David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

And Crispin Hershey had put him there.

Crispin Hershey keeps him there.

“Hello, Mr. Hershey,” says a woman. “Fancy finding you here.”

I jump up with unexpected vigor. “Holly! Hi! I was just …” I’m not sure how to finish my sentence so we kiss, cheek to cheek, like fairly good friends. She looks tired, which is only to be expected for a time-zone hopper, but her velvet suit looks great on her — Carmen’s taken her shopping a few times. I indicate an imaginary companion in the third chair: “Do you and Captain Jetlag know each other?”

She glances at the chair. “We go back a few years, yes.”

“When did you get in from — was it Singapore?”

“Um … Got to think. No, Jakarta. It’s Monday, right?”

“Welcome to the Literary Life. How’s Aoife?”

“Officially in love.” Holly’s smile has several levels to it. “With a young man called Örvar.”

“Örvar? From which galaxy do Örvars hail?”

“Iceland. Aoife went there a week ago, to meet the folks.”

“Lucky Aoife. Lucky Örvar. Do you approve of the young man?”

“As it happens, yes. Aoife’s brought him down to Rye a few times. He’s doing genetics at Oxford, despite his dyslexia, don’t ask me how that works. He fixes things. Shelves, shower doors, a stuck blind.” Holly asks the waitress who brings my cognac for a glass of the house white. “What about Juno?”

“Juno? Never fixed a sodding thing in her life.”

“No, you dope! Is Juno dating yet?”

“Oh. That. No, give her a chance, she’s only fifteen. Mmm. Did you discuss boys with your father at that age?”

Holly’s phone bleeps. She glances at it. “It’s a message for you, from Carmen: ‘Tell Crispin I told him not to eat the durian fruit.’ Does that make any sense?”

“It does, alas.”

“Will you be moving into that new place in Madrid?”

“No. It’s a bit of a long story.”

“ROTTNEST?” HOLLY FLICKS her wineglass with her fingernail, as if testing its note. “Well, as Carmen may have mentioned, at various points in my life, I’ve heard voices that other people didn’t hear. Or I’ve been sure about things that I had no way of knowing. Or, occasionally, been the mouthpiece for … presences that weren’t me. Sorry that last one sounds seancey, I can’t help it. And unlike a seance, I don’t summon anything up. Voices just … nab me. I wish they didn’t. I wish very badly that they didn’t. But they do.”

I know all this. “You’ve got a degree in psychology, right?”

Holly sees the subtext, takes off her glasses, and pinches the indented mark on her nose. “Okay, Hershey, you win. Summer of 1985. I was sixteen. Jacko had been missing for twelve months. Me and Sharon were staying at Bantry in County Cork, with relatives. One wet day we were playing snakes and ladders with the smallies, when”—three decades later, Holly flinches—“I knew, or heard , or ‘felt a certainty,’ whatever you want to call it, what number the dice was next going to land on. My cousin’d rattle the eggcup and I’d think, Five . Lo and behold, the die landed on five. One. Five. Three . On and on. A lucky streak, right? Happens all the time. But on it went. For over fifty throws, f’Chrissakes. I wanted it to stop. Each time I thought, This time it’ll be wrong and I’ll be able to dismiss it all as a coincidence … but on and on it went, till Sharon needed a six to win, which I knew she’d roll. And she did. By now, I had a cracking headache, so I crawled off to bed. When I woke up, Sharon and our cousins were playing Cluedo, and everything was back to normal. And straightaway I started persuading myself that I’d only i mag ined knowing the numbers. By the time I got back to boring old Gravesend, I’d half persuaded myself the whole thing’d just been just a … a one-off weirdness I was probably misremembering.”

I think I’m drunker than I realized. “But it wasn’t.”

Holly picks at her ring. “That autumn, my mum got me enrolled on an office-skills course at Gravesend Tech, so at least I could do a bit of temping. I managed it okay, but one day in the canteen, I was on my own, as usual, when … Well, all of sudden, I knew that this girl, Rebecca Jones, who was sat chatting with friends on the table opposite, was going to knock her coffee onto the floor, in just a few seconds’ time. I just knew , Crispin, like I know … your name, or that I’ll go to sleep later. I’ve never believed in God, really, but I was praying, Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t . Then Rebecca Jones flapped out her hand to illustrate her story, it hit her coffee cup and smashed it onto the floor. Little streams and puddles of coffee everywhere.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I bloody legged it, but … the certainties chased me. I knew that round the next corner I’d see a Dalmatian cocking its leg against a lamppost. As if I’d already seen it, only I hadn’t. Round the corner, lo and behold, one Dalmatian, one lamppost, its hind leg up. A hundred yards from the railway bridge, I knew that when I crossed the bridge, the London train’d be passing under. Right again. On and on, all the way back to the pub. Then, as I passed through the bar, a regular, Frank Sharkey, was playing darts and …” she pauses to look at the goosebumps on her forearms, “… I knew I’d never see him again. I knew , Crispin. Sure,” she winces, “I ignored it, it was nasty and morbid. Old Mr. Sharkey was as much a friend of the family as a regular. He’d watched us all grow up. I told Dad I’d come back from college ’cause of a migraine, which by now I had. Went to bed, woke up, felt tons better. It’d stopped. What’d happened was harder to dismiss as fantasy, of course; I couldn’t. But I was just glad it’d stopped and tried not to think about Mr. Sharkey. But the next day, he didn’t appear, and even then, I knew. I nagged Dad to call a neighbor who had a key. Frank Sharkey was found dead in his garden shed. He’d had a massive heart attack. The doctor said he’d have been dead before he hit the floor.”

She’s persuasive, and she’s persuaded herself, I can see. But the paranormal is persuasive; why else does religion persist?

Holly stares sadly into her glass. “Many people need to believe in psychic powers. A lot of them latch onto my book so I get accused of milking the gullible. By people I respect, even. But s’pose it was real, Crispin, s’pose you had these certainties, which can’t be altered or second-guessed — about, say, Juno or Anaïs. Would you think, Happy Days, I’m psychic ?”

“Well, it depends …” I think about it. “No. At the risk of sounding like a GP, how long did all this last?”

She sucks in her lips and shakes her head. “Well … they’ve never stopped. Aged sixteen, seventeen, I’d be mugged by a bunch of facts that hadn’t happened yet, every few weeks, rush home, and bury myself in my bed with my head in a duffel bag. Told no one, apart from my great-aunt Eilísh. What would I say? People’d just think I wanted attention. Aged eighteen, I went grape picking for the summer in Bordeaux, then worked winters in the Alps. At least if I was abroad, the certainties wouldn’t be Brendan falling downstairs or Sharon getting hit by a bus.”

“This precognition doesn’t work long distance, then?”

“Not usually, no.”

“And do you get inside info on your own future?”

“Thank Christ, no.”

I hesitate to repeat my question, but I do. “Rottnest?”

Holly rubs an eye. “That was a strong one. Occasionally I hear a certainty about the past. I’m seized by it, I sort of … Oh, Christ, I can’t avoid the terminology, however crappy it sounds: I was channeling some sentience that was lingering in the fabric of that place.”