The Bone Clocks (8 page)

“Ye-es. No picking on a Sunday. Not at Black Elm Farm. We let the fruit grow on a Sunday. We’ll start tomorrow at six sharp. There’s dorms for pickers, but we’re not the Ritz. No room service.”

Brilliant
. “That’s fine. So … have I got a job?”

“Thirty-five pence a tray. Full punnets, no rotten fruit, or you’ll be picking the whole tray again. No stones, or you’re out.”

“That’s fine. Can I turn up this afternoon?”

“Ye-es. Do you have a name?”

I’m so relieved I blurt out, “Holly,” even as I realize giving a false name might be cleverer. There’s a poster by the railway bridge advertising Rothmans cigarettes so I say, “Holly Rothmans,” and regret it straightaway. Should have chosen something forgettable like Tracy Smith, but I’m stuck with it now.

“Holly Bossman, is it?”

“Holly
Rothmans
. Like the cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes, is it? I smoke a pipe, me.”

“How do I get to your farm?”

“Our pickers make their own way here. We’re no taxi service.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking you directions.”

“It’s very simple.”

I bloody hope so, ’cause at this rate I’ll run out of coins. “Okay.”

“First you cross the bridge onto the Isle of Sheppey. Then you ask for Black Elm Farm.” With that, Gabriel Harty hangs up.

R
OCHESTER
C
ASTLE SITS
by the Medway River like a giant model, and a big black lion guards the iron bridge. I pat its paw for good luck as I pass. The girders groan as trucks go over and my feet are aching, but I’m pretty pleased with myself; only twenty-four hours ago I was a weeping bruise, but I just passed my first-ever job interview and next week’s sorted, at least. Black Elm Farm’ll be a place to lie low and get some money together. I think of small bombs going off in Gravesend, one by one. Dad’ll go round to Vinny’s later, I reckon: “Oh, morning, I believe you’ve been sleeping with my underage daughter; I’m not leaving till I’ve spoken with her.”
Ka-booom!
Vinny’s ferrety face.
Ka-boom!
Dad’ll rush back to tell Mam I’m not there either.
Ka-boom!
Mam’ll start replaying that slap, over and over. Then she’ll march round to Vinny’s. Shit, meet Fan. Fan, this is Shit. Mam’ll leave Vinny splattered down the hallway and hurry to Brendan and Ruth’s to see if I’m there. Brendan’ll report I was on my way to Stella Yearwood’s yesterday morning, so he and Mam’ll stomp off there. Stella’ll be all, “No, Mrs. Sykes, she was never here, actually I was out, I’ve got no idea,” but she knows a heat-seeker missile’s heading her way. Monday comes and goes, and Tuesday, then on Wednesday school’ll phone ’cause I’m missing exams. Mr. Nixon’ll say to her, “So let me get this straight, Mrs. Sykes. Your daughter’s been missing since Saturday morning?” Mam’ll mumble ’bout a small disagreement. Dad’ll start wanting details, like what she said to me, and what she means by “a little slap.” How little?
Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom
. She’ll lose it and
and snap, “I already feckin’ told you, Dave!” and go upstairs to the kitchen, and as she’s looking out over the river, she’ll be thinking,
She’s only fifteen, anything could’ve happened …
 Serve her bloody right.

Gulls kick up a racket on the river, below.

A police boat buzzes under the bridge. I walk on.

Up ahead, there’s a Texaco garage—it’s open.

“W
HERE
’
S THE BEST
place to hitch a ride to Sheppey from?” I ask the bloke at the till, after he’s handed me change and my two cans of Tizer, my Double Decker, and pack of Ritz biscuits. My £13.85 is down to £12.17.

“I never hitch,” he says, “but if I did, I’d try the A2 roundabout, the top of Chatham Hill.”

“How do I get to the top of Chatham Hill?”

But before he answers, a woman with raspberry-red hair comes in and the Texaco bloke just drinks her in.

I have to remind him I’m there. “ ’Scuse me? How do I get to the top of Chatham Hill?”

“Head left out of the forecourt, over the first set of traffic lights, past the Star Inn, and up the hill to the clock tower. Take the left turn to Chatham and follow your nose a bit further, past Saint Bart’s Hospital. Keep going till you get to an Austin Rover dealer and you’re at the Chatham roundabout. Stick your thumb out there, wait for a knight in a shining Jag to stop.” He deliberately said it all too quick for me to take in. “You might get lucky, or you might be waiting hours. You never know with hitching. Make sure you’re dropped at the turnoff to Sheerness—if you find yourself in Faversham, you’ve gone too far.” He readjusts his crotch and turns to the woman. “Now, what can I do for you, sweetheart?”

“Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.”

I don’t hide my laugh. The guy stares daggers at me.

•   •   •

L
ESS THAN A
hundred yards later this knackered Ford Escort van pulls over. It might’ve been orange once, or perhaps that’s just rust. The passenger winds down the window. “Hi.” I’ve got a gobful of Ritz biscuit and must look like a total spaz, but I recognize who it is straight off. “It’s not quite a shiny Jaguar,” the woman with the raspberry-red hair slaps the door cheerfully, “and Ian here definitely isn’t a knight,” the guy driving does a little lean-over and a wave, “but if you’re after a lift to Sheppey, we’re going nearly to the bridge. Guide’s honor, we’re not axe murderers or chainsaw killers, and it’s got to beat standing on a slip road for six hours waiting for someone like
that
”—she cocks her head towards the Texaco garage—“to stop and ‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’ all over you.”

My feet are killing me, and a lift off a couple’s safer than a single man, she’s right. “That’d be brill, thanks.”

She opens the back of the van and shunts some boxes to make space. I wedge myself in, but there’s windows on all sides so I’ve got a nice enough view. Ian, who’s midtwenties, baldish, and has a nose as big as a Concorde, asks, “Not too crushed back there, I hope?”

“Not at all,” I say. “It’s dead cozy.”

“It’ll only be twenty-five minutes,” Ian says, and we move off.

“I was saying to Ian,” the woman tells me, “if we didn’t give you a lift, I’d spend all day worrying. I’m Heidi, anyway. Who are you?”

“Tracy,” I answer. “Tracy Corcoran.”

“You know, I never met a Tracy I didn’t like.”

“I could find you one or two,” I say, and Ian and Heidi laugh, like that was pretty witty, and I s’pose it was, yeah. “Heidi’s a nice name, too.”

Ian does a dubious
mmm
, and Heidi gives him a poke in the ribs. “Stop interfering with the driver,” he says.

We pass a school ordered from the same catalogue as Windmill Hill Comprehensive—same big windows, same flat roofs, same muddy football pitch. I’m actually starting to believe I’ve left school: It’s like old Mr. Sharkey says, “Life’s a matter of Who Dares Wins.”

Heidi asks, “Do you live on Sheppey, Tracy?”

“No. I’m going there to work on a fruit farm.”

Ian asks, “Gabriel Harty’s place, would that be?”

“That’s right. D’you know him?”

“Not personally, but he’s known for having a subjective grasp of arithmetic when it comes to totting up your pay, so keep your wits about you. Errors are likely to be in his favor.”

“Thanks, I will. But it should be okay. A friend at school was there last summer.” I find myself gabbling to make myself more believable. “I’ve just done my O levels ’cause I’m sixteen, and I’m saving for an InterRail in August.”

That all sounded like I read it off a card.

“InterRails look great fun,” says Heidi. “Europe’s your oyster. So where’s home, Tracy?”

Where would I
like
home to be? “London.”

The lights are red. A blind man and his guide dog step out.

“Big city, London,” says Ian. “Whereabouts, exactly?”

Now I panic a bit. “In Hyde Park.”

“What—
in
Hyde Park? Up a tree, with the squirrels?”

“No. Our actual house is closer to, uh, Camden Town.”

Heidi and Ian don’t answer at first—have I said something stupid?—but then Ian says, “I’m with you,” so it’s okay. The blind man reaches the other side of the road, and Ian struggles with the gearbox before we move off. “I stayed in Camden Town when I first went to London,” he says, “sleeping on a mate’s sofa. In Rowntree Square, by the cricket ground next to the Tube station. Know it?”

“Sure,” I lie. “I go past there, like, all the time.”

Heidi asks, “Have you hitched from Camden this morning?”

“Yes. I got a lift off a truck driver to Gravesend, then a German tourist brought me to Rochester Bridge, and then you pulled up. Jammy or what?” I look for a way to change the subject. “What’s in all these boxes, then? Are you moving house?”

“No, it’s this week’s
Socialist Worker
,” says Heidi.

“They sell that in Queen Street,” I say. “In Camden.”

“We’re with the Central London branch,” says Ian. “Me and
Heidi are postgrads at the LSE, but we spend our weekends near Faversham so we’re a sort of distribution hub. Hence all the boxes.”

I pick up a copy of the
Socialist Worker
. “Good read, is it?”

“Every other British newspaper is a propaganda sheet,” replies Ian. “Even
The Guardian
. Take one.”

It seems rude to refuse, so I say “Thanks” and study the front page: the headline is
WORKERS UNITE NOW!
over a photo of striking miners. “So do you, like … agree with Russia?”

“Not at all,” says Ian. “Stalin butchered Russian communism in its cradle, Khrushchev was a shameless revisionist, and Brezhnev built luxury stores for Party sycophants while the workers queued for stale bread. Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

Houses loop past, like the background on cheap cartoons.

Heidi asks, “What do your parents do for a living, Tracy?”

“They own a pub. The King’s Head. Near Camden.”

“Pub landlords,” says Ian, “get bled white by the big breweries. Same old story, I’m afraid. The worker makes the profit and the bosses cream it off. Hello-hello, what’s all this about?”

The traffic ahead’s come to a standstill, halfway up a hill.

“An invisible war’s going on,” says Heidi, which confuses me till I realize she doesn’t mean the slow traffic, “all through history—the class war. Owners versus slaves, nobles versus serfs, the bloated bosses versus workers, the haves versus the have-nots. The working classes are kept in a state of repression by a mixture of force and lies.”

So I ask, “What sort of lies?”

“The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,” says Ian. “The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there
is
no class war. That’s why the Establishment keeps such an iron grip on what’s taught in schools, specially in history. Once the workers wise up, the revolution will kick off. And, as Gil Scott-Heron tells us, it will not be televised.”

I don’t know who the heron is, but it’s hard to think of our history teacher Mr. Simms as a cog in a vast plot to keep the workers
down. I wonder if Dad’s a bloated boss for employing Glenda. I ask, “Don’t revolutions often end up making things even worse?”

“Fair point,” says Heidi. “Revolutions
do
attract the Napoleons, the Maos, the Pol Pots. But that’s where the Party comes in. When the British revolution kicks off, we’ll be here with our structure in place, to protect it from Fascists and hijackers.”

The traffic inches forward; Ian’s van rumbles on.

I ask, “D’you think the revolution’ll be soon, then?”

“The miners’ strike could be the match in the gas tank,” says Ian. “When workers see the unions being gunned down—first with laws, then bullets—it’ll be clear that a class-based revolution isn’t some pie-in-the-sky lefty dream, but a matter of survival.”

“Karl Marx,” says Heidi, “proved how capitalism eats itself. When it can’t feed the millions it spits out, no amount of lies or brutality will save it. Sure, the Americans will go for our jugular—they’ll want to keep their fifty-first state—and Moscow will try to grab the reins, but when the soldiers join in, as they did in 1917 in Russia, then we’ll be unstoppable.” She and Ian are so sure of everything, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Heidi leans out to look ahead: “Police.”

Ian mutters about Thatcher’s pigs and attack dogs, and we reach a roundabout where a lorry’s lying on its side. Bits of windscreen are scattered across the tarmac, and a policewoman’s merging three lanes of traffic into one. She looks calm and in control—not piggish or wolfish or on the lookout for a runaway teenager at all, so far as I can see.

“Even if Thatcher doesn’t trigger the revolution this year,” Heidi turns to say, strands of her raspberry-red hair blowing in the wind, “it’s coming. In our lifetimes. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. By the time we’re old, society’ll be run like this: ‘From each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs.’ Sure, the bosses, the liberals, the Fascists, they’ll all squeal, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. And speaking of eggs,” she looks at Ian, who nods, “fancy breakfast at our place? Ian cooks a five-star full English.”

•   •   •

H
EIDI
’
S BUNGALOW
’
S SURROUNDED
by fields and isn’t what I’d imagine as Kent’s HQ for a socialist revolution, with its net curtains, cushion covers, porcelain figurines, and Flower Fairies. There’s even carpet on the bathroom floor. Heidi told me it was her gran’s house before she died, but her mum and stepfather live in France somewhere so Ian and she come here most weekends to make sure squatters haven’t moved in and to distribute the magazine. Heidi shows me how to lock the bathroom from the inside and makes a joke about the Norman Bates Motel, which I pretend to get. I’ve never used a shower before—we only have a bath at the Captain Marlow—so I freeze myself and boil myself before I get the water right. Heidi has a whole shelf of shampoos, conditioners, and soaps with labels written all in foreign, but I try a bit of everything till I smell like the ground floor of a department store. When I get out, I see the ghost of letters written in last time’s steam:
WHO
’
S A PRETTY BOY THEN
? Did Heidi write it for Ian? Wish I hadn’t lied ’bout my name, now; I’d really like to be friends with Heidi. I smear a bit of Woods of Windsor moisturizer on my suntanned skin, thinking how easily Heidi might have been born in a grotty Gravesend pub, and me the one who’s clever and confident and studying politics in London, and who has French shampoo, and a kind, funny, caring, and loyal boyfriend who leaves messages on the mirror and cooks a five-star English breakfast. Being born’s a hell of a lottery.