The Bone Clocks

“DA’S SAYING IT’LL be okay,” Izzy O’Daly tells us, “and that Stability’ll just keep the Cordon intact, where it is now.” Izzy and Lorelei came running back across the fields from Knockroe Farm and found Rafiq, Zimbra, and me up in Mo’s tidy kitchen. Mo’d heard the same RTЙ report as us, and we’ve been telling Rafiq that not much’ll change, only Chinese imported goods’ll be a little trickier to get hold of than before. The ration boxes will still be delivered by Stability every week, and provision will still be made for special medicines. Rafiq’s reassured, or pretends to be. Declan O’Daly gave Izzy and Lorelei an equally upbeat assessment. “Da says,” Izzy goes on, “that the Cordon was a fifteen-foot razor-wire fence before ten o’clock and it still is after ten o’clock, and there’s no reason for the Stability troops to abandon their posts.”

“Your dad’s a very wise man,” I tell Izzy.

Izzy nods. “Da ’n’ Max’ve gone into town to check on my aunt.”

“Fair play to Declan now,” says Mo. “Kids, if you’d give Zimbra a run in the garden, I’ll make pancakes. Maybe I’ve a dusting of cocoa powder left somewhere. Go on, give Holly and me a little space, hey?”

Once they’re out, a grim and anxious Mo tries to thread friends in Bantry, where the Cordon’s westernmost garrison is stationed. Calls to Bantry normally get threaded without trouble, but today there isn’t even an error message. “I’ve got this nasty feeling,” Mo stares at the blank screen, “that we’ve kept our Net access as long as we have because our threads were routed via the server at Ringaskiddy, and now the Chinese have gone … it’s over.”

I feel as if someone’s died. “No more Net? Ever?”

Mo says, “I might be wrong,” but her face says, No, never.

For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that “the natural order of things” is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings. Outside, the kids’re playing with a frisbee older than any of them—look closely, you’ll see the phantom outline of the London 2012 Olympics logo. Aoife spent her pocket money on it. It was a hot day on the beach at Broadstairs. Izzy’s showing Rafiq how you step forward and release the frisbee in one fluid motion. I wonder if they’re all putting on a brave face about the end of the Lease Lands, and that really they’re as scared as we are by the threat of gangs, militiamen, land pirates, Jackdaws and God knows what streaming through the Cordon. Zimbra retrieves the frisbee and Rafiq does a better throw, lifted by the wind. Lorelei has to spring up high to catch it, revealing a glimpse of shapely midriff. “Medicine for the chronically ill is one worry,” I speak my thoughts aloud, “but what kind of life will women have, if things carry on the way they are? What if Dуnal Boyce isthe best future the girls in Lol’s class can hope for? Men are always men, I know, but at least during our lives, women have gathered a sort of arsenal of legal rights. But only because, law by law, shifting attitude by shifting attitude, our society became more civilized. Now I’m scared the Endarkenment’ll sweep all that away. I’m scared that Lol’ll just be some bonehead’s slave, stuck in some wintry, hungry, bleak, lawless, Gaelic-flavored Saudi Arabia.”

Lorelei throws the frisbee, but the east wind biffs it off course into Mo’s wall of camellias.

“Pancakes,” says Mo. “I’ll measure the flour and you crack a few eggs. Six should be enough for the five of us?”

·   ·   ·

“WHAT’S THAT SOUND?” asks Izzy O’Daly, half an hour later. Mo’s kitchen table is strewn with the wreckage of lunch. Mo, of course, did unearth a small tub of cocoa powder from one of her bottomless hidden nooks. It must be a year since the last square of waxy Russian chocolate appeared in the ration boxes. Neither me nor Mo had any ourselves, but watching the kids as they ate their chocolate-laced lunch was a sight more delicious than the taste. “There,” says Izzy, “that … crackly noise. Didn’t you hear it?” She looks anxious.

“Raf’s stomach, probably,” says Lorelei.

“Sure I only had one more than you,” objects Rafiq. “And—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a growing boy, we know,” says his sister. “Growing into a total pancake monster.”

“There,” says Izzy, making a shushgesture. “Hear it?”

We listen. Like the old woman I am, I say, “I can’t hear—”

Zimbra leaps up, whining, at the door. Rafiq tells him, “Shush, Zimbra!”

The dog shushes, and—there. A spiky, sickening sequence of bangs. I look at Mo and Mo nods back: “Gunfire.”

We rush out onto Mo’s scrubby, dandelion-dotted lawn. The wind’s still from the east and it buffets our ears but now another burst of automatic fire is quite distinct and not far away. Its echo reaches us a couple of seconds later from Mizen Head across the water.

“Isn’t it coming from Kilcrannog?” asks Lorelei.

Izzy’s voice is shaky. “Dad went into the village.”