The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  What grade, I wonder, would me and Holly get, on the relationship scorecard of the Reverend Audrey Withers? C+? D–?

  “When’s the bit where Uncle Peter kisses her?” asks a kid.

  The congregation laughs. “Great idea.” The Reverend Audrey Withers looks like a woman who enjoys her job. “Why not just skip to the good bit?”

  NASSER DROVE THE half-Corolla half–Fiat 5. Aziz occupied the passenger seat with his camera under a blanket at his feet, and I sat in the back behind a screen of dry cleaning, ready to burrow into the footwell under sheets and boxes of infant formula. Baghdad’s low-rise western suburbs stretched out along the four-lane highway to Fallujah. After a mile or two the apartment blocks gave way to middle-class streets from the money-slick 1970s: whitewashed, flat-roofed houses surrounded by high walls and steel gates. Then we passed a few miles of two-story cinder-block buildings, with shops or workshops below and meager living quarters above. These acquired the visual repetition of a cheap cartoon. We passed several petrol stations, whose queues went on for many hundreds of vehicles. The drivers would be waiting there all day. Even in April, the sun was more of a glaring sky zone than the bright disk of northern latitudes. Unemployed men of all ages stood around in dishdashas, smoking and talking. Women in hijabs or full-length burkas walked in small groups, carrying plastic bags of vegetables: It struck me that Iraq was looking more Iranian by the week. Kids Aoife’s age played at Insurgents Versus Americans. Nasser fed a cassette into the player, and Arabic music blammed out through the tinny speakers. A woman sang scales I’m not hardwired for, and the song must have been a classic because both Nasser and Aziz got to work on the backing vocals. During an instrumental break, I asked Nasser—half shouting above the din of the car and the music—what the song was about. “A girl,” my fixer half-shouted back. “Man she love go to Iran to fight the war, but he never come back. She very beautiful, so other men say, ‘Hey, honey, I got money, I got big house, I got wasta, you marry me?’ But the girl she say, ‘No, I wait one thousand years for my soldier.’ Sure, this song is very … How you say?—like sugar too much? I forget word—santi-mantle?”

  “Sentimental.”

  “Veeery sentimental, and my wife say, the girl of this song, she is crazy! If she don’t marry, what happen to her? Dead soldiers can’t send money! She gonna starve! Only a man write so stupid song, my wife say. But I say, ‘Ah …’ ” Nasser made a dismissive motion with his hand. “This song touch me.” He thumped his chest. “Love is more strong than the death.” He turned around. “You know?”

  IVANO DEL PIO at the Sydney Morning Herald had recommended Nasser as a fixer when he left Baghdad, and he was one of the best I’ve ever employed. Preinvasion, Nasser had worked in broadcasting and had reached management level, which meant he’d had to join the Ba’ath Party. He had a decent house and could support his wife and three children, even in a society starved by U.S. and UN sanctions. Postinvasion, Nasser scraped a living from working for foreign press. Under Saddam’s regime the official fixers were a shifty crew, paid to feed you Saddam’s line and inform the Mukhabarat about any ordinary Iraqis foolish enough to try to tell you anything true about life under the dictator. Nasser, however, had a journalist’s nose and eye, and on some of my best stories for Spyglass I insisted he received credit and pay as co-writer. He never used his real name, however, in case an enemy denounced him to any of a dozen insurgency groups as a collaborator. Aziz the photographer was an ex-colleague of Nasser’s, but his English was as limited as my Arabic so I didn’t know him as closely as I did my fixer. He knew his trade, though, and was cautious, crafty, and brave in pursuit of a good shot. Photography is a dangerous hobby in Iraq; the police assume that you’re recceing for a suicide mission.

  We passed crumbling walls and decrepit shops.

  “You break it,” Colin Powell had warned Bush, in what’s become known as the Pottery Barn Anecdote, “you’ll own it …”

  Bedraggled families sifted giant tumuli of rubbish.

  “You’ll be the proud owner of twenty-five million people …”

  Lines of streetlamps, most leaning over, some fallen.

  “All their hopes, aspirations, problems. You’ll own it all.”

  We passed a buckled crash barrier by a small crater: the site of an IED attack. We hit an official checkpoint manned by the Iraqi police that cost us forty minutes. Official police shouldn’t hassle a foreign journalist but we were all relieved that they didn’t seem to notice my foreignness. Nasser’s car is in a bad way even by Iraqi standards, but its shiteness acts as professional camouflage. What self-respecting journo, agent, or jihadist would travel in such a pile of crap?

  The further west we drove, the riskier our venture became. Nasser’s local knowledge grew scantier, and both the Abu Ghraib Highway and the N10 would be littered with dozens of roadside IEDs. The obvious targets for these were the U.S. military convoys, but knowing that any dead dog or cardboard box or bin-bag of crap might conceal enough explosives to roast a Humvee put you on permanent edge. Then there was the danger of kidnapping. My darkish complexion, beard, brown eyes, and local attire let me pass as a pale Iraqi at first glance, but my basic Arabic betrays me as a foreigner within a few words. I had my fake Bosnian passport to explain my poor language skills while claiming a Muslim affinity, but subterfuge is a high-risk game, and if a mob could be calmly reasoned with, it wouldn’t be a mob. Bosnians aren’t obvious kidnappees for ransom bounty, but neither were Japanese NGO workers until a fortnight ago. If my press pass was found, my value would go up; I’d be sold as a spy to an Al Qaeda affiliate, and they’re less interested in money than in a recorded “confession” and a beheading for the webcam. Midway between Baghdad and Fallujah we reached the town of Abu Ghraib, famous for decaying factories, palm dates, and a vast prison complex where Saddam’s enemies, or potential enemies, used to be tortured in submedieval conditions. Big Mac hears rumors that not a lot has changed under the CPA. We passed its high, kilometer-long fortified wall on the left and Nasser translated a slogan daubed on a bombed-out building facing it: We will knock on the gates of Heaven with American skulls. That was a killer opening or closing line for an article. I jotted it down in my notebook.

  In front of a mosque, Nasser pulled over to give plenty of space to a U.S. convoy joining the highway. Aziz took a few pictures from inside the car, but didn’t dare get out; to a jumpy gunner, a telephoto lens looks like an RPG launcher. I counted twenty-five vehicles in the Fallujah-bound convoy, and wondered if Big Mac was sweating his butt off in any of the Humvees. Then Aziz said something in Arabic and Nasser told me, “Ed, trouble!” Half a dozen men were walking towards us from a row of low buildings alongside the mosque.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Nasser turned the ignition.

  Nothing.

  Nasser turned the ignition.

  Nothing.

  Three seconds to decide whether to bluff it, or hide …

  I slid down under the milk cartons, a few seconds before a man exchanged greetings with Nasser through the driver’s window. The man asked us where we were going. Nasser said he and his cousin were taking supplies to Fallujah. Then the man asked Nasser, “Are you a Sunni or a Shi’a?”

  A dangerous question; preinvasion, I seldom heard it.

  Nasser replied, “While Fallujah burns, we are all Iraqis.”

  Like I said, Nasser’s good. The voice asked for a cigarette.

  After another pause, the man asked what supplies we had.

  “Baby milk,” said Aziz. “For the hospitals.” Nasser said how his imam told them the American pigs were throwing baby milk into the sewers, to stop Iraqi babies growing up to become jihadists.

  “We have hungry babies here, too,” said the man.

  Neither Aziz nor Nasser had an answer to hand.

  “I said,” repeated the man, “we have hungry babies too.”

  If the car was unloaded, I’d be found, a foreigner, within spitting distance of Iraq’s
Ground Zero of Incarceration. By hiding, I’d already put my Bosnian Muslim journalist story beyond use. Nasser sounded cheerful. They’d be happy to donate a box of baby powder to the babies of Abu Ghraib. Then, innocently, he asked for a favor in return. His damn car wouldn’t start, and he needed a push.

  I couldn’t catch the man’s reply. When the Corolla’s door opened, I had no way of knowing if Nasser was being ordered out at gunpoint, or if every box of baby formula was about to be removed. The seat was flipped forward and the box covering my face was lifted away …

  … I saw a hairy wrist with a Chinese Rolex and the underside of the box covering my face. I waited for a shout. Then the driver’s seat flopped back, and no more boxes were taken. I heard laughter, then the car sagged under Nasser’s weight and goodbyes called out. Soon after, I felt the car being pushed along, heard the tires crunch gravel, and felt the car jolt before the engine started.

  Aziz half gasped: “I thinked we dead men.”

  I was lying under the boxes twisted and breathless.

  Thinking, When I get back home, I’ll never leave again.

  Thinking, When I get back home, I’ll never feel this alive.

  “HOKEY-DOKEY, WE’LL START with the two families,” says the beagle-faced photographer in his Hawaiian shirt. It’s sunny on the church steps, and all the leaves are fresh and lime-green. They’d be microwaved brown by a single afternoon in Mesopotamia, where flora has to equip itself with armor and thorns to survive. “Webbers on the left,” says the photographer, “and Sykeses on the right, if you will.” Pauline Webber gets her family into position with martial efficiency, while the Sykeses drift into place unhurriedly. Holly looks around for Aoife, who’s scooping up drifts of confetti for a confetti fight. “Picture time, Aoife.” Aoife snuggles against Holly and neither think to look for me. So I stay where I am, out of shot. Like all belongers, the Sykeses and Webbers don’t notice how easily they slip into groups, lines, ranks, gangs. But we nonbelongers know what we are, all right. “Squeeze in both ends, if you will,” says the photographer.

  “Wakey-wakey, Ed.” Kath Sykes beckons me. “You’re in on this.”

  The devil suggests I answer, “Holly seems to disagree,” but I step between Kath and Ruth. Holly, below, doesn’t turn around, but Aoife, with flowers in her hair, looks back and up. “Daddy, did you see me take up the ring tray?”

  “I’ve never seen a ring tray held so skillfully, Aoife.”

  “Daddy, flattery will get you anywhere,” and everyone who hears laughs, so much to Aoife’s delight that she repeats the phrase.

  Once I hoped that, by not getting married, me and Holly might avoid the scenes that Mum and Dad played out before Dad got sent down for his twelve years. True, me and Holly don’t shout and throw stuff, but we sort of do, invisibly.

  “Hokey-dokey,” says the photographer. “All aboard?”

  “Where’s Great-aunt Eilísh?” asks Amanda, Brendan’s eldest.

  “Great-great-aunt Eilísh to you, technically,” notes Brendan.

  “Right, Dad, whatever.” Amanda’s sixteen.

  “We’re on rather a tight schedule,” declares Pauline Webber.

  “She was talking to Audrey the vicar …” Amanda scoots off.

  The photographer straightens up, his smile drooping. I tell my sort-of sister-in-law, “Beautiful ceremony, Sharon.”

  “Cheers, Ed.” Sharon smiles. “Lucky with the weather, too.”

  “Blue skies and sunshine all the way from here on in.”

  I shake Peter’s hand. “So, Pete, how does it feel to be Mr. Sykes?”

  Peter Webber smiles at what he imagines is my mistake. “Er, you mean Mr. Webber, Ed. Sharon’s now Mrs. Webber.”

  My expression should tell him, You just married a Sykes, matey, but he’s too in love to read it. He’ll learn. Just like I did.

  Holly’s acting like I’m not there. Getting some practice in.

  “Ancient lady coming through, make way, make way,” says Great-aunt Eilísh, in her freewheeling Cork accent, escorted by Amanda. “Audrey—the vicar—is off to Tanzania next week and she was asking for a few pointers. Kath, might I just slip in here …” So I step forward and find myself next to Holly after all, wishing I could just slip my hand into hers without it being such a big bloody deal. But it is. I don’t.

  “All present and correct,” Pauline Webber tells the photographer. “At last.”

  A lithe roller-blader glides past the church. He looks so free.

  “Hokey-dokey,” says the photographer, “on the count of three I’d like a big cheesey ‘Cheeeeeeeeese!’ Yes? A-one, a-two, and …”

  THROUGH A HOLE blasted in a dry block wall, Aziz snapped a family hurrying across the wasteland north of the doctors’ compound. An Arabic Grapes of Wrath, on foot. I told him it could be a cover shot, if it came out well. “I bring to your hotel tomorrow, after I develop. If on cover,” Aziz rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers in the universal symbol, “Miss Olive, she pay more?”

  “If it’s used, yeah,” I said. “But you ought to—”

  A helicopter hammered by very low, blasting up sand and grit, and Aziz and I both ducked. A Cobra gunship? Kids appeared in the road from the next-door compound, shouting and pointing in the ballooning clouds, and watched it disappear. One boy threw a symbolic stone after it. A woman in hijab anxiously called the children in, shot us a hostile glance, and shut the gate. We were about as close as it was possible to get to Fallujah, a golf shot shy of the “Cloverleaf” intersection, where the Abu Ghraib highway knots into Highway 10. South, through the baked and wavery air, was the bad-tempered holding pen of vehicles, pooling at the verges of the outer checkpoint. Large numbers of marines and a couple of Bradleys—mini-tanks, basically—blocked the road. The second checkpoint was just beyond the Cloverleaf, flanked by a bulldozed-up berm, a ridge of dirt and rubble topped with razor wire. Nobody was allowed into Fallujah today, and only women and children were allowed out.

  The rumors about this makeshift clinic for refugees set up by a couple of Iraqi doctors turned out to be true. Nasser was inside recording interviews, thanks to his Al Jazeera press accreditation, which was every bit as authentic as my Bosnian passport. Aziz and I had joined him for a while; at least a hundred patients were being attended to by two doctors and two nurses with little more in the way of equipment than donated first aid boxes. “Beds” were blankets on the floor of what had been a spacious living room, and the main operating table had until recently been a pool table. There was no anesthetic. Most patients were in various degrees of pain, a few in agony, and some dying. The mortuary was an inner room, where six unclaimed bodies lay. The flies and the smell were intolerable; some guys were digging graves in the garden. The nurses promised to distribute the infant formula, but the doctors asked us for painkillers and bandages.

  Aziz took a few photographs while Nasser conducted interviews. I’d been introduced as Nasser’s Bosnian cousin, also working for Al Jazeera, but anti-foreign sentiment was acute so Aziz and I soon left to wait by the car and let Nasser work unimpeded. We sat on a broken curb and each drank a bottle of water. Even in spring Mesopotamia is so hot you can drink all day and never need to piss. From Fallujah, just a kilometer to the west, we heard gunfire and, every few minutes, big explosions. The air tasted of burning tires.

  Aziz stowed his camera in the car. He returned with cigarettes and offered me one, but I was still on the wagon. “Bush, I understand,” said Aziz, as he lit his. “Bush father, he hate Saddam, then Twin Towers, so Bush want revenge. America need many oil, Iraq has oil, so Bush get oil. Friends of Bush get money also, Halliburton, supply, guns, much money. Bad reason, but I understand. But why your country, Ed? What Britain want here? Britain spend many many dollars here, Britain lose hundreds men here—for why, Ed? I not understand. Long ago people say, ‘Britain good, Britain gentleman.’ Now people say, ‘Britain is whore of America.’ Why? I want understand.”

  I sifted through possible answer
s for Aziz. Did Tony Blair really believe that Saddam Hussein possessed missiles capable of destroying London in forty-five minutes? Did he really believe in the Neocon fantasia about planting a liberal democracy in the Middle East and watching it spread? I could only shrug. “Who knows?”

  “Allah know,” said Aziz. “Blair know. Blair wife know.”

  I’d give a year of my life to see inside the prime minister’s head. Three, maybe. He’s an intelligent man. You can tell by his gymnastic evasions in interviews. Does he not think, when he’s looking at himself in the mirror, Oh, fuck, Tony, Iraq has gone well and truly tits-up—why oh why oh why did you ever listen to George?

  A drone circled above us. It would be armed. I thought of its operator, picturing a crewcut nineteen-year-old called Ryan at a base in Dallas, sucking an ice-cold Frappuccino through a straw. He could open fire on the clinic, kill everyone in and near it, and never smell the cooked meat. To Ryan, we’d be pixellated thermal images on a screen, writhing about a bit, turning from yellow to red to blue.

  The drone flew off, and a white pickup truck hurtled up the dirt-track from the checkpoint area. It skidded to a halt by the clinic gate and the driver—head wrapped in a bloodstained kaffiyeh—jumped out and ran around to the passenger door. Aziz and I walked over to help. The driver, a guy about my age, pulled out a bundle wrapped in a sheet. He tried to carry it but he tripped over a cinder block, cushioning the bundle against his body as he fell. As we helped him up I saw he was holding a boy. The kid was unconscious, a sickly color, only five or six, and had blood oozing from his mouth. The man fired out a frantic volley of Arabic—I only knew the word for “doctor”—and Aziz led him into the clinic compound. I followed. Inside what had been a reception room a woman felt for a pulse on the boy’s arm, said nothing, and called to one of the doctors, who shouted something back from the far corner. As my eyes adjusted to the shade inside the house I saw Nasser speaking with a hollow-faced old guy in a wife-beater’s vest, fanning himself. Then a soft-spoken man, who, even here, smelt of aftershave, was in my face, asking a complex question in dialect—or a question that turned into a threat—containing the words “Bosnia,” “America,” and “kill.” He finished by slashing his throat with his finger. I half nodded, half shook my head, hoping to imply that I’d understood but things were too complicated for me to give him a straightforward answer. Then I walked off. Foolishly, I looked back; the guy was still watching. Aziz followed me out, and around to the Corolla. He told me, “He militia. He test you.”