Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  The wart on my thumb was growing.

  The phone rang. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

  John was nearest. “Hello?”

  My throat was dry.

  “Tamlin …”

  Tamlin Sheehy. Calm down, Mo. No newcomers to Clear Island today.

  “Yes, Liam tied the tarpaulin down. They’ll be fine. Thanks for asking. She would, would she? Okay … Mind how you go.…”

  John cupped the receiver. “Hey loverboy, Bernadette wants to murmur sweet nothings.”

  “Da! She’s frightmare! Don’t you dare!”

  “Don’t be rotten. You’ve got the lure of the exotic. You’ve been to Switzerland.”

  John smiled twistedly and spoke back into the receiver. “Just a mo there, Bernadette, he’s just coming. He was in the shower. He’s just toweling himself dry for …”

  Liam half-snarled, half-hissed, and took the phone into the hallway, shutting the door on the cord.

  We listened to the radio over dinner.

  “Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The wind rose and fell like mountains at sea. The glass rattled. Liam yawned, and so did I. “One game to me, one game to you. Will Feynman be okay?”

  “He will. He huddles down behind his boulder. Where’s your da?”

  “In his study, meditating.”

  Liam started putting away the Scrabble. “It’s going to be a harsh winter, Maisie was telling me. Long-range weather forecast.”

  “Maisie? Has she got satellite TV installed?”

  “No, her bees told her.”

  “Ah, the bees.”

  • • •

  The Chinese policeman was unexpectedly tall and civil. A lieutenant from the old Prince of Wales guard, he knew about Huw’s work. He wrote down our versions of the raid in his notebook, and sipped iced tea. An ink-devil of sweat soaked itself into his shirt.

  “I should tell you that the burglars wanted to know where were hidden the gwai los. Your neighbors said there no gwai los.”

  “Before or after the gun was fired?” I asked.

  “After. They lied for you.”

  Huw puffed out his cheeks. “What are you thinking, officer?”

  “Two possibilities. One. They thought the apartment of gwai los had better things to steal. Two. Mr. Llewellyn, you are investigating the accounts of powerful companies. Might they include some Triad links?”

  “Show me a company in Hong Kong that doesn’t have Triad links.”

  “Foreigners don’t live in neighborhoods like this, especially white ones. Discovery Bay is more secure.”

  I went into the kitchenette. In the opposite tenement the blinds were rolling down as the excitement subsided. Eyes everywhere. Eyes, eyes.

  I remembered my conversation with the Texan. I knew who the “burglars” were and what they had come for. Next time they wouldn’t mistake the British, American, and Chinese systems of labeling floors.

  I hadn’t touched a piano since Switzerland. I played a passable aria from the Goldberg Variations.

  Liam played a gorgeous “In a Sentimental Mood.”

  John half-improvised, half-remembered. “This one’s the crow on the wall.… This one’s the wind turbine.… This one’s …”

  “Totally random notes?” suggested Liam.

  “No. It’s the music of chance.”

  “The wind’s really getting up! Maybe there’ll be no boats tomorrow either, Ma?”

  “Maybe so. So tell me about Uni, Liam.”

  “They’ve got some cool electron microscopes. I’m doing my first-year thesis on superliquids, and I’ve been playing synths in a band, and—”

  “—deflowering maidens,” butted in John through a mouthful of sausage. “According to Dennis.”

  “It’s not fair, Ma.” Liam turned red as a beetroot. “He speaks to Professor Dannan once a week.”

  “As I have done for the last twenty years. Why should I stop just because he’s your tutor?”

  Liam harrumphed, and walked over to the window. “It looks like the end of the world out there.”

  Schroedinger came in through the cat flap, and looked around hypercritically.

  “What, cat?” asked Liam.

  Schroedinger chose John’s lap in which to exact tribute. The storm battered the island.

  “I’m a shade concerned about our Kiwi visitor.” John picked up the telephone. “Mrs. Dunwallis? This is John. I’m just phoning to check whether or not your Kiwi visitor got back to the hostel safe and sound.… She called in here earlier, asking for directions to the stone row, with the gales, I was worried.… Are you sure? Of course you’re sure.… No idea. Mrs. Cuchthalain’s at Roe Bridge? Sure … will do.”

  “What’s up, Da?”

  “No New Zealanders at the Youth Hostel.”

  “She must have just been a day tripper, then.”

  “Billy wouldn’t risk taking St. Fachtna over to Baltimore in this weather.”

  “She’s still on the island then. She must have taken shelter in the village.”

  “Aye. There’s a logical explanation.”

  I felt hollow. I was afraid there was a very logical explanation.

  John and I were in our firelit bedroom. Liam was in the bath having a long soak, after e-mailing a girl in Dublin whose name we couldn’t tease out of him. John massaged my feet as thunder galloped by. I watched the sphinxes and the faces and flowers in the bedroom’s fireplace. The physics and chemistry of fire only add to its poetry. This way of living was so normal to Clear Islanders. Mo, why are evenings like this so rare for you?

  I am the ancient mariner: that black book is my albatross.

  “What am I going to do, John? When they get here?”

  “Mo, let’s cross that one when we get to it.”

  “I don’t even know if I should cross it at all.”

  On the third day I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. The black book was safe. Yesterday’s storms were long gone, the early sunlight lit the curtains, ending its twenty-six-minute journey on the jiggleable electrons in my retina. The wind was brisk, the sky was bright and cloud shadows slid over Roaringwater Sound and the three Calf Islands. Planck was barking. Thousands of Arab children were gamboling into the sea, steam hissing off their burns. A noise on the stairs made me turn around. The Texan filled the doorframe. He clicked the safety catch off and aimed the gun at the black book, then at me. “We need Quancog to rise again, Dr. Muntervary.” He winked at me as he pulled the trigger.

  I lay there for twenty minutes, calming down. The early sunlight lit the curtains.

  John’s eyeballs rolled under his eyelids, seeing something I couldn’t.

  Our very first morning together in this house, this room, this bed, was our first morning as husband and wife. Twenty years ago! Brendan had constructed the bed, and Maisie had painted the Michaelmas daisies along the headboard. The bedding was from Mrs. Dunwallis, who’d stuffed the pillows from her own geese. Aodhagan Croft itself was a wedding present from John’s Aunt Cath, who had gone to live with Aunt Triona in Baltimore. No electricity, no telephone, no sewage tank. My own parents’ house in the sycamore trees was still standing, but the floorboards and rafters had rotted right through, and we didn’t have the money to reverse dereliction.

  Besides Aodhagan we had John’s harp, my doctorate, a crate of books that had been my da’s library, and a cartload of tiles and whitewash lugged up from the harbor by Freddy Doig’s horse. My job at Cork University didn’t begin until the autumn term. I’ve never felt such freedom since, and I know I never will again.

  Down in the kitchen the telephone rang. Leave me alone, leave me alone.

  To my surprise Liam was already up and had answered it before the third ring. “Oh, hi, Aunt Maisie … Yeah, they’re still in bed, on a morning like this, can you believe it? Bone
idle or what? Uni’s fine … Which one? Nah, she’s history, I knocked that one on the head weeks ago.… Not literally, no. Right, I’ll tell ’em when they drag themselves down. Okay.”

  I left John asleep. I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. “Morning, First-Born.”

  “Only-Born. That was Aunt Maisie. She told me to say ‘Kilmagoon’ to you. She’s cleaning the pipes in the bar, but will be going to Minnaunboy to cut Sylvester’s hair later. Nicky O’Driscoll’s privy got blown away in the gale, and Maire Doig caught a monster conger eel. She’s suffering from gossip deprivation. Sleep okay?”

  “Like a log.”

  A pause while Liam worked up to something.

  “Ma—are you going to tell everyone about the Americans?”

  “I think it’s best not to.”

  “When are they going to come?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sooner or later?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then when are we going to hide out somewhere?”

  “You’re going back to university, my boy.”

  “And you?”

  “As you astutely observed, I’m not James Bond. I can’t go on hiding. The only places I would be safe from the Americans are places more dangerous than Saragosa. All I can do is wait for them to come.”

  Liam spooned up some milk and dribbled it down into his bowl.

  “They can’t just abduct an Irish citizen! And you’re not exactly nobody, either. It would be an international incident. The media would kick up too much fuss.”

  “Liam, they are the most powerful people on the planet and they want what is in my head and my black book. Neither international law nor BBC Radio would come into it.”

  Liam’s forehead knotted up, like it used to before a tantrum. “But … how are we supposed to live like this? Do we just sit around waiting for you to be got?”

  “I wish I had an answer for you, love.”

  “It’s not fair!”

  “No.”

  The legs of his chair scraped as he stood up. “Well, damn it all, Ma!”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m going to go and feed the chickens.” He put his duffle coat over his pajamas and went out.

  I put the kettle on, and waited for it to whistle.

  The grandfather clock’s pendulum grated like a spade digging far below.

  Eighteen years ago I was flat on my back in the bedroom, with Liam tunneling out of my womb. A wind tunnel of agony! I didn’t want to give birth on Clear Island—I was a research lecturer acquainted with the latest medical technology. That very day I was leaving for Cork to stay with Bella and Alain near a shiny hospital with a cheerful midwife from Jamaica, but Liam had other ideas. Even today he’s patient only until he’s bored. So instead of my gleaming ward I had Aodhagan’s bedroom, my mother, Maisie, an icon of St. Bernadette, some anti-fairy herbs, towels and steaming kettles. John was smoking downstairs with Brendan, and Father Wally was on hand with his holy water.

  When he was out, as I lay there unstitched, the pain seeping away, Maisie held up Liam! This alien parasite, glistening in mucus? Laugh or cry? Birth had come visiting, just as death will, and everything was perfectly clear. My mother, Maisie, St. Bernadette and I shared a few moments, postponing the clod-hopping hullabaloo. Maise washed Liam in a tin bath.

  It was noon. I felt I was cradling little Apollo.

  Liam fed the hook into the mouth of the earthworm. The hook slid deeper into its gut as it squirmed. “Chew on that, my hermaphrodite.”

  “How can you do that and not bring your breakfast up?”

  The sea breathed deeply in, and deeply out.

  “Ah well, Mam. Life’s a bitch, then you die.”

  He got up and cast off. I lost sight of the float until the plop sounded. My eyesight is definitely getting worse.

  Seals were basking between the rock pools. The bull hauled himself into the sea, and sank from sight for thirty seconds. Thirty yards out his head appeared, reminding me of Planck.

  “You must have fished with live bait when you were a girl, Ma?”

  “I usually had my head in books. Your grandmother was the real fisherman of the family. She’d be out before dawn on mornings like these. I must have told you a dozen times.”

  “You never have. What about Grandpa?”

  “His pleasure lay in weaving extraordinary lies.”

  “What like?”

  “One time he said King Cuchulainn had given Bonnie Prince Charlie all his gold to look after before he went mad and turned into a newt. Bonnie Prince Charlie, running from Napoléon Bonaparte, hid the gold under a stone on Clear Island, and if we looked hard enough we’d be sure to find it. We spent a whole summer, me and the Docherty twins. Then Roland Davitt pointed out the chronological inconsistencies.”

  “What did you say to Grandpa?”

  “I asked him why he’d lied.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me that no scientist based her research on secondhand data without checking its veracity beforehand, using the Encyclopedia Britannica in the village school.”

  A motor boat crossed the sound. I looked through the binoculars.

  “It’s okay, Ma. It’s only Daibhi O’Bruadair raising his lobster pots.”

  Mo, don’t be so jumpy! God knows when you’ll next have a free morning with Liam. Could be tomorrow, could be years from now.

  For a little while we said nothing, Liam standing there fishing, and me lying on the warm rock. I listened to the waves breathe through the shingle.

  The rain was falling onto the roofs of Skibbereen, coming out of the guttering in great gurgling arcs and slapping onto the pavements. The nursing home attendant poured one cup of tea in the china teacup. It had a wide brim to hasten thermal equilibrium and a mousepaw-sized handle to hasten spillage. “I’m sorry the head matron couldn’t be here to see you herself, Dr. Muntervary … but visitors usually let us know in advance that they’ll be paying a call.”

  “It’s just a flying visit.”

  The nurse and I caught each other searching the other’s face and we both looked down. I could imagine the Texan speaking to her: “I’m an old friend of Mo and John.… If Mo shows up, give me a bell. I’d love to surprise her.”

  We looked at my ma.

  “Mrs. Muntervary? Your daughter’s come.” I suspected the softness in the attendant’s voice only appeared when visitors came to tea.

  I looked around the room. “Very nice in here …” What rubbish.

  “Yes,” said the attendant. “We do our best.” More rubbish. “Well, I’ll leave you for a little while. I have to supervise the crochet class, to make sure there are no upsets with the needles.”

  Everything in the room was magnolia. Anonymity is gray, forgetting is magnolia.

  I looked at my mother. Lucy Eileen Muntervary. Are you somewhere, looking at us both but unable to signal, or are you nowhere now? When I visited at the end of winter you had been upset. You remembered my face but not who it belonged to.

  Wigner maintains that human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all of the possible ones. Had my mother’s universe now uncollapsed? Were cards flying across the baize back into the dealer’s pack?

  My mother blinked.

  “Ma …” A voice used to address a saint believed in only when needed.

  “Ma, if you can hear me …” Now I’m opening a séance.

  Why are you putting yourself through this, Mo?

  Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wide-worlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots—how do they do it? How do they know who they are?

  My ma blinked.

  “Ma, do you remember dancing with Da in the parlor?”

  I persuaded myself that she was enjoying the patter of rain
drops on the windowsill. We watched the waterflower-fireworks until the attendant returned.

  Over Lios Ó Móine comes Father Wally, freewheeling on his tricycle, his habit flapping behind him in the wind. I watch him getting nearer and larger, and find myself calculating a parallax matrix. We wave. Liam is still concentrating, swishing his fishing line from time to time. I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle now, a rusty brigand on coasters. He dismounts cowboy-style, standing on one pedal and jumping as it cruises to a crash. His face is red from the exercise and the wind, his hair fine and white from age.

  “Morning to the pair o’ye! You survived the gales, then. Your eye’s looking better, Mo. I called into Aodhagan to see about saving my bishop. He told me you’d be here. It’s a fair old spot to see dolphins. Fish biting, Liam?”

  “Not yet, Father. They’ve probably just had breakfast.”

  “Shufty up on our blanket, Father. I’ve got a thermos of tea and a thermos of coffee.”

  “I’ll go with your tea, there, Mo. Coffee is fine for the body, but tea is the drink of the soul.”

  “I read a few weeks back,” said Liam, “that tea was first processed accidentally in the holds of long-distance clippers from India. It took so long, and got so hot, that the crates of green tea started to ferment. And when they opened the crates at Bristol or Dublin or Le Havre, the stuff we call tea is what they found. But it was all a mistake, to begin with.”

  “I wasn’t knowing that,” said Father Wally, “so many things there are to know. Most things happen because of mistakes.”

  “Can I leave you with Ma, Father Wally? I want to cast off further down. I think the seals might be scaring the fishing off.”

  “Even Jesus tended to put fishing first.”

  After the upstairs raid, I knew I had to leave right then. Huw tried to dissuade me, and talked about coincidences and overreacting, but there was no way I’d risk bringing those people into his life, and he knew I was right. We spoke in whispers as I packed. I judged it too dangerous to try to leave Hong Kong by the airport. Huw walked me to a big hotel near his office. I said goodbye to my only friend east of Lake Geneva. I checked in with my real name, and then took a taxi to another hotel, where I checked in with my fake passport.

  The following day I lay low. From the travel office in the hotel I obtained a visa for China and a train ticket with my own compartment to Beijing. When I was a girl, I dreamed of such journeys. Now I could only dream of its end.