The Bone Clocks

  Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you think you love someone? … No, Ness, no, no—don’t hang up. Look. Just … I want things back to how we were, Ness!… But if you’d explain, if you’d talk, if you’d … I am calm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”

  A phony peace, then an explosive “Fuck it!”

  Quinn hammers his fist on the glass a few times. This attracts attention, so I slip back into the stream of shoppers and loop back around the way I came, sideways as I pass, for long enough to see my lovesick classmate folded over, hiding his face in his hands. Crying—in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.

  THE AUSTRIAN-ETHIOPIAN DJ is silent and hooded, won’t take requests, and, in the last hour alone, has loped through remixes of the KLF’s “3 A.M. Eternal,” Phuture’s “Your Only Friend,” and the Norfolklorists’ “Ping Pong Apocalypse.” Club Walpurgis is housed in the basement annex of the vast and elderly Hôtel Le Sud, a six-floor, hundred-room angular labyrinth converted in the 1950s from a sanatorium for the tubercular and very wealthy. A recent refit has stripped Club Walpurgis down to a bare-brick Bowie-in-Berlin look, and expanded the dance floor to the size of a tennis court. Submarine lights are strobing and a decent percentage of the two to three hundred dancing skeletons clad in young flesh and high-end apparel is young and female. A snort or two of devil’s dandruff has reerected the Mighty Quinn from his emotional crash earlier, so all four of us have come clubbing. Unusually, I’m the only one who isn’t in the act of pulling; my three fellow Humberites are sitting on a horseshoe-shaped sofa, each nursing a young, attractive black girl. No doubt Chetwynd-Pitt is playing his nineteenth-in-line-to-the-throne card—the drunker he gets, the bluer his blood—Fitzsimmons is flashing his francs, and presumably Quinn’s squeeze just finds him cute and fluffy. Fair play to them all. Any other night I’d go fishing too, and I won’t pretend my Alpine glow, Rupert Everett sultriness, charcoal Harry Enna shirt, and Makoto Grelsch jeans wrapping my rower’s torso aren’t drawing long-lashed attention, but this New Year’s Eve I’d rather get blown by a dance track. Could I be on to a Temptation of Christ deal whereby an act of continence at Club Walpurgis tonight earns me credit in the Bank of Karma to be redeemed by a certain girl from Gravesend? Only Dr. Coke has the answer, and after this archangelic remix of “Walking on Thin Ice” by somebody or other, I’ll go and consult with the good medicine man …

  THE CUBICLES IN the Gents are as commodious as Le Bog du Croc is not, and seemingly designed for the insufflation of cocaine: frequently cleaned, spacious, and sans that incriminating gap between the top of the door and the ceiling so common in British clubs. I seat myself upon the throne and produce my compact mirror—borrowed from an elfin Filipina who was angling for a spouse’s visa—and Foo Foo Dust, won from Chetwynd-Pitt at blackjack this very night and stored in a little plastic wrapper inside a bag of menthol Fisherman’s Friends to confuse any canine investigators in the unlikely event … My tooter is a straw made from coarse paper and Sellotape. With superb precision I deposit the last of my coke in a swirl on the mirror and—kids, don’t try this at home, don’t try it anywhere, Drugs Are Bad—toke it up my left nostril in a powerful snort. For five seconds it stings like a nettle being threaded down my throat via my nose, until …

  We have liftoff.

  The bass is reverberating in my bones and godalmightythat’sgood. I flush the paper straw away, dampen a sheet of loo paper in the cascade, and wipe my mirror clean. Tiny lights I can’t quite see pinprick the hedges of my field of vision. I emerge from the cubicle like the Son of God rolling away the stone, and inspect myself in the mirror—all good, even if my pupils are more Varanus komodoensis than Homo sapiens. Exiting the bogs, I encounter an Armani-clad stoner known as Dominic Fitzsimmons. He smoked a joint earlier, and his habitual sharp-wittedness has bungee-jumped from the bridge and is yet to return. “Hugo, what’s a shit like you doing in a nice place like this?”

  “Powdering my nose, dear Fitz.”

  He peers up my nostril. “Looks like a blizzard blew in.” He does a melted grin and I can’t help but think of his mother wearing the same smile and nothing else. “We met girls, Hugo. One for CP, one for Olly, one for moi. Come and say hello.”

  “You know how shy I am around women.”

  He finds this too funny to laugh at. “Pants—on—fire.”

  “Really, Fitz, no one loves a gooseberry. Who are they?”

  “This is the best part. Okay. Remember that African pop song “Yé Ké Yé Ké”? Summer of … 1988, I think. Massive hit.”

  “Uh … Not well, but yeah. What’s his name—Mory Kanté?”

  “We are a-wooing Mory Kanté’s backing singers.”

  “Riiiiiight. And doesn’t Mory Kanté need them tonight?”

  “They did a big gig last night in Geneva, but tonight they’re free and they’ve never learned to ski—lack of snow in Algeria, I presume—so they’ve all come to Sainte-Agnès for two or three days to learn.”

  I find this story semi-plausible, more semi than plausible, but before I can voice my skepticism Chetwynd-Pitt rocks up. “It’s the season of lurrrve back at chez CP. There’s a still a slab of Gruyère in the fridge for you to impregnate, Lamb, so you won’t feel left out.”

  Southern Comfort, cocaine, and horniness turns my old friend Chetwynd-Pitt into an A1 shithead and compels me to retaliate: “I don’t want to shit in your baguette, Rufus, but hasn’t it occurred to you you’re pulling a trio of tarts? They have that air of paid sex about them. I’m only asking.”

  “You may be better at cheating at cards than us but tonight you’ve failed to pull.” Chetwynd-Pitt pokes my chest and I imagine ripping off the offending index finger. “We’ve got three dusky maidens zero-to-gagging for it in less than sixty minutes, so Lamb decides we’re paying them. Well, actually, no, they’re discerning women, so you’d better put your earplugs in: Shandy’s a screamer, I can tell.”

  I can’t let that pass: “I don’t fucking cheat at cards.”

  “Oh, I believe you do fucking cheat at cards, Scholarship Boy.”

  “Take your finger off my chest, Gaylord Chetwynd-Pitt, and prove it.”

  “Oh, you’re too fucking clever to leave proof, but year in, year out, you’ve fleeced your friends for thousands. Intestinal parasite.”

  “If you’re so sure I cheat, Rufus, why do you play me?”

  “I won’t again, and in-fucking-fact, Lamb, why don’t—”

  “Guys, guys,” says Fitz the stoned peacemaker, “this isn’t you; it’s Colombian snort or whatevertheshit it was that Günter sold you. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! Switzerland! New Year’s Eve! Shandy’s into lovers, not fighters. Kiss and make up.”

  “Cheat-boy can kiss my fat one,” mutters Chetwynd-Pitt, pushing past me. “Get our coats, Fitz. Tell the girls it’s afterparty time.”

  The door to the Gents swings behind us. “He didn’t mean it,” said Fitzsimmons, apologetically.

  I hope not. For several reasons, I hope not.

  I STAY ON the dance floor for DJ Aslanski’s remix of Damon MacNish’s mid-eighties anthem “Exocets for Breakfast,” but Chetwynd-Pitt’s parting shot has disfigured my night by shaking my faith in the whole Marcus Anyder project. I created Anyder not only as fake account holder to own and obscure my ill-gotten gains, but to be a better, sharper, truer version of Hugo Lamb. But if a privileged clot like Chetwynd-Pitt can see through me so easily, I’m not as clever and Anyder isn’t as hidden as I’ve believed up until now. And even if I am a master dissembler, so what? So what if I join a City firm in eight months, and stab and bluff my way to a phone-number income within two years? So what if I own a Maserati convertible, a villa in the Cyclades, and a yacht in Poole harbor by the turn of the century? So what if Marcus Anyder builds his own empire of stocks, properties, portfolios? Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: Wrink
les spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag; behold Brigadier Philby, French kissing with Mrs. Bolitho; as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in irradiated tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that aging pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.

  PAST THE QUEUE for the gorilla-man’s crêperie on the plaza, under lights strung between the spiky pines, through air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams, my feet know the way, and it’s not back to family Chetwynd-Pitt’s Swiss chalet. I take off my gloves to light a cigarette. My watch says 23:58. All Praise the God of Perfect Timing. After giving way to a police 4×4—its snow chains clink, sleigh-bell-like—I walk down the narrow alley to Le Croc and peer in through the round window at the scrum of natives, visitors, and shady in-betweeners; Monique’s fixing drinks but Holly’s not in eyeshot. I go in anyway, and ease myself through flesh, jackets, smoke, chatter, clatter, and phrases of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. No sooner do I reach the bar than Günter turns down the volume and clambers onto a stool, whirling a soccer rattle for attention. Our host points at the large clock with the handle of a tennis racket: Less than twenty seconds remain of the old year. “Mesdames et messieurs, Herr und Herren, ladies and gentlemen, signore e signori—le countdown, s’il vous-plaît …” I’m allergic to choruses so I abstain, but as the unified clientele reaches five I feel her eyes pulling mine down from the clock and we watch each other like kids playing a game where the first one to smile loses. A lunatic cheering breaks out, and I lose the game. Holly pours a measure of Kilmagoon over a single cube of ice and slides it my way. “What mystery object did you forget this time?”

  I tell her, “Happy New Year.”

  New Year’s Day, 1992

  THIS MORNING I WAKE in my garret at Chetwynd-Pitt’s, knowing that the phone in the lounge, two floors down, will ring in sixty seconds and that the caller will be my father, with bad news. Obviously it won’t; obviously it’s the dregs of a dream—otherwise I’d have powers of precognition, which I don’t. Obviously. What if Dad’s calling about Penhaligon? What if Penhaligon blabbed in his suicide note, and an officer from Truro has spoken to Dad? Obviously this is postcocaine paranoia, but just in case, just in case, I get up, slip into the Turkish dressing gown, and go down to the sunken lounge where the phone sits silent, and will stay silent, obviously. Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way dribbles out of Chetwynd-Pitt’s room, no doubt to beef up his wigga credentials. The lounge is empty of bodies but full of debris: wineglasses, ashtrays, food wrappers, and a pair of silk boxer shorts over the Boer War rifle. When I got home last night, the Three Musketeers and their backing singers were frolicky and high, so I went straight to bed.

  Perching on the back of the sofa, I watch the phone.

  09:36, says the clock. 08:36 in the U.K.

  Dad’s peering over his glasses at the number I left.

  +36 for Switzerland; the area code; the chalet’s number …

  Yes, I’ll say, Jonny did play cards from time to time.

  Just a bunch of friends. Relaxation, after a long week.

  Absolute tops was fifty pounds a sitting, though. Beer money.

  How much? Thousands? I’ll laugh, once, in disbelief.

  That’s not relaxation, Dad. That’s lunacy. I mean …

  He must have fallen in with another bunch altogether.

  09:37. The molded plastic phone sits innocuously.

  If it doesn’t ring by 09:40, I’ve been scaring myself …

  09:45 AND ALL’S well. Thank Christ. I’ll lay off the cocaine for a while—maybe longer. Didn’t the Yeti warn me about paranoia? An orange-juice breakfast and a vigorous ski from Pointe les Hlistes will flush last night’s toxins away, so—

  The phone rings. I grab it. “Dad?”

  “Morning … Hugo? Is that you?”

  Damn it, it is Dad. “Dad! How are you?”

  “A bit startled. How the Dickens did you know it was me?”

  Good question. “There’s a display on Rufus’s phone,” I lie. “So, uh, Happy New Year. Is everything okay?”

  “Happy New Year to you too, Hugo. Can we talk?”

  I notice Dad’s subdued tone. Something’s up. “Fire away.”

  “Well. The damnedest thing happened yesterday. I was watching the business news at lunch when I had a phone call from a police detective—a lady detective, no less—at Scotland Yard.”

  “Good God.” Think think think, but nothing joins up.

  “One Superintendent Sheila Young from the Art and Antiques Recovery Division. I had no idea such a thing existed, but apparently if Monet’s Water Lilies gets stolen, say, it’s their job to get it back.”

  Either Bernard Kriebel’s shopped me or someone’s shopped Kriebel. “A fascinating job, I guess. But why phone you?”

  “Well, actually, Hugo, she wanted a word with you.”

  “What about? I certainly haven’t nicked a Monet.”

  A worried little laugh. “She wouldn’t actually say. I explained you’re in Switzerland, and she said she’d appreciate your calling her when you get back. ‘To assist in an ongoing inquiry.’ ”

  “And you’re sure this wasn’t some idiot’s idea of a practical joke?”

  “She sounded real. There was a busy office in the background.”

  “Then I’ll call Detective Sheila Young the moment I’m home. Some manuscript got nicked from Humber Library, I wonder? They have a few. Or … nope, I’m clueless, but I’m itching with curiosity.”

  “Super. I—I must admit, I didn’t tell your mother.”

  “Tactful, but feel free to tell her. Hey, if I end up in Wormwood Scrubs, she can do the ‘Free Hugo’ campaign.”

  Dad’s laugh is brighter. “I’ll be there, with my placard.”

  “Splendiferous. So, apart from Interpol hounding you about your criminal-mastermind son, is everything else okay?”

  “Pretty much. I’m back to work on the third, and Mum’s rushed off her feet at the theater, but that’s panto season for you. You’re quite sure you don’t need a lift from the airport when you get home?”

  “Thanks, Dad, but the Fitzsimmonses’ driver is dropping me off. See you in eight days or so, when our mystery will be resolved.”

  I GO UPSTAIRS with scenarios flashing by at twenty-four frames a second: The brigadier’s died and a legal executor is asking, “What valuable stamps?”; Nurse Purvis is asked about the brigadier’s visitors; Kriebel points the finger at Marcus Anyder; CCTV footage gets reviewed; I’m identified; I conduct a taped interview with Sheila Young; I deny her accusations, but Kriebel appears from behind a one-way mirror—“It’s him.” Formal charges; bail denied, expulsion from Cambridge, four years for theft and fraud, two suspended; if it’s a quiet news day I’ll make the national papers—OLD RICHMONDIAN STEALS STROKE VICTIM’S FORTUNE; out in eighteen months for good behavior, with a criminal record. The only profession open to me will be wheel clamping.

  In my garret, I wipe a clear bit on the misted-up window. Snowy roofs, Hôtel Le Sud, sheer peaks. No snow’s falling yet, but the granite sky is full of oaths. January 1.

  A compass needle is turning. I feel it.

  Pointing to prison? Or somewhere else?

  Madam Constantin doesn’t choose people at random.

  I hope. Hard rabbitty thumps from below: Quinn.

  He comes soon, like a disappointed brontosaurus.

  Detective Sheila Young isn’t a trap; she’s a catalyst.

  Pack a bag, my instinct says. Be ready. Wait.

  I obey, then find my place in The Magic Mountain.

  THE CHALET OF Sin is astir. I hear Fitzsimmons on the first landing be
low: “I’ll have a quick shower …” The boiler wakes, the pipes growl, and the shower spatters; women are speaking an African language; earthy laughter; Chetwynd-Pitt booms, “Good morning, Oliver Quinn! Tell me that wasn’t what the doctor ordered!” One of the women—Shandy?—asks, “Rufus, honey, I call our agent, so he know we are okay?” Footsteps go down to the sunken lounge; in the kitchen, the radio leaks that song “One Night in Bangkok”; Fitzsimmons comes out of the shower; male muttering on the landing: “The scholarship boy’s still up in his holding pen … On the phone earlier … If he wants to sulk, let him sulk …” I’m half tempted to yell down, “I’m not bloody sulking, I’m really happy that you all got your rocks off!” but why should I spend my energy on rectifying their assumption? Someone whistles; the kettle’s boiling; then I hear a half-falsetto half-croak half-shout: “You are shitting me!”

  I give my full attention. A quiet few seconds … For the second time on this oddest of mornings I experience an inexplicable certitude that something’s about to happen. As if it’s scripted. For the second time, I obey my instinct, close The Magic Mountain, and stow it in my backpack. One of the singers is talking fast and low so I can’t make out what she’s saying, but it prompts a thud-thud-thud up the stairs to the landing, where Chetwynd-Pitt blurts out, “A thousand dollars! They want a thousand fucking dollars! Each!”

  Drop, drop, drop, go the pennies. Or dollars. Like the best songs, you can’t see the next line coming, but once it’s sung, how else could it have gone? Fitzsimmons: “They’ve got to be fucking joking.”

  Chetwynd-Pitt: “They’re very very not fucking joking.”

  Quinn: “But they … they didn’t say they were hookers!”

  Chetwynd-Pitt: “They don’t even look like hookers.”

  Fitzsimmons: “I don’t have a thousand dollars. Not here!”