The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  THE SKI LIFT guy clicks our rail into place, and I resist a joke about being swept off my feet as Holly and I are swept off our feet. December 30 has lost its earlier clarity and the summit of the Palanche de la Cretta is hidden in cloud. I follow the ski lift cable from pylon to pylon up the mountainside. The ravine opens up below us and, as I’m mugged by vertigo and grip the bar, my testicles run and hide next to my liver. Forcing myself to look down at the distant ground, I wonder about Penhaligon’s final seconds. Regret? Relief? Blank terror? Or did his head suddenly fill with “Babooshka” by Kate Bush? Two crows fly beneath our feet. They mate for life, my cousin Jason once told me. I ask Holly, “Do you ever have flying dreams?”

  Holly looks dead ahead. Her goggles hide her eyes. “No.”

  We’ve cleared the ravine again and pass sedately over a wide swath of the piste we’ll be skiing down later. Skiers curve, speed, and amble downhill to Chemeville station.

  “Conditions look better after last night’s snow,” I say.

  “Yeah. This mist’s getting thicker by the minute, though.”

  That is true; the mountain peak is blurry and gray now. “Do you work at Sainte-Agnès every winter?”

  “What is this? A job interview?”

  “No, but my telepathy’s a bit rusty.”

  Holly explains: “I used to work at Méribel over in the French Alps for a guy who knew Günter from his tennis days. When Günter needed a discreet employee, I got offered a transfer, a pay hike, and a ski pass.”

  “Why ever would Günter need a discreet employee?”

  “Not a clue—and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.”

  I think of Madam Constantin. “You’re not wrong.”

  Empty ski chairs migrate from the mist ahead. Behind us, Chemeville is fading from view, and nobody’s following us up. “Wouldn’t it be freaky,” I think aloud, “if we saw the dead in the chairs opposite?”

  Holly gives me a weird look. “Not dead as in undead, with bits dropping off,” I hear myself trying to explain. “Dead as in your own dead. People you knew, who mattered to you. Dogs, even.” Or Cornishmen.

  The steel-tube-and-plastic chair squeaks. Holly’s chosen to ignore my frankly bizarre question, and to my surprise asks this: “Are you from one of those army-officer families?”

  “God, no. My dad’s an accountant and Mum works at Richmond Theatre. Why do you ask?”

  “ ’Cause you’re reading a book called The Art of War.”

  “Oh, that. I’m reading Sun Tzu because it’s three thousand years old, and every CIA agent since Vietnam has studied it. Do you read?”

  “My sister’s the big reader, really, and sends me books.”

  “How often do you go back to England?”

  “Not so often.” She fiddles with a Velcro glove strap. “I’m not one of those people who’ll spill their guts in the first ten minutes. Okay?”

  “Okay. Don’t worry, that just means you’re sane.”

  “I know I’m sane, and I wasn’t worried.”

  Awkward silence. Something makes me look over my shoulder; five ski chairs behind sits a solo passenger in a silver parka with a black hood. He sits with his arms folded, his skis making a casual X. I look ahead again, and try to think of something intelligent to say, but I seem to have left all my witty insights at the ski-lift station below.

  AT THE PALANCHE de la Cretta station, Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers. The ski-lift guy greets Holly in French, and I slope off out of earshot. I find I’m waiting for the skier in the silver parka to appear from the fast-flowing mist; I count a twenty-second gap between each ski chair, so he’ll be here in a couple of minutes, at most. Odd thing is, he never arrives. With mild but rising alarm, I watch the fifth, sixth, seventh chairs after us arrive without a passenger … By the tenth, I’m worried—not so much that he’s fallen off the ski chair, but that he wasn’t there in the first place. The Yeti and Madam Constantin have shaken my faith in my own senses, and I don’t like it. Finally a pair of jolly bear-sized Americans appear, thumping to earth with gusts of laughter and needing the ski-lift guy’s help. I tell myself the skier behind us was a false memory. Or I dreamt him. Holly joins me at the lip of the run, marked by flags disappearing into cloud. In a perfect world, she’ll say, Look, why don’t we ski down together? “Okay,” she says, “this is where I say goodbye. Take care, stay between the poles, and no heroics.”

  “Will do. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride up.”

  She shrugs. “You must be disappointed.”

  I lift my goggles so she can see my eyes, even if she won’t show me hers. “No. Not in the least. Thank you.” I’m wondering if she’d tell me her surname if I asked. I don’t even know that.

  She looks downhill. “I must seem unfriendly.”

  “Only guarded. Which is fair enough.”

  “Sykes,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Holly Sykes, if you were wondering.”

  “It … suits you.”

  Her goggles hide her face but I’m guessing she’s puzzled.

  “I don’t quite know what I meant by that,” I admit.

  She pushes off and is swallowed by the whiteness.

  THE PALANCHE DE la Cretta’s middle flank isn’t a notorious descent, but stray more than a hundred meters off-piste to the right and you’ll need near-vertical skiing skills or a parachute, and the fog’s so dense that I take my own sweet time and stop every couple of minutes to wipe my goggles. About fifteen minutes down, a boulder shaped like a melting gnome rears from the freezing fog by the edge of the piste. I huddle in its leeward side to smoke a cigarette. It’s quiet. Very quiet. I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.

  A group of skiers weave past the granite gnome, like a school of fluorescent fish. None notices me. I drop my cigarette butt and follow in their wake. The jolly Texans either decided they’d bitten off more than they could chew and went back down on the ski lift, or they’re following at an even more cautious pace than mine. No skier in a silver parka, either. Soon the fog thins, crags, ridges, and contours sketch and shade themselves in, and by the time I reach Chemeville station I’m under the cloud rafters again. I line my innards with a hot chocolate, then take the gentler blue piste down to La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès.

  “WELL WELL WELL, the talented Mr. Lamb.” Chetwynd-Pitt’s making garlic bread in the kitchen, or trying to. It’s gone five o’clock but he’s still in his dressing gown. A cigar is balanced across a wine glass and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice is on the CD player. “Olly and Fitz went off in search of you two or three hours ago.”

  “It’s a big old massif. Needles, haystacks, and all that.”

  “And where did your Alpine foray take you aujourd’hui?”

  “Up to Palanche de la Cretta, then cross-country. No more nasty black pistes for me. How’s your hangover?”

  “How was Stalingrad in 1943? The hair of the dog: ouzo on ice.” He jiggles a small glass of milky liquid and knocks back half.

  “Ouzo always reminds me of sperm.” I wish I had a camera as Chetwynd-Pitt swallows the stuff. “Tactless. Sorry.”

  He glares at me, puffs on his cigar, and returns to chopping garlic. I fish in a drawer. “Try this revolutionary device: the ‘garlic-crusher.’ ”

  Now Chetwynd-Pitt glares at the implement. “The housekeeper must have bought it before we arrived.”

  I used it here last year, but never mind. I wash my hands and turn on the oven, which Chetwynd-Pitt had not. “C’mon, make way.” I squeeze the ga
rlicky pulp into the butter.

  Grumpy but glad, Chetwynd-Pitt parks his arse on the counter. “I suppose it’s compensation for fleecing me at pool.”

  “You’ll get your revenge.” Pepper, parsley, stir with a fork.

  “I’ve been thinking about why he did it.”

  “I gather we’re talking about Jonny Penhaligon?”

  “There’s more to this than meets the eye, Lamb.”

  My fork stops: His gaze is … accusing? A code of omertà operates at Toad’s, but no code can be 100 percent secure. “Go on.” Absurdly, I find myself scanning the kitchen for a murder weapon. “I’m all ears.”

  “Jonny Penhaligon was a victim of privilege.”

  “Okay.” My fork’s stirring again. “Elaborate.”

  “A pleb is someone who thinks privilege is about living off the fat of the land and getting chambermaids to nosh you. Truth is, blue blood’s a serious curse in this day and age. First off, the great unwashed laugh at you for having too many syllables in your name and blame you, personally, for class inequality, the deforestation of the Amazon, and the price of beer going up. The second curse is marriage: How can I know if it’s me my future wife loves—as opposed to my eleven hundred acres of Buckinghamshire and the title Lady Chetwynd-Pitt? Third, my future is shackled to estate management. Now, if you want to be a broker earning gazillions or an Antarctic archaeologist or a zero-gravity vibraphonist, it’s ‘If you’re happy we’re happy, Hugo.’ Me, I’ve tenants to keep afloat, charities to sponsor, and a seat in the House of Lords to fill one day.”

  I fork garlic butter into grooves in the bread. “My heart bleeds. You’re, what, sixty-third in line to the throne?”

  “Sixty-fourth, now whatsisname’s born. But I’m serious, Hugo, and I haven’t finished: The fourth curse is the county hunt. I bloody hate beagles, and horses are moody quad-bikes that piss on your boot and cost thousands in vets’ fees. And the fifth curse is the kicker: the dread that you’ll be the one who loses it all. Start out in life as a social nobody, like you and Olly—no offense—and the only direction you can go is up. Start off with your name in the Domesday Book, like me and Jonny, and the only direction is down the sodding crapper. It’s like an intergenerational pass-the-parcel with bankruptcy instead of a tube of Rolos, and whoever’s alive when the money dries up gets to be the Chetwynd-Pitt who has to learn how to assemble flat-pack furniture from Argos.”

  I wrap the garlic bread in foil. “And you reckon this posy of curses was what made Jonny drive off a cliff?”

  “That,” says Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt, “and the fact he had nobody to call in his darkest hour. Nobody to trust.”

  I put the tray into the oven and crank up the heat.

  December 31

  I CICLES ARE DRIPPING all down the alley, catching the slanted sun. There’s a barstool propping open the door of Le Croc, and inside Holly is hoovering, attired in baggy army trousers, a white T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap, which doubles as a ponytail scrunchie. A droplet from an icicle above finds the gap between my coat and my neck and sizzles between my shoulder blades. Holly senses me and turns. As the Hoover’s groan dies, I say, “Knock-knock.”

  She recognizes me. “We’re not open. Come back in nine hours.”

  “You say, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a knock-knock joke.”

  “I refuse even to open the door, Hugo Lamb.”

  “But it’s already a bit open. And look,” I hold up the paper bags from the patisserie, “breakfast. Surely Günter has to let you eat?”

  “Some of us had breakfast two hours ago, Poshboy.”

  “If you go to Richmond Boys College you get ridiculed for the crime of not being posh enough. How about a midmorning snackette, then?”

  “Le Croc doesn’t clean itself.”

  “Don’t Günter and your colleague ever help?”

  “Günter’s the owner, Monique’s hired just as bar staff. They’ll be wrapped up in each other until after lunch. Literally, as it happens: Günter left his third wife a few weeks ago. So the privilege of sloshing out the sty falls to the manager.”

  I look around. “Where’s the manager?”

  “You’re looking at her, y’eejit. Me.”

  “Oh. Then if Poshboy does the men’s lavvy, will you take a twenty-minute break?”

  Holly hesitates. A part of her wants to say yes. “See that long thing? It’s called a mop. You hold the pointy end.”

  “TOLD YOU IT was a sty.” Like a time traveler operating her machine, Holly pulls the handles and swivels the valves of the chrome coffeemaker. It hisses, belches, and gurgles.

  I wash my hands and take a couple of barstools off a table. “That was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done. Men are pigs. They wipe their arses, then miss the toilet bowl, and just leave the scrunched-up shitty tissue where it fell. And the splattered puke in the last cubicle—nice. Vomit sets if it’s just left there. Like Polyfilla.”

  “Switch your nose off. Breathe with your mouth.” She brings over a cappuccino. “And someone had to clean every toilet you’ve ever used. If your dad had run a pub instead of a bank, like mine did, it might’ve been you. Thought for the Day.”

  I take out an almond croissant and slide the other bags to Holly. “Why don’t you do the cleaning the night before?”

  Holly unravels the edge of an apricot pastry. “Günter’s regulars don’t piss off till three in the morning, if I’m lucky. You try facing the cleaning at that time after nine hours’ worth of serving drinks.”

  I concede the point. “Well, the bar’s looking battle-ready now.”

  “Sort of. I’ll clean the taps later, then restock.”

  “There was I, thinking bars just ran themselves.”

  She lights a cigarette. “I’d be out of a job if they did.”

  “Do you see yourself in, uh, hospitality long-term?”

  Holly’s frown is a warning. “What’s it to you?”

  “I just … Dunno. You seem capable of doing anything.”

  Her frown is both wary and weary. She taps ash from her cigarette. “The schools the lower orders go to don’t exactly encourage you to think that way. Hairdressing courses or garage apprenticeships were more the thing.”

  “You can’t blame a crap school forever, though.”

  She taps her cigarette. “You’re clever, obviously. But there are some areas where you really don’t know shit, Mr. Lamb.”

  I nod and sip my coffee. “Your French teacher was brilliant.”

  “My French teacher was nonexistent. I picked it up on the job. Survival. Fending off Frenchmen.”

  I dig a bit of almond from my teeth. “So where’s the pub?”

  “What pub?”

  “The one your dad works in.”

  “Owns. Co-owns, in fact, with my mam. It’s the Captain Marlow, by the Thames at Gravesend.”

  “Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”

  “ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”

  “It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”

  She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old—apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”

  My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”

  “What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”

  “You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”

  Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get annoyed when you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”

  “I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way
?”

  “You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”

  “Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”

  Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”

  I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”

  “ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”

  • • •

  THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnès, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stunning progress, and I almost fail to recognize Olly Quinn in the phone box by the bank. He’s looking agitated. If he’s using a phone box instead of Chetwynd-Pitt’s phone, he doesn’t want to be overheard. Would I be fully human if curiosity didn’t get the better of me occasionally? I hide behind the solid wall of the booth where Olly can’t see me. Thanks to a bad line and his angst, Olly’s voice is loud and every punched-out sentence is pretty clear. “You did, Ness. You did! You said you loved me too! You said—”

  Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.

  “Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some—some mind-fucking experiment?”

  Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.

  “No no no, I’m not getting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what you said—I said the phone line’s shit … What’s that? You thought you meant it?”