The Bone Clocks

I know, I know. One man alone could extract Cheeseman from his Bogotб hellhole and that is Crispin Hershey—but consider the cost. Please. By offering up a full confession, I’d be facing prison myself, quite possibly at Cheeseman’s current address. The legal fees would be ruinous, and no friendsofcrispinhershey.org would procure mea private cell, either—it’d be straight to the piranha tank. Juno and Anaпs would cut me off forever. So a full confession would be tantamount to suicide, and better a guilty coward than a dead Judas.

I can’t do it to myself. I just can’t do it.

Beyond the parade ground the dusty track fizzles out.

We all take a few wrong turns. I turn my bike around.

THE AFTERNOON SUN is a microwave oven, door wide open, cooking all exposed flesh. Rottnest is small as islands go, only eight square miles of naked rock and baked gullies, twists, and bends, ups and downs, and the Indian Ocean is either always visible or always around the next bend. Halfway up a hill I dismount and push. My pulse bangs my eardrums and my shirt’s sticking to my unflat torso. When did I get so sodding unfit? Back in my thirties I could’ve streaked up this slope, but now I’m so knackered I’m nearly puking. When did I last ride a bike? Eight years ago, give or take, with Juno and Anaпs in our back garden at Pembridge Place. One afternoon in the holidays I made an obstacle course for the girls with plank ramps, bamboo-stick slaloms, a tunnel out of a sheet and the washing line, and an evil scarecrow to decapitate with Excalibur as we cycled by. I called it “Scrambler Motocross” and the three of us held time trials. That French au pair, I forget her name, made ruby grapefruit lemonade and even Zoл joined the picnic in the fairy clearing behind the foaming hydrangeas. Juno and Anaпs often asked me to set the course up again, and I always meant to, but there was a review to write, or an email to send, or a scene to polish, and Scrambler Motocross ended up being a one-off. What happened to the kids’ bicycles? Zoл must have disposed of them, I suppose. Disposing of unwanted items proved to be her forte.

Finally, gratefully, I reach the ridge, remount my bike, and coast down the other side. Iron trees untwist from the beige soil around gloopy pools. I imagine the first sailors from Europe landing here, searching for water in this infernal Eden, taking a quiet shit. Yobs from Liverpool, Rotterdam, Le Havre, and Cork; sun-blacked, tattooed, scurvied, calloused, and muscled as all buggery, and—

Suddenly I’m aware that I’m being watched.

It’s strong. It’s uncanny. It’s disturbing.

I scan the hillside. Every rock, bush …

… no. Nobody. It’s just … Just what?

I want to go back to the beginning.

AT THE NEXT turnoff, I follow the road to the lighthouse. No spray-cloaked monarch of the rocks, this; the Rottnest Light is a stumpy middle finger sticking up from a rocky rise, grunting, “Sit on this, mate.”It keeps reappearing at odd angles and in wrong sizes, but refuses to let me arrive. There’s a hill in Through the Looking-Glassthat does the same until Alice stops trying to arrive there—maybe I’ll try the same. What’ll I think about, to distract myself?

Richard Cheeseman, who else? All I wanted was to embarrass Richard Cheeseman. I’d pictured him being held for a few hours at Heathrow airport while lawyers scrambled, and a much-humbled reviewer would be released on bail. That’s all. How could I have predicted that British and Colombian police were enjoying a rare season of cooperation that might result in poor Richard being arrested at Bogotб International Airport, preflight?

“Easily,” my conscience replies. And yes, dear reader, I regret my actions very much, and I’m aiming to atone. With Richard’s sister Maggie, I set up the Friends of Richard Cheeseman to keep his plight in the news—and, lamentable though my misdeed was, I’m hardly in the Premier Division of Infamy. I’m not a certain Catholic bishop who shuffled boy-raping priests from parish to parish to avoid embarrassment for the Holy Church. I’m not ex-president Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who gassed thousands of men, women, and children for the crime of living in a rebel-held suburb. All I did was punish a man who had smeared my reputation. The punishment was a little excessive. Yes, I’m guilty. I regret it. But my guilt is my burden. Mine. My punishment is to live with what I’ve done.