David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“Oh, tons of stuff. Stuff I’ll never tell anyone, probably.”

Holly looks away, making a decision …

WHEN WE LEFT the town square there were just a few scratchy snowflakes prowling at roof height, but a hundred yards and a couple of corners later it’s as if the vast nozzle of an Alp-sized pump is blasting godalmighty massive coils of snow up the valley. Snow’s up my nose, snow’s in my eyes, snow’s in my armpits, snow howls after us through a stone archway into a grotty yard with dustbins already half buried under snow, snow, snow. Holly fumbles with the key and then we’re in, snow gusting through the gap and the wind whoo-whooing after us until she slams the door shut, and it’s suddenly very peaceful. A short hallway, a mountain bike, stairs going up. Holly’s cheeks are hazed dark pink. Too skinny; if I were her mum I’d get a few fattening desserts down her. We take off our coats and boots and she gestures me up the carpeted stairs first. Above, there’s a light, airy flat with paper lampshades and varnished floorboards that squeak. Holly’s flat’s plainer than my rooms at Humber, and obviously 1970s, not 1570s, but I envy her it. It’s tidy and very sparsely furnished: The big room has an ancient TV and VHS player, a hand-me-down sofa, a beanbag, a low table, a neat pile of books in a corner, and that’s a near-complete inventory. The kitchenette, too, is minimalist: a single plate, dish, cup, knife, fork, and spoon wait on the drainer. Rosemary and sage grow in pots on a shelf. The top three smells are toast, cigarettes, and coffee. The only nod to ornament is a small oil painting of a pale blue cottage on a green slope over a silver ocean. Holly’s large window must offer an amazing view, but today it’s obscured by a blizzard, like white-noise static on an untuned telly. “It’s unbelievable,” I say. “All that snow.”

“It’s a whiteout.” She fills the kettle. “They happen. What did you do to your ankle? You’re limping.”

“I left my old accommodation à la Spiderman.”

“And landed à la sack-of-Spudsman.”

“My Scout pack did the Leaping from Buildings to Escape Violent Pimps badge the week I was away.”

“I’ve got some stretchy bandages you can borrow. But first …” She opens the door of a box room with one window as big as a shoebox lid. “My sister slept here okay, with the sofa cushions and blankets.”

“It’s warm, it’s dry.” I dump my bag inside. “It’s great.”

“Good. I sleep in my room, you sleep here. Yep?”

“Understood.” When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind. “I’m grateful, Holly. God only knows what I would have done if you hadn’t taken pity on me.”

“You’d have survived. Your sort always does.”

I look at her. “My sort?”

She huffs through her nose.

“F’CHRISSAKES, LAMB, bandage it, it’s not a tourniquet.” Holly is less than impressed by my first aid skills. “Obviously you missed the Junior Doctor badge too. What badges did you get? No, forget I asked. All right ,” she puts down her cigarette, “I’ll do it — but if you make any idiotic nurse jokes, your other ankle gets cracked with a breadboard.”

“Definitely no nurse jokes.”

“Foot on the stool. I’m not kneeling at your feet.”

She unravels my cack-handed attempt, tutting at my ineptitude. My sockless swollen foot looks alien, naked, and unattractive against Holly’s fingers. “Here, rub in some arnica cream first — it’s pretty miraculous for swellings and bruises.” She hands me a tube. I obey, and when my ankle’s shiny she wraps the bandage around my foot with just the right degree of pressure and support. I watch her fingers, her loopable black hair, how her face hides and shows her inner weather. This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it. The wind attacks the window. “It’s not too tight?” asks Holly.

“It feels perfect,” I tell her.

“LIKE SNOW IN a snow globe,” Holly says, watching the blizzard. She tells me about UFO hunters who come to Sainte-Agnès, which somehow leads on to working as a strawberry picker in Kent and a grape-picker in Bordeaux; why the Troubles in Northern Ireland won’t end without desegregated schools; how she once skied through a valley three minutes before an avalanche swept through. I light a cigarette and talk about how a bus I missed in Kashmir skidded off the Ladakh road and fell five hundred feet; why townies in Cambridge hate students; why roulette wheels have a zero; how great it is to row on the Thames at six A.M. in the summer. We discuss the first singles we bought, The Exorcist versus The Shining , planetariums and Madame Tussaud’s. We spout a lot of rubbish, but watching Holly Sykes talk is a fine thing. I empty the ashtray again. She quizzes me about my three months’ study program at Blithewood College in upstate New York. I give her the edited highlights, including getting shot at by a hunter who thought I was a deer. She tells me about her friend Gwyn, who worked last year at a summer camp in Colorado. I tell her about how Bart Simpson phones Marge from his summer camp and declares, “I’m no longer afraid of death,” but Holly asks who Bart Simpson is, so I have to explain. Holly talks about the band Talking Heads, like a Catholic discussing her favorite saints. The morning’s gone, we realize. Using a half bag of flour and bits and pieces from her fridge I make us a pizza, which I can tell impresses her more than she lets on. Aubergine, tomatoes, cheese, pesto, and Dijon mustard. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge, too, but I serve us water in case she thinks I want to get her drunk. I ask if she’s a vegetarian, having noticed that even the stock cubes are veggie. She is, and she tells me how when she was sixteen she was at her great-aunt Eilísh’s house in Ireland, “and this ewe walked by, bleating, and I realized, ‘Sweet fecking hell, I’m eating its children!’ ” I remark how people are superb at not thinking about awkward truths. After I’ve done the dishes—“to pay my rent”—I discover she’s never played backgammon, so I make us a board using the inside of a Weetabix box and a marker. She finds a pair of dice in a jar in a drawer, and we use silver and copper coins for pieces. By the third game she’s good enough for me to plausibly let her win.

“Congratulations,” I tell her. “You’re a fast learner.”

“Ought I to thank you for letting me beat you?”

“Oh no I didn’t! Seriously, you beat me fair and—”

“And you’re a virtuoso liar, Poshboy.”

LATER, WE TRY the TV but the reception’s affected by the storm and the screen’s as blizzardy as the window. Holly finds a black-and-white film on a videotape inherited from the flat’s last tenant. She stretches out on the sofa, I’m sunk into the beanbag, and the ashtray’s balanced on the arm between us. I try to focus on the film and not her body. The film’s British and made, I guess, in the late 1940s. Its opening minutes are missing so we don’t know the title, but it’s quite compelling, despite the Noël Cowardy diction. The characters are on a cruise liner crossing some foggy expanse, and it takes a while for the passengers, Holly, and me to twig that they’re all dead. Each character gets deepened by a backstory — a good Chaucerian mix — before a magisterial Examiner arrives to decide each passenger’s fate in the afterlife. Ann, the saintly heroine, gets a pass into heaven, but her husband, Henry, the Austrian-pianist-resistance-fighter hero, killed himself — head in a gas cooker — and has to work as a steward aboard a similar ocean liner between the worlds. The wife tells the Examiner she’ll exchange heaven to be with her husband. Holly snorts. “Oh, please !” Ann and Henry then hear the sound of breaking glass and wake up in their flat, saved from the gas by the fresh air flooding in through the broken windows. String crescendo, man and wife embrace each other and a new life. The End.