The Bone Clocks

I think she’s asking if I’ve broken anything. “Non. А part ma fiertй, mais bon, зa ne se soigne pas.”

She hasn’t removed her goggles so, apart from a few loose strings of wavy black hair and an unsmiling mouth, my Good Samaritaness’s face stays unseen. “Tu en as eu, de la veine.”

I’m a jammy bugger? “Tu peux …” “Bloody well say that again,” I’d like to say. “C’est vrai.”

“Зa ne rate jamais: chaque annйe, il y a toujours un couillon qu’on vient ramasser а la petite cuillиre sur cette piste. Il restera toute sa vie en fauteuil roulant, tout зa parce qu’il s’est pris pour un champion olympique. La prochaine fois, reste sur la piste bleu.”

Jesus, my French is rustier than I thought: “Every year someone breaks their spine and I ought to stick to the blue piste”? Something like that? Whatever it was, she launches herself without a goodbye and she’s gone, swooping through the curves.

BACK AT CHETWYND-PITT’S chalet, floating in the tub, Nirvana’s Nevermindthumping through the walls, I smoke a joint among the steam serpents and peruse the Case of the Body-Hopping Mind for the thousandth time. The facts are deceptively simple: Six nights ago, outside my parents’ home, I encountered one mind in possession of someone else’s body. Weird shit needs theories and I have three.

Theory 1: I hallucinated both the second coming of the Yeti and his secondary proofs, like his footprints and those statements that only Miss Constantin—or I—could have known about.

Theory 2: I am the victim of a stunningly complex hoax, involving Miss Constantin and an accomplice who poses as a homeless man.

Theory 3: Things are exactly as they appear to be, and “mind-walking”—what else to call it?—is a real phenomenon.

The Hallucination Theory: “I don’t feel insane” is a feeble retort, but I really don’t. If I was hallucinating a character so vividly, surely I’d be hallucinating other things too? Like hearing, I don’t know, Sting singing “An Englishman in New York” from inside lightbulbs.

The Complex Hoax Theory: “Why me?” Some people may hold a grudge against Marcus Anyder, if certain fictions were known. But why seek revenge via some wacky plot to loosen my grip on sanity? Why not just kick the living shit out of me?

The Mind-walking Theory: Plausible, ifyou live in a fantasy novel. Here, in the real world, souls stay inside the body. The paranormal is always, alwaysa hoax.

Water drops go plink, plink, plinkfrom the tap. My palms and fingers are pink and wrinkly. Someone’s thumping upstairs.

So what do I do about Immaculйe Constantin, the Yeti, and the weird shit? The only possible answer is “Nothing, for now.” Perhaps I’ll be served another slice tonight, or perhaps it’s waiting for me back in London or Cambridge, or perhaps this will just be one of life’s dangly plot lines that one never revisits. “Hugo?” It’s Olly Quinn, bless him, knocking on the door. “You still alive in there?”

“Yes, the last time I checked,” I shout, over Kurt Cobain.

“Rufus says we should get going before Le Croc fills up.”

“You three go on ahead and get a table. I’ll be along soon.”

LE CROC—A.K.A. LE Croc of Shit to its regulars—is a badger’s set of a drinking hole down an alley off the three-sided plaza in Sainte-Agnиs. Gьnter, the owner, gives me a mock salute and points to the Eagle’s Nest—a tiny mezzanine cubbyhole occupied by my three fellow Richmondians. It’s gone ten, the place is chocka, and Gьnter’s two saisonniers—one skinny girl in Hamlet black, the other plumper, frillier, and blonder—are busy with orders. Back in the 1970s Gьnter was ranked the 298th best tennis player in the world (for a week) and has a framed clipping to prove it. Now he supplies cocaine to wealthy Eurotrash, including Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’s eldest scion. His Andy Warhol flop of bleached hair is stylistic self-immolation, but a Swiss-German drug dealer in his fifties does not welcome fashion advice from an Englishman. I order a hot red wine and climb to the Nest, past a copse of seven-foot Dutchmen. Chetwynd-Pitt, Quinn, and Fitzsimmons have eaten—Gьnter’s daube, a beef stew, and a wedge of apple pie with cinnamon sauce—and have started on the cocktails which, thanks to my lost bet, I have the honor of buying for Chetwynd-Pitt. Olly Quinn’s tanked and glassy-eyed. “Can’t get my head round it,” he’s saying morosely. The boy’s a crap drunk.

“Can’t get your head round what?” I take off my scarf.

Fitzsimmons mouths, “Ness.”

I mime hanging myself with my scarf, but Quinn doesn’t notice: “We’d plannedit. I’d drive her to Greenwich, she’d introduce me to Mater and Pater. I’d see her over Christmas, we’d go to Harrods for the sales, skate on the rink at Hyde Park Corner … It was all planned. Then that Saturday, after I took Cheeseman to hospital for his stitches, she calls me up and it’s ‘We’ve come to the end of the road, Olly.’ ” Quinn swallows. “I’m like … huh? Shewas all, ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s mine.’ She said she’s feeling conflicted, tied-down, and—”