The Bone Clocks (53 page)

Either the audience is listening, or else they’re merely snoozing with eyes open. I turn over my notes.

“So much for the pen. Now for the place. From the vantage point of continental Europeans, Iceland is, of course, a mostly treeless, mostly cold oval rock where a third of a million souls eke out a living. Within my own lifetime Iceland has made the front pages exactly
four times: the Cod Wars of the 1970s; the setting for Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s arms-control talks; an early casualty of the 2008 crash; and as the source of a volcanic ash cloud that disabled European aviation in 2010. Blocs, however, whether geometric or political, are defined by their outer edges. Just as Orientalism seduces the imagination of a certain type of Westerner, to a certain type of southerner, Iceland exerts a gravitational force far in excess of its landmass and cultural import. Pytheas, the Greek cartographer who lived around 300
B.C.
in a sunbaked land on the far side of the ancient world, he felt this gravity, and put you on his map: Ultima Thule. The Irish Christian hermits who cast themselves onto the sea in coracles, they felt this pull. Tenth-century refugees from the civil war in Norway, they felt it too. It was their grandsons who wrote the sagas. Sir Joseph Banks, enough Victorian scholars to sink a longship, Jules Verne, even Hermann Göring’s brother, who was spotted by Auden and MacNeice here in 1937, they all felt the pull of the north, of your north, and all of them,
I
believe, like Auden—were never not thinking about Iceland.”

The UFO-shaped lights of the House of Literature blink on.

“Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, ideally in a house like Laxness’s Gljúfrasteinn, but we also write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves, and cabinets full of … junk, treasure, both cultural—nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called ‘the compost heap’; and also personal stuff—childhood TV, homegrown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children—and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate …”

H
OLLY
’
S BEEN RENTING
her apartment since June, but she’ll be moving back to Rye in a couple of weeks so it’s minimally furnished, uncluttered, and neat, all walnut floors and cream walls, with a fine view of Reykjavik’s jumbled roofs, sloping down to the inky bay.
Streetlights punctuate the northern twilight as color drains away, and a trio of cruise liners glitters in the harbor, like three floating Las Vegases. Over the bay, a long, whale-shaped mountain dominates the skyline, or would, if the clouds weren’t so low. Örvar says it’s called Mount Esja, but admits he’s never climbed it because it’s right there, on the doorstep. I biff away an intense wish to live here, intense, perhaps, because of its utter lack of realism: I don’t think I’d survive a single winter of these three-hour days. Holly, Aoife, Örvar, and I eat a veggie moussaka and polish off a couple of bottles of wine. They ask me about my week on the road. Aoife talks about her summer’s dig on a tenth-century settlement near Eglisstaðir, and nudges the amiable but quiet Örvar into discussing his work on the genetic database that has mapped the entire Icelandic population: “Eighty-plus women were found to have Native American DNA,” he tells me. “This proves pretty conclusively that the Vinland Sagas are based on historical truth, not just wishful thinking. Lots of Irish DNA on the women’s side, too.” Aoife describes an app that can tell every living Icelander if and how closely related they are to every other living Icelander. “They’ve needed it for years,” she pats Örvar’s hand on the table, “to avoid those awkward, morning-after
in-Thor’s-name-did-I-just-shag-my-cousin?
moments. Right, Örvar?” The poor lad half blushes and mumbles about a gig starting somewhere. Everyone in Reykjavik under thirty years old, Aoife says, is in at least one band. They get up to go, and as I’m leaving first thing in the morning they both wish me bon voyage. I get a niece’s hug from Aoife and a firm handshake from Örvar, who only now remembers that he brought
Desiccated Embryos
for me to sign. While Örvar laces up his boots, I try to think of something witty to mark the occasion, but nothing witty arrives.

To Örvar, from Crispin, with best regards.

I’ve striven to be witty since
Wanda in Oils
.

Letting it go feels so sodding liberating.

•   •   •

I
STIR, STIR
, stir until the mint leaves are bright green minnows in a whirlpool. “The nail in the coffin of Carmen and me,” I tell Holly, “was Venice. If I never see the place again, I’ll die happy.”

Holly looks puzzled. “I found it rather romantic.”

“That’s the trouble. All that beauty: in-
sodding-sufferable
. Ewan Rice calls Venice the Capital of Divorce—and set one of his best books there. About divorce. Venice is humanity at its ripped-off, ripping-off worst … I made this smart-arse remark about a rip-off umbrella Carmen bought—really, the sort of thing I say twenty times a day—but instead of batting it away, she had this look … like,
‘Remind me
, why
am I spending the last of my youth on this whingeing old man?’
She walked off across Saint Mark’s Square. Alone, of course.”

“Well,” Holly says neutrally, “we all have off days …”

“Bit of a Joycean epiphany, looking back. I don’t blame her. Either for finding me irritating or for dumping me. When she’s my age now, I’ll be
sixty
-sodding-
eight
, Holly! Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos. So we spent the next day moseying around museums on our own, and when we said goodbye at Venice airport, the last thing she said was ‘Take care’; and when I got home, a Dear John was in my inbox. Couldn’t call it unexpected. Both of us have been through a messy divorce already, and one’s enough. We’ve agreed we’re still friends. We’ll exchange Christmas cards for a few years, refer to each other without rancor, and probably never meet again.”

Holly nods and makes an “I see” noise in her throat.

A late bus stops outside, its air brakes hissing.

I fail to mention this afternoon’s message to Holly.

My iPhone’s still switched off. Not now. Later.

“L
OVELY SHOT, THAT.
” There’s a framed photograph on a shelf behind Holly showing her as a young mum, with a small toothy
Aoife dressed as the Cowardly Lion with freckles on her nose, and Ed Brubeck, younger than I remember, all smiling in a small back garden in the sun with pink and yellow tulips. “When was it taken?”

“2004. Aoife’s theatrical debut in
The Wizard of Oz
.” Holly sips her mint tea. “Ed and I mapped out
The Radio People
around then. The book was his idea, you know. We’d been in Brighton that weekend, for Sharon’s wedding, and he’d always been Mr. There Has to Be a Logical Explanation.”

“But after the room-number thing, he started believing?”

Holly makes an equivocal face. “He stopped disbelieving.”

“Did Ed ever know what a monster
The Radio People
turned into?”

Holly shakes her head. “I wrote the Gravesend bits quite quickly, but then I got promoted at the center. What with that, and raising Aoife, and Ed being away, I never got it finished until …” she chooses words with practiced care, “… Ed’s luck ran out in Syria.”

Now I’m appalled by my own self-pity about Zoë and Carmen. “You’re a bit of a hero, our Holly. Heroine, rather.”

“You soldier on. Aoife was ten. Falling to pieces wasn’t an option. My family’d lost Jacko so …” a sad little laugh, “… the Sykes clan does mourning and loss really bloody well. Taking up
The Radio People
and actually finishing it was therapy, sort of. I never imagined for a minute that anyone outside our family’d want to read it. Interviewers never believe me when I say that, but it’s the truth. The TV Book Club, the Prudence Hanson endorsement, the whole ‘The Psychic with the Childhood Scar’ thing, I wasn’t prepared for any of it, or the websites, the loonies, the begging letters, the people you lost touch with years ago for very good reasons. My first boyfriend—who really did
not
leave me with fond memories—got in touch to say he’s now Porsche’s main man in West London, and how about a test drive now my ship had come in? Uh,
no
. Then after the U.S. auction for
The Radio People
became a news item, all the fake Jackos crawled out from under the floorboards. My agent set the first one up via Skype. He was the right age, looked
sort of
like Jacko might look, and stared out of the screen, whispering, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God … It’s you.’ ”

I feel like smoking, but I munch a carrot stick instead. “How did he account for the three missing decades?”

“He said he was kidnapped by Soviet sailors who needed a cabin boy, then taken to Irkutsk to avoid a Cold War incident. Yeah, I know. Brendan’s bullshit detector was buzzing, so he shuftied me over and asked, ‘Recognize me, Jacko?’ The guy hesitated, then burst out, ‘Daddy!’ End of call. The last ‘Jacko’ we interviewed was Bangladeshi, but the imperialists at the British embassy in Dhaka refused to believe he was my brother. Would I send ten thousand pounds and sponsor his visa application? We called it a day after that.
If
Jacko’s alive,
if
he reads the book,
if
he wants to locate us, he’ll find a way.”

“Were you still working at the homeless center all this time?”

“I quit before I went to Cartagena. A shame—I loved the job, and I think I was good at it—but if you’re chairing a fund-raising meeting the same day a six-figure royalty payment slips into your bank account, you can’t pretend nothing’s changed. More ‘Jackos’ were trying their luck at the office, and my phone was hacked. I’m still involved with homeless charities at a patron level, but I had to get Aoife out of London to a nice sleepy backwater like Rye. So I thought. Did I ever tell you about the Great Illuminati Brawl?”

“You tell me less about your life than you think. The Illuminati: as in the lizard aliens who enslave humanity via beta-blocking mind waves beamed from their secret moonbase?”

“That’s them. One fine April morning, two groups of conspiracy theorists hide in my shrubbery. Christ knows how it started—a stray remark on Twitter, probably. So, the two groups realize they’re not alone, each group convinces itself that the other group are the Illuminati’s agents. With me so far? Stop smirking; they kicked the crap out of each other. The police were up in a jiffy. After that I had to put up a security fence and CCTV.
Me
, f’Chrissakes, holed up like an investment banker! But what choice did I have? Next time the loonies might not be hell-bent on
defending
me but attacking
me. So while the contractor was in, I went out to Australia, which was when Aoife and I met you on Rottnest.” She pads over to draw the curtain on the night harbor. “Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”

In the street two dogs bark furiously, then stop.

“If you don’t publish again, the loonies’ll move on.”

“This is true,” says Holly, looking evasive.

“
Are
you working on another book?”

Now she looks cornered. “Only a few stories.”

I feel envious and pleased. “That’s brilliant. Your publishers will be doing backflips down the corridors.”

“There’s no guarantee anyone’ll read it. They’re stories based on people I knew at the center. Not a psychic in sight.”

“Right now,
The Collected Shopping Lists of Holly Sykes
would go straight to number one on preorders alone.”

“Well, we’ll see. But that’s what I’ve been doing here all summer. Reykjavik’s a good place to work. Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”

By chance our fingertips are almost touching. Holly notices at the same instant, and we pull our hands back onto our laps. I try to come up with a joke I can turn this micro-embarrassment into, but nothing springs to mind. “I’ll call you a taxi, Crisp. It’s gone midnight.”

“No
way
is it that late.” I check my phone: 00:10. “Sodding hell, it’s tomorrow already.”

“So it is! What time’s your flight to London?”

“Nine-thirty, but can I ask you two last things?”

“Anything,” she says. “Almost.”

“Am I still ‘the spiral, the spider, the one-eyed man’?”

“You want me to check?”

Like an atheist wanting to be prayed for, I nod.

As she did in Shanghai, Holly touches the spot on her forehead and lets her eyelids almost close. What a great face she has but … it shouldn’t be that gray, or stretched. My eyes wander to her pendant.
It’s a labyrinth. Some symbolic mind-body-spirit thing, I guess. From Ed?

“Yes.” Holly opens her eyes. “Same as ever.”

A possible drunk laughs maniacally outside. “Will I ever know what that means? That’s not my second question.”

“Some day, yes. Let me know when you know.”

“I promise.” The second question’s harder because one answer to it scares me very much: “Holly, you’re not ill, are you?”

She reacts with surprise but not denial. She looks away.

“Oh, sod it.” I want to unask my question. “Forgive me, it’s not—”

“Cancer of the gall bladder.” Holly attempts a smile. “Trust me to choose a nice rare one, eh?”

I can’t even attempt a smile. “What’s the prognosis?”

Holly wears the expression of someone discussing a tiresome inconvenience. “Too late for surgery—it’s spread to my liver and … um, yeah, it’s all over the shop. My oncologist in London gives me a—a—a five to ten percent chance of being here this time next year.” Her voice croaks. “Not the odds I’d choose. With chemo and drugs the odds improve, up to twenty percent, maybe, but … do I want to spend a few extra months puking in bin-liners? That’s the other reason I’ve been here in Iceland all summer, shadowing poor Aoife, like, y’know, whatsisface from
Macbeth
.”

“Banquo. Aoife knows, then?”