The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “Spit it out, Hugo.”

  Persuasion is not about force; it’s about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it. “That old sports car of yours, Jonny. An Alfa Romeo, is it?”

  “It’s a 1969 vintage Aston Martin Coda, but—sell it?”

  “Unthinkable, I know. Better just to grovel at your mother’s feet.”

  “But … the car was Dad’s. He left it to me. I love it. How could I explain away a missing Aston Martin?”

  “You’re an inventive man, Jonny. Tell your family you’d prefer to liquidate your assets and put them in a steady offshore bond issue than tear up and down Devon and Cornwall in a sports car, even if it was your father’s. Look—this just occurs to me now—there’s a dealer in vintage cars here in Richmond. Very discreet. I could pop round before he closes for Christmas, and ask what sort of numbers we’re talking.”

  A shuddered sigh from the chilblained toe of England.

  “I guess that’s a no,” I say. “Sorry, Jonny, I wish I could—”

  “No, okay. Okay. Go and see him. Please.”

  “And do you want to tell Toad what’s happening or—”

  “Could you call him? I—I don’t think I … I don’t …”

  “Leave everything to me. A friend in need.”

  I DIAL TOAD’S number from memory. His answering machine clicks on after a single ring. “Pirate’s selling. I’m off to the Alps after Boxing Day, but see you in Cambridge in January. Merry Christmas.” I hang up and let my eye travel over the bespoke bookshelves, the TV, Dad’s drinks cabinet, Mum’s blown-glass light fittings, the old map of Richmond-upon-Thames, the photographs of Brian, Alice, Alex, Hugo, and Nigel Lamb at a range of ages and stages. Their chatter reaches me like voices echoing down speaking tubes from another world.

  “All fine and dandy, Hugo?” Dad appears in the doorway. “Welcome back, by the way.”

  “Hi, Dad. That was Jonny, a friend from Humber. Wanted to check next term’s reading list for economics.”

  “Commendably organized. Well, I left a bottle of cognac in the boot of the car, so I’m just popping out to—”

  “Don’t, Dad—it’s freezing out and you’ve still got a bit of a cold. My coat’s there on the peg, let me fetch it.”

  “HERE WE ARE again,” says a man, who appears as I shut the rear door of Dad’s BMW, “in the bleak midwinter.” I damn nearly drop the cognac. He’s bundled in an anorak, and shadow from his hood, thrown by the streetlight, is covering his face. He’s only a few paces from the pavement, but definitely on our drive.

  “Can I help you?” I’d meant to sound firmer.

  “We wonder.” He lowers his hood and when I recognize the begging Yeti from Piccadilly Circus, the bottle of cognac slips from my grip and thumps onto my foot.

  All I say is, “You? I …” My breath hangs white.

  All he says is, “So it seems.”

  My voice is a croak. “Why—why did you follow me?”

  He looks up at my parents’ house, like a potential buyer. The Yeti’s hands are in his pockets. There’s room for a knife.

  “I’ve got no more money to give you, if that’s what—”

  “I didn’t come all this way for banknotes, Hugo.”

  I think back; I’m sure I didn’t tell him my name. Why would I have done? “How do you know my name?”

  “We’ve known it for a couple of years, now.” His underclass accent’s vanished without trace, I notice, and his diction’s clear.

  I peer at his face. An ex-classmate? “Who are you?”

  The Yeti scratches his greasy head; he’s got gloves with the fingerends snipped off. “If you mean ‘Who is the owner of this body?’ then, frankly, who cares? He grew up near Gloucester, has head lice, a heroin addiction, and a topical autoimmune virus. If you mean, ‘With whom am I speaking?’ then the answer is Immaculée Constantin, with whom you discussed the nature of power not very long ago. I know you remember me.”

  I take a step back; Dad’s BMW’s exhaust pipe pokes my calf. The Yeti of Piccadilly couldn’t have even pronounced “Immaculée Constantin.” “A setup. She prepped you, what to say, but how …”

  “How could she have known which homeless beggar you would pay your alms to today? Impossible. And how could she know about Marcus Anyder? Think larger. Redraw what is possible.”

  In the next street along a car alarm goes off. “The security services. You’re both—both part of … of …”

  “Of a government conspiracy? Well, I suppose it’s larger, but where does paranoia stop? Perhaps Brian and Alice Lamb are agents. Might Mariângela and Nurse Purvis be in on it? Maybe Brigadier Philby isn’t as gaga as he appears. Paranoia is so all-consuming.”

  This is real. Look at the Yeti’s footprints in the crusty snow. Smell his mulchy odor of sick and alcohol. Feel the cold biting my lips. You can’t hallucinate these things. “What do you want?”

  “To germinate the seed.”

  We stare at each other. He smells of greasy biscuit. “Look,” I say, “I don’t know what’s happening here, or why she sent you, or why you’d pretend to be her … But Ms. Constantin needs to know she’s made a mistake.”

  “What species of mistake have I made, exactly?” asks the Yeti.

  “I don’t want this. I’m not what you think I am. I just want a quiet Christmas and a quiet life with—”

  “We know you better than that, Hugo Lamb. We know you better than you do.” The Yeti makes a final amused grunt, turns, and walks down the drive. He tosses a “Merry Christmas” over his shoulder, and then he’s gone.

  December 29

  HERE AN ALP, THERE AN ALP, everywhere an Alp-Alp. Torn, castellated, blue-white, lilac-white, white-white, scarred by rock faces, fuzzed by snowy woods … I’ve visited Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet often enough now to know the peaks’ names: the fanglike Grande Dent de Veisivi; across the valley, Sasseneire, La Pointe du Tsaté, and Pointe de Bricola; and behind me, Palanche de la Cretta, taking up most of the sky. I drink in two lungfuls of iced atmosphere and airbrush modernity from all I survey. That airplane in the evening sunlight: gone. The lights of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès, six hundred meters below: off. The chalets, bell tower, steep-roofed houses, not unlike a little wooden village I had as a kid: erased. The hulking Chemeville station—a seventies concrete turd—with its rip-off coffee shop and its discus-shaped platform where we four Humberites stand: demolished. The télécabines bringing up us skiers and the chair lifts going on up to the summit of Palanche de la Cretta: gone in a pfff! The forty or fifty or sixty skiers skiing downhill on the meandering blue run or the far steeper black route: What skiers? I see no skiers. Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, Olly Quinn, and Dominic Fitzsimmons, nice knowing you. Up to a point. There. Now that’s what I call medieval. Did La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès exist back then? That skinny girl in the mint-green ski suit leaning on the railing, smoking like all French girls smoke—is it on the school curriculum?—let her stay. Every Adam needs an Eve.

  • • •

  “WHAT SAY WE add a dash of glory to this run?” Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt lifts his £180 Sno-Fox ski goggles. “The three losers can pick up the winner’s bar tab, from dawn till dusk. Takers?”

  “Count me out,” says Olly Quinn. “I’m taking the blue run down. I don’t want to end my first day in the clinic.”

  “Hardly a fair contest,” says Dominic Fitzsimmons. “You’ve skied here more often than you’ve siphoned your python.”

  “Grannies Quinn and Fitz have made their excuses.” Chetwynd-Pitt turns to me. “What about the Lamb of Doom?”

  Chetwynd-Pitt is a better skier than the rest of us, here or anywhere else, and at Sainte-Agnès nightlife prices the “dash of glory” will cost me dearly, but I mime spitting on my palms. “May the best man win, Rufus.” My logic is sound. If he wins the race, he’ll bet more rashly at pool later, but if he takes a tumble and loses, he’ll bet even more rashly later to restore his alpha-male credentials.

  Chetw
ynd-Pitt grins and pulls down his Sno-Foxes. “Glad someone has his balls stitched on. Fitz, you’re our starter.” We go to the top of the run, where Chetwynd-Pitt draws a notional starting line in the dirty snow with his pole. “First to the giant fluffy snowman at the end of the black run is the winner. No griping, no ifs, a direct race to the bottom, as one Etonian said to the other. We’ll see you pair of delicate woollens”—he looks at Fitzsimmons and Quinn—“back at chez moi.”

  “Under starter’s orders, then …” declares Fitzsimmons.

  Me and Chetwynd-Pitt crouch like Winter Olympians.

  “Ready, steady—bang!”

  BY THE TIME I’ve settled into my crouch Chetwynd-Pitt is a snowball lob ahead. We barrel it down the first stretch, passing a wedge of Spanish kids who have chosen the middle of the run for a group photo. The run divides into two—blue to the right, black over a sharp lip to the left. Chetwynd-Pitt takes the latter and I follow, grunting at my poor landing a few meters later, but at least I stay upright. The old snow here is glassy but fast and my skis sound like knives being sharpened. I’m accelerating, but so is my opponent’s black-and-orange-Lycra-clad arse as it passes the télécabine pylon. The run curves into the upper wood and the gradient steepens. At thirty, thirty-five, forty klicks an hour, the air scours my cheeks. The four of us zigzagged down this section this morning, but now Chetwynd-Pitt’s taking it straight as a javelin—up to forty-five, fifty kph—as fast as I’ve ever gone on skis, my calves and thighs are aching, and the rushing air’s howling in my ear canals. An unseen but vicious bump launches me for three, five, eight meters … I nearly lose it on landing, but just maintain my balance. Fall at this speed and your only protection against multiple breakages is blind luck. Chetwynd-Pitt disappears around a deep bend up ahead, fifteen seconds before I hit it, misjudging its sharpness and whipping through the overhanging claws of fir trees before wrenching myself back onto the piste. Here come the slalomlike snake-curves: I watch Chetwynd-Pitt weaving in and out of eyeshot; try to follow his angles of incidence; duck on reflex as crows bowl up the tunnel of branches. Suddenly out of the woods, I shoot onto the slower strip between a sheer flank of rock and a neck-breaking drop. Yellow diamond signs with skulls and crossbones warn you away from the edge. My rival slows down a little and glances back … He’s stick-man-distant now, passing the Lonesome Pine on its finger of rock—the halfway point. Four or five minutes in now, surely. I straighten up to rest my stomach muscles and glimpse the town in its hollow below—see the Christmas-tree lights, in the plaza? My bastard goggles are starting to fog up, even though the salesgirl swore they wouldn’t. Chetwynd-Pitt is already entering the lower woods, so I thrust with my poles as far as the Lonesome Pine, then settle back into my racing crouch. Soon I’m up to forty-five, fifty kph again, and I should ease off but the wind in my ears will speak if I dare to go faster, and the lower woods smother me and the tunnel’s a blur and it’s fifty-five, sixty, and I’m flying over a ridge with a savage dip beyond, and the ground’s fallen away … And I soar like a stoner archangel … This freedom is eternal for as long as it lasts … Why are my feet level with my chin?

  MY RIGHT FOOT hits the ground first, but my left one’s gone AWOL, and I’m cartwheeling, my body mapped by local explosions of pain—ankle, knee, elbow—shit, my left ski’s gone, whipped off, vamoosed—ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky, a faceful of gravelly snow; dice in a tumbler; apples in a tumble dryer; a grunt, a groan, a plea, a shiiiiiiiiit … Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain—

  OUCH. WRIST, SHIN, rib, butt, ankle, earlobe … Sore, walloped, sure … but unless I’m too doped on natural painkillers to notice, nothing’s broken. Flat on my back in a crash-mat of snow, pine needles, and mossy, stalky mulch. I sit up. My spine still works. That’s always useful. My watch is still working, and it’s 16:10, just as it should be. Tiny silver needles of birdsong. Can I stand? I have an ache instead of a right buttock; and my coccyx feels staved in by a geologist’s hammer … But, yes, I can stand, which makes this one of my luckiest escapes. I lift my goggles, brush the snow off my jacket, unclip the ski I still have and use it as a staff to hobble uphill, searching for its partner. One minute, two minutes, still no joy. Chetwynd-Pitt will be giving the fluffy snowman a victory punch down in the village just about now. I backtrack, searching through the undergrowth along the side of the piste. There’s no dishonor in taking a fall on a black run—it’s not as if I’m a professional or a ski instructor—but returning to chez Chetwynd-Pitt forty minutes after Fitzsimmons and Quinn with one ski missing would be, frankly, crap.

  Here comes a whooshing sound—another skier—and I stand well back. It’s the French girl from the viewing platform—who else wears mint green this season? She takes the rise as gracefully as I was elephantine, lands like a pro, sees me, takes in what’s happened, straightens up, and stops a few meters away on the far side of the piste. She bends down to retrieve what turns out to be my ski and brings it over to me. I muster my mediocre French: “Merci … Je ne cherchais pas du bon côté.”

  “Rien de cassé?”

  I think she’s asking if I’ve broken anything. “Non. À part ma fierté, mais bon, ça 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.”

  “Ça ne rate jamais: chaque année, il y a toujours un couillon qu’on vient ramasser à la petite cuillère sur cette piste. Il restera toute sa vie en fauteuil roulant, tout ça 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 Nevermind thumping 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, if you live in a fantasy novel. Here, in the real world, souls stay inside the body. The paranormal is always, always a hoax.

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

  So what do I do about Immaculée 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. “Hug
o?” 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-Agnès. Günter, 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 Günter’s two saisonniers—one skinny girl in Hamlet black, the other plumper, frillier, and blonder—are busy with orders. Back in the 1970s Günter 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—Günter’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 planned it. 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? She was all, ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s mine.’ She said she’s feeling conflicted, tied-down, and—”