David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“Polish your mating rituals, Octopus Boy,” says a Welsh voice. Me and Gary both jump a mile. It’s Gwyn. “Your seductions look very like muggings to me.”

“We were — we were — we were just talking.” Gary’s already scuttling away to the common room. “That’s all.”

“Annoying but harmless.” Gwyn watches him go. “Like mouth ulcers. He’s propositioned every female on the farm except Sheba.”

Being rescued’s humiliating and what comes out is a grumpy “I can look after myself.”

Gwyn says, a bit too sincerely, “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

Is she taking the piss? “I could’ve handled him.”

“You don’t half remind me of me, Holly.”

How do you answer that? “Up the Junction” by Squeeze booms from the ghetto-blaster. Gwyn stoops. “Look, Octopus Boy dropped his ciggies.” She lobs them my way and I catch the box. “Hand them back or keep them as compensation for harassment. Your call.”

I imagine Gary’s version of this. “He’ll hate me now.”

“He’ll be scared shitless you’ll tell everyone what a horse’s arse he made of himself. Rejection makes lads like our Gaz feel four feet tall and two inches long, full size. Anyhow, I came to say I borrowed a sleeping bag off Mrs. Harty for you. God only knows how many previous owners it’s had, but it’s been washed so the stains aren’t sticky at least, and the barn can get chilly at night. I’m turning in, so if I’m asleep before you, sweet dreams. The hooter goes at five-thirty.”

MY PERIOD’S ONLY A FEW DAYS LATE, so I don’t see how I can be pregnant, so what’s this belly doing, or this blue-veined third boob pushing out below my normal two, which Vinny named Dolly and Parton? Mam is not taking the news well and doesn’t believe that I don’t know who the father is: “Well, someone put the baby inside you! We both know you’re not the Virgin Mary, don’t we?” But I really don’t know. Vinny’s the chief suspect, but am I quite sure nothing happened with Ed Brubeck in the church? Or Gary at Black Elm Farm, or even Alan Wall the gypsy? When you know your memory’s been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again? Smoky Joe’s old moo glares over her copy of the Financial Times: “Ask the baby. It ought to know.”

Everyone starts chanting, “Ask the baby! Ask the baby!” and I try to say I can’t, it hasn’t been born yet, but it’s like my mouth’s stitched up, and when I look at my belly it’s grown. Now it’s a sort of massive skin tent that I’m attached to. The baby’s lit red inside, like when you shine a torch through your hand, and it’s as big as a naked grown-up. I’m afraid of it.

“Ask it, then,” hisses Mam.

So I ask it, “Who’s your dad?”

We wait. It swivels its head my way and speaks in a badly synched-up voice from a hot place: When Sibelius is smashed into little pieces, at three on the Day of the Star of Riga, you’ll know I’m near …

• • •

… and the dream caves in. Relief, a sleeping bag, brothy darkness, I’m not pregnant, and a Welsh voice is whispering, “It’s okay, Holly, you were dreaming, girl.”

Our plywood partition, in a barn, on a farm; what was her name? Gwyn. I whisper back, “Sorry if I woke you.”

“I’m a light sleeper. Sounded nasty. Your dream.”

“Yeah … Nah, just stupid. What time is it?”

The light on her watch is mucky gold. “Five-and-twenty to five.”

Most of the night’s gone. Is it worth trying to go back to sleep?

A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.

I feel a stab of homesickness for my room at home, but I stab my homesickness back. Remember the slap .

“You know, Holly,” Gwyn’s whisper rustles the sheets of the dark, “it’s tougher than you think out there.”

That’s a weird thing to say and a weird time to say it. “If that lot can do it,” I mean the students, “I bloody know I can.”

“Not fruit picking. The running-away-from-home deal.”

Quick, deny it. “What makes you think I’ve run away?”

Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide. “Unless you know for a fact, a fact , that going back’ll get you …” she sort of sighs, “… damaged, I’d say go back. When the summer’s gone, and your money’s gone too, and Mr. Richard Gere hasn’t pulled up on his Harley-Davidson and said, ‘Hop on,’ and you’re fighting for a place by the bins behind McDonald’s at closing time, then, whatever Gabriel Harty says to the contrary, you will think of Black Elm Farm as a five-star hotel. You make a list, see. It’s called ‘All the Things I’ll Never, Ever Do to Get By.’ The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to ‘All the Things I’ve Had to Do to Get By.’ ”

I keep my voice calm. “I’m not running away.”

“Then why the false name?”

“My name is Holly Rothmans.”

“And mine’s Gwyn Aquafresh. Fancy a squirt of toothpaste?”

“Aquafresh isn’t a surname. Rothmans is.”

“That’s true enough, but I bet you a pack of Benson & Hedges it’s not yours. Don’t get me wrong, a false name’s clever. I changed mine often, in my first few months away. But all I’m saying is, if you’re weighing possible trouble ahead against the trouble you’ve left behind, times the ‘ahead’ trouble by twenty.”

It’s appalling she’s seen through me so easily. “Too early for Thoughts for the Day,” I growl. “Good night .”

The first bird of the morning starts twittering.

AFTER I’VE WASHED down three peanut-butter-and-Digestive-biscuit sandwiches with a glass of water we head out to the big south field, where Mrs. Harty and her husband’re putting up a big tent thing. It’s cool and dewy but another sticky day’s ahead, I reckon. I don’t hate Gwyn or anything, but it’s like she saw me naked and I’m not sure how to meet her eyes, so I stick with Marion and Linda. Gwyn seems to understand and she’s picked a row next to Stuart and Gina, and Alan Wall, ten rows or so away, so we couldn’t talk now even if we wanted to. Gary acts like I’m totally invisible and is working on the far side of the students. Suits me.

Strawberry picking’s boring work, sure, but it’s calming, too, compared to bar work. It’s nice being out in the open air. There’s birds, and sheep, and the sound of a tractor somewhere, and the students’ chattering, though that dies away after a bit. We’ve each got a cardboard tray with twenty-five punnets in, and our job’s to fill each punnet with ripe strawberries, or nearly ripe. You snip through the stalk with your thumbnail, put the berry in the punnet, and on you go like that. I start off squatting on my haunches but it murders my calves so I kneel on the straw as I go along. Wish I’d brought a looser pair of jeans, or shorts. If a strawberry’s a bit overripe and mushes in my fingers, I lick the fruity smear, but it’d be stupid to scoff the perfect ones ’cause that’s like eating your own wages. When all the punnets are full, you carry the tray to the tent, where Mrs. Harty weighs it. If it’s on or over the right weight she pays you a plastic token, otherwise you have to go back to your row for a few more strawbs to bring it up to weight. Linda says at three o’clock we all troop back to the office to swap the tokens for money, so you keep your tokens safe: no token, no money.

Once we get going, it’s pretty obvious who’s used to field-working: Stuart and Gina move up their rows twice as fast as the rest of us, and Alan Wall’s even faster. Some of the students are a bit crap, which means I’m not the slowest at least. The sun gets higher and stronger and now I’m glad I’ve got Ed Brubeck’s cap to shield the back of my neck. An hour goes by and I’ve sort of slipped into autopilot. The punnets fill, strawberry by strawberry by strawberry, and my earnings go up, 2 p by 5 p by 10 p. I keep thinking ’bout what Gwyn said this morning. Sounds like she’s learned a lot of bad stuff the hard way. I think about Jacko and Sharon eating breakfast with my empty chair there, like I’ve died or something. Bet Mum’s all, “I refuse to even discuss that young mademoiselle, I do.” She sounds really Irish when she’s angry or wound up. I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there’s a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed’ll totally alter what happens to you later, so a fraction of an inch to the right, and the ball’ll just hit a pinger and a dinger and fly down between your flippers, no messing, a waste of 10 p. But a fraction to the left and it’s action in the play zone, bumpers and kickers, ramps and slingshots and fame on the high-score table. My problem is, I don’t know what I want, apart from a bit of money to buy food later on today. Until the day before yesterday all I wanted was Vinny, but I won’t make that mistake again. Like a shiny silver pinball whizzing out of the firing lane, I’ve not got the faintest bloody clue where I’m going or what’ll happen next.