The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “I’m not rejecting you, Crispin, honestly. I just …”

  Evening in Shanghai is turning suddenly cooler.

  “I just … want to carry on as we are for a while, that’s all.”

  Everyone I see appears to be one half of a loving couple. I remember this I’m not rejecting you, Crispin from my pre-Zoë era, when it marked the beginning of breakups. Resentment snarls through the letterbox, feeding me lines to say: “Carmen, make your sodding mind up!”; “Do you know how much we’re wasting on airfares?”; even, “Have you met someone else? Someone Spanish? Someone closer to your own age?”

  I tell her, “That’s fine.”

  She listens to the long pause. “It is?”

  “I’m disappointed, but only because I don’t have enough money to buy a place near yours, so we could establish some sort of Hanseatic League of Little Castles. Maybe if a film deal for Echo Must Die falls from the skies. Look, this call’s costing you a fortune. Go and cheer up your booksellers.”

  “Am I still welcome in Hampstead next week?”

  “You’re always welcome in Hampstead. Any week.”

  She’s smiling in her office in Madrid, and I’m glad I didn’t listen to the snarls through the letterbox. “Thanks, Crispin. Give my love to Holly, if you meet up. She’s hoping to. And if anyone offers you the deep-fried durian fruit, steer clear. Okay, bye then—love you.”

  “Love you too.” And end call. Do we use the L-word because we mean it, or because we want to kid ourselves into thinking we’re still in that blissful state?

  BACK IN HIS hotel room on the twenty-ninth floor, Crispin Hershey showers away his sticky day and flumps back onto his snowy bed, clad in boxers and a T-shirt emblazoned with Beckett’s “fail better” quote I was given in Santa Fe. Dinner was a gathering of writers, editors, foreign bookshop owners, and British Council folks at a restaurant with revolving tables. Nick Greek was on eloquent form, while I imagined him dying in spectacular fashion, facedown in a large dish of glazed duck, lotus root, and bamboo shoot. Hercule Poirot would emerge from the shadows to tell us who had poisoned the rising literary star, and why. The older writer would be an obvious choice, with professional jealousy as a motive, which is why it couldn’t be him. I stare at the digital clock in the TV-screen frame: 22:17. Thinking about Carmen, I shouldn’t be surprised at her reticence re: Our Flat. The “Honeymoon Over” signs were already there. She refused to be in London when Juno and Anaïs came over last month. The girls’ visit was not a wholly unqualified success. On the way from the airport, Juno announced she was not into horses anymore so, of course, Anaïs decided that she was too old for pony camp as well, and as the deposit was nonrefundable, I expressed my displeasure perhaps a tad too much in the manner of my own father. Five minutes later Anaïs was bawling her eyes out and Juno was studying her nails, telling me, “It’s no good, Dad, you can’t use twentieth-century methods on twenty-first-century kids.” It cost me five hundred pounds and three hours in Carnaby Street boutiques to stop them phoning their mother to get their flights back to Montreal rebooked for the next day. Zoë lets Juno get away with rejecting even the gentlest admonishment with a virulent “Oh, whatever!” while Anaïs is turning into a sea anemone whose mind sways whichever way the currents of the moment push her. The visit would have gone better if Carmen had pitched in, but she wasn’t having any of it: “They don’t need a stepmother laying down the law when holidaying in London with their dad.” I said I felt a deep affection for my own stepmother. Carmen replied that after reading my memoir about Dad she could quite understand why. Subject deftly changed.

  Classic Carmen Salvat strategy, that.

  22:47. I PLAY chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn’t a mind of digital code but Dad: It’s Dad’s attacks I repel; Dad’s defenses I dismantle; Dad’s king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable. Stress will out, however; usually I win at this level, but today I keep making repeated slips. Worse, the old git starts taking the piss: “Superb strategy, Crisp; that’s it, you move your rook there; so I’ll move my knight here; pincer your dozy rook against your blundering queen and now there’s Sweet Fanny Adams you can do about it!” When I use the undo function to take back my rook, Dad crows: “That’s right—ask a sodding machine to bail you out. Why not download an app to write your next novel?” “Sod off,” I tell him, and turn off my phone. I switch on the TV and sift through the channels until I recognize a scene from Mike Leigh’s film One Year. It’s appallingly good. My own dialogue is shite compared to this. Sleep would be a good idea, but I’m at the mercy of jet lag and I find I’m wired. My stomach isn’t too sure about the deep-fried chunks of durian fruit, either; Nick Greek admitted to the British consul that he hadn’t yet acquired the taste, so I ate three. I’d love a smoke but Carmen’s bullied me into quitting so, yummy yummy, it’s a zap of Nicorette. Richard Cheeseman’s smoking again. How can he not, stuck where he is, poor bastard? His teeth are brown as tea. I flick through more channels and find a subtitled American import, The Dog Whisperer, about an animal trainer who sorts out psychotic Californians’ psychotic pets. 23:10. I consider jerking off again, purely for medicinal purposes, and browse my mental Blu-ray collection, settling on the girl from that commune Rivendell somewhere in West London—but decide that I can’t be bothered. So I open my new Moleskine, turn to the first page, and write “The Rottnest Novel” at the top …

  … and find I’ve forgotten my main character’s name again. Bugger it. For a while he was Duncan Frye, but Carmen said that sounded like a Scottish chip-shop owner. So I went with “Duncan McTeague” but the “Mc” is too obvious for a Scot. I’ll settle with Duncan Drummond, for now. DD. Duncan Drummond, then, an 1840s stonemason who ends up in the Swan River Settlement, designs a lighthouse on Rottnest Island. Hyena Hal isn’t sure about this book—“Certainly a fresh departure, Crisp”—but I woke up one morning and realized that all my novels deal with contemporary Londoners whose upper-middle-class lives have their organs ripped out by catastrophe or scandal. Diminishing returns were kicking in even before Richard Cheeseman’s review, I fear. Already, however, a few problemettes with the Rottnest novel are mooning their brown starfishes my way: Viz., I’ve only got three thousand words; those three thousand are not the best of my career; my final new deadline is December 31 of this year; Editor Oliver has been sacked for “underperformance” and his aptly named successor Curt is making some unpleasant noises about paying back advances.

  Would a quokka or two spice it up? I wonder.

  Sod this. There must be a bar open somewhere.

  HALLELUJAH! I WALK into the Sky High bar on the forty-third floor and it’s still open. I sink my weary carcass into an armchair by the window and order a twenty-five-dollar shot of cognac. The view is to die for. Shanghai by night is a mind of a million lights: of orange dot-to-dots along expressways, of pixel-white headlights and red taillights; green lights on the cranes; blinking blues on airplanes; office blocks across the road, and smearages of specks, miles away, every microspeck a life, a family, a loner, a soap opera; floodlights up the skyscrapers over in Pudong; closer up, animated ad-screens for Omega, Burberry, Iron Man 5, gigawatt-brite, flyposted onto night’s undarkness. Every conceivable light, in fact, except the moon and stars. “There’s no distances in prisons,” Richard Cheeseman wrote, in a letter to our Friends Committee. “No outside windows, so the furthest I ever see is the tops of the walls around the yard. I’d give a lot just for a view of a few miles. It wouldn’t have to be pretty—urban grot would be fine—so long as there was several miles’ worth.”

  And Crispin Hershey had put him there.

  Crispin Hershey keeps him there.

  “Hello, Mr. Hershey,” says a woman. “Fancy finding you here.”

  I jump up with unexpected vigor. “Holly! Hi! I was just …” I’m not sure how to finish my sentence so we kiss, cheek to cheek, like fairly good friends. She looks tired, which is only to be expected for a time-zo
ne hopper, but her velvet suit looks great on her—Carmen’s taken her shopping a few times. I indicate an imaginary companion in the third chair: “Do you and Captain Jetlag know each other?”

  She glances at the chair. “We go back a few years, yes.”

  “When did you get in from—was it Singapore?”

  “Um … Got to think. No, Jakarta. It’s Monday, right?”

  “Welcome to the Literary Life. How’s Aoife?”

  “Officially in love.” Holly’s smile has several levels to it. “With a young man called Örvar.”

  “Örvar? From which galaxy do Örvars hail?”

  “Iceland. Aoife went there a week ago, to meet the folks.”

  “Lucky Aoife. Lucky Örvar. Do you approve of the young man?”

  “As it happens, yes. Aoife’s brought him down to Rye a few times. He’s doing genetics at Oxford, despite his dyslexia, don’t ask me how that works. He fixes things. Shelves, shower doors, a stuck blind.” Holly asks the waitress who brings my cognac for a glass of the house white. “What about Juno?”

  “Juno? Never fixed a sodding thing in her life.”

  “No, you dope! Is Juno dating yet?”

  “Oh. That. No, give her a chance, she’s only fifteen. Mmm. Did you discuss boys with your father at that age?”

  Holly’s phone bleeps. She glances at it. “It’s a message for you, from Carmen: ‘Tell Crispin I told him not to eat the durian fruit.’ Does that make any sense?”

  “It does, alas.”

  “Will you be moving into that new place in Madrid?”

  “No. It’s a bit of a long story.”

  “ROTTNEST?” HOLLY FLICKS her wineglass with her fingernail, as if testing its note. “Well, as Carmen may have mentioned, at various points in my life, I’ve heard voices that other people didn’t hear. Or I’ve been sure about things that I had no way of knowing. Or, occasionally, been the mouthpiece for … presences that weren’t me. Sorry that last one sounds seancey, I can’t help it. And unlike a seance, I don’t summon anything up. Voices just … nab me. I wish they didn’t. I wish very badly that they didn’t. But they do.”

  I know all this. “You’ve got a degree in psychology, right?”

  Holly sees the subtext, takes off her glasses, and pinches the indented mark on her nose. “Okay, Hershey, you win. Summer of 1985. I was sixteen. Jacko had been missing for twelve months. Me and Sharon were staying at Bantry in County Cork, with relatives. One wet day we were playing snakes and ladders with the smallies, when”—three decades later, Holly flinches—“I knew, or heard, or ‘felt a certainty,’ whatever you want to call it, what number the dice was next going to land on. My cousin’d rattle the eggcup and I’d think, Five. Lo and behold, the die landed on five. One. Five. Three. On and on. A lucky streak, right? Happens all the time. But on it went. For over fifty throws, f’Chrissakes. I wanted it to stop. Each time I thought, This time it’ll be wrong and I’ll be able to dismiss it all as a coincidence … but on and on it went, till Sharon needed a six to win, which I knew she’d roll. And she did. By now, I had a cracking headache, so I crawled off to bed. When I woke up, Sharon and our cousins were playing Cluedo, and everything was back to normal. And straightaway I started persuading myself that I’d only imagined knowing the numbers. By the time I got back to boring old Gravesend, I’d half persuaded myself the whole thing’d just been just a … a one-off weirdness I was probably misremembering.”

  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 knew that 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 knew that 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 is persuasive; 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 was real, Crispin, s’pose you had these certainties, which can’t be altered or second-guessed—about, say, Juno or Anaïs. 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 Eilísh. 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 me the 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 exp
lodes 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, before your 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, not kneeling.”

  “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.