David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

From next door’s TV I hear a Hollywood space battle.

She touches my wrist. “You do know it’s not that simple? As you always told me when I used to beat myself up over Jacko.”

Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s 9/11, it’s Bush and Blair, it’s militant Islam, the occupation, Nasser’s career choices, Olive Sun and Spyglass , a clapped-out Corolla that wouldn’t start, tragic timing, oh, a million little switches — but also me. Ed Brubeck hired them. Nasser needed to feed his family. I am why he and Aziz were there …” I choke up and steady myself. “I’m an addict, Holly. Life is flat and stale when I’m not working. What Brendan denied implying yesterday, it’s true. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. I … I’m a war-zone junkie. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

HOLLY’S CLEANING HER teeth, and a slab of vanilla light falls across Aoife. Look at her, this bright, bonkers, no-longer-so-little girl, who revealed herself from the mystery of ultrasound scans, nearly seven years ago. I remember us giving friends and family the big news; surprised joy from the Sykes clan and amused glances as Holly added, “No, Mum, Ed and I won’t be getting married. It’s 1997, not 1897”; and my own mum — whose leukemia was already getting to work on her bone marrow — saying, “Oh, Ed!” before bursting into tears and me asking, “Why’re you crying, Mum?” and her laughing, “I don’t know!”; and “Bump” swelling up until Holly’s navel was inverted; and Bump’s kicks; sitting in the Spence Café in Stoke Newington and compiling lists of girls’ names — Holly just knew , of course; and my irrational anxiety during my trip to Jerusalem about London ice and London muggers; then on the night of November 30 Holly calling from the bathroom, “Brubeck, find your car keys”; and a dash to the maternity ward, where Holly got axed and shredded alive by a whole new pain called childbirth; and clocks that went at six times the speed of time, until Holly was holding a glistening mutant in her arms and telling her, “We’ve been expecting you”; and Dr. Shamsie the Pakistani doctor insisting, “No, no, no, Mr. Brubeck, you will snip the cord, you absolutely must . Don’t be squeamish — you’ve seen much worse on assignment”; and last, the mugs of milky tea and the plate of Digestive biscuits in a small room down a corridor. Aoife was discovering the joys of breast milk, and Holly and I found that we were both bloody ravenous.

Our very first breakfast as a family.

WELSH RAIN GODS PISS onto the roofs, festival tents, and umbrellas of Hay-on-Wye and also on Crispin Hershey, as he strides along a gutter-noisy lane, into the Old Cinema Bookshop and makes his way down to its deepest bowel, where he rips this week’s Piccadilly Review to confetti. Who on God’s festering Earth does that six-foot-wide, corduroy-clad, pubic-bearded, rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is ? I shut my eyes but the words of his review slide by like the breaking news: “I tried my utmost to find something, anything , in Crispin Hershey’s long-awaited novel to dilute its trepanning godawfulness.” How dare that inflatable semen-stained Bagpuss write that after cosying up to me at the Royal Society of Literature bashes? “In my salad days at Cambridge, I got into a fistfight defending the honor of Hershey’s early masterpiece Desiccated Embryos and to this day I wear the scar on my ear as a badge of honor.” Who sponsored Richard Cheeseman’s application for Pen UK? I did. I did! And how does he thank me? “To dub Echo Must Die ‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” I stamp on the magazine’s shredded remains, panting and gasping …

TRULY, DEAR READER, I could weep. Kingsley Amis boasted how a bad review might spoil his breakfast, but it bloody wasn’t going to spoil his lunch. Kingsley Amis lived in the pre-Twitter age, when reviewers actually read proofs and thought independently. Nowadays they just Google for a preexisting opinion and, thanks to Richard Cheeseman’s chainsaw massacre, what they’ll read about my comeback novel is: “So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?” Richard Cheeseman has hung a KICK ME sign around Echo Must Die ’s neck, at the very time I need a commercial renaissance. It isn’t the 1990s, when my agent, Hal “the Hyena” Grundy, could pluck a £500K book deal as easily as a plug of mucus from his giant honker. Now is the official Decade of the Death of the Book. I’m hemorrhaging £40K a year on school fees for the girls, and the little pied-à-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood may have put a smile back on Zoë’s face but the expense has rendered me financially mortal for the first time since Hal the Hyena got me my book deal for Desiccated Embryos . My iPhone trills. Speak of the devil, it’s a message from Hal.

gig kicks off 45mins o brother where art thou?

The Hyenas are howling. The show must go on.

MAEVE MUNRO, SALTY captain of BBC2’s flagship arts show, gives a let’s-roll nod to the stage manager. I’m waiting in the wings, miked up. Publicity Girl scrolls through her messages. Stage Manager asks me to check that my mobile is switched off. I check, and find two new messages: one from Qantas air miles and one about garbage collection. In our marital halcyon days, Mrs. Zoë Legrange-Hershey would send Knock ’em dead, Genius —type texts before my gigs, but these days she doesn’t even ask what country I’m going to. Nothing from the girls, even. Juno will be playing remotely with her schoolfriends — or perverts pretending to be schoolfriends — on Tunnel Town or whatever the latest app is, while Anaïs will be reading a Michael Morpurgo book. Why don’t I write kids’ books about lonely children forging bonds with animals? Because I’ve spent two decades being the Wild Child of British literature, that’s sodding why. In publishing it’s easier to change your body than it is to switch genre.

House lights dim, stage lights brighten, and the audience falls silent. Maeve Munro’s telegenic face shines and her trademark Orcadian lilt fills the tent. “Good evening, I’m Maeve Munro, broadcasting live from the Hay Festival, 2015. Ever since his debut novel Wanda in Oils , published while its author was still an undergraduate, Crispin Hershey has earned his stripes as a master stylist and a laser-sharp chronicler of our times. Our most lusted-after gong, the Brittan Prize, has — scandalously — eluded his grasp so far, but many believe that 2015 could finally be his year. With no further ado, reading from Echo Must Die , his first novel in five years, please join me and our very proud sponsors FutureNow Bank in welcoming — Crispin Hershey!”

Solid applause. I approach the lectern. A full house. Sodding well ought to be — they already moved me from the six-hundred seater PowerGen Venue to this “more intimate setting.” Editor Oliver sits in the front row with Hyena Hal and his newest client and the Next Hot Young American Thing, Nick Greek. Let silence fall. Rain drums on the marquee roof. Most writers would now thank the audience for coming out on such a bad night, but Hershey treats ’em mean to keep ’em keen and opens Echo Must Die at page one.