The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  There has been no sequel. Marinus, if she got out of that domed room, has never reappeared and it isn’t going to happen now. I streetviewed 119A a few times and found the tall brownstone townhouse with its varied windows, so someone’s still looking after it—New York real estate is still New York real estate, even as America disintegrates—but I’ve never been back, or tried to find out who’s living there. Once I deviced the Three Lives Bookstore, but when a bookseller answered, I chickened out and hung up before asking if Inez still lived upstairs. One of the last books Sharon sent me before post from Australia stopped getting through was about the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and I sort of felt my time in the Dusk was a bit like that. And now that I was back on earth, I could either go slowly crazy by trying to get back to that other realm, to psychosoterica and 119A and Horology, or not, and just say, “It happened, but it’s over,” and get on with the ordinary stuff of family and life. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could, I dunno, write up the minutes for the Kilcrannog Tidy Towns Committee, knowing that, as we sat there discussing grants for the new playground, souls were migrating across an expanse of Dusk into a blankness called the Last Sea—but I found I could. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I met a woman twice my age in an abortion clinic in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. She was posh and composed. I was a scared, weepy mess. As she lit a new cigarette from the dying ember of the last one, she told me this: “Sweetheart, you’ll be astounded by what you can live with.”

  Life has taught me that she was right.

  … Zimbra’s barking in my dreams. I wake up in my chair next to the stove, and Zimbra’s still barking, on the side porch. Fuddled, I get up, dropping the half-darned sock, and walk over to the porch: “Zimbra!” But Zimbra can’t hear me; Zimbra’s not even Zimbra, he’s a primeval canine scenting an ancient enemy. Is anyone out there? God, I wish the old security floodlight was still working. Zimbra’s barking stops for one second—long enough for me to hear the terror of hens. Oh, no, not a fox. I grab the torch, open the door only a crack but our dog barges through and scrabbles at what’s probably the fox’s hole under the wire. Dirt flies over me and the chickens are going berserk around the wire walls of their coop. I shine the torch in and can’t see the fox but Zimbra’s in no doubt. One dead hen; two; three; one feebly flapping; and there, two disks on the head of a reddish blur on top of the hen coop. Zimbra—fifteen kilos’ worth of German shepherd crossed with black Labrador with bits of the devil knows what else—squeezes into the cage and launches himself at the henhouse, which topples over while the hens squawk and flap around the wire-mesh enclosure. Quick as a whip, the fox leaps back to the hole and its head’s actually through before Zimbra’s sunk his fangs into its neck. The fox looks at me for a split second before it’s yanked back, shaken, flung, and pounced on. Then its throat’s ripped out and it’s all over. The hens keep panicking until one notices the battle’s over, then they all fall quiet. Zimbra stands over his prey, his maw bloodred. Slowly he returns to himself and I return to myself. The porch door opens and Rafiq’s standing there in his dressing gown. “What happened, Holly? I heard Zim going mental.”

  “A fox got into the chickens, love.”

  “Oh, bloody hell, no!”

  “Language, Rafiq.”

  “Sorry. But how many did it get?”

  “Only two or three. Zim killed it.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “No. It’s a dead fox.”

  “Can we eat the dead chickens, at least?”

  “Too risky. Specially now rabies is back.”

  Rafiq’s eyes go even wider: “You weren’t bitten, or …”

  Bless him. “Back to bed, mister. Really, I’m fine.”

  SORT OF. RAFIQ has plodded upstairs and Zimbra is locked on the porch. It’s four dead hens, not three, which is a medium-sized loss, with eggs being my main bartering token at the Friday market, as well as Lorelei and Rafiq’s main source of protein. Zimbra looks okay, but I can only hope he doesn’t need veterinary attention. Synthetic meds for humans have all but dried up; if you’re a dog, forget it. I turn down the solar, dig out a bottle of Declan O’Daly’s potato hooch, and pour myself what Dad would’ve called a goodly slug. I let the alcohol cauterize my nerves and look at the backs of my old, old hands. Ridged tendons, snaky veins, vacuum-packed. My left hand trembles a little these days. Not much. Mo’s noticed, but pretends not to. If you’re Lol and Raf’s age, all old people’re trembly, so they’re not worried. I pull my blanket over me, like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who I feel like, in fact, in a world of too many wolves and not enough woodcutters. It’s chilly out. Tomorrow I’ll ask Martin the Mayor if we’re likely to see a delivery of coal this winter, though I know he’ll just say, “If we see any, Holly, the answer’s yes.” Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant, but there’s nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar’s. Through the side window I see my garden chalkdusted by the nearly full moon, rising over the Mizen Peninsula. I should harvest the onions soon and plant some kale.

  In the window I see a reflection of an old woman sitting in her great-aunt’s chair and I tell her, “Go to bed.” I haul myself to my feet, ignoring the twinge in my hip, but pausing for a moment at the little driftwood box shrine we keep on the dresser. I made it five years ago during the worst grief-numbed weeks after the Gigastorm, and Lorelei decorated it with shells. Aoife and Örvar’s photo is inside, but tonight I just stroke my thumb across the top edge, trying to remember how Aoife’s hair felt.

  “Sleep tight, sweetheart, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  October 27

  UP BEFORE DAWN to pluck the feathers from four dead hens. Only twelve hens left, now. When I first moved to Dooneen Cottage—a quarter of a century ago—I couldn’t have plucked a hen if my life depended on it. Now I can stun, decapitate, and gut one as casually as Mam used to make a beef and Guinness stew. Necessity’s even taught me how to skin and dress rabbits without puking. One old fertilizer bag of feathers later I put the dead hens into the wheelbarrow and walk down the end of the garden via the hen coop, where I add the fox’s body to my one-wheeled hearse. He’s male, I see. Don’t touch fox’s tails, Declan says. A fox’s brush is a bacteriological weapon, barbed with disease. Probably got fleas, too, and we’ve had enough trouble with fleas, ticks, and lice as it is. The fox looks like he’s having an afternoon nap, if you ignore the ripped-out throat. One of his fangs protrudes slightly, pressing in his lower lip. Ed’s tooth did that. I wonder if the fox has cubs and a mate. I wonder if the cubs’ll understand that he’s never coming back, if the heart’ll be ripped out of their lives, or if they’ll just carry on foraging without a second thought. If they do, I envy them.

  The sea’s ruffled this morning. I think I see a couple of dolphins a few hundred yards out, but when I look again, they’ve gone, so I’m not sure. The wind’s still from the west and not the east. It’s an awful thing to think, but if Hinkley is spewing radioactive material, which way the wind happens to be blowing could be a matter of life or death.

  I tip the wheelbarrow’s grisly cargo off the stone pier. I never name our hens, ’cause it’s harder to wring the neck of something you’ve named, but I’m sad they had such frightened deaths. Now they’re drifting away with their killer into the open bay.

  I want to hate the fox, but I can’t.

  It was only trying to survive.

  BACK AT THE house, Lorelei’s in the kitchen spreading a bit of butter on yesterday’s rolls for her and Rafiq’s lunch. “Morning, Gran.”

  “Morning. There’s dried seaweed, too. And pickled turnip.”

  “Thanks. Raf told me about the fox. You should’ve woken me.”

  “No point, love. You can’t raise chickens from the dead, and Zim dealt with the fox.” I wonder if she’s remembered the date. “There’s a few strips of corrugated iron from the old shed—I’ll try sinking some underground walls around the coop.”

  “Good idea. It should ‘outfox’ the next vis
itor.”

  “That’s one gene you inherited from Granddad Ed.”

  She likes it when I say that sort of thing. “It’s, uh,” she makes an effort to sound breezy, “Mum and Dad’s Day, today. The twenty-seventh of October.”

  “It is, love. Want to light the incense?”

  “Yes, please.” Lorelei goes to the little box shrine and opens up its front. The photo shows Aoife and Örvar and a ten-year-old Lorelei, against the background of a dig at L’Anse aux Meadows. It was taken in spring of 2038, the year they died, but its greens and yellows are already fading and the blues and magentas blotting. I’d pay a lot for a reprint but there’s no power or ink cartridges to print one, and no original to make a reprint from; my feckless generation trusted our memories to the Net, so the ’39 Crash was like a collective stroke.

  “Gran?” She’s looking at me like my mind’s gone walkabout.

  “Sorry, love, I was, um …” Often, there are just blanks.

  “Where’s the tin with the incense sticks?”

  “Oh. I tidied it up. Put it somewhere safe. Um …” Is this happening more these days? “The tin, above the stove.”

  Lorelei lights the new incense stick at the stove, then blows out the tiny flame. She crosses the kitchen, placing the stick in the holder in the little shrine. On the ledge are a Roman coin, which Aoife gave to Lorelei, and an old windup watch Örvar inherited from his grandfather. We watch the sandalwood smoke unthread itself from the glowing tip. Sandalwood, yet another old-world scent. The first year we did this, I’d prepared a prayer and a poem, but I started weeping so uncontrollably that I appalled Lorelei; since then we’ve tacitly agreed that we just stand here for a little while and sort of be alone together with our memories. I remember waving them off at Cork airport five years ago—the last year that ordinary people could buy diesel, drive cars, and fly, though ticket prices were spiraling through the roof, and they couldn’t have gone if the Australian government hadn’t paid Örvar’s way. Aoife went to see her aunt Sharon and uncle Peter, who’d moved out there in the late twenties and who I hope are still alive and well in Byron Bay, but there’ve been no news-threads to—and precious little information from—Australia for eighteen months. How easily, how instantly we used to message anyone, anywhere on earth. Lorelei holds my hand. She would’ve gone with her parents if she hadn’t been getting over chicken pox, so Aoife and Örvar drove her here from Dublin, where they were living that year. A fortnight with Grandma Holly was the consolation prize.

  Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

  “I’m so sorry, Lol.” I sigh, looking around for a box of tissues before remembering our world no longer has tissues.

  “It’s all right, Gran. It’s good to remember Mum and Dad.”

  Upstairs, Rafiq is hopping along the landing—probably pulling on a sock—as he sings in hybrid Mandlish. Chinese bands are as cool to kids in the Cordon as American New Wave bands were to me.

  “We’re luckier, in a way,” Lorelei says quietly. “Mum and Dad didn’t … Y’know, it was all over so quickly, and they had each other, and at least we know what happened. But for Raf …”

  I look at Aoife and Örvar. “They’d be so proud of you, Lol.”

  Then Rafiq appears at the top of the stairs. “Is there any honey for the porridge, Lol? Morning, Holly, by the way.”

  SCHOOL BAGS PACKED, lunches stowed, Lorelei’s hair braided, Rafiq’s insulin pump checked and his blue tie—the last vestige of a uniform the school at Kilcrannog can reasonably insist on—done again and redone, we set off up the track. Caher Mountain, whose southern face I’ve looked at in all seasons, all weathers, and all moods nearly every day over the last twenty-five years, rises ahead. Cloud shadows slide over its heathered, rocky, gorse-patched higher slopes. Lower down is a five-acre plantation of Monterey pines. I push the big pram that was already a museum piece when me and Sharon used to play with it during summer holidays here in the late seventies.

  Mo’s up and out. She’s hanging clothes on her line as we get to her gateway, wearing a fisherman’s geansaí so stretched it’s almost a robe. “Morning, neighbors. Friday again. Who knows where the weeks go?” The white-haired ex-physicist grabs her stick and hobbles across the rough-cropped lawn, handing me her empty ration box to take to town. “Thanks in advance,” she says, and I tell her, “No bother,” and add it to Lorelei’s, Rafiq’s, and mine in the pram.

  “Let me help with that washing, Mo,” says Lorelei.

  “The washing I can handle, Lol, but yomping off to town,” as we call the village of Kilcrannog, “I can’t. What I’d do without your gran to fill up my ration box, I cannot imagine.” Mo whirls her cane like a rueful Chaplin. “Well, actually I can: starve by degrees.”

  “Nonsense,” I tell her. “The O’Dalys’d take care of you.”

  “A fox killed four of our chickens last night,” says Rafiq.

  “That’s regrettable.” Mo glances at me, and I shrug. Zimbra sniffs a trail all the way up to Mo, wagging his tail.

  “We’re lucky Zimmy got him before he killed the lot,” says Rafiq.

  “My, my.” Mo scratches behind Zimbra’s ear and finds the magic spot that makes him go limp. “Quite a night at the opera.”

  I ask, “Did you have any luck on the Net last night?” Meaning, Any news about the Hinkley Point reactor?

  “Only a few minutes, on official threads. Usual statements.” We leave it there, in front of the kids. “But drop by later.”

  “I was half hoping you’d mind Zimbra for us, Mo,” I say. “I don’t want him going all Call of the Wild on us after killing the fox.”

  “Course I will. And, Lorelei, would you tell Mr. Murnane I’ll be in the village on Monday to teach the science class? Cahill O’Sullivan’s taking his horse and trap in that day and he’s offered me a lift. I’ll be borne aloft like the Queen of Sheba. Off you go now, I mustn’t make you late. C’mon, Zimbra, see if we can’t find that revolting sheep’s shin you buried last time …”

  AUTUMN’S AT ITS tipping point. Ripe and gold is turning manky and cold, and the first frost isn’t far off. In the early 2030s the seasons went badly haywire, with summer frosts and droughts in winter, but for the last five years we’ve had long, thirsty summers, long, squally winters, with springs and autumns hurrying by in between. Outside the Cordon the tractor’s going steadily extinct and harvests have been derisory, and on RTÉ two nights ago there was a report on farms in County Meath that are going back to using horse-drawn plows. Rafiq trots ahead, picking a few late blackberries, and I encourage Lorelei to do the same. Vitamin supplements in the ration boxes have grown fewer and further between. Brambles grow as vigorously as ever, at least, but if we don’t shear them back soon, our track up to the main road’ll turn into the hedge of thorns round Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Must speak to Declan or Cahill about it. The puddles are getting deeper and the boggy bits boggier, too, and here and there Lorelei has to help me with the pram; more’s the pity I didn’t have the whole track resurfaced when money still got things done. More’s the pity I didn’t lay in better, deeper, bigger stores, too, but we never knew that every temporary shortage would turn out to be a permanen
t one until it was too late.

  We pass the spring that feeds my cottage’s and Mo’s bungalow’s water tanks. It’s gurgling away nicely now after the recent rains, but last summer it dried up for a whole week. I never pass the spring without remembering Great-aunt Eilísh telling me about Hairy Mary the Contrary Fairy, who lived there, when I was little. Being so hairy the other fairies laughed at her, which made her so cranky she’d reverse people’s wishes out of spite, so you had to outwit her by asking for what you didn’t want. “I never want a skateboard” would get you a skateboard, for example. That worked for a bit till Hairy Mary cottoned on to what people were doing, so half the time she gave people what they wished for, and half the time she gave them the opposite. “So the moral is, my girl,” Great-aunt Éilish says to me across the six decades, “if you want a thing, get it the old-fashioned way, by elbow grease and brain power. Don’t mess with the fairies.”

  But today, I don’t know why, maybe it’s the fox, maybe it’s Hinkley, I take my chances. Hairy Mary, Contrary Fairy: Please, let my darlings survive. “Please.”

  Lorelei turns and asks, “You okay, Gran?”

  WHERE DOONEEN TRACK reaches the main road we turn right and soon pass the turnoff leading down to Knockroe Farm. We meet the farm’s owner, Declan O’Daly, hauling a handcart of hay. Declan’s around fifty, is married to Branna, has two older boys plus a daughter in Lorelei’s class, owns two dozen Jerseys and about two hundred sheep, which graze on the rockier, tuftier end of the peninsula. His Roman brow, curly beard, and lived-in face give him the air of a Zeus gone to seed a bit, but he’s helped Mo and us out more than a few times and I’m glad he’s there. “I’d give you a big hug,” he says, walking across the farmyard to the road in stained overalls, “but one of the cows just knocked me over into a huge pile of cow shite. What’s so funny,” he mock-fumes, “young Rafiq Bayati? By God, I’ll use you as a rag …”