David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“What a pile of pants,” says Holly.

“It kept us watching.”

The window’s dim mauve except for snowflakes tumbling near the glass. Holly gets up to draw the curtains but stands there, under the spell of the snow. “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, Poshboy?”

I fidget in my beanbag. It rustles. “Why?”

“You’re so megaconfident.” She draws the curtains and turns around, almost accusingly. “Rich people are, I s’pose, but you’re up on a different level. Do you never do stupid things that make you cringe with embarrassment — or shame — when you look back?”

“If I worked through the hundreds of stupid things I’ve done, we’d still be here next New Year’s Day.”

“I’m only asking for one.”

“Okay, then …” I guess she wants a flash of vulnerable underbelly — it’s like that witless interview question, “What’s your worst fault?” What have I done that’s stupid enough to qualify as a proper answer, but not so morally repugnant (à la Penhaligon’s Last Plunge) that a Normal would recoil in horror? “Okay. I’ve got this cousin, Jason, who grew up in this village in Worcestershire called Black Swan Green. One time, I’d have been about fifteen, my family was visiting, and Jason’s mum sent Jason and me to the village shop. He was younger than me and, as they say, ‘easily led.’ As his sophisticated London cousin, how did I amuse myself? By stealing a box of cigarettes from his village shop, luring poor Jason into the woods, and telling him that to fix his picked-on, shitty life, he had to learn to smoke. Seriously. Like the villain in some antismoking campaign. My meek cousin said, ‘Okay,’ and fifteen minutes later he was kneeling on the grass at my feet, vomiting up everything he’d eaten in the previous six months. There. One stupid, cruel act. My conscience goes ‘You bastard’ whenever I think of it,” I wince to hide my fib, “and I think, Sorry, Jason .”

Holly asks, “Does he smoke now?”

“I don’t believe he’s ever smoked.”

“Perhaps you inoculated him that day.”

“Perhaps I did. Who got you smoking?”

“OFF I WENT, across the Kent marshes. No plan. Just …” Holly’s hand gestures at the rolling distance. “The first night, I slept in a church in the middle of nowhere and … that was when it happened. That was the night Jacko disappeared. Back at the Captain Marlow he had his bath, Sharon read to him, Mam said good night. Nothing seemed wrong — apart from the fact that I’d gone off. After shutting up the pub, Dad went into Jacko’s room as usual to switch his radio off — that’s how he used to fall asleep, listening to foreign voices chuntering away. But, come Sunday morning, Jacko wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the pub. Like some crappy whodunnit puzzle, the doors were locked from the inside. At first the cops — Mam and Dad, even — thought I ’d hatched a plot with Jacko, so it was only when …” Holly pauses to stabilize herself, “… I was tracked down, on the Monday afternoon, on this fruit farm on the Isle of Sheppey where I’d blagged a job as a picker, only then did the police start a proper search. Thirty-six hours later. First it was dogs and a radio appeal …” Holly rubs her palm around her face, “… then chains of locals combing wasteland around Gravesend, and police divers checking the … y’know, the obvious places. They found nothing. No body, no witnesses. Days went by, all the leads fizzled out. My parents shut the pub for weeks, I didn’t go to school, Sharon was crying the whole time …” Holly chokes. “You’d pray for the phone to go, then when it did, you’d be too scared it’d be bad news to pick it up. Mam shriveled up, Dad … He was always joking, before it happened. Afterwards, he was … like … hollow. I didn’t go out for weeks and weeks. Basically I left school. If Ruth, my sister-in-law, hadn’t weighed in, taken over, got Mam to go over to Ireland in the autumn, I honestly don’t think Mam’d still be alive. Even now, six years later, it’s still … Terrible to say, but now when I hear on the news about some murdered kid, I think, That’s hell, that’s your worst nightmare, but at least the parents know . At least they can grieve. We can’t. I mean, I know Jacko would’ve come back if he could’ve done, but unless there’s proof , unless there’s a”—Holly’s voice catches—“a body, your imagination never shuts up. It says, What if this happened? If that happened? What if he’s still alive somewhere in some psycho’s basement praying that today’s the day you find him? But even that’s not the worst part …” She looks away so I can’t see her face. There’s no need to tell her to take her time, even though, unbelievably, her travel clock on the shelf says it’s nine forty-five P.M. I light her a cigarette and put it in her fingers. She fills her lungs and slowly empties them. “If I hadn’t run off that weekend — over some stupid fucking boyfriend — would Jacko’ve let himself out of the Captain Marlow that night?” Still turned away, Holly rubs her face. “No. The answer’s no. Which means it’s my fault. Now my family tell me that’s not true, this counselor I went to told me the same, everybody says it. But they don’t have that question— Was it my fault? — drilling into their heads every hour, every day. Or the answer.”

The wind hammers out mad organist’s chords.

“I don’t know what to say, Holly …”

She finishes her glass of white wine.

“… except ‘Stop it.’ It’s rude .”

She turns to me, her eyes red, her face shocked.

“Yes,” I say. “Rude. It’s rude to Jacko.”

Obviously nobody’s ever said this to her.

“Switch places. Suppose Jacko had stormed off somewhere; suppose you’d gone looking for him, but some … evil overtook you and stopped you ever returning. Would you want Jacko to spend his life as self-blame junkie because once, one day, he committed a thoughtless action and made you worry about him?”

Holly looks as if she can’t quite believe I’m daring to say this. Actually, I can’t either. She’s this far from kicking me out.

“You’d want him to live fully,” I go on. “Wouldn’t you? To live more fully, not less. You’d need him to live your life for you.”

The VCR chooses now to trundle out its videotape. Holly’s voice comes out serrated: “So I’m s’posed to act like it never happened?”

“ No . But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life — how could it not? — but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Günter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”

Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posed to do, then?”

“ I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you could help. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thing that forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”

Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”