The Bone Clocks

Is she taking the piss? “I could’ve handled him.”

“You don’t half remind me of me, Holly.”

How do you answer that? “Up the Junction” by Squeeze booms from the ghetto-blaster. Gwyn stoops. “Look, Octopus Boy dropped his ciggies.” She lobs them my way and I catch the box. “Hand them back or keep them as compensation for harassment. Your call.”

I imagine Gary’s version of this. “He’ll hate me now.”

“He’ll be scared shitless you’ll tell everyone what a horse’s arse he made of himself. Rejection makes lads like our Gaz feel four feet tall and two inches long, full size. Anyhow, I came to say I borrowed a sleeping bag off Mrs. Harty for you. God only knows how many previous owners it’s had, but it’s been washed so the stains aren’t sticky at least, and the barn can get chilly at night. I’m turning in, so if I’m asleep before you, sweet dreams. The hooter goes at five-thirty.”

July 2

MY PERIOD’S ONLY A FEW DAYS LATE, so I don’t see how I can be pregnant, so what’s this belly doing, or this blue-veined third boob pushing out below my normal two, which Vinny named Dolly and Parton? Mam is not taking the news well and doesn’t believe that I don’t know who the father is: “Well, someoneput the baby inside you! We both know you’re not the Virgin Mary, don’t we?” But I really don’t know. Vinny’s the chief suspect, but am I quite sure nothing happened with Ed Brubeck in the church? Or Gary at Black Elm Farm, or even Alan Wall the gypsy? When you know your memory’s been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again? Smoky Joe’s old moo glares over her copy of the Financial Times:“Ask the baby. Itought to know.”

Everyone starts chanting, “Ask the baby! Ask the baby!”and I try to say I can’t, it hasn’t been born yet, but it’s like my mouth’s stitched up, and when I look at my belly it’s grown. Now it’s a sort of massive skin tent that I’m attached to. The baby’s lit red inside, like when you shine a torch through your hand, and it’s as big as a naked grown-up. I’m afraid of it.

“Ask it, then,” hisses Mam.

So I ask it, “Who’s your dad?”

We wait. It swivels its head my way and speaks in a badly synched-up voice from a hot place: When Sibelius is smashed into little pieces, at three on the Day of the Star of Riga, you’ll know I’m near …

·   ·   ·

… and the dream caves in. Relief, a sleeping bag, brothy darkness, I’m not pregnant, and a Welsh voice is whispering, “It’s okay, Holly, you were dreaming, girl.”

Our plywood partition, in a barn, on a farm; what was her name? Gwyn. I whisper back, “Sorry if I woke you.”

“I’m a light sleeper. Sounded nasty. Your dream.”

“Yeah … Nah, just stupid. What time is it?”

The light on her watch is mucky gold. “Five-and-twenty to five.”

Most of the night’s gone. Is it worth trying to go back to sleep?

A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.

I feel a stab of homesickness for my room at home, but I stab my homesickness back. Remember the slap.

“You know, Holly,” Gwyn’s whisper rustles the sheets of the dark, “it’s tougher than you think out there.”

That’s a weird thing to say and a weird time to say it. “If that lot can do it,” I mean the students, “I bloody know I can.”

“Not fruit picking. The running-away-from-home deal.”

Quick, deny it. “What makes you think I’ve run away?”

Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide. “Unless you know for a fact, a fact, that going back’ll get you …” she sort of sighs, “… damaged, I’d say go back. When the summer’s gone, and your money’s gone too, and Mr. Richard Gere hasn’t pulled up on his Harley-Davidson and said, ‘Hop on,’ and you’re fighting for a place by the bins behind McDonald’s at closing time, then, whatever Gabriel Harty says to the contrary, you willthink of Black Elm Farm as a five-star hotel. You make a list, see. It’s called ‘All the Things I’ll Never, Ever Do to Get By.’ The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to ‘All the Things I’ve Had to Do to Get By.’ ”

I keep my voice calm. “I’m not running away.”

“Then why the false name?”

“My name isHolly Rothmans.”

“And mine’s Gwyn Aquafresh. Fancy a squirt of toothpaste?”

“Aquafresh isn’t a surname. Rothmans is.”

“That’s true enough, but I bet you a pack of Benson & Hedges it’s not yours. Don’t get me wrong, a false name’s clever. I changed mine often, in my first few months away. But all I’m saying is, if you’re weighing possible trouble ahead against the trouble you’ve left behind, times the ‘ahead’ trouble by twenty.”

It’s appalling she’s seen through me so easily. “Too early for Thoughts for the Day,” I growl. “Good night.”

The first bird of the morning starts twittering.