The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  Soleil Moore flaunts her lunatic’s credentials by staying calm. “Nobody wanted William Blake’s work, either.”

  “William Blake had the merit of being William Blake.”

  “Mr. Hershey, if you don’t read this and act, you’ll be complicit in animacide.” She places Soul Carnivores by the ashtray, wanting me to ask what that made-up word means. “You’re in the Script,” she says, as if that settles everything, before finally buggering off, as if she’s just delivered a killer argument. I take a few more puffs, sifting a conversation nearby: “She said, ‘Hershey’: I thought it was him”; “Nah, can’t be, Crispin Hershey’s not that old”; “Ask him”; “No, you ask him.” Cover blown, I crumple up my death-stick and flee my smoker’s Eden.

  THE BRITFONE PAVILION was designed by an eminent architect I’ve never heard of and “quotes” Hadrian’s Wall, the Tower of London, a Tudor manor, postwar public housing, Wembley Stadium, and a Docklands skyscraper. What a sicked-up fry-up it is. A holographic flag of the BritNet logo flutters from its pinnacle and you ingress through a double-sized replica of 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. The security men are dressed as Beefeaters, and one asks for my VIP lanyard. I check my jacket; my trousers; my jacket again. “Oh, sod a dog, I put it down somewhere—look, I’m Crispin Hershey.”

  “Sorry, sir,” says the Beefeater. “No ID, no entry.”

  “Check your little list. Crispin Hershey. The writer.”

  The Beefeater shakes his head. “I got my orders.”

  “But I did a sodding event here only an hour ago.”

  A second Beefeater comes over, eyes ashine with fan-glow: “You’re never—are you really … him? Oh, my God, you are …”

  “Yes, I am.” I glare at the first. “Thank you.”

  The Worthy Beefeater walks me through the small lobby where lesser mortals are patted down and have their bags checked. “Sorry about that, sir. The Afghan president’s here tonight so we’re on amber alert. My colleague back there’s not au fait with contemporary fiction. And, to be fair, you do look older on your author photos.”

  I double-check this pleasing sentence. “Do I?”

  “If I weren’t such a fan, sir, I wouldn’t have recognized you.” We enter the pavilion proper, where hundreds are mingling, but the Worthy Beefeater has a favor to beg: “Look, sir, I shouldn’t ask, but …” he produces a book from inside his ridiculous uniform, “… your new book’s the best thing you’ve ever written. I went to bed with it and read right through to dawn. My fiancée’s mother’s a huge fan too, and, well, for premarital Brownie points, would you mind?”

  I produce my fountain pen and the Beefeater hands me his book, already turned to the title page. Only when nib touches paper do I notice I am signing a novel called Best Kept Secret by Jeffrey Archer. I look up at the Beefeater to see if he’s taking the piss, but no: “Would you write ‘To Bridie on your Sixtieth Birthday from Lord Archer’?”

  A famous columnist from The Times is standing three feet away.

  Dedication written, I tell the bouncer, “So glad you enjoyed it.”

  The pavilion contains enough celebrity wattage to power a small sun: I spy two Rolling Stones, a Monty Python; a teenage fifty-something presenter of Top Gear joshing with a disgraced American cyclist; an ex–U.S. secretary of state; an ex–football manager who writes an autobiography every five years; an ex-head of MI6 who cranks out a third-rate thriller annually; and a lush-lipped TV astronomer who writes, at least, about astronomy. We’re all here for the same reason: We have books to flog. “I spy with my little eye the rarest of sights,” an old codger purrs in my ear by the champagne bar, “a literary writer at a literary festival. How’s life, Crispin?”

  The stranger absorbs Hershey’s withering stare like a man in his prime with nothing to fear, notwithstanding the damage that Time the Vandal has done to his face. The clawed lines, the whisky nose, the sagging pouches, the droopy eyelids. A silk handkerchief pokes up from his jacket pocket and he wears an elegant fedora, but Sodding Hell. How can the incurably elderly stand it? “And you are?”

  “I’m your near future, my boy.” He swivels his once-handsome face. “Take a good, long look. What do you think?”

  What I think is that tonight is the Night of the Fruitcakes. “What I think is that I’m no fan of cryptic crosswords.”

  “No? I enjoy them. I am Levon Frankland.”

  I take the proffered champagne flute and make an underimpressed face. “No bells are going ‘dong,’ I must confess.”

  “I’m an old mucker of your father’s from another time. We were both contemporaries at the Finisterre Club in Soho.”

  I maintain my underimpressed face. “I heard it finally closed down.”

  “The end of the end of an era. My era. We met,” Levon Frankland tilts his glass my way, “at a party at your house in Pembridge Place in, ooh, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, around the time of the Gethsemane jazzamaroo. Amongst the various pies into which I had thrust my sticky fingers was artist management, and your father hoped that an avant-folk combo I represented would work on music for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The plan came to nought, but I remember you, dressed up as a cowboy. You had not long mastered the art of bowel control and social intercourse was still years away, but I’ve followed your career with an avuncular interest, and read your memoir about your dad with relish. Do you know, every few months, I get it into my head to call him and arrange lunch? I clean forget he’s gone! I do so miss the old contrarian. He was sinfully proud of you.”

  “Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”

  “Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

  A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”

  “I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”

  “I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”

  Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”

  Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”

  Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via Out on Your Arse!, the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a £100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to £150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show The Unput-downables, and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick the twentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It’s—”

  “I knew you’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adore it. The only war novel to really ‘g
et’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”

  “I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of All Quiet on the Western—”

  “What German ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”

  Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why The Naked and the Dead is so important, Rog—ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”

  “To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.

  “Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “The Naked and the Dead? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”

  Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”

  “Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

  I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”

  “I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship Desiccated Embryos.”

  “Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand, wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since Embryos is a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.”

  “I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”

  “So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”

  “—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “after the Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”

  My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman raved about it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”

  “Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called? Highway 66?”

  “Route 605.” Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”

  “Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”

  “No, but that’s a fair description of my brother. Route 605 wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”

  A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”

  “Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”

  Oh, great. Why didn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer—and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying—weren’t you Suze?—that Route 605 is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones—it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of Route 605’s sales graph. I need a drink.

  HERSHEY IS not going to vomit. Did Hershey not pass this broken gate earlier? A hunchback tree, a brook that won’t shut up, the puddle reflecting the BritFone holo-logo, the acid reek of cowshit. Hershey is not drunk. Just well oiled. Why am I here? “So far up his own arse he can see daylight.” Gulp it down. The pavilion was a bottomless pit. The mascarpone trifle was ill-advised. “That wasn’t Crispin Hershey, was it?” My shortcut across the car park back to my comfy room at the Coach and Horses has trapped me in a Möbius loop of Land Rovers, Touaregs, and slurping hoofed-up mud. I thought I saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu and I followed him to ask about something that seemed important at the time but it turned out not to be him anyway. So why am I here, dear reader? Because I need to keep my author profile high. Because the £500,000 advance that Hyena Hal extracted for Echo Must Die is gone—half to the Inland Revenue, a quarter to the mortgage, a quarter to negative equity. Because if I’m not a writer, what am I? “Anything new in the pipeline, Mr. Hershey? My wife and I adored Desiccated Embryos.” Because of Nick sodding Greek and the Young Ones, eyeing my place in the throne room of English Literature. Oh, rum, sodomy, and the lash: Mount Vomit is ready to erupt; let us now kneel before the Lord of the Gastric Spasm and all pay homage …

  March 11, 2016

  PLAZA DE LA ADUANA IS THROBBING with Cartagenans holding their iPhones aloft. Plaza de la Aduana is roofed by a tropical twilight of Fanta Orange and oily amethyst. Plaza de la Aduana is oscillating to the cod-ska chorus of “Exocets for Breakfast” by Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship. Up on his balcony, Crispin Hershey taps ash into his champagne glass and remembers a sexual encounter to the music of She Blew Out the Candle—the Sinking Ship’s debut album—around the time of his twenty-first birthday, when the images of Morrissey, Che Guevara, and Damon MacNish surveyed a million student bedrooms. The second album was less well received—bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears—and the follow-up’s follow-up bombed. MacNish would have returned to his career in pizza delivery had he not resurrected himself as a celebrity campaigner for AIDS, for Sarajevo, for the Nepalese minority in the Kingdom of Bhutan, for any cause at all, as far as I could see. World leaders eagerly submitted themselves to two minutes of MacNish while the cameras rolled. Winner of Sexiest Scot of the Year for three years running, tabloid interest in his regularly rotating girlfriends, a steady trickle of okay but mojoless albums, an ethical clothing brand, and two BBC seasons of Damon MacNish’s Five Continents kept the Glaswegian’s star well lit until the last decade, and even today “Saint Nish” remains in demand at festivals, where he delivers a polished Q&A by day and a tour through his old hits by night—for a mere $25,000 plus business-class travel and five-star accommodation, I understand.

  I slap a mosquito against my cheek. The little bastards are the price for this delicious warmth. Zoë and the girls were due to join me here—I’d even bought the (nonrefundable) tickets—but then the shitstorm blew up about Zoë’s earth-mother marriage counselor. £250+VAT for an hour of platitudes about mutual respect? “No,” I told Zoë, “and, as we all know, no means no.”

  Zoë opened fire with every weapon known to woman.

  Yes, the porcelain mermaid was launched from my hand. But had it been aimed at her, it would not have missed. Therefore I didn’t mean to hurt her. Zoë, by now too hysterical to follow this simple logic, packed her Louis Vuitton bags and left with Lori the hairy au pair to pick up Anaïs and Juno from school, thence to her old friend’s pad in Putney. Which was mysteriously available at zero notice. Crispin was supposed to proffer promises to mend his ways, but he preferred to watch No Country for Old Men with the volume up really loud. The following day, I wrote a story about a gang of feral youths who roam the near future, siphoning oil tanks of lardy earth mothers. It’s one of my best. Zoë phoned that evening and told me she “needed space—perhaps a fortnight”; the subtext being, dear reader
, If you apologize grovelingly enough, I may come back. I suggested that she take a month and hung up. Lori brought Juno and Anaïs to visit last Sunday. I was expecting tears and emotional blackmail, but Juno told me her mother had described me as impossible to live with, and Anaïs asked if she could have a pony if we got divorced, because when Germaine Bigham’s parents got divorced she got a pony. It rained all day, so I ordered in pizza. We played Mario Carts. John Cheever has a short story called “The Season of Divorce.” It’s one of his best.

  “STILL PUTS ON a decent show, don’t he, f’ra fella his age?” Kenny Bloke offers me a smoke as Damon MacNish windmills through “Corduroy Skirts Are a Crime Against Humanity.” “I saw the lads in Fremantle, back in … eighty-six? Fackin’ A.” Kenny Bloke’s in his late fifties, sports ironmongery in his ear, and is a Noongar elder, according to the festival bumf. I observe how Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate. Kenny Bloke taps ash into the geraniums. “MacNish’s sitting pretty compared to a lot of them, I reckon. Guess who was playing at Busselton Park not so long ago? Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Remember them? Not a massive turnout, I’m afraid, but they’ve got pensions and kids to put through college, same as everyone. Us writers get spared that, at least, eh? Farewell tours on the nostalgia circuit.”

  I probe this not-necessarily-true remark. Echo Must Die cleared twenty thousand in the U.K. and the same in the States. Respectable …

  … -ish, but for the new Crispin Hershey novel, disappointing. Time was I’d shift a hundred thousand units in both territories, no questions asked. Hyena Hal talks about eBook downloads reconfiguring the old paradigm, but I know exactly why my “return to form” novel failed to sell—Richard Cheeseman’s Rottweilering. That one sodding review declared open season on the Wild Child of British Letters, and by the time the Brittan Prize longlist was announced, Echo Must Die was better known as The One Richard Cheeseman Hilariously Shafted. I scan the spacious ballroom behind us. Still no sign of him, but he won’t resist the tug of coffee-skinned Latino butlers for long.