David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

That sinking feeling. “It’s been a year since Perth.”

“I’m not rejecting you, Crispin, honestly. I just …”

Evening in Shanghai is turning suddenly cooler.

“I just … want to carry on as we are for a while, that’s all.”

Everyone I see appears to be one half of a loving couple. I remember this I’m not rejecting you, Crispin from my pre-Zoë era, when it marked the beginning of breakups. Resentment snarls through the letterbox, feeding me lines to say: “Carmen, make your sodding mind up!”; “Do you know how much we’re wasting on airfares?”; even, “Have you met someone else? Someone Spanish? Someone closer to your own age?”

I tell her, “That’s fine.”

She listens to the long pause. “It is?”

“I’m disappointed, but only because I don’t have enough money to buy a place near yours, so we could establish some sort of Hanseatic League of Little Castles. Maybe if a film deal for Echo Must Die falls from the skies. Look, this call’s costing you a fortune. Go and cheer up your booksellers.”

“Am I still welcome in Hampstead next week?”

“You’re always welcome in Hampstead. Any week.”

She’s smiling in her office in Madrid, and I’m glad I didn’t listen to the snarls through the letterbox. “Thanks, Crispin. Give my love to Holly, if you meet up. She’s hoping to. And if anyone offers you the deep-fried durian fruit, steer clear. Okay, bye then — love you.”

“Love you too.” And end call. Do we use the L-word because we mean it, or because we want to kid ourselves into thinking we’re still in that blissful state?

BACK IN HIS hotel room on the twenty-ninth floor, Crispin Hershey showers away his sticky day and flumps back onto his snowy bed, clad in boxers and a T-shirt emblazoned with Beckett’s “fail better” quote I was given in Santa Fe. Dinner was a gathering of writers, editors, foreign bookshop owners, and British Council folks at a restaurant with revolving tables. Nick Greek was on eloquent form, while I imagined him dying in spectacular fashion, facedown in a large dish of glazed duck, lotus root, and bamboo shoot. Hercule Poirot would emerge from the shadows to tell us who had poisoned the rising literary star, and why. The older writer would be an obvious choice, with professional jealousy as a motive, which is why it couldn’t be him. I stare at the digital clock in the TV-screen frame: 22:17. Thinking about Carmen, I shouldn’t be surprised at her reticence re: Our Flat. The “Honeymoon Over” signs were already there. She refused to be in London when Juno and Anaïs came over last month. The girls’ visit was not a wholly unqualified success. On the way from the airport, Juno announced she was not into horses anymore so, of course, Anaïs decided that she was too old for pony camp as well, and as the deposit was nonrefundable, I expressed my displeasure perhaps a tad too much in the manner of my own father. Five minutes later Anaïs was bawling her eyes out and Juno was studying her nails, telling me, “It’s no good, Dad, you can’t use twentieth-century methods on twenty-first-century kids.” It cost me five hundred pounds and three hours in Carnaby Street boutiques to stop them phoning their mother to get their flights back to Montreal rebooked for the next day. Zoë lets Juno get away with rejecting even the gentlest admonishment with a virulent “Oh, whatever!” while Anaïs is turning into a sea anemone whose mind sways whichever way the currents of the moment push her. The visit would have gone better if Carmen had pitched in, but she wasn’t having any of it: “They don’t need a stepmother laying down the law when holidaying in London with their dad.” I said I felt a deep affection for my own stepmother. Carmen replied that after reading my memoir about Dad she could quite understand why. Subject deftly changed.

Classic Carmen Salvat strategy, that.

22:47. I PLAY chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn’t a mind of digital code but Dad: It’s Dad’s attacks I repel; Dad’s defenses I dismantle; Dad’s king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable. Stress will out, however; usually I win at this level, but today I keep making repeated slips. Worse, the old git starts taking the piss: “Superb strategy, Crisp; that’s it, you move your rook there; so I’ll move my knight here; pincer your dozy rook against your blundering queen and now there’s Sweet Fanny Adams you can do about it!” When I use the undo function to take back my rook, Dad crows: “That’s right — ask a sodding machine to bail you out. Why not download an app to write your next novel?” “Sod off,” I tell him, and turn off my phone. I switch on the TV and sift through the channels until I recognize a scene from Mike Leigh’s film One Year . It’s appallingly good. My own dialogue is shite compared to this. Sleep would be a good idea, but I’m at the mercy of jet lag and I find I’m wired. My stomach isn’t too sure about the deep-fried chunks of durian fruit, either; Nick Greek admitted to the British consul that he hadn’t yet acquired the taste, so I ate three. I’d love a smoke but Carmen’s bullied me into quitting so, yummy yummy, it’s a zap of Nicorette. Richard Cheeseman’s smoking again. How can he not, stuck where he is, poor bastard? His teeth are brown as tea. I flick through more channels and find a subtitled American import, The Dog Whisperer , about an animal trainer who sorts out psychotic Californians’ psychotic pets. 23:10. I consider jerking off again, purely for medicinal purposes, and browse my mental Blu-ray collection, settling on the girl from that commune Rivendell somewhere in West London — but decide that I can’t be bothered. So I open my new Moleskine, turn to the first page, and write “The Rottnest Novel” at the top …

… and find I’ve forgotten my main character’s name again. Bugger it. For a while he was Duncan Frye, but Carmen said that sounded like a Scottish chip-shop owner. So I went with “Duncan McTeague” but the “Mc” is too obvious for a Scot. I’ll settle with Duncan Drummond, for now. DD. Duncan Drummond, then, an 1840s stonemason who ends up in the Swan River Settlement, designs a lighthouse on Rottnest Island. Hyena Hal isn’t sure about this book—“Certainly a fresh departure, Crisp”—but I woke up one morning and realized that all my novels deal with contemporary Londoners whose upper-middle-class lives have their organs ripped out by catastrophe or scandal. Diminishing returns were kicking in even before Richard Cheeseman’s review, I fear. Already, however, a few problemettes with the Rottnest novel are mooning their brown starfishes my way: Viz., I’ve only got three thousand words; those three thousand are not the best of my career; my final new deadline is December 31 of this year; Editor Oliver has been sacked for “underperformance” and his aptly named successor Curt is making some unpleasant noises about paying back advances.

Would a quokka or two spice it up? I wonder.

Sod this. There must be a bar open somewhere.

HALLELUJAH! I WALK into the Sky High bar on the forty-third floor and it’s still open. I sink my weary carcass into an armchair by the window and order a twenty-five-dollar shot of cognac. The view is to die for. Shanghai by night is a mind of a million lights: of orange dot-to-dots along expressways, of pixel-white headlights and red taillights; green lights on the cranes; blinking blues on airplanes; office blocks across the road, and smearages of specks, miles away, every microspeck a life, a family, a loner, a soap opera; floodlights up the skyscrapers over in Pudong; closer up, animated ad-screens for Omega, Burberry, Iron Man 5 , gigawatt-brite, flyposted onto night’s undarkness. Every conceivable light, in fact, except the moon and stars. “There’s no distances in prisons,” Richard Cheeseman wrote, in a letter to our Friends Committee. “No outside windows, so the furthest I ever see is the tops of the walls around the yard. I’d give a lot just for a view of a few miles. It wouldn’t have to be pretty — urban grot would be fine — so long as there was several miles’ worth.”