The Bone Clocks

… and find I’ve forgotten my main character’s name again. Bugger it. For a while he was Duncan Frye, but Carmen said that sounded like a Scottish chip-shop owner. So I went with “Duncan McTeague” but the “Mc” is too obvious for a Scot. I’ll settle with Duncan Drummond, for now. DD. Duncan Drummond, then, an 1840s stonemason who ends up in the Swan River Settlement, designs a lighthouse on Rottnest Island. Hyena Hal isn’t sure about this book—“Certainly a fresh departure, Crisp”—but I woke up one morning and realized that all my novels deal with contemporary Londoners whose upper-middle-class lives have their organs ripped out by catastrophe or scandal. Diminishing returns were kicking in even before Richard Cheeseman’s review, I fear. Already, however, a few problemettes with the Rottnest novel are mooning their brown starfishes my way: Viz., I’ve only got three thousand words; those three thousand are not the best of my career; my final new deadline is December 31 of this year; Editor Oliver has been sacked for “underperformance” and his aptly named successor Curt is making some unpleasant noises about paying back advances.

Would a quokka or two spice it up? I wonder.

Sod this. There must be a bar open somewhere.

HALLELUJAH! I WALK into the Sky High bar on the forty-third floor and it’s still open. I sink my weary carcass into an armchair by the window and order a twenty-five-dollar shot of cognac. The view is to die for. Shanghai by night is a mind of a million lights: of orange dot-to-dots along expressways, of pixel-white headlights and red taillights; green lights on the cranes; blinking blues on airplanes; office blocks across the road, and smearages of specks, miles away, every microspeck a life, a family, a loner, a soap opera; floodlights up the skyscrapers over in Pudong; closer up, animated ad-screens for Omega, Burberry, Iron Man 5, gigawatt-brite, flyposted onto night’s undarkness. Every conceivable light, in fact, except the moon and stars. “There’s no distances in prisons,” Richard Cheeseman wrote, in a letter to our Friends Committee. “No outside windows, so the furthest I ever see is the tops of the walls around the yard. I’d give a lot just for a view of a few miles. It wouldn’t have to be pretty—urban grot would be fine—so long as there was several miles’ worth.”

And Crispin Hershey had put him there.

Crispin Hershey keeps him there.

“Hello, Mr. Hershey,” says a woman. “Fancy finding you here.”

I jump up with unexpected vigor. “Holly! Hi! I was just …” I’m not sure how to finish my sentence so we kiss, cheek to cheek, like fairly good friends. She looks tired, which is only to be expected for a time-zone hopper, but her velvet suit looks great on her—Carmen’s taken her shopping a few times. I indicate an imaginary companion in the third chair: “Do you and Captain Jetlag know each other?”

She glances at the chair. “We go back a few years, yes.”

“When did you get in from—was it Singapore?”

“Um … Got to think. No, Jakarta. It’s Monday, right?”

“Welcome to the Literary Life. How’s Aoife?”

“Officially in love.” Holly’s smile has several levels to it. “With a young man called Цrvar.”

“Цrvar? From which galaxy do Цrvars hail?”

“Iceland. Aoife went there a week ago, to meet the folks.”

“Lucky Aoife. Lucky Цrvar. Do you approve of the young man?”

“As it happens, yes. Aoife’s brought him down to Rye a few times. He’s doing genetics at Oxford, despite his dyslexia, don’t ask me how that works. He fixes things. Shelves, shower doors, a stuck blind.” Holly asks the waitress who brings my cognac for a glass of the house white. “What about Juno?”

“Juno? Never fixed a sodding thing in her life.”

“No, you dope! Is Juno dating yet?”

“Oh. That. No, give her a chance, she’s only fifteen. Mmm. Did you discuss boys with your father at that age?”

Holly’s phone bleeps. She glances at it. “It’s a message for you, from Carmen: ‘Tell Crispin I told him not to eat the durian fruit.’ Does that make any sense?”

“It does, alas.”

“Will you be moving into that new place in Madrid?”

“No. It’s a bit of a long story.”

“ROTTNEST?” HOLLY FLICKS her wineglass with her fingernail, as if testing its note. “Well, as Carmen may have mentioned, at various points in my life, I’ve heard voices that other people didn’t hear. Or I’ve been sure about things that I had no way of knowing. Or, occasionally, been the mouthpiece for … presences that weren’t me. Sorry that last one sounds seancey, I can’t help it. And unlike a seance, I don’t summon anything up. Voices just … nab me. I wish they didn’t. I wish very badly that they didn’t. But they do.”

I know all this. “You’ve got a degree in psychology, right?”