The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “Did I pass the test?”

  Aziz didn’t answer. “I bring Nasser. If man come, hide. If men with guns come … Goodbye, Ed.” Aziz hurried back to the compound. The open landscape was wasteland, pretty much devoid of cover. Unlike my previous brush with capture outside the mosque, I had time to think. I thought of Aoife in Mrs. Vaz’s classroom at her Stoke Newington primary school, singing “Over the Rainbow.” I thought of Holly at the homeless shelter off Trafalgar Square, helping some runaway kid make sense of a social-security form.

  But the figure who stepped out of the compound, maybe twenty paces away, was neither Aziz nor Nasser nor an AK47-wielding Islamist. It was the driver of the pickup truck, the father of the boy. He stared past his car, towards Fallujah, where helicopters thucker-thucker-thuckered over a quarter of a million humans.

  Then he collapsed and sobbed in the dirt.

  “COP A LOAD o’ this!” Dave Sykes comes into the Gents at the Maritime Hotel as I’m washing my hands, thinking how precious water is in Iraq. The lounge band in the banquet hall are doing a jazzy rendition of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red.” Dave gazes around the echoey space. “You could fit a crazy-golf course in here.”

  “Classy, as well,” I say. “Those tiles are real marble.”

  “A classy khazi for the perfect Mafia hit. You could have five machine-gunners leaping out of the cubicles.”

  “Though maybe not on your daughter’s wedding day.”

  “Nah, maybe not.” Dave walks over to the urinal and unzips his fly. “Remember the bogs in the Captain Marlow?”

  “Fondly. That sounds weird. I remember the graffiti. Not that I ever contributed, of course.”

  “The smuttiest graffiti in Gravesend, we had at the Captain Marlow. Kath used to make me paint over it, but a fortnight later it’d be back.”

  The journo within asks, “Do you miss life as a landlord?”

  “Bits and pieces, sure. The craic. Some of the regulars. Can’t say I miss the hours, or the fights. Or the taxes and the paperwork. But the old place was home for forty years, so it’d be strange if I didn’t, y’know, have memories wrapped up in it. The kids grew up there. I can’t go back. I couldn’t bear to see it. ‘The Purple Turtle,’ f’Chrissakes! Yuppies on their poserphones. Upstairs all converted into ‘executive apartments.’ Do you go back to Gravesend ever?”

  “Not since Mum died, no. Not once.”

  Dave zips up his trousers and walks over, placing one foot in front of the other, like an old man who could do with losing a few pounds. At the sink, he tentatively reaches out for the soap dispenser; a frothy blob blooms and drops onto his hand. “Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.” Dave holds his soapy hands under the warm tap and out spurts the water. “Enjoy Aoife while you can, Ed. One moment you’re carrying this lovable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she’s off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan.”

  “What I’m dreading is Aoife’s first boyfriend,” I say.

  Dave shakes the water from his hands. “Oh, you’ll be fine.”

  Me and my big mouth might’ve just reminded Dave of Vinny Costello and the prelude to Jacko’s disappearance, so I grope for a topic changer: “Pete seems like a decent enough bloke, anyway.”

  “Reckon so. Mind you, Sharon always was choosy.”

  I find myself searching Dave’s reflection in the mirror for any signs of an unspoken “unlike Holly,” but he’s on to me: “Don’t worry Ed, you’ll do. You’re one of the very few other blokes I’ve ever met who can really carry off a beard as well as I can.”

  “Thanks.” I hold my hands under the dryer and wonder, Would I actually do it? Leave Holly and Aoife for the sake of my job?

  I’m angry that Holly’s forcing me to choose.

  All I want is for Holly to share me with my job.

  Like I share Holly with her job. It seems fair.

  “It’ll come as a bit of a jolt, I guess,” says Dave, the intuitive ex-pub landlord, “being back in England full-time, like. Will it?”

  “Um … yeah, it will, all things being equal.”

  “Ah. So all things might not be equal?”

  “Spyglass offered me an extension to December.”

  Dave exhales through his teeth in sympathy.

  “Age-old dilemma. Duty versus family. Can’t advise you, Ed, but for what it’s worth, I’ve met a fair few fellers down the years just after they’ve been told by a doctor that they’re going to die. Stands to reason—if a quack ever tells me I’ve only got X weeks to live, I’ll need a bar, a sympathetic ear, and a stiff drink, too. You won’t be surprised when I tell you that not a one of them fellers ever said, ‘Dave, if only I’d spent more time at work.’ ”

  “Maybe they were doing the wrong jobs,” I say, and regret straight away how flippant it sounds. Worse, I don’t get the chance to clarify what I meant because the door flies open and a trio of Holly’s Irish cousins burst in, laughing at a lost punch line: “Ed, Uncle Dave, here you are,” says Oisín, whose blood relationship to Holly I can never get my head around. “Aunt Kath dispatched us to hunt you both down and bring you back alive.”

  “Blimey O’Riley, what’ve I done now?”

  “Chillax, Uncle Dave. Time to cut the cake, is all.”

  AZIZ DROVE US back towards Baghdad so Nasser could tell me about the patients he’d interviewed at the clinic. With Aziz’s photos, we had the bones of a good Spyglass story. Before we reached Abu Ghraib, however, we hit a long tailback. Nasser hopped out at a roadside stall and returned with kebabs and two items of news: A fuel convoy had been attacked earlier and the main road back to Baghdad was part blocked by a thirty-foot crater, hence the holdup; and that an American helicopter had been brought down on farmland southeast of the prison complex. We decided to make a detour in search of the crash site. We chewed the chunks of stringy lamb—or possibly goat—and Aziz turned south at the mosque where we’d run into trouble earlier. Once the prison complex was behind us, we saw a reedy column of black smoke rising from behind a windbreak of tamarisk trees. A boy on a bicycle confirmed that, yes, the American helicopter, a Kiowa, had been brought down over there, Allah be praised. Boys growing up in occupied Iraq know about weaponry and military hardware just as I knew about fishing gear, motorbikes, and the Top 40 in the 1980s. The boy mimed a boom! and laughed. Some marines had removed the two dead Americans thirty minutes ago, he told Nasser, so now it was safe to go and see.

  A track led over an irrigation canal, through the tamarisks and into a field of weeds. The smoldering carcass of the crushed and blackened Kiowa lay on its side, with its tail section lying half the field away. “Ground-to-air missile,” speculated Nasser, “cut in middle. Like sword.” Maybe twenty men and boys were standing around. Farm buildings stood on the far side, and machinery lay neglected. Aziz parked in the corner and we got out and walked over. The late afternoon was filled with insect noises. Aziz took pictures as we approached. I thought of the pilots, and wondered what had spun through their heads as they careered to Earth. An old man in a red kaffiyeh asked Nasser if we were with a newspaper, and Nasser said, Yes, we worked for a Jordanian one. We were here to counter the lies of the Americans and their allies, Nasser said, and asked the man if he had seen the helicopter crash. The old man said, No, he knew nothing, he only heard an explosion. Some other men, maybe the Mahdi Army, drove off, but he had been too far away, and look—he pointed to his eyes—his cataracts were clouding over.

  Seeing too much in Iraq can get you killed.

  Suddenly we heard the rumble of army vehicles, and the crowd scattered, or tried to; we clustered into a group again as we realized both exits from the field were blocked by two convoys of four Humvees. Marines emerged from the vehicles in full body armor, pointing their M16s at us. A
disembodied roar filled the field: “Hands above your heads! Hands where I can see them! All of you on the fucking ground now or I swear, you gloating fucking Ali Baba pig-fuckers, I’ll put you in the ground!” No translation was provided, but we all got the idea.

  “HANDS HIGHER!” another marine yelled at a man in a mechanic’s oil-stained overalls, who said, “Mafee mushkila, mafee mushkila,” No problem, no problem, but the marine shouted, “Don’t contradict me! Don’t contradict me!” and booted the man in the stomach—all our guts jerked tight in sympathy—and he folded over, gasping and coughing. “Find out who owns this farm,” the marine ordered an interpreter, whose face was hidden in a sort of head-wrapping, like a ninja. The marine spoke into his headset, saying the area was secured while the interpreter asked the old man in the red kaffiyeh who owned the farm.

  I didn’t hear the answer because a black marine was standing over Aziz, saying, “Souvenirs, huh? This your handiwork, huh?” Fate sent a Chinook thundering out of the sun; it drowned my voice as the marine yanked Aziz’s camera off his neck with such force that the strap broke, and Aziz fell forward headfirst. Next thing I knew the marine was kneeling by Aziz with his handgun pressed against my photographer’s head.

  I shouted, “No—stop! He’s working for me,” but the din of the Chinook drowned me out, and suddenly I was flipped to the ground and an armored kneecap was pressing my windpipe into the dirt, too, and I thought, They won’t discover their mistake till I’m dead. Then, No, they won’t discover their mistake at all; I’ll be deposited in a shallow pit on the edge of Baghdad.

  “WHY AREN’T THEY grateful, Ed?”

  A cube of wedding cake is halfway to my mouth, but Pauline Webber has a penetrating voice, and now I’m being watched by four Webbers, six Sykeses, Aoife, and a vase of orange lilies. My problem is, I have no idea who or what she’s talking about, as I’ve spent the last few minutes mentally composing an email to the accounts department at the corporation that owns Spyglass. I look at Holly for a hint, but she blanks me from behind her wronged-woman mask. Though I wouldn’t be too sure it is a mask.

  Luckily, Peter’s younger brother and best man, Lee, comes to my aid; his “core competence” may be “tax evoision” but that doesn’t stop him being an authority on international affairs too. “Iraq under Saddam used to be a concentration camp aboveground and a mass grave below. So us and the Yanks, we come along and take their dictator down for them, gratis and for free—and how do they pay us back? By turning on their liberators. Ingratitude is deeply, deeply, ingrained into the Arab races. And it’s not just our lads in uniform they hate; it’s any Westerner, right, Ed? Like that poor reporter who got offed last year, just for being American? Grotesque.”

  “You’ve got spinach stuck in your teeth, Lee,” says Peter.

  Of course Aoife asks, “What does ‘offed’ mean, Daddy?”

  “Why don’t you and I,” Holly says to Aoife, “go and see Lola and Amanda at the big kids’ table? I think they’ve got Coca-Cola.”

  “You always say Coca-Cola stops you sleeping, Mummy.”

  “Yes, but you worked so hard being Aunty Sharon’s bridesmaid, we can make an exception this once.” Holly and Aoife slip away.

  Lee still hasn’t caught on. “Has the spinach gone?”

  “It has,” says Peter, “but the tactlessness is still there.”

  “Huh? Oh.” Lee does a contrite smirk. “Oops. No offense, Ed. Imbibed too freely of the old vino, methinks.”

  I should say, “No offense taken,” but I just shrug.

  “Thing is,” says Lee in a let’s-face-it tone, “the invasion of Iraq was about one thing and one thing only: oil.”

  If I had a tenner for every time I heard that I could buy the Outer Hebrides. I put down my fork. “If you want a country’s oil, you just buy it. Like we did from Iraq up until Gulf One.”

  “Cheaper just to install a puppet government, surely.” Lee pokes out the very tip of his tongue to show how provocative he is. “Think of all those lucrative oil contracts. Favorable terms. Yum-yum.”

  “Maybe that’s what the Iraqis object to,” says Austin Webber, father of Peter and Lee, a retired bank manager with drooping eyes and a fascinating forehead like a Klingon’s. “Being governed by puppets. Can’t say I’d relish the prospect much, either.”

  “Could we please let Ed answer my questions?” Pauline says. “Why has the Iraqi intervention gone so horribly off script?”

  My head’s humming. After Holly’s ultimatum last night, I didn’t sleep so well, and I’ve drunk too much champagne. “Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush et al. wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be. They expected to find a unified state like Japan in 1945. Instead, they found a perpetual civil war among majority Shi’a Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein—a Sunni—had imposed a brutal peace on the country, but with him gone, the civil war reheated, and now it’s … erupted, and the CPA is embroiled. When you’re in control, neutrality isn’t possible.”

  The band at the far end of the hall strikes up “The Birdy Song.”

  Ruth asks, “So the Sunni are fighting in Fallujah because they want a Sunni leader back in charge?”

  “That’s one reason, but the Shi’a elsewhere are fighting because they want the foreigners out.”

  “Being occupied’s unpleasant,” says Austin. “I get that. But surely Iraqis can see that life’s better now than it used to be.”

  “Two years ago your average Iraqi—male—had a job, of some type. Now he hasn’t. There was water in the taps and power in the grid. Now there isn’t. Petrol was available. Now it isn’t. Toilets worked. Now they don’t. You could send your kids to school without being afraid they’ll be kidnapped. Now you can’t. Iraq was a creaking, broken, sanction-ravaged place, but it sort of, kind of, worked. Now it doesn’t.”

  An Arab-looking waiter fills my cup from a silver pot. I thank him and wonder if he’s thinking, This guy’s talking out of his hole. Sharon, meanwhile, a girl happy to discuss Middle Eastern politics over her wedding cake, asks, “Who’s to blame?”

  “It entirely depends who you ask,” I reply.

  “We’re asking you,” says Peter the groom.

  I sip my coffee. It’s good. “The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba’ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremer consigned to the scrap-heap the very civil servants, scientists, teachers, police officers, engineers, and doctors that the coalition needed to rebuild the country. Fifty thousand white-collar Iraqis lost their salaries, pensions, and futures and wanted the occupation to fail from that day on. Edict number two disbanded the Iraqi Army. No back pay, no pension, no nothing. Bremer created 375,000 potential insurgents—unemployed, armed, and trained to kill. Hindsight is easy, sure, but if you’re the viceroy of an occupied country, it’s your job to possess foresight—or at least to listen to advisers who do.”

  Brendan’s phone goes off; he answers it and turns away, saying, “Jerry, what news from the Isle of Dogs?”

  “If this Bremer’s doing such an appalling job,” asks Peter, loosening his white silk tie, “why isn’t he recalled?”

  “His days are numbered.” I plop a lump of sugar into my coffee. “But everyone, from the president to the lowliest staffer in the Green Zone, has a vested interest in peddling the bullshit that the insurgents are just a few fanatics and that the corner is always being turned. The Green Zone’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes, where speaking the truth is an act of treason. Bad things happen to realists.”

  “Surely,” asks Sharon, “the truth must be obvious when they set foot outside the Green Zone.”

  “Most staffers never do. Ever. Except to go to the airport.”

  If A
ustin Webber wore a monocle, it would drop. “How do you run a country from inside a bunker, for God’s sake?”

  I shrug. “Nominally. Sketchily. In a state of ignorance.”

  “But the military must know what’s going on, at least. They’re the ones getting blown up and shot at.”

  “They do, Austin, yes. And the infighting between Bremer’s faction and the generals is ruthless, but the military, too, often acts as if it wants to radicalize the population. My photographer, Aziz, has an uncle in Karbala who farms a few acres of olive orchards. Well, he did farm a few acres of olive orchards. Last October, a convoy was attacked on a stretch of road running through his land, so the coalition forces asked the locals for information on the ‘bandits.’ When none was forthcoming, a platoon of marines chopped down every last tree: ‘To encourage the locals to be more cooperative in future.’ Imagine the cooperation that act of vandalism earned.”

  “It’s like the British in Ireland in 1916,” says Oisín O’Dowd. “They repeated the ageless macho mantra ‘Force is the only thing these natives understand’ so often that they ended up believing it. From that point on they were doomed.”