The Bone Clocks

At eleven-fifteen P.M. I switch on my tab to patch Brendan, but when the thing asks for my password, I blank. My password. F’Chrissakes. I never change it. It was something to do with dogs … Years ago I’d laugh about these flashes of forgetfulness, but at my age, it’s like the beginning of a slow-motion death sentence. If you can’t trust your mind anymore, you’re mentally homeless. I get up to retrieve my little book where I write things down, but Zimbra’s on my foot, and I remember: NEWKY, the name of the dog we had when I was a girl. I enter the password and try to thread Brendan. After five days of letdowns I’m ready for the error message, but on the first go I get a hi-res image of my brother frowning into his tab, 250 miles away in his study in his house on Exmoor. Something’s wrong: His strands of white hair are a mess, his haggard, puffy face is a mess, his voice is a nervous mess. “ Holly?I can see you! Can you see me?”

“And hear you, Brendan, clear as a bell. What’s happened?”

“Well, apart from”—he reaches offscreen to get a drink, and I’m left looking at a photo on his shelf of a twenty-years-ago Brendan Sykes shaking hands with King Charles on Tintagel Gated Village’s opening day—“apart from the west of England looking more like the Book of Revelation and a nuclear reactor down the road about to blow? Jackdaws. We had a visit two nights ago.”

I feel sick. “In the village, or in your actual house?”

“The village, but that was bad enough. Four nights ago our dedicated guards all buggered off, taking half the food in the store andthe backup generator.” Brendan’s half drunk, I realize. “Most of us stayed—where’d we go to?—and we drew up a security rota.”

“You could come here.”

“If I don’t get sliced and diced by highwaymen at Swansea. If the trafficker doesn’t cut my throat a mile off the Welsh coast. If Immigration at Ringaskiddy takes my bribe.”

I know now, if I didn’t before, that I’ll never see Brendan in the flesh again. “Maybe Oisнn Corcoran could help?”

“They’re all too busy trying to survive to help an eighty-year-old English Asylumite. No, you reach an age when … journeys, voyages, are for other people, not you.” He drinks his whisky. “I was telling you about the Jackdaws. At one o’clock or so this morning the alarms all went off, so I got dressed, got my .38 and went to the storehouse, where about a dozen of the bastards with guns, knives, and face-masks were loading up a van. Jem Linklater walked up and told the organizer, ‘That’s our food you’re thieving, sunshine, and we’ve the right to defend it.’ He shone a solar right in Jem’s face and said, ‘It’s ours now, Granddad, so back off, and that’s your last warning.’ Jem didn’t back off, and Jem”—Brendan shuts his eyes—“Jem got his head blown in.”

My hand’s over my mouth. “Jesus. You sawthis?”

“From ten feet away. The murderer said, ‘Any more heroes?’ Then a gun went off and the guard went down, and total bloody anarchy broke out, and the Jackdaws realized we weren’t quite the doddery old farts they’d expected. Someone shot out the headlamps on the van. It was too dark to know who was where, what was what, and”—Brendan’s chest’s heaving—“I ran into the tomato polytunnel, where a Jackdaw came pounding at me, waving a machete, I thought … And my .38 was suddenly in my hand with the safety off, a bang sounded, and something skidded into me … His mask’d come away, somehow, and I saw—I saw he was a boy, younger than Lorelei. The machete was a garden trowel. And”—Brendan controls his voice—“I shot him, Hol. Straight through the heart.”

My brother’s trembling and his face is shining, and a memory comes to me of a woman lying at a crossroads in an impossible labyrinth with her head staved in and a marble rolling pin dropping from my hand. I manage to say, “Under the circumstances …”

“I know. I thought it was him or me and some reflex kicked in. I dug his grave myself, at least. That’s a lot of earth to shift, at my age. We got four of them, they got six of us, plus Harry McKay’s boy, who’s in a bad way with a punctured lung. There’s a clinic in Exmouth, but care standards are pretty Middle Ages, by all accounts.”

“Bren, if you can’t come here, perhaps I could try to—”

“No!”For the first time Brendan looks afraid. “For your sake, for Lol’s sake, for Rafiq’s sake, for God’s sake stay put. Traveling’s too dangerous now, unless you’ve ten armed men willing to kill, and Sheep’s Head Peninsula’s probably the safest place in western Europe. When Pearl Occident first leased the West Cork coastal strip I thought, What a humiliation for the Paddies, but at least you’ve still got law and order there, of sorts. At least—”