The Bone Clocks (5 page)

I think of Vinny and his Norton and shake my head. He mounts his bike, poser-style, and he’s gone. I scoop up a fistful of stones and fling it over the water, hard and angry.

A
SPECK-SIZED
E
D
Brubeck vanishes behind a clump of pointy trees way up ahead. He didn’t look back. Wish I’d said yes to his offer, now. My knees are stiff and my feet are two giant throbs and my ankles feel like they’ve been attacked with tiny drills. Five miles at this rate’ll take me forever. But Ed Brubeck’s a guy, like Vinny’s a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns. My stomach growls with dry hunger. Green tea’s great while you’re drinking it, but it makes you pee like a racehorse, and now my mouth feels like a dying rat crapped in it. Ed Brubeck’s a guy, yes, but he’s not a total tosser. Last week he got into an argument with Mrs. Binkirk, our RE teacher, and got sent to Mr. Nixon for calling her “Bigot of the Year.” A grown-up insult, that. People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t. I try not to think about Vinny, but I do, and remember how only this morning I dreamt of starting a band with him. Up ahead, from behind the clump of pointy trees, comes a speck-sized Ed Brubeck, cycling back my way. Probably he’s decided it’s too late to fish, and he’s heading back to Gravesend. He grows bigger and bigger until he’s life-sized, and does a show-offy skid-turn that reminds me he’s still a boy as well as a guy. His eyes are white in his dark face. “Why don’t you get on, Sykes?” He slaps his bike saddle. “Allhallow’s
miles
. It’ll be dark before you get there.”

We wobble along the track at a decent clip. Whenever we go over a bump Brubeck says, “You okay?” and I tell him, “Yeah.” The sea breeze and bike breeze slip up my sleeves and stroke my front like a pervy Mr. Tickle. Sweat’s gluing Brubeck’s T-shirt to his back. I
refuse to think ’bout Vinny’s sweat, and Stella’s … My heart cracks again and goo dribbles out and stings, like Dettol on a graze. I grip the bike rack with both hands, but then the track gets rucklier so I steady myself by hooking one thumb through a belt loop on Brubeck’s jeans. Probably Brubeck’s getting a hard-on from this, but it’s his problem, not mine.

Fluffy lambs are nibbling grass. Ewes watch us, like we’re planning to serve up their babies with sprouts and mash.

We scare birds on stilts with spoony beaks; they skim off across the river. Their wing tips touch the water, sending out circles.

Here the Thames is turning into the sea and Essex is turning gold. That smudge is Canvey Island; farther on, Southend.

The English Channel’s Biro-blue; the sky’s the blue of snooker chalk. We judder across a footbridge over a rusty creek, half-marsh, half-dune, inland:
WELCOME TO THE ISLE OF GRAIN
.

It’s not a real island, mind. Once upon a time, perhaps.

That loony, loopy, tweety bird’s followed us. Must of.

A
LLHALLOWS-ON-
S
EA
’
S BASICALLY A
big holiday park spilling up to the shorefront from a nothingy village behind. It’s all rows of caravans and those oblong cabins on little stilts they call trailer homes in American films. There’s half-naked kids and totally naked toddlers all over the shop, firing water pistols and playing Swingball and running about. Half-sloshed mums’re rolling their eyes at sun-pinked dads burning bangers on barbecues. I try to eat the smoke. “Dunno about you,” says Brubeck, “but I’m starving.”

Too enthusiastically I say, “Just a bit,” so he parks his bike at the fish-and-chip place, next to Lazy Rolf’s Krazy Golf. Brubeck orders cod and chips, which is two pounds, but I just order chips ’cause it’s only fifty p. But then Brubeck tells the bloke at the counter, “
Two
cod and chips, please,” and hands over a fiver, and the bloke glances at me and gives Brubeck that nice-one-son look that men give each other, which pisses me off ’cause me and Brubeck aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend and we’re not bloody going to be, however many battered
cods he gives me. Brubeck gets us two cans of Coke too and notices my face. “It’s only fish and chips—no strings attached.”

“You’re damn right there’s no strings attached.” It comes out spikier than I meant. “But thanks.”

We walk past the last cabin and on a bit to a concrete shelter, just on the lip of the dunes. A whiff of wee leaks through the slitted window but Brubeck climbs onto its low, flat roof. “This is a pillbox,” he says. “They were machine-gun posts during the war, in case the Germans invaded. There’s still hundreds of them around, if you keep your eyes peeled. This is peace, if you think about it—machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables.” I look at him: You’d never dare say something that clever at school. I scramble up on my own and take in the view. Southend’s across the wider-than-a-mile mouth of the Thames and the other way I can see Sheerness docks on the Isle of Sheppey. Then we open our Cokes and I peel off the ring carefully to put in the can after. They slice open dogs’ paw-pads. Brubeck holds his can towards me so I clunk it, like it’s a wineglass, but I don’t meet his eyes in case he gets any ideas, and we drink. My first gulp’s a
booom
of freezing fizz. The chips are warm and vinegary and the batter’s hot in our fingers as we pull it back to get at the fat flakes of cod. “It tastes great,” I say. “Cheers.”

“Not as good as a Manchester chipper,” says Brubeck.

A stunt kite writes on the blue with its pink tail.

I
FILL MY
lungs with one of Brubeck’s Dunhills. That’s better. Then I think of Stella Yearwood and Vinny smoking his Marlboros in bed, and suddenly I have to pretend I’ve got something in my eye. To distract myself, I ask Brubeck, “So who’s this uncle of yours, then? The one you visited earlier.”

“Uncle Norm. My mum’s brother. Used to be a crane operator at Blue Circle Cement, but he’s stopped working. He’s going blind.”

I take another deep drag. “That’s awful. Poor guy.”

“Uncle Norm says, ‘Pity is a form of abuse.’ ”

“Is he completely blind, or just partly, or …”

“He’s lost about three-quarters of his sight in both eyes, and the rest’s going. What gets him down most is that he can’t read the papers anymore. It’s like searching for your keys in dirty snow, he says. So most Saturdays I cycle out to his bungalow and read him pieces from the
Guardian
. Then he talks about Thatcher versus the unions, why the Russians are in Afghanistan, why the CIA are taking down democratic governments in Latin America.”

“Sounds like school,” I say.

Brubeck shakes his head. “Most of our teachers just want to get home by four and retire by sixty. But my uncle Norm loves talking and thinking and he wants you to love it too. He’s sharp as a razor. Then my aunt makes a big late lunch, and my uncle nods off, and I go fishing, if the weather’s nice. Unless I see someone from my class at school lying dead on the beach.” He stubs out his cigarette on the concrete. “So. What’s your story, Sykes?”

“What do you mean, what’s my story?”

“At eight forty-five I see you walking up Queen Street, ducking—”

“You
saw
me?”

“Yep—ducking into the Indoor Market, but seven hours later the target is sighted ten miles east of Gravesend, along the river.”

“What is this? Ed Brubeck, Private Investigator?”

A little tailless dog that’s all waggling bum comes up. Brubeck chucks it a chip. “If I
was
a detective, I’d suspect boyfriend trouble.”

My voice goes sharp. “None of your business.”

“This is true. But the tosser’s not worth it, whoever he is.”

Scowling, I drop the dog a chip. He scoffs it so hungrily I wonder if he’s a stray. Like me.

Brubeck makes a funnel out of his chip paper to pour the crispy bits into his mouth. “You planning on going back to town tonight?”

I abort a groan. Gravesend’s a black cloud. Vinny and Stella and Mam are in it.
Are
it. My watch says 18:19 and the Captain Marlow’ll be cheerful and chattery as the evening regulars drift in. Upstairs Jacko and Sharon’ll be sat on the sofa watching
The A-Team
with cheese thingies and a slab of chocolate cake. I’d like to be there, but what about Mam’s slap? “No,” I tell Brubeck, “I’m not.”

“It’ll be dark in three hours. Not a lot of time to find a circus to run away with.”

The dune grass sways. Clouds’re unrolling across the sky from France. I put my jacket on. “Maybe I’ll find a nice cozy pillbox. One that’s not used to pee in. Or a barn.”

Here come seagulls on boingy elastic, scrawking for chips too. Brubeck stands up and flaps his arms at the gulls like the Mad Prince of Allhallows-on-Sea to make them scatter, just for the hell of it. “Maybe I know somewhere better.”

W
E
’
RE CYCLING ALONG
a proper road again. Big fields in the pancake-flat arse-end of nowhere, with long black shadows. Brubeck’s being all mysterious ’bout where we’re going—“Either you trust me, Sykes, or you don’t”—but he says it’s warm, dry, and safe and he’s stayed there himself five or six times when he’s been out night-fishing, so I’ll go along with it, for now. He says he’ll head off home after Gravesend. That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late. Ed Brubeck seems okay, and he spends his Saturday afternoons reading for a blind uncle, but thanks to bloody Vinny and Stella, I’m not so sure if I’m a good judge of character. With night coming on, though, I don’t have much choice. We pass a massive factory. I’m ’bout to ask Brubeck what they make there when he tells me it’s Grain Power Station and it provides electricity for Gravesend and half of southeast London.

“Yeah, I know,” I lie.

T
HE CHURCH IS
stumpy with a tower that’s got arrow-slits and it’s gold in the last light. The wood sounds like never-ending waves, with rooks tumbling about like black socks in a dryer.
ST MARY HOO PARISH CHURCH
says a sign, with the vicar’s phone number
underneath. The village of Saint Mary Hoo is up ahead, but it’s really just a few old houses and a pub where two lanes meet. “The bedding’s basic,” says Brubeck, as we get off the bike, “but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit handle security, and at zero quid a night, it’s priced competitively.”

Does he mean the church? “You’re joking, right?”

“Check-out’s seven sharp or the management get shirty.”

Yes, he means the church. I make a dubious face.

Brubeck makes a face that says,
Take it or leave it
.

I’ll have to take it. The Kent marshes are not dotted with cozy barns full of warm straw, like in
Little House on the Prairie
. The only one I’ve seen was a corrugated-iron job a few miles back, guarded by two Dobermans with rabies. “Don’t they lock churches?”

Brubeck says, “Yeah,” in the same way I’d say, “So?” After checking no one’s around, he wheels his bike into the graveyard. He hides it between dark brushy trees and the wall, then leads me to the porch. Confetti’s piled up in dirty drifts. “Keep an eye on the gate,” he tells me. From his pocket he digs out a leather purse-thing and inside’s a dangly row of spindly keys and an L-shaped piece of thin metal. One last look at the lane, then he pokes a key into the lock, and jiggles it a bit.

I feel a lurch of fear we’ll get caught. “Where did you learn to break into buildings?”

“It wasn’t footy or repairing punctures that Dad taught me.”

“We could get done for this! It’s called, it’s called—”

“Breaking and entering. That’s why you keep your eyes peeled.”

“But what am I s’posed to do exactly if somebody comes?”

“Act embarrassed, like we’ve been caught snogging.”

“Uh—I don’t
think
so, Ed Brubeck.”

He does a half-hiss half-laugh. “
Act
it, I said. Relax, you only get nicked if the cops can prove
you
picked the lock. If you don’t confess, and if you’re careful not to bugger the mechanism …” he feeds a skeleton key into the keyhole, “… then who’s to say you didn’t just happen along, find the door left ajar, and go in to satisfy your
interest in Saxon church architecture? That’s our story, by the way, just in case.” Brubeck’s got his ear against the lock as he’s twizzling. “Though I’ve stayed here three Saturday nights since Easter and not heard a dickie-bird. Plus it’s not like we’re taking anything. Plus you’re a girl, so just sob your eyes out and do the ‘Please, Mr. Vicar, I’m running away from my violent stepfather’ bit and, chances are, you’ll walk away with a cup of tea and a Penguin biscuit.” Brubeck holds up a hand for hush: a click. “Got it.” The church door swings open with the perfect Transylvanian hinge-creak.

Inside, Saint Mary Hoo’s Church smells of charity shops, and the stained-glass gloom’s all fruit-salady. The walls’re thick as a nuclear bunker and the
thunk
when Brubeck shuts us in echoes all around, like a dungeon. The roof’s all beams and timbers. We walk down the short aisle, past the ten or twelve pews. The pulpit’s wooden, the font’s stone, the organ’s like a fancy piano with exhaust pipes. The lectern-thingy must be fake gold, or a burglar—Brubeck’s dad, for example—would’ve swiped it long ago. We reach the altar table and look up at the window showing the crucifixion. A dove in the stained-glass sky has spokes coming off it. The Marys, two disciples, and a Roman at the foot of the cross look like they’re discussing whether it’s starting to rain or not. Brubeck asks, “You’re Catholic, right?”

I’m surprised he’s ever thought ’bout this. “My mum’s Irish.”

“So do you believe in heaven and God and that?”

I stopped going to church last year; that was me and Mam’s biggest row till this morning. “I sort of developed an allergy.”

“My uncle Norm says religion’s ‘spiritual paracetamol,’ and in a way I hope he’s right. Unless God issues personality transplants when you arrive, heaven’d mean a never-ending family reunion with the likes of my uncle Trev. I can’t think of anything more hellish.”

“So Uncle Trev’s no Uncle Norm, then?”

“Chalk and cheese. Uncle Trev’s my dad’s older brother. ‘The Brains of the Operation,’ he says, which is true enough: He’s got brains enough to get losers like Dad to do the dirty work. Uncle
Trev fences the merchandise if the job’s a success, does his Mr. Nonstick Frying Pan when it goes belly-up. He even tried it on with my mum after Dad got sent down, which is partly why we moved south.”