The Bone Clocks (81 page)

“Bren, if you can’t come here, perhaps I could try to—”

“No!”
For the first time Brendan looks afraid. “For your sake, for Lol’s sake, for Rafiq’s sake, for God’s sake stay put. Traveling’s too dangerous now, unless you’ve ten armed men willing to kill, and Sheep’s Head Peninsula’s probably the safest place in western Europe. When Pearl Occident first leased the West Cork coastal strip I thought,
What a humiliation for the Paddies
, but at least you’ve still got law and order there, of sorts. At least—”

Brendan’s features freeze in midsyllable, as if the wind changed direction just as he pulled a weird face. “Brendan? Can you hear me?” Nothing. I groan with frustration and Zimbra looks up, worried. I try rethreading, I try resetting my tab, I try waiting. I didn’t even ask if he’d heard from Sharon in Australia, but now the coverage has gone and something tells me it won’t be coming back.

U
P IN MY
room, I can’t get to sleep. Shadows bloom in the corners, swaying a little against darker darkness. The wind’s risen, the roof creaks, the sea booms. What Brendan said is on imperfectly remembered, nonstop shuffle repeat: I think of better things to say, calming things, but as usual it’s too late. My big brother, the onetime
multimillionaire property developer, looked so hollowed out and so fragile. I envy the God-intoxicated Boyces of the world. Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better. At the end of my garden the sound of waves dies and gives birth to the sound of waves, forever and ever, Amen. Across the corridor, Rafiq says something in his sleep, quite loud and afraid and in Arabic. I get up, go to his room, and say, “You okay, Raf?” but he’s asleep and mumbling, so I go back to my warm bed. My stomach makes a buried squeal. Once upon a time “my body” meant “me,” pretty much, but now “me” is my mind and my body is a selection box of ailments and aches. My molar throbs, the pain in my right side is jaggedy, rheumatism rusts my knuckles and knees, and if my body was a car I’d have traded it in, years ago. But my small, late, unexpected family—me, Lorelei, Rafiq, Zimbra, and Mo—will last only as long as my body functions. The O’Dalys would look after the kids as best they could, I know, but the world is getting worse, not better. I’ve seen the future and it’s hungry.

My fingers find Jacko’s silver labyrinth, looped on its cord over my bedpost, and I press it against my forehead. The pattern of its walls, passageways, and junctions cools my hot brain down a bit. “I doubt you survived,” I murmur to any real angel, to any surviving Horologist, “so I doubt you’ll hear me. But let me be wrong. Give me one final abracadabra. Two golden apples, if you can spare them. Get the kids out of here, somewhere safe, if anywhere is safe. Please.”

M
Y OLD CURTAIN FILTERS
the early rose-orange sun, but it’s cold rose-orange, not warm rose-orange. The wind and waves sound busy this morning, rather than relentless, like last night. I hear Zimbra coming up the stairs, and here he is, nosing his way into my room and wagging his tail to say good morning. Strange how he always knows when I’m awake. I’m aware I’ve forgotten something, something deeply unpleasant. What was it? Brendan. I wonder how he is this morning. I hope he’s being looked after. Only five years ago I could have booked myself a seat on an airplane, driven to the airport, flown over to Bristol, and within the hour been at Tintagel Gated Village. Now it’s like a trip to the moon …

What can’t be helped can’t be helped. I’ve jobs to be doing. I get out of bed like an old lady, carefully, open the curtains and open my window. Dunmanus Bay’s still a bit choppy, but I see a sailboat—probably Aileen Jones, out checking her lobster pots. The sea holly and myrtle at the end of the garden are being buffeted; back they bend towards the cottage, then spring up, then bend back towards the cottage. This means something. Something I’m missing, even though it’s there in front of me, as plain as day.

It’s an east wind, blowing from England; from Hinkley Point.

R
ADIO
POC
ISN
’
T
broadcasting this morning; there’s just a looped message saying the station is off the air today for operational reasons. So I switch to JKFM and leave it playing the Modern Jazz Quartet as I quarter an apple for my breakfast and heat up a couple
of potato cakes for Rafiq. Soon he smells the garlic and clops down the stairs in his makeshift dressing gown and he tells me about a zipwire some of the older village boys are planning up in Five Acre Wood. After we’ve eaten I feed the chickens, water the pumpkins in the polytunnel, make a few days’ worth of dog biscuits from oats, husk, and mutton fat, and sharpen the hair scissors while Rafiq cleans our drinking-water tub, refills it by taking the long hosepipe up to the spring, then goes down to the pier with his fishing rod. Zimbra joins him. Later he comes back with a pollack and a mackerel. Rafiq has bits of memories of fishing in sunny blue water before he came to Ireland, he says, and Declan O’Daly says the boy’s a natural angler—luckily for his and Lorelei’s diet, as they only eat meat once a month, at most. I’ll bake the fish for dinner tonight, and serve them up with mashed swede. I make a pot of mint tea and start cutting Rafiq’s hair. He’s long overdue a trim and it’ll be headlice season at school soon. “I saw Aileen Jones through my telescope earlier,” he says. “Out on the bay in the
Lookfar
, checking her lobster pot.”

“That’s great,” I say, “but I hope you were careful—”

“—not to point it at the sun,” he says. “ ’Course I didn’t, Holly. I’m not a total doofus, y’know?”

“Nobody’s saying you’re even a partial doofus,” I tell him mildly. “It’s just once you’re a parent, a sort of … accident detector switches on, and never switches off. You’ll see, one day, if you’re ever a father.”

“Euuuyyyuckh”
is what Rafiq thinks of that prospect.

“Hold still. Lol should be doing this. She’s the better stylist.”

“No way! Lol’d make me look like a boy in Five-star Chongqing.”

“Like a boy in what?”

“Five-star Chongqing. They’re Chinese. All the girls fancy them.”

And dream dreams of lives of plenty in Shanghai, I don’t doubt. They say there are only two women to every three men in China ’cause of selective feticide, and when the Lease Lands were new and buses still ran to Cork, my relatives there told me about local girls being recruited as “China brides” and sailing away to full stomachs,
24/7 electricity, and Happy Ever After. I was old enough to have my doubts about the recruiting agencies’ testimonials. I switch the radio from JKFM to RTÉ in case there’s a report about Hinkley, which went unmentioned on the eight
A.M.
news. Zimbra comes and puts his head on Rafiq’s lap and looks up at the boy. Rafiq musses his head. The RTÉ announcer reads the birth notices, where people thread the program the names of new babies, birthweights, the parents’ names, parishes, and counties. I like hearing them. Christ knows these kids’ lives won’t be easy, especially for the majority who are born beyond the Pale or the Cork Cordon, but each name feels like a tiny light held up against the Endarkenment.

I snip a bit more around Rafiq’s right ear to match his left.

I snip off too much, so now have to snip around his left.

“I wish all this never had to change,” says Rafiq, unexpectedly.

I’m pleased he’s content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts. “Change is sort of hardwired into the world.”

The boy asks, “What does ‘hardwired’ mean?”

“A computer phrase from the old days. I just mean … what’s real changes. If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.” I snip the hairs up his neck. “Even photos change, mind. They fade.”

We say nothing for a bit. I accidentally spike the bit between the tendons on Rafiq’s neck and he goes, “Ouch,” and I say, “Sorry,” and he says, “No bother,” like an Irishman. Crunchie, a semiwild tomcat I named after a long-ago chocolate bar, strolls across the kitchen windowsill. Zimbra notices, but can’t be bothered to make a fuss. Rafiq asks, “Holly, d’you think Cork University’ll be open again by the time I’m eighteen?”

I love him too much to puncture his dreams. “Possibly. Why?”

“ ’Cause I want to be an engineer when I grow up.”

“Good. Civilization needs more engineers.”

“Mr. Murnane said we need to fix stuff, build stuff, move stuff, like oil states do, but do it all without oil.”

And start forty years ago
, I think. “He’s right.” I pull up a chair in front of Rafiq. “Lower your head, I’ll do your fringe.”

I lift up his fringe with a comb and snip off the hair that shows through its teeth, leaving a centimeter. I’m getting better at this. Then I see Rafiq’s got this strange intense look on his face; it makes me stop. I turn the radio down to a mumble. “What is it, Raf love?”

He looks like he’s trying to catch a far-off sound. Then he looks at the window. Crunchie’s gone. “I remember someone cutting my hair. A woman. I can’t see her face, but she’s talking Arabic.”

I lean back and lower the scissors. “One of your sisters, perhaps? Someone must’ve cut your hair before you were five.”

“Was my hair short when I got here?”

“I don’t remember it being long. You were half starved, half drowned, then you nearly died of hypothermia. The state of your hair didn’t register. But this woman, Raf—can you see her face?” Rafiq scrunches up his face. “It’s like, if I don’t look, I see her, but if I look at her, her face melts away. When I dream, I sometimes see her, but when I wake up, the faces’ve gone again, leaving just the name, like. One was Assia, I
think
she’s my aunt … or maybe a sister. Maybe it’s her with the scissors. Hamza and Ismail, they were my brothers, on the boat.” I’ve heard this a few times, but I don’t interrupt Rafiq when he’s in the mood to study the surviving fragments of his life before Ireland. “Hamza was funny, and Ismail wasn’t. There were so many men on the boat—we were all jammed up with each other. There were no women, and only one other boy, but he was a Berber and I didn’t understand his Arabic very well. Most of the passengers were seasick, but I was okay. We all went to the toilet over the side. Ismail said we were going to Norway. I said, ‘What’s Norway?’ and Ismail said it’s a safe place where we could earn money, where they didn’t have Ebola and nobody tried to shoot you … That sounded good, but the days and nights on the boat were bad.” Rafiq’s frown deepens. “Then we saw lights across the water, down a long bay, it was night, and there was a big fight. Hamza was saying to the captain in Arabic, ‘It can’t be Norway,’ and the captain was saying, ‘Why would I lie to you?’ and Hamza had a sort of compass in his hand, saying, ‘Look, we’re not north
enough,’ and the captain threw it over the side of the boat and Hamza told the others, ‘He’s lying to us to save fuel. Those lights aren’t Norway, it’s somewhere else!’ Then all the shouting began, and then the guns were going off, and …” Rafiq’s eyes and voice are hollow. “That’s where I am for most of my nightmares. We’re all jammed in too tight …”

I remember how the Horologists could redact bad memories, and wish I could grant Rafiq the same mercy. Or not, I dunno.

“… and most times it’s like it was, with Hamza throwing a ring into the water, telling me, ‘We’ll swim together,’ and he throws me into the water first, but then he never follows. And that’s all I have.” Rafiq dabs his eyes on the back of his hand. “I’ve forgotten everything else. My own family. Their faces.”

“Owain and Yvette Richie of Lifford, up in County Donegal,” says the radio guy, “announce the birth of their daughter Keziah—a dainty but perfect six pounds … Welcome aboard, Keziah.”

“You were five or six, Raf. When you washed up on the rocks below you were in shock, you had hypothermia, you’d seen slaughter at close quarters, you’d drifted for heaven only knows how long in the cold Atlantic, you were alone. You’re not a forgetter, you’re a survivor. I think it’s a miracle you remember anything at all.”

Rafiq takes a clipping of his own hair, fallen onto his thigh, and rubs it moodily between his finger and thumb. I think back to that spring night. It was calm and warm for April, which probably saved Rafiq’s life. Aoife and Örvar had only died the autumn before, and Lorelei was a mess. So was I, but I had to pretend not to be, for Lorelei’s sake. I was speaking with my friend Gwyn on my tab in my chair when this face appeared at the door, staring in like a drowned ghost. I didn’t have Zimbra yet, so no dog scared him off. Once I’d recovered, I opened the door and got him inside. Where he puked up a liter of seawater. The boy was soaked and shivering and didn’t understand English, or seemed not to. We still had fuel for our boiler at that time, just about, but I understood enough about hypothermia to know a hot bath can trigger arrhythmia and possibly a
cardiac arrest, so I got him out of his wet clothes and sat him by the fire wrapped in blankets. He was still shivering, which was another hopeful sign.

Lorelei had woken up by this point, and was making a cup of warm ginger drink for the boy from the sea. I threaded Dr. Kumar but she was busy at Bantry helping with an outbreak of Ratflu, so we were on our own for a couple more days. Our young visitor was feverish, malnourished, and suffered from terrible dreams, but after about a week we, with Mo’s and Branna O’Daly’s help, had nursed him back to relative health. We’d worked out his name was Rafiq by that stage, but where had he come from? Maps didn’t work so Mo Netsourced “Hello” in all the dialects a dark-skinned Asylumite might speak: Moroccan Arabic rang the bell. With Mo’s help, Lorelei studied the language from Net tutorials and became Rafiq’s first English teacher, pulling herself out of mourning for the first time. When an unsmiling Stability officer arrived with Martin, our mayor, to inspect the illegal immigrant about a month later, Rafiq was capable of stringing together basic English sentences.

“The law says he has to be deported,” stated the Stability officer.

Feeling sick, I asked where he’d be deported to, and how.

“Not your problem, Miss Sykes,” stated the Stability officer.