The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  Lorelei studies the Scrabble board. “Who’s winning, Mo?”

  “I’m demolishing myself: 384 versus 119. Any homework?”

  “I’ve got quadratic equations,” says Lorelei. “Yummy.”

  “Ah, sure you can do those in your sleep now, so you can.”

  “I’ve got geography,” says Rafiq. “Ever see an elephant, Mo?”

  “Yes. At zoos, and at a reservation in South Africa.”

  Rafiq’s impressed. “Were they really as big as houses? That’s what Mr. Murnane said.”

  “As big as small cottages, maybe. African elephants were bigger than Indian ones. Magnificent beasts.”

  “Then why did people let them go extinct?”

  “There’s plenty of blame for everyone, but the last herds were slaughtered so that people in China could show how rich they were by giving each other knickknacks made of ivory.”

  Mo isn’t one to sugar pills. I watch Rafiq’s face go almost sulky as he digests this. “I wish I’d been born sixty years ago,” he says. “Elephants, tigers, gorillas, polar bears … All the best animals’ve gone. All we’ve got left is rats and crows and earwigs.”

  “And some first-class dogs,” I say, patting Zimbra’s head.

  We all fall quiet at once, for no obvious reason. Mo’s husband, John, fifteen years dead, smiles out of his frame above the hearth. It’s a beautiful likeness in oils painted on a summer’s day in the garden of Mo and John’s old cottage on Cape Clear. John Cullin was blind and his life wasn’t always an easy one, but he lived at a civilized time in a civilized place where people had full bellies. John wrote fine poetry. Admirers wrote to him from America.

  That world wasn’t made of stone, but sand.

  I’m afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.

  LATER, LORELEI GOES off to Knockroe Farm for her sleepover. Mo comes down to the cottage for dinner, where Rafiq and us two old ladies eat broad beans and potatoes fried in butter. At Rafiq’s age Aoife would have turned her nose up at such plain fare, but before he reached Ireland Rafiq knew real stomach-gnawing hunger and he never turns anything down. Dessert is blackberries we picked on the way home and a little stewed rhubarb. Dinner is quieter without our resident teenager, and I’m reminded of when Aoife first left home to go to college. Once the dishes are done, we all play cribbage listening to an RTÉ program about how to dig a well. Rafiq then escorts Mo home before it gets dark, while I empty the latrine bucket into the sea below and check the wind direction; still easterly. I round the hens up into their house and bolt its door shut, wishing I’d done so last night as well. Rafiq comes back, yawns, strip-washes in a bucket of cold water, cleans his teeth, and takes himself up to bed. I read an old copy of The New Yorker from December 2031, savoring a story by Ersilia Holt and marveling at the adverts and the wealth that existed so recently.

  At eleven-fifteen P.M. I switch on my tab to patch Brendan, but when the thing asks for my password, I blank. My password. F’Chrissakes. I never change it. It was something to do with dogs … Years ago I’d laugh about these flashes of forgetfulness, but at my age, it’s like the beginning of a slow-motion death sentence. If you can’t trust your mind anymore, you’re mentally homeless. I get up to retrieve my little book where I write things down, but Zimbra’s on my foot, and I remember: NEWKY, the name of the dog we had when I was a girl. I enter the password and try to thread Brendan. After five days of letdowns I’m ready for the error message, but on the first go I get a hi-res image of my brother frowning into his tab, 250 miles away in his study in his house on Exmoor. Something’s wrong: His strands of white hair are a mess, his haggard, puffy face is a mess, his voice is a nervous mess. “Holly? I can see you! Can you see me?”

  “And hear you, Brendan, clear as a bell. What’s happened?”

  “Well, apart from”—he reaches offscreen to get a drink, and I’m left looking at a photo on his shelf of a twenty-years-ago Brendan Sykes shaking hands with King Charles on Tintagel Gated Village’s opening day—“apart from the west of England looking more like the Book of Revelation and a nuclear reactor down the road about to blow? Jackdaws. We had a visit two nights ago.”

  I feel sick. “In the village, or in your actual house?”

  “The village, but that was bad enough. Four nights ago our dedicated guards all buggered off, taking half the food in the store and the backup generator.” Brendan’s half drunk, I realize. “Most of us stayed—where’d we go to?—and we drew up a security rota.”

  “You could come here.”

  “If I don’t get sliced and diced by highwaymen at Swansea. If the trafficker doesn’t cut my throat a mile off the Welsh coast. If Immigration at Ringaskiddy takes my bribe.”

  I know now, if I didn’t before, that I’ll never see Brendan in the flesh again. “Maybe Oisín Corcoran could help?”

  “They’re all too busy trying to survive to help an eighty-year-old English Asylumite. No, you reach an age when … journeys, voyages, are for other people, not you.” He drinks his whisky. “I was telling you about the Jackdaws. At one o’clock or so this morning the alarms all went off, so I got dressed, got my .38 and went to the storehouse, where about a dozen of the bastards with guns, knives, and face-masks were loading up a van. Jem Linklater walked up and told the organizer, ‘That’s our food you’re thieving, sunshine, and we’ve the right to defend it.’ He shone a solar right in Jem’s face and said, ‘It’s ours now, Granddad, so back off, and that’s your last warning.’ Jem didn’t back off, and Jem”—Brendan shuts his eyes—“Jem got his head blown in.”

  My hand’s over my mouth. “Jesus. You saw this?”

  “From ten feet away. The murderer said, ‘Any more heroes?’ Then a gun went off and the guard went down, and total bloody anarchy broke out, and the Jackdaws realized we weren’t quite the doddery old farts they’d expected. Someone shot out the headlamps on the van. It was too dark to know who was where, what was what, and”—Brendan’s chest’s heaving—“I ran into the tomato polytunnel, where a Jackdaw came pounding at me, waving a machete, I thought … And my .38 was suddenly in my hand with the safety off, a bang sounded, and something skidded into me … His mask’d come away, somehow, and I saw—I saw he was a boy, younger than Lorelei. The machete was a garden trowel. And”—Brendan controls his voice—“I shot him, Hol. Straight through the heart.”

  My brother’s trembling and his face is shining, and a memory comes to me of a woman lying at a crossroads in an impossible labyrinth with her head staved in and a marble rolling pin dropping from my hand. I manage to say, “Under the circumstances …”

  “I know. I thought it was him or me and some reflex kicked in. I dug his grave myself, at least. That’s a lot of earth to shift, at my age. We got four of them, they got six of us, plus Harry McKay’s boy, who’s in a bad way with a punctured lung. There’s a clinic in Exmouth, but care standards are pretty Middle Ages, by all accounts.”

  “Bren, if you can’t come here, perhaps I could try to—”

  “No!” For the first time Brendan looks afraid. “For your sake, for Lol’s sake, for Rafiq’s sake, for God’s sake stay put. Traveling’s too dangerous now, unless you’ve ten armed men willing to kill, and Sheep’s Head Peninsula’s probably the safest place in western Europe. When Pearl Occident first leased the West Cork coastal strip I thought, What a humiliation for the Paddies, but at least you’ve still got law and order there, of sorts. At least—”

  Brendan’s features freeze in midsyllable, as if the wind changed direction just as he pulled a weird face. “Brendan? Can you hear me?” Nothing. I groan with frustration and Zimbra looks up, worried. I try rethreading, I try resetting my tab, I try waiting. I didn’t even ask if he’d heard from Sharon in Australia, but now the coverage has gone and something tells me it won’t be coming back.

  UP IN MY room, I can’t get to sleep. Shadows bloom in the corners, swaying a little against darker darkness. The wind’s risen, the roof creaks, the sea booms. What Brendan said is on
imperfectly remembered, nonstop shuffle repeat: I think of better things to say, calming things, but as usual it’s too late. My big brother, the onetime multimillionaire property developer, looked so hollowed out and so fragile. I envy the God-intoxicated Boyces of the world. Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better. At the end of my garden the sound of waves dies and gives birth to the sound of waves, forever and ever, Amen. Across the corridor, Rafiq says something in his sleep, quite loud and afraid and in Arabic. I get up, go to his room, and say, “You okay, Raf?” but he’s asleep and mumbling, so I go back to my warm bed. My stomach makes a buried squeal. Once upon a time “my body” meant “me,” pretty much, but now “me” is my mind and my body is a selection box of ailments and aches. My molar throbs, the pain in my right side is jaggedy, rheumatism rusts my knuckles and knees, and if my body was a car I’d have traded it in, years ago. But my small, late, unexpected family—me, Lorelei, Rafiq, Zimbra, and Mo—will last only as long as my body functions. The O’Dalys would look after the kids as best they could, I know, but the world is getting worse, not better. I’ve seen the future and it’s hungry.

  My fingers find Jacko’s silver labyrinth, looped on its cord over my bedpost, and I press it against my forehead. The pattern of its walls, passageways, and junctions cools my hot brain down a bit. “I doubt you survived,” I murmur to any real angel, to any surviving Horologist, “so I doubt you’ll hear me. But let me be wrong. Give me one final abracadabra. Two golden apples, if you can spare them. Get the kids out of here, somewhere safe, if anywhere is safe. Please.”

  October 28

  MY OLD CURTAIN FILTERS the early rose-orange sun, but it’s cold rose-orange, not warm rose-orange. The wind and waves sound busy this morning, rather than relentless, like last night. I hear Zimbra coming up the stairs, and here he is, nosing his way into my room and wagging his tail to say good morning. Strange how he always knows when I’m awake. I’m aware I’ve forgotten something, something deeply unpleasant. What was it? Brendan. I wonder how he is this morning. I hope he’s being looked after. Only five years ago I could have booked myself a seat on an airplane, driven to the airport, flown over to Bristol, and within the hour been at Tintagel Gated Village. Now it’s like a trip to the moon …

  What can’t be helped can’t be helped. I’ve jobs to be doing. I get out of bed like an old lady, carefully, open the curtains and open my window. Dunmanus Bay’s still a bit choppy, but I see a sailboat—probably Aileen Jones, out checking her lobster pots. The sea holly and myrtle at the end of the garden are being buffeted; back they bend towards the cottage, then spring up, then bend back towards the cottage. This means something. Something I’m missing, even though it’s there in front of me, as plain as day.

  It’s an east wind, blowing from England; from Hinkley Point.

  RADIO POC ISN’T broadcasting this morning; there’s just a looped message saying the station is off the air today for operational reasons. So I switch to JKFM and leave it playing the Modern Jazz Quartet as I quarter an apple for my breakfast and heat up a couple of potato cakes for Rafiq. Soon he smells the garlic and clops down the stairs in his makeshift dressing gown and he tells me about a zipwire some of the older village boys are planning up in Five Acre Wood. After we’ve eaten I feed the chickens, water the pumpkins in the polytunnel, make a few days’ worth of dog biscuits from oats, husk, and mutton fat, and sharpen the hair scissors while Rafiq cleans our drinking-water tub, refills it by taking the long hosepipe up to the spring, then goes down to the pier with his fishing rod. Zimbra joins him. Later he comes back with a pollack and a mackerel. Rafiq has bits of memories of fishing in sunny blue water before he came to Ireland, he says, and Declan O’Daly says the boy’s a natural angler—luckily for his and Lorelei’s diet, as they only eat meat once a month, at most. I’ll bake the fish for dinner tonight, and serve them up with mashed swede. I make a pot of mint tea and start cutting Rafiq’s hair. He’s long overdue a trim and it’ll be headlice season at school soon. “I saw Aileen Jones through my telescope earlier,” he says. “Out on the bay in the Lookfar, checking her lobster pot.”

  “That’s great,” I say, “but I hope you were careful—”

  “—not to point it at the sun,” he says. “ ’Course I didn’t, Holly. I’m not a total doofus, y’know?”

  “Nobody’s saying you’re even a partial doofus,” I tell him mildly. “It’s just once you’re a parent, a sort of … accident detector switches on, and never switches off. You’ll see, one day, if you’re ever a father.”

  “Euuuyyyuckh” is what Rafiq thinks of that prospect.

  “Hold still. Lol should be doing this. She’s the better stylist.”

  “No way! Lol’d make me look like a boy in Five-star Chongqing.”

  “Like a boy in what?”

  “Five-star Chongqing. They’re Chinese. All the girls fancy them.”

  And dream dreams of lives of plenty in Shanghai, I don’t doubt. They say there are only two women to every three men in China ’cause of selective feticide, and when the Lease Lands were new and buses still ran to Cork, my relatives there told me about local girls being recruited as “China brides” and sailing away to full stomachs, 24/7 electricity, and Happy Ever After. I was old enough to have my doubts about the recruiting agencies’ testimonials. I switch the radio from JKFM to RTÉ in case there’s a report about Hinkley, which went unmentioned on the eight A.M. news. Zimbra comes and puts his head on Rafiq’s lap and looks up at the boy. Rafiq musses his head. The RTÉ announcer reads the birth notices, where people thread the program the names of new babies, birthweights, the parents’ names, parishes, and counties. I like hearing them. Christ knows these kids’ lives won’t be easy, especially for the majority who are born beyond the Pale or the Cork Cordon, but each name feels like a tiny light held up against the Endarkenment.

  I snip a bit more around Rafiq’s right ear to match his left.

  I snip off too much, so now have to snip around his left.

  “I wish all this never had to change,” says Rafiq, unexpectedly.

  I’m pleased he’s content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts. “Change is sort of hardwired into the world.”

  The boy asks, “What does ‘hardwired’ mean?”

  “A computer phrase from the old days. I just mean … what’s real changes. If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.” I snip the hairs up his neck. “Even photos change, mind. They fade.”

  We say nothing for a bit. I accidentally spike the bit between the tendons on Rafiq’s neck and he goes, “Ouch,” and I say, “Sorry,” and he says, “No bother,” like an Irishman. Crunchie, a semiwild tomcat I named after a long-ago chocolate bar, strolls across the kitchen windowsill. Zimbra notices, but can’t be bothered to make a fuss. Rafiq asks, “Holly, d’you think Cork University’ll be open again by the time I’m eighteen?”

  I love him too much to puncture his dreams. “Possibly. Why?”

  “ ’Cause I want to be an engineer when I grow up.”

  “Good. Civilization needs more engineers.”

  “Mr. Murnane said we need to fix stuff, build stuff, move stuff, like oil states do, but do it all without oil.”

  And start forty years ago, I think. “He’s right.” I pull up a chair in front of Rafiq. “Lower your head, I’ll do your fringe.”

  I lift up his fringe with a comb and snip off the hair that shows through its teeth, leaving a centimeter. I’m getting better at this. Then I see Rafiq’s got this strange intense look on his face; it makes me stop. I turn the radio down to a mumble. “What is it, Raf love?”

  He looks like he’s trying to catch a far-off sound. Then he looks at the window. Crunchie’s gone. “I remember someone cutting my hair. A woman. I can’t see her face, but she’s talking Arabic.”

  I lean back and lower the scissors. “One of your sisters, perhaps? Someone must’ve cut your hair before you were fi
ve.”

  “Was my hair short when I got here?”

  “I don’t remember it being long. You were half starved, half drowned, then you nearly died of hypothermia. The state of your hair didn’t register. But this woman, Raf—can you see her face?” Rafiq scrunches up his face. “It’s like, if I don’t look, I see her, but if I look at her, her face melts away. When I dream, I sometimes see her, but when I wake up, the faces’ve gone again, leaving just the name, like. One was Assia, I think she’s my aunt … or maybe a sister. Maybe it’s her with the scissors. Hamza and Ismail, they were my brothers, on the boat.” I’ve heard this a few times, but I don’t interrupt Rafiq when he’s in the mood to study the surviving fragments of his life before Ireland. “Hamza was funny, and Ismail wasn’t. There were so many men on the boat—we were all jammed up with each other. There were no women, and only one other boy, but he was a Berber and I didn’t understand his Arabic very well. Most of the passengers were seasick, but I was okay. We all went to the toilet over the side. Ismail said we were going to Norway. I said, ‘What’s Norway?’ and Ismail said it’s a safe place where we could earn money, where they didn’t have Ebola and nobody tried to shoot you … That sounded good, but the days and nights on the boat were bad.” Rafiq’s frown deepens. “Then we saw lights across the water, down a long bay, it was night, and there was a big fight. Hamza was saying to the captain in Arabic, ‘It can’t be Norway,’ and the captain was saying, ‘Why would I lie to you?’ and Hamza had a sort of compass in his hand, saying, ‘Look, we’re not north enough,’ and the captain threw it over the side of the boat and Hamza told the others, ‘He’s lying to us to save fuel. Those lights aren’t Norway, it’s somewhere else!’ Then all the shouting began, and then the guns were going off, and …” Rafiq’s eyes and voice are hollow. “That’s where I am for most of my nightmares. We’re all jammed in too tight …”

  I remember how the Horologists could redact bad memories, and wish I could grant Rafiq the same mercy. Or not, I dunno.