The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  WE WALKED MOST of the night to an outcrop whose Noongar name meant “Five Fingers” in English, not far from present-day Armadale. This was home for the warriors’ clan, and the season’s residence for Esther. When day broke, I tried to make myself as useful to my hosts as I could, but although I’d been resurrected as Itsekiri, Kawésqar, and Gurage tribespeople in earlier lives, I’d grown pampered as Lucas Marinus, Klara Koskov, and Pablo Antay, and two centuries had passed since I had hunted and foraged for dinner. I was of more use in helping the women to cure kangaroo hides, setting a broken arm, and gathering bush honey. I also busied myself gratifying my curiosity as a proto-anthropologist: My journals describe the burning of scrubland to smoke out game; totemic animals; a visit by five men from the south to trade red ocher for prized burdun wood; and a paternity suit, settled by Esther, who ingressed into a fetus to perform a psychosoteric DNA test. Esther’s skin-group showed me the pity owed to a simpleminded uncle, a distrust of my Europeanness, and respect for a Boylyada maaman colleague of Moombaki’s. The children were the least reserved. One boy named Kinta used to borrow my jacket and hat and strut about, and they all liked showing off their bushcraft skills to the clumsy pale visitor. My attempts to speak Noongar caused endless amusement, but with the tribe’s help Pablo Antay compiled the best extant glossary of the Noongar language.

  Moombaki, I learned, was not thought of as a god but a spirit guardian, a collective memory, a healer, a weapon of last resort, and a sort of assize judge. She moved from skin-group to skin-group at the start of each of the six Noongar seasons, helping each family and clan as best she could, and circulating the idea that violent resistance to the Europeans would result in more dead Noongar. Some called her a traitor, she told me, but by the 1870s her logic was demonstrable. The Europeans were too many, their appetites too voracious, their morality too fickle, and their rifles too accurate. The Noongar’s slim hope of survival lay in adaptation, and if this altered what it meant to be Noongar, what choice was there? Without knowledge of the Ship People’s minds, however, even this slim hope was doomed, and so Moombaki had chosen a ten-year-old half-caste girl for her present sojourn. Similarly, she had invited Pablo Antay to Five Fingers with a view to learning about the world and its peoples.

  By night, then, Esther and I sat across the fire from each other at the mouth of her small cave and subspoke about empires, their ascents and falls; about cities, shipbuilding, industry; slavery, the dismemberment of Africa, the genocide of the natives of Van Diemen’s Land; farming, husbandry, factories, telegraphs, newspapers, printing, mathematics, philosophy, law, and money and a hundred other topics. I felt like Lucas Marinus once did, lecturing in the houses of the Nagasaki scholars. I talked about who the settlers landing at Fremantle were, why they had voyaged here, and what they believed, desired, and feared. I tried to explain religion, too, but the Whadjuk Noongar had a distrust of priests after men had distributed blankets “from Jesus” to several clans up the Swan River, only for the recipients to die a few days later of what sounded like smallpox.

  In most other subject areas, however, Esther was the teacher. Her metaage became apparent one night when she recited the names of all her previous hosts, and I lined up one pebble per name. There were 207 pebbles. Moombaki sojourned into new hosts when they were about ten and stayed until death, which implied a metalife stretching back approximately seven millennia. This was twice as old as Xi Lo, the oldest Atemporal known to Horology, who at twenty-five centuries was a stripling compared to Esther, whose soul predated Rome, Troy, Egypt, Peking, Nineveh, and Ur. She taught me some of her invocations, and I identified within them various tributaries to the Deep Stream from long before the Schism. On some nights we transversed together, and Esther enfolded my soul in hers so I could spirit-walk much further and faster than I was otherwise able. When she scansioned me I felt like a third-rate poet showing his doggerel to a Shakespeare. When I scansioned her, I felt like a minnow tipped from a jar into a deep inland sea.

  TWENTY DAYS AFTER my arrival, I said my goodbyes and set out with Esther toward the Swan River valley accompanied by the four warriors who had escorted us from Jervoise Bay. We headed north from Five Fingers, climbing into the Perth Hills. My guides knew the wooded, trackless slopes as unerringly as Pablo Antay knew the thoroughfares and alleys of Buenos Aires. We camped in a dry creek near a water hole, and after a supper of yam, berries, and duck meat, Pablo Antay fell into steep-sided, slippery sleep. I slept until Esther subwoke me, which is a disorienting reveille. It was still dark, but a predawn wind was stirring the slanting trees into near speech. Esther was outlined against a banksia bush. Blearily, I subasked, All well?

  Esther subreplied, Follow. We walked through a stretch of nighttime forest of rustling she-oaks, up a sandstone ridge that cleared the treeline before trifurcating into three “prongs.” Each of these ridges was only a few feet wide, but a hundred paces long, and with steep drops on either side I proceeded with great caution. Esther told me this place was called, descriptively, Emu’s Claw, and led me along the central “toe.” It ended at a lookout point over the Swan River. The looping watercourse was burnished pewter by starlight, and the land was a crumpled patchwork of light and dark blacks. A day’s walk to the west, streaks of surf delineated the ocean, and I guessed that a rough clutter on the north bank of the river was Perth.

  Esther sat, so I sat too. A currawong sang throaty gargle phrases in a peppermint tree. I’m gunna teach y’m’true name.

  You told me, I subreplied, it would take a day to learn.

  Aye, it’s true, but I’m gunna speak it inside y’head, Marinus.

  I hesitated. This is a gift I’ll struggle to repay. My true name is only one word long, and you already know that.

  “Ain’t y’fault yurra savage,” she said. “Shurrup now. Open up.”

  Esther’s soul ingressed and inscribed her long, long, true name onto my memory. Moombaki’s name had grown with the tens, hundreds, and thousands of years since Moombaki’s mother-birth at the Five Fingers, back when it was known as Two Hands. While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and the names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned. With the word Esther her name ended. My visitor egressed and I opened my eyes to find slanted sunlight flaming the canopy below us sharp green, torching the scrub dark gold and reddening the whale-rib clouds, and countless thousands of birds, singing, shrieking, yammering. “Not a bad name,” I said, already feeling the ache of loss.

  A marri tree bled gum and starry blooms. Corymbia calophylla.

  “Come back anytime,” she said, “or y’kin y’spoke of.”

  “I will,” I promised, “but my face will have changed.”

  “World’s changin’,” she said. “Even here. Can’t stop it.”

  “How’ll we find you, Esther? Me, or Xi Lo, or Holokai?”

  Camp here. This place. Emu’s Claw. I’ll know. The Land’ll tell.

  I wasn’t surprised to find that she’d gone back. So I set off for Perth, where a dishonorable man called Caleb Warren would soon suffer the fright of his life.

  I FINISH FILLING in twenty-seven across—VERTIGO—before looking up to find Iris Marinus-Fenby mirrored in Holly Sykes’s sunglasses. Today’s head-wrap is lilac. I guess her hair only partly recovered from the chemo five years ago. Holly’s indigo dress extends from the buttoned throat to her ankles. “I’m a world-class ignorer of attention-seekers,” Holly slaps the envelope on the table, “but this is so crass, so intrusive, so bizarre, it’s off the scale. So you win. I’m here. I walked down Broadway, and at every crossing I thought, Why give even one minute to this head-meddling nutso? I don’t know how often I almost turned back.”

  I ask, “Why didn’t you?”

  “ ’Cause I need to know: If Hugo Lamb wishes
to contact me, why not do it like everyone else and send an email via my agent? Why send you and this”—she knocks on the envelope—“this tampered-with photo? Does he think it’ll impress me? Reignite old flames? ’Cause if he does he’s in for a heck of a disappointment.”

  “Why not sit down and order lunch while I explain?”

  “I don’t think so. I only eat lunch with friends.”

  “Coffee, then? One drinks coffee with anyone.”

  With ill grace, Holly accedes. I mime a cup and mouth “Coffee” at Nestor, who makes a coming-right-up face. “First,” I tell Holly, “Hugo Lamb knows nothing about this. We hope. He’s gone by the name of Marcus Anyder for many years, incidentally.”

  “So if Hugo Lamb hasn’t sent you, how can you possibly know that we met years ago in an obscure Swiss ski resort?”

  “One of us resides in the Dark Internet. Overhearing things is what he does for a living, as it were.”

  “And you. Are you still a Chinese doctor who died in 1984? Or are you alive and female today?”

  “I am all those four.” I put a business card on the table. “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. A clinical psychiatrist based in Toronto, though I consult further afield. And, yes, until 1984 I was Yu Leon Marinus.”

  Holly removes her sunglasses, scrutinizes the card, and me, with distaste. “I see I have to spell this out, so here goes: I haven’t seen Hugo Lamb since New Year’s Day 1992, when he was in his early twenties, yeah? He’ll be in his midfifties by now. Like me. Now, the manipulator of this image shows Hugo Lamb still looking twenty-five years old, give or take, with the Helix Towers—built in 2018—and iShades hooked over his Qatar 2022 World Cup T-shirt. And the car. Cars didn’t look like that in the nineties. I was there. This photo has been buggered about with. Two questions for you: ‘Why bother?’ and ‘Who bothered?’ ”

  A kid at the next table’s playing a 3D app: A kangaroo’s bouncing up a scrolling series of platforms. It’s off-putting. “The photo was taken last July,” I tell Holly. “It has not been altered.”

  “So … Hugo Lamb found the fountain of eternal youth?”

  A young waiter with Nestor’s heavyweight nose walks by with a T-bone steak sizzling on a hot plate. “Not a fountain, no. A place and a process. Hugo Lamb became an Anchorite of the Chapel of the Blind Cathar in 1992. Since his induction, he hasn’t aged.”

  Holly takes this in and puffs out her cheeks. “Well, great. That’s that cleared up. My one-night fling is now … let’s say it, ‘immortal.’ ”

  “Immortal with terms and conditions,” I equivocate. “Immortal only in the sense that he doesn’t age.”

  Holly’s exasperated. “And nobody’s noticed, of course. Or does his family put it down to moisturizer and quinoa salad?”

  “His family believe he drowned in a scuba-diving accident off Rabaul, near New Guinea, in 1996. Go ahead, call them.” I give Holly a card with the Lambs’ London number on it. “Or just shirabu one of his brothers, Alex or Nigel, and ask them.”

  Holly stares. “Hugo Lamb faked his own death?”

  I sip my tap water. It’s passed through many kidneys. “His new Anchorite friends arranged it. Obtaining a death certificate without a dead body is irksome, but they have years of experience.”

  “Stop talking as if I believe you. Anyway, ‘Anchorites’? That’s something … medieval, isn’t it?”

  I nod. “An Anchorite was a girl who lived like a hermit in a cell, but in the wall of a church. A living human sacrifice, in a way.”

  Nestor drifts up. “One coffee. Say, is your friend hungry?”

  “No, thank you,” says Holly. “I … I’ve got no appetite.”

  “Come on,” I urge her, “you just walked from Columbus Circle.”

  “I’ll bring a menu,” says Nestor. “You a veggie, like your friend?”

  “She’s not my friend,” Holly fires back. “I mean, we just met.”

  “Friend or not,” says the restaurateur, “a body’s got to eat.”

  “I’ll be leaving soon,” declares Holly. “I have to rush.”

  “Rush, rush, rush.” Nestor’s nasal hair streams in and out like seaweed. “Too busy to eat, too busy to breathe.” He turns away and turns back. “What’s next? Too busy to live?” Nestor’s gone.

  Holly hisses: “Now you made me piss off an elderly Greek.”

  “Order his moussaka, then. In my medical view, you don’t eat—”

  “Since you’ve raised the subject of medical matters, ‘Dr. Fenby,’ I knew the name was familiar. I checked with Tom Ballantyne, my old GP. You came to my house in Rye when I was very nearly dying of cancer. I could have your medical license revoked.”

  “If I was guilty of any malpractice, I would revoke it myself.”

  She looks both outraged and baffled. “Why were you in my home?”

  “Advising Tom Ballantyne. I was involved in trials of ADC-based drugs in Toronto, and Tom and I both thought your gall-bladder cancer might respond positively. It did.”

  “You said you’re a psychiatrist, not an oncologist.”

  “I’m a psychiatrist who owns a number of other hats.”

  “So you’re claiming that I owe you my life now, are you?”

  “Not at all. Or only partly. Cancer recovery is a holistic process, and while the ADCs contributed to your cancer’s remission, they weren’t the only curative agent, I suspect.”

  “So … you got to know Tom Ballantyne before my diagnosis? Or … or … just how long have you been watching my life?”

  “On and off, since your mother brought you into the consulting room in Gravesend Hospital in 1976.”

  “Can you hear yourself? And it’s your actual job to cure people of psychoses and delusions? Now for the last time, why did you send me a digitally jiggled image of a very brief, very ex-boyfriend?”

  “I want you to consider that the clause of life which reads ‘What lives must one day die’ can, in rare instances, be renegotiated.”

  All the voices in the Santorini Café, all the gossiping, joking, cajoling, flirting, complaining, become, in my ears, a sonic waterfall.

  Holly asks, “Dr. Fenby, are you a Scientologist?”

  I try not to smile. “To believers in L. Ron Hubbard and the galactic Emperor Xenu, psychiatrists belong in septic tanks.”

  “Immortality”—she lowers her voice—“isn’t—bloody—real.”

  “But Atemporality, with terms and conditions applied, is.”

  Holly looks around, and back. “This is deranged.”

  “People said that about you after The Radio People.”

  “If I could unwrite that wretched book, I would. Anyway, I don’t hear those voices any longer. Not since Crispin died. Not that that’s any of your goddamn business.”

  “Precognition comes and goes,” I snowplow up some spilled sugar granules with my little finger, “mysteriously, like allergies or warts.”

  “The big mystery to me is why I’m still sitting here.”

  “Guess the name of Hugo Lamb’s mentor in the dark arts.”

  “Sauron. Lord Voldemort. John Dee. Louis Cypher. Who?”

  “An old friend of yours. Immaculée Constantin.”

  Holly rubs at a smear of lipstick on her coffee cup. “I never knew her first name. She’s only referred to as ‘Miss Constantin’ in the book. And in my head. So why are you inventing her first name?”

  “I didn’t. It is her given name. Hugo Lamb’s one of her ablest pupils. He’s a superb groomer, and a formidable psychosoteric after only three decades following the Shaded Way.”

  “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, what bloody planet are you on?”

  “The same one as you. Hugo Lamb now sources prey, just as Miss Constantin sourced you. And if she hadn’t scared you into reporting her so that Yu Leon Marinus was informed about and inoculated you, she would have abducted you and not Jacko.”

  Chatter and clinking cutlery is loud and all around us.

  Behind us, a girl is dumping her boy
friend in Egyptian Arabic.

  “Now, I”—Holly pinches the bridge of her nose—“want to hit you. Really hard. What are, life-trespassing, fantasy-peddling … I—I—I have no words for you.”

  “We’re truly sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Sykes. If there was any alternative at all, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “ ‘We’ being who, exactly?”

  My back straightens a little. “We are Horology.”

  Holly heaves a long, long sigh, meaning, Where do I start?

  “Please.” I place a green key by her saucer. “Take this.”

  She stares at it, then me. “What is it? And why would I?”

  A couple of zombie-eyed junior doctors troop by, talking medical prognoses. “This key opens the door to the answers and proof you deserve and need. Once inside, go up the stairs to the roof garden. You’ll find me there with a friend or two.”

  She finishes her coffee. “My flight home leaves at three P.M. tomorrow. I’ll be on it, heading home. Keep your key.”

  “Holly,” I say gently, “I know you’ve met countless crazies thanks to The Radio People. I know the Jacko bait has been dangled at you before. But please. Take this key. Just in case I’m the real thing. It’s a thousand to one, I know, but I might be. Throw it away at the airport, by all means, but for now, take it. Where’s the harm?”

  She holds my gaze for a few seconds, then pushes her empty cup and saucer away, stands, swipes up the key, and puts it into her handbag. She puts two dollars on the photo of Hugo Lamb. “That’s so I owe you nothing,” she mutters. “Don’t call me ‘Holly.’ Goodbye.”

  April 5

  IN THE SILT OF DREAMS, ill-wishers were cutting off my exits until the one way out was up. I can’t remember which self I am until I find my nightlight’s 05:09 imprinted on the overheated darkness. 119A. More than a mile away across Central Park on the ninth floor of the Empire Hotel, Arkady is preparing to dreamseed Holly Sykes with Ōshima standing guard. I pray he won’t be needed. Staying here sticks in my craw, but if I went over to the Empire to help, I could end up triggering the very attack I so fear. Minutes limp by as I trawl New York’s nighttime tinnitus for meaning …