The Bone Clocks (44 page)

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… Zoë and the girls had flown out to Montreal as soon as school broke up, giving me a week to get stuck into my new book, a black comedy about a fake mystic who pretends to see the Virgin Mary during the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. It’s one of my best three or four. Unfortunately that week without me also allowed Zoë’s family to get to work on Juno and Anaïs, inculcating in my daughters the cultural superiority of the French-speaking world. By the time
I
arrived at our little pad in Outremont on December 23, the girls would only speak to me in English when I explicitly ordered them to. Zoë allowed them a treble budget of online games as long as they played
en français
, and Zoë’s sister took them and their cousins out to a Christmas fashion show, in French, followed by some sort of teenybop boy-band concert, in French. Cultural bribery of the first degree—and when I objected, Zoë was all, “Well, Crispin,
I
believe in broadening the girls’ horizons and giving them access to their family roots—and I’m astonished and depressed that
you
want them locked inside Anglo-American monoculture.” Then, on Boxing Day, we all went bowling. The eugenically favored Legranges were astonished beyond words by my score: twenty. Not on one ball, but for the whole sodding game. I’m just not built for bowling; I’m built for writing. Juno flicked back her hair and said, “Papa, I don’t know where to look.”

“Creespin!” Here comes Miguel Alvarez, my Spanish-language editor, smiling as if he has a present for me. “Creespin, I have a small present for you. Follow me a little, to a place a little more discreet.” Feeling like an Irvine Welsh character, I follow Miguel away from the hubbub of the main party to a bench in the shadow of a tall wall behind, indeed, a tangle of cacti. “So, I have items you ask for, Creespin.”

“That’s most obliging of you.” I light a cigarette.

Miguel slips a small envelope the size of a credit card into my jacket pocket. “Enjoy, is shame to leave Colombia without tasting. Is very very pure. But a thing, Creespin. To use here, here in Cartagena,
in private, is not big deal. But to transport, to carry to airport”—grimacing, Miguel slices his throat. “You understand?”

“Miguel, only a deadhead would consider taking drugs anywhere near an airport. Don’t worry. What I don’t use, I’ll flush away.”

“A good plan. Play safe. Enjoy. Is best in world.”

“And were you able to find a Colombian phone?”

“Yes, yes.” My editor hands me another envelope.

It, too, goes into my jacket pocket. “Thank you. Smartphones are great when they work, but if the coverage is dodgy you can’t beat the little old phones for sending texts, I find.”

Miguel tilts his head, not really agreeing, but thirty dollars, or however much the thing cost him, is a cheap price to keep the Wild Child of British Letters onside. “So, now you have all, and all is good?”

“Very good indeed, Miguel, thank you.”

Like my best plots, this one is writing itself.

“Eh, Crispin,” beckons Kenny Bloke, the Australian poet, as we pass a huddle of celebrants on the far gate of the cactus garden. “Some people here to meet.” Miguel and I join the small group of writers, apparently, under a canopy of tree ferns. The foreign names don’t really sink in—none has had a story in
The New Yorker
, so far as I’m aware, but when Kenny Bloke’s introducing me to the pale, dark-haired, angular woman, I suffer a throb of recognition even before he names her: “Holly Sykes, a fellow Pom.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hershey,” she says.

“You’re vaguely familiar,” I tell her, “if I’m not mistaken?”

“We were both at the Hay Festival on the same day, last year.”

“Not that sodding awful party in that ghastly tent?”

“We were both in the signing tent, actually, Mr. Hershey.”

“Hang on! Yes. You’re that angel author. Holly Sykes.”

“Not angels in the harps-’n’-haloes sense, though,” interjects Kenny Bloke. “Holly writes about inner voices—and as I was just saying, there’s a strong affinity with the spirit guides my people believe in.”

“Miss Sykes,” says Miguel, oleaginously. “I am Miguel Alvarez, editor of
Ottopusso
, editor of Creespin. Is great honor.”

The Sykes woman shakes his hand. “Mr. Alvarez.”

“Is true you sell over half-million books in Spain?”

“My book seemed to strike a chord there,” she says.

“Uri Geller struck a chord everywhere.” I’m drunker than I thought. “Remember him? Michael Jackson’s best mate? Big in Japan? Huge.” My cocktail tastes of mango and seawater.

Miguel smiles at me but swivels his eyes back to the Sykes woman like an Action Man figure I once owned. “You happy with your Spanish publishers, Miss Sykes?”

“As you pointed out, they sold half a million copies.”

“Is fantastic. But in case of problem, here, my card …”

As Miguel hovers, another woman materializes by the tree fern’s trunk like a
Star Trek
character. She’s dark, golden, mid-to-late thirties, and impalingly attractive. Miguel says, “Carmen!” as if he’s delighted to see her.

Carmen stares at Miguel’s business card until it vanishes into his jacket pocket, then turns to Holly Sykes. I’m expecting a Latina accent full of thunder, but she speaks like a Home Counties domestic-science teacher. “I hope Miguel hasn’t been making a nuisance of himself, Holly—the man is a shameless poacher. Yes, you
are
, Miguel—I
know
you haven’t forgotten the Stephen Hawking episode.” Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence. “Mr. Hershey,” the woman turns my way, “we’ve never met. I’m Carmen Salvat, and I have the
singular
privilege”—a dart aimed at Miguel—“of being Holly’s Spanish-language publisher. Welcome to Colombia.”

Carmen Salvat’s handshake is no-nonsense. She radiates. With her free hand she toys with her necklace of lapis lazuli.

Kenny Bloke pipes up: “Holly mentioned that you also publish Nick Greek in Spanish, Carmen?”

“Yes, I bought the rights to
Route 605
before Nick had finished the manuscript. I just had a good feeling about it.”

“Bloody blew me away, that book did,” says Kenny Bloke. “Totally deserved last year’s Brittan Prize, I reckon.”

“Nick has a lovely soul,” says a Newfoundland poetess, whose name I’ve already forgotten but who has the eyes of a seal gazing out of a Greenpeace poster. “Truly lovely.”

“Carmen knows how to pick a winner,” says Miguel. “But I think, in sales, Holly is still streets ahead, no, Carmen?”

“Which reminds me,” says Carmen Salvat. “Holly, the minister of culture’s wife would love to meet you—could I be a pest?”

As the Sykes woman is led away, I watch Carmen Salvat’s appetizing haunches and get to work on a fantasy in which my phone rings—right now: a doctor in London with the catastrophic news that Zoë’s Saab was knocked off the Hammersmith flyover by a drunk driver. She and the girls were killed instantly. I fly home tomorrow for the funeral. My grief is ennobling, but crushing, and I withdraw from life. I’m glimpsed occasionally riding the obscurer London Tube lines, out in zones four and five. Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides. One day next year, Hershey finds himself at the end of the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow airport. He exits the Tube, wanders into Departures, and glances up at the board to see the name “Cartagena”—the last place on earth where he was still a husband and father. On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket—for some reason he has his passport with him—and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines,
saudade
, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Aduana, Hershey sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them. Surprisingly, neither is surprised.

M
ANY COCKTAILS LATER
, I’m helping a royally bladdered Richard Cheeseman into the lift and back to his room. “I’m fine, Crisp, I look drunkier than I am, really.” The lift doors open and we step inside. He staggers like a drugged camel in storm-force winds. “Jussamo,
I f’got m’room number, I’ll just”—Cheeseman takes out his wallet and drops it—“oh, bumplops’n’pissflaps.”

“Allow me.” I pick up Cheeseman’s wallet and take out the swipe-card in its sleeve—405—before returning it. “There you go, squire.”

Cheeseman nods his thanks and mumbles, “If th’numbers in y’room number add up to nine, Hersh, you’ll never die in it.”

I press 4. “First stop, your room.”

“I’m fine. Icanfindmy—my—my way home.”

“But I’m duty-bound to see you safe to your door, Richard. Don’t worry, my intentions are entirely honorable.”

Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”

I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes
ping
and we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a
nunnery
,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”

Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”

I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”

Arms outspread, the critic Richard Cheeseman passes out.

I
ORDER EGG-WHITE OMELETTE
with spinach, sourdough toast, and organic turkey patties, freshly squeezed orange juice, chilled Evian water, and local coffee to wash down painkillers and entomb my hangover. Seven-thirty
A.M.
, and the air in the roofed-over courtyard is still cool. The hotel’s mynah bird sits on its perch, making improbable noises. Its beak is an enameled scythe and its eye is all-seeing and all-knowing. Were this a work of fiction, dear reader, my protagonist would wonder if the mynah bird intuits what he’s planning. Damon MacNish, dressed in a striped linen suit like Our Man in Havana, sits in a corner half hidden by
The Wall Street Journal
. Funny how the trajectory of life can be altered by a few days in a Scottish recording studio at the end of one’s teens. His girlfriend, who
is
still in her teens, is flipping through
The Face
. For her, their sex must be like shagging Sandpaperman. What’s in it for her? Apart from first-class air travel, five-star accommodation, minglings with the rock aristocracy, movie directors, and charity tsars; exposure in every gossip magazine on Earth, and modeling contracts to match, obviously … I only hope that if Juno and Anaïs scale Mount Society they’ll use their own talents and not just straddle the skinny thighs of a mediocre songwriter wrinklier than their dad.
For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful
.

Can Literature Change the World?
is the name of Cheeseman’s event. This urgent and timely commingling of the cultural elite’s finest minds is being held in a long, whitewashed hall on the top
floor of the ducal palace, Ground Zero of Cartagena 2016. Things kick off when a trio of Colombian writers strolls onto the stage to a standing ovation. The three salute their audience like postwar resistance heroes. The moderator follows them—a twig-thin woman in a blood-red dress, whose fondness for chunky gold is visible even from my seat on the back row. Richard Cheeseman has opted for the English-consul look, with a three-piece cream suit and damson-purple tie, but just looks like a hairy twat off
Brideshead Revisited
. The Three Revolutionaries take their seats and we non-Hispanophones don our headphones for the English simultaneous translation. The female interpreter renders first the moderator’s greeting, then the potted biographies of the four guests. Richard Cheeseman’s biog is the scantiest: “A famous and respected English critic and novelist.” In fairness to whoever wrote it, Richard Cheeseman’s Wikipedia page is scanty too, though his “notorious demolition” of Crispin Hershey’s
Echo Must Die
is there, and connected via hyperlink to the
Piccadilly Review
website. Hyena Hal tells me he’s done his damnedest to get the link deleted, but Wikipedia doesn’t take bribes.

South American readings are audience-participative affairs, like stand-up comedy at home. My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.” Richard Cheeseman reads a scene from his newest novel,
Man in a White Car
, about the final moments of a Sonny Penhallow, a Cambridge undergraduate who drives his vintage Aston Martin over a Cornish cliff. Cheeseman’s prose lacks even the merit of being awful; it’s merely mediocre, and one by one the earphones slip off and the smartphones come out. When Cheeseman’s finished the applause is lackluster, though my own reading yesterday hardly brought the house down.

Then the “round table” starts and the bollocks gets going.

“Literature should assassinate,” declares the first revolutionary. “
I
write with a pen in one hand and a knife in the other!” Grown men stand, cheer, and clap.

The second writer won’t be outdone: “Woody Guthrie, one of the few great American poets, painted the words
This Guitar Kills Fascists
on his guitar; on
my
laptop, I have written
This Machine Kills Neocapitalism!
” Oh, the crowd goes wild!