The Bone Clocks

“Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”

“ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”

“It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”

She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old—apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”

My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”

“What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”

“You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”

Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get a

“Do what?”

“Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”

“I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way?”

“You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”

“Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”

Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”

I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”

“ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”

·   ·   ·

THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnиs, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stu

Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.

“Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some—some mind-fucking experiment?”

Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.

“No no no, I’m notgetting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what yousaid—I said the phoneline’s shit … What’s that? You thoughtyou meant it?”

Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you thinkyou 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 amcalm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”

A phony peace, then an explosive “ Fuckit!”

Qui

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 a

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 komodoensisthan 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 fu

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

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