David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

He glares at me. “ You try sleepin’ in a skip.”

I take out my wallet and offer him two twenties.

He looks at the money and looks at me.

I say, “Three nights in the hostel, right?”

He takes the notes and slips them inside his dirty coat. “Obliged.”

My sacrifice to the gods duly performed, I let Piccadilly Circus Tube Station suck me down into its vortex of body odor and bad breath.

THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolò Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light. Gasworks and Edwardian roofs, chimneys and aerials, a supermarket car park, Premises for Rental. Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat , clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat . But what does “beating the system” mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? Another train on a parallel track overtakes us slowly enough for me to glimpse the young City worker I’ll have turned into this time next year, squashed against the window, only a meter away. Good skin, good clothes, drained eyes. How to Get Seriously Rich by Thirty reads the cover of his magazine. The guy looks up and sees me. He squints at my Penguin Classic to make out the title, but his train swings away down a different track.

If I have doubts that you beat the system by moving up, I damn well know you don’t beat it by dropping out. Remember Rivendell? The summer before I went up to Cambridge a few of us went clubbing at the Floating World in Camden Town. I took Ecstasy and got off with a waifish girl wearing dried-blood lipstick and clothes made of black cobwebs. Spidergirl and I got a taxi back to her place: a commune called Rivendell, which turned out to be a condemned end-of-terrace squat next to a paper recycling plant. Spidergirl and I frolicked to an early Joni Mitchell LP about seagulls and drowsed until noon, when I was shown downstairs to the Elrond Room, where I ate lentil curry and the squat’s “pioneers” told me how their commune was an outpost of the postcapitalist, postoil, postmoney future. For them everything was “inside the system”—bad — or “outside the system”—good. When one asked me how I wanted to spend my sojourn on Earth, I said something about the media and was bombarded with a collective diatribe about how the system’s media divides people, not connects them. Spidergirl told me that “here in Rivendell, we actually talk to each other, and share tales from wiser cultures, like the Inuit. Wisdom’s the ultimate currency.” As I left, she asked for a “loan” of twenty pounds to buy a few things from Sainsbury’s. I suggested she recite an Inuit folktale at the checkout, because wisdom is the ultimate currency. Some of her response was radical feminist, most was just Anglo-Saxon. What I took from Rivendell, apart from pubic lice and an allergy to Joni Mitchell that continues to the present day, was the insight that “outside the system” means poverty.

Ask the Yeti how free he feels.

AS I TAKE off my hat and boots on the porch, I hear Mum in the front room: “Hold on a moment. That may be him now.” She appears, holding the phone with its cord stretched to the max. “Oh, it is ! Superb timing. I’ll put him on. Wonderful to put a voice to the name, as it were, Jonny — season’s greetings and all that.”

I go in after her and mouth, “Jonny Penhaligon?” and Mum nods and leaves, closing the door behind her. The dark front room is lit by the fairy lights on the Christmas tree, pulsing on and off. The receiver lies on the wicker chair; I hold it against my ear, taking in the sound of Penhaligon’s nervous breathing, and the trancey Twin Peaks theme wafting from another room in Tredavoe House. I count from ten to zero, slowly … “Jonny! What a surprise! So sorry to keep you.”

“Hugo, hi, yeah, it’s Jonny. Hi. How are things?”

“Great. All revved up for Christmas. Yourself?”

“Not so great, to be brutally honest, Hugo.”

“Sorry to hear that. Anything I can help with?”

“Um … I don’t know. It’s a bit … awkward.”

“O -kay . Speak.”

“You know the other night, at Toad’s? You remember I was four thousand up when you called it a night?”

“Do I remember? Cleaned out in the first hour, I was. Not so the Pirate of Penzance, eh?”

“Yeah, it was … one of those charmed runs.”

“ ‘Charmed’? Four thousand quid is more than the basic student grant.”

“Well, yeah. It went to my head a bit, a lot, that and the mulled wine, and I thought how fantastic it’d be not to go groveling to Mum for funds every time the account goes low … So, anyway, you’d left, Eusebio was dealing, and I got a flush, spades, jack high. I played it flawlessly — acted like I was bluffing over a pot of crap — till over two thousand quid was on the table.”

“Shitting hell, Jonny. That’s quite a bucketful.”

“I know. We’d agreed to scrap the pot limit, and there were three of us bidding up and up, and nobody was backing down. Rinty only had two pairs, and Bryce Clegg looked at my flush and said, ‘Shafted by the Pirate again,’ but as I scooped up the pot he added, ‘Unless I’ve got — oh, what is this? A full house.’ And he had. Three queens, two aces. I should have gone then, wish to Christ I had. I was still two grand up. But I’d lost two grand and I thought it was just a blip, that if I kept my nerve I’d win it all back. Fortune favors the brave , I thought. One more hand, it’ll turn around … Toad asked me if I wanted to drop out a couple of times, but … by then I was … I was …” Penhaligon’s voice wobbles, “… ten thousand down.”

“Wow, Jonny. Them’s grown-up numbers.”

“So, yeah, we carried on, and my losses piled up, and I didn’t know why the King’s College bells were ringing in the middle of the night, but Toad opened up the curtains and it was daylight. Toad said his casino was closing for the holidays. He offered to scramble eggs for us, but I wasn’t hungry …”

“You win a few,” I console him, “you lose a few. That’s poker.”

“No, Hugo, you don’t get it. Eusebio took a hammering, but I took a … a pulverizing, and when Toad wrote down what I owe, it’s”—a strangled whisper—“ fifteen thousand, two hundred . Toad said he’ll round it down to fifteen in the interest of nice round numbers, but …”

“Your sense of honor brings out the best in Toad,” I assure him, peering through the blue velvet curtain. It’s a cold, dark indigo, streetlight-amber night out. “He knows he’s not dealing with an underclass scuzzball with a can’t-pay-won’t-pay attitude.”

Penhaligon sighs. “That’s the awkward thing, you see.”

I act puzzled. “To be honest, I don’t quite see, no.”

“Fifteen thousand pounds is … is quite a lot. A shit of a lot.”

“For a financial mortal like myself, sure — but not for old Cornish aristocracy, surely?”