The Bone Clocks (42 page)

I produce the plastic tag I refuse to wear around my neck. “If I get lost,” I tell her, “I’ll just follow the sound of knives sinking into vertebrae.” Inside the Win
²
Win tent, fellow initiates of the Order of Nicotine sit on barstools chatting, reading, or gazing hollow-eyed at smartphones, fingers busy. We are relics from the days when smoking in cinemas, airplanes, and trains was the natural order; when the Hollywood hero was identified by his cigarette. Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really
is
an expression of the rebel spirit—it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless. Careerless! Dad was addicted to the hurly-burly of getting a film made. Zoë’s addictions are fad diets, one-sided comparisons between London and Montreal, and obsessing over Juno and Anaïs’s vitamin intake.

I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs, and think dark thoughts
about Richard Cheeseman. Someone needs to skewer
his
reputation; jeopardize
his
livelihood; see if
he
shrugs it off with an “I bloody well won’t let it spoil my lunch.” When I stub out my cigarette, I imagine it’s into Cheeseman’s fatuous eye.

“Mr. Hershey?” A short fat boy in glasses and a maroon Burberry jacket interrupts my revenge fantasy. His head is shaved and he’s doughy and ill-looking, like Piggy in
Lord of the Flies
.

“My signing session’s over. I’ll be back in about five years.”

“No, I wish to give you a book.” The boy is a girl, with a soft American accent. She’s Asian American, or semi–Asian American.

“And I wish to smoke. It’s been a most exhausting few years.”

Ignoring the hint, the girl proffers a thin volume. “My poetry.” A self-funded volume, plainly. “
Soul Carnivores
, by Soleil Moore.”

“I don’t look at unsolicited manuscripts.”

“Humanity asks you to make an exception.”

“
Please
don’t think me rude, Miss Moore, but I’d rather perform root-canal surgery on myself, or wake up next to Aphra Booth in the breeding pen of an alien menagerie, or take six shots in the heart at close range than
ever
read your poems. Do you understand?”

Soleil Moore flaunts her lunatic’s credentials by staying calm. “Nobody wanted William Blake’s work, either.”

“William Blake had the merit of being William Blake.”

“Mr. Hershey, if you don’t read this and act, you’ll be complicit in animacide.” She places
Soul Carnivores
by the ashtray, wanting me to ask what that made-up word means. “You’re in the Script,” she says, as if that settles everything, before
finally
buggering off, as if she’s just delivered a killer argument. I take a few more puffs, sifting a conversation nearby: “She said, ‘Hershey’: I
thought
it was him”; “Nah, can’t be, Crispin Hershey’s not
that
old”; “Ask him”; “No, you ask him.” Cover blown, I crumple up my death-stick and flee my smoker’s Eden.

T
HE
B
RIT
F
ONE
P
AVILION
was designed by an eminent architect I’ve never heard of and “quotes” Hadrian’s Wall, the Tower of London,
a Tudor manor, postwar public housing, Wembley Stadium, and a Docklands skyscraper. What a sicked-up fry-up it is. A holographic flag of the BritNet logo flutters from its pinnacle and you ingress through a double-sized replica of 10 Downing Street’s famous black door. The security men are dressed as Beefeaters, and one asks for my VIP lanyard. I check my jacket; my trousers; my jacket again. “Oh, sod a dog, I put it down somewhere—look, I’m Crispin Hershey.”

“Sorry, sir,” says the Beefeater. “No ID, no entry.”

“Check your little list. Crispin Hershey. The writer.”

The Beefeater shakes his head. “I got my orders.”

“But I did a sodding event here only an hour ago.”

A second Beefeater comes over, eyes ashine with fan-glow: “You’re never—are you really … 
him
? Oh, my God, you
are …
”

“Yes, I
am
.” I glare at the first. “
Thank
you.”

The Worthy Beefeater walks me through the small lobby where lesser mortals are patted down and have their bags checked. “Sorry about that, sir. The Afghan president’s here tonight so we’re on amber alert. My colleague back there’s not au fait with contemporary fiction. And, to be fair, you do look older on your author photos.”

I double-check this pleasing sentence. “Do I?”

“If I weren’t such a fan, sir, I wouldn’t have recognized you.” We enter the pavilion proper, where hundreds are mingling, but the Worthy Beefeater has a favor to beg: “Look, sir, I shouldn’t ask, but …” he produces a book from inside his ridiculous uniform, “… your new book’s the best thing you’ve ever written. I went to bed with it and read
right through to dawn
. My fiancée’s mother’s a huge fan too, and, well, for premarital Brownie points, would you mind?”

I produce my fountain pen and the Beefeater hands me his book, already turned to the title page. Only when nib touches paper do I notice I am signing a novel called
Best Kept Secret
by Jeffrey Archer. I look up at the Beefeater to see if he’s taking the piss, but no: “Would you write ‘To Bridie on your Sixtieth Birthday from Lord Archer’?”

A famous columnist from
The Times
is standing three feet away.

Dedication written, I tell the bouncer, “So glad you enjoyed it.”

The pavilion contains enough celebrity wattage to power a small sun: I spy two Rolling Stones, a Monty Python; a teenage fifty-something presenter of
Top Gear
joshing with a disgraced American cyclist; an ex–U.S. secretary of state; an ex–football manager who writes an autobiography every five years; an ex-head of MI6 who cranks out a third-rate thriller annually; and a lush-lipped TV astronomer who writes, at least, about astronomy. We’re all here for the same reason: We have books to flog. “I spy with my little eye the rarest of sights,” an old codger purrs in my ear by the champagne bar, “a literary writer at a literary festival. How’s life, Crispin?”

The stranger absorbs Hershey’s withering stare like a man in his prime with nothing to fear, notwithstanding the damage that Time the Vandal has done to his face. The clawed lines, the whisky nose, the sagging pouches, the droopy eyelids. A silk handkerchief pokes up from his jacket pocket and he wears an elegant fedora, but Sodding Hell. How can the incurably elderly stand it? “And you are?”

“I’m your near future, my boy.” He swivels his once-handsome face. “Take a good, long look. What do you think?”

What I think is that tonight is the Night of the Fruitcakes. “What I think is that I’m no fan of cryptic crosswords.”

“No? I enjoy them. I am Levon Frankland.”

I take the proffered champagne flute and make an underimpressed face. “No bells are going ‘dong,’ I must confess.”

“I’m an old mucker of your father’s from another time. We were both contemporaries at the Finisterre Club in Soho.”

I maintain my underimpressed face. “I heard it finally closed down.”

“The end of the end of an era. My era. We met,” Levon Frankland tilts his glass my way, “at a party at your house in Pembridge Place in, ooh, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, around the time of the
Gethsemane
jazzamaroo. Amongst the various pies into which I had thrust my sticky fingers was artist management, and your father hoped that an avant-folk combo I represented would work on music for
The Narrow
Road to the Deep North
. The plan came to nought, but I remember you, dressed up as a cowboy. You had not long mastered the art of bowel control and social intercourse was still years away, but I’ve followed your career with an avuncular interest, and read your memoir about your dad with relish. Do you know, every few months, I get it into my head to call him and arrange lunch? I clean forget he’s gone! I do so miss the old contrarian. He was
sinfully
proud of you.”

“Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”

“Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”

“I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”

“I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”

Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”

Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”

Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via
Out on Your Arse!
, the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a £100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by
purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to £150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show
The Unput-downables
, and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick
the
twentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
. It’s—”

“I
knew
you’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I
adore
it. The only war novel to
really
‘get’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”

“I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of
All Quiet on the Western—
”

“
What
German ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”

Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why
The Naked and the Dead
is so important, Rog—ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”

“To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.

“Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “
The Naked and the Dead
? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”

Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”

“Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”

“I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship
Desiccated Embryos
.”

“Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand,
wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since
Embryos
is a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
.”

“I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”

“So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”

“—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “
after
the Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”

My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman
raved
about it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”

“Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called?
Highway 66
?”

“Route 605.”
Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”

“Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”

“No, but that’s a fair description of my brother.
Route 605
wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”

A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”

“Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”

Oh, great.
Why
didn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s
a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer—and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying—weren’t you Suze?—that
Route 605
is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones—it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of
Route 605
’s sales graph. I need a drink.