The Bone Clocks

I slap a mosquito against my cheek. The little bastards are the price for this delicious warmth. Zoл and the girls were due to join me here—I’d even bought the (nonrefundable) tickets—but then the shitstorm blew up about Zoл’s earth-mother marriage counselor. Ј250+VAT for an hour of platitudes about mutual respect? “No,” I told Zoл, “and, as we all know, no means no.”

Zoл opened fire with every weapon known to woman.

Yes, the porcelain mermaid waslaunched from my hand. But had it been aimedat her, it would not have missed. Therefore I didn’t mean to hurt her. Zoл, 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 Anaпs 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 Menwith 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. Zoл 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 Anaпs 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 Anaпs 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 Diecleared 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 Diewas 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.

“Did you look around the old quarter today?” asks Kenny Bloke.

“Yes, it’s pretty in a UNESCO way. If a touch unreal.”

The Australian grunts. “My taxi driver told me how the FARC people and the intelligence services needed a place for a holiday, so Cartagena’s their de facto demilitarized zone.” He accepts one of my cigarettes. “Don’t tell the missus—she thinks I’ve given up.”

“Your secret’s safe. I doubt I’ll be coming to …?”

“Katanning. Western Australia. Bottom-left corner. Compared to this”—Kenny Bloke gestures at the Latin Baroque glory—“it’s a dingo’s arse. But my people are buried there, from way, way back, and I wouldn’t want to leave my roots.”

“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.”

“You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”