Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  “Poppy! This is me.”

  “Well. Look what the cat didn’t drag back last night.” Wry. Tired?

  “I told you about the private view. A kid in a sweetshop. How’s the little trilobite?”

  “She fell asleep in a sulk because she wanted her bedtime story from you.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Oh, poor Marco.”

  “I’ve been having paradigm shifts. Poppy …”

  “Do you have to do your paradigm shifts in the middle of the night?”

  “Sorry, this can’t wait.… Look, financially, you know I’m not John Paul Getty here, but … look, seriously, I’ve been wondering if you’d like to merge our estates, both in a financial and maybe existential sense too, of course that would just be the tip of the, erm, commitment iceberg, and if you’d like to do the same, then maybe—”

  “Marco. What on earth are you talking about?”

  Say it. “Would you like to get married?” Oh, lordy lord.

  “With whom?”

  She wasn’t going to make this easy. “With me.”

  “Well. This is out of the blue. Let me think about it.”

  “How long do you need?”

  “A couple of decades?”

  “You hussy! I bought you a T-shirt with a pig on it.…”

  “You’re hoping to win my hand in holy matrimony, and in return you’re offering a pig. Is this east Putney or east Bangladesh?”

  “Poppy, I’m serious. I want to be your, your, I want you to be my …” Husband. Wife. Jesus wept. “I can’t quite say it yet. But I will. I’m not drunk, I’m not stoned, I’m serious.”

  The few moments that passed had more mass than ordinary time, because a possible lifetime was compressed into them. I started to say something at the same time as Poppy. Poppy carried on. “Look. If you use the word ‘serious’ just once more I’ll start believing you. Then if I find out you’re not serious, our friendship stroke relationship stroke whatever is destroyed. This is your point of no return. Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  Poppy whistled softly. “Marco. I’m taken aback that you can still take me aback.”

  “I’m coming over now. Is that okay?”

  The longest wait of all.

  “Yes, under the circumstances, I guess that’s okay.”

  I hung up, and collected my coat. The tube closed hours ago. I had the money for a taxi to Putney, but £15 would feed India for—how long? Anyway, I had some thinking to do. I’d walk it.

  Even if it took all night.

  CLEAR ISLAND

  GASPING AND DRIPPING I opened my eyes, a sun spun from bright seawater. I looked at Billy in the cabin, who was trying not to laugh. I mouthed “Rat,” and he laughed. St. Fachtna cleared the crosscurrents between Illaunbrock shoal and Clarrigmore rock, rounded the west cape of Sherkin Island, and my black book and I, after a trip of twelve thousand miles, could see the end. Clear Island moved into view, my face felt crusty as the seawater dried, and here was home.

  The lonely arm of Ardatruha pointing out to the Atlantic. I watched the light on the waves. The shades of blue where the reefs dropped away into the deeps. Cliffs tumbling around the back of Carriglure. Meadows in hollows and pastures on rises. The shabby harbor in the crook of the headland. A few miles of looping roads. The cemetery, the island’s politest place. St. Ciaran’s Well. An island as old as the world.

  Billy’s mute daughter nudged at me, offering me her father’s binoculars.

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  The houses swam into focus. I could see my godparents, Maisie and Brendan Mickledeen, pottering out on the verandah of The Green Man, and thought of the mechanical figurines on the town clock opposite my lab in Zurich. Ancient O’Farrell’s grocery store at the foot of Baile Iarthach, doubling up as the post office and trebling up as the gossip exchange. Damn me if that isn’t Bertie Crow’s ancient three-wheeler vanishing over the neck of Cnocán an Choimhthigh! Won’t it ever give up the ghost?

  What is it that ties shapes of land to the human heart, Mo?

  At the water’s edge was the clump of sycamore trees smothering the falling-down croft where I was born. I wondered if the roof had fallen in yet.

  I remembered the strong-jawboned of Switzerland, driving around their polished towns in the latest German sports cars. I remembered the spindly kids who scratched together a living in the Kowloon streets around Huw’s apartment building. I remembered my lucky childhood, galloping over this island and prising out its secrets. Birth deals us out a hand of cards, but as important as their value is the place we are dealt them in.

  “You’ve brought us some heavenly weather, Mo,” Billy yelled over the diesel engine. “It was bucketing down this morning. Did you miss us?”

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the island. I missed all eight square miles of you! In Smug Zurich and Euromoney Geneva and Pell Mell Hong Kong and Merciless Beijing and Damned London I could close my eyes and see your topography, like I could John’s body. I watched the cormorants sail on the wind, from the south today, and I watched the gannets dive and vanish into mBairneach Bay. I suddenly wanted to grin and blubber like a madwoman, to shout back at Baltimore and the low mountains and all the way to Cork, “You blew it! I got here! I’m home! Come and get me!”

  An island of cloud rounded the sun, and the temperature dropped. I was goosepimpled.

  Only give me a little time first, with John and Liam.

  The boat slowed to a chug. Billy steered the St. Fachtna into the harbor.

  The night the U.S. staged its “preemptive strike,” I was holding an impromptu dinner party at my chalet. Daniella, the brightest of that year’s postgrads doing a research placement at Light Box, had switched on the satellite news just to get the weather, and we were still watching six hours later, picking at cold food with dead appetites. Alain was down from Paris, and a friend of John’s from Hong Kong called Huw. The TV showed the night skyline of a burning city in the Gulf.

  A young pilot was talking with a CNN reporter whose hair was not his own. “Yessir, the whole place was lit up like the prettiest Fourth of July I ever did see!”

  “We’ve been hearing about the surgical precision of the missile strikes, thanks to Homer Quancog technology.”

  “Yessir, with the Homers you can pick your elevator shaft. The boys at mission control program in the building blueprints, and you sit back and let the missile’s flight computer do the thinking for you. Just let those babies rip! Straight down the elevator shafts!”

  Alain spilled some wine. “Putain! Next he tells us the missiles buy a stick of bread and walk the doggie.”

  A general wearing a torso of medals was talking in the Washington studio. “For Americans, freedom is an inalienable right. For all. Homer Technology is revolutionizing warfare. We can hit these evil dictators hard, where it hurts, with minimum collateral damage to the civilians they tyrannize.”

  John phoned from Clear Island. “This isn’t news, it’s sports coverage. Have so many films been made about high-tech war that high-tech war is now a film? It’s product placement. Had anyone even heard of Homer missiles two days ago?”

  A sickening sense that this was coming for me. I was gnawing my knuckles.

  “Yeah … I’ve heard about them.”

  “Mo, love. Are you okay?”

  “No. John, I’ll have to phone you back.”

  BBC footage. A street lit by ambulances and fire. “Film Censored by Enemy Forces” scrolled across the screen. An Irish reporter from the north was holding a microphone to a woman whose face glistened with sweat or blood or both. “Tell me! Ask your people, why dropping a bomb on baby food factory? Why is dropping a bomb on baby food factory necessary for your war?

  Tell me!”

  Cut.

  Back to the studio for more analysis with experts. Daniella had fallen asleep, so I covered her with a blanket and put another log on the fire.

  “ ‘Preemptive strik
e,’ ” said Huw, “must mean not declaring war until your cameras are in position.”

  I felt weary. I peered through the curtain out at the night and the mountains: the Milky Way and a haggard middle-aged scientist looked back at me. So far you’ve stretched, Mo. You’ve become unelastic. When your mother was your age she was a widow. How much further will you have to stretch? The cold glass nipped the tip of my nose.

  Do you hear the waterfall, over the meadow, at the foot of the mountain?

  Three thousand miles away the forces of freedom and democracy were using the fruits of their finest scientific minds to crush Liams and Daniellas under buildings. Then we watch the rubble burn, and the fireworks above. Congratulations, Mo. This is your life.

  “My, it’s a sick zoo we’ve turned the world into.”

  Alain heard, but misunderstood me. “No zoo kills off its own animals.”

  My breath fogged everything up. “Out of our cages, and out of control of ourselves.”

  Billy swung me onto the quayside with a “ta-rar!” I swayed as I found my shore legs. I could almost hear my bones grind. It could be the day I left. The row of fishing boats: Mayo Davitt’s Dún an Óir; Daibhi O’Bruadair’s Oileán na n’an; Scott’s Abigail Claire, repainted in blues and yellows; Red Kildare’s barnacled dinghy The South’s Gonna Rise Again, needing an overhaul worse than ever. Coils of ropes, hillocks of netting, oil barrels, plastic crates. Scraggy cats picked about their business. Inside is outside on islands. Things lie where they fall. I breathed in deep. Mulchy fishiness from the seawater, sweet- and sourness from the sheep dung, diesel fumes from the boats’ engines.

  “Mo!” Father Wally was perched on his tricycle over by the oyster sheds. Bernadette Sheehy was hosing down some lobster baskets, in a miniskirt and waders. He waved me over, grinning. “Mo! You’re back in time! Glorious weather you’ve brought back with you. It was bucketing it down this morning.”

  “Father Wally! You’re a picture of health.” How right it feels to be conversing in Gaelic.

  “Octogenarians stop aging. It becomes pointless. Whatever happened to your eye?”

  “I head-butted a taxi in London.”

  “How was your trip? There must be easier ways to hail a taxi, even English ones.” We laughed, and I looked into his blue eighty-four-year-old eyes. What miraculous organs are eyes. How much Father Wally’s have seen—

  A thump of panic—a snare drum—

  Suppose the Texan had been here, recruiting locals? He had more money than the seventeen counties of the Republic.

  Mo, calm down! Father Wally christened your mother. The table in the back parlor hosted year-long games of chess that stood testament to his friendship with John. If you start doubting Clear Islanders, the Texan has already won.

  “My trip? A bit grueling, to be honest with you, Father. Hi, Bernadette.”

  The island beauty queen walked over. “Afternoon, Mo. Been far?”

  “Further than usual.”

  “You missed the best-ever summer fair. All the folks from Ballydehob and Skull and Baltimore too came over. A Norwegian bird-watcher called Hans fell in love with me. He writes to me every week.”

  “He’s written exactly twice,” said Bernadette’s little sister Hanna, climbing out of a rotting laundry basket, before being hosed away squealing into the oyster shed.

  “Aye,” said Father Wally. “It was a grand fair. And heavenly weather for the Fastnet Races. The Baltimore lifeboat got called out again, though. A catamaran capsized. Maybe you’ll be here for the races next year?”

  “I hope so. I really hope so.”

  “Will Liam be coming back to Clear before the weekend, Mo?” Bernadette was too unschooled to feign indifference well. She had wound a curl of hair around her little finger and was not looking where she was pointing her hose.

  If only. “He’d better not be. It’s slap bang in the middle of the autumn term.”

  Father Wally gave me a slightly strange look. Had I given a slightly strange answer? “Well then, Mo. Don’t keep the man waiting.”

  “Is he at home?”

  “Was but an hour ago. I dropped by to extricate my king’s rook from his pincer.”

  “I’ll say cheerio for now, then, Father Wally. Bernadette.”

  “Mind how you go now.”

  “Science is the game,” Dr. Hammer, my mentor at Queen’s, was fond of saying, “Its secrets are the stake. Errors are the card sharks. Scientists are the mugs.”

  Niels Bohr, the great Dane of quantum physics, was fond of saying, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”

  The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies. Historians have their axes to grind, just as physicists do.

  Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

  I remember the sun streaming in through the skylight of Heinz Formaggio’s office. The view was operatic. The mountains fringing Lake Geneva were crumpled mauve and silver. By the lakeside, under a folly with a copper weathercock, a gnomish gardener trimmed the baize lawn. Mercury was jetpacking off his marble pedestal in his winged helmet.

  Heinz had introduced the Texan as “Mr. Stolz.” There was a ten-gallon hat on the sofa. He took off his sunglasses and regarded me with his ill-occluding eyes.

  “Were you to desert at this stage,” Heinz was reasoning, “you would be walking out at a crucial stage. You’re the anchorman of a heavyweight team here, Mo. This isn’t a Saturday job you can just resign from at the drop of a pin.”

  “I can resign. I resigned yesterday. Read the letter again.”

  Avuncular-Heinz. “Mo—I understand the ups and downs of think-tank life. It’s a peculiar environment. I have these moments of doubt myself. I’m sure Mr. Stolz has them.” The Texan just watched me. “But they pass. I implore you to put this drastic decision on ice for a month or two.”

  “My drastic decision has already been made, Heinz.”

  Flabbergasted-Heinz. “Where are you going to go? What about Liam, and his scholarship from us? There are a hundred considerations here to weigh up properly.”

  “All weighed up. And my son’s education does not require your money.”

  Moral blackmailer-Heinz. “You’re being poached, aren’t you? We all receive better offers at the cutting edge, Mo. What gives you the right to be so selfish? Who are you going to?”

  “I’m going to grow turnips in County Cork.”

  “Being facetious is not helping. Light Box has a right to know. We have the CERN facilities completely to ourselves in April. The Saragosa supercollider data is due in next week. These could be Quancog’s way out of the nonlocality straitjacket. Why now?”

  I sighed. “It’s in the letter.”

  “Did you really believe that Light Box conducts experiments purely for fun?”

  “No. I really believed that Light Box conducts experiments purely for space agencies. That’s what we’ve been told quantum cognition is for. Then a war comes along, and I discover that my modest contribution to global enlightenment is being used in air-to-surface missiles to kill people who aren’t white enough.”

  “Must you be so melodramatic? The border where military and civilian applications of aerospace technology meet has always been subjective. Face it, Mo. It’s the way the world works.”

  “Somebody is fed bullshit for four years; they find out they’ve been fed bullshit for four years; they want out. Face it, Heinz. It’s the way the world works.”

  The Texan shifted his weight and the sofa creaked. “Mr. Formaggio, it’s plain that Dr. Muntervary values precision.” He spoke with the leisure of a never-interrupted man. “I can relate to that. As a friend of Quancog, I believe I can show a wider panorama. May I chew the fat alone with the lady?”

  A rhetorical question.

  The thin face in the window of
Ancient O’Farrell’s store swam back into the murk as I climbed the lane. The shop had no opening hours and no closing hours, but Ancient’s wife never met anyone unless Ancient, or their son, Old O’Farrell, was with her. Even in my childhood she had always been suspicious of the mainland: of Britain and the world beyond, suspicious of its very existence. Baltimore, she would concede, was there. But beyond Baltimore was a land insubstantial as radio waves.

  If both Ancient and Old were out you just went into the shop, helped yourself, and left the money in the shoebox. I took a breather on the gate to O’Driscoll’s meadow. This hill gets steeper every time I come back to the island, I swear. A couple of old ladies in black cloaks were beachcombing the strand, down where the dune grass ends. They walked like crows. They looked up at me in unison and waved. Moya and Roisin Tourmakeady! I waved back. We used to believe they were witches who caused whirlpools. Owls lived in their attic, and probably still do.

  Coming back was dangerous, Mo. They’d be here soon. It was a minor miracle that you got this far. A miracle, and the splendid isolation of Aer Lingus’s computer systems.

  Coming back was dangerous, but not coming back was impossible.

  The sun was warm, moss was thick on the stone wall, ferns nodded.

  With only three motorbikes on Clear Island, islanders can identify each by the engine. Red Kildare pulled up, his sidecar empty, and pushed up his goggles.

  “They let you back then, Mo? That’s quite a shiner you’re sporting.”

  “Red. You look like a defrocked wizard. Yes, my wicket-keeping days for the national team are drawing to a close.”

  Red Kildare, like John, is a newcomer to Clear. He first came as a “Blow-In” in the sixties, when an attempt to found a colony of freethinkers based on the philosophy of Timothy Leary went the same way as Timothy Leary, and dwindled down to Red, his pigs and goats, and a few wild stories. He milks Feynman for John every day up at Aodhagan, and pays in goat cheese and by tidying up the vegetable garden. John says he still grows the best marijuana this side of Cuba. His Gaelic is better than mine, now.