David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Funny places, hospitals …

HOLLY SYKES AND the Weird Shit, Part 2. A few weeks went by, I must’ve turned eight, and I began to think I’d only dreamt Miss Constantin, ’cause she’d never come back. ’Cept for the fact I didn’t know that word she’d called me, “singular” … I looked it up and wondered how it’d got into my head if Miss Constantin hadn’t put it there. To this day I still don’t know the answer to that. But then one night in September, after we’d gone back to school, I woke up and knew she was there, and I was more glad than I was scared. I liked being singular. I asked Miss Constantin if she was an angel, and she laughed a little, saying, no, she was human, like me, but she’d learned how to slip out of her own body, and go visiting her friends. I asked if I was one of her friends now, and she asked, “Would you like that?” and I said, Yes, please, more than anything, and she replied, “Then you shall be.” And I asked Miss Constantin where she came from, and she said Switzerland. To show off, I asked if Switzerland was where chocolate was invented, and she said I was one of the brightest buttons she’d ever known. From then on she visited me every night, for a few minutes, and I’d tell her a bit about my day, and she’d listen, and sympathize or cheer me up. She was always on my side, like Mam or Brendan never seemed to be. I asked Miss Constantin questions, too. Sometimes she’d give me direct answers, like when I asked her her hair color and she told me “chromium blond,” but as often as not she’d sidestep my questions with “Let’s not spoil the mystery quite yet, Holly, shall we?”

Then one day our school’s most gifted bully, Susan Hillage, got me as I walked home from school. Her dad was a squaddie in Belfast and, ’cause my mam’s Irish, she knelt on my head and wouldn’t let me go unless I admitted we kept our coal in the bathtub and that we loved the IRA. I wouldn’t, so she threw my bag into a tree, and told me she was going to make me pay for her dad’s mates who got killed in Belfast, and that if I told anyone, her dad’s platoon’d set fire to my pub and my family’d all roast and it’d all be my fault. I was no pushover, but I was only little, and Susan Hillage had pulled all the right levers. I didn’t tell Mam or Dad what’d happened, but I was worried sick about going to school the next day and what might happen. But that night, when I woke up in the warm pocket of my bed and Miss Constantin’s voice came, it wasn’t just her voice in my head — she was actually there, in person, sitting in the armchair at the end of my bed saying, “Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead.” She was young, and had white-gold hair, and what must’ve been rose-red lips were purple-black in the moonlight, and she wore a gown thing. She was beautiful, like a painting. Finally I managed to ask if I was dreaming and she replied, “I’m here because my brilliant, singular child was so unhappy tonight, and I want to know why.” So I told her about Susan Hillage. Miss Constantin said nothing until the end, when she told me that she despised bullies of all stripes, and did I want her to remedy the situation? I said, Yes, please, but before I could ask anything else Dad’s footsteps were coming down the corridor and he’d opened the door, and the light from the landing shone in my eyes, dazzling me. How was I going to explain Miss Constantin sitting in my bedroom at, like, one o’clock in the morning? But Dad acted like she wasn’t even there. He just asked me if I was okay, saying he’d heard a voice, and sure enough, Miss Constantin wasn’t there. I told Dad I must’ve been dreaming and talking in my sleep.

Which was what I ended up believing. Voices are one thing, but women in gowns, sitting there? The next morning I went to school as usual, and didn’t see Susan Hillage. Nobody else did, either. Our headmaster hurried late into school assembly and announced that Susan Hillage had been hit by a van while she cycled to school, that it was very serious and we had to pray for her recovery. Hearing all this, I felt numb and cold, and so much blood left my head that the school hall sort of folded up around me, and after, I had no memory even of hitting the floor.

THE THAMES IS riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, it’s eleven-thirty and the town’s a little model of itself, a long way behind me. The wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer’s pocket. To my right, the A2 roars away over the marshes. Old Mr. Sharkey says it’s built over a road made by the Romans in Roman times, and the A2’s still how you get to Dover, to catch the boat to the Continent, just like the Romans did. Pylons march off in double file. Back at the pub, Dad’ll be hoovering the bar, unless Sharon’s doing it to get my three pounds. The morning’s gone muggy and stretched, like it does in triple maths, and the sun’s giving me eye-ache. I left my sunglasses in Vinny’s kitchen, sat on the draining board. Fourteen ninety-nine they cost me. I bought them with Stella, who said she’d seen the same sunglasses on Carnaby Street for three times the price so I thought I was getting a bargain. Then I imagine myself strangling Stella and my arms and hands go all stiff, like I’m actually doing it.

I’m thirsty. By now Mam will’ve told Dad something ’bout why Holly went off in a teenage strop, but I bet a million quid she will’ve twisted it all. Da’ll be joking ’bout “The Girls’ Bust-up” and PJ and Nipper and Big Dex’ll nod and grin like the shower of tossers they are. PJ’ll pretend to read from the Sun . “It says here, ‘Astronomers at the University of Bullshitshire have just found new evidence that, yes, teenagers really are the center of the universe.’ ” They’ll all cackle, and Good Old Dave Sykes, everyone’s favorite landlord, will join in with his you’re-so-witty-I-could-wet-myself laugh. Let’s see if they’re still laughing by Wednesday when I haven’t shown up.

Up ahead, in the distance, men are fishing.

WEIRD SHIT, LAST Act. Even as I was half carried to the school nurse’s room, I could hear the Radio People were back. Hundreds of them, all whispering at once. That freaked me out but not as much as the idea that I’d killed Susan Hillage. So I told the nurse about the Radio People and Miss Constantin. The old dear thought I was concussed at best and nuts at worst, so she called Mam, who called our GP, and later that day I was being seen by an ear doctor at Gravesend General Hospital. He couldn’t find anything wrong, but suggested a child psychiatrist he knew from Great Ormond Street Hospital in London who specialized in cases like mine. Mam was all “My daughter’s not mental!” but the doctor scared her with the word “tumor.” After the worst night of my life — I prayed to God to keep Miss Constantin away, had the Bible under my pillow but, thanks to the Radio People, I could hardly sleep a wink — we got a call from the ear doctor saying that his friend the specialist was due in Gravesend in one hour, and could Mam bring me up right now?

Dr. Marinus was the first Chinese person I ever met, apart from the ones at the Thousand Autumns Restaurant, where me and Brendan were sometimes sent for takeaways if Mam was too tired to cook. Dr. Marinus spoke in posh, perfect English, quite softly, so you had to pay close attention to catch everything. He was short and skinny but sort of filled the room anyway. First he asked ’bout school and my family and stuff, then moved on to my voices. Mam was all, “My daughter’s not crazy, if that’s what you’re implying — it’s just concussion.” Dr. Marinus told Mam that he agreed, I wasn’t remotely crazy, but the brain could be an illogical place. To help him rule out a tumor, she had to let me answer his questions on my own. So I told him about the Radio People and Susan Hillage and Miss Constantin. Mam went all jittery again but Dr. Marinus assured her that auditory hallucinations—“daymares”—were not uncommon in girls my age. He told me that Susan Hillage’s accident was a big coincidence, and that coincidences even of this size were happening to people all over the world, right now; my turn had come, that was all. Mam asked if there was any medicine to stop these daymares, and I remember Dr. Marinus saying that, before we went down that route, he’d like to try a simpler technique from “the Old Country.” It worked like acupuncture, he said, but it didn’t use needles. He got Mam to squeeze a point on my middle finger — he marked it with a Biro — then touched a place on my forehead, in the middle, with his thumb. Like an artist putting on a dab of paint. My eyes shut …