The Bone Clocks (14 page)

“Manchester, Birmingham, semi-homeless, homeless. Begging in the Bull Ring shopping center. Sleeping in squats, in flats of friends who weren’t so friendly after all. Surviving. Barely. It’s one miracle I’m here to tell the tale, and another that I dodged getting sent back—until you’re eighteen, see, all Social Services’ll do is pass you back to the local authority you came from. I still have nightmares about my father welcoming home the prodigal daughter while the liaison officer looks on, thinking,
All’s well that ends well
, and then my father after he’s locked the door. Now, why I’m telling you this tale of joy and light is to show you how bad it has to be before running away is a smart move. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks, you don’t get out. It’s taken me five years until I can dare to think the worst is behind me. Thing is, I look at you, and—” She breaks off ’cause a boy on a bike’s skidded to a halt smack bang in front of us. “Sykes,” he says.

Ed Brubeck? Ed Brubeck. “What’re
you
doing here?”

His hair’s spiky with sweat. “Looking for you.”

“Don’t tell me you
cycled
? What ’bout school?”

“Maths exam this morning, but I’m free now. Put my bike on the train and just rode over from Sheerness. Look—”

“You must
really
want your baseball cap back.”

“The cap doesn’t matter, Sykes, but we need—”

“Hang on—how did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t, but I remembered talking about Gabriel Harty’s farm, so I phoned him earlier. No Holly Sykes, he said, only a Holly Rothmans. I thought it might be you, and I was right, wasn’t I?”

Gwyn mutters, “I’m saying nothing.”

I say, “Brubeck, Gwyn, Gwyn, Brubeck,” and they nod at each other before Brubeck turns back to me.

“Something’s happened.”

Gwyn gets up. “See you in the penthouse suite.” She gives me a go-for-it-girl look and waltzes off.

I turn back to Brubeck, a bit annoyed. “I heard.”

He looks uncertain. “Then why are you here?”

“It’s on Radio Kent. The three murders. At that Iwade place.”

“Not that.” Brubeck bites his lip. “Is Jacko here? Your brother?”

“Jacko? Course not. Why would he be here?”

Sheba comes running up, barking at Brubeck, who’s hesitating, like someone who’s got abysmal news. “Jacko’s gone missing.”

My head spins as it sinks in. Brubeck tells Sheba, “Shut
up
!” and Sheba obeys.

I ask feebly, “When?”

“Between Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

“Jacko?” I must’ve heard it wrong, over the noise. “Missing? But … I mean, he can’t be. The pub’s locked at night.”

“The police were at school earlier, and Mr. Nixon came into the exam hall to ask if anyone had information about where you were. I almost spoke up but I’m here instead. Sykes? Can you hear me?”

I’ve got that nasty floaty feeling you get in a lift when you can’t trust the floor. “But I haven’t seen Jacko since Saturday morning …”

“
I
know, but the cops don’t. They probably think that you and Jacko cooked something up between you.”

“But that’s rubbish, Brubeck—you know it is.”

“Yes, I
do
know it is, but you have to tell them that, otherwise they won’t start searching for Jacko as hard as they should.”

My mind zigzags from trains to London, to police frogmen dredging the Thames, to a murderer in the hedgerows. “But Jacko doesn’t even know where I am!” I’m shaking and the sky’s slipped and my head’s splitting. “He’s not a normal kid and—and—and—”

“Listen, listen.” Brubeck’s caught me and is holding my head like a boy about to kiss me, but he’s not. “
Listen
. Grab your bag. We’re going back to Gravesend. On my bike, then on the train. I’ll get you through this, Holly. I promise. Let’s go. Now.”

“B
OOM
IER FROM THE TENORS,
” commands the choirmaster. “Get our firm diaphragms wobbling, boys! Wibble-wobble, wibble-wobble. Trebles, le
sss sss
ybilanccce on the e
sss
—we aren’t a troupe of Gollums, now, are we?—and
t
ap ou
t
those
t
s. Adrian B—if you can nail the top C in ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains,’ you can nail it here. Once more with more welly! A-o
ne
, a-t
wo
, and a—” King’s College Choir’s sixteen bat-eared choristers, bereft of hairstyles, and fourteen choral scholars exhale in unison …

Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to the Virgin” launches, chasing its echoey tail around the sumptuous ceiling before dive-bombing the scattering of winter tourists and students sitting there in the chancel in our damp coats. For me, Britten’s a hit-and-miss composer; prolix on occasion but, when pumped and primed, the old queen binds your quivering soul to the mast and lashes it with fiery sublimity …

In my idler moments, I do wonder what music I’ll hear as I lie dying, surrounded by a bevy of hot nurses. Nothing more exultant than “Hymn to the Virgin” occurs to me, but I worry that when the big moment arrives DJ Unconscious will launch me off on the back
of that “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” and for once in my life I’ll have no redress. World, shut yer mouth, for one of the canon’s most glorious musical orgasms, on the “Cry”:

The hairs on my neck prickle, as if blown on. By her, for example, sitting across the aisle. She wasn’t there when I last looked. Her eyes are closed to drink in the music so I drink her in. Late thirties … vanilla hair, creamy-skinned, beaujolais lips, cheekbones you’d slice your thumb on. Slim beneath a midnight-blue winter coat. A defected Russian opera singer, waiting to meet her handler. You never know, this is Cambridge. A true, rare ten …

Let her stay put after the choir troop out. Let her turn to the young man across the aisle and murmur, “Wasn’t that the very breath of heaven?” Let us discuss the
Peter Grimes
Interludes, and Bruckner’s Ninth. Let us avoid talk of her domestic arrangements as we drink coffee at the County Hotel. Let coffee turn into trout and red wine, and to hell with my last pint of the Michaelmas term with the boys at the Buried Bishop. Let us climb the carpeted stairs to that snug suite where Fitzsimmons’s mother and I frolicked during fresher’s week. Ouch. The Kraken in my boxer shorts wakes. I’m male, twenty-one, it’s been ten days since I last got laid, what do you expect? But I can hardly adjust myself with a lady watching. Oh? Well well well, if she isn’t discreetly studying me. I watch Rubens’s
Adoration of the Magi
above the altar, and wait for her to make a move.

•   •   •

T
HE CHOIR TROOPS
out but the woman stays put. A tourist aims his fat camera at the Rubens before Security Goblin snarls, “No flash!” The chancel empties, the goblin returns to his booth by the organ, and minutes trickle by. My Rolex says three-thirty. I’ve an essay to polish on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, but an eerie goddess is sitting six feet away, waiting for me to make a move. “I always think,” I tell her, “that seeing the choir’s blood, sweat, and tears as they work on a piece deepens the mystery of music, not lessens it. Does that make sense?”

She tells me, “In an undergraduate way, yes.”

Oh, you sultry minx. “Post-grad? Staff?”

Ghost of a smile. “Do I dress like an academic?”

“Definitely not.” There are Francophone curves in her soft voice. “Though I’m guessing you can sting like one.”

No acknowledgment. “I just feel at home here.”

“Almost true for me—my rooms are at Humber College, only a few minutes away. Most third-years live off campus, but I can drop in to hear the choir most days, supervisions allowing.”

A droll look, saying,
Someone’s a quick worker, isn’t he?

I shrug cutely.
I might get hit by a bus tomorrow
.

She says, “Cambridge has met your expectations?”

“If you don’t use Cambridge well, you don’t deserve to be here. Erasmus, Peter the Great, and Lord Byron all lodged in my rooms. It’s a fact.” Bullshit, but I love to act. “I think of them, lying on my bed, staring up at the very same ceiling, in our respective centuries. That, for me, is Cambridge.” And that’s one tried-and-tested pick-up line. “My name’s Hugo, by the way. Hugo Lamb.”

Instinct warns me off attempting a handshake.

Her lips say, “Immaculée Constantin.”

My, oh, my. A seven-syllable hand grenade. “French?”

“I was born in Zürich, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m fond of Switzerland. I go skiing in La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès most years; one of my friends has a chalet there. Do you know it?”

“Once upon a time.” She places a suede-gloved hand on her knee. “You major in politics, Hugo Lamb.”

That’s impressive. “How could you tell?”

“Speak to me about power. What is it?”

I do believe I’m being out-Cambridged. “You want me to discuss power? Right here and now?”

Her shapely head tilts. “No time except the present.”

“Okay.”
Only for a ten
. “Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would.”

Immaculée Constantin is unreadable. “How?”

“By coercion and reward. Carrots and sticks, though in bad light one looks much like the other. Coercion is predicated upon the fear of violence or suffering. ‘Obey, or you’ll regret it.’ Tenth-century Danes exacted tribute by it; the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact rested upon it; and playground bullies rule by it. Law and order relies upon it. That’s why we bang up criminals and why even democracies seek to monopolize force.” Immaculée Constantin watches my face as I talk; it’s thrilling and distracting. “Reward works by promising ‘Obey and feel the benefit.’ This dynamic is at work in, let’s say, the positioning of NATO bases in nonmember states, dog training, and putting up with a shitty job for your working life. How am I doing?”

Security Goblin’s sneeze booms through the chapel.

“You scratch the surface,” says Immaculée Constantin.

I feel lust and annoyance. “Scratch deeper, then.”

She brushes a tuft of fluff off her glove and appears to address her hand: “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth,
are
the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the
Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ That thought sickens me, Hugo Lamb, like nothing else. Doesn’t it sicken you?”

Immaculée Constantin’s voice lulls like rain at night.

The silence in King’s College Chapel has a mind all its own.

“What do you expect?” I say eventually. “We all have to die one day. End of. But in the meantime, doing unto others is a damn sight more attractive than being done to by others.”

“What is born must one day die. So says the contract of life, yes? I am here to tell you, however, that in rare instances this iron clause may be … rewritten.”

I look at her calm and serious face. “What level of nuts are we talking here? Fitness regimes? Vegan diets? Organ transplants?”

“A form of power that allows one to defer death in perpetuity.”

Yes, she’s a ten, but if she’s Scientologically slash cryogenically oriented, Ms. Constantin needs to understand that I don’t eat bullshit. “Did you just cross the border into the Land of the Crazy People?”

“The lie of the land has no notion of borders.”

“But you’re talking about immortality as if it’s real.”

“No. I’m talking about the perpetual deferral of death.”

“Hang on, did Fitzsimmons send you? Or Richard Cheeseman? Is this a setup?”

“No. This is a seed.”

This is too creative to be a Fitzsimmons prank. “A seed that grows into what, exactly?”

“Into your cure.”

Her sobriety is unsettling. “But I’m not ill.”

“Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you’re not ill? Look at the painting. Look at it.” She nods towards
The Adoration of the Magi
. I obey. I always will. “Thirteen subjects, if you count them, like the Last Supper. Shepherds, the Magi, the relatives. Study their faces, one by one. Who believes this newborn manikin can one day conquer death? Who wants proof? Who suspects the Messiah is a false prophet? Who knows that he is in a painting, being watched? Who is watching you back?”