The Bone Clocks

… but my truth sounds no crazier than their faith, no saner either; and who has the right to kill Santa? Specially a Santa who promises to reunite the Coogans with their dead son, Pat Joe with his dead brother, me with Aoife, Jacko, Mum, and Dad; and even put the Endarkenment into reverse, and bring back central heating, online ordering, Ryanair, and chocolate. Our hunger for our loved ones and our lost world is as sharp as grief; it howls to be fed. If only that same hunger didn’t make us so meekly vulnerable to men like Father Brady.

“Fallen pregnant?” Betty Power covers her mouth. “Never!” We’re back to Sheep’s Head gossip. I’d like to ask who’s pregnant, but if I do so at this point they’ll all wonder if I’m going deaf or turning senile.

“That’s the problem.” Sinйad Fitzgerald leans in. “Three lads went off with young Miss Hegarty after the harvest festival, they were all off their faces”—she mimes smoking a joint—“so until the baby’s features are clear enough to play Spot the Daddy, Damien Hegarty doesn’t know who to point the shotgun at. A proper mess it is.”

The Hegartys keep goats lower down the peninsula, between Ahakista and Durrus. “Shocking,” says Betty Power, “and Niamh Hegarty not a day over sixteen, too, am I right? No mother in the house to lay down the rules, that’s what this is about. They just think anything goes. Which is exactly why Father Brady’s—”

“Hear that,” says Pat Joe, holding up a finger and listening …

… cups are poised in midlift; sentences dangle; babies are shushed; nearly two hundred West Corkonians fall silent, all at once; and then let out a collective sigh of relief. It’s the Convoy: two armored jeeps, ahead of and behind the diesel tanker and the box truck. Inside the Cordon we still have tractors and harvesters, and Stability vehicles still drive on the old N71 to Bantry to service the garrisons and the depots, but these four shiny state-of-the-art vehicles rumbling up Church Lane are the only regular visitors to Kilcrannog. For anyone over Rafiq’s age, say, the sound evokes the world we knew. Back then, traffic was a “noise,” not a “sound,” but it’s different now. If you close your eyes as the Convoy arrives you can imagine it’s 2030, say, back when you had your own car and Cork was a ninety-minute drive away, and my body didn’t ache all the time, and climate change was only a problem for people who lived in flood-prone areas. Only I don’t close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them. We all go outside to watch the show. I take my pram. It’s not that I don’t trust the villagers not to steal from an old lady with two kids to raise, but you shouldn’t tempt hungry people.

THE HEAD JEEP pulls up past the diesel store. Four young Irish Stability troops jump out, enjoying the impact their uniforms, guns, and swagger makes on the yokels; it’s not by chance that Kilcrannog’s single girls wear their dwindling supplies of makeup and best clothes on Convoy Days. Corinna Kennedy from Rossmore Farm married a Convoyman and now she’s living in the Bandon garrison with five hours of electricity a day. The head Irish guard speaks rapid-fire “Mandlish” into his transband to confirm their current position to the Main Convoy. “Each of them helmets’d cost more than my house,” Pat Joe tells me, not for the first time, “if you had the contacts to turn it into hard yuan.”

Three Chinese troops jump down from the rear jeep, in the uniforms of the Pearl Occident Company, or POC. They are taller than their Irish counterparts, their teeth are better, and their guns are more, as teenage Aoife would’ve said, badass. The Irish troops will chat a little, but the Chinese troops are under orders not to fraternize with the locals. Bantry is the western, wilder end of the Lease Lands, and the diesel they’re delivering is more precious than gold. One of the Irishmen spots Kevin Murray’s lit pipe too close to the tanker and barks, “Sir, we need you to put that pipe out right now!” Mortified, Kevin shuffles back into the Big Hall. Convoymen never need to threaten. The Convoys are our umbilical cord to the Ringaskiddy depot and its special items, no longer manufactured in Ireland, or anywhere in Europe, for all we know.