David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“Good,” I tell her. “I didn’t, either.”

“Me neither,” says Rafiq. “Dónal Boyce is a jizbag.”

I open my mouth to say, “Language,” but don’t.

FORTY MINUTES LATER we arrive home, at the end of the bumpy Dooneen track. “Dooneen” means “little fortress” and that’s how our cottage feels to me, even as I stow the food, items from the market and our ration boxes. While the kids get changed I try my tab to see if I can get through to Brendan, or even one of my closer relatives in Cork, but no luck; all I get is a SERVER NOT DETECTED message, and IF PROBLEMS PERSIST, CONTACT YOUR LOCAL DEALER. Useless. I check the hens and retrieve three fresh eggs from the coop. When Rafiq and Lorelei are ready, we go through the thicket between our garden and Mo’s, and over to her back door. It’s open, and Zimbra comes padding into the kitchen wagging his tail. He used to jump up more when he was a puppy, but now he’s calmer. Mo’s ration box and the eggs go in her cupboard. I click it shut to keep out the mice. We find Mo in her sunroom playing twohanded Scrabble with herself. “Welcome back, scholars. How were school and the market?”

“Okay,” says Rafiq, “but we saw a drone this morning.”

“Yes, I saw it too. Stability must have fuel to burn. Odd.”

Lorelei studies the Scrabble board. “Who’s winning, Mo?”

“I’m demolishing myself: 384 versus 119. Any homework?”

“I’ve got quadratic equations,” says Lorelei. “Yummy.”

“Ah, sure you can do those in your sleep now, so you can.”

“I’ve got geography,” says Rafiq. “Ever see an elephant, Mo?”

“Yes. At zoos, and at a reservation in South Africa.”

Rafiq’s impressed. “Were they really as big as houses? That’s what Mr. Murnane said.”

“As big as small cottages, maybe. African elephants were bigger than Indian ones. Magnificent beasts.”

“Then why did people let them go extinct?”

“There’s plenty of blame for everyone, but the last herds were slaughtered so that people in China could show how rich they were by giving each other knickknacks made of ivory.”

Mo isn’t one to sugar pills. I watch Rafiq’s face go almost sulky as he digests this. “I wish I’d been born sixty years ago,” he says. “Elephants, tigers, gorillas, polar bears … All the best animals’ve gone. All we’ve got left is rats and crows and earwigs.”

“And some first-class dogs,” I say, patting Zimbra’s head.

We all fall quiet at once, for no obvious reason. Mo’s husband, John, fifteen years dead, smiles out of his frame above the hearth. It’s a beautiful likeness in oils painted on a summer’s day in the garden of Mo and John’s old cottage on Cape Clear. John Cullin was blind and his life wasn’t always an easy one, but he lived at a civilized time in a civilized place where people had full bellies. John wrote fine poetry. Admirers wrote to him from America.

That world wasn’t made of stone, but sand.

I’m afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.

LATER, LORELEI GOES off to Knockroe Farm for her sleepover. Mo comes down to the cottage for dinner, where Rafiq and us two old ladies eat broad beans and potatoes fried in butter. At Rafiq’s age Aoife would have turned her nose up at such plain fare, but before he reached Ireland Rafiq knew real stomach-gnawing hunger and he never turns anything down. Dessert is blackberries we picked on the way home and a little stewed rhubarb. Dinner is quieter without our resident teenager, and I’m reminded of when Aoife first left home to go to college. Once the dishes are done, we all play cribbage listening to an RTÉ program about how to dig a well. Rafiq then escorts Mo home before it gets dark, while I empty the latrine bucket into the sea below and check the wind direction; still easterly. I round the hens up into their house and bolt its door shut, wishing I’d done so last night as well. Rafiq comes back, yawns, strip-washes in a bucket of cold water, cleans his teeth, and takes himself up to bed. I read an old copy of The New Yorker from December 2031, savoring a story by Ersilia Holt and marveling at the adverts and the wealth that existed so recently.

At eleven-fifteen P.M. I switch on my tab to patch Brendan, but when the thing asks for my password, I blank. My password. F’Chrissakes. I never change it. It was something to do with dogs … Years ago I’d laugh about these flashes of forgetfulness, but at my age, it’s like the beginning of a slow-motion death sentence. If you can’t trust your mind anymore, you’re mentally homeless. I get up to retrieve my little book where I write things down, but Zimbra’s on my foot, and I remember: NEWKY, the name of the dog we had when I was a girl. I enter the password and try to thread Brendan. After five days of letdowns I’m ready for the error message, but on the first go I get a hi-res image of my brother frowning into his tab, 250 miles away in his study in his house on Exmoor. Something’s wrong: His strands of white hair are a mess, his haggard, puffy face is a mess, his voice is a nervous mess. “ Holly? I can see you! Can you see me?”

“And hear you, Brendan, clear as a bell. What’s happened?”

“Well, apart from”—he reaches offscreen to get a drink, and I’m left looking at a photo on his shelf of a twenty-years-ago Brendan Sykes shaking hands with King Charles on Tintagel Gated Village’s opening day—“apart from the west of England looking more like the Book of Revelation and a nuclear reactor down the road about to blow? Jackdaws. We had a visit two nights ago.”

I feel sick. “In the village, or in your actual house?”

“The village, but that was bad enough. Four nights ago our dedicated guards all buggered off, taking half the food in the store and the backup generator.” Brendan’s half drunk, I realize. “Most of us stayed — where’d we go to? — and we drew up a security rota.”

“You could come here.”

“If I don’t get sliced and diced by highwaymen at Swansea. If the trafficker doesn’t cut my throat a mile off the Welsh coast. If Immigration at Ringaskiddy takes my bribe.”

I know now, if I didn’t before, that I’ll never see Brendan in the flesh again. “Maybe Oisín Corcoran could help?”

“They’re all too busy trying to survive to help an eighty-year-old English Asylumite. No, you reach an age when … journeys, voyages, are for other people, not you.” He drinks his whisky. “I was telling you about the Jackdaws. At one o’clock or so this morning the alarms all went off, so I got dressed, got my.38 and went to the storehouse, where about a dozen of the bastards with guns, knives, and face-masks were loading up a van. Jem Linklater walked up and told the organizer, ‘That’s our food you’re thieving, sunshine, and we’ve the right to defend it.’ He shone a solar right in Jem’s face and said, ‘It’s ours now, Granddad, so back off, and that’s your last warning.’ Jem didn’t back off, and Jem”—Brendan shuts his eyes—“Jem got his head blown in.”

My hand’s over my mouth. “Jesus. You saw this?”

“From ten feet away. The murderer said, ‘Any more heroes?’ Then a gun went off and the guard went down, and total bloody anarchy broke out, and the Jackdaws realized we weren’t quite the doddery old farts they’d expected. Someone shot out the headlamps on the van. It was too dark to know who was where, what was what, and”—Brendan’s chest’s heaving—“I ran into the tomato polytunnel, where a Jackdaw came pounding at me, waving a machete, I thought … And my.38 was suddenly in my hand with the safety off, a bang sounded, and something skidded into me … His mask’d come away, somehow, and I saw — I saw he was a boy, younger than Lorelei. The machete was a garden trowel. And”—Brendan controls his voice—“I shot him, Hol. Straight through the heart.”