David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Aziz stowed his camera in the car. He returned with cigarettes and offered me one, but I was still on the wagon. “Bush, I understand,” said Aziz, as he lit his. “Bush father, he hate Saddam, then Twin Towers, so Bush want revenge. America need many oil, Iraq has oil, so Bush get oil. Friends of Bush get money also, Halliburton, supply, guns, much money. Bad reason, but I understand. But why your country, Ed? What Britain want here? Britain spend many many dollars here, Britain lose hundreds men here — for why, Ed? I not understand. Long ago people say, ‘Britain good, Britain gentleman.’ Now people say, ‘Britain is whore of America.’ Why? I want understand.”

I sifted through possible answers for Aziz. Did Tony Blair really believe that Saddam Hussein possessed missiles capable of destroying London in forty-five minutes? Did he really believe in the Neocon fantasia about planting a liberal democracy in the Middle East and watching it spread? I could only shrug. “Who knows?”

“Allah know,” said Aziz. “Blair know. Blair wife know.”

I’d give a year of my life to see inside the prime minister’s head. Three, maybe. He’s an intelligent man. You can tell by his gymnastic evasions in interviews. Does he not think, when he’s looking at himself in the mirror, Oh, fuck, Tony, Iraq has gone well and truly tits-up — why oh why oh why did you ever listen to George?

A drone circled above us. It would be armed. I thought of its operator, picturing a crewcut nineteen-year-old called Ryan at a base in Dallas, sucking an ice-cold Frappuccino through a straw. He could open fire on the clinic, kill everyone in and near it, and never smell the cooked meat. To Ryan, we’d be pixellated thermal images on a screen, writhing about a bit, turning from yellow to red to blue.

The drone flew off, and a white pickup truck hurtled up the dirt-track from the checkpoint area. It skidded to a halt by the clinic gate and the driver — head wrapped in a bloodstained kaffiyeh — jumped out and ran around to the passenger door. Aziz and I walked over to help. The driver, a guy about my age, pulled out a bundle wrapped in a sheet. He tried to carry it but he tripped over a cinder block, cushioning the bundle against his body as he fell. As we helped him up I saw he was holding a boy. The kid was unconscious, a sickly color, only five or six, and had blood oozing from his mouth. The man fired out a frantic volley of Arabic — I only knew the word for “doctor”—and Aziz led him into the clinic compound. I followed. Inside what had been a reception room a woman felt for a pulse on the boy’s arm, said nothing, and called to one of the doctors, who shouted something back from the far corner. As my eyes adjusted to the shade inside the house I saw Nasser speaking with a hollow-faced old guy in a wife-beater’s vest, fanning himself. Then a soft-spoken man, who, even here, smelt of aftershave, was in my face, asking a complex question in dialect — or a question that turned into a threat — containing the words “Bosnia,” “America,” and “kill.” He finished by slashing his throat with his finger. I half nodded, half shook my head, hoping to imply that I’d understood but things were too complicated for me to give him a straightforward answer. Then I walked off. Foolishly, I looked back; the guy was still watching. Aziz followed me out, and around to the Corolla. He told me, “He militia. He test you.”

“Did I pass the test?”

Aziz didn’t answer. “I bring Nasser. If man come, hide. If men with guns come … Goodbye, Ed.” Aziz hurried back to the compound. The open landscape was wasteland, pretty much devoid of cover. Unlike my previous brush with capture outside the mosque, I had time to think. I thought of Aoife in Mrs. Vaz’s classroom at her Stoke Newington primary school, singing “Over the Rainbow.” I thought of Holly at the homeless shelter off Trafalgar Square, helping some runaway kid make sense of a social-security form.

But the figure who stepped out of the compound, maybe twenty paces away, was neither Aziz nor Nasser nor an AK47-wielding Islamist. It was the driver of the pickup truck, the father of the boy. He stared past his car, towards Fallujah, where helicopters thucker-thucker-thucker ed over a quarter of a million humans.

Then he collapsed and sobbed in the dirt.

“COP A LOAD o’ this!” Dave Sykes comes into the Gents at the Maritime Hotel as I’m washing my hands, thinking how precious water is in Iraq. The lounge band in the banquet hall are doing a jazzy rendition of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red.” Dave gazes around the echoey space. “You could fit a crazy-golf course in here.”

“Classy, as well,” I say. “Those tiles are real marble.”

“A classy khazi for the perfect Mafia hit. You could have five machine-gunners leaping out of the cubicles.”

“Though maybe not on your daughter’s wedding day.”

“Nah, maybe not.” Dave walks over to the urinal and unzips his fly. “Remember the bogs in the Captain Marlow?”

“Fondly. That sounds weird. I remember the graffiti. Not that I ever contributed, of course.”

“The smuttiest graffiti in Gravesend, we had at the Captain Marlow. Kath used to make me paint over it, but a fortnight later it’d be back.”

The journo within asks, “Do you miss life as a landlord?”

“Bits and pieces, sure. The craic . Some of the regulars. Can’t say I miss the hours, or the fights. Or the taxes and the paperwork. But the old place was home for forty years, so it’d be strange if I didn’t, y’know, have memories wrapped up in it. The kids grew up there. I can’t go back. I couldn’t bear to see it. ‘The Purple Turtle,’ f’Chrissakes! Yuppies on their poserphones. Upstairs all converted into ‘executive apartments.’ Do you go back to Gravesend ever?”

“Not since Mum died, no. Not once.”

Dave zips up his trousers and walks over, placing one foot in front of the other, like an old man who could do with losing a few pounds. At the sink, he tentatively reaches out for the soap dispenser; a frothy blob blooms and drops onto his hand. “Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.” Dave holds his soapy hands under the warm tap and out spurts the water. “Enjoy Aoife while you can, Ed. One moment you’re carrying this lovable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she’s off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan.”

“What I’m dreading is Aoife’s first boyfriend,” I say.

Dave shakes the water from his hands. “Oh, you’ll be fine.”

Me and my big mouth might’ve just reminded Dave of Vinny Costello and the prelude to Jacko’s disappearance, so I grope for a topic changer: “Pete seems like a decent enough bloke, anyway.”

“Reckon so. Mind you, Sharon always was choosy.”

I find myself searching Dave’s reflection in the mirror for any signs of an unspoken “unlike Holly,” but he’s on to me: “Don’t worry Ed, you’ll do. You’re one of the very few other blokes I’ve ever met who can really carry off a beard as well as I can.”

“Thanks.” I hold my hands under the dryer and wonder, Would I actually do it? Leave Holly and Aoife for the sake of my job?

I’m angry that Holly’s forcing me to choose.

All I want is for Holly to share me with my job.

Like I share Holly with her job. It seems fair.

“It’ll come as a bit of a jolt, I guess,” says Dave, the intuitive ex-pub landlord, “being back in England full-time, like. Will it?”