The Bone Clocks

… and gray comes in through the cracks, birdsong too, and the sound of a lorry passing overhead, and a sharp pain from a knocked ankle, and I’m crouching on the concrete ground of an underpass, just a few yards from the exit. A breeze that smells of car fumes washes over my face, and it’s over, my daymare, my vision, my whatever-it-was, is over. There’s no one to ask, Did you see that too?There’s just those three words, I’ll be here. I wobble out into the light, into the dry blue morning, still shaking with the gutted weirdness of it all, and sit on the grass bank. Perhaps daymares are like cancer, which goes away and comes back when you think you’re all clear. Perhaps whatever Dr. Marinus did to fix me is wearing off. Perhaps the stress of yesterday, of Mam and Vinny and everything, triggered some sort of relapse. I just dunno. There was no sign of Jacko, so I must’ve imagined seeing him, too. Good. I’m glad he’s safe at the Captain Marlow, twenty miles away, even though I’d love to see him, to know he’s okay, even though I know he’s fine and there’s nothing to worry about.

THE FIRST TIME I saw Jacko, he was in an incubator ’cause he was born too soon. That was in Gravesend General Hospital, too, though the maternity wing’s in a different building. Mam, who’d just had a C-section, looked tireder than I’d ever seen her, but happier, too, and told us to say hi to our new brother, Jack. Dad had been at the hospital all the previous day; he looked and smelt like he’d been sleeping in a car park for a week. Sharon, I remember, was most dischuffed at losing her cutest-thing-at-the-Captain-Marlow crown, specially to this monkey-shrimp in a nappy with tubes coming off of him. Brendan was fifteen and spooked by all the bawling, breast-feeding, sick and poo in the ward. I tapped on the glass and said, “Hi, Jacko, I’m your big sister,” and his fingers waggled, just a tiny, tiny bit, like he was waving. The God’s honest truth, that; nobody else saw but I felt a tickle in my heart and I felt willing and able to kill to protect him, if I had to. I still feel it, when some twat talks ’bout the “weirdo” or the “freak” or the “premature one.” People can be so crap. Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you’re asking to be picked on? Why’s it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages? Mam and Dad sometimes decide Jacko needs to read less and play footy more, and for a bit he’ll act more like a normal seven-year-old kid, but it’s only acting, and we all know it. Just now and then who he really is smiles out at me through the blacks of Jacko’s eyes, like someone watching you from a train zipping past. At those times, I almost want to wave, even though he’s just across the table, or we’re passing on the stairs.

·   ·   ·

HALLUCINATIONS OR NOT, I can’t just sit on my arse all day. I need food and a plan. So off I walk, and after a roundabout, the fields stop and I’m back in the world of garden fences, billboards, and zebra crossings. The sky’s hazing over a bit and I’m thirsty again. I haven’t had a proper drink since me and Brubeck got some water from a tap in the church, and the rules say that you can’t knock on a door and ask for a glass of water in a town the way you can in the middle of nowhere. A park with a water fountain’d be perfect, or even a public toilet, but there’s no sign of either. I’d like to brush my teeth, too; they’re all scaly like the inside of kettles. I smell bacon from a window and stomach pangs wake up, and here comes a bus with GRAVESEND written on it. Hop aboard, I could be home in forty-five minutes …

Sure, but picture Mam’s face when she opens the side door. The bus wafts by, and on I trog under a railway bridge. Up ahead there’s a row of shops and a newsagent where I can buy a can of drink and a pack of biscuits. There’s a Christian bookshop, a knitting shop, a betting shop, a shop that just sells Airfix models and stuff, and a pet shop, with scabby hamsters in cages. Everything’s mostly closed and a bit sad. Okay, so I’m arriving in Rochester. Now what?

Here’s a phone box, strawberry red.

Strawberries. That’s an idea.

THE DIRECTORY ENQUIRIES woman finds Gabriel Harty and Black Elm Farm on the Isle of Sheppey, no bother, and asks if I want to be put straight through. I say yes, and a moment later the ringing tone rings. My watch says 08:57. Surely not too early for a farm, even on a Sunday. Nobody’s answering. I don’t know why I’m so nervous but I am. If it rings ten times and no one answers, I’ll hang up and assume this wasn’t meant to be.

On the ninth ring the phone’s picked up. “Ye-es?”

I ram in my ten pence. “Hi. Is that Black Elm Farm?”

“It was when last I looked, ye-es.” A rusty drawl.

“Are you Mr. Harty?”

“When I last looked I was, ye-es.”