The Bone Clocks (54 page)

Holly nods. “Brendan, Sharon, their kids, my mother, and Örvar too—I’m hoping he’ll help Aoife when, y’know. When I can’t. But nobody else knows. ’Cept you. People get so maudlin. I have to spend what energy I’ve got cheering them up. I wasn’t going to tell you either but … you asked. Sorry to put a downer on a lovely evening.”

I see her, and see Crispin Hershey through her eyes, and perhaps she sees Holly Sykes through mine. Suddenly it’s later. Holly and I are standing by the table, hugging goodbye. It isn’t an erotic hug. Truly it isn’t, dear reader. I’d know.

It’s this: As long I’m holding her, nothing bad can happen.

•   •   •

T
HE TAXI DRIVER
has earlobes full of metalwork and just says, “Okay,” when I tell him the name of my hotel. I wave goodbye until I can’t see Holly anymore. I’ve arranged to go to Rye before Christmas, so I’ll just ignore this unpleasant premonition that I’ll never see her again. The radio’s tuned to a classical-music station and I recognize Maria Callas singing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s
Norma—
Dad used it in the model-airplane scene in
Battleship Hill
. For a moment I forget where I am. I switch on my iPhone to text Holly, to thank her for the evening, and as I’m writing it, a message from Carmen gets relayed through. She sent it while I was delivering my lecture earlier. It has no text: it’s just an image of … a blizzard?

A blizzard at night through a windscreen?

I tilt my head and rotate the phone.

Mashed-up asteroids? No.

It’s an ultrasound scan.

Of Carmen’s womb.

With a tenant in it.

T
HE
K
EY
by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: That’s the one. But having found the title in my cupboard-under-the-stairs of once-read books, the mind of Crispin Hershey drifts away from Devon Kim-Ashkenazy’s novel-in-progress (
Across the Wide Ocean
, three generations of abused women from Pusan to Brooklyn). I know it’s happening, but I feel powerless to stop it. Up, up, and away my mind rises, through the ceiling tiles and roofing slates, over the bunker where the English Department has been temporarily housed since 1978. Espy the theater’s curvaceous roof by Frank Gehry; skim over Lego-like accommodation blocks; circle the Gothic chapel from Lincoln’s era; tumble amid the glass-and-steel science buildings; up to the president’s house, red-bricked, gabled, ivy-veined; through the lych-gate to the cemetery, where Blithewood College lifers turn into trees at the speed of worms and roots, and up the highest tree of all, spirals Hershey’s absent mind, known only unto squirrels and crows; the Hudson River stately winds between the Catskills’ pigeon-toes; a train’s revealed, a train’s obscured, a quote around a broken cup, “I like to see it lap the miles and lick the valleys up.” GoogleEarthlike soars his mind, through clouds where snowstorms brew; New York State has dropped away, and Massachusetts flew, and Newfoundland is ice-entombed and Rockall gull-beshatten, where no eye sees the lightning flash its momentary pattern …

“C
RISPIN
?” D
EVON
K
IM
-A
SHKENAZY
. “Are you okay?”

My postgrads’ faces suggest it was a prolonged zone-out. “Yes. I
was recalling a Tanizaki novel that does wonderful things with a similar diary-narrative to yours, Devon.
The Key
. It could save you from reinventing the wheel. But generally,” I hand her back her manuscript, “good progress. My only cavil is the, uh, violation scene. Still a little adverb-rich, I felt.”

“Fine.” Devon uses a breezy tone to prove she’s unoffended. “The violation in the flower shop or the violation in the motel?”

“The one in the carwash. Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better. Japheth?”

Japheth Solomon (author of
In God’s Country
, a Mormon bildungsroman-in-progress about a Utah boy escaping to a liberal East Coast college where sex, dope, and a creative writing program provoke existential angst) asks, “What if we can’t decide if a metaphor’s a three or a four?”

“If you can’t decide, Japheth, it’s only a three.”

Maaza Kolofski (
Horsehead Nebula
, a Utopia about life after a plague destroys every male on earth) raises her hand: “Any holiday assignments, Crispin?”

“Yes. Compose five letters from five leading characters, to yourself. Does everyone know what a letter is?”

“A paper email,” answers Louis Baranquilla (
The Creepy Guy in the Yoga Class
about a creepy guy in a yoga class). My pre-Internet credentials are an ongoing joke. “What do we put into these letters?”

“Your characters’ potted life histories. Whom or what your characters love and despise. Details on education, employment, finances, political affiliations, social class. Fears. Skeletons in cupboards. Addictions. Biggest regret; believer, agnostic, or atheist. How afraid of dying are they?” I think of Holly, suppress a sigh and push on. “Have they ever seen a corpse? A ghost? Sexuality. Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? Snazzy or scruffy dressers? It’s a
letter, so consider their use of language. Would they say ‘mellifluous’ or ‘a sharp talker’? Foul-mouthed or profanity-averse? Record the phrases they unknowingly overuse. When did they last cry? Can they see another person’s point of view? Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth”—I rap my knuckles on the table—“you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue. Ersilia?”

“Seems …” Ersilia Holt (a thriller named
The Icepick Man
about Triad gangs versus Taliban cells in Vancouver) scrunches her face, “… kinda deranged, to actually write
letters
to yourself?”

“Agreed, Ersilia. A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading
will
bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”

My ten postgrads look sober. So they should.

“Art feasts upon its maker,” I tell them.

T
HE FACULTY STAFF
room is empty but for Claude Mo (medievalist, not tenured) and Hilary Zakrewska (linguistics, not tenured either), who are engrossed in the fireside witticisms of Christina Pym-Lavit (head of political science, chair of the Tenure Committee). If their tenure track at Blithewood ends in failure, no other Ivy League college will be offering them a career. Christina Pym-Lavit waves me over. “Pull up a pew, Crispin, I was telling Hilary and Claude about the time I blew a tire while driving John Updike and Aphra Booth to the Iowa workshop, both of whom you knew, I believe?”

“Only ever so slightly,” I say.

“Don’t be coy,” says the Tenured One, but I’m not. I interviewed Updike for
The New Yorker
back when I was the Wild Child and shifted units in the U.S.A. I haven’t seen Aphra Booth since she threatened me with legal action in Perth, whenever that was. That pile of undergrad assignments back in my office suddenly doesn’t
strike me as such an awful prospect, so I make my excuses. “Grading, on the last day of the semester?” exclaims Christina Pym-Lavit. “Would that all the staff were as conscientious, Crispin.” We agree to meet at the Christmas party later, and I head off down the corridor. As a guest lecturer I’m excused the cow’s arse of campus politics, but if I’m offered a full-time position next year, I’ll be burrowing so deep that only my shoes’ll be showing. I’ll need the salary, there’s no doubt about it. Thanks to the “recoupment arrangement” ex-agent Hal negotiated, 75 percent of my ever-dwindling book royalties go to my ex-publishers to repay money I owe. I need a job with accommodation attached, too. I’ve kept the Hampstead house, just, but it’s in the hands of a letting agent. I use the rent to pay alimony to Zoë. Alimony that Zoë refused point-blank to renegotiate: “Just because you got a Spanish girlfriend pregnant? Seriously, Crispin—why
would
I?” Carmen hasn’t gone all legal on me, but child care costs an arm and a couple of legs even in Spain.

“Who da’ man?” Inigo Wilderhoff clatters down the stairs with a mighty suitcase and his anchorman teeth flashing white. “I directed your friend to your office, just a minute ago.”

I stop. “My friend?”

“Your friend from England.”

“Did he give a name?”

Inigo strokes his professorial beard. “Do you know, I
don’t
believe he did. Fiftyish. Tall. An eye patch. My taxi’s waiting outside, I gotta fly. Enjoy tonight’s party for me. Au revoir till January.” I manage a “Take care,” but Inigo Wilderhoff’s suitcase is already
thwack-thwack-thwack
ing down the steps.

An eye patch? A one-eyed man.

Calm down. Calm down.

M
Y OFFICE DOOR
is ajar. Our secretary is nowhere to be seen—security is lax at Blithewood College, two miles from the nearest town. In I peer … Nobody. Probably a mature student with corrective glasses who sounded a bit British to Wilderhoff, wanting a book
signed for eBay. He’ll have seen I’m out and gone for a tactful wander until my surgery hour at three
P.M.
Much relieved, I walk over to my desk.

“The door was open, Crispin.”

I yelp, twist, knocking clutter from my desk onto the floor. A man is standing by my bookshelves. With an eye patch.

Richard Cheeseman stands still. “Quite an entrance.”

“Richard! You scared the sodding
shit
out of me.”

“Well, pardon me for scaring the sodding shit out of you.”

We ought to be clapping each other’s back, but I just gape. Richard Cheeseman’s flab had melted away after a month of Latin American prison diet, but his civilian clothes accentuate how hard, gnarled, and leathered he’s become. That eye patch—when did
that
happen?—gives him the air of an Israeli general. “I—I was all set to see you in Bradford after Christmas. I’ve arranged it with Maggie.”

“Then it looks like I’ve saved you a trip.”

“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have …”

“Laid on champagne, a brass band? Not my style.”

“So”—I try to smile—“to what
do
I owe this pleasure?”

Richard Cheeseman sighs and bites at a hangnail. “Back in the Penitenciaría, one method of slaying minutes was to plan my first trip to New York as a free man. The tinier the details, the more minutes my reverie would kill, you see. I used to refine my plans, night after night.
So
, when I found myself unable to face a family Christmas at Maggie’s, full of jollity, pity, Christmas TV specials, then, naturally, New York was where I fled. And once there, what could be more appropriate than a ride up the Hudson Line to see the leading light, the chiefest friend of the Friends of Richard Cheeseman, Crispin Hershey?”

“The Friends of Richard Cheeseman was the least I could do.”

His stare says,
The very fucking least you could do
.

I try to delay what I dread is coming. “Did you damage your eye in a fight, Richard?”

“No, no, not a knife fight, nothing so
Shawshank Redemption
. It
was a spark from a welding torch on my very last day as a prisoner in Yorkshire. The doctor says the patch can come off in a week.”

“Good.” The framed photo of Gabriel is on the floor. I pick it up, and my visitor remarks, with sinister levity, “That’s your son?”

“Yes. Gabriel Joseph. After Garcia Marquéz and Conrad.”

“May your son be blessed with friends as true as mine.”

He knows. He’s worked it out. He’s here for payback.

“Must be tough,” remarks Cheeseman. “You here, him in Spain.”

“It’s less than ideal,” I try to sound casual, “but Carmen has family in Madrid, so she’s not alone. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, you see, so for her, Gabriel was a minor miracle. Well, a major one. We were no longer an item by that point, but she was determined to go through with the pregnancy and”—I reposition Gabriel next to my sticky-tape dispenser—“he’s the fruit of her labor. Won’t you sit down? I could scare up a shot of brandy to celebrate …”

“What—to celebrate my four wasted years in prison?”

I can’t look at him and I can’t look away.

“You seem antsy, Crispin. I seem to be unnerving you.”

“Seem” x 2 = textual mumble squared
, I think, and notice that Richard Cheeseman’s coat pocket is bulging and sagging. I can guess what heavy lethal object it may contain. He reads my thoughts. “Working out who put the cocaine in my suitcase, Crispin, and when, and even why—it didn’t take me long.”

Hot. Strange. My insides are being decanted out of me.

“I made up my mind not to confront my betrayer until I was out. After all, he was doing his damnedest to get me repatriated and released. Wasn’t he?”

I can’t trust my voice so I just nod, once.

“
No
, Crispin! He fucking well
wasn’t
doing his best to get me out! If he’d confessed, I’d have been out in days. He let me
rot
.”

Snow is falling again, I notice. The second hand on the clock lurches in tiny arcs. Nothing else moves. Nothing.

“As I lay in my cell in Bogotá, it wasn’t only New York I dreamt of. I also dreamt of what I’d do to him. To the slug-fuck who came
to see me, to gloat, who cared, but not enough to change places. Never that. I planned how I’d drug him, bind him, and kill him with a screwdriver over forty days. No script was ever polished as lovingly. Then I realized I was being silly. Teenage. Why take all that risk? Why not just meet him in America, buy a gun, and blow the fucker away in some out-of-the-way locale?”

I wish Betty the secretary or Inigo Wilderhoff was still pottering around. “Your tormentor,” I try to keep my voice steady, “has been tortured by remorse.”