The Bone Clocks

“LIKE SNOW IN a snow globe,” Holly says, watching the blizzard. She tells me about UFO hunters who come to Sainte-Agnиs, which somehow leads on to working as a strawberry picker in Kent and a grape-picker in Bordeaux; why the Troubles in Northern Ireland won’t end without desegregated schools; how she once skied through a valley three minutes before an avalanche swept through. I light a cigarette and talk about how a bus I missed in Kashmir skidded off the Ladakh road and fell five hundred feet; why townies in Cambridge hate students; why roulette wheels have a zero; how great it is to row on the Thames at six A.M. in the summer. We discuss the first singles we bought, The Exorcistversus The Shining, planetariums and Madame Tussaud’s. We spout a lot of rubbish, but watching Holly Sykes talk is a fine thing. I empty the ashtray again. She quizzes me about my three months’ study program at Blithewood College in upstate New York. I give her the edited highlights, including getting shot at by a hunter who thought I was a deer. She tells me about her friend Gwyn, who worked last year at a summer camp in Colorado. I tell her about how Bart Simpson phones Marge from his summer camp and declares, “I’m no longer afraid of death,” but Holly asks who Bart Simpson is, so I have to explain. Holly talks about the band Talking Heads, like a Catholic discussing her favorite saints. The morning’s gone, we realize. Using a half bag of flour and bits and pieces from her fridge I make us a pizza, which I can tell impresses her more than she lets on. Aubergine, tomatoes, cheese, pesto, and Dijon mustard. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge, too, but I serve us water in case she thinks I want to get her drunk. I ask if she’s a vegetarian, having noticed that even the stock cubes are veggie. She is, and she tells me how when she was sixteen she was at her great-aunt Eilнsh’s house in Ireland, “and this ewe walked by, bleating, and I realized, ‘Sweet fecking hell, I’m eating its children!’ ” I remark how people are superb at not thinking about awkward truths. After I’ve done the dishes—“to pay my rent”—I discover she’s never played backgammon, so I make us a board using the inside of a Weetabix box and a marker. She finds a pair of dice in a jar in a drawer, and we use silver and copper coins for pieces. By the third game she’s good enough for me to plausibly let her win.

“Congratulations,” I tell her. “You’re a fast learner.”

“Ought I to thank you for letting me beat you?”

“Oh no I didn’t! Seriously, you beat me fair and—”

“And you’re a virtuoso liar, Poshboy.”

LATER, WE TRY the TV but the reception’s affected by the storm and the screen’s as blizzardy as the window. Holly finds a black-and-white film on a videotape inherited from the flat’s last tenant. She stretches out on the sofa, I’m sunk into the beanbag, and the ashtray’s balanced on the arm between us. I try to focus on the film and not her body. The film’s British and made, I guess, in the late 1940s. Its opening minutes are missing so we don’t know the title, but it’s quite compelling, despite the Noлl Cowardy diction. The characters are on a cruise liner crossing some foggy expanse, and it takes a while for the passengers, Holly, and me to twig that they’re all dead. Each character gets deepened by a backstory—a good Chaucerian mix—before a magisterial Examiner arrives to decide each passenger’s fate in the afterlife. Ann, the saintly heroine, gets a pass into heaven, but her husband, Henry, the Austrian-pianist-resistance-fighter hero, killed himself—head in a gas cooker—and has to work as a steward aboard a similar ocean liner between the worlds. The wife tells the Examiner she’ll exchange heaven to be with her husband. Holly snorts. “Oh, please!” Ann and Henry then hear the sound of breaking glass and wake up in their flat, saved from the gas by the fresh air flooding in through the broken windows. String crescendo, man and wife embrace each other and a new life. The End.

“What a pile of pants,” says Holly.

“It kept us watching.”

The window’s dim mauve except for snowflakes tumbling near the glass. Holly gets up to draw the curtains but stands there, under the spell of the snow. “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, Poshboy?”

I fidget in my beanbag. It rustles. “Why?”

“You’re so megaconfident.” She draws the curtains and turns around, almost accusingly. “Rich people are, I s’pose, but you’re up on a different level. Do you never do stupid things that make you cringe with embarrassment—or shame—when you look back?”

“If I worked through the hundreds of stupid things I’ve done, we’d still be here next New Year’s Day.”

“I’m only asking for one.”