The Bone Clocks

“This festival does not yitpractice censorship.” She glares at Event Moderator. “Am I correct?”

“Oh, totally,” he blinks, “no censorship in Australia. Definitely.”

“Then perhaps Crispin would pay me the courtesy,” Aphra Booth sweeps her death ray back my way, “of letting me finish. As is clearto anyone out of his intellectual nappies, the soul isa pre-Cartesian avatar. If that’s too taxing a concept, suck a gobstopper and wait quietly in the corner.”

“I’d rather suck on a cyanide tooth,” I mutter.

“Crispin wants a cyanide tooth! Can anyone oblige? Please.”

Oh, how the rehydrated mummies wheezed and tittered!

BY THE TIME Aphra Booth is finished, only fifteen of our ninety minutes remain. Event Moderator tries to lasso the runaway theme and asks me whether I believe in the soul, and if so, what the soul may be. I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory stick in search of a corporeal hard drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality. Aphra Booth suggests that I’ve fudged the question because I’m a classic commitmentphobe—“as we all know.” Clearly this is a reference to my recent, well-publicized divorce from Zoл, so I suggest she stop making cowardly insinuations and say what she wants to say, straight up. She accuses me of Hersheycentricism and paranoia. I accuse her of making accusations she’s too gutless to stand by, emphasizing “gut” with everything I’ve got. Tempers fray. “The tragic paradox of Crispin Hershey,” Aphra Booth tells the venue, “is that while he poses as the scourge of clichй, his whole Joh

I imagine a hair dryer falling into her bath: Her limbs twitch and her hair smokes as she dies. “Richard Cheeseman is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and using his misfortune as a stick to beat mewith is vulgar beyond belief, even for Dr. Aphra Booth.”

“Thirty grams of cocaine was found in the lining of his suitcase.”

“I think,” says Event Moderator, “we should get back to—”

I cut him off: “Thirty grams doesn’t make you a drug lord!”

“No, Crispin; examine the record—I said drug smuggler.”

“There’s no evidence Richard Cheeseman hid the cocaine.”

“Who did, then?”

“ Idon’t know, but—”

“Thank you.”

“—but Richard would never take such a colossal, stupid risk.”

“Unless he was a cokehead who thought his celebrity placed him above Colombian law, as both judge and jury concluded.”

“If Richard Cheeseman were RebeccaCheeseman, you’d be setting your pubic hair on fire outside the Colombian embassy, screaming for justice. The very least that Richard deserves is a transfer to a British jail. Smuggling is a crime against the country of destination, not the country of departure.”

“Oh—so now you’re saying Cheeseman isa drug smuggler?”

“He should be allowed to fight for his i

“But as a columnist in the right-wing Piccadilly Review, Richard Cheeseman was very hot on prison as a deterrent. In fact, to quote—”

“Enough already, Aphra, you bigoted blob of trans fat.”

Aphra springs to her feet and points her finger at me, like a loaded Magnum. “Apologize now, or you’ll have a crash course in how Australian courts handle slander, defamation, and body fascism!”

“I’m sure all Crispin meant,” says Event Moderator, “was—”

“I de mandan apology from that Weightist Male Pig!”

“Of course I’ll apologize, Aphra. What I meantto call you was a preening, sexist, irrelevant, and bigoted blob of trans fat, who bullies her graduate class into posting five-star reviews of her books on Amazon and who was witnessed, on February the tenth at sixteen hundred hours local time, purchasing a Dan Brown novel from the Relay Bookshop at Singapore Changi International Airport. Some public-spirited witness has already downloaded the clip onto YouTube, you’ll find.”

The audience gasps as one, most gratifyingly.

“And don’t say it was ‘just for research,’ Aphra, because it won’t wash. There. I do hope this apology clarifies matters.”

“You,”Aphra Booth tells Event Moderator, “shouldn’t give a stage to rank, fetid misogynists, and you,” me, “will need a libel lawyer because I am going to sue the living shit out of you!”

Aphra Booth: Exit stage left to sound of thunder.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Aphra,” I call after her. “Your fans are here. Both of them. Aphra … Was it something I said?”

I CYCLE OUT of the strip of souvenir shops and cafйs, but a minute later end up down a dead end at a dusty parade ground. There are Second World War–style huts, and I half recall being told that Italian prisoners of war were interned on Rottnest Island. This train of thought conveys me to Richard Cheeseman, as so many trains of thought do, these days. My fateful act of vengeance in Cartagena last year didn’t so much backfire as explode with horrifying success: Cheeseman is now 342 days into a six-year sentence in the Penitenciarнa Central, Bogotб, for drug trafficking. Trafficking! For one little sodding envelope! The Friends of Richard Cheeseman managed to wangle him a private cell and a bunk, but for this luxury we had to pay two thousand dollars to the gangsters who run his wing. Countless, countless times have I achedto undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past. We—the Friends—are using every cha

I know, I know. One man alone could extract Cheeseman from his Bogotб hellhole and that is Crispin Hershey—but consider the cost. Please. By offering up a full confession, I’d be facing prison myself, quite possibly at Cheeseman’s current address. The legal fees would be ruinous, and no friendsofcrispinhershey.org would procure mea private cell, either—it’d be straight to the piranha tank. Juno and Anaпs would cut me off forever. So a full confession would be tantamount to suicide, and better a guilty coward than a dead Judas.

I can’t do it to myself. I just can’t do it.

Beyond the parade ground the dusty track fizzles out.

We all take a few wrong turns. I turn my bike around.

THE AFTERNOON SUN is a microwave oven, door wide open, cooking all exposed flesh. Rottnest is small as islands go, only eight square miles of naked rock and baked gullies, twists, and bends, ups and downs, and the Indian Ocean is either always visible or always around the next bend. Halfway up a hill I dismount and push. My pulse bangs my eardrums and my shirt’s sticking to my unflat torso. When did I get so sodding unfit? Back in my thirties I could’ve streaked up this slope, but now I’m so knackered I’m nearly puking. When did I last ride a bike? Eight years ago, give or take, with Juno and Anaпs in our back garden at Pembridge Place. One afternoon in the holidays I made an obstacle course for the girls with plank ramps, bamboo-stick slaloms, a tu