The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “F’Chrissakes, the risks are different.” Holly lets out an angry sigh. “Why bring this up in the middle of the bloody night? I’m Sharon’s matron of honor tomorrow. I’ll look like a hungover panda. You’re at a crossroads, Brubeck. Choose.”

  I make an ill-advised quip: “More of a T-junction, technically.”

  “Right. I’d forgotten. It’s all a joke to you, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that’s not what I—”

  “Well, I’m not joking. Quit Spyglass or move out. My house isn’t just a storage dump for your dead laptops.”

  THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, and things are fairly shit. “Never let the sun set on an argument,” my uncle Norm used to say, but my uncle Norm didn’t have a kid with a woman like Holly. I said “Good night” to her peaceably enough after switching off the lights, but her “Good night” back sounded very like “Screw you,” and she turned away. Her back’s as inviting as the North Korean border. It’s six o’clock in the morning in Baghdad now. The stars will be fading in the freeze-dried dawn, as skin-and-bone dogs pick through rubble for something to eat, the mosques’ Tannoys summon the devout, and bundles by the side of the road solidify into last night’s crop of dead bodies. The luckier corpses have a single bullet through the head. At the Safir Hotel, repairs will be under way. Daylight will be reclaiming my room at the back, 555. My bed will be occupied by Andy Rodriguez from The Economist—I owe him a favor from the fall of Kabul two years ago—but everything else should be the same. Above the desk is a map of Baghdad. No-go areas are marked in pink highlighter. After the invasion last March, the map was marked by only a few pink slashes here and there: Highway 8 south to Hillah, and Highway 10 west to Fallujah—other than that, you could drive pretty much wherever you wanted. But as the insurgency heated up the pink ink crept up the roads north to Tikrit and Mosul, where an American TV crew got shot to shit. Ditto the road to the airport. When Sadr City, the eastern third of Baghdad, got blocked off, the map became about three-quarters pink. Big Mac says I’m re-creating an old map of the British Empire. This makes the pursuit of journalism difficult in the extreme. I can no longer venture out to the suburbs to get stories, approach eyewitnesses, speak English on the streets, or even, really, leave the hotel. Since the new year my work for Spyglass has been journalism by proxy, really. Without Nasser and Aziz I’d have been reduced to parroting the Panglossian platitudes tossed to the press pack in the Green Zone. All of which begs the question, if journalism is so difficult in Iraq, why am I so anxious to hurry back to Baghdad and get to work?

  Because it is difficult, but I’m one of the best.

  Because only the best can work in Iraq right now.

  Because if I don’t, two good men died for nothing.

  April 17

  WINDSURFERS, SEAGULLS, AND SUN, a salt-’n’-vinegar breeze, a glossy sea, and an early walk along the pier with Aoife. Aoife’s never been on a pier before and she loves it. She does a row of froggy jumps, enjoying the flicker of the LED bulbs in the heels of her trainers. We’d have killed for shoes like that when I was a kid, but Holly says it’s hard to find shoes that don’t light up these days. Aoife has a Dora the Explorer helium balloon tied to her wrist. I just paid a fiver for it to a charming Pole. I look behind us, trying to work out which window of the Grand Maritime Hotel is our room. I invited Holly out on the walk but she said she had to help Sharon get ready for a hairdresser who isn’t due until nine-thirty. It’s not yet eight-thirty. It’s her way of letting me know she hasn’t shifted her position from last night.

  “Daddy? Daddy? Did you hear me?”

  “Sorry, poppet,” I tell Aoife. “I was miles away.”

  “No, you weren’t. You’re right here.”

  “I was miles away metaphorically.”

  “What’s meta … frickilly?”

  “The opposite of literally.”

  “What’s litter-lily?”

  “The opposite of metaphorically.”

  Aoife pouts. “Be serious, Daddy.”

  “I’m always serious. What were you asking, poppet?”

  “If you were any animal, what would you be? I’d be a white Pegasus with a black star on its forehead, and my name’d be Diamond Swiftwing. Then Mummy and me could fly to Bad Dad and see you. And Pegasuses don’t hurt the planet like airplanes—they only poo. Grandpa Dave says when he was small his daddy used to hang apples on very tall poles over his allotment, so all the Pegasuses’d hover there, eat, and poo. Pegasus poo is so magic the pumpkins’d grow really really big, bigger than me, even, so just one would feed a family for a week.”

  “Sounds like Grandpa Dave. Who’s the Bad Dad?”

  Aoife frowns at me. “The place where you live, silly.”

  “Baghdad. ‘Bagh-dad.’ But I don’t live there.” God, it’s lucky Holly didn’t hear that. “It’s just where I work.” I imagine a Pegasus over the Green Zone, and see a bullet-riddled corpse plummeting to earth and getting barbecued by Young Republicans. “But I won’t be there forever.”

  “Mummy wants to be a dolphin,” says Aoife, “because they swim, talk a lot, smile, and they’re loyal. Uncle Brendan wants to be a Komodo dragon, ’cause there’re people on Gravesend Council he’d like to bite and shake to pieces, which is how Komodo dragons make their food smaller. Aunty Sharon wants to be an owl because owls are wise, and Aunt Ruth wants to be a sea otter so she can spend all day floating on her back in California and meet David Attenborough.” We reach a section of the pier where it widens out around an amusement arcade. Big letters spelling BRIGHTON PIER stand erect between two limp Union flags. The arcade’s not open yet, so we follow the walkway around the outside of the arcade. “What animal would you be, Daddy?”

  Mum used to call me a gannet; and as a journalist I’ve been called a vulture, a dung beetle, a shit snake; a girl I once knew called me her dog, but not in a social context. “A mole.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re good at burrowing into dark places.”

  “Why d’you want to burrow into dark places?”

  “To discover things. But moles are good at something else, too.” My hand rises like a possessed claw. “Tickling.”

  But Aoife tilts her head to one side like a scale model of Holly. “If you tickle me I’ll wet myself and then you’ll have to wash my pants.”

  “Okay.” I act contrite. “Moles don’t tickle.”

  “I should think so too.” How she says that makes me afraid Aoife’s childhood’s a book I’m flicking through instead of reading properly.

  Behind the arcade, seagulls are squabbling over chips spilling from a ripped-open bag. Big bastards, these birds. A row of stalls, booths, and shops runs down the middle of the pier. I can’t help but notice the woman walking towards us, because everything around her shifts out of focus. She’s around my age, give or take, and tall for a woman though not stand-outishly so. Her hair is white-gold in the sun, her velvet suit is the dark green of moss on graves, and her bottle-blue sunglasses will be fashionable some decades from now. I put on my own sunglasses. She compels attention. She compels. She’s way out of my class, she’s way out of anybody’s class, and I feel grubby and disloyal to Holly, but look at her, Jesus Christ, look at her—graceful, lithe, knowing, and light bends around her. “Edmund Brubeck,” say her wine-red lips. “As I live and breathe, it’s you, isn’t it?”

  I’ve stopped in my tracks. You don’t forget beauty like this. How on earth does she know me, and why don’t I remember? I take off my sunglasses now and say, “Hi!,” hoping that I sound confident, hoping to buy time for clues to emerge. Not a native English accent. European. French? Bendier than German, but not Italian. No journalist looks this semidivine. An actress or model I interviewed, years ago? Someone’s trophy wife from a more recent party? A friend of Sharon’s in Brighton for the wedding? God, this is embarrassing.

  She’s still smiling. “I have you at a disadvantage, don’t I?”

  Am I blushing? “You ha
ve to forgive me, I—I’m …”

  “I’m Immaculée Constantin, a friend of Holly’s.”

  “Oh,” I bluster, “Immaculée—yes, of course!” Do I half-know that name from somewhere? I shake her hand and perform an awkward cheek-to-cheek kiss. Her skin’s as smooth as marble but cooler than sun-warmed skin. “Forgive me, I … I just got back from Iraq yesterday and my brain’s frazzled.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” says Immaculée Constantin, whoever the hell she is. “So many faces, so many faces. One must lose a few old ones to make space for the new. I knew Holly as a girl in Gravesend, although I left town when she was eight years old. It’s curious how the two of us keep bumping into each other, every now and then. As if the universe long ago decided we’re connected. And this young lady,” she gets down on one knee to look eye-to-eye at my daughter, “must be Aoife. Am I correct?”

  Wide-eyed Aoife nods. Dora the Explorer sways and turns.

  “And how old are you now, Aoife Brubeck? Seven? Eight?”

  “I’m six,” says Aoife. “My birthday’s on December the first.”

  “How grown up you look! December the first? My, my.” Immaculée Constantin recites in a secretive, musical voice: “ ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.’ ”

  Holidaymakers pass us by like they’re ghosts, or we are.

  Aoife says, “There’s not a cloud in the sky today.”

  Immaculée Constantin stares at her. “How right you are, Aoife Brubeck. Tell me. Do you take after your mummy most, do you think, or your daddy?”

  Aoife sucks in her lip and looks up at me.

  Waves slap and echo below us and a Dire Straits song snakes over from the arcade. “Tunnel of Love” it’s called; I loved it when I was a kid. “Well, I like purple best,” says Aoife, “and Mummy likes purple. But Daddy reads magazines all the time, whenever he’s home, and I read a lot too. Specially I Love Animals. If you could be any animal, what would you be?”

  “A phoenix,” murmurs Immaculée Constantin. “Or the phoenix, in truth. How about an invisible eye, Aoife Brubeck? Do you have one of those? Would you let me check?”

  “Mummy has blue eyes,” says Aoife, “but Daddy’s are chestnut brown and mine are chestnut brown, too.”

  “Oh, not those eyes”—now the woman removes her strange blue sunglasses. “I mean your special, invisible eye, just … here.” She rests her fingers on Aoife’s right temple and strokes her forehead with her thumb, and deep in my liver or somewhere I know something’s weird, something’s wrong, but it’s drowned out when Immaculée Constantin smiles up at me with her heart-walloping beauty. She studies a space above my eyes, then turns back to Aoife’s, and frowns. “No,” she says, and purses her painterly lips. “A pity. Your uncle’s invisible eye was magnificent, and your mother’s was enchanting, too, before it was sealed shut by a wicked magician.”

  “What’s an invisible eye?” asks Aoife.

  “Oh, that hardly matters.” She stands up.

  I ask, “Are you here for Sharon’s wedding?”

  She replaces her sunglasses. “I’m finished here.”

  “But … You’re a friend of Holly’s, right? Aren’t you even going to …” But as I look at her, I forget whatever it was I meant to ask.

  “Have a heavenly day.” She walks towards the arcade.

  Aoife and I watch her shrink as she moves further away.

  My daughter asks, “Who was that lady, Daddy?”

  SO I ASK my daughter, “Who was what lady, darling?”

  Aoife blinks up at me. “What lady, Daddy?”

  We look at each other, and I’ve forgotten something.

  Wallet, phone; Aoife; Sharon’s wedding; Brighton Pier.

  Nope. I haven’t forgotten anything. We walk on.

  A boy and girl are snogging, like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. “That’s gross!” declares Aoife, and they hear, and glance down, before resuming their tonsil-tickling. Yeah, I tell the boy telepathically, enjoy the cherries and cream because twenty years on from now nothing tastes as good. He ignores me. Up ahead, a picture spray-painted on a rolled-down metal shutter captures Aoife’s attention: a Merlinesque face with a white beard and spiral eyes in a halo of Tarot cards, crystals, and stardust. Aoife reads the name: “D-wiggert?”

  “Dwight.”

  “ ‘Dwight … Silverwind. For-tune … Teller.’ What’s that?”

  “Someone who claims to be able to read the future.”

  “Class! Let’s go inside and see him, Daddy.”

  “Why would you want to see a fortune-teller?”

  “To know if I’ll open my animal-rescue center.”

  “What happened to being a dancer like Angelina Ballerina?”

  “That was ages ago, Daddy, when I was little.”

  “Oh. Well, no. We won’t be visiting Mr. Silverwind.”

  One, two, three—and here’s the Sykes scowl: “Why not?”

  “First, he’s closed. Second, I’m sorry to say that fortune-tellers can’t really tell the future. They just fib about it. They—”

  The shutter is rattled up by a less flattering version of the Merlin on the shutter. This Merlin looks shat out by a hippo, and is dressed up in prog-rock chic: a lilac shirt, red jeans, and a waistcoat encrusted with gems as fake as its wearer.

  Aoife, however, is awestruck. “Mr. Silverwind?”

  He frowns and looks around before looking down. “I am he. And you are who, young lady?”

  A Yank. Of bloody course. “Aoife Brubeck,” says Aoife.

  “Aoife Brubeck. You’re up and about very early.”

  “It’s my aunty Sharon’s wedding today. I’m a bridesmaid.”

  “May you have an altogether sublime day. And this gentleman would be your father, I presume?”

  “Yes,” says Aoife. “He’s a reporter in Bad Dad.”

  “I’m sure Daddy tries to be good, Aoife Brubeck.”

  “She means Baghdad,” I tell the joker.

  “Then Daddy must be very … brave.” He looks at me. I stare back. I don’t like his way of talking and I don’t like him.

  Aoife asks, “Can you really see the future, Mr. Silverwind?”

  “I wouldn’t be much of a fortune-teller if I couldn’t.”

  “Can you tell my future? Please?”

  Enough of this. “Mr. Silverwind is busy, Aoife.”

  “No, he isn’t, Daddy. He hasn’t got one customer even!”

  “I usually ask for a donation of ten pounds for a reading,” says the old fraud, “but, off-peak, to special young ladies, five would suffice. Or”—Dwight Silverwind reaches to a shelf behind him and produces a pair of books—“Daddy could purchase one of my books, either The Infinite Tether or Today Will Happen Only Once for the special rate of fifteen pounds each, or twenty pounds for both, and receive a complimentary reading.”

  Daddy would like to kick Mr. Silverwind in his crystal balls. “We’ll pass on your generosity,” I tell him. “Thanks.”

  “I’m open until sunset, if you change your mind.”

  I tug at my daughter’s hand to tell her we’re moving on, but she flares up: “It’s not fair, Daddy! I want to know my future!”

  Just bloody great. If I take back a tearful Aoife, Holly’ll be insufferable. “Come on—Aunty Sharon’s hairdresser will be waiting.”

  “Oh dear.” Silverwind retreats into his booth. “I foresee trouble.” He shuts a door marked THE SANCTUM behind him.

  “Nobody knows the future, Aoife. These”—I aim this at the Sanctum—“liars tell you whatever they think you want to hear.”

  Aoife turns darker, redder, and shakier. “No!”

  My own temper now wakes up. “No what?”

  “No no no no no no no no no no.”

  “Aoife! Nobody knows the future. That’s why it’s the future!”

  My daughter turns red, shaky, and scre
eches: “Kurde!”

  I’m about to flame her for bad language—but did my daughter just call me a Kurd? “What?”

  “Aggie says it when she’s cross but Aggie’s a million times nicer than you and at least she’s there! You’re never even home!” She storms off back down the pier on her own. Okay, a mild Polish swearword, a mature dollop of emotional blackmail, picked up perhaps from Holly. I follow. “Aoife! Come back!”

  Aoife turns, tugs the balloon string off and threatens to let it go.

  “Go ahead.” I know how to handle Aoife. “But be warned, if you let go, I’ll never buy you a balloon again.”

  Aoife twists her face up into a goblin’s and—to my surprise, and hurt—lets the balloon go. Off it flies, silver against blue, while Aoife dissolves into cascading sobs. “I hate you—I hate Dora the Explorer—I wish you were back—back in Bad Dad—forever and ever! I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate your guts!”

  Then Aoife’s eyes shut tight and her six-year-old lungs fill up.

  Half of Sussex hears her shaken, sobbing scream.

  Get me out of here. Anywhere.

  Anywhere’s fine.

  NASSER DROPPED ME near the Assassin’s Gate, but not too near; you never know who’s watching who’s giving lifts to foreigners, and the guards at the gate have the jumpiest trigger fingers, the poor bastards. “I’ll call you after the press conference,” I told Nasser, “or if the network’s down, just meet me here at eleven-thirty.”

  “Perfect, Ed,” replied my fixer. “I get Aziz. Tell Klimt, all Iraqis love him. Seriously. We build big statue with big fat cock pointing to Washington.” I slapped the roof and Nasser drove off. Then I walked the fifty meters to the gate, past the lumps of concrete placed in a slalom arrangement, past the crater from January’s bomb, still visible; half a ton of plastic explosives, topped with a smattering of artillery shells, killing twenty and maiming sixty. Olive used five of Aziz’s photos, and the Washington Post paid him a reprint fee.

  The queue for the Assassin’s Gate wasn’t too bad last Saturday; about fifty Iraqi staffers, ancillary workers, and preinvasion residents of the Green Zone were ahead of me, lining up to one side of the garish arch, topped by a large sandstone breast with an aroused nipple. An East Asian guy was ahead of me, so I struck up a conversation. Mr. Li, thirty-eight, was running one of the Chinese restaurants inside the zone—no Iraqi is allowed near the kitchens for fear of a mass poisoning. Li was returning from a meeting with a rice wholesaler, but when he found out my trade his English mysteriously worsened and my hopes for a “From Kowloon to Baghdad” story evaporated. So I turned my thoughts to the logistics of the day ahead until it was my turn to be ushered into the tunnel of dusty canvas and razor wire. “Blast Zone” security has been neo-liberalized, and the affable ex-Gurkhas who used to man Checkpoint One have been undercut by an agency recruiting Peruvian ex-cops, who are willing to risk their lives for four hundred dollars a month. I showed my press ID and British passport, got patted down, and had my two Dictaphones inspected by a captain with an epidermal complaint who left flakes of his skin on them.