David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

PLAZA DE LA ADUANA IS THROBBING with Cartagenans holding their iPhones aloft. Plaza de la Aduana is roofed by a tropical twilight of Fanta Orange and oily amethyst. Plaza de la Aduana is oscillating to the cod-ska chorus of “Exocets for Breakfast” by Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship. Up on his balcony, Crispin Hershey taps ash into his champagne glass and remembers a sexual encounter to the music of She Blew Out the Candle —the Sinking Ship’s debut album — around the time of his twenty-first birthday, when the images of Morrissey, Che Guevara, and Damon MacNish surveyed a million student bedrooms. The second album was less well received — bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears — and the follow-up’s follow-up bombed. MacNish would have returned to his career in pizza delivery had he not resurrected himself as a celebrity campaigner for AIDS, for Sarajevo, for the Nepalese minority in the Kingdom of Bhutan, for any cause at all, as far as I could see. World leaders eagerly submitted themselves to two minutes of MacNish while the cameras rolled. Winner of Sexiest Scot of the Year for three years running, tabloid interest in his regularly rotating girlfriends, a steady trickle of okay but mojoless albums, an ethical clothing brand, and two BBC seasons of Damon MacNish’s Five Continents kept the Glaswegian’s star well lit until the last decade, and even today “Saint Nish” remains in demand at festivals, where he delivers a polished Q&A by day and a tour through his old hits by night — for a mere $25,000 plus business-class travel and five-star accommodation, I understand.

I slap a mosquito against my cheek. The little bastards are the price for this delicious warmth. Zoë and the girls were due to join me here — I’d even bought the (nonrefundable) tickets — but then the shitstorm blew up about Zoë’s earth-mother marriage counselor. £250+VAT for an hour of platitudes about mutual respect? “No,” I told Zoë, “and, as we all know, no means no.”

Zoë opened fire with every weapon known to woman.

Yes , the porcelain mermaid was launched from my hand. But had it been aimed at her, it would not have missed. Therefore I didn’t mean to hurt her. Zoë, by now too hysterical to follow this simple logic, packed her Louis Vuitton bags and left with Lori the hairy au pair to pick up Anaïs and Juno from school, thence to her old friend’s pad in Putney. Which was mysteriously available at zero notice. Crispin was supposed to proffer promises to mend his ways, but he preferred to watch No Country for Old Men with the volume up really loud. The following day, I wrote a story about a gang of feral youths who roam the near future, siphoning oil tanks of lardy earth mothers. It’s one of my best. Zoë phoned that evening and told me she “needed space — perhaps a fortnight”; the subtext being, dear reader, If you apologize grovelingly enough, I may come back . I suggested that she take a month and hung up. Lori brought Juno and Anaïs to visit last Sunday. I was expecting tears and emotional blackmail, but Juno told me her mother had described me as impossible to live with, and Anaïs asked if she could have a pony if we got divorced, because when Germaine Bigham’s parents got divorced she got a pony. It rained all day, so I ordered in pizza. We played Mario Carts. John Cheever has a short story called “The Season of Divorce.” It’s one of his best.

“STILL PUTS ON a decent show, don’t he, f’ra fella his age?” Kenny Bloke offers me a smoke as Damon MacNish windmills through “Corduroy Skirts Are a Crime Against Humanity.” “I saw the lads in Fremantle, back in … eighty-six? Fackin’ A.” Kenny Bloke’s in his late fifties, sports ironmongery in his ear, and is a Noongar elder, according to the festival bumf. I observe how Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate. Kenny Bloke taps ash into the geraniums. “MacNish’s sitting pretty compared to a lot of them, I reckon. Guess who was playing at Busselton Park not so long ago? Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Remember them? Not a massive turnout, I’m afraid, but they’ve got pensions and kids to put through college, same as everyone. Us writers get spared that, at least, eh? Farewell tours on the nostalgia circuit.”

I probe this not-necessarily-true remark. Echo Must Die cleared twenty thousand in the U.K. and the same in the States. Respectable …

… -ish, but for the new Crispin Hershey novel, disappointing. Time was I’d shift a hundred thousand units in both territories, no questions asked. Hyena Hal talks about eBook downloads reconfiguring the old paradigm, but I know exactly why my “return to form” novel failed to sell — Richard Cheeseman’s Rottweilering. That one sodding review declared open season on the Wild Child of British Letters, and by the time the Brittan Prize longlist was announced, Echo Must Die was better known as The One Richard Cheeseman Hilariously Shafted . I scan the spacious ballroom behind us. Still no sign of him, but he won’t resist the tug of coffee-skinned Latino butlers for long.

“Did you look around the old quarter today?” asks Kenny Bloke.

“Yes, it’s pretty in a UNESCO way. If a touch unreal.”

The Australian grunts. “My taxi driver told me how the FARC people and the intelligence services needed a place for a holiday, so Cartagena’s their de facto demilitarized zone.” He accepts one of my cigarettes. “Don’t tell the missus — she thinks I’ve given up.”

“Your secret’s safe. I doubt I’ll be coming to …?”

“Katanning. Western Australia. Bottom-left corner. Compared to this”—Kenny Bloke gestures at the Latin Baroque glory—“it’s a dingo’s arse. But my people are buried there, from way, way back, and I wouldn’t want to leave my roots.”

“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.”

“You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”

Damon MacNish’s drummer whacks out a solo and the sea of Latino youth below makes me feel WASPish and old. Friday, ten P.M. in London, no school tomorrow. Juno and Anaïs are handling my and Zoë’s trial separation with suspicious maturity. Surely I deserve a few teary episodes. Has Zoë been readying them for a bust-up? My old mucker Ewan Rice told me his first wife had sought legal advice six months before the D-word, hence her cool million-quid settlement. When had the rot set in for me and Zoë? Was it there at the very beginning, hiding like a cancer cell, on Zoë’s father’s yacht, Aegean sea light playing on the cabin ceiling, an empty wine bottle rolling oh-ever-so-gently on the cabin floor, this way and that, this way and that? We’d been celebrating Hal the Hyena’s text to say the auction for Desiccated Embryos had reached £750,000 and was still climbing. Zoë said, “Don’t panic, Crisp, but I’d like to spend my life with you.” This way and that … This way and that …

“Swim for it!” I want to shout at that moronic Romeo. Before you know it, she’ll “study” for an online PhD in crystal healing and call you narrow-minded if you dare wonder aloud where the science is. She’ll stop greeting you in the hallway when you get home. Her powers of accusation will stupefy you, young Romeo. If the au pair’s lazy, it’s your fault for vetoing the Polish troglodyte. If the piano teacher’s too strict, you should have found a huggier one. If Zoë is unfulfilled, it’s your fault for depriving her of the imperative to earn a living. Sex? Ha. “Stop pressuring me, Crispin.” “I’m not pressuring you, Zoë, I’m just asking when?” “Sometime.” “When is ‘Sometime’?” “Stop pressuring me, Crispin!” Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed, and meanwhile Romeo on the yacht kisses his soon-to-be-fiancée and murmurs, “Let’s get hitched, Miss Legrange.”