The feeling of being watched comes back, stronger than ever. We aren’t the only ones here. There are lots. Near. I could swear.
Acacia tree to wiry shrub to shed-sized rock … Nobody.
“Do you feel them too?” Holly Sykes is watching me. “It’s an echo chamber, this place …”
If I say yes to this, I say yes to her whole flaky, nonempirical world. By saying yes to this, how do I refuse crystal healing, pastlife therapy, Atlantis, Reiki, and homeopathy? The problem is, she’s right. I do feel them. This place is … What’s another word for “haunted,” Mr. Novelist? My throat’s dry. My water bottle’s empty.
Down on the rocks blue breakers flume on rocks. I hear the boom, faint and soft, a second later. Further out, surfers at play.
“They were brought here in chains,” says Holly Sykes.
“Who were?”
“The Noongar. Wadjemup, they called this island. Means the Place Across the Water.” She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.”
Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd. “The djanga came. We thought they were dead ones, come back. They forgot how to speak when they were dead, so now they spoke like birds. Only a few came, at first. Their canoes were big as hills, but hollow, like big floating rooms made of many many rooms. Then more ships, more and more, every ship it puked up more, more, more of them. They planted fences, waved maps, brought sheep, mined for metals. They shot our animals, but if we killed their animals, they hunted us like vermin, and took the women away …”
This performance ought to be ridiculous. But in the flesh, three feet away, a vein pulsing in her temple, I don’t know what to make of it. “Is this a story you’re working on, Holly?”
“Too late, we understood, the djanga wasn’t dead Noongar jumped up, they was Whitefellas.” Holly’s voice is blurring now. Some words go missing. “Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. F’fighting at Whitefella, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: Our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from out body. Sick joke. So when come to Wadjemup, we Noongar we die like flies.”
One in four words I’m guessing at now. Holly Sykes’s pupils have shrunk to dots as tiny as full stops. This can’t be right. “Holly?” What’s the first-aid response for this? She must be blind. Holly starts speaking again but not a lot’s in English: I catch “priest,” “gun,” “gallows,” and “swim.” I have zero knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but what’s battling its way out of Holly Sykes’s mouth now sure as hell isn’t French, German, Spanish, or Latin. Then Holly Sykes’s head jerks back and smacks the lighthouse and the word “epilepsy” flashes through my mind. I grip her head so that when she repeats the head-smash it only bashes my hand. I swivel upright and clasp her head firmly against my chest and yell, “Aoife!”
The girl reappears from behind a tree, the quokkas beat a retreat, and I call out, “Your mother’s having an attack!”
A few pounding seconds later, Aoife Brubeck’s here, holding her mother’s face. She speaks sharply: “Mum! Stop it! Come back! Mum!”
A cracked buzzing hum starts deep in Holly’s throat.
Aoife asks, “How long have her eyes been like that?”
“Sixty seconds? Less, maybe. Is she epileptic?”
“The worst’s over. It’s not epilepsy, no. She’s stopped talking, so she’s not hearing now, and—oh, shit—what’s this blood?”
There’s sticky red on my hand. “She hit the wall.”
Aoife winces and inspects her mother’s head. “She’ll have a hell of a lump. But, look, her eyes are coming back.” Sure enough, her pupils are swelling from dots to proper disks.
I note, “You’re acting as if this has happened before.”
“A few times,” replies Aoife, with understatement. “You haven’t read The Radio People, have you?”
Before I can answer Holly Sykes blinks, and finds us. “Oh, f’Chrissakes, it just happened, didn’t it?”
Aoife’s worried and motherly. “Welcome back.”
She’s still pasty as pasta. “What did I do to my head?”
“Tried to dent the lighthouse with it, Crispin says.”
Holly Sykes flinches at me. “Did you listen to me?”
“It was hard not to. At first. Then it … wasn’t exactly English. Look, I’m no first-aid expert, but I’m worried about concussion. Cycling down a hilly, bendy road would not be clever, not right now. I’ve got a number from the bike-hire place. I’ll ask for a medic to drive out and pick you up. I strongly advise this.”
Holly looks at Aoife, who says, “It’s sensible, Mum,” and gives her mother’s arm a squeeze.
Holly props herself upright. “God alone knows what you must think of all this, Crispin.”
It hardly matters. I tap in the number, distracted by a tiny bird calling Crikey, crikey, crikey …
FOR THE FIFTIETH time Holly groans. “I just feel so embarrassed.”
The ferry’s pulling into Fremantle. “Please stop saying that.”
“But I feel awful, Crispin, cutting short your trip to Rottnest.”
“I’d have come back on this ferry, anyway. If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it’s Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aborigine art were eroding away my will to live. It’s as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.”
“Spot the writer.” Aoife finishes her ice pop. “Again.”
“Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”
The ferry’s engines growl, and cut out. Passengers gather their belongings, unplug earphones, and look for children. Holly’s phone goes and she checks it: “It’s my friend, the one who’s picking us up. Just a mo.” While she takes the call, I check my own phone for messages. Nothing since the picture of Juno’s birthday party earlier. Our international marriage was once a walk-in closet of discoveries and curiosities, but international divorce is not for the fainthearted. Through the spray-dashed window I watch lithe young Aussies leap from prow to quayside, tying ropes around painted steel cleats.
“Our friend’s picking us up from the terminal building.” Holly puts her phone away. “She’s got space for you too, Crispin, if you’d like a lift back to the hotel.”
I’ve got no energy to go exploring Perth. “Please.”
We walk down the gangway onto the concrete pier, where my legs struggle to adjust to terra firma. Aoife waves to a woman waving back, but I don’t zone in on Holly’s friend until I’m a few feet away.
“Hello, Crispin,” the woman says, as if she knows me.
“Of course,” remembers Holly. “You two met in Colombia!”
“I may,” the woman smiles, “have slipped Crispin’s mind.”
“Not at all, Carmen Salvat,” I tell her. “How are you?”
August 20, 2018
LEAVING THE AIR-CONDITIONED FOYER of the Shanghai Mandarin we plunge into a wall of stewy heat and adoration from a flash mob—I’ve never seen anything like this level of fandom for a literary writer. More’s the pity that writer isn’t me—as they recognize him, the cry goes up, “Neeeeeck!” Nick Greek, at the vanguard of our two-writer convoy, has been living in Shanghai since March, learning Cantonese and researching a novel about the Opium Wars. Hal the Hyena has liaised closely with his local agent and now a quarter of a million Chinese readers follow Nick Greek on Weibo. Over lunch he mentioned he’s been turning down modeling contracts, for sod’s sake. “It’s so embarrassing,” he said modestly. “I mean, what would Steinbeck have made of this?” I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother. Some heavyweight minders from the book fair are h
aving to widen a path through the throng of nubile, raven-haired, book-toting Chinese fans: “Neeck! Sign, please, please sign!” Some are even waving A4 color photos of the young American for him to deface, for buggery’s sake. “He’s a U.S. imperialist!” I want to shout. “What about the Dalai Lama on the White House lawn?” Miss Li, my British Council elf, and I follow in the wake of his entourage, blissfully unhassled. If I appear in any of the footage, they’ll assume I’m his father. And guess what, dear reader? It doesn’t matter. Let him enjoy the acclaim while it lasts. In six weeks Carmen and I will be living in our dream apartment overlooking the Plaza de la Villa in Madrid. When my old mucker Ewan Rice sees it he’ll be so sodding jealous he’ll explode in a green cloud of spores, even if he has won the Brittan Prize twice. Once we’re in, I can divide my time more equally between London and Madrid. Spanish cuisine, cheap wine, reliable sunshine, and love. Love. During all those wasted years of my prime with Zoë, I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to love and to be loved. After all, what is the Bubble Reputation compared to the love of a good woman?
Well? I’m asking you a question.
MISS LI LEADS me into the heart of the Shanghai Book Fair complex, where a large auditorium awaits keynote speakers—the true Big Beasts of International Publishing. I can imagine Chairman Mao issuing his jolly-well-thought-out economic diktats in this very space in the 1950s; for all I know, he did. This afternoon the stage is dominated by a jungle of orchids and a ten-meter-high blowup of Nick Greek’s blond American head and torso. Miss Li leads me out through the other side of the large auditorium and on to my own venue, although she has to ask several people for directions. Eventually she locates it on the basement level. It appears to be a row of knocked-through broom cupboards. There are thirty chairs in the venue, though only seven are occupied, not counting myself. To wit: my smiling interviewer, an unsmiling female translator, a nervous Miss Li, my friendly Editor Fang, in his Black Sabbath T-shirt, two youths with Shanghai Book Fair ID tags still round their necks, and a girl of what used to be known as Eurasian extraction. She’s short, boyish, and sports a nerdy pair of glasses and a shaven head: electrotherapy chic. A droning fan stirs the heat above us, a striplight flickers a little, and the walls are blotched and streaked, like the inside of a never-cleaned oven. I am tempted to walk out—I really am—but handling the fallout would be worse than putting a brave face on the afternoon. I’m sure the British Council keeps a blacklist of badly behaved authors.
My interviewer thanks everyone for coming in Chinese, and gives what I gather is a short introduction. Then I do a reading from Echo Must Die while a Mandarin translation is projected onto a screen behind me. It’s the same section I read at Hay-on-Wye, three years ago. Sodding hell, is it already three years since I last published? Trevor Upward’s hilarious escapades on the roof of the Eurostar do not appear to amuse the select gathering. Was my satire translated as a straight tragedy? Or was the Hershey wit taken into custody at the language barrier? After my reading I endure the sound of fourteen hands clapping, take my seat, and help myself to a glass of sparkling water—I’m thirsty as hell. The water is flat and tastes of yeast. I hope it didn’t come out of a Shanghai tap. My interviewer smiles, thanks me in English, and asks me the same questions I’ve been asked since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago: “How does your famous father’s work influence your novels?”; “Why does Desiccated Embryos have a symmetrical structure?”; “What truths should the Chinese reader find in your novels?” I give the same answers I’ve been giving since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago, and my spidery, unsmiling translator, who also translated my answers several times yesterday, renders my sentences into Chinese without any difficulty. Electrotherapy Girl, I notice, is actually taking notes. Then the interviewer asks, “And do you read your reviews?” which redirects my train of thought towards Richard Cheeseman where it smashes into last week’s miserable visit to Bogotá and comes off the tracks altogether …
HELL’S BELLS, THAT was one dispiriting visit, dear reader. Dominic Fitzsimmons had been pulling strings for months to get me and Richard’s sister Maggie a meeting with his Colombian counterpart at the Ministry of Justice for us to discuss the terms of repatriation—only for said dignitary to become “unavailable” at the last minute. A youthful underling came in his place—the boy was virtually tripping over his umbilical cord. He kept taking calls during our twenty-seven-minute audience, and twice he called me Meester Cheeseman while referring to “the Prisoner ’Earshey.” Waste of sodding time. The next day we visited poor Richard at the Penitenciaría Central. He’s suffering from weight loss, shingles, piles, depression, and his hair’s falling out too, but there’s only one doctor for two thousand inmates, and in the case of middle-class European prisoners, the good medic requires a fee of five hundred dollars per consultation. Richard asked us to bring books, paper, and pencils, but he turned down my offer of a laptop or iPad because the guards would nick it. “It marks you as rich,” he told us, in a broken voice, “and if they know you’re rich they make you buy insurance.” The place is run by gangs who control the in-house drug trade. “Don’t worry, Maggie,” Richard told his sister. “I don’t touch the stuff. Needles are shared, they bulk out the stuff with powder, and once you owe them, they’ve got your soul. It’d kill off my chances of an early appeal.” Maggie stayed brave for her brother, but as soon as we were out of the prison gates, she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. My own conscience felt hooked and zapped by a Taser. It still does.
But I can’t change places with him. It would kill me.
“Mr. Hershey?” Miss Li’s looking worried. “You okay?”
I blink. Shanghai. The book fair. “Yes, I just … Sorry, um, yes … Do I read my reviews? No. Not anymore. They take me to places I don’t wish to go.” As my interpreter gets to work on this, I notice that my audience is down to six. Electrotherapy Girl has slipped away.
THE SHANGHAI BUND is several things: a waterfront sweep of 1930s architecture with some ornate Toytown set pieces along the way; a symbol of Western colonial arrogance; a symbol of the ascension of the modern Chinese state; four lanes of slow-moving, or no-moving, traffic; and a raised promenade along the Huangpu River where flows a Walt Whitman throng of tourists, families, couples, vendors, pickpockets, friendless novelists, muttering drug dealers, and pimps: “Hey, mister, want drug, want sex? Very near, beautiful girls.” Crispin Hershey says, “No.” Not only is our hero loyally hitched, but he fears that the paperwork arising from getting Shanghaied in a Shanghai brothel would be truly Homeric, and not in a good way.
The sun disintegrates into evening and the skyscrapers over the river begin to fluoresce: there’s a titanic bottle opener; an outsize 1920s interstellar rocket; a supra-Ozymandian obelisk, plus a supporting cast of mere forty-, fifty-, sixty-floor buildings, clustering skywards like a doomed game of Tetris. In Mao’s time Pudong was a salt marsh, Nick Greek was telling me, but now you look for levitating jet-cars. When I was a boy the U.S.A. was synonymous with modernity; now it’s here. So I carry on walking, imagining the past: junks with lanterns swinging in the ebb and flow; the ghostly crisscross of masts and rigging, the groan of hulls laid down in Glasgow, Hamburg, and Marseille; hard, knotted stevedores unloading opium, loading tea; dotted lines of Japanese bombers, bombing the city to rubble; bullets, millions of bullets, bullets from Chicago, bullets from Fukuoka, bullets from Stalingrad, ratatat-tat-tat-tat. If cities have auras, like Zoë always insisted people do, if your “chakra is open,” then Shanghai’s aura is the color of money and power. Its emails can shut down factories in Detroit, denude Australia of its iron ore, strip Zimbabwe of its rhino horn, pump the Dow Jones full of either steroids or financial sewage …
My phone’s ringing. Perfect. My favorite person.
“Hail, O Face That Launched a Thousand Ships.”
“Hello, you idiot. How’s the mysterious Orient?”
“Shanghai’s impressive, but it lacks a Carmen Salvat.”
“And how was
the Shanghai International Book Fair?”
“Ah, same old, same old. A good crowd at my event.”
“Great! You gave Nick a run for his money, then?”
“ ‘Nick Greek’ to you,” growls my green-eyed monster. “It’s not a popularity contest, you know.”
“Good to hear you say so. Any sign of Holly yet?”
“No, her flight’s not due in until later—and, anyway, I’ve snuck off from the hotel to the Bund. I’m here now, skyscraper-watching.”
“Amazing, aren’t they? Are they all lit up yet?”
“Yep. Glowing like Lucy and the Sky and Diamonds. So much for my day, how was yours?”
“A sales meeting with an anxious sales team, an artwork meeting with a frantic printer, and now a lunch meeting with melancholic booksellers, followed by crisis meetings until five.”
“Lovely. Any news from the letting agent?”
“Ye-es. The news is, the apartment’s ours if we—”
“Oh that’s fantastic, darling! I’ll get on to the—”
“But listen, Crisp. I’m not quite as sure about it as I was.”
I stand aside for a troop of cheerful Chinese punks in full regalia. “The Plaza de la Villa flat? It was far and away the best place we saw. Plenty of light, space for my study, just about affordable, and please—when we lift the blinds every morning, it’ll be like living over a Pérez-Reverte novel. I don’t understand: What boxes isn’t it ticking?”
My editor-girlfriend chooses her words with care. “I didn’t realize how attached I am to having my own place, until now. My place here is my own little castle. I like the neighborhood, my neighbors …”
“But, Carmen, your own little castle is little. If I’m to divide my time between London and Madrid, we need somewhere bigger.”
“I know … I just feel we’re rushing things a bit.”
That sinking feeling. “It’s been a year since Perth.”
The Bone Clocks Page 37