David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

“You cannot make the call as dialed. Replace the handset, check the number, and try again.”

Desolation. I assumed the worst, that the Hogginses had torched the place so badly that even the telephones had melted. I tried once more, in vain. The only other telephone number I could reconstruct since my stroke was my next, and last, resort. After five or six tense rings Georgette, my sister-in-law, answered in the kittenish pout I knew, Lordy, Lordy, I knew. “It’s gone bedtime, Aston.”

“Georgette, it’s me, Timbo. Put Denny on, will you?”

“Aston? What’s wrong with you?”

“It isn’t Aston, Georgette! It’s Timbo!”

“Put Aston back on, then!”

“I don’t know Aston! Listen, you must get me Denny.”

“Denny can’t come to the phone right now.”

Georgette’s grip on her rocker was never exactly firm, but she sounded buckarooed over the rainbow. “Are you drunk?”

“Only if it’s a nice wine bar with a good cellar. I can’t abide pubs.”

“No, listen, it’s Timbo, your brother-in-law! I’ve got to speak to Denholme.”

“You sound like Timbo. Timbo? Is that you?”

“Yes, Georgette, it’s me, and if this is a—”

“Rather rum of you not to turn up at your own brother’s funeral. That’s what the whole family thought.”

The floor spun. “What?”

“We knew about your various tiffs, but I mean —”

I fell. “Georgette, you just said Denny is dead. Did you mean to say it?”

“Of course I did! D’you think I’m bloody doolally?”

“Tell me once more.” I lost my voice. “Is—Denny—dead?”

“D’you think I’d make something like this up?”

Nurse Noakes’s chair creaked with treachery and torture. “How, Georgette, for Christ’s sake, how?”

“Who are you? It’s the middle of the night! Who is this, anyway? Aston, is this you?”

I had a cramp in my throat. “Timbo.”

“Well, what clammy stone have you been hiding under?”

“Look, Georgette. How did Denny”—saying made it more so—”pass away?”

“Feeding his priceless carp. I was spreading duckling pâté on crackers for supper. When I went to fetch Denny he was floating in the pond, facedown. He may have been there a day or so, I wasn’t his babysitter, you know. Dixie had told him to cut back on the salt, strokes run in his family. Look, stop hogging this line and put Aston on.”

“Listen, who’s there now? With you?”

“Just Denny.”

“But Denny’s dead!”

“I know that! He’s been in the fishpond for absolutely … weeks, now. How am I supposed to get him out? Listen, Timbo, be a dear, bring me a hamper or something from Fortnum and Mason’s, will you? I ate all the crackers, and all the thrushes ate the crumbs, so now I’ve got nothing to eat but fish food and Cumberland sauce. Aston hasn’t called back since he borrowed Denny’s art collection to show his evaluator friend, and that was … days ago, weeks rather. The gas people have stopped the supply and …”

My eyes stung with light.

The doorway filled with Withers. “You again.”

I flipped. “My brother has died! Dead, do you understand? Stone Ruddy Dead! My sister-in-law’s bonkers , and she doesn’t know what to do! This is a family emergency! If you have a Christian bone in your ruddy body you’ll help me sort this out this godawful ruddy mess!”

Dear Reader, Withers saw only a hysterical inmate making nuisance calls after midnight. He shoved a chair from his path with his foot. I cried into the phone: “Georgette, listen to me, I’m trapped in a ruddy madhouse hellhole called Aurora House in Hull , you’ve got that? Aurora House in Hull , and for Christ’s sake, get anybody there to come up and rescue—”

A giant finger cut my line. Its nail was gammy and bruised.

Nurse Noakes walloped the breakfast gong to declare hostilities open. “Friends, we have clasped a thief to our bosom.” A hush fell over the assembled Undead.

A desiccated walnut banged his spoon. “The Ay-rabs know what to do with ’em, Nurse! No light-fingered Freddies in Saudi, eh? Friday afternoons in the mosque car parks, chop! Eh? Eh?”

“A rotten apple is in our barrel.” I swear, it was Gresham Boys’ School again, sixty years on. The same shredded wheat disintegrating in the same bowl of milk. “Cavendish!” Nurse Noakes’s voice vibrated like a pennywhistle. “Stand!” The heads of those semianimate autopsies in mildewed tweeds and colorless blouses swiveled my way. If I responded like a victim, I would seal my own sentence.

It was hard to care. I had not slept a wink all night. Denny was dead. Turned to carps, most likely. “Oh, for God’s sake, woman, get some proportion in your life. The Crown Jewels are still safe in the Tower! All I did was make one crucial telephone call. If Aurora House had a cybercafe I would willingly have sent an e-mail! I didn’t want to wake anyone up, so I used my initiative and borrowed the telephone. My profoundest apologies. I’ll pay for the call.”

“Oh, pay you shall. Residents, what do we do to Rotten Apples?”

Gwendolin Bendincks rose and pointed her finger. “Shame on you!”

Warlock-Williams seconded the motion. “Shame on you!”

One by one those Undead sentient enough to follow the plot joined in. “Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” Mr. Meeks conducted the chorus like Herbert von Karajan. I poured my tea, but a wooden ruler knocked the cup from my hands.

Nurse Noakes spat electrical sparks: “Don’t dare look away while you’re being shamed!”

The chorus died the death, except for one or two stragglers.

My knuckles whimpered. Anger and pain focused my wits like a zazen beating stick. “I doubt the kindly Mr. Withers told you, but it transpires my brother Denholme is dead. Yes, stone dead. Call him yourself, if you won’t believe me. Indeed, I beg you to call him. My sister-in-law is not a well woman, and she needs help with funeral arrangements.”

“How could you know your brother had died before you broke into my office?”

A crafty double nelson. Her crucifix toying inspired me. “Saint Peter.”

Big Bad Frown. “What about him?”

“In a dream he told me that Denholme recently passed to the Other Side. ’Phone your sister-in-law,’ he said. ’She needs your help.’ I told him using the telephone was against Aurora House rules, but Saint Peter assured me that Nurse Noakes was a God-fearing Catholic who wouldn’t mock such an explanation.”

La Duca was actually halted in her tracks by this balderdash. (“Know thine Enemy” trumps “Know thyself.”) Noakes ran through the alternatives: was I a dangerous deviant; harmless delusional; realpolitikster; Petrine visionary? “Our rules in Aurora House are for everyone’s benefit.”

Time to consolidate my gains. “How true that is.”

“I shall have a chat with the Lord. In the meantime”—she addressed the dining room—”Mr. Cavendish is on probation. This episode is not gone and not forgotten.”

After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X. (The place was a dive. All crumbling council houses and joss-stick shops.) Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?

The point is that it lets your mind go elsewhere. Elsewhere was not rosy. Denholme had died some time ago, but I was still in Aurora House. I dealt myself a new worst-case scenario, one where Denholme sets up a standing order from one of his tricky-dicky accounts to pay for my residency in Aurora House, out of kindness or malice. Denholme dies. My flight from the Hogginses was classified, so nobody knows I’m here. The standing order survives its maker. Mrs. Latham tells the police I was last seen going to a loan shark. Detective Plod conjectures I had been turned down by my lender of the last resort and had Done a Eurostar. So, six weeks later, nobody is looking for me, not even the Hogginses.