The Bone Clocks

“The clue’s in the job title.” The guy turns and lobs a pocketful of coins into a gap in the traffic roaring into Piccadilly Circus. “Collect the fucking money, Einstein!” Coins roll between tires and under cars, scattering in ruts of dirty ice. “Look at that, the streets of London arepaved with gold.” The two tormentors shuffle off, delighted with themselves, leaving the shrunken Yeti calculating the odds of picking up coins without getting whacked by a bus. “Don’t,” I tell the homeless guy.

He glares at me. “ Youtry sleepin’ in a skip.”

I take out my wallet and offer him two twenties.

He looks at the money and looks at me.

I say, “Three nights in the hostel, right?”

He takes the notes and slips them inside his dirty coat. “Obliged.”

My sacrifice to the gods duly performed, I let Piccadilly Circus Tube Station suck me down into its vortex of body odor and bad breath.

THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolт Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light. Gasworks and Edwardian roofs, chimneys and aerials, a supermarket car park, Premises for Rental. Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard;and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat. But what does “beating the system” mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? Another train on a parallel track overtakes us slowly enough for me to glimpse the young City worker I’ll have turned into this time next year, squashed against the window, only a meter away. Good skin, good clothes, drained eyes. How to Get Seriously Rich by Thirtyreads the cover of his magazine. The guy looks up and sees me. He squints at my Penguin Classic to make out the title, but his train swings away down a different track.

If I have doubts that you beat the system by moving up, I damn well know you don’t beat it by dropping out. Remember Rivendell? The summer before I went up to Cambridge a few of us went clubbing at the Floating World in Camden Town. I took Ecstasy and got off with a waifish girl wearing dried-blood lipstick and clothes made of black cobwebs. Spidergirl and I got a taxi back to her place: a commune called Rivendell, which turned out to be a condemned end-of-terrace squat next to a paper recycling plant. Spidergirl and I frolicked to an early Joni Mitchell LP about seagulls and drowsed until noon, when I was shown downstairs to the Elrond Room, where I ate lentil curry and the squat’s “pioneers” told me how their commune was an outpost of the postcapitalist, postoil, postmoney future. For them everything was “inside the system”—bad—or “outside the system”—good. When one asked me how I wanted to spend my sojourn on Earth, I said something about the media and was bombarded with a collective diatribe about how the system’s media divides people, not connects them. Spidergirl told me that “here in Rivendell, we actually talk to each other, and share tales from wiser cultures, like the Inuit. Wisdom’s the ultimate currency.” As I left, she asked for a “loan” of twenty pounds to buy a few things from Sainsbury’s. I suggested she recite an Inuit folktale at the checkout, because wisdom is the ultimate currency. Some of her response was radical feminist, most was just Anglo-Saxon. What I took from Rivendell, apart from pubic lice and an allergy to Joni Mitchell that continues to the present day, was the insight that “outside the system” means poverty.

Ask the Yeti how free he feels.

AS I TAKE off my hat and boots on the porch, I hear Mum in the front room: “Hold on a moment. That may be him now.” She appears, holding the phone with its cord stretched to the max. “Oh, it is! Superb timing. I’ll put him on. Wonderful to put a voice to the name, as it were, Jonny—season’s greetings and all that.”