambulance, leaving me to explain to our classmates’ parents that our Pembridge Place house was as bereft of adults as all but the last two pages of Lord of the Flies. Mum and Nina got home after eight P.M. Dad got home much later. Voices were raised. Doors were slammed. The following morning I was awoken by the snarl of Dad’s Jaguar XJS in the garage beneath my room. Off he went to Shepperton Studios—he was editing Ganymede 5at the time. I was eating Shredded Wheat over my comic 2000 ADwhen I heard Mum lugging a suitcase down the stairs. She told me she still loved me and Phoebe, but that our father had broken too many promises, so she was taking a break. She said, “This one might be permanent.” As my Shredded Wheat turned to mush, she spoke of how her swinging sixties had been a blur of morning sickness, washing nappies, wringing snot from Dad’s handkerchiefs, and doing unpaid donkey work for Hershey Pictures; how she had turned a blind eye to Dad’s “entanglements” with actresses, makeup girls, and secretaries; and how, when she was pregnant with Phoebe, Dad had promised to write and shoot a film just for her. Her role would be complex, subtle, and showcase her talent as an actress. Dad and his co-writer had completed the script, Domenico and the Queen of Spain, a few weeks before. Mum was to play Princess Maria Barbara, who became the titular queen. Now, this much we all knew. What I didn’t know was that the day before, while anarchy reigned at Pembridge Place, the head of Transcontinental Pictures had phoned Dad and put Raquel Welch on the line. Miss Welch had read the script, she said, considered it a work of genius, and would play Maria Barbara. Had Dad explained that his wife, who had sacrificed her own acting career for the family, was to play the role? No. He had said, “Raquel, it’s all yours.” The doorbell rang and it was Mum’s brother, my uncle Bob, come to pick her up. Mum said I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgivable one. A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn’t start crying.

Назад к карточке книги "The Bone Clocks"