The Bone Clocks (48 page)

My interviewer thanks everyone for coming in Chinese, and gives what I gather is a short introduction. Then I do a reading from
Echo Must Die
while a Mandarin translation is projected onto a screen behind me. It’s the same section I read at Hay-on-Wye, three years
ago. Sodding hell, is it already three years since I last published? Trevor Upward’s hilarious escapades on the roof of the Eurostar do not appear to amuse the select gathering. Was my satire translated as a straight tragedy? Or was the Hershey wit taken into custody at the language barrier? After my reading I endure the sound of fourteen hands clapping, take my seat, and help myself to a glass of sparkling water—I’m thirsty as hell. The water is flat and tastes of yeast. I hope it didn’t come out of a Shanghai tap. My interviewer smiles, thanks me in English, and asks me the same questions I’ve been asked since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago: “How does your famous father’s work influence your novels?”; “Why does
Desiccated Embryos
have a symmetrical structure?”; “What truths should the Chinese reader find in your novels?” I give the same answers I’ve been giving since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago, and my spidery, unsmiling translator, who also translated my answers several times yesterday, renders my sentences into Chinese without any difficulty. Electrotherapy Girl, I notice, is actually taking notes. Then the interviewer asks, “And do you read your reviews?” which redirects my train of thought towards Richard Cheeseman where it smashes into last week’s miserable visit to Bogotá and comes off the tracks altogether …

H
ELL
’
S BELLS, THAT
was one dispiriting visit, dear reader. Dominic Fitzsimmons had been pulling strings for months to get me and Richard’s sister Maggie a meeting with his Colombian counterpart at the Ministry of Justice for us to discuss the terms of repatriation—only for said dignitary to become “unavailable” at the last minute. A youthful underling came in his place—the boy was virtually tripping over his umbilical cord. He kept taking calls during our twenty-seven-minute audience, and twice he called
me
Meester Cheeseman while referring to “the Prisoner ’Earshey.” Waste of sodding time. The next day we visited poor Richard at the Penitenciaría Central. He’s suffering from weight loss, shingles, piles, depression, and his hair’s falling out too, but there’s only one doctor for two thousand inmates,
and in the case of middle-class European prisoners, the good medic requires a fee of five hundred dollars per consultation. Richard asked us to bring books, paper, and pencils, but he turned down my offer of a laptop or iPad because the guards would nick it. “It marks you as rich,” he told us, in a broken voice, “and if they know you’re rich they make you buy insurance.” The place is run by gangs who control the in-house drug trade. “Don’t worry, Maggie,” Richard told his sister. “I don’t touch the stuff. Needles are shared, they bulk out the stuff with powder, and once you owe them, they’ve got your soul. It’d kill off my chances of an early appeal.” Maggie stayed brave for her brother, but as soon as we were out of the prison gates, she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. My own conscience felt hooked and zapped by a Taser. It still does.

But I can’t change places with him. It would kill me.

“Mr. Hershey?” Miss Li’s looking worried. “You okay?”

I blink. Shanghai. The book fair. “Yes, I just … Sorry, um, yes … Do I read my reviews? No. Not anymore. They take me to places I don’t wish to go.” As my interpreter gets to work on this, I notice that my audience is down to six. Electrotherapy Girl has slipped away.

T
HE
S
HANGHAI
B
UND
is several things: a waterfront sweep of 1930s architecture with some ornate Toytown set pieces along the way; a symbol of Western colonial arrogance; a symbol of the ascension of the modern Chinese state; four lanes of slow-moving, or no-moving, traffic; and a raised promenade along the Huangpu River where flows a Walt Whitman throng of tourists, families, couples, vendors, pickpockets, friendless novelists, muttering drug dealers, and pimps: “Hey, mister, want drug, want sex? Very near, beautiful girls.” Crispin Hershey says, “No.” Not only is our hero loyally hitched, but he fears that the paperwork arising from getting Shanghaied in a Shanghai brothel would be truly Homeric, and not in a good way.

The sun disintegrates into evening and the skyscrapers over the
river begin to fluoresce: there’s a titanic bottle opener; an outsize 1920s interstellar rocket; a supra-Ozymandian obelisk, plus a supporting cast of mere forty-, fifty-, sixty-floor buildings, clustering skywards like a doomed game of Tetris. In Mao’s time Pudong was a salt marsh, Nick Greek was telling me, but now you look for levitating jet-cars. When I was a boy the U.S.A. was synonymous with modernity; now it’s here. So I carry on walking, imagining the past: junks with lanterns swinging in the ebb and flow; the ghostly crisscross of masts and rigging, the groan of hulls laid down in Glasgow, Hamburg, and Marseille; hard, knotted stevedores unloading opium, loading tea; dotted lines of Japanese bombers, bombing the city to rubble; bullets, millions of bullets, bullets from Chicago, bullets from Fukuoka, bullets from Stalingrad,
ratatat-tat-tat-tat
. If cities have auras, like Zoë always insisted people do, if your “chakra is open,” then Shanghai’s aura is the color of money and power. Its emails can shut down factories in Detroit, denude Australia of its iron ore, strip Zimbabwe of its rhino horn, pump the Dow Jones full of either steroids or financial sewage …

My phone’s ringing. Perfect. My favorite person.

“Hail, O Face That Launched a Thousand Ships.”

“Hello, you idiot. How’s the mysterious Orient?”

“Shanghai’s impressive, but it lacks a Carmen Salvat.”

“And how was the Shanghai International Book Fair?”

“Ah, same old, same old. A good crowd at my event.”

“Great! You gave Nick a run for his money, then?”

“ ‘Nick
Greek
’ to you,” growls my green-eyed monster. “It’s not a popularity contest, you know.”

“Good to hear you say so. Any sign of Holly yet?”

“No, her flight’s not due in until later—and, anyway, I’ve snuck off from the hotel to the Bund. I’m here now, skyscraper-watching.”

“Amazing, aren’t they? Are they all lit up yet?”

“Yep. Glowing like Lucy
and
the Sky
and
Diamonds. So much for my day, how was yours?”

“A sales meeting with an anxious sales team, an artwork meeting
with a frantic printer, and now a lunch meeting with melancholic booksellers, followed by crisis meetings until five.”

“Lovely. Any news from the letting agent?”

“Ye-es. The news is, the apartment’s ours if we—”

“Oh that’s fantastic, darling! I’ll get on to the—”

“But listen, Crisp. I’m not quite as sure about it as I was.”

I stand aside for a troop of cheerful Chinese punks in full regalia. “The Plaza de la Villa flat? It was far and a
way
the best place we saw. Plenty of light, space for my study, just about affordable, and
please
—when we lift the blinds every morning, it’ll be like living over a Pérez-Reverte novel. I don’t understand: What boxes isn’t it ticking?”

My editor-girlfriend chooses her words with care. “I didn’t realize how attached I am to having my own place, until now. My place here is my own little castle. I like the neighborhood, my neighbors …”

“But, Carmen, your own little castle is
little
. If I’m to divide my time between London and Madrid, we need somewhere bigger.”

“I
know …
 I just feel we’re rushing things a bit.”

That sinking feeling. “It’s been a year since Perth.”

“I’m not rejecting you, Crispin, honestly. I just …”

Evening in Shanghai is turning suddenly cooler.

“I just … want to carry on as we are for a while, that’s all.”

Everyone I see appears to be one half of a loving couple. I remember this
I’m not rejecting you, Crispin
from my pre-Zoë era, when it marked the beginning of breakups. Resentment snarls through the letterbox, feeding me lines to say: “Carmen, make your sodding mind up!”; “Do you
know
how much we’re wasting on airfares?”; even, “Have you met someone else? Someone Spanish? Someone closer to your own age?”

I tell her, “That’s fine.”

She listens to the long pause. “It is?”

“I’m disappointed, but only because I don’t have enough money to buy a place near yours, so we could establish some sort of Hanseatic
League of Little Castles. Maybe if a film deal for
Echo Must Die
falls from the skies. Look, this call’s costing you a fortune. Go and cheer up your booksellers.”

“Am I still welcome in Hampstead next week?”

“You’re always welcome in Hampstead. Any week.”

She’s smiling in her office in Madrid, and I’m glad I didn’t listen to the snarls through the letterbox. “Thanks, Crispin. Give my love to Holly, if you meet up. She’s hoping to. And if anyone offers you the deep-fried durian fruit, steer clear. Okay, bye then—love you.”

“Love you too.” And end call. Do we use the L-word because we mean it, or because we want to kid ourselves into thinking we’re still in that blissful state?

B
ACK IN HIS
hotel room on the twenty-ninth floor, Crispin Hershey showers away his sticky day and flumps back onto his snowy bed, clad in boxers and a T-shirt emblazoned with Beckett’s “fail better” quote I was given in Santa Fe. Dinner was a gathering of writers, editors, foreign bookshop owners, and British Council folks at a restaurant with revolving tables. Nick Greek was on eloquent form, while I imagined him dying in spectacular fashion, facedown in a large dish of glazed duck, lotus root, and bamboo shoot. Hercule Poirot would emerge from the shadows to tell us who had poisoned the rising literary star, and why. The older writer would be an obvious choice, with professional jealousy as a motive, which is why it couldn’t be him. I stare at the digital clock in the TV-screen frame: 22:17. Thinking about Carmen, I shouldn’t be surprised at her reticence re: Our Flat. The “Honeymoon Over” signs were already there. She refused to be in London when Juno and Anaïs came over last month. The girls’ visit was not a wholly unqualified success. On the way from the airport, Juno announced she was not into horses anymore so, of course, Anaïs decided that she was too old for pony camp as well, and as the deposit was nonrefundable, I expressed my displeasure perhaps a tad too much in the manner of my own father. Five minutes later Anaïs was bawling her eyes out and Juno was
studying her nails, telling me, “It’s no good, Dad, you can’t use twentieth-century methods on twenty-first-century kids.” It cost me five hundred pounds and three hours in Carnaby Street boutiques to stop them phoning their mother to get their flights back to Montreal rebooked for the next day. Zoë lets Juno get away with rejecting even the gentlest admonishment with a virulent “Oh, whatever!” while Anaïs is turning into a sea anemone whose mind sways whichever way the currents of the moment push her. The visit would have gone better if Carmen had pitched in, but she wasn’t having any of it: “They don’t need a stepmother laying down the law when holidaying in London with their dad.” I said I felt a deep affection for my own stepmother. Carmen replied that after reading my memoir about Dad she could quite understand why. Subject deftly changed.

Classic Carmen Salvat strategy, that.

22:47. I
PLAY
chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn’t a mind of digital code but Dad: It’s Dad’s attacks I repel; Dad’s defenses I dismantle; Dad’s king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable. Stress will out, however; usually I win at this level, but today I keep making repeated slips. Worse, the old git starts taking the piss: “Superb strategy, Crisp; that’s it, you move your rook there; so I’ll move my knight here; pincer your dozy rook against your blundering queen and now there’s Sweet Fanny Adams you can do about it!” When I use the undo function to take back my rook, Dad crows: “That’s right—ask a sodding machine to bail you out. Why not download an app to write your next novel?” “Sod off,” I tell him, and turn off my phone. I switch on the TV and sift through the channels until I recognize a scene from Mike Leigh’s film
One Year
. It’s appallingly good. My own dialogue is shite compared to this. Sleep would be a good idea, but I’m at the mercy of jet lag and I find I’m wired. My stomach isn’t too sure about the deep-fried chunks of durian fruit, either; Nick Greek admitted to the British consul that he hadn’t yet acquired the taste, so I ate three. I’d love a smoke but Carmen’s bullied me into
quitting so, yummy yummy, it’s a zap of Nicorette. Richard Cheeseman’s smoking again. How can he not, stuck where he is, poor bastard? His teeth are brown as tea. I flick through more channels and find a subtitled American import,
The Dog Whisperer
, about an animal trainer who sorts out psychotic Californians’ psychotic pets. 23:10. I consider jerking off again, purely for medicinal purposes, and browse my mental Blu-ray collection, settling on the girl from that commune Rivendell somewhere in West London—but decide that I can’t be bothered. So I open my new Moleskine, turn to the first page, and write “The Rottnest Novel” at the top …

… and find I’ve forgotten my main character’s name again. Bugger it. For a while he was Duncan Frye, but Carmen said that sounded like a Scottish chip-shop owner. So I went with “Duncan McTeague” but the “Mc” is too obvious for a Scot. I’ll settle with Duncan Drummond, for now. DD. Duncan Drummond, then, an 1840s stonemason who ends up in the Swan River Settlement, designs a lighthouse on Rottnest Island. Hyena Hal isn’t sure about this book—“Certainly a fresh departure, Crisp”—but I woke up one morning and realized that all my novels deal with contemporary Londoners whose upper-middle-class lives have their organs ripped out by catastrophe or scandal. Diminishing returns were kicking in even before Richard Cheeseman’s review, I fear. Already, however, a few problemettes with the Rottnest novel are mooning their brown starfishes my way: Viz., I’ve only got three thousand words; those three thousand are not the best of my career; my final new deadline is December 31 of this year; Editor Oliver has been sacked for “underperformance” and his aptly named successor Curt is making some unpleasant noises about paying back advances.