The Bone Clocks (47 page)

“What does he”—too late I spot the “was”—“do now?”

“Unfortunately a missile hit his hotel. In Homs, in Syria.”

I nod. “Excuse my tactlessness. Both of you.”

“It’s eight years ago,” Holly Sykes reassures me, “and …”

“… and I’m lucky,” now Aoife reassures me, “ ’cause there’s, like, a gazillion interviews with Dad on YouTube, so I can go online and there he is, chattering away, large as life. Next best thing to hanging out.”

My dad’s on YouTube too, but I find watching him makes him deader than ever. I ask Aoife, “What was his name, your dad?”

“Ed Brubeck. I’ve got his name, too. Aoife Brubeck.”

“Not
the
Ed Brubeck? Wrote for
Spyglass
magazine?”

“That’s him,” says Holly Sykes. “Did you know Ed’s writing?”

“We met! When was it? Washington, about 2002? My former wife’s brother-in-law was on the panel for the Sheehan-Dower Prize. They awarded it to Ed that year, and I’d done a reading in town that day, so we shared a table at dinner that evening.”

Aoife asks, “What did you and Dad talk about?”

“Oh, a hundred things. His job. 9/11. Fear. Politics. The pram in the writer’s hallway. He had a four-year-old back in London, I recall.” Aoife smiles with her whole wide face. “I was working on a journalist character, so Ed let me quiz him. Then we emailed from time to time, after that. When I heard the news, about Syria …” I exhale. “My very belated condolences, to both of you. For whatever they’re worth. He was a bloody good journalist.”

“Thank you,” says one; and “Thanks,” the other.

We gaze out across eleven miles of ferry-plowed sea.

Perth’s dark skyscrapers stand against the light sky.

Twenty paces away, a medium-sized mammal I cannot identify lollops out of the scrub and down the slope. Chubby as a wallaby, reddish-brown, kangaroo forepaws, and a foxy wombat face. A tongue like a finger slurps the apricot stones. “Good God.
What
is
that
?”

“That charming devil is a quokka,” says Aoife.

“What’s a quokka? Besides a hell of a Scrabble score.”

“An endangered marsupial. The first Dutch who landed here thought they were giant rats, so they called the place Rat’s Nest Island: Rottnest, in Dutch. Most mainland quokkas got killed by dogs and rats, but they’ve managed to survive here.”

“If the archaeology falls through, there’s always natural history.”

Aoife smiles. “I Wikipediaed them five minutes ago.”

I ask, “Reckon they like apricots? There’s a squishy one left.”

Holly looks dubious. “What about ‘Do Not Feed the Animals’?”

“It’s not like we’re chucking them Cherry Ripe bars, Mum.”

“And surely,” I add, “if they’re endangered, they’ll need all the Vitamin C they can get.” I lob the apricot to within a few feet of the animal. It waddles over, sniffs, chomps, and looks up at us.

“ ‘Please, sir,’ ” Aoife does a trembly Oliver Twist voice, “ ‘can I have some more?’ How
cute
is that? I’ve got to take a photo.”

“Not too close, love,” says her mother. “It’s a wild animal.”

“Gotcha.” Aoife walks down the slope, holding out her phone.

“What a well-raised kid,” I tell her mother, in a low voice.

She looks at me, and I see the signs of a full, fraught life around her eyes. If only she hadn’t written a book full of angel bollocks for gullible women disappointed with their lives, we could be friends. It’s a fair guess that Holly Sykes knows about my daughters and my divorce: the ex–Wild Child of British Letters may not be famous enough to sell books, but Zoë’s huge “I Will Survive” splash for the
Sunday Telegraph
gave the world a very one-sided version of our troubles. We watch Aoife feed the quokka, while all around us Rottnest’s bleached slopes buzz and whistle with insects, tinnitus-like. A lizard crosses the dust and …

The feeling of being watched comes back, stronger than ever. We aren’t the only ones here. There are lots. Near. I could swear.

Acacia tree to wiry shrub to shed-sized rock … Nobody.

“Do you feel them too?” Holly Sykes is watching me. “It’s an echo chamber, this place …”

If I say yes to this, I say yes to her whole flaky, nonempirical world. By saying yes to this, how do I refuse crystal healing, pastlife therapy, Atlantis, Reiki, and homeopathy? The problem is, she’s right. I do feel them. This place is … What’s another word for “haunted,” Mr. Novelist? My throat’s dry. My water bottle’s empty.

Down on the rocks blue breakers flume on rocks. I hear the boom, faint and soft, a second later. Further out, surfers at play.

“They were brought here in chains,” says Holly Sykes.

“Who were?”

“The Noongar. Wadjemup, they called this island. Means the
Place Across the Water.” She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.”

Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd. “The
djanga
came. We thought they were dead ones, come back. They forgot how to speak when they were dead, so now they spoke like birds. Only a few came, at first. Their canoes were big as hills, but hollow, like big floating rooms made of many many rooms. Then more ships, more and more, every ship it puked up more, more, more of them. They planted fences, waved maps, brought sheep, mined for metals. They shot our animals, but if we killed their animals, they hunted us like vermin, and took the women away …”

This performance ought to be ridiculous. But in the flesh, three feet away, a vein pulsing in her temple, I don’t know what to make of it. “Is this a story you’re working on, Holly?”

“Too late, we understood, the
djanga
wasn’t dead Noongar jumped up, they was Whitefellas.” Holly’s voice is blurring now. Some words go missing. “Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. F’fighting at Whitefella, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: Our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from out body. Sick joke. So when come to Wadjemup, we Noongar we die like flies.”

One in four words I’m guessing at now. Holly Sykes’s pupils have shrunk to dots as tiny as full stops. This can’t be right. “Holly?” What’s the first-aid response for this? She must be blind. Holly starts speaking again but not a lot’s in English: I catch “priest,” “gun,” “gallows,” and “swim.” I have zero knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but what’s battling its way out of Holly Sykes’s mouth now sure as hell isn’t French, German, Spanish, or Latin. Then Holly Sykes’s head jerks back and smacks the lighthouse and the word “epilepsy” flashes through my mind. I grip her head so
that when she repeats the head-smash it only bashes my hand. I swivel upright and clasp her head firmly against my chest and yell,
“Aoife!”

The girl reappears from behind a tree, the quokkas beat a retreat, and I call out, “Your mother’s having an attack!”

A few pounding seconds later, Aoife Brubeck’s here, holding her mother’s face. She speaks sharply: “Mum! Stop it! Come back! Mum!”

A cracked buzzing hum starts deep in Holly’s throat.

Aoife asks, “How long have her eyes been like that?”

“Sixty seconds? Less, maybe. Is she epileptic?”

“The worst’s over. It’s not epilepsy, no. She’s stopped talking, so she’s not hearing now, and—oh,
shit
—what’s this blood?”

There’s sticky red on my hand. “She hit the wall.”

Aoife winces and inspects her mother’s head. “She’ll have a hell of a lump. But, look, her eyes are coming back.” Sure enough, her pupils are swelling from dots to proper disks.

I note, “You’re acting as if this has happened before.”

“A few times,” replies Aoife, with understatement. “You haven’t read
The Radio People
, have you?”

Before I can answer Holly Sykes blinks, and finds us. “Oh, f’Chrissakes, it just happened, didn’t it?”

Aoife’s worried and motherly. “Welcome back.”

She’s still pasty as pasta. “What did I do to my head?”

“Tried to dent the lighthouse with it, Crispin says.”

Holly Sykes flinches at me. “Did you listen to me?”

“It was hard not to. At first. Then it … wasn’t exactly English. Look, I’m no first-aid expert, but I’m worried about concussion. Cycling down a hilly, bendy road would not be clever, not right now. I’ve got a number from the bike-hire place. I’ll ask for a medic to drive out and pick you up. I strongly advise this.”

Holly looks at Aoife, who says, “It’s sensible, Mum,” and gives her mother’s arm a squeeze.

Holly props herself upright. “God alone knows what you must think of all this, Crispin.”

It hardly matters. I tap in the number, distracted by a tiny bird calling
Crikey, crikey, crikey …

F
OR THE FIFTIETH
time Holly groans. “I just feel so em
bar
rassed.”

The ferry’s pulling into Fremantle. “
Please
stop saying that.”

“But I feel awful, Crispin, cutting short your trip to Rottnest.”

“I’d have come back on this ferry, anyway. If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it’s Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aborigine art were eroding away my will to live. It’s as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.”

“Spot the writer.” Aoife finishes her ice pop. “Again.”

“Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”

The ferry’s engines growl, and cut out. Passengers gather their belongings, unplug earphones, and look for children. Holly’s phone goes and she checks it: “It’s my friend, the one who’s picking us up. Just a mo.” While she takes the call, I check my own phone for messages. Nothing since the picture of Juno’s birthday party earlier. Our international marriage was once a walk-in closet of discoveries and curiosities, but international divorce is not for the fainthearted. Through the spray-dashed window I watch lithe young Aussies leap from prow to quayside, tying ropes around painted steel cleats.

“Our friend’s picking us up from the terminal building.” Holly puts her phone away. “She’s got space for you too, Crispin, if you’d like a lift back to the hotel.”

I’ve got no energy to go exploring Perth. “Please.”

We walk down the gangway onto the concrete pier, where my legs struggle to adjust to terra firma. Aoife waves to a woman waving back, but I don’t zone in on Holly’s friend until I’m a few feet away.

“Hello, Crispin,” the woman says, as if she knows me.

“Of course,” remembers Holly. “You two met in Colombia!”

“I may,” the woman smiles, “have slipped Crispin’s mind.”

“Not at all, Carmen Salvat,” I tell her. “How are you?”

L
EAVING THE AIR-CONDITIONED FOYER
of the Shanghai Mandarin we plunge into a wall of stewy heat and adoration from a flash mob—I’ve never seen anything like this level of fandom for a literary writer. More’s the pity that writer isn’t me—as they recognize him, the cry goes up,
“Neeeeeck!”
Nick Greek, at the vanguard of our two-writer convoy, has been living in Shanghai since March, learning Cantonese and researching a novel about the Opium Wars. Hal the Hyena has liaised closely with his local agent and now a quarter of a million Chinese readers follow Nick Greek on Weibo. Over lunch he mentioned he’s been turning down modeling contracts, for sod’s sake. “It’s so embarrassing,” he said modestly. “I mean, what would Steinbeck have made of this?” I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother. Some heavyweight minders from the book fair are having to widen a path through the throng of nubile, raven-haired, book-toting Chinese fans: “Neeck! Sign, please, please sign!” Some are even waving A4 color photos of the young American for him to deface, for buggery’s sake. “He’s a U.S. imperialist!” I want to shout. “What about the Dalai Lama on the White House lawn?” Miss Li, my British Council elf, and I follow in the wake of his entourage, blissfully unhassled. If I appear in any of the footage, they’ll assume I’m his father. And guess what, dear reader? It doesn’t matter. Let him enjoy the acclaim while it lasts. In six weeks Carmen and I will be living in our dream apartment overlooking the Plaza de la Villa in Madrid. When my old mucker Ewan Rice sees it he’ll be
so
sodding jealous he’ll explode in a green cloud of spores, even if he
has
won the Brittan Prize twice. Once we’re in, I can divide my time more
equally between London and Madrid. Spanish cuisine, cheap wine, reliable sunshine, and love. Love. During all those wasted years of my prime with Zoë, I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to love and to be loved. After all, what is the Bubble Reputation compared to the love of a good woman?

Well? I’m asking you a question.

M
ISS
L
I LEADS
me into the heart of the Shanghai Book Fair complex, where a large auditorium awaits keynote speakers—the true Big Beasts of International Publishing. I can imagine Chairman Mao issuing his jolly-well-thought-out economic diktats in this very space in the 1950s; for all I know, he did. This afternoon the stage is dominated by a jungle of orchids and a ten-meter-high blowup of Nick Greek’s blond American head and torso. Miss Li leads me out through the other side of the large auditorium and on to my own venue, although she has to ask several people for directions. Eventually she locates it on the basement level. It appears to be a row of knocked-through broom cupboards. There are thirty chairs in the venue, though only seven are occupied, not counting myself. To wit: my smiling interviewer, an unsmiling female translator, a nervous Miss Li, my friendly Editor Fang, in his Black Sabbath T-shirt, two youths with Shanghai Book Fair ID tags still round their necks, and a girl of what used to be known as Eurasian extraction. She’s short, boyish, and sports a nerdy pair of glasses and a shaven head: electrotherapy chic. A droning fan stirs the heat above us, a striplight flickers a little, and the walls are blotched and streaked, like the inside of a never-cleaned oven. I am tempted to walk out—I really am—but handling the fallout would be worse than putting a brave face on the afternoon. I’m sure the British Council keeps a blacklist of badly behaved authors.