The Bone Clocks (30 page)

“Good,” Aoife pronounces, teetering on the brink of sleep …

… she’s gone. I pull the duvet over her My Little Pony pajama top and kiss her forehead, remembering the week in 1997 when Holly and I made this precious no-longer-quite-so-little life-form. The Hale-Bopp Comet was adorning the night sky, and thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in San Diego so their souls could be picked up by a UFO in the comet’s tail and be transported to a higher state of consciousness beyond human. I rented a cottage in Northumbria and we had plans to go hiking along Hadrian’s Wall, but hiking didn’t turn out to be the principal activity of the week. Now look at her. I wonder how she sees me. A
bristly giant who teleports into her life and teleports out again for mystifying reasons, perhaps—not so different from how I saw my own father, I guess, except while I’m away on various assignments, Dad went away to various prisons. I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was a kid. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.

When I was back in February she was having her period.

I hear Holly’s key in the door. I feel vaguely guilty.

Not half as guilty as she’ll make me feel, though.

Holly’s having trouble with the lock so I go over, put the chain on, and open it up a crack. “Sorry, sweetheart,” I tell her, in my Michael Caine voice. “I never ordered no kinky massage. Try next door.”

“Let me in,” says Holly, sweetly, “or I’ll kick you in the nuts.”

“Nope, I didn’t order no kick in the nuts, neither. Try—”

Not so sweetly: “Brubeck, I need to use the loo!”

“Oh, all right, then.” I unchain the door and stand aside. “Even if you have come home too plastered to use a key, you dirty stop out.”

“The locks in this hotel are all fancy and burglar-proofed. You need a PhD to open the damn things.” Holly bustles past to the bathroom, peering down at Aoife in passing. “Plus I only had a
few
glasses of wine. Mam was there as well, remember.”

“Right, as if Kath Sykes was ever a girl to put the dampeners on a ‘wine-tasting session.’ ”

Holly closes the bathroom door. “Was Aoife okay?”

“She woke up for a second, otherwise not a squeak.”

“Good. She was
so
excited on the train down, I was afraid she was going to be up all night dancing on the ceiling.” Holly flushes the toilet to provide a bit of noise cover. I go over to the window again. The funfair at the end of the pier is winding down, by the look of it. Such a lovely night. My proposed six-month extension for
Spyglass
in Iraq is going to wreck it, I know. Holly opens the bathroom
door, smiling at me and drying her hands. “How did you spend your quiet night in? Snoozing, writing?”

Her hair’s up, she’s wearing a low-cut figure-hugging black dress and a necklace of black and blue stones. She hardly ever looks like that anymore. “Thinking impure thoughts about my favorite yummy mummy. Can I help you out of that dress, Miss Sykes?”

“Down, boy.” She fusses over Aoife. “We’re sharing a room with our daughter, you might have noticed.”

I walk over. “I can operate on silent mode.”

“Not tonight, Romeo. I’m having my period.”

Thing is, I haven’t been back often enough in the last six months to know when Holly’s period is. “Guess I’ll have to make do with a long, slow snog, then.”

“ ’Fraid so matey.” We kiss, but it’s not as long and slow as advertised, and Holly isn’t as drunk as I was half hoping. When was it that Holly stopped opening her mouth when we kiss? It’s like kissing a zipped-up zip. I think of Big Mac’s aphorism: In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex. I’m keeping my half of the deal—so far as I know—but sexually, Holly acts like she’s forty-five or fifty-five, not thirty-five. Of course I’m not allowed to complain, because that’s pressurizing her. Once Holly and I could talk about anything, anything, but all these no-go areas keep springing up. It all makes me … I’m not allowed to be sad either, because then I’m a sulky boy who isn’t getting the bag of sweets he thinks he deserves. I haven’t cheated on her—ever—not that Baghdad is a hotbed of sexual opportunity, but it’s depressing still being a fully functioning thirty-five-year-old male and having to take matters into my own hands so often. The Danish photojournalist in Tajikistan last year would’ve been up for it if I’d been less anxious about how I’d feel when the taxi dropped me off at Stoke Newington and I heard Aoife yelling, “It’s Daaaaddyyy!”

Holly turns back to the bathroom. She leaves the door open, and starts to remove her makeup. “So, are you going to tell me or not?”

I sit on the edge of the double bed, alert. “Tell you what?”

She dabs cotton wool under her eyes. “I don’t know yet.”

“What makes you think I … have anything to tell you?”

“Dunno, Brubeck. Must be my feminine intuition.”

I don’t believe in psychics but Holly can do a good impression of one. “Olive asked me to stay on in Baghdad until December.”

Holly freezes for a few seconds, drops the cotton wool, and turns to me. “But you’ve already told her you’re quitting in June.”

“Yeah. I did. But she’s asking me to reconsider.”

“But you told
me
you’re quitting in June. Me and Aoife.”

“I told her I’d call back on Monday. After discussing it with you.”

Holly’s looking betrayed. Or as if she’s caught me downloading porn. “We a
greed
, Brubeck. This would be your final final extension.”

“I’m only talking about another six months.”

“Oh, f’Chrissakes. You said that the
last
time.”

“Sure, but since I won the Sheehan-Dower Prize I’ve been—”

“
And
the time before that. ‘Half a year, then I’m out.’ ”

“This’ll cover a year of Aoife’s college expenses, Hol.”

“She’d rather have a living father than a smaller loan.”

“That’s just”—you can’t call angry women “hysterical” these days; it’s sexist—“hyperbole. Don’t stoop to that.”

“Is that what Daniel Pearl said to his partner before he jetted off to Pakistan? ‘That’s just hyperbole’?”

“That’s tasteless. And wrongheaded. And Pakistan’s not Iraq.”

She lowers the toilet lid and sits on it so we’re roughly at eye level. “I’m
sick
of wanting to puke with fear every time I hear the word ‘Iraq’ or ‘Baghdad’ on the radio. I’m
sick
of hardly sleeping. I’m
sick
of having to hide from Aoife how worried I am. Fantastic, you’re an in-demand award-winning journalist, but you have a six-year-old who wants help riding a bike with no stabilizers. Being a crackly voice for a minute every two or three days,
if
the satphone’s working, isn’t enough. You
are
a war junkie. Brendan was right.”

“No, I am
not
. I am a journalist doing what I do. Just as he does what he does and you do what you do.”

Holly rubs her head like I’m giving her a headache. “Go, then!
Back to Baghdad, to the bombs taking the front off your hotel. Pack. Go. Back to ‘what you do.’ If it’s more precious than us. Only you’d better get the tenants out of your King’s Cross flat ’cause the next time you’re back in London, you’ll be needing somewhere to live.”

I keep my voice low: “Will you
please
fucking
listen
to yourself?”

“No,
you
fucking listen to
your
fuckingself! Last month you agree to quit in June and come home. Your high-powered American editor says, ‘Make it December.’ You say, ‘Uh, okay.’ Then you tell me. Who are you with, Brubeck? Me and Aoife, or Olive Sun and
Spyglass
?”

“I’m being offered another six months’ work. That’s all.”

“No, it’s
not
‘all’ ’cause after Fallujah dies down or gets bombed to shit it’ll be Baghdad or Afghanistan Part Two or someplace else, there’s
always
someplace else, and on and on until the day your luck runs out and then I’m a widow and Aoife has no dad.
Yes
, I put up with Sierra Leone,
yes
, I survived your assignment in Somalia, but Aoife’s older now. She needs a dad.”

“Suppose I told you, ‘No, Holly, you can’t help homeless people anymore. Some have AIDS, some have knives, some are psychotic. Quit that job and work for … for Greenland supermarkets instead. Put all those people skills of yours to use on dried goods. In fact, I’m
ordering
you to, or I’ll kick you out.’ How would
you
respond?”

“F’Chrissakes,
the risks are different
.” Holly lets out an angry sigh. “Why bring this up in the middle of the bloody night? I’m Sharon’s matron of honor tomorrow. I’ll look like a hungover panda. You’re at a crossroads, Brubeck. Choose.”

I make an ill-advised quip: “More of a T-junction, technically.”

“Right. I’d forgotten. It’s all a joke to you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that’s not what I—”

“Well,
I
’m
not
joking. Quit
Spyglass
or move out. My house isn’t just a storage dump for your dead laptops.”

T
HREE O
’
CLOCK IN
the morning, and things are fairly shit. “Never let the sun set on an argument,” my uncle Norm used to say, but my
uncle Norm didn’t have a kid with a woman like Holly. I said “Good night” to her peaceably enough after switching off the lights, but her “Good
night
” back sounded very like “Screw you,” and she turned away. Her back’s as inviting as the North Korean border. It’s six o’clock in the morning in Baghdad now. The stars will be fading in the freeze-dried dawn, as skin-and-bone dogs pick through rubble for something to eat, the mosques’ Tannoys summon the devout, and bundles by the side of the road solidify into last night’s crop of dead bodies. The luckier corpses have a single bullet through the head. At the Safir Hotel, repairs will be under way. Daylight will be reclaiming my room at the back, 555. My bed will be occupied by Andy Rodriguez from
The Economist
—I owe him a favor from the fall of Kabul two years ago—but everything else should be the same. Above the desk is a map of Baghdad. No-go areas are marked in pink highlighter. After the invasion last March, the map was marked by only a few pink slashes here and there: Highway 8 south to Hillah, and Highway 10 west to Fallujah—other than that, you could drive pretty much wherever you wanted. But as the insurgency heated up the pink ink crept up the roads north to Tikrit and Mosul, where an American TV crew got shot to shit. Ditto the road to the airport. When Sadr City, the eastern third of Baghdad, got blocked off, the map became about three-quarters pink. Big Mac says I’m re-creating an old map of the British Empire. This makes the pursuit of journalism difficult in the extreme. I can no longer venture out to the suburbs to get stories, approach eyewitnesses, speak English on the streets, or even, really, leave the hotel. Since the new year my work for
Spyglass
has been journalism by proxy, really. Without Nasser and Aziz I’d have been reduced to parroting the Panglossian platitudes tossed to the press pack in the Green Zone. All of which begs the question, if journalism is so difficult in Iraq, why am I so anxious to hurry back to Baghdad and get to work?

Because it is difficult, but I’m one of the best.

Because only the best
can
work in Iraq right now.

Because if I don’t, two good men died for nothing.

W
INDSURFERS, SEAGULLS, AND SUN
, a salt-’n’-vinegar breeze, a glossy sea, and an early walk along the pier with Aoife. Aoife’s never been on a pier before and she loves it. She does a row of froggy jumps, enjoying the flicker of the LED bulbs in the heels of her trainers. We’d have killed for shoes like that when I was a kid, but Holly says it’s hard to find shoes that
don’t
light up these days. Aoife has a Dora the Explorer helium balloon tied to her wrist. I just paid a fiver for it to a charming Pole. I look behind us, trying to work out which window of the Grand Maritime Hotel is our room. I invited Holly out on the walk but she said she had to help Sharon get ready for a hairdresser who isn’t due until nine-thirty. It’s not yet eight-thirty. It’s her way of letting me know she hasn’t shifted her position from last night.

“Daddy? Daddy? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry, poppet,” I tell Aoife. “I was miles away.”

“No, you weren’t. You’re right here.”

“I was miles away metaphorically.”

“What’s meta … frickilly?”

“The opposite of literally.”

“What’s litter-lily?”

“The opposite of metaphorically.”

Aoife pouts. “Be
serious
, Daddy.”

“I’m always serious. What were you asking, poppet?”

“If you were any animal, what would you be? I’d be a white Pegasus with a black star on its forehead, and my name’d be Diamond Swiftwing. Then Mummy and me could fly to Bad Dad and see you. And Pegasuses don’t hurt the planet like airplanes—they only poo.
Grandpa Dave says when he was small
his
daddy used to hang apples on very tall poles over his allotment, so all the Pegasuses’d hover there, eat, and poo. Pegasus poo is so magic the pumpkins’d grow really really big, bigger than me, even, so just one would feed a family for a week.”

“Sounds like Grandpa Dave. Who’s the Bad Dad?”

Aoife frowns at me. “The place where
you
live, silly.”

“Baghdad. ‘
Bagh
-dad.’ But I don’t live there.” God, it’s lucky Holly didn’t hear that. “It’s just where I work.” I imagine a Pegasus over the Green Zone, and see a bullet-riddled corpse plummeting to earth and getting barbecued by Young Republicans. “But I won’t be there forever.”

“Mummy wants to be a dolphin,” says Aoife, “because they swim, talk a lot, smile, and they’re loyal. Uncle Brendan wants to be a Komodo dragon, ’cause there’re people on Gravesend Council he’d like to bite and shake to pieces, which is how Komodo dragons make their food smaller. Aunty Sharon wants to be an owl because owls are wise, and Aunt Ruth wants to be a sea otter so she can spend all day floating on her back in California and meet David Attenborough.” We reach a section of the pier where it widens out around an amusement arcade. Big letters spelling
BRIGHTON PIER
stand erect between two limp Union flags. The arcade’s not open yet, so we follow the walkway around the outside of the arcade. “What animal would you be, Daddy?”