The Bone Clocks

“We’ll see if ye change your tune,” Muriel Boyce calls after me, “when the Lord’s Party’s controlling the Co-op, deciding what’s going into whose ration boxes, so we will.”

Shocked, I turn around. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s a fact, Holly Sykes. Here’s another: The food in your bellies is Irish food. Christian food. If it’s not to your liking, there’s lots of houses going begging in England, I hear, near Hinkley.”

I hear wood being chopped. “Sheep’s Head is my home.”

“There’s plenty hereabouts who won’t be seeing things that way, not when belts are tighter. Ye’d do well to remember.”

My legs feel weak and stiff, like stilts, as I walk off.

Dуnal Boyce calls after us, “I’ll be seeing you, Lol.”

He’s a leery, muscly, horny threat. We leave the village passing the SLБN ABHAILE sign and the old 80 KPH. speed limit sign. “I don’t like the way Dуnal Boyce was looking at me, Gran,” says Lorelei.

“Good,” I tell her. “I didn’t, either.”

“Me neither,” says Rafiq. “Dуnal Boyce is a jizbag.”

I open my mouth to say, “Language,” but don’t.

FORTY MINUTES LATER we arrive home, at the end of the bumpy Dooneen track. “Dooneen” means “little fortress” and that’s how our cottage feels to me, even as I stow the food, items from the market and our ration boxes. While the kids get changed I try my tab to see if I can get through to Brendan, or even one of my closer relatives in Cork, but no luck; all I get is a SERVER NOT DETECTED message, and IF PROBLEMS PERSIST, CONTACT YOUR LOCAL DEALER. Useless. I check the hens and retrieve three fresh eggs from the coop. When Rafiq and Lorelei are ready, we go through the thicket between our garden and Mo’s, and over to her back door. It’s open, and Zimbra comes padding into the kitchen wagging his tail. He used to jump up more when he was a puppy, but now he’s calmer. Mo’s ration box and the eggs go in her cupboard. I click it shut to keep out the mice. We find Mo in her sunroom playing twohanded Scrabble with herself. “Welcome back, scholars. How were school and the market?”

“Okay,” says Rafiq, “but we saw a dronethis morning.”

“Yes, I saw it too. Stability must have fuel to burn. Odd.”

Lorelei studies the Scrabble board. “Who’s winning, Mo?”

“I’m demolishing myself: 384 versus 119. Any homework?”

“I’ve got quadratic equations,” says Lorelei. “Yummy.”

“Ah, sure you can do those in your sleep now, so you can.”

“I’ve got geography,” says Rafiq. “Ever see an elephant, Mo?”

“Yes. At zoos, and at a reservation in South Africa.”

Rafiq’s impressed. “Were they really as big as houses? That’s what Mr. Murnane said.”

“As big as small cottages, maybe. African elephants were bigger than Indian ones. Magnificent beasts.”

“Then why did people let them go extinct?”

“There’s plenty of blame for everyone, but the last herds were slaughtered so that people in China could show how rich they were by giving each other knickknacks made of ivory.”

Mo isn’t one to sugar pills. I watch Rafiq’s face go almost sulky as he digests this. “I wish I’d been born sixty years ago,” he says. “Elephants, tigers, gorillas, polar bears … All the best animals’ve gone. All we’ve got left is rats and crows and earwigs.”

“And some first-class dogs,” I say, patting Zimbra’s head.

We all fall quiet at once, for no obvious reason. Mo’s husband, John, fifteen years dead, smiles out of his frame above the hearth. It’s a beautiful likeness in oils painted on a summer’s day in the garden of Mo and John’s old cottage on Cape Clear. John Cullin was blind and his life wasn’t always an easy one, but he lived at a civilized time in a civilized place where people had full bellies. John wrote fine poetry. Admirers wrote to him from America.

That world wasn’t made of stone, but sand.

I’m afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.

LATER, LORELEI GOES off to Knockroe Farm for her sleepover. Mo comes down to the cottage for dinner, where Rafiq and us two old ladies eat broad beans and potatoes fried in butter. At Rafiq’s age Aoife would have turned her nose up at such plain fare, but before he reached Ireland Rafiq knew real stomach-gnawing hunger and he never turns anything down. Dessert is blackberries we picked on the way home and a little stewed rhubarb. Dinner is quieter without our resident teenager, and I’m reminded of when Aoife first left home to go to college. Once the dishes are done, we all play cribbage listening to an RTЙ program about how to dig a well. Rafiq then escorts Mo home before it gets dark, while I empty the latrine bucket into the sea below and check the wind direction; still easterly. I round the hens up into their house and bolt its door shut, wishing I’d done so last night as well. Rafiq comes back, yawns, strip-washes in a bucket of cold water, cleans his teeth, and takes himself up to bed. I read an old copy of The New Yorkerfrom December 2031, savoring a story by Ersilia Holt and marveling at the adverts and the wealth that existed so recently.