The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”

  I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes ping and we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a nunnery,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”

  Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”

  I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”

  Arms outspread, the critic Richard Cheeseman passes out.

  March 12, 2016

  I ORDER EGG-WHITE OMELETTE with spinach, sourdough toast, and organic turkey patties, freshly squeezed orange juice, chilled Evian water, and local coffee to wash down painkillers and entomb my hangover. Seven-thirty A.M., and the air in the roofed-over courtyard is still cool. The hotel’s mynah bird sits on its perch, making improbable noises. Its beak is an enameled scythe and its eye is all-seeing and all-knowing. Were this a work of fiction, dear reader, my protagonist would wonder if the mynah bird intuits what he’s planning. Damon MacNish, dressed in a striped linen suit like Our Man in Havana, sits in a corner half hidden by The Wall Street Journal. Funny how the trajectory of life can be altered by a few days in a Scottish recording studio at the end of one’s teens. His girlfriend, who is still in her teens, is flipping through The Face. For her, their sex must be like shagging Sandpaperman. What’s in it for her? Apart from first-class air travel, five-star accommodation, minglings with the rock aristocracy, movie directors, and charity tsars; exposure in every gossip magazine on Earth, and modeling contracts to match, obviously … I only hope that if Juno and Anaïs scale Mount Society they’ll use their own talents and not just straddle the skinny thighs of a mediocre songwriter wrinklier than their dad. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful.

  Can Literature Change the World? is the name of Cheeseman’s event. This urgent and timely commingling of the cultural elite’s finest minds is being held in a long, whitewashed hall on the top floor of the ducal palace, Ground Zero of Cartagena 2016. Things kick off when a trio of Colombian writers strolls onto the stage to a standing ovation. The three salute their audience like postwar resistance heroes. The moderator follows them—a twig-thin woman in a blood-red dress, whose fondness for chunky gold is visible even from my seat on the back row. Richard Cheeseman has opted for the English-consul look, with a three-piece cream suit and damson-purple tie, but just looks like a hairy twat off Brideshead Revisited. The Three Revolutionaries take their seats and we non-Hispanophones don our headphones for the English simultaneous translation. The female interpreter renders first the moderator’s greeting, then the potted biographies of the four guests. Richard Cheeseman’s biog is the scantiest: “A famous and respected English critic and novelist.” In fairness to whoever wrote it, Richard Cheeseman’s Wikipedia page is scanty too, though his “notorious demolition” of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die is there, and connected via hyperlink to the Piccadilly Review website. Hyena Hal tells me he’s done his damnedest to get the link deleted, but Wikipedia doesn’t take bribes.

  South American readings are audience-participative affairs, like stand-up comedy at home. My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.” Richard Cheeseman reads a scene from his newest novel, Man in a White Car, about the final moments of a Sonny Penhallow, a Cambridge undergraduate who drives his vintage Aston Martin over a Cornish cliff. Cheeseman’s prose lacks even the merit of being awful; it’s merely mediocre, and one by one the earphones slip off and the smartphones come out. When Cheeseman’s finished the applause is lackluster, though my own reading yesterday hardly brought the house down.

  Then the “round table” starts and the bollocks gets going.

  “Literature should assassinate,” declares the first revolutionary. “I write with a pen in one hand and a knife in the other!” Grown men stand, cheer, and clap.

  The second writer won’t be outdone: “Woody Guthrie, one of the few great American poets, painted the words This Guitar Kills Fascists on his guitar; on my laptop, I have written This Machine Kills Neocapitalism!” Oh, the crowd goes wild!

  A file of latecomers shuffles along the row in front of me. So perfect an opportunity, it might have been scripted. Behind this human shield, I slip out of the room and clip-clop down the whitewashed stairs. Across the open-air courtyard of the Claustro de Santo Domingo, Kenny Bloke is reading to a hemisphere of children. The kids are entranced. Dad had a story about a party where Roald Dahl arrived by helicopter and told everyone he met, “Write books for children, you know—the little shits’ll believe anything.” I exit the ducal gates onto the plaza where Damon MacNish performed last night. Five blocks along the not-quite-straight Calle 36, I light a cigarette, but drop it down a drain before taking a single puff. Cheeseman’s given up smoking, and the tang of tobacco could be a lethal clue. This is serious shit. I’ve never done anything quite like it. On the other hand, no review ever killed a book as wantonly as Richard Cheeseman’s killed Echo Must Die. Plantains sizzle at a stall. A toddler surveys the street from a second-floor veranda, clutching the ironwork, like a prisoner. Soldiers guard a bank with machine guns slung round their necks, but I’m glad my money isn’t dependent on their vigilance; one’s text-messaging while another flirts with a girl Juno’s age. Is Carmen Salvat married? She made no mention.

  Focus, Hershey. Serious shit. Focus.

  STEP UP FROM the bright hot street into the cool marble-and-teak lobby of the Santa Clara Hotel. Pass the two doormen, who, one suspects, have been trained to kill. They assess clothes, gringocity quotient, credit rating. Remove sunglasses and blink a bit gormlessly—See, boys, I’m a hotel guest—but replace them as you skirt the courtyard, passing preprandial guests sipping cappuccinos and banging out emails where Benedictine nuns once imbibed deep drafts of Holy Spirit. Avoid the eye of the mynah bird and, beyond the sleepless fountain, take the stairs up to the fourth floor. Retrace last night’s midnight steps to the inevitable forking path. A sunny corridor leads around the echoey well of the upper courtyard to my room, where Crispin Hershey bottles out, while the crookeder way twists off to Richard Cheeseman’s Room 405, where Crispin Hershey extracts his due. A minnow of déjà vu darts by and its name is Geoffrey Chaucer:

  “Now, Sirs,” quoth he, “if it be you so lief

  To finde Death, turn up this crooked way,

  For in that grove I left him, by my fay,

  Under a tree, and there he will abide …”

  But it’s justice, not death, that I be so lief to finde. Any eyewitnesses? None. The crooked way, then. A maid’s trolley is parked outside Room 403, but there’s no sign of the maid. Room 405 is around the corner, the last-but-one down a dead end. Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” sashays through my head, and via an arch in the hotel’s outer wall, four floors above street level, Hershey sees roofs, a blue stripe of Caribbean, and dirty cauliflower clouds … Far-off coastal skyscrapers, finished and unfinished. Room 405. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Your come-sodding-uppance, Dickie Cheeseman. Down in the street, a motorbike revs up the octaves. Here’s Cheese
man’s spare swipe-card, retained after my act of Good Samaritanship last night, and here is Fate’s chance to nix my best-laid plan: If Cheeseman noticed he was missing a swipe-card this morning and obtained a replacement with a new code, the little LED on the door will blink red, the door will stay shut, and Hershey must abort mission. But should Fate want me to press ahead, the LED will turn green. There’s a lizard on the door frame. Its tongue flickers.

  Swipe the card, then. Go on.

  Green. Go go go go go!

  The door closes. Good, the room’s been tidied and the bed is made. If a maid arrives, just act like nothing’s wrong. A shirt hangs from a cupboard door and Independent People by Halldór Laxness lies on the bedside table. In the same way that Muslim women are forbidden to touch the Koran during menstruation, a shit like Richard Cheeseman shouldn’t be allowed to touch Laxness unless he’s wearing a pair of CSI latex gloves. Excellent thought. Unfurl the Marigolds from your jacket pocket and don the same. Good. Find Richard Cheeseman’s suitcase in the wardrobe. New, pricy, capacious: ideal. Open it up and unzip an inner pocket: The zip feels stiff and never-used. Take out the Swiss Army knife and carefully make a half-inch incision in the outer lining. Excellent. Remove the credit-card-sized envelope from your jacket pocket, carefully, and, just as carefully, snip off a corner, and scatter a tiny quantity of the white powder around the suitcase–undetectable to the human eye, but whiffy as skunk shit to a beagle’s nose. Slip the envelope through the incision in the lining of the suitcase. Push it down deep. Rezip the inner pocket. Stow the suitcase back in the wardrobe and check Santa’s left no trail of crumbs. Nothing. All good. Depart the crime scene. Rubber gloves off first, you idiot …

  Outside, the maid unbends from behind her cart and gives me a tired smile, and my heart crunches its gears. Even as I say the short word “Hello,” I know I’ve made a fatal slip. She mouths “Hello” back and her mestiza gaze glances off my sunglasses, but I’ve identified myself as an English speaker. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I hurry back down the crooked path. Slowly! Not like a scuttling adulterer. Did the maid see me remove my gloves?

  Should I go back and retrieve the cocaine?

  Calm down! To the illiterate maid, you’re one more middle-aged white guy with sunglasses. To her, Room 405 was your room. She’s already forgotten seeing you. I pass the heavies in the foyer, and take an alternative route back to Festival Ground Zero. This time I smoke. I deposit the rubber gloves in a bin behind a restaurant, and reenter the gates of the Claustro de Santo Domingo flashing my VIP lanyard. Kenny Bloke is telling a boy, “Now, that’s a brilliant question …” Up via an alternative route, past a large hall of three hundred people listening to Holly Sykes on the far stage reading from her book. I stop. What the sodding hell do all these people see in her? Slack-jawed, focused, gazing devoutly at a translation of the Sykes woman’s text on a big screen above the stage. Even the Festival Elves are neglecting their door duties to tune in to the Angel Authoress. “The boy looked like Jacko,” the Sykes woman reads, “with Jacko’s height, clothes, and appearance, but I knew my brother was in Gravesend, twenty miles away.” Silence fills the hall like snow fills a wood. “The boy waved as if he’d been waiting for me to show up. So I waved back, and then he disappeared into the underpass.” Audience members are actually crying as they listen to this tripe! “How had Jacko traveled that distance, so early on a Sunday morning? He was only seven years old. How had he found me? Why didn’t he wait for me before dashing away into the underpass again? So I began running too …”

  I hurry up another flight of steps and sidle back into my seat on the back row, unseen from the stage. People are talking, standing, texting. “But, no, I don’t really agree poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Richard Cheeseman is ruminating. “Only a third-rate poet like Shelley would believe such wishful thinking.”

  Soon the symposium ends and I make my way up to the stage. “Richard, you were the voice of reason, from beginning to end.”

  EVENING. ON NARROW streets laid out by Dutchmen and built by their slaves four centuries ago, grandmothers water geraniums. I climb steep stone steps onto the old city wall. Its stones radiate the day’s heat through my thin soles and the rhubarb-pink sun’s fattening nicely as it sinks into the Caribbean. Why do I live in my rainy bitchy anal country again? If Zoë and I go the whole divorce hog, why not up sticks and live somewhere warm? Here would do. Down below, between four lanes of traffic and the sea, boys are playing football on a dirt pitch: One team wears T-shirts, the other goes topless. Up ahead, I find a vacant bench. So. A last-minute stay of execution?

  No sodding way. I spent four years on Echo Must Die, and that pube-bearded Cheeseman murdered it in eight hundred words. He elevated his own reputation at the expense of mine. This is called theft. Justice demands that thieves be punished.

  I load up my mouth with five Mint Imperials, take out the pay-as-you-go phone Editor Miguel supplied, and, digit by digit, I enter the phone number I copied down from the poster at Heathrow airport. The noise of traffic and seabirds and the footballers fades away. I press Call.

  A woman answers straight away: “Heathrow Customs Agency Confidential Line?” I speak in my crappest Sean Connery accent, the Mint Imperials jangling my voice further. “Listen to me. There’s this character, Richard Cheeseman, flying into London from Colombia on BA713, tomorrow night. BA713, tomorrow. You getting all this?”

  “BA713, sir. Yes, I’m recording it.” That jolts me. Of course, they’d have to. “And the name was what again?”

  “Richard Cheeseman. ‘Cheese’ and ‘man.’ He’s got cocaine in his suitcase. Let a sniffer dog sniff. Watch what happens.”

  “I understand,” says the woman. “Sir, may I ask if—”

  CALL ENDED, say the chunky pixels on the tiny screen. The sounds of evening return. I spit out the Mint Imperials. They shatter on the stones and lie there, like bits of teeth after a fight. Richard Cheeseman committed the action: I am the reaction. Ethics are Newtonian. Maybe what I just said was sufficient to trigger a bag inspection. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he’ll be let off with a private caution, or maybe get his bum spanked in public. Maybe the embarrassment will cause Cheeseman to lose his column in the Telegraph. Maybe it won’t. I’ve done my bit, now it’s up to Fate. I go back down the stone steps, and pretend to tie my shoelace. Surreptitiously I slip the phone into a storm drain. Plop! By the time its remains are disinterred, if indeed they ever are, everybody alive on this glorious evening will have been dead for centuries.

  You, dear reader, me, Richard Cheeseman, all of us.

  February 21, 2017

  APHRA BOOTH BEGINS the next page of her Position Paper, entitled Pale, Male and Stale: The De(CON?)struction of Post-Post-Feminist Straw Dolls in the New Phallic Fiction. I top up my sparkling water, Glug-splush-glig-sploshglugsplshssssss … To my right, Event Moderator sits with his professorial eyes half shut in a display of worshipful concentration, but I suspect he’s napping. The glass wall behind the audience offers a view down to the Swan River, shimmering silver-blue through Perth, Western Australia. How long has Aphra been droning? This is worse than church. Either our moderator really is asleep, or he’s too scared to interrupt Ms. Booth in mid-position. What am I missing? “When held up to the mirror of gender, masculine metaparadigms of the female psyche refract the whole subtext of an assymetric opacity; or to paraphrase myself, when Venus depicts Mars, she paints from below; from the laundry room and the baby-changing mat. Yet when Mars depicts Venus, he cannot but paint from above; from the imam’s throne, the archbishop’s pulpit or via the pornographer’s lens …” I pandiculate, and Aphra Booth swivels around. “Can’t keep up without a PowerPoint show, Crispin?”

  “Just a touch of deep-vein thrombosis, Aphra.” I win a few nervous giggles, and the prospect of a fight injects a little life into the sun-leathered citizens of Perth. “You’ve been going on for hours. And isn’t this panel supposed to be about the soul?”

  “This fest
ival does not yit practice censorship.” She glares at Event Moderator. “Am I correct?”

  “Oh, totally,” he blinks, “no censorship in Australia. Definitely.”

  “Then perhaps Crispin would pay me the courtesy,” Aphra Booth sweeps her death ray back my way, “of letting me finish. As is clear to anyone out of his intellectual nappies, the soul is a pre-Cartesian avatar. If that’s too taxing a concept, suck a gobstopper and wait quietly in the corner.”

  “I’d rather suck on a cyanide tooth,” I mutter.

  “Crispin wants a cyanide tooth! Can anyone oblige? Please.”

  Oh, how the rehydrated mummies wheezed and tittered!

  BY THE TIME Aphra Booth is finished, only fifteen of our ninety minutes remain. Event Moderator tries to lasso the runaway theme and asks me whether I believe in the soul, and if so, what the soul may be. I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory stick in search of a corporeal hard drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality. Aphra Booth suggests that I’ve fudged the question because I’m a classic commitmentphobe—“as we all know.” Clearly this is a reference to my recent, well-publicized divorce from Zoë, so I suggest she stop making cowardly insinuations and say what she wants to say, straight up. She accuses me of Hersheycentricism and paranoia. I accuse her of making accusations she’s too gutless to stand by, emphasizing “gut” with everything I’ve got. Tempers fray. “The tragic paradox of Crispin Hershey,” Aphra Booth tells the venue, “is that while he poses as the scourge of cliché, his whole Johnny Rotten of Literature schtick is the tiredest stereotype in the male zoo. But even that posturing is lethally undermined by his recent advocacy of a convicted drug smuggler.”

  I imagine a hair dryer falling into her bath: Her limbs twitch and her hair smokes as she dies. “Richard Cheeseman is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and using his misfortune as a stick to beat me with is vulgar beyond belief, even for Dr. Aphra Booth.”