David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

A whole sentence! Ernie, Veronica, and I were stunned as mullets.

High drama. Nobody stirred.

Mr. Meeks pointed at Withers with skeletal forefinger and intoned this ancient curse: “Those there English gerrrru n t s are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst dírely an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance!”

Withers growled at us: “Come quiet and face your punishments.”

Our captor’s southern Englishness was out! A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles. A crane operator stood by him. A sharky-chinned man in a thousand-quid suit. An axwoman with the scars to prove it.

The TV was switched off.

A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

Withers assessed the stage and went for a get real! smirk. “These men are car thieves.”

“You a copper?” The axwoman advanced.

“Show us your badge then.” The crane operator advanced.

“Aw, you’re full o’ shite, man,” spat Poseidon.

Coolheadedness might have lost us the day, but Johns Hotchkiss scored a fatal own goal. Finding his way blocked by a pool cue, he prefixed his distress with “Now you just look here, you grebo , you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—” One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.) Withers caught and snapped an incoming wrist, hurled a wee Krankie over the pool table, but the ogre was one and his enraged foes legion. Oh, the ensuing scene was Trafalgaresque. I must admit, the sight of that brute being brutalized was not wholly unpleasant, but when Withers hit the deck and disfiguring blows began to fall, I proposed a tactful exit stage left to our borrowed vehicle. We departed via the back and scuttled over the blustery car park as fast as our legs, whose combined age well exceeded three centuries, could carry us. I drove. North.

Where all this will end, I do not know.

THE END

Very well, dear Reader, you deserve an epilogue if you’ve stayed with me this far. My ghastly ordeal touched down in this spotless Edinburgh rooming house, kept by a discreet widow from the Isle of Man. After the brawl at the Hanged Edward, we four blind mice drove to Glasgow, where Ernie knows a bent copper who can take care of the Hotchkiss vehicle. Here our fellowship parted. Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks waved me off at the station. Ernie promised to take the flak if the law were ever to catch up, as he’s too old to stand trial, which is ruddy civilized of him. He and Veronica were headed to a Hebridean location where Ernie’s handyman-preacher-cousin does up falling-down crofts for Russian mafiosi and German enthusiasts of the Gaelic tongue. I offer my secular prayers for their well-being. Mr. Meeks was to be deposited in a public library with a “Please Look After This Bear” tag, but I suspect Ernie and Veronica will take him with them. After my arrival at Widow Manx’s, I slept under my goosedown quilt as sound as King Arthur on the Blessed Isle. Why didn’t I get on the first train south to London, there and then? I’m still not sure. Maybe I recall Denholme’s remark about life beyond the M25. I shall never know what part he played in my incarceration, but he was right—London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here.

I looked up Mrs. Latham’s home number at the library. Our telephone reunion was a moving moment. Of course, Mrs. Latham smothered her emotion by lambasting me, before filling me in on my missing weeks. The Hoggins Hydra had ripped the office apart when I failed to show for my three o’clock castration, but years of financial brinkmanship had stood my redoubtable pit prop in good stead. She had captured the vandalism on a cunning video camera supplied by her nephew. The Hogginses were thus restrained: steer clear of Timothy Cavendish, Mrs. Latham warned, or this footage will appear on the Internet and your various probations shall hatch into prison sentences. Thus they were prevailed upon to accept an equitable proposal cutting them into future royalties. (I suspect they had a sneaking admiration for my lady bulldog’s cool nerves.) The building management used my disappearance—and the trashing of my suite—as an excuse to turf us out. Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans. Cavendish Publishing is currently run from a house owned by my secretary’s eldest nephew, who resides in Tangier. Now for the best news: a Hollywood studio has optioned Knuckle Sandwich—The Movie for a figure as senselessly big as the number on a bar code. A lot of the money will go to the Hogginses, but for the first time since I was twenty-two, I am flush.

Mrs. Latham sorted out my bank cards, etc., and I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, and I must say the future is not too shabby. I shall find a hungry ghostwriter to turn these notes you’ve been reading into a film script of my own. Well, sod it all, if Dermot “Duster” Hoggins can write a bestseller and have a film made, why the ruddy hell not Timothy “Lazarus” Cavendish? Put Nurse Noakes in the book, the dock, and on the block. The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. The minor matter of Johns Hotchkiss’s vehicle loan needs to be handled with delicacy, but fouler fish have been fried. Mrs. Latham got on the e-mail to Hilary V. Hush to express our interest in Half-Lives , and the postman delivered part two not an hour ago. A photo was enclosed, and it turns out the V is for Vincent! And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats. I’ll find out if Luisa Rey is still alive in a corner of the Whistling Thistle, my de facto office and a wrecked galleon of a back-alley tavern where Mary, Queen of Scots, summoned the devil to assist her cause. The landlord, whose double measures would be quadruples in management-consulted Londinium, swears he sees Her ill-starred Majesty, regularly. In vino veritas .

That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

40

The black sea roars in. Its coldness shocks Luisa’s senses back to life. Her VW’s rear struck the water at forty-five degrees, so the seat saved her spine, but the car now swings upside down. She is trussed by her seat belt inches from the windshield. Get out, or die here . Luisa panics, breathes a lungful of water, and struggles into a pocket of air, coughing. Unhook this belt . She squirms and jackknifes up to the belt lock. Release button . It doesn’t click. The car half-somersaults deeper, and with a wrenching noise, a giant squid-shaped air bubble flies away. Luisa stabs the button, frantic, and the strap drifts free. More air . She finds an air pocket trapped beneath a windshield of dark water. The sea’s mass jams the door shut. Roll down the window . It inches halfway and jams, right where it always jams . Luisa shimmies around, squeezes her head, shoulders, and torso through the gap.