The Bone Clocks

I imagine a hair dryer falling into her bath: Her limbs twitch and her hair smokes as she dies. “Richard Cheeseman is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and using his misfortune as a stick to beat mewith is vulgar beyond belief, even for Dr. Aphra Booth.”

“Thirty grams of cocaine was found in the lining of his suitcase.”

“I think,” says Event Moderator, “we should get back to—”

I cut him off: “Thirty grams doesn’t make you a drug lord!”

“No, Crispin; examine the record—I said drug smuggler.”

“There’s no evidence Richard Cheeseman hid the cocaine.”

“Who did, then?”

“ Idon’t know, but—”

“Thank you.”

“—but Richard would never take such a colossal, stupid risk.”

“Unless he was a cokehead who thought his celebrity placed him above Colombian law, as both judge and jury concluded.”

“If Richard Cheeseman were RebeccaCheeseman, you’d be setting your pubic hair on fire outside the Colombian embassy, screaming for justice. The very least that Richard deserves is a transfer to a British jail. Smuggling is a crime against the country of destination, not the country of departure.”

“Oh—so now you’re saying Cheeseman isa drug smuggler?”

“He should be allowed to fight for his innocence from a U.K. prison, and not from a festering pit in Bogotб where there’s no access to soap, let alone a decent defense lawyer.”

“But as a columnist in the right-wing Piccadilly Review, Richard Cheeseman was very hot on prison as a deterrent. In fact, to quote—”

“Enough already, Aphra, you bigoted blob of trans fat.”

Aphra springs to her feet and points her finger at me, like a loaded Magnum. “Apologize now, or you’ll have a crash course in how Australian courts handle slander, defamation, and body fascism!”

“I’m sure all Crispin meant,” says Event Moderator, “was—”

“I de mandan apology from that Weightist Male Pig!”

“Of course I’ll apologize, Aphra. What I meantto call you was a preening, sexist, irrelevant, and bigoted blob of trans fat, who bullies her graduate class into posting five-star reviews of her books on Amazon and who was witnessed, on February the tenth at sixteen hundred hours local time, purchasing a Dan Brown novel from the Relay Bookshop at Singapore Changi International Airport. Some public-spirited witness has already downloaded the clip onto YouTube, you’ll find.”

The audience gasps as one, most gratifyingly.

“And don’t say it was ‘just for research,’ Aphra, because it won’t wash. There. I do hope this apology clarifies matters.”

“You,”Aphra Booth tells Event Moderator, “shouldn’t give a stage to rank, fetid misogynists, and you,” me, “will need a libel lawyer because I am going to sue the living shit out of you!”

Aphra Booth: Exit stage left to sound of thunder.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Aphra,” I call after her. “Your fans are here. Both of them. Aphra … Was it something I said?”

I CYCLE OUT of the strip of souvenir shops and cafйs, but a minute later end up down a dead end at a dusty parade ground. There are Second World War–style huts, and I half recall being told that Italian prisoners of war were interned on Rottnest Island. This train of thought conveys me to Richard Cheeseman, as so many trains of thought do, these days. My fateful act of vengeance in Cartagena last year didn’t so much backfire as explode with horrifying success: Cheeseman is now 342 days into a six-year sentence in the Penitenciarнa Central, Bogotб, for drug trafficking. Trafficking! For one little sodding envelope! The Friends of Richard Cheeseman managed to wangle him a private cell and a bunk, but for this luxury we had to pay two thousand dollars to the gangsters who run his wing. Countless, countless times have I achedto undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past. We—the Friends—are using every channel we can to shorten the critic’s sentence, or to have him repatriated to the U.K. at least, but it’s an uphill struggle. Dominic Fitzsimmons, the suave and able undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, knew Cheeseman at Cambridge and is on our side, but he has to act with discretion to avoid charges of cronyism. Elsewhere, sympathy for the lippy columnist is not widespread. People point to the life sentences doled out in Thailand and Indonesia and conclude Cheeseman got off lightly, but there’s nothing “light” about life in the Penitenciarнa. Two or three deaths occur in the prison every month.