The Bone Clocks

The door closes. Good, the room’s been tidied and the bed is made. If a maid arrives, just act like nothing’s wrong. A shirt hangs from a cupboard door and Independent Peopleby Halldуr Laxness lies on the bedside table. In the same way that Muslim women are forbidden to touch the Koran during menstruation, a shit like Richard Cheeseman shouldn’t be allowed to touch Laxness unless he’s wearing a pair of CSI latex gloves. Excellent thought. Unfurl the Marigolds from your jacket pocket and don the same. Good. Find Richard Cheeseman’s suitcase in the wardrobe. New, pricy, capacious: ideal. Open it up and unzip an inner pocket: The zip feels stiff and never-used. Take out the Swiss Army knife and carefully make a half-inch incision in the outer lining. Excellent. Remove the credit-card-sized envelope from your jacket pocket, carefully, and, just as carefully, snip off a corner, and scatter a tiny quantity of the white powder around the suitcase–undetectable to the human eye, but whiffy as skunk shit to a beagle’s nose. Slip the envelope through the incision in the lining of the suitcase. Push it down deep. Rezip the inner pocket. Stow the suitcase back in the wardrobe and check Santa’s left no trail of crumbs. Nothing. All good. Depart the crime scene. Rubber gloves off first, you idiot …

Outside, the maid unbends from behind her cart and gives me a tired smile, and my heart crunches its gears. Even as I say the short word “Hello,” I know I’ve made a fatal slip. She mouths “Hello” back and her mestiza gaze glances off my sunglasses, but I’ve identified myself as an English speaker. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I hurry back down the crooked path. Slowly! Not like a scuttling adulterer. Did the maid see me remove my gloves?

Should I go back and retrieve the cocaine?

Calm down! To the illiterate maid, you’re one more middle-aged white guy with sunglasses. To her, Room 405 was your room. She’s already forgotten seeing you. I pass the heavies in the foyer, and take an alternative route back to Festival Ground Zero. This time I smoke. I deposit the rubber gloves in a bin behind a restaurant, and reenter the gates of the Claustro de Santo Domingo flashing my VIP lanyard. Kenny Bloke is telling a boy, “Now, that’s a brilliant question …” Up via an alternative route, past a large hall of three hundred people listening to Holly Sykes on the far stage reading from her book. I stop. What the sodding hell do all these people see in her? Slack-jawed, focused, gazing devoutly at a translation of the Sykes woman’s text on a big screen above the stage. Even the Festival Elves are neglecting their door duties to tune in to the Angel Authoress. “The boy looked like Jacko,” the Sykes woman reads, “with Jacko’s height, clothes, and appearance, but I knew my brother was in Gravesend, twenty miles away.” Silence fills the hall like snow fills a wood. “The boy waved as if he’d been waiting for me to show up. So I waved back, and then he disappeared into the underpass.” Audience members are actually crying as they listen to this tripe! “How had Jacko traveled that distance, so early on a Sunday morning? He was only seven years old. How had he found me? Why didn’t he wait for me before dashing away into the underpass again? So I began running too …”

I hurry up another flight of steps and sidle back into my seat on the back row, unseen from the stage. People are talking, standing, texting. “But, no, I don’t really agree poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Richard Cheeseman is ruminating. “Only a third-rate poet like Shelley would believe such wishful thinking.”

Soon the symposium ends and I make my way up to the stage. “Richard, you were the voice of reason, from beginning to end.”

EVENING. ON NARROW streets laid out by Dutchmen and built by their slaves four centuries ago, grandmothers water geraniums. I climb steep stone steps onto the old city wall. Its stones radiate the day’s heat through my thin soles and the rhubarb-pink sun’s fattening nicely as it sinks into the Caribbean. Why doI live in my rainy bitchy anal country again? If Zoл and I go the whole divorce hog, why not up sticks and live somewhere warm? Here would do. Down below, between four lanes of traffic and the sea, boys are playing football on a dirt pitch: One team wears T-shirts, the other goes topless. Up ahead, I find a vacant bench. So. A last-minute stay of execution?

No sodding way. I spent four years on Echo Must Die, and that pube-bearded Cheeseman murdered it in eight hundred words. He elevated his own reputation at the expense of mine. This is called theft. Justice demands that thieves be punished.

I load up my mouth with five Mint Imperials, take out the pay-as-you-go phone Editor Miguel supplied, and, digit by digit, I enter the phone number I copied down from the poster at Heathrow airport. The noise of traffic and seabirds and the footballers fades away. I press Call.