David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“No, I am not . I am a journalist doing what I do. Just as he does what he does and you do what you do.”

Holly rubs her head like I’m giving her a headache. “Go, then! Back to Baghdad, to the bombs taking the front off your hotel. Pack. Go. Back to ‘what you do.’ If it’s more precious than us. Only you’d better get the tenants out of your King’s Cross flat ’cause the next time you’re back in London, you’ll be needing somewhere to live.”

I keep my voice low: “Will you please fucking listen to yourself?”

“No, you fucking listen to your fuckingself! Last month you agree to quit in June and come home. Your high-powered American editor says, ‘Make it December.’ You say, ‘Uh, okay.’ Then you tell me. Who are you with, Brubeck? Me and Aoife, or Olive Sun and Spyglass ?”

“I’m being offered another six months’ work. That’s all.”

“No, it’s not ‘all’ ’cause after Fallujah dies down or gets bombed to shit it’ll be Baghdad or Afghanistan Part Two or someplace else, there’s always someplace else, and on and on until the day your luck runs out and then I’m a widow and Aoife has no dad. Yes , I put up with Sierra Leone, yes , I survived your assignment in Somalia, but Aoife’s older now. She needs a dad.”

“Suppose I told you, ‘No, Holly, you can’t help homeless people anymore. Some have AIDS, some have knives, some are psychotic. Quit that job and work for … for Greenland supermarkets instead. Put all those people skills of yours to use on dried goods. In fact, I’m ordering you to, or I’ll kick you out.’ How would you respond?”

“F’Chrissakes, the risks are different .” Holly lets out an angry sigh. “Why bring this up in the middle of the bloody night? I’m Sharon’s matron of honor tomorrow. I’ll look like a hungover panda. You’re at a crossroads, Brubeck. Choose.”

I make an ill-advised quip: “More of a T-junction, technically.”

“Right. I’d forgotten. It’s all a joke to you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that’s not what I—”

“Well, I ’m not joking. Quit Spyglass or move out. My house isn’t just a storage dump for your dead laptops.”

THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, and things are fairly shit. “Never let the sun set on an argument,” my uncle Norm used to say, but my uncle Norm didn’t have a kid with a woman like Holly. I said “Good night” to her peaceably enough after switching off the lights, but her “Good night ” back sounded very like “Screw you,” and she turned away. Her back’s as inviting as the North Korean border. It’s six o’clock in the morning in Baghdad now. The stars will be fading in the freeze-dried dawn, as skin-and-bone dogs pick through rubble for something to eat, the mosques’ Tannoys summon the devout, and bundles by the side of the road solidify into last night’s crop of dead bodies. The luckier corpses have a single bullet through the head. At the Safir Hotel, repairs will be under way. Daylight will be reclaiming my room at the back, 555. My bed will be occupied by Andy Rodriguez from The Economist —I owe him a favor from the fall of Kabul two years ago — but everything else should be the same. Above the desk is a map of Baghdad. No-go areas are marked in pink highlighter. After the invasion last March, the map was marked by only a few pink slashes here and there: Highway 8 south to Hillah, and Highway 10 west to Fallujah — other than that, you could drive pretty much wherever you wanted. But as the insurgency heated up the pink ink crept up the roads north to Tikrit and Mosul, where an American TV crew got shot to shit. Ditto the road to the airport. When Sadr City, the eastern third of Baghdad, got blocked off, the map became about three-quarters pink. Big Mac says I’m re-creating an old map of the British Empire. This makes the pursuit of journalism difficult in the extreme. I can no longer venture out to the suburbs to get stories, approach eyewitnesses, speak English on the streets, or even, really, leave the hotel. Since the new year my work for Spyglass has been journalism by proxy, really. Without Nasser and Aziz I’d have been reduced to parroting the Panglossian platitudes tossed to the press pack in the Green Zone. All of which begs the question, if journalism is so difficult in Iraq, why am I so anxious to hurry back to Baghdad and get to work?

Because it is difficult, but I’m one of the best.

Because only the best can work in Iraq right now.

Because if I don’t, two good men died for nothing.

WINDSURFERS, SEAGULLS, AND SUN, a salt-’n’-vinegar breeze, a glossy sea, and an early walk along the pier with Aoife. Aoife’s never been on a pier before and she loves it. She does a row of froggy jumps, enjoying the flicker of the LED bulbs in the heels of her trainers. We’d have killed for shoes like that when I was a kid, but Holly says it’s hard to find shoes that don’t light up these days. Aoife has a Dora the Explorer helium balloon tied to her wrist. I just paid a fiver for it to a charming Pole. I look behind us, trying to work out which window of the Grand Maritime Hotel is our room. I invited Holly out on the walk but she said she had to help Sharon get ready for a hairdresser who isn’t due until nine-thirty. It’s not yet eight-thirty. It’s her way of letting me know she hasn’t shifted her position from last night.

“Daddy? Daddy? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry, poppet,” I tell Aoife. “I was miles away.”

“No, you weren’t. You’re right here.”

“I was miles away metaphorically.”

“What’s meta … frickilly?”

“The opposite of literally.”

“What’s litter-lily?”

“The opposite of metaphorically.”

Aoife pouts. “Be serious , Daddy.”

“I’m always serious. What were you asking, poppet?”

“If you were any animal, what would you be? I’d be a white Pegasus with a black star on its forehead, and my name’d be Diamond Swiftwing. Then Mummy and me could fly to Bad Dad and see you. And Pegasuses don’t hurt the planet like airplanes — they only poo. Grandpa Dave says when he was small his daddy used to hang apples on very tall poles over his allotment, so all the Pegasuses’d hover there, eat, and poo. Pegasus poo is so magic the pumpkins’d grow really really big, bigger than me, even, so just one would feed a family for a week.”

“Sounds like Grandpa Dave. Who’s the Bad Dad?”

Aoife frowns at me. “The place where you live, silly.”

“Baghdad. ‘ Bagh -dad.’ But I don’t live there.” God, it’s lucky Holly didn’t hear that. “It’s just where I work.” I imagine a Pegasus over the Green Zone, and see a bullet-riddled corpse plummeting to earth and getting barbecued by Young Republicans. “But I won’t be there forever.”

“Mummy wants to be a dolphin,” says Aoife, “because they swim, talk a lot, smile, and they’re loyal. Uncle Brendan wants to be a Komodo dragon, ’cause there’re people on Gravesend Council he’d like to bite and shake to pieces, which is how Komodo dragons make their food smaller. Aunty Sharon wants to be an owl because owls are wise, and Aunt Ruth wants to be a sea otter so she can spend all day floating on her back in California and meet David Attenborough.” We reach a section of the pier where it widens out around an amusement arcade. Big letters spelling BRIGHTON PIER stand erect between two limp Union flags. The arcade’s not open yet, so we follow the walkway around the outside of the arcade. “What animal would you be, Daddy?”