David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

You, dear reader, me, Richard Cheeseman, all of us.

APHRA BOOTH BEGINS the next page of her Position Paper, entitled Pale, Male and Stale: The De(CON?)struction of Post-Post-Feminist Straw Dolls in the New Phallic Fiction . I top up my sparkling water, Glug -splush- glig -splosh glugsplsh sss sss … To my right, Event Moderator sits with his professorial eyes half shut in a display of worshipful concentration, but I suspect he’s napping. The glass wall behind the audience offers a view down to the Swan River, shimmering silver-blue through Perth, Western Australia. How long has Aphra been droning ? This is worse than church. Either our moderator really is asleep, or he’s too scared to interrupt Ms. Booth in mid-position. What am I missing? “When held up to the mirror of gender, masculine metaparadigms of the female psyche refract the whole subtext of an assymetric opacity; or to paraphrase myself, when Venus depicts Mars, she paints from below; from the laundry room and the baby-changing mat. Yet when Mars depicts Venus, he cannot but paint from above; from the imam’s throne, the archbishop’s pulpit or via the pornographer’s lens …” I pandiculate, and Aphra Booth swivels around. “Can’t keep up without a PowerPoint show, Crispin?”

“Just a touch of deep-vein thrombosis, Aphra.” I win a few nervous giggles, and the prospect of a fight injects a little life into the sun-leathered citizens of Perth. “You’ve been going on for hours . And isn’t this panel supposed to be about the soul?”

“This festival does not yit practice censorship.” She glares at Event Moderator. “Am I correct?”

“Oh, totally,” he blinks, “no censorship in Australia. Definitely.”

“Then perhaps Crispin would pay me the courtesy,” Aphra Booth sweeps her death ray back my way, “of letting me finish. As is clear to anyone out of his intellectual nappies, the soul is a pre-Cartesian avatar. If that’s too taxing a concept, suck a gobstopper and wait quietly in the corner.”

“I’d rather suck on a cyanide tooth,” I mutter.

“Crispin wants a cyanide tooth! Can anyone oblige? Please .”

Oh, how the rehydrated mummies wheezed and tittered!

BY THE TIME Aphra Booth is finished, only fifteen of our ninety minutes remain. Event Moderator tries to lasso the runaway theme and asks me whether I believe in the soul, and if so, what the soul may be. I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory stick in search of a corporeal hard drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality. Aphra Booth suggests that I’ve fudged the question because I’m a classic commitmentphobe—“as we all know.” Clearly this is a reference to my recent, well-publicized divorce from Zoë, so I suggest she stop making cowardly insinuations and say what she wants to say, straight up. She accuses me of Hersheycentricism and paranoia. I accuse her of making accusations she’s too gut less to stand by, emphasizing “gut” with everything I’ve got. Tempers fray. “The tragic paradox of Crispin Hershey,” Aphra Booth tells the venue, “is that while he poses as the scourge of cliché, his whole Johnny Rotten of Literature schtick is the tiredest stereotype in the male zoo. But even that posturing is lethally undermined by his recent advocacy of a convicted drug smuggler.”

I imagine a hair dryer falling into her bath: Her limbs twitch and her hair smokes as she dies. “Richard Cheeseman is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and using his misfortune as a stick to beat me with is vulgar beyond belief, even for Dr. Aphra Booth.”

“Thirty grams of cocaine was found in the lining of his suitcase.”

“I think,” says Event Moderator, “we should get back to—”

I cut him off: “Thirty grams doesn’t make you a drug lord!”

“No, Crispin; examine the record — I said drug smuggler .”

“There’s no evidence Richard Cheeseman hid the cocaine.”

“Who did, then?”

“ I don’t know, but—”

“Thank you .”

“—but Richard would never take such a colossal, stupid risk.”

“Unless he was a cokehead who thought his celebrity placed him above Colombian law, as both judge and jury concluded.”

“If Richard Cheeseman were Rebecca Cheeseman, you’d be setting your pubic hair on fire outside the Colombian embassy, screaming for justice. The very least that Richard deserves is a transfer to a British jail. Smuggling is a crime against the country of destination, not the country of departure.”

“Oh — so now you’re saying Cheeseman is a drug smuggler?”

“He should be allowed to fight for his innocence from a U.K. prison, and not from a festering pit in Bogotá where there’s no access to soap, let alone a decent defense lawyer.”

“But as a columnist in the right-wing Piccadilly Review , Richard Cheeseman was very hot on prison as a deterrent. In fact, to quote—”

“Enough already, Aphra, you bigoted blob of trans fat.”

Aphra springs to her feet and points her finger at me, like a loaded Magnum. “Apologize now , or you’ll have a crash course in how Australian courts handle slander, defamation, and body fascism!”

“I’m sure all Crispin meant,” says Event Moderator, “was—”

“I de mand an apology from that Weightist Male Pig!”

“Of course I’ll apologize, Aphra. What I meant to call you was a preening, sexist, irrelevant, and bigoted blob of trans fat, who bullies her graduate class into posting five-star reviews of her books on Amazon and who was witnessed, on February the tenth at sixteen hundred hours local time, purchasing a Dan Brown novel from the Relay Bookshop at Singapore Changi International Airport . Some public-spirited witness has already downloaded the clip onto YouTube, you’ll find.”

The audience gasps as one, most gratifyingly.

“And don’t say it was ‘just for research,’ Aphra, because it won’t wash . There. I do hope this apology clarifies matters.”

“You,” Aphra Booth tells Event Moderator, “shouldn’t give a stage to rank, fetid misogynists, and you ,” me, “will need a libel lawyer because I am going to sue the living shit out of you! ”

Aphra Booth: Exit stage left to sound of thunder.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Aphra,” I call after her. “Your fans are here. Both of them. Aphra … Was it something I said?”

I CYCLE OUT of the strip of souvenir shops and cafés, but a minute later end up down a dead end at a dusty parade ground. There are Second World War — style huts, and I half recall being told that Italian prisoners of war were interned on Rottnest Island. This train of thought conveys me to Richard Cheeseman, as so many trains of thought do, these days. My fateful act of vengeance in Cartagena last year didn’t so much backfire as explode with horrifying success: Cheeseman is now 342 days into a six-year sentence in the Penitenciaría Central, Bogotá, for drug trafficking. Trafficking! For one little sodding envelope! The Friends of Richard Cheeseman managed to wangle him a private cell and a bunk, but for this luxury we had to pay two thousand dollars to the gangsters who run his wing. Countless, countless times have I ached to undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past. We — the Friends — are using every channel we can to shorten the critic’s sentence, or to have him repatriated to the U.K. at least, but it’s an uphill struggle. Dominic Fitzsimmons, the suave and able undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, knew Cheeseman at Cambridge and is on our side, but he has to act with discretion to avoid charges of cronyism. Elsewhere, sympathy for the lippy columnist is not widespread. People point to the life sentences doled out in Thailand and Indonesia and conclude Cheeseman got off lightly, but there’s nothing “light” about life in the Penitenciaría. Two or three deaths occur in the prison every month.