The Bone Clocks

MY LAST PUNTER, a Volumnia from Coventry, treated me to her book group’s thoughts on Red Monkey, which they “quite liked” but found the repetition of the adjectives “sodding” and “buggering” tiresome. Dear reader, Hershey missed not a beat: “So why choose the buggering book in the first sodding place?” A trio of dealers then descended, wanting a stack of first edition Desiccated Embryossigned, thereby increasing their value by five hundred pounds a pop. I asked, “Why should I?” One of the dealers gave me a sob story about driving up from Exeter “special, like, mate, and it’s not like scribbling your name costs you anything,” so I told him that if he paid me 50 percent of the markup on the nail, we’d have a deal. Mate. He vanished in a puff of poverty. Next stop is the first-night party at the BritFone Pavilion, where I am to endure a brief audience with Lord and Lady Roger and Suze Brittan. I stand up—and feel … a sniper’s tracer on my forehead. Who’s that? I look around and see Holly Sykes, watching me. She’s probably curious about real writers. I click my fingers at Publicity Girl. “ I’m a celebrity. Get meout of here.”

On our way to the BritFone Pavilion, we pass the smoking tent, sponsored by Win ²Win: Europe’s premier facilitator of ethically sourced organs for medical transplant. I tell my minders I’ll be along soon, and although Editor Oliver offers to join me I warn him there’s a two-hundred-pound fine for nonsmokers who don’t light up, and he takes the hint. Publicity Girl checks mumsily that I have my lanyard for getting past the bouncers.

I produce the plastic tag I refuse to wear around my neck. “If I get lost,” I tell her, “I’ll just follow the sound of knives sinking into vertebrae.” Inside the Win ²Win tent, fellow initiates of the Order of Nicotine sit on barstools chatting, reading, or gazing hollow-eyed at smartphones, fingers busy. We are relics from the days when smoking in cinemas, airplanes, and trains was the natural order; when the Hollywood hero was identified by his cigarette. Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really isan expression of the rebel spirit—it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless. Careerless! Dad was addicted to the hurly-burly of getting a film made. Zoл’s addictions are fad diets, one-sided comparisons between London and Montreal, and obsessing over Juno and Anaпs’s vitamin intake.

I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs, and think dark thoughts about Richard Cheeseman. Someone needs to skewer hisreputation; jeopardize hislivelihood; see if heshrugs it off with an “I bloody well won’t let it spoil my lunch.” When I stub out my cigarette, I imagine it’s into Cheeseman’s fatuous eye.

“Mr. Hershey?” A short fat boy in glasses and a maroon Burberry jacket interrupts my revenge fantasy. His head is shaved and he’s doughy and ill-looking, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

“My signing session’s over. I’ll be back in about five years.”

“No, I wish to give you a book.” The boy is a girl, with a soft American accent. She’s Asian American, or semi–Asian American.

“And I wish to smoke. It’s been a most exhausting few years.”

Ignoring the hint, the girl proffers a thin volume. “My poetry.” A self-funded volume, plainly. “ Soul Carnivores, by Soleil Moore.”

“I don’t look at unsolicited manuscripts.”

“Humanity asks you to make an exception.”

“ Pleasedon’t think me rude, Miss Moore, but I’d rather perform root-canal surgery on myself, or wake up next to Aphra Booth in the breeding pen of an alien menagerie, or take six shots in the heart at close range than everread your poems. Do you understand?”

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 Carnivoresby 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 finallybuggering off, as if she’s just delivered a killer argument. I take a few more puffs, sifting a conversation nearby: “She said, ‘Hershey’: I thoughtit was him”; “Nah, can’t be, Crispin Hershey’s not thatold”; “Ask him”; “No, you ask him.” Cover blown, I crumple up my death-stick and flee my smoker’s Eden.