The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  December 23

  BERNARD KRIEBEL PHILATELY of Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, envelops me with pipe-tobacco fug as the bell jingles. It’s a long, narrow shop with a central stand where sets of midprice stamps are displayed, like LPs. Pricier items live in locked cabinets along the walls. I unwind my scarf, but my old satchel stays around my neck. The radio is warbling Don Giovanni, Act 2. Bernard Kriebel, clad in green tweed and a navy cravat, glances around the customer at the desk to ensure I come in peace; I send him a take-your-time face and stay at a tactful distance, perusing the mint condition Penny Blacks in their humidity-controlled display cabinets. It soon becomes clear, however, that the customer ahead of me is not a happy bunny: “What do you mean, fake?”

  “This specimen is closer to a hundred days old,” the proprietor removes his delicate glasses to rub a watery eye, “than a hundred years.”

  The customer pinches the air like a comedy Italian: “What about the faded dye? The browned paper? That paper’s not contemporary!”

  “Period paper isn’t hard to obtain—although the crosshatch fibers suggest the 1920s more than the 1890s.” Bernard Kriebel’s unhurried English has a Slavonic burr: He’s Yugoslav, I happen to know. “Dunking the paper in weak tea is an old gambit. The blocks must have taken many a night to craft, I’ll admit—though with a list price of twenty-five thousand pounds, the prize justifies the labor. The ink itself is modern—Windsor and Newton Burnt Sienna?—diluted, slightly. Not an inept forgery.”

  Appalled falsetto huff: “You accuse me of forgery?”

  “I accused someone, not you. Interestingly.”

  “You’re trying to beat the price down. Admit it.”

  Kriebel grimaces with distaste. “A part-timer at Portobello may bite, or one of the traveling stamp and coin fairs. Now, if you’d excuse me, Mr. Budd, a genuine customer is waiting.”

  Mr. Budd snarls a gaaagh and storms out. He tries to slam the door—but it’s not slammable—and he’s gone. Kriebel shakes his head at the ways of the world.

  I ask, “Do many forgers bring you their handiwork?”

  Kriebel sucks in his cheeks to show he’ll ignore the question. “I know your face …” he searches for me in his mental Rolodex, “… Mr. Anyder. You sold me a Pitcairn Island set of eight in August. A good clean set.”

  “I hope you’re well, Mr. Kriebel.”

  “Passably. How are your studies? Law at UCL, wasn’t it?”

  I think he’s trying to catch me out. “Astrophysics at Imperial.”

  “So it was. And have you found any sentient life up there?”

  “At least as much as there is down here, Mr. Kriebel.”

  He smiles at the old joke and looks at my satchel. “Are you buying or selling this afternoon?”

  I bring out the black folder and remove a strip of four stamps.

  A Biro in Kriebel’s hand goes tap-tap-tap on the benchtop.

  The philatelist and his Anglepoise lamp peer closer.

  The Biro falls silent. Bernard Kriebel’s old eyes look my way inquisitorially, so I recite: “Four Indian Half-Anna Deep Blues; 1854 or 1855; from the right of sheet, with part marginal inscription; fresh condition; unused. How am I doing so far?”

  “Well enough.” He renews his inspection under a Sherlock-sized magnifying glass. “I won’t pretend that a plethora of these pass through my hands. Did you have any … price in mind?”

  “A single franked specimen sold at Sotheby’s last June for two thousand one hundred pounds. Times four, gives us eight thousand four hundred. Add fifty percent for the pristine set, and we’re in the neighborhood of thirteen grand. However. You have Central London overheads, you pay on the nail, and I have high hopes for a long-term relationship, Mr. Kriebel.”

  “Oh, I think we are on ‘Bernard’ terms from now on.”

  “Then call me Marcus, and my price is ten thousand.”

  Kriebel’s already decided to accept, but pretends to agonize out of courtesy: “Commonwealth stamps are underperforming at present.” He lights his pipe and the aria ends. “The highest I can go is eight and a half, alas.”

  “It’s an icy day for chasing me to Trafalgar Square, Bernard.”

  He sighs through hairy nostrils. “My wife will pull me limb from limb for my softness, but young philatelists should be encouraged. We can agree to split the difference: nine thousand two hundred and fifty?”

  “Ten is a simpler, rounder number.” I put on my scarf.

  A final sigh. “Ten it is.” We shake. “You’ll take a check?”

  “Yes, but, Bernard …” he turns in the doorway to his cubbyhole, “… would you let your sweet Half-Annas out of sight prior to getting your hands on the payment?”

  Bernard Kriebel tilts his head at my professionalism. He returns my stamps and goes to prepare my check. A terminally ill bus hauls itself up Charing Cross Road. Demons drag Don Giovanni down into the underworld: The fate of all amateurs who neglect their homework.

  I WEAVE THROUGH Christmassy Soho, blaring, steamy, and hazardous with icy slush, cross the glacial stampede of traffic on Regent Street, and arrive at Suisse Integrité Banc’s discreet London office, tucked away behind Berkeley Square. Security Ape holds the bulletproof door open with a nod of recognition; I have an appointment. Once within its airy, mahogany and cream interior, I deposit my check with the petite female teller across the polished desk, who asks no questions beyond, “How are you today, Mr. Anyder?” There’s a little Swiss flag by her computer terminal, and as she fills out my deposit slip, I wonder if Madam Constantin, as a Swiss expatriate of understated means, ever graces this same plush chair. That odd encounter in King’s College Chapel keeps returning to me, even if I’ve experienced no more time-slips. “Until next time, Mr. Anyder,” the teller says, and I agree, Yes, until next time. The money is only the side product of my art, but I still leave feeling armed and flak-jacketed; when Kriebel’s check clears, my account will cross the fifty K mark. This is, of course, a tadpole-sized account for Integrité’s sheets, but it’s a tidy enough stash for an undergraduate paying his own way in the world. And it will multiply. Half of my fellow Humberites—unless their parents are good and willing milkers—are so up to their nostrils in debt and denial that for their first five working years they’ll have to take whatever shit gets flung their way and act like it’s caviar. Not I. I’ll throw it back. Harder.

  IN A SHELTERED walkway off Piccadilly Circus, two men in suits and raincoats are blocking off a doorway and haranguing someone, hidden from view. The bright windows of Tower Records shine out through the feeble sleet, and early commuters are pouring into Piccadilly Circus Tube, but my curiosity is piqued. Between the men’s backs I glimpse a shrunken Yeti huddled in an entrance. “Nice business strategy you’ve got worked out,” says one. “You watch people buy flowers there and collar them for money here so they can’t walk off without feeling like callous bastards.” The tormentor sounds drunk. “We’re in marketing, too, see. So what’s your hit rate?”

  “I”—the Yeti’s blinking and scared—“I don’t hit no one.”

  The tormentors laugh in each other’s face: not a nice sound.

  “All—all I’m askin’ for’s a bit of change. The hostel’s thirteen quid a night.”

  “Then get yourself a shave and get a job stacking shelves!”

  “Nobody’ll give me a job without I’ve got a perm’nent address.”

  “Get a permanent address, then. Duh.”

  “Nobody’ll rent me a room without I’ve got a job.”

  “This one’s got excuses for everything, hasn’t he, Gaz?”

  “Hey. Hey. Want a job? I’ll give you a job. Want it?”

  The burliest one leans down: “My colleague’s asking you very nicely if you want a job.”

  The Yeti swallows and nods. “What’s the job?”

  “Hear that, Gaz? Beggars can be choosers, after all.”

  “Money collector,” says Gaz. “Ten quid a minute, guaranteed.”
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  The Yeti has a facial tic. “What do I have to do?”

  “The clue’s in the job title.” The guy turns and lobs a pocketful of coins into a gap in the traffic roaring into Piccadilly Circus. “Collect the fucking money, Einstein!” Coins roll between tires and under cars, scattering in ruts of dirty ice. “Look at that, the streets of London are paved with gold.” The two tormentors shuffle off, delighted with themselves, leaving the shrunken Yeti calculating the odds of picking up coins without getting whacked by a bus. “Don’t,” I tell the homeless guy.

  He glares at me. “You try sleepin’ in a skip.”

  I take out my wallet and offer him two twenties.

  He looks at the money and looks at me.

  I say, “Three nights in the hostel, right?”

  He takes the notes and slips them inside his dirty coat. “Obliged.”

  My sacrifice to the gods duly performed, I let Piccadilly Circus Tube Station suck me down into its vortex of body odor and bad breath.

  THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolò Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light. Gasworks and Edwardian roofs, chimneys and aerials, a supermarket car park, Premises for Rental. Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat. But what does “beating the system” mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? Another train on a parallel track overtakes us slowly enough for me to glimpse the young City worker I’ll have turned into this time next year, squashed against the window, only a meter away. Good skin, good clothes, drained eyes. How to Get Seriously Rich by Thirty reads the cover of his magazine. The guy looks up and sees me. He squints at my Penguin Classic to make out the title, but his train swings away down a different track.

  If I have doubts that you beat the system by moving up, I damn well know you don’t beat it by dropping out. Remember Rivendell? The summer before I went up to Cambridge a few of us went clubbing at the Floating World in Camden Town. I took Ecstasy and got off with a waifish girl wearing dried-blood lipstick and clothes made of black cobwebs. Spidergirl and I got a taxi back to her place: a commune called Rivendell, which turned out to be a condemned end-of-terrace squat next to a paper recycling plant. Spidergirl and I frolicked to an early Joni Mitchell LP about seagulls and drowsed until noon, when I was shown downstairs to the Elrond Room, where I ate lentil curry and the squat’s “pioneers” told me how their commune was an outpost of the postcapitalist, postoil, postmoney future. For them everything was “inside the system”—bad—or “outside the system”—good. When one asked me how I wanted to spend my sojourn on Earth, I said something about the media and was bombarded with a collective diatribe about how the system’s media divides people, not connects them. Spidergirl told me that “here in Rivendell, we actually talk to each other, and share tales from wiser cultures, like the Inuit. Wisdom’s the ultimate currency.” As I left, she asked for a “loan” of twenty pounds to buy a few things from Sainsbury’s. I suggested she recite an Inuit folktale at the checkout, because wisdom is the ultimate currency. Some of her response was radical feminist, most was just Anglo-Saxon. What I took from Rivendell, apart from pubic lice and an allergy to Joni Mitchell that continues to the present day, was the insight that “outside the system” means poverty.

  Ask the Yeti how free he feels.

  AS I TAKE off my hat and boots on the porch, I hear Mum in the front room: “Hold on a moment. That may be him now.” She appears, holding the phone with its cord stretched to the max. “Oh, it is! Superb timing. I’ll put him on. Wonderful to put a voice to the name, as it were, Jonny—season’s greetings and all that.”

  I go in after her and mouth, “Jonny Penhaligon?” and Mum nods and leaves, closing the door behind her. The dark front room is lit by the fairy lights on the Christmas tree, pulsing on and off. The receiver lies on the wicker chair; I hold it against my ear, taking in the sound of Penhaligon’s nervous breathing, and the trancey Twin Peaks theme wafting from another room in Tredavoe House. I count from ten to zero, slowly … “Jonny! What a surprise! So sorry to keep you.”

  “Hugo, hi, yeah, it’s Jonny. Hi. How are things?”

  “Great. All revved up for Christmas. Yourself?”

  “Not so great, to be brutally honest, Hugo.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Anything I can help with?”

  “Um … I don’t know. It’s a bit … awkward.”

  “O-kay. Speak.”

  “You know the other night, at Toad’s? You remember I was four thousand up when you called it a night?”

  “Do I remember? Cleaned out in the first hour, I was. Not so the Pirate of Penzance, eh?”

  “Yeah, it was … one of those charmed runs.”

  “ ‘Charmed’? Four thousand quid is more than the basic student grant.”

  “Well, yeah. It went to my head a bit, a lot, that and the mulled wine, and I thought how fantastic it’d be not to go groveling to Mum for funds every time the account goes low … So, anyway, you’d left, Eusebio was dealing, and I got a flush, spades, jack high. I played it flawlessly—acted like I was bluffing over a pot of crap—till over two thousand quid was on the table.”

  “Shitting hell, Jonny. That’s quite a bucketful.”

  “I know. We’d agreed to scrap the pot limit, and there were three of us bidding up and up, and nobody was backing down. Rinty only had two pairs, and Bryce Clegg looked at my flush and said, ‘Shafted by the Pirate again,’ but as I scooped up the pot he added, ‘Unless I’ve got—oh, what is this? A full house.’ And he had. Three queens, two aces. I should have gone then, wish to Christ I had. I was still two grand up. But I’d lost two grand and I thought it was just a blip, that if I kept my nerve I’d win it all back. Fortune favors the brave, I thought. One more hand, it’ll turn around … Toad asked me if I wanted to drop out a couple of times, but … by then I was … I was …” Penhaligon’s voice wobbles, “… ten thousand down.”

  “Wow, Jonny. Them’s grown-up numbers.”

  “So, yeah, we carried on, and my losses piled up, and I didn’t know why the King’s College bells were ringing in the middle of the night, but Toad opened up the curtains and it was daylight. Toad said his casino was closing for the holidays. He offered to scramble eggs for us, but I wasn’t hungry …”

  “You win a few,” I console him, “you lose a few. That’s poker.”

  “No, Hugo, you don’t get it. Eusebio took a hammering, but I took a … a pulverizing, and when Toad wrote down what I owe, it’s”—a strangled whisper—“fifteen thousand, two hundred. Toad said he’ll round it down to fifteen in the interest of nice round numbers, but …”

  “Your sense of honor brings out the best in Toad,” I assure him, peering through the blue velvet curtain. It’s a cold, dark indigo, streetlight-amber night out. “He knows he’s not dealing with an underclass scuzzball with a can’t-pay-won’t-pay attitude.”

  Penhaligon sighs. “That’s the awkward thing, you see.”

  I act puzzled. “To be honest, I don’t quite see, no.”

  “Fifteen thousand pounds is … is quite a lot. A shit of a lot.”

  “For a financial mortal like myself, sure—but not for old Cornish aristocracy, surely?”

  “I don’t actually have that much in … my main account.” />
  “Oh. Right. Right! Look, I’ve known Toad since I got to Cambridge and, I promise you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Penhaligon croaks a hope-tortured “Really?”

  “Toad’s cool. Tell him that, with the banks closed over Christmas, you can’t transfer what you owe until the New Year. He knows that a Penhaligon’s word is his bond.”

  Here it comes: “But I don’t have fifteen thousand pounds.”

  Take a dramatic pause, add a dollop of confusion and a pinch of disbelief. “You mean … you don’t have the money … anywhere?”

  “Well … no. Not at present. If I could, I would, but—”

  “Jonny. Stop. Jonny, these are your debts. I vouched for you. To Toad. I said, ‘He’s a Penhaligon,’ and that was that. Enough said.”

  “Just because your ancestors were admirals and you live in a listed building, that doesn’t make you a billionaire! Courtard’s Bank owns Trevadoe House, not us!”

  “Okay, okay. Just ask your mother to write you out a check.”

  “For a poker debt? Are you mad? She’d refuse point-blank. Look, what could Toad actually do if, y’know … that fifteen thousand …”

  “No no no no no. Toad’s a friendly chap but he’s a businessman, and business trumps friendly chap–ness. Please. Pay.”

  “But it’s only a poker game. It’s not like … a legal contract.”

  “Debt’s debt, Jonny. Toad believes you owe him this money, and I’m afraid I do too, and if you refuse to honor your debt, I’m afraid the gloves would come off. He wouldn’t put a horse’s head in your bed, but he’d involve your family and Humber College, which, by the by, would take a dim view of its good name being dragged through the gutter press.”

  Penhaligon hears his future, and it sounds like a bottle-bank heaved off the roof of a multistory car park. “Oh, shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “One possibility does occur to me—but, no, forget it.”

  “Right now, I’d consider anything. Anything.”

  “No, forget it. I already know what the answer would be.”