The Bone Clocks

… Zoл and the girls had flown out to Montreal as soon as school broke up, giving me a week to get stuck into my new book, a black comedy about a fake mystic who pretends to see the Virgin Mary during the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. It’s one of my best three or four. Unfortunately that week without me also allowed Zoл’s family to get to work on Juno and Anaпs, inculcating in my daughters the cultural superiority of the French-speaking world. By the time Iarrived at our little pad in Outremont on December 23, the girls would only speak to me in English when I explicitly ordered them to. Zoл allowed them a treble budget of online games as long as they played en fran з ais, and Zoл’s sister took them and their cousins out to a Christmas fashion show, in French, followed by some sort of teenybop boy-band concert, in French. Cultural bribery of the first degree—and when I objected, Zoл was all, “Well, Crispin, Ibelieve in broadening the girls’ horizons and giving them access to their family roots—and I’m astonished and depressed that youwant them locked inside Anglo-American monoculture.” Then, on Boxing Day, we all went bowling. The eugenically favored Legranges were astonished beyond words by my score: twenty. Not on one ball, but for the whole sodding game. I’m just not built for bowling; I’m built for writing. Juno flicked back her hair and said, “Papa, I don’t know where to look.”

“Creespin!” Here comes Miguel Alvarez, my Spanish-language editor, smiling as if he has a present for me. “Creespin, I have a small present for you. Follow me a little, to a place a little more discreet.” Feeling like an Irvine Welsh character, I follow Miguel away from the hubbub of the main party to a bench in the shadow of a tall wall behind, indeed, a tangle of cacti. “So, I have items you ask for, Creespin.”

“That’s most obliging of you.” I light a cigarette.

Miguel slips a small envelope the size of a credit card into my jacket pocket. “Enjoy, is shame to leave Colombia without tasting. Is very very pure. But a thing, Creespin. To use here, here in Cartagena, in private, is not big deal. But to transport, to carry to airport”—grimacing, Miguel slices his throat. “You understand?”

“Miguel, only a deadhead would consider taking drugs anywhere near an airport. Don’t worry. What I don’t use, I’ll flush away.”

“A good plan. Play safe. Enjoy. Is best in world.”

“And were you able to find a Colombian phone?”

“Yes, yes.” My editor hands me another envelope.

It, too, goes into my jacket pocket. “Thank you. Smartphones are great when they work, but if the coverage is dodgy you can’t beat the little old phones for sending texts, I find.”

Miguel tilts his head, not really agreeing, but thirty dollars, or however much the thing cost him, is a cheap price to keep the Wild Child of British Letters onside. “So, now you have all, and all is good?”

“Very good indeed, Miguel, thank you.”

Like my best plots, this one is writing itself.

“Eh, Crispin,” beckons Kenny Bloke, the Australian poet, as we pass a huddle of celebrants on the far gate of the cactus garden. “Some people here to meet.” Miguel and I join the small group of writers, apparently, under a canopy of tree ferns. The foreign names don’t really sink in—none has had a story in The New Yorker, so far as I’m aware, but when Kenny Bloke’s introducing me to the pale, dark-haired, angular woman, I suffer a throb of recognition even before he names her: “Holly Sykes, a fellow Pom.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hershey,” she says.

“You’re vaguely familiar,” I tell her, “if I’m not mistaken?”

“We were both at the Hay Festival on the same day, last year.”

“Not that sodding awful party in that ghastly tent?”

“We were both in the signing tent, actually, Mr. Hershey.”

“Hang on! Yes. You’re that angel author. Holly Sykes.”

“Not angels in the harps-’n’-haloes sense, though,” interjects Kenny Bloke. “Holly writes about inner voices—and as I was just saying, there’s a strong affinity with the spirit guides my people believe in.”

“Miss Sykes,” says Miguel, oleaginously. “I am Miguel Alvarez, editor of Ottopusso, editor of Creespin. Is great honor.”

The Sykes woman shakes his hand. “Mr. Alvarez.”

“Is true you sell over half-million books in Spain?”

“My book seemed to strike a chord there,” she says.

“Uri Geller struck a chord everywhere.” I’m drunker than I thought. “Remember him? Michael Jackson’s best mate? Big in Japan? Huge.” My cocktail tastes of mango and seawater.

Miguel smiles at me but swivels his eyes back to the Sykes woman like an Action Man figure I once owned. “You happy with your Spanish publishers, Miss Sykes?”

“As you pointed out, they sold half a million copies.”

“Is fantastic. But in case of problem, here, my card …”

As Miguel hovers, another woman materializes by the tree fern’s trunk like a Star Trekcharacter. She’s dark, golden, mid-to-late thirties, and impalingly attractive. Miguel says, “Carmen!” as if he’s delighted to see her.