The Bone Clocks

Holly looks cornered. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“But you usually find out what they mean after, right?”

“Usually. Eventually. But this is a … slow-cooking certainty.”

“ ‘A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man’? What isthat? A shopping list? A dance track? A line from a sodding haiku?”

“Crispin, if I knew, I’d tell you, I swear.”

“Then it may just be random gobbledegook.”

Holly agrees too easily. “Probably, yes. Yep. Forget it.”

An elderly Chinese guy in a pink Lacoste top, fudge-brown slacks, and golf shoes steps out of the lift. Hooked onto his arm is a blond model wearing a nйgligй sewn of cobwebs and gold coins, extraplanetary makeup, and not a lot else. They go around a corner.

“Maybe she’s his daughter,” says Holly.

“What did you mean just then, ‘It’s never changed’?”

Holly, I expect, regrets having started this. “In Cartagena, at the president’s house, I heard the same certainty. Same words. At Rottnest, too, before I started channeling. And now, if I tune in. I did the coin thing so you might take the spiral-spider-one-eyed-manthing seriously, in case it’s ever …” she shrugs, “… relevant.”

The lifts hum in their turboshafts. “What’s the use of certainties,” I ask, “that are so sodding uncertain?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Crispin. I’m not a bloody oracle. If I couldstop them I would, like a bloody shot!”

These uncensored stupid words spill out: “You’ve profited from them well enough.”

Holly looks shocked, hurt, then pissed off, all in under five seconds. “ Yes, I wrote The Radio Peoplebecause stupidly, stupidly, I thought if Jacko’s alive and out there somewhere”—she sweeps an angry hand at the borderless city through the window—“he might read it, or someone who knows him might recognize him and get in touch. Fat bloody chance ’cause he’s probably dead but I had to try. But I enduremy certainties. I live despitethem. Don’t say I profit from them. Don’t darebloody say that, Crispin.”

“Yeah.” I close my eyes. “Look, it came out wrong. I …”

My crimes, my misdeeds. Where do I sodding begin?

Then I hear the lift doors close. Great. She’s gone.

AS I SHAMBLE back to my room, I send a text to Holly to apologize. I’ll phone in the morning after we’ve both had a decent night’s sleep, and we’ll meet for breakfast. I arrive at Room 2929, where I find a black bag hung over my door handle. It’s embroidered with runes in gold thread: a real labor of love. Inside is a book entitled Your Last Chanceby Soleil Moore. Never heard of her. Or him. I already know it’s dreck. No real poet would be rude enough to imagine that I’d read unsolicited sonnets, just because of a hand-embroidered bag. How did she find out my room number? We’re in China. Bribes, of course. Not at the Shanghai Mandarin, surely. Ah, who cares? I’m so—soddingly—buggeringly— tired. I just go into my room, dump the book still in its lovely bag into the deep bin with the detritus of the day, empty my grateful bladder, crawl into bed, and sleep opens up like a sink-hole …

September 17, 2019

DID YOU EVER ESPY a lonelier signpost, dear reader? North to Festap, east along the Kaldidadur Road, and west to Юingvellir, 23 kilometers. Цrvar, I recall, taught me that “Ю” is a voiced “th” as in “lathe.” Twenty-three kilometers on British back roads would be a mere twenty-minute drive, but I left the tourist center at Юingvellir an hour and a half ago. The tarmac road degenerated into a dirt track twisting its way up the escarpment and onto this rocky plateau under gunmetal mountains and churning clouds. On a whim, I pull over, kill the engine of my rented Mitsubishi, and climb up the stony hillock to sit on a boulder. Not a telephone pole, not a power line, not a tree, not a shrub, not a sheep, not a crow, not a fly, just a few tufts of coarse grass and a lone novelist. The valley in The Fall of the House of Usher. A terraforming experiment on a lesser moon of Saturn. A perfect opposite of end-of-summer Madrid, and I wonder how Carmen’s doing, then remind myself that how she’s doing is no longer my business. Driving around Iceland for a week before the Reykjavik Festival was her idea: “The Land of the Sagas! It’ll be a blast, Crispin!” Dutifully I did the research, booked the rooms and the car, and was even reading Njal’s Sagathat London evening only eight weeks ago. When the phone went, I knew it was trouble: Holly would call it a “Certainty” with a capital C. My separation from Zoл was long forecast, but Carmen’s declaration of independence came from a clear blue sky. Frantic, hurt, above all fearful, I began arguing that it’s the challenges and routines that make a relationship real but I was soon incoherent as the house seemed to collapse and the sky fell in on top.

Enough. I had two years of love from a kind woman.

Cheeseman’s on his third year in hell, and counting.