The Bone Clocks

Carmen stares at Miguel’s business card until it vanishes into his jacket pocket, then turns to Holly Sykes. I’m expecting a Latina accent full of thunder, but she speaks like a Home Counties domestic-science teacher. “I hope Miguel hasn’t been making a nuisance of himself, Holly—the man is a shameless poacher. Yes, you are, Miguel—I knowyou haven’t forgotten the Stephen Hawking episode.” Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence. “Mr. Hershey,” the woman turns my way, “we’ve never met. I’m Carmen Salvat, and I have the singularprivilege”—a dart aimed at Miguel—“of being Holly’s Spanish-language publisher. Welcome to Colombia.”

Carmen Salvat’s handshake is no-nonsense. She radiates. With her free hand she toys with her necklace of lapis lazuli.

Kenny Bloke pipes up: “Holly mentioned that you also publish Nick Greek in Spanish, Carmen?”

“Yes, I bought the rights to Route 605before Nick had finished the manuscript. I just had a good feeling about it.”

“Bloody blew me away, that book did,” says Kenny Bloke. “Totally deserved last year’s Brittan Prize, I reckon.”

“Nick has a lovely soul,” says a Newfoundland poetess, whose name I’ve already forgotten but who has the eyes of a seal gazing out of a Greenpeace poster. “Truly lovely.”

“Carmen knows how to pick a winner,” says Miguel. “But I think, in sales, Holly is still streets ahead, no, Carmen?”

“Which reminds me,” says Carmen Salvat. “Holly, the minister of culture’s wife would love to meet you—could I be a pest?”

As the Sykes woman is led away, I watch Carmen Salvat’s appetizing haunches and get to work on a fantasy in which my phone rings—right now: a doctor in London with the catastrophic news that Zoл’s Saab was knocked off the Hammersmith flyover by a drunk driver. She and the girls were killed instantly. I fly home tomorrow for the funeral. My grief is ennobling, but crushing, and I withdraw from life. I’m glimpsed occasionally riding the obscurer London Tube lines, out in zones four and five. Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides. One day next year, Hershey finds himself at the end of the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow airport. He exits the Tube, wanders into Departures, and glances up at the board to see the name “Cartagena”—the last place on earth where he was still a husband and father. On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket—for some reason he has his passport with him—and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Aduana, Hershey sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them. Surprisingly, neither is surprised.

MANY COCKTAILS LATER, I’m helping a royally bladdered Richard Cheeseman into the lift and back to his room. “I’m fine, Crisp, I look drunkier than I am, really.” The lift doors open and we step inside. He staggers like a drugged camel in storm-force winds. “Jussamo, I f’got m’room number, I’ll just”—Cheeseman takes out his wallet and drops it—“oh, bumplops’n’pissflaps.”

“Allow me.” I pick up Cheeseman’s wallet and take out the swipe-card in its sleeve—405—before returning it. “There you go, squire.”

Cheeseman nods his thanks and mumbles, “If th’numbers in y’room number add up to nine, Hersh, you’ll never die in it.”

I press 4. “First stop, your room.”

“I’m fine. Icanfindmy—my—my way home.”

“But I’m duty-bound to see you safe to your door, Richard. Don’t worry, my intentions are entirely honorable.”

Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”

I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes pingand we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a nunnery,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”

Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”

I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”