David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Worrying times, Holly Sykes.

“I KNEW THAT was going to happen!” says Rafiq, swamped in Aoife’s old red coat that now serves as his dressing gown, hugging his knees at the foot of Lorelei’s bed. “When Marcus found the brooch was missing from his cloak, that was a — a dead giveaway, like. You can’t nick a golden eagle from a tribe like the Painted People and expect to get away with it. For them, it’s like Marcus and Esca have stolen God. Of course they’ll come and hunt them down.” Then, ’cause he knows how much I love The Eagle of the Ninth , he tries his luck: “Holly, can’t we have just a bit of the next chapter?”

“It’s almost ten,” says Lorelei, “and school tomorrow,” and if I close my eyes I can almost imagine it’s Aoife at fifteen years old.

“All right. And is the slate recharged?”

“Yes, but there’s still no thread and no Net.”

“Is it really true,” Rafiq shows no sign of shifting from Lorelei’s bed, “that when you were my age you used to get as much electricity as you wanted all the time, like?”

“Do I detect a bedtime postponement tactic, young man?”

He grins. “Must’ve been magno to have all that electricity.”

“It must’ve been what?”

“Magno. Everyone says it. Y’know: boss, class, epic, good.”

“Oh. Looking back, yes, it was ‘magno,’ but we all took it for granted back then.” I remember Ed’s pleasure at unlimited electricity each time he got back to our little house in Stoke Newington from Baghdad, where he and his colleagues had to power their laptops and satellite phones with car batteries brought by the battery guy. Sheep’s Head could do with a battery guy now, but his truck’d need diesel, and there isn’t any spare, which is why we need him.

“And airplanes used to fly all the time, right?” sighs Rafiq. “Not just people from Oil States or Stability?”

“Yes, but …” I flounder for a way to change the subject. Lorelei, too, must be thinking dark thoughts about airplanes tonight.

“So where did you go, Holly?” Rafiq never tires of this conversation, no matter how often we do it.

“Everywhere,” says Lorelei, being brave and selfless. “Colombia, Australia, China, Iceland, Old New York. Didn’t you, Gran?”

“I did, yes.” I wonder what life in Cartagena, in Perth, in Shanghai is like now. Ten years ago I could have streetviewed the cities, but the Net’s so torn and ragged now that even when we have reception it runs at prebroadband speed. My tab’s getting old, too, and I only have one more in storage. If any arrive via Ringaskiddy Concession, they never make it out of Cork City. I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch. But since Netcrash One we’ve had hardly any news at all and, if anything, this is worse.

The wind shakes the windowpane. “Lights out now. Let’s save the bulb.” I have only six bulbs left, too, stowed under the floorboards in my bedroom with the final slate since the spate of break-ins up Durrus way. I kiss Rafiq’s wiry-haired head as he traipses out to his tiny room, and tell him, “Sweet dreams, love.” I mean it, too: Rafiq’s nightmares are down to one night in ten, but when they come his screams could wake the dead.

Rafiq yawns. “You too, Holly.”

Lorelei snuggles down under her blankets and sheepskin as I close her door. “Sleep tight, Gran, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Dad used to say that me, I used to say it to Aoife, Aoife passed it on to Lorelei, and now Lorelei says it back to me.

We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.

IT’S PROPERLY DARK, but now I’m in my seventies, I need only a few hours — one of the rare compensations of old age. So I feed the stove another log, turn up the globe, and get out my sewing box to patch an old pair of Lol’s jeans so Rafiq can inherit them, and then I need to repair some socks. Wish I could stop longing for a hot shower before bed. Occasionally Mo and I torment each other with memories of the Body Shop, and its various scents: musk and green tea, bergamot, lily-of-the-valley; mango, brazil nut, banana; coconut, jojoba oil, cinnamon … Rafiq and Lorelei’ll never know these flavors. For them, “soap” is now an unscented block from “the Pale,” as the Dublin manufacturing zone is known. Until last year you could still buy Chinese soap at the Friday market, but whatever black-market tentacle got it as far as Kilcrannog has now been lopped off.

When I’m sure the kids are asleep, I turn on the radio. I’m always nervous that there’ll just be silence, but it’s okay: All three stations are on air. The RTÉ station is the mouthpiece of Stability and broadcasts officially approved news on the hour with factual how-to programs in between about growing food, repairing objects, and getting by in our ever-more-makeshift country. Tonight’s program is a first-aid repeat about fitting a splint to a broken arm, so I switch to JKFM, the last private station in Ireland, for a little music. You never know what you’ll get, though obviously it’s all at least five years old. I recognize the chorus of Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship’s “Exocets for Breakfast,” and remember a party in Colombia, or was it Mexico City? where I met the singer. Crispin was there as well, if I’m not wrong. I know the next song, too: “Memories Can’t Wait” by Talking Heads, but it reminds me of Vinny Costello so I try our third station, Pearl Island Radio. Pearl Island Radio is broadcast from the Chinese Concession at Ringaskiddy, outside Cork. It’s mostly in Mandarin, but sometimes there’s an international news bulletin in English, and if the Net’s unthreaded this is the only way to get news unfiltered by Stability. Of course, the news has a pro-Chinese slant — Ed would call it “naked propaganda”—and there’ll be not a whisper about Hinkley E, which was built and operated by a Chinese-French firm until the accident five years ago when the foreign operators pulled out, leaving the British with a half-melted core to ineffectively contain. There’s no English news tonight, but the sound of the Chinese speakers soothes my nerves and, inevitably, I think of Jacko; and then of those days and nights with the Horologists in New York, and out of New York, nearly twenty years ago …

THE CHAPEL, THE battle, the labyrinth: Yes, I believe it all took place, even though I know that if I ever described what I saw, it’d sound like attention-seeking, insanity, or bad drugs. If it’d just been the trippier parts that I remembered, if I’d woken up in my room at the Empire Hotel, I might be able to put it down to delusion, or food poisoning, or an “episode” with memory loss, or false memories. There’s too much other stuff that won’t be explained away, though: Stuff like how, after touching the golden apple in the domed room of the bird shadows I vanished in a head-rush of vertigo and found myself not waking up in my hotel room but in the gallery at 119A, with my middle finger touching the golden apple on the Bronzino picture, a dove trilling on the windowsill outside, and all the Horologists gone. The marble rolling pin was missing from the kitchen drawer. My knees were scabbed and sore from when Constantin ambushed me in the labyrinth. I never knew why Marinus didn’t travel back in my head — maybe the golden apple only worked for one passenger. Last of all, when evening came and I gave up waiting for a friendly Atemporal to appear, I got a cab across Central Park back to my room, where I found all charges for the week had been paid by a credit card that wasn’t mine. If a New York hotel receptionist tells you your room’s been paid for, you can bet your life you weren’t dreaming it.