The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  I can imagine Ed, my long-dead partner, making hang-dog eyes at the authenticity of this so-called news but there’s more to come as talk switches to a sister-in-law of Pat Joe’s cousin in County Offaly, who knows a “Man in the Know” at Stability Research in the Dublin Pale who reckons the Swedes have genomed a rustproof, selffertile strain of wheat. “I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” says Pat Joe, “but there’s talk of Stability planting it all over Ireland next spring. If people have full bellies, the Jackdawing and rioting’ll stop.”

  “White bread,” sighs Sínead Fitzgerald. “Imagine that.”

  “I’d not want to go pissing on your snowman now, Pat Joe,” says Seamus Coogan, “but was that the same Man in the Know who said the Germans had a pill that cured Ratflu, or that the States was reunited again, and the president was sending airdrops of blankets, medicine, and peanut butter to all the NATO countries? Or was it that friend of a friend who met an Asylumite outside Youghal who swore on his mother’s life that he’d found a Technotopia where they still have twenty-four-hour electricity, hot showers, pineapples, and dark chocolate mousse, in Bermuda or Iceland or the Azores?”

  I think about Martin’s remarks on imaginary lifeboats.

  “I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” sniffs Pat Joe.

  “Whatever the future has in store,” says Betty Power, “we’re all in the hollow of God’s hand, so we are.”

  “That’s certainly how Muriel Boyce sees it,” says Seamus Coogan.

  “Martin’s doing his best,” says Betty Power, crisply, “but it’s clear that only the Church can take care of the devilry falling over the world.”

  “Why will a loving God only help us if we vote for him?” asks Molly.

  “You have to ask,” blinks Betty Power. “That’s how prayer works.”

  “But Molly’s saying,” says Pat Joe, “why can’t He just answer our prayers directly? Why does he need us to vote for him?”

  “To put the Church back where it belongs,” says Betty Power. “Guiding our country.”

  The conversation heats up but I may as well be listening to children arguing about the acts and motives of Santa Claus. I’ve seen what happens after death, the Dusk and the Dunes, and it was as real to me as the chipped mug of tea in my hand. Perhaps the souls I saw were bound for an afterlife beyond the Last Sea, but if so, it’s not the afterlife described by any priest or imam. There is no God but the one we dream up, I could assure my fellow parishioners: Humanity is on its own and always was …

  … but my truth sounds no crazier than their faith, no saner either; and who has the right to kill Santa? Specially a Santa who promises to reunite the Coogans with their dead son, Pat Joe with his dead brother, me with Aoife, Jacko, Mum, and Dad; and even put the Endarkenment into reverse, and bring back central heating, online ordering, Ryanair, and chocolate. Our hunger for our loved ones and our lost world is as sharp as grief; it howls to be fed. If only that same hunger didn’t make us so meekly vulnerable to men like Father Brady.

  “Fallen pregnant?” Betty Power covers her mouth. “Never!” We’re back to Sheep’s Head gossip. I’d like to ask who’s pregnant, but if I do so at this point they’ll all wonder if I’m going deaf or turning senile.

  “That’s the problem.” Sinéad Fitzgerald leans in. “Three lads went off with young Miss Hegarty after the harvest festival, they were all off their faces”—she mimes smoking a joint—“so until the baby’s features are clear enough to play Spot the Daddy, Damien Hegarty doesn’t know who to point the shotgun at. A proper mess it is.”

  The Hegartys keep goats lower down the peninsula, between Ahakista and Durrus. “Shocking,” says Betty Power, “and Niamh Hegarty not a day over sixteen, too, am I right? No mother in the house to lay down the rules, that’s what this is about. They just think anything goes. Which is exactly why Father Brady’s—”

  “Hear that,” says Pat Joe, holding up a finger and listening …

  … cups are poised in midlift; sentences dangle; babies are shushed; nearly two hundred West Corkonians fall silent, all at once; and then let out a collective sigh of relief. It’s the Convoy: two armored jeeps, ahead of and behind the diesel tanker and the box truck. Inside the Cordon we still have tractors and harvesters, and Stability vehicles still drive on the old N71 to Bantry to service the garrisons and the depots, but these four shiny state-of-the-art vehicles rumbling up Church Lane are the only regular visitors to Kilcrannog. For anyone over Rafiq’s age, say, the sound evokes the world we knew. Back then, traffic was a “noise,” not a “sound,” but it’s different now. If you close your eyes as the Convoy arrives you can imagine it’s 2030, say, back when you had your own car and Cork was a ninety-minute drive away, and my body didn’t ache all the time, and climate change was only a problem for people who lived in flood-prone areas. Only I don’t close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them. We all go outside to watch the show. I take my pram. It’s not that I don’t trust the villagers not to steal from an old lady with two kids to raise, but you shouldn’t tempt hungry people.

  THE HEAD JEEP pulls up past the diesel store. Four young Irish Stability troops jump out, enjoying the impact their uniforms, guns, and swagger makes on the yokels; it’s not by chance that Kilcrannog’s single girls wear their dwindling supplies of makeup and best clothes on Convoy Days. Corinna Kennedy from Rossmore Farm married a Convoyman and now she’s living in the Bandon garrison with five hours of electricity a day. The head Irish guard speaks rapid-fire “Mandlish” into his transband to confirm their current position to the Main Convoy. “Each of them helmets’d cost more than my house,” Pat Joe tells me, not for the first time, “if you had the contacts to turn it into hard yuan.”

  Three Chinese troops jump down from the rear jeep, in the uniforms of the Pearl Occident Company, or POC. They are taller than their Irish counterparts, their teeth are better, and their guns are more, as teenage Aoife would’ve said, badass. The Irish troops will chat a little, but the Chinese troops are under orders not to fraternize with the locals. Bantry is the western, wilder end of the Lease Lands, and the diesel they’re delivering is more precious than gold. One of the Irishmen spots Kevin Murray’s lit pipe too close to the tanker and barks, “Sir, we need you to put that pipe out right now!” Mortified, Kevin shuffles back into the Big Hall. Convoymen never need to threaten. The Convoys are our umbilical cord to the Ringaskiddy depot and its special items, no longer manufactured in Ireland, or anywhere in Europe, for all we know.

  The two week in, week out Convoymen are Noel Moriarty, the tankerman, and Seamus Li, the chief merchant. Noel Moriarty, a busy-eyed, quick-witted, pale, and balding man in his midthirties, shakes hands and chats with Martin while the driver fits nozzle to intake. Martin asks Noel if he has any information about Hinkley Point. Noel says his POC boss told him the Chinese are monitoring the site from low-altitude satellites, but the whole complex appears to have been deserted. This news flies round the onlooking crowd in less than a minute, but as ever it’s difficult to draw reliable conclusions from such scant facts. Noel Moriarty and Martin sign each other’s clipboards, then the tankerman pulls the red handle that starts the flow of diesel into the Co-op tank. We try to catch a whiff of the stuff, and suffer a fresh round of pangs for the Petrol Age.

  The box truck, meanwhile, has backed into the Co-op warehouse across the square, where Seamus Li speaks with Olive O’Dwyer, Kilcrannog’s deputy mayor. Items loaded onto the truck are mostly farm produce; from the deep freeze come recently slaughtered beef, bacon, turkey, rabbit, mutton, and lamb, and from the fresh store come boxes of cured tobacco, leeks, kale, onions, potatoes, pumpkins, and late fruit. Most of the fruit and vegetables will feed the Ringaskiddy Concession, where the POC officials live with their families, or the crews of the People’s Liberation Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. The meat, uncloned and cesium-free—so far—will be sold for jaw-dropping prices in Beijing, Chongqing, and Shanghai. Milk is powdered at Ringaskiddy, an
d is a major export.

  In return, the three Sheep’s Head Co-ops of Durrus, Ahakista, and Kilcrannog receive diesel, fertilizer, insecticide, machine parts, lightbulbs, tools, hardware, as well as the special requests—including vital medicines like Rafiq’s insulin—agreed upon every month by the town committee. The POC also has a deal with Cork Stability to deliver the basic commodities for our weekly ration boxes, though the quality of these has been going downhill in recent months. The most important item delivered by the Company, however, is security. The POC protects its Lease Lands by paying for the Stability Militia to man the sixty-mile Cordon, which is why the ten-mile coastal strip from Bantry to Cork has been spared the worst of the lawlessness that plagues much of Europe as the Endarkenment switches off power networks and emaciates civic society. The men in Fitzgerald’s bar mutter that the Chinese aren’t here out of love, and that the POC is no doubt turning a tidy profit from its operation, but even the drunkest lout can imagine how savage life on Sheep’s Head would soon become without the three Cs: Company, Convoy, and Cordon.

  It’s our Great Wall of China, so to speak.

  MY PRAM AND me are at the school gate at three o’clock sharp. I remember the various kindergartens and schools in north London and Rye where I used to collect Aoife. The main topic of conversation is the half-empty ration box, returned to us irrespective of age from the Co-op with a 400-gram bag of oatmeal bulked out with husk and straw, 200 grams of brown rice, 200 grams of lentils, 50 grams of sugar and 50 grams of salt, a packet of ten Dragon Brand teabags, half a small bar of DMZ soap, a tub of Korean detergent two years past its use-by date, a small bottle of iodine labeled in Cyrillic, and, bafflingly, a Hello Kitty cola-flavoured eraser. What isn’t used will become currency in future Friday markets, but today’s ration box is the worst in the six years since the system was introduced in the wake of the ’39 crop failure. “I know it’s a disgrace,” Martin’s saying to a group of the disgruntled, “but I’m your mayor, not a magician. I’ve threaded messages to Stability in Cork till I’m blue in the face, but how can I make them answer if they won’t? Stability is not a democracy; they’ll look after their own first and answer only to Dublin.”

  Martin’s saved, sort of, by the bell. The kids troop out, and my two and I set off along the main road out of Kilcrannog, Lorelei and Rafiq taking it in turns to sniff the cola eraser. The scent awakens very early memories for Lorelei, but Rafiq’s too young to have tasted the real thing, and he keeps asking, “But what is cola? A fruit or a herb or what?”

  The last house out of the town happens to be Muriel Boyce’s, standing alone after a row of terraced houses. It’s big and blockish, every window has net curtains, and its conservatory is now a greenhouse, like most other conservatories round here. The three houses before Muriel Boyce’s are occupied by three of her four big thumping sons and their wives, who seem to give birth only to boys, so the houses are referred to collectively as “Boyce Row.” I remember Ed saying how in tribal areas of Afghanistan sons mean power; the Endarkenment’s taking us the same way. Crosses are painted over Boyce Row’s windows and doors. Muriel Boyce has always been devout, organizing trips to Lourdes in the old days, but since her husband “was called to the Lord” two years ago—appendicitis—her piety has grown fangs and she’s let the hedge grow tall, though that doesn’t stop her seeing out, somehow. We’ve already passed her house when I hear her call my name. We turn, and she appears at her garden gate. She’s dressed nunnishly and has her lumpish twenty-year-old son, Dónal, with her. Dónal wears cutoff shorts and a wife-beater’s vest. “Beautiful evening it’s turned into, Holly. Lorelei, aren’t ye after shooting up tall into a pretty young thing? And hello, Rafiq. What class are ye in at our school up above?”

  “Fourth,” says Rafiq, cautiously. “Hello.”

  “Lovely day, Lolly,” says Dónal Boyce, and Lorelei nods and looks away.

  Muriel Boyce says, “Ye’re after having fox trouble, I hear?”

  “You heard correctly, yes,” I reply.

  “Now isn’t that fierce unlucky?” She tuts. “How many birds are you after losing altogether?”

  “Four.”

  “Four, is it?” She shakes her head. “Any of your best layers?”

  “One or two.” I shrug, wanting to move on. “Eggs are eggs.”

  “That hound o’ yours got the fox, I gather?”

  “He did.” Hoping she’ll ask me to vote for her so I can give a vague reply and go, I say, “I see you’re running for mayor.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to, but the Lord insisted so I’m obeying. People’re free to vote as they choose, of course—you won’t catch me giving my friends and neighbors the ‘hard sell.’ ” Father Brady’s doing that for you, I think, and Muriel brushes away a fly. “No, no. It’s about the youngsters,” she smiles at Lorelei and Rafiq, “that I was wanting a word with ye, Holly.”

  The kids look puzzled. “I haven’t done anything,” protests Rafiq.

  “Nobody’s saying you have,” Muriel Boyce looks at me, “but is it true you’re refusing to let Father Brady speak to them about the Lord’s Good News?”

  “Are you talking about the religion class?”

  “About Father Brady’s Bible study, yes.”

  “We’ve opted out. Which is a private matter.”

  Muriel Boyce looks away, sighing over Dunmanus Bay. “The whole parish admired how you’ve rolled up your sleeves, so to speak, when the Lord gave these two to your care—at your point in life. And when one isn’t even your blood! Nobody could fault you.”

  “Blood doesn’t come into it.” Now I’m riled. “I didn’t give Rafiq a home because the parish admires me, or because ‘the Lord’ wanted me to—I did it because it was the right thing to do.”

  Muriel Boyce’s smile is pained. “Which is exactly why the parish is so dismayed, now ye’re hell-bent on neglecting their spiritual needs. The Lord’s so disappointed. Your own angel’s crying, right next to you, right now. Youngsters in these godless times need the power of prayer more than ever. It’s as if ye’re not feeding them.”

  Lorelei and Rafiq look around and see, of course, nothing.

  “Oh, I can see all your angels, children.” Muriel Boyce gives a glazed look above our heads, just as prophetesses are supposed to. “Yours is like a bigger sister, Lorelei, but with long golden hair, and Rafiq’s is a man, a darkie but sure so was one o’ the Wise Men, but all three are sad, so sad. Your grandmother’s angel is weeping her blue eyes red, so she is. It breaks my heart. She’s begging ye to—”

  “Enough of this, Muriel, f’Chrissakes.”

  “Yes, it is for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ that I’m—”

  “No no no no no. First off, you are not the parish. Second, I’m afraid the angels you ‘see’ happen to agree with Muriel Boyce too often to be plausible. Third, Lorelei’s parents weren’t churchgoers and Rafiq’s mum was from a Muslim background, so as the children’s guardian I’m respecting their parents’ wishes. We’re done here. Good day to you, Muriel.”

  Muriel Boyce’s fingers clutching the top of her gate remind me of talons. “There’s many who were ‘atheists’ when Satan was dazzling them with money, abortions, science, and Sky TV but who’re sorry now they’ve seen what it’s all led to.” With one hand she holds her crucifix towards me as if it’ll awe me into submission. “But the Lord forgives sinners who seek forgiveness. Father Brady’s willing to come and speak with ye—at home. And it’s churches not mosques we have in this part of the world, thanks be to God.”

  Dónal, I notice, is nakedly eyeing up Lorelei.

  I push the pram away and tell the kids, “C’mon.”

  “We’ll see if ye change your tune,” Muriel Boyce calls after me, “when the Lord’s Party’s controlling the Co-op, deciding what’s going into whose ration boxes, so we will.”

  Shocked, I turn around. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a fact, Holly Sykes. Here’s another: The food in your bellies is Iri
sh food. Christian food. If it’s not to your liking, there’s lots of houses going begging in England, I hear, near Hinkley.”

  I hear wood being chopped. “Sheep’s Head is my home.”

  “There’s plenty hereabouts who won’t be seeing things that way, not when belts are tighter. Ye’d do well to remember.”

  My legs feel weak and stiff, like stilts, as I walk off.

  Dónal Boyce calls after us, “I’ll be seeing you, Lol.”

  He’s a leery, muscly, horny threat. We leave the village passing the SLÁN ABHAILE sign and the old 80 KPH. speed limit sign. “I don’t like the way Dónal Boyce was looking at me, Gran,” says Lorelei.

  “Good,” I tell her. “I didn’t, either.”

  “Me neither,” says Rafiq. “Dónal Boyce is a jizbag.”

  I open my mouth to say, “Language,” but don’t.

  FORTY MINUTES LATER we arrive home, at the end of the bumpy Dooneen track. “Dooneen” means “little fortress” and that’s how our cottage feels to me, even as I stow the food, items from the market and our ration boxes. While the kids get changed I try my tab to see if I can get through to Brendan, or even one of my closer relatives in Cork, but no luck; all I get is a SERVER NOT DETECTED message, and IF PROBLEMS PERSIST, CONTACT YOUR LOCAL DEALER. Useless. I check the hens and retrieve three fresh eggs from the coop. When Rafiq and Lorelei are ready, we go through the thicket between our garden and Mo’s, and over to her back door. It’s open, and Zimbra comes padding into the kitchen wagging his tail. He used to jump up more when he was a puppy, but now he’s calmer. Mo’s ration box and the eggs go in her cupboard. I click it shut to keep out the mice. We find Mo in her sunroom playing twohanded Scrabble with herself. “Welcome back, scholars. How were school and the market?”

  “Okay,” says Rafiq, “but we saw a drone this morning.”

  “Yes, I saw it too. Stability must have fuel to burn. Odd.”