The Bone Clocks (49 page)

Would a quokka or two spice it up? I wonder.

Sod this. There must be a bar open somewhere.

H
ALLELUJAH
! I
WALK
into the Sky High bar on the forty-third floor and it’s still open. I sink my weary carcass into an armchair by the window and order a twenty-five-dollar shot of cognac. The view
is to die for. Shanghai by night is a mind of a million lights: of orange dot-to-dots along expressways, of pixel-white headlights and red taillights; green lights on the cranes; blinking blues on airplanes; office blocks across the road, and smearages of specks, miles away, every microspeck a life, a family, a loner, a soap opera; floodlights up the skyscrapers over in Pudong; closer up, animated ad-screens for Omega, Burberry,
Iron Man 5
, gigawatt-brite, flyposted onto night’s undarkness. Every conceivable light, in fact, except the moon and stars. “There’s no distances in prisons,” Richard Cheeseman wrote, in a letter to our Friends Committee. “No outside windows, so the furthest I ever see is the tops of the walls around the yard. I’d give a lot just for a view of a few miles. It wouldn’t have to be pretty—urban grot would be fine—so long as there was several miles’ worth.”

And Crispin Hershey had put him there.

Crispin Hershey keeps him there.

“Hello, Mr. Hershey,” says a woman. “Fancy finding you here.”

I jump up with unexpected vigor. “Holly! Hi! I was just …” I’m not sure how to finish my sentence so we kiss, cheek to cheek, like fairly good friends. She looks tired, which is only to be expected for a time-zone hopper, but her velvet suit looks great on her—Carmen’s taken her shopping a few times. I indicate an imaginary companion in the third chair: “Do you and Captain Jetlag know each other?”

She glances at the chair. “We go back a few years, yes.”

“When did you get in from—was it Singapore?”

“Um … Got to think. No, Jakarta. It’s Monday, right?”

“Welcome to the Literary Life. How’s Aoife?”

“Officially in love.” Holly’s smile has several levels to it. “With a young man called Örvar.”

“Örvar? From which galaxy do Örvars hail?”

“Iceland. Aoife went there a week ago, to meet the folks.”

“Lucky Aoife. Lucky Örvar. Do you approve of the young man?”

“As it happens, yes. Aoife’s brought him down to Rye a few times. He’s doing genetics at Oxford, despite his dyslexia, don’t ask me how that works. He fixes things. Shelves, shower doors, a stuck
blind.” Holly asks the waitress who brings my cognac for a glass of the house white. “What about Juno?”

“Juno? Never fixed a sodding thing in her life.”

“No, you dope! Is Juno dating yet?”

“Oh. That. No, give her a chance, she’s only fifteen. Mmm. Did you discuss boys with your father at that age?”

Holly’s phone bleeps. She glances at it. “It’s a message for you, from Carmen: ‘Tell Crispin I told him not to eat the durian fruit.’ Does that make any sense?”

“It does, alas.”

“Will you be moving into that new place in Madrid?”

“No. It’s a bit of a long story.”

“R
OTTNEST
?” H
OLLY FLICKS
her wineglass with her fingernail, as if testing its note. “Well, as Carmen may have mentioned, at various points in my life, I’ve heard voices that other people didn’t hear. Or I’ve been sure about things that I had no way of knowing. Or, occasionally, been the mouthpiece for … presences that weren’t me. Sorry that last one sounds seancey, I can’t help it. And unlike a seance, I don’t summon anything up. Voices just … nab me. I wish they didn’t. I wish very badly that they didn’t. But they do.”

I know all this. “You’ve got a degree in psychology, right?”

Holly sees the subtext, takes off her glasses, and pinches the indented mark on her nose. “Okay, Hershey, you win. Summer of 1985. I was sixteen. Jacko had been missing for twelve months. Me and Sharon were staying at Bantry in County Cork, with relatives. One wet day we were playing snakes and ladders with the smallies, when”—three decades later, Holly flinches—“I knew, or
heard
, or ‘felt a certainty,’ whatever you want to call it, what number the dice was next going to land on. My cousin’d rattle the eggcup and I’d think,
Five
. Lo and behold, the die landed on five.
One. Five. Three
. On and on. A lucky streak, right? Happens all the time. But on it went. For over fifty throws, f’Chrissakes. I wanted it to stop. Each time I thought,
This time it’ll be wrong and I’ll be able to dismiss it
all as a coincidence …
 but on and on it went, till Sharon needed a six to win, which I knew she’d roll. And she did. By now, I had a cracking headache, so I crawled off to bed. When I woke up, Sharon and our cousins were playing Cluedo, and everything was back to normal. And straightaway I started persuading myself that I’d only i
mag
ined knowing the numbers. By the time I got back to boring old Gravesend, I’d half persuaded myself the whole thing’d just been just a … a one-off weirdness I was probably misremembering.”

I think I’m drunker than I realized. “But it wasn’t.”

Holly picks at her ring. “That autumn, my mum got me enrolled on an office-skills course at Gravesend Tech, so at least I could do a bit of temping. I managed it okay, but one day in the canteen, I was on my own, as usual, when … Well, all of sudden, I
knew
that this girl, Rebecca Jones, who was sat chatting with friends on the table opposite, was going to knock her coffee onto the floor, in just a few seconds’ time. I just
knew
, Crispin, like I know … your name, or that I’ll go to sleep later. I’ve never believed in God, really, but I was praying,
Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t
. Then Rebecca Jones flapped out her hand to illustrate her story, it hit her coffee cup and smashed it onto the floor. Little streams and puddles of coffee everywhere.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I bloody legged it, but … the certainties chased me. I knew that round the next corner I’d see a Dalmatian cocking its leg against a lamppost. As if I’d already seen it, only I hadn’t. Round the corner, lo and behold, one Dalmatian, one lamppost, its hind leg up. A hundred yards from the railway bridge, I
knew
that when I crossed the bridge, the London train’d be passing under. Right again. On and on, all the way back to the pub. Then, as I passed through the bar, a regular, Frank Sharkey, was playing darts and …” she pauses to look at the goosebumps on her forearms, “… I knew I’d never see him again. I
knew
, Crispin. Sure,” she winces, “I ignored it, it was nasty and morbid. Old Mr. Sharkey was as much a friend of the family as a regular. He’d watched us all grow up. I told Dad I’d come back from college ’cause of a migraine, which by now I had. Went
to bed, woke up, felt tons better. It’d stopped. What’d happened was harder to dismiss as fantasy, of course; I couldn’t. But I was just glad it’d stopped and tried not to think about Mr. Sharkey. But the next day, he didn’t appear, and even then, I knew. I nagged Dad to call a neighbor who had a key. Frank Sharkey was found dead in his garden shed. He’d had a massive heart attack. The doctor said he’d have been dead before he hit the floor.”

She’s persuasive, and she’s persuaded herself, I can see. But the paranormal
is
persuasive; why else does religion persist?

Holly stares sadly into her glass. “Many people need to believe in psychic powers. A lot of them latch onto my book so I get accused of milking the gullible. By people I respect, even. But s’pose it
was
real, Crispin, s’pose
you
had these certainties, which can’t be altered or second-guessed—about, say, Juno or Anaïs. Would you think,
Happy Days, I’m psychic
?”

“Well, it depends …” I think about it. “No. At the risk of sounding like a GP, how long did all this last?”

She sucks in her lips and shakes her head. “Well … they’ve never stopped. Aged sixteen, seventeen, I’d be mugged by a bunch of facts that hadn’t happened yet, every few weeks, rush home, and bury myself in my bed with my head in a duffel bag. Told no one, apart from my great-aunt Eilísh. What would I say? People’d just think I wanted attention. Aged eighteen, I went grape picking for the summer in Bordeaux, then worked winters in the Alps. At least if I was abroad, the certainties wouldn’t be Brendan falling downstairs or Sharon getting hit by a bus.”

“This precognition doesn’t work long distance, then?”

“Not usually, no.”

“And do you get inside info on your own future?”

“Thank Christ, no.”

I hesitate to repeat my question, but I do. “Rottnest?”

Holly rubs an eye. “That was a strong one. Occasionally I hear a certainty about the past. I’m seized by it, I sort of … Oh, Christ, I can’t avoid the terminology, however crappy it sounds: I was channeling some sentience that was lingering in the fabric of that place.”

The barman’s shaking a cocktail-maker. My friend watches with a discerning eye. “That guy knows what he’s doing.”

Again, I hesitate. “Do you know anything about Multiple Personality Disorder?”

“Yes. As a mature student, I wrote a thesis on it. It had a namechange in the 1990s to Disassociative Identity Disorder but, even by the standards of clinical psychiatry, its presentation is obscure.” Holly fingers an earring. “It may explain things like Rottnest, but what about the precognition? Old Mr. Sharkey? Or how about when Aoife was little and we were at Sharon’s wedding in Brighton and she took it into her head to run off, and a certainty
spoke through me
the very number of the room she’d got locked herself into? How could I have known that, Crispin? How? How could I’ve made that up?”

A group of East Asian businessmen explodes into laughter.

“What if your memory is inverting cause and effect?”

Holly looks blank, drinks her wine, and still looks blank.

“Take Rebecca Wotsit’s coffee. Normally, your brain sees the cup knocked over first, and stores the memory of that event second. What if some neural glitch causes your brain to reverse the order—so the memory of the cup smashing on the floor was stored first,
before
your memory of the cup sitting on the edge of the table. That way, you believe in all sincerity that action B comes before A.”

Holly looks at me like I just don’t get it. “Lend us a coin.”

I fish out a two-pound coin from the international collection that lives in my wallet. She holds it in her left palm, then, with the middle finger of her right hand, touches a spot on her forehead. I ask, “What’s that in aid of?”

“Dunno, it just helps. Buddhism talks about a third eye in the forehead, but … Shush a mo.” She shuts her eyes, and tilts her head. Like a dog listening to silence. The background bar noises—low-key chat, ice cubes in glasses, Keith Jarrett’s “My Wild Irish Rose”—swell and recede. Holly hands me back the coin. “Flip it. Should be heads.”

I flip the coin. “It’s heads.” Fifty-fifty.

“Heads again,” says Holly, concentrating.

I flip the coin. “So it is.” One in four against.

“Tails this time,” says Holly. Her finger stays on her forehead.

I flip the coin: It’s tails. “Three out of three. Not bad.”

“Back to heads.”

I flip the coin: It’s heads.

“Tails,” says Holly.

I flip the coin: It’s tails. “How are you doing this?”

“Let’s try a sequence,” says Holly. “Heads, heads, heads, tails, and … tails again, but … 
kneeling
? Crispin, why are you kneeling?”

“As you can see, I’m sitting here,
not
kneeling.”

“Forget it. Three heads, two tails, in that order.”

So I flip the coin: heads. And again: heads. How’s she doing this? I rub the coin on my shirt, like a scratched disk, then flip it: heads, as predicted. “This is clever,” I say, but I feel uneasy.

She’s irritated by the adjective. “Two tails, now.”

I flip the coin: tails. Nine out of nine. On the tenth flip, I fumble the catch and the coin goes freewheeling away. I give chase, and only when I draw it out from under a chair and see it’s tails do I realize that I’m kneeling. Holly looks like someone being given the answer to a simple riddle. “Obviously. The coin runs away.”

As I retake my seat, I don’t quite trust myself to speak.

“Odds of 1,024 to 1 against a ten-digit sequence, if you’re wondering. We can increase it to 4,096 to 1 with two more throws?”

“No need.” My voice is tight. I look at Holly Sykes: Who
is
she? “That kneeling thing. How …”

“Maybe your brain is mistaking memories for predictions, too.” Holly Sykes looks not at all like a magician whose ambitious trick just went perfectly, but like a tired woman who needs to gain a few pounds. “Oh, Christ, that was a mistake. You’re looking at me in that way.”

“In what way?”

“Look, Crispin, can we just forget all of this? I need my bed.”

•   •   •

W
E WALK TO
the lift lobby without much to say. A pair of terracotta warriors don’t think very much of me, judging from their expressions. “You’ve got a gazillion true believers who’d pay a year of their lives to see what you just showed me,” I tell Holly. “I’m a cynical bastard, as you well know. Why honor me with that private demonstration?”

Now Holly looks pained. “I hoped you might believe me.”

“About what? About your Radio People? Rottnest? About—”

“That evening in Hay-on-Wye, in the signing tent. We were sat a few yards away. I had a strange strong certainty. About you.”

The lift doors close, and I remember from Zoë’s flirtation with feng shui that lifts are jaws that eat good luck. “Me?”

“You. And it’s an odd one. And it’s never changed.”

“Well, what’s it saying about me, for heaven’s sake?”

She swallows. “ ‘A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man.’ ”

I wait for an explanation. None comes. “Meaning?”

Holly looks cornered. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“But you usually find out what they mean after, right?”

“Usually. Eventually. But this is a … slow-cooking certainty.”

“ ‘A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man’? What
is
that? A shopping list? A dance track? A line from a sodding haiku?”