The Bone Clocks

“Switch places. Suppose Jacko had stormed off somewhere; suppose you’d gone looking for him, but some … evil overtook you and stopped you ever returning. Would you want Jacko to spend his life as self-blame junkie because once, one day, he committed a thoughtless action and made you worry about him?”

Holly looks as if she can’t quite believe I’m daring to say this. Actually, I can’t either. She’s thisfar from kicking me out.

“You’d want him to live fully,” I go on. “Wouldn’t you? To live morefully, not less. You’d need him to live your life for you.”

The VCR chooses now to trundle out its videotape. Holly’s voice comes out serrated: “So I’m s’posed to act like it never happened?”

“ No. But stop beating yourself up because you failed to see how a seven-year-old kid might respond to your ordinary act of teenage rebellion in 1984. Stop burying yourself alive at Le Croc of Shit. Your penance isn’t helping Jacko. Of course his disappearance has changed your life—how could it not?—but why does that make it right to squander your talents and the bloom of your youth serving cocktails to the likes of Chetwynd-Pitt and for the enrichment of the likes of Gьnter the employee-shagging drug dealer?”

Holly snaps back, “What am I s’posedto do, then?”

“ Idon’t know, do I? I haven’t had to survive what you’ve had to survive. Though, since you ask, there are countless other Jackos in London you couldhelp. Runaways, homeless teenagers, victims of God only knows what. You’ve told me a lot today, Holly, and I’m honored, even if you think I’m betraying your trust by talking to you like this. But I haven’t heard one thingthat forfeits your right to a useful and, yeah, even a content life.”

Holly stands up, looking angry and hurt and puffy-eyed. “Half of me wants to hit you with something metal.” She sounds serious. “So does the other half. So I’ll go to sleep. You’d better leave in the morning. Switch off the light when you go to bed.”

WHEN I’M WOKEN by the wedge of dim light, my head’s in a fog and my body’s gripped in a tangled sleeping bag. Tiny room, more of a walk-in cupboard; silhouetted girl in a man’s rugby shirt, long, loopy hair … Holly: good. Holly, whom I ordered out of a six-year period of mourning for a missing little brother—presumably dead and skillfully buried—come now to turf me out without breakfast into a very uncertain future … pretty bad. But the little window’s black as night still. My eyes are still gouged with tiredness. My dry, cigarette-and-pinot-blanc-caked mouth croaks, “Is it morning already?”

“No,” says Holly.

THE GIRL’S BREATHING deepens as she drifts off. Her futon’s our raft and sleep is the river. I sift through all the scents. “I’m out of practice,” she told me, in a blur of hair, clothing, and skin. I told her I was out of practice too, and she said, “Bull shit, Poshboy.” A long-dead violinist plays a Bach partita on the clock radio. The crappy speaker buzzes on the upper notes, but I wouldn’t trade this hour for a private concert with Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing his Stradivarius. Neither would I want to travel back to my and the Humberites’ very undergrad discourse on the nature of love at Le Croc the other night, but if I did I’d tell Fitzsimmons et al. that love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love youto Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

STILL DARK. THE Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through files of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hourfrom three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?”

“An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.”

“You’ve been awake a whole hour?”

“My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide it out.

I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.”

I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?”

In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?”