The Bone Clocks

This feels like some demonic pub quiz: “Horology? The study of the measurement of time. Or old clocks.”

He leans over me; I feel like a microbe on a slide. “Tell me what you know about Marinus.”

Wretched as a snitch and hopeful this will save my daughters, I tell my eerie interrogator that Marinus was a child psychiatrist at Gravesend Hospital. “He’s mentioned in Holly’s book as well.”

“Has she met Marinus during the time you’ve known her?”

I shake my head. “He’ll be ancient now. If he’s still alive.”

Is a woman laughing on the outer edge of my hearing?

“What is,” Hugo Lamb watches me carefully, “the Star of Riga?”

“The capital of Estonia. No. Latvia. Or Lithuania. I’m not sure. One of the Baltic states, anyway. I’m sorry.”

Hugo Lamb considers me. “We’re finished.”

“I—I told you the truth. Completely. Don’t hurt my kids.”

He swings off the mossy boulder and walks away, telling me, “If their daddy’s an honest man, Juno and Anaпs have nothing to fear.”

“You—you’re—you’re letting me go?” I touch my legs. They’re still dead. “Hey! My legs! Please!”

“Knew I’d forgotten something.” Hugo Lamb turns around. “By the by, Mr. Hershey, the critics’ treatment of Echo Must Diewas egregious. But, hey, you shafted Richard Cheeseman royallyin return, didn’t you?” Lamb’s smile is puckered and conspiratorial. “He’ll never guess, unless someone plants the idea in his head. Sorry about your trousers; the car park is left at the last fork. That much you’ll remember. Everything else I’ll redact. Ready?” His eyes fixing mine, Hugo Lamb twists the air into threads between his forefingers and thumbs, then pulls tight …

… a mossy boulder, big as a troll’s head, on its side and brooding over an ancient wrong. I’m sitting on the ground with no memory of tripping, though I must have done; I’m aching all over. How the sodding hell did I get down here? A mini-stroke? Magicked by the elves of Бsbyrgi? I must have … what? Sat down for a breather, then nodded off. A breeze passes, the trees shiver, and a yellow leaf loop-the-loops, landing by a fluke of air currents on my palm. Look at that. For the second time today, I think of Mr. Chimes the conjuror. Not far away, a woman’s laughing. The campsite’s near. I get up—and notice a big cold stain down my thigh. Oh. Okay. The Wild Child of British Letters has suffered a somnambulant urethral mishap. Lucky there’s no Piccadilly Reviewdiarist around. I’m only fifty-three—surely still a bit young for incontinence pads? It’s all chilly and clammy, like it happened a couple of minutes ago. Thank God I’m so close to the parking area, clean boxers, and trousers. Back to the fork, then turn left. Let us hurry, dear reader. It’ll be night before you know it.

September 23, 2019

IT LOOKS LIKE HALLDУR LAXNESS splurged most of the Nobel dosh on Gljъfrastei

Upstairs, the digital guide mentions in passing that Mr. and Mrs. Laxness occupied different bedrooms. So I see. Strikes a sodding chord. Laxness’s typewriter sits on his desk—or, more accurately, his wife’s typewriter, as she typed up his handwritten manuscripts. I wrote my debut novel on a typewriter, but Wanda in Oilswas composed on a secondhand Brittan PC handed down by Dad as a birthday present, and it’s been ever-lighter, ever-trustier laptops ever since. For most digital-age writers, writing isrewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, pa

On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces? I enter a small library where Laxness seems to have kept his overflow, and bend my neck to graze upon the titles. Plenty of hardbacks in Icelandic, Danish, I guess, German, English … and sodding hell —Desiccated Embryos!

Hang on, this is the 2001 edition …

… and Laxness died in 1998. Right.

Well, a kind gesture of the Hidden Folk.

GOING DOWNSTAIRS, I make way for a dozen teenagers trooping up. Where do Juno and Anaпs go on their school trips in Montreal? Not knowing saddens me. What a long-distance, part-time father I am. These twenty-first-century children of Iceland are plugged into headsets but still exude that Nordic confidence and sense of wellbeing, even the two African Icelanders and a girl in a Muslim headdress. All have a 2 in front of their birth year and need barely scroll down an inch when finding it on an online form. They carry a fragrance of hair conditioner and fabric conditioner. Their consciences are as undented as cars in a dealership showroom, and all are bound for the world’s center stage, where they’ll challenge, outperform, and patronize us old farts at our retirement parties, as we did when we looked that beautiful. Their teacher brings up the rear and smiles his thanks at me, and as he passes, a rather fine mirror is revealed on the Laxness stairway. From its deep square well of grays peers out a haggard look-alike of Anthony Hershey. Look at that. My metamorphosis into Dad is complete. Did some evil spirit at Бsbyrgi suck out the last of my youth? My hair’s thi

My prime of life is going, going, gone …

TRUDGING DOWN TO the Mitsubishi waiting in Gljъfrastei

hello crispin pIs can we talk? x yr friend C

I huff. My soul still aches from being dumped, but I’m handling it. I don’t want to have to unhandle it, or un-unhandle it. We ingest our emotions, and grief for a lost relationship is not what I want to ingest. Carmen’s “yr friend” is code for “We won’t be getting back together”and “hello” instead of “hi” is the textual equivalent of a chilly air-kiss rather than a cheek-to-cheek contact kiss: