How to Stop Time

I am old.

That is the main thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.

I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old.

To give you an idea: I was born well over four hundred years ago on the third of March 1581, in my parents’ room, on the third floor of a small French château that used to be my home. It was a warm day, apparently, for the time of year, and my mother had asked her nurse to open all the windows.

‘God smiled on you,’ my mother said. Though I think she might have added that – should He exist – the smile had been a frown ever since.

My mother died a very long time ago. I, on the other hand, did not.

You see, I have a condition.

I thought of it as an illness for quite a while, but illness isn’t really the right word. Illness suggests sickness, and wasting away. Better to say I have a condition. A rare one, but not unique. One that no one knows about until they have it.

It is not in any official medical journals. Nor does it go by an official name. The first respected doctor to give it one, back in the 1890s, called it ‘anageria’ with a soft ‘g’, but, for reasons that will become clear, that never became public knowledge.

The condition develops around puberty. What happens after that is, well, not much. Initially the ‘sufferer’ of the condition won’t notice they have it. After all, every day people wake up and see the same face they saw in the mirror yesterday. Day by day, week by week, even month by month, people don’t change in very perceptible ways.

But as time goes by, at birthdays or other annual markers, people begin to notice you aren’t getting any older.

The truth is, though, that the individual hasn’t stopped ageing. They age exactly the same way. Just much slower. The speed of ageing among those with anageria fluctuates a little, but generally it is a 1:15 ratio. Sometimes it is a year every thirteen or fourteen years but with me it is closer to fifteen.

So, we are not immortal. Our minds and bodies aren’t in stasis. It’s just that, according to the latest, ever-changing science, various aspects of our ageing process – the molecular degeneration, the cross-linking between cells in a tissue, the cellular and molecular mutations (including, most significantly, to the nuclear DNA) – happen on another timeframe.

My hair will go grey. I may go bald. Osteoarthritis and hearing loss are probable. My eyes are just as likely to suffer with age-related presbyopia. I will eventually lose muscle mass and mobility.

A quirk of anageria is that it does tend to give you a heightened immune system, protecting you from many (not all) viral and bacterial infections, but ultimately even this begins to fade. Not to bore you with the science, but it seems our bone marrow produces more hematopoietic stem cells – the ones that lead to white blood cells – during our peak years, though it is important to note that this doesn’t protect us from injury or malnutrition, and it doesn’t last.

So, don’t think of me as a sexy vampire, stuck for ever at peak virility. Though I have to say it can feel like you are stuck for ever when, according to your appearance, only a decade passes between the death of Napoleon and the first man on the moon.

One of the reasons people don’t know about us is that most people aren’t prepared to believe it.

Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview. So you could say ‘I am four hundred and thirty-nine years old’ easily enough, but the response would generally be ‘are you mad?’. ‘Or, alternatively, death.’

Another reason people don’t know about us is that we’re protected. By a kind of organisation. Anyone who does discover our secret, and believes it, tends to find their short lives are cut even shorter. So the danger isn’t just from ordinary humans.

It’s also from within.

Sri Lanka, three weeks ago

Chandrika Seneviratne was lying under a tree, in the shade, a hundred metres or so behind the temple. Ants crawled over her wrinkled face. Her eyes were closed. I heard a rustling in the leaves above and looked up to see a monkey staring down at me with judging eyes.

I had asked the tuk-tuk driver to take me monkey spotting at the temple. He’d told me this red-brown type with the near bald face was a rilewa monkey.

‘Very endangered,’ the driver had said. ‘There aren’t many left. This is their place.’

The monkey darted away. Disappeared among leaves.

I felt the woman’s hand. It was cold. I imagined she had been lying here, unfound, for about a day. I kept hold of her hand and found myself weeping. The emotions were hard to pin down. A rising wave of regret, relief, sorrow and fear. I was sad that Chandrika wasn’t here to answer my questions. But I was also relieved I didn’t have to kill her. I knew she’d have had to die.

This relief became something else. It might have been the stress or the sun or it might have been the egg hoppas I’d had for breakfast, but I was now vomiting. It was in that moment that it became clear to me. I can’t do this any more.

There was no phone reception at the temple, so I waited till I was back in my hotel room in the old fort town of Galle tucked inside my mosquito net sticky with heat, staring up at the pointlessly slow ceiling fan, before I phoned Hendrich.

‘You did what you were supposed to do?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, which was halfway to being true. After all, the outcome had been the one he’d asked for. ‘She is dead.’ Then I asked what I always asked. ‘Have you found her?’

‘No,’ he said, as always. ‘We haven’t. Not yet.’

Yet. That word could trap you for decades. But this time, I had a new confidence.

‘Now, Hendrich, please. I want an ordinary life. I don’t want to do this.’

He sighed wearily. ‘I need to see you. It’s been too long.’

Los Angeles, two weeks ago

Hendrich was back in Los Angeles. He hadn’t lived there since the 1920s so he assumed it was pretty safe to do so and that no one was alive who would remember him from before. He had a large house in Brentwood that served as the headquarters for the Albatross Society. Brentwood was perfect for him. A geranium-scented land of large houses tucked behind high fences and walls and hedges, where the streets were free from pedestrians and everything, even the trees, looked perfect to the point of sterile.

I was quite shocked, on seeing Hendrich, sitting beside his large pool on a sun-lounger, laptop on knee. Normally, Hendrich looked pretty much the same, but I couldn’t help notice the change. He looked younger. Still old and arthritic, but, well, better than he’d done in a century.

‘Hi, Hendrich,’ I said, ‘you look good.’

He nodded, as if this wasn’t new information. ‘Botox. And a brow lift.’

He wasn’t even joking. In this life he was a former plastic surgeon. The back story was that after retiring he had moved from Miami to Los Angeles. That way he could avoid the issue of not having any former local clients. His name here was Harry Silverman. (‘Silverman. Don’t you like it? It sounds like an ageing superhero. Which I kind of am.’)

I sat on the spare lounger. His maid, Rosella, came over with two sunset-coloured smoothies. I noticed his hands. They looked old. Liver spots and baggy skin and indigo veins. Faces could lie easier than hands could.

‘Sea buckthorn. It’s crazy. It tastes like shit. Try it.’

The amazing thing about Hendrich was that he kept thoroughly of the times. He always had done, I think. He certainly had been since the 1890s. Centuries ago, selling tulips, he’d probably been the same. It was strange. He was older than any of us but he was always very much in the current of whatever zeitgeist was flowing around.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘in California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you can move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.’

He told me that he had been in Santa Barbara for a couple of years but he got a bit bored. ‘Santa Barbara is pleasant. It’s heaven, with a bit more traffic. But nothing ever happens in heaven. I had a place up in the hills. Drank the local wine every night. But I was going mad. I kept getting these panic attacks. I have lived for over seven centuries and never had a single panic attack. I’ve witnessed wars and revolutions. Fine. But I get to Santa Barbara and there I was waking up in my comfortable villa with my heart going crazy and feeling like I was trapped inside myself. Los Angeles, though, is something else. Los Angeles calmed me right down, I can tell you . . .’

‘Feeling calm. That must be nice.’

He studied me for a while, as if I was an artwork with a hidden meaning. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Have you been missing me?’

‘Something like that.’

‘What is it? Was Iceland that bad?’

I’d been living in Iceland for eight years before my brief assignment in Sri Lanka.

‘It was lonely.’

‘But I thought you wanted lonely, after your time in Toronto. You said the real loneliness was being surrounded by people. And, besides, that’s what we are, Tom. We’re loners.’

I inhaled, as if the next sentence was something to swim under. ‘I don’t want to be that any more. I want out.’

There was no grand reaction. He didn’t bat an eye. I looked at his gnarled hands and swollen knuckles. ‘There is no out, Tom. You know that. You are an albatross. You are not a mayfly. You are an albatross.’

The idea behind the names was simple: albatrosses, back in the day, were thought to be very long-living creatures. Reality is, they only live to about sixty or so; far less than, say, the Greenland sharks that live to four hundred, or the quahog clam scientists called ‘Ming’ because it was born at the time of the Ming dynasty, over five hundred years ago. But anyway, we were albatrosses. Or albas, for short. And every other human on earth was dismissed as a mayfly. So called, because of the short-lived aquatic insects who go through an entire life cycle in a day or – in the case of one sub-species – five minutes.

Hendrich never talked of other, ordinary human beings as anything other than mayflies. I was finding his terminology – terminology I had ingrained into me – increasingly ridiculous.

Albatrosses. Mayflies. The silliness of it.

For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. An incredibly ancient child.

That was the depressing thing about knowing other albas. You realised that we weren’t special. We weren’t superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn’t really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

‘I find it disrespectful, to be honest with you,’ he told me. ‘After all I’ve done for you.’

‘I appreciate what you’ve done for me . . .’ I hesitated. What exactly had he done for me? The thing he had promised to do hadn’t happened.

‘Do you realise what the modern world is like, Tom? It’s not like the old days. You can’t just move address and add your name to the parish register. Do you know how much I have had to pay to keep you and the other members safe?’

‘Well then, I could save you some money.’

‘I was always very clear: this is a one-way street—’

‘A one-way street I never asked to be sent down.’

He sucked on his straw, winced at the taste of his smoothie. ‘Which is life itself, isn’t it? Listen, kid—’

‘I’m hardly that.’

‘You made a choice. It was your choice to see Dr Hutchinson—’

‘And I would never have made that choice if I’d have known what would happen to him.’

He made circles with the straw, then placed the glass on the small table beside him in order to take a glucosamine supplement for his arthritis.

‘Then I would have to have you killed.’ He laughed that croak of his, to imply it was a joke. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. ‘I’ll make a deal, a compromise. I will give you the exact life you want – any life at all – but every eight years, as usual, you’ll get a call and, before you choose your next identity, I’ll ask you to do something.’

I had heard all this before, of course. Although ‘any life you want’ never really meant that. He would give me a handful of suggestions and I’d pick one of them. And my response, too, was more than familiar to his ears.

‘Is there any news of her?’ It was a question I had asked a hundred times before, but it had never sounded as pathetic, as hopeless, as it did now.

He looked at his drink. ‘No.’

I noticed he said it a little quicker than he normally would. ‘Hendrich?’

‘No. No, I haven’t. But, listen, we are finding new people at an incredible rate. Over seventy last year. Can you remember when we started? A good year was five. If you still want to find her you’d be mad to want out now.’

I heard a small splashing sound from the swimming pool. I stood up, went to the edge of the pool, and saw a small mouse, hopelessly swimming along past a water filter. I knelt down and scooped the creature out. It scuttled away towards the perfectly manicured grass.

He had me, and he knew it. There was no way out alive. And even if there was, it was easier to stay. There was a comfort to it – like insurance.

‘Any life I want?’

‘Any life you want.’

I am pretty sure, Hendrich being Hendrich, he was assuming that I was going to demand something extravagant and expensive. That I would want to live in a yacht off the Amalfi Coast, or in a penthouse in Dubai. But I had been thinking about this, and I knew what to say. ‘I want to go back to London.’

‘London? She probably isn’t there, you know.’

‘I know. I just want to be back there. To feel like I’m home again. And I want to be a teacher. A history teacher.’

He laughed. ‘A history teacher. What, like in a high school?’

‘They say “secondary school” in England. But, yes, a history teacher in a high school. I think that would be a good thing to do.’

And Hendrich smiled and looked at me with mild confusion, as if I had ordered the chicken instead of the lobster. ‘That’s perfect. Yes. Well, we’ll just need to get a few things in place and . . .’

And as Hendrich kept talking I watched the mouse disappear under the hedge, and into dark shadows, into freedom.

London, now

London. The first week of my new life.

The headteacher’s office at Oakfield School.

I am trying to seem normal. It is an increasing challenge. The past is trying to burst through.

No.

It is already through. The past is always here. The room smells of instant coffee, disinfectant and acrylic carpet, but there is a poster of Shakespeare.

It is the portrait you always see of him. Receding hairline, pale skin, the blank eyes of a stoner. A picture that doesn’t really look like Shakespeare.

I return my focus to the headteacher, Daphne Bello. She is wearing orange hoop earrings. She has a few white hairs amid the black. She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

‘I’ve been here a long while.’

‘Really?’ I say.

Outside a distant police siren fades into nothing.

‘Time,’ she says, ‘is a strange thing, isn’t it?’

She delicately holds the brim of her paper cup of coffee as she places it down next to her computer.

‘The strangest,’ I agree.

I like Daphne. I like this whole interview. I like being back here, in London, back in Tower Hamlets. And to be in an interview for an ordinary job. It is so wonderful to feel, well, ordinary for once.

‘I have been a teacher now for three decades. And here for two. What a depressing thought. All those years. I am so old.’ She sighs through her smile.

I have always found it funny when people say that.

‘You don’t look it,’ is the done thing to say, so I say it.

‘Charmer! Bonus points!’ She laughs a laugh that rises through an entire two octaves.

I imagine the laugh as an invisible bird, something exotic, from Saint Lucia (where her father was from), flying off into the grey sky beyond the window.

‘Oh, to be young, like you,’ she chuckles.

‘Forty-one isn’t young,’ I say, emphasising the ludicrous number. Forty-one. Forty-one. That is what I am.

‘You look very well.’

‘I’ve just come back from holiday. That might be it.’

‘Anywhere nice?’

‘Sri Lanka. Yes. It was nice. I fed turtles in the sea . . .’

‘Turtles?’

‘Yes.’

I look out of the window and see a woman with a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform head onto the playing field. She stops, turns to them, and I see her face as she speaks unheard words. She is wearing glasses and jeans and a long cardigan that flaps gently in the wind, and she pulls her hair behind her ear. She is laughing now, at something a pupil is saying. The laugh lights up her face, and I am momentarily mesmerised.

‘Ah,’ Daphne says, to my embarrassment when she sees where I am looking. ‘That’s Camille, our French teacher. There’s no one like her. The kids love her. She always gets them out and about . . . Al fresco French lessons. It’s that kind of school.’

‘I understand you’ve done a lot of great things here,’ I say, trying to get the conversation back on track.

‘I try. We all try. It’s sometimes a losing battle, though. That’s my only concern about your application. Your references are amazing. And I’ve had them all checked . . .’

I feel relieved. Not that she has checked the references, but that there had been someone who had picked up the phone, or emailed back.

‘. . . but this isn’t a rural comprehensive in Suffolk. This is London. This is Tower Hamlets.’

‘Kids are kids.’

‘And they’re great kids. But this is a different area. They don’t have the same privileges. My concern is that you’ve lived a rather sheltered life.’

‘You might be surprised.’

‘And many students here struggle hard enough with the present, let alone with history. They just care about the world around them. Getting them engaged is the key. How would you make history come alive?’

There was no easier question in the world. ‘History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn’t politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It’s that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.’

‘You’ve put me right off my drink.’

‘Oh, sorry. But the point is: history is everywhere. It’s about making people realise that. It makes you understand a place.’

‘Right.’

‘History is people. Everyone loves history.’

Daphne looks at me doubtfully, her face retreating into her neck as her eyebrows rise. ‘Are you sure about that?’

I offer a small nod. ‘It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.’

I look out of the window. We are on the third floor and have quite a view, even in the grey London drizzle. I see an old Georgian building I have walked past many times.

‘That place, that place over there. The one with all the chimneys? That used to be an asylum. And over there’ – I point to another, lower brick building – ‘was the old slaughterhouse. They used to take all the old bones and make porcelain from them. If we had walked past it two hundred years ago we’d have heard the wails coming from the people society had declared mad on one side and the cattle on the other . . .’

If, if, if.

I point to the slate terrace rooftops in the east.

‘And just over there, in a bakery, on Old Ford Road, that’s where Sylvia Pankhurst and the East London suffragettes used to meet. They used to have a big sign, painted in gold, saying “VOTES FOR WOMEN” that you couldn’t miss, not far from the old match factory.’

Daphne writes something down. ‘And you play music, I see. Guitar, piano and violin.’

And the lute, I don’t say. And the mandolin. And the cittern. And the tin pipe.

‘Yes.’

‘You put Martin to shame.’

‘Martin?’

‘Our music teacher. Hopeless. He’s hopeless. Can barely play the triangle. Thinks he’s a rock star, though. Poor Martin.’

‘Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I’d find it a hard thing to teach. I’ve always found it hard to talk about music.’

‘Unlike history?’

‘Unlike history.’

‘And you seem up to speed with the current curriculum.’

‘Yes,’ I lie, easily. ‘Absolutely.’

‘And you’re still on the young side of things.’

I shrug, and make the kind of face I think you are meant to make.

‘I’m fifty-six so forty-one is young, trust me.’

Fifty-six is young.

Eighty-eight is young.

One hundred and thirty is young.

‘Well, I am quite an old forty-one.’

She smiles at me. She clicks the top of her pen. Then clicks it again. Each one is a moment. The first click, the pause between the click, and the second click. The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.

Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

I am drifting away.

It has been happening a lot recently. I had heard about this. Other albas had spoken about it. You reached the mid-point of your life, and the thoughts got too much. The memories swell. The headaches grow. The headache today isn’t so bad, but it is there.

I try to concentrate. I try to hold on to that other now, a short few seconds ago, where I was enjoying the interview. Enjoying the feeling of relative ordinariness. Or the illusion of it.

There is no ordinary.

Not for me.

I try to concentrate. I look at Daphne as she shakes her head and laughs, but softly now, at something she doesn’t disclose. Something sad, I feel, from the sudden glazing of her eyes. ‘Well, Tom, I am quite impressed by you and this application, I must say.’

Tom.

Tom Hazard.

My name – my original name – was Estienne Thomas Ambroise Christophe Hazard. That was the starting point. Since then I have had many, many names, and been many, many things. But, on my first arrival into England, I quickly lost the trimmings and became just Tom Hazard.

Now, using that name again, it feels like a return. It echoes in my head. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom.

‘You tick all the boxes. But even if you didn’t you’d be getting the job.’

‘Oh, really. Why?’

She raises her eyebrows. ‘There’s no other applicant!’

We both laugh a little at that.

But the laugh dies faster than a mayfly.

Because then she says, ‘I live on Chapel Street. I wonder if you know anything about that?’

And, of course, I do know about that, and the question wakes me like a cold wind. My headache pulses harder. I picture an apple bursting in an oven. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should never have asked Hendrich for this to happen. I think of Rose, the last time I saw her, and those wide desperate eyes.

‘Chapel Street. I don’t know. No. No, I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She sips her coffee.

I look at the poster of Shakespeare. He seems to be staring at me, like an old friend. There is a quote below his image.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

‘I have a feeling about you, Tom. You have to trust your feelings, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ I say, though feelings were the one thing I had never trusted.

She smiles.

I smile.

I stand up, and head to the door. ‘See you in September.’

‘Ha! September. September. It will fly by. Time, you see. That’s another thing about getting older. Time speeds up.’

‘I wish,’ I whisper.

But she doesn’t hear, because then she says, ‘And children.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Children are another thing that seem to make life go faster. I have three. Oldest is twenty-two. Graduated last year. Yesterday she was playing with her Lego; today she’s collecting the keys to her new flat. Twenty-two years in a blink of an eye. Do you have any?’

I grip the door handle. This is a moment, too. And inside it, a thousand others come painfully alive.

‘No,’ I say, because it is easier than the truth, ‘I don’t.’

She seems, for a brief moment, a little awkward. I think she is about to comment on this but instead she says, ‘See you soon, Mr Hazard.’

I step out into the corridor that smells of the same disinfectant, where two teenagers lean against the wall, staring down at their phones as devoutly as old priests with prayer books. I turn back to see Daphne looking towards her computer.

‘Yes. See you soon.’

As I walk out of Daphne Bello’s office, and out of the school, I am in the twenty-first century but also the seventeenth.

As I walk the mile or so to Chapel Street – a stretch of betting shops and pavements and bus-stops and concrete lampposts and half-hearted graffiti – I am almost in a trance. The streets feel too wide. And when I get to Chapel Street I discover what I of course know: the houses that had once been there no longer are, replaced by ones built in the late 1800s, tall and red-bricked and as austere as the time of their design.

At the corner, where I had known a small deserted church, and a watchman, there is now a KFC. The red plastic throbs like a wound. I walk along with my eyes closed, trying to sense how far along the street the house had originally been and I come to a stop after twenty or so steps. I open my eyes to see a semi-detached house that bears no physical relation to the house I had arrived at all those centuries ago. The unmarked door is now a modern blue. The window reveals a living room complete with a TV. Someone is playing a video game on it. An alien explodes on the screen.

My headache pounds and I feel weak and I have to step back, almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity. I lean back against a car, lightly, but enough to set off the alarm.

And the noise is loud, like a wail of pain, howling all the way from 1623, and I walk briskly away from the house, then the street, wishing I could just as easily walk away from the past.

London, 1623

I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

And my point, for a while, was Rose.

But after she was gone so many of the good memories were clouded by the last. An end that was also a terrible beginning. That final day I had with her. Because it is this day, the one where I headed to Chapel Street to see her, that has defined so many over the centuries.

So . . .

I was standing outside her door.

I had knocked and waited and knocked again.

The watchman, who I had passed at the corner of the street, was now approaching.

‘It is a marked house, lad.’

‘Yes. I know that.’

‘You must not go in there . . . It is unsafe.’

I held out my hand. ‘Stand back. I am cursed with it too. Do not get any closer.’

This was a lie, of course, but an effective one. The watchman stepped back away from me, with considerable haste.

‘Rose,’ I said, through the door. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Tom. I just saw Grace. By the river. She told me you were here . . .’

It took a while, but I heard her voice, from inside. ‘Tom?’

It had been years since I had heard that voice.

‘Oh, Rose, open the door. I need to see you.’

‘I can’t, Tom. I am sick.’

‘I know. But I won’t catch it. I have been around many plague sufferers these last months and I have had not so much as a cold. Come on, Rose, open the door.’

She did so.

And she was there, a woman. We were the same age, near enough, but now she looked like she was nearing fifty, while I still seemed a teenager.

Her skin was grey. Sores patterned her face like territories on a map. She could hardly stand up. I felt guilty that I had made her leave her bed but she seemed pleased to see me. She talked, semi-coherently, as I helped her back into bed.

‘You look so young, still . . . You are still a young man . . . a boy, almost.’

‘I have a little line, in my forehead. Look.’

I held her hand. She couldn’t see the line.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am sorry I told you to leave.’

‘It was the right thing. Just my existence was a danger to you.’

I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

Though I am absolutely sure, word for word, she then said: ‘There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.’ And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another’s pain as if our own.

She drifted in and out of delirium.

The illness was taking further hold, almost by the minute. She was now the opposite of me. While for me life stretched out towards an almost infinitely distant point in the future, for Rose the end was now galloping closer.

It was dark in the house. All the windows had been boarded up. But as she lay on the bed in her damp night clothes, I could see her face shining like pale marble, the red and grey patches colonising her skin. Her neck was swollen with egg-sized lumps. It was terrible, a kind of violation, to see her transformed like this.

‘It’s all right, Rose. It’s all right.’

Her eyes were wide with fear, almost as if something was inside her skull, slowly pushing from behind.

‘Soft, soft, soft . . . All will be well . . .’

It was such a ridiculous thing to say. All was not going to be well.

She moaned a little. Her body writhed in pain.

‘You must go.’ Her voice was dry.

I leaned over and kissed her brow.

‘Careful,’ she said.

‘It is safe.’ In truth, I didn’t know for certain if that was true. I thought it was, but couldn’t know it, having only lived forty-two years on earth (and looking little more than the sixteen Rose first thought I was). But I didn’t care. Life had lost its value in the years away from her.

Even though I hadn’t seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.

‘We were happy, weren’t we, Tom?’ The faintest echo of a smile was on her face now. I remembered walking past Oat Barn carrying heavy pails of water, on some long-lost Tuesday morning, content in our chatter. I remembered the joy of her smile and her body, when it had writhed from pleasure not pain, and of trying to be quiet so her sister wouldn’t wake. I remembered long walks back from Bankside, dodging the stray dogs and slithering in mud, comforted by nothing but the thought that she would be at the end of the journey home, and be the point of it.

All those times, all those talks, all that everything, reduced to the simplest most elemental truth.

‘We were . . . I love you, Rose. I love you so much.’

I wanted to hold her up and feed her a rabbit pie and some cherries and make her well again. I could see she was in so much pain that she just wanted to die now but I didn’t know what that would mean. I didn’t know how the world would stay together.

There was also something else I wanted. An answer that I hoped dearly she would have.

‘Sweetheart, where is Marion?’ I asked.

She stared at me a long time. I readied myself for some terrible news. ‘She fled . . .’

‘What?’

‘She was like you.’

It took a moment to sink in.

‘She stopped growing old?’

She spoke slowly, between sighs and coughs and whimpers. I told her she didn’t have to say anything, but she felt she had to. ‘Yes. And people started to notice when the years went by and she didn’t change. I told her we would have to move again and it troubled her greatly, and Manning came to us—’

‘Manning?’

‘And that night she ran, Tom. I ran after her yet she had vanished. She never came back. I have no idea where she went or if she is safe. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . . Pray, be strong now, Tom. You find her. I shall be fine. I shall be joining my brothers . . .’

I had never felt weaker, and yet I was ready to give her anything, even the myth of my strength and future happiness.

‘I will be strong, my Rose.’

Her breath was a weak draught. ‘You will.’

‘Oh, Rose.’

I needed to keep saying her name and for her to keep hearing it. I needed her to keep being a living reality.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone . . .

She asked me to sing to her. ‘Anything in your heart.’

‘My heart is sad.’

‘Sing sadly, then.’

I was going to grab my lute but she just wanted my voice, and my unaccompanied voice was not something I was particularly proud of, even in front of Rose, but I just sang it for her.

Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow,

Her frowns the Winters of my woe . . .

She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going. I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.

‘I will look for Marion.’

She closed her eyes, as if she had heard the final thing she had wanted to hear.

She was as grey, now, as a January sky.

‘I love you, Rose.’

And I searched her mouth, and the line between her pale, blistered lips for the slightest curve, the slightest response, but she was still now. The stillness was terrifying. Motes of dust were the only things moving.

I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.

London, now

I still feel weak. My head throbs. I walk. I think it will help ease the memories of Chapel Street. I walk to the antidote: Hackney. Well Lane. Now called Well Street. The place where Rose and I first lived together, before the years of misery and separation and plague took over. The cottages and stables and barns and pond and fruit orchards are long gone. I know it isn’t healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over, but I need to see it.

I keep walking along. These must be among the busiest streets in Hackney. Buses and shoppers bustle past. I pass a phone shop and a pawnbroker’s and a sandwich bar. And then I see it, on the other side of the road – the spot where we must have lived.

It is now a windowless red-brick building, with a blue and white sign outside. HACKNEY PET RESCUE SERVICES. It is depressing to feel your life erased. The kind of depressing that requires you to rest against a wall near the cash machine, causing you to apologise to the old man guarding his PIN number, explaining that you don’t want to rob him, and deal with his stare as if he still isn’t sure.

I watch a man with a Staffordshire terrier leave the building. Then I realise what I can do. How I can make a little peace with my past.

I can cross the street and go inside.

Every other dog in the place is barking. But this one is just lying in its undersized basket. It is a strange grey creature with sapphire eyes. The dog, I feel, is too dignified for such modern garishness, a wolf out of its time. I related.

The dog has an untouched chew toy beside him. A bright yellow rubber bone.

‘What breed is it?’ I ask the dog shelter volunteer (name badge ‘Lou’). She scratches the eczema on her arm.

‘He’s an Akita,’ she says. ‘Japanese. Pretty rare. Bit like a husky, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

This is the spot, as far as I can tell. This kennel, this one with this beautiful, sad-looking dog inside, is where the room used to be. The room we slept in.

‘How old is he?’ I ask Lou.

‘Pretty old. He’s eleven. That’s one of the reasons it’s been hard to find a home for him.’

‘And why is he in here?’

‘He was picked up. He was living on a balcony to a flat. Chained up. Horrid state. Look.’ She points at a red-brown scar on his thigh where there is no hair growing.

‘A cigarette burn.’

‘He looks so depressed.’

‘Yep.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘We never knew his name. We call him Abraham.’

‘Why?’

‘The tower block where we found him was called Lincoln Tower.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Abraham. It suits him.’

Abraham stands up. Comes over to me and stares up with those light blue eyes, as if trying to tell me something. I hadn’t intended to get a dog. That hadn’t been part of today’s plan. And yet, here I am, saying, ‘This is the one. I’d like to take him home.’

Lou looks at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want to see the rest?’

‘No.’

I notice the blotched skin on Lou’s arm – crimson and sore – and in my mind it was that cold winter’s day, in Dr Hutchinson’s waiting room, amid the other patients, as I nervously waited for a diagnosis.

London, 1860

There was a blizzard. After a relatively mild and inconsequential spell, during the previous few days in January the temperature had fallen sharply. It was the coldest I had known London to be since 1814, the year of Napoleon jokes and financial scandal and the last Frost Fair, when market traders had sold their wares on the frozen Thames.

As then, to be outside meant to be almost unable to move your face. You could almost feel your blood start to freeze. I could hardly see during my two-mile walk to Blackfriars Road, and my path was guided by the lampposts, those elegant black wrought-iron streetlamps that once seemed so modern. Blackfriars Road was the location of the hospital where Dr Hutchinson was working at the time, the London Cutaneous Institution for Treatment and Cure of Non-infectious Diseases of the Skin. Quite a catchy name, by Victorian standards.

Of course, I didn’t have a disease of the skin. My skin caused me no irritation. I had no rashes. There was nothing wrong with my skin other than that it was two hundred and seventy-nine years old, yet looked centuries younger; but then my whole body felt centuries younger. If only my mind could have felt thirty as well.

The reason I had contacted Dr Hutchinson was because of his work discovering and researching a similar, albeit opposite, affliction known as ‘progeria’.

The word is derived from the Greek words ‘pro’, meaning not only before but also early, and ‘geras’, which means old age. Premature old age. That’s what it is, essentially. A child is born and when they are still a toddler strange symptoms begin to emerge. These symptoms become more startling as the child ages.

The symptoms include those associated with ageing: hair loss, wrinkled skin, weak bones, prominent veins, stiff joints, kidney failure and often loss of eyesight. They die at a young age.

These ill-fated children have always existed. Yet the illness was never recognised until Dr Hutchinson first described it, in relation to a six-year-old boy who was losing his hair and suffering skin atrophy.

So, I was reasonably optimistic on my way to see him. If anyone could help me, he could. You see, I had, in truth, been struggling recently. I had spent most of the last two hundred years searching London and the rest of the country, looking for Marion, occasionally thinking I had seen someone who looked like her, then making a fool of myself. I remember, in particular, the beating I’d received from a drunken cobbler in York on the Shambles, who believed I was propositioning his wife, by asking her when she was born. I played music whenever I could get paid for it, moving on and changing my identity whenever anyone got suspicious. I had never accumulated wealth. The money I had made had always floated through like a draught, being spent on rent and ale.

There were many times I had lost all hope in my search. A search not just for a lost person, but for that other thing I had lost – meaning. For a point. It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

Indeed, it was often enough to make you want to kill yourself. I sometimes thought about putting this desire into action. For years after Rose died, I would often catch myself in apothecaries, contemplating a purchase of arsenic. And recently I was back in that state. Standing on bridges, dreaming of non-existence.

And I possibly would have gone through with it, were it not for the promises I had made to Rose and my mother.

I just didn’t like my condition.

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

You see, in total, there had been three people I had properly loved in life: my mother, Rose and Marion. Of those, two were dead, and one was alive only as a possibility. And without love as an anchor, I had drifted. I had gone to sea, on two different voyages, drowning myself in drink, driven only by the determination to find Marion, and hopefully also myself in the process.

I walked through the blizzard. I was hungover. It took a lot to make me hungover, but I was always sure to put in the effort. The city seemed only half there, because of the snow, as if I was walking inside one of Monet’s fuzzy depictions of London, which he was soon to paint. There was no one about, except outside the Christian Mission where men in ragged, ill-fitting suits and flat caps waited for food. They were so still, so quiet, so despondent, stiff with cold.

There was a very good chance, I realised, that my journey would be wasted. Yet what could I do? I was quite desperate to see Dr Hutchinson, for if anyone in the world could tell me about my condition I was sure it would be him.

I had no idea if he would even be there, given the weather.

As soon as I arrived a nurse, Miss Forster, assured me that Dr Hutchinson was always here.

‘Never missed a day’s work in his life, I’d dare say,’ Miss Forster told me, as I am sure she had told many before. She looked so pristine and white with her immaculate cap and apron that she seemed to have been something made by the blizzard itself. ‘You are lucky today,’ she said. ‘Everyone in London seems to want to speak to Mr Hutchinson about their ailments.’ She studied me, trying to work out exactly what kind of skin complaint I had.

I followed Miss Forster up three flights of stairs and I was told to wait in a well-furnished room, full of expensive high-backed chairs with red velvet seats and damask wallpaper and a stately wall clock. ‘He’s still seeing someone,’ she told me, in the kind of reverential whisper you’d use in church. ‘You might have to wait a fair time, Mr Cribbs.’

(I was now Edward Cribbs, in honour of a former Plymouth drinking buddy.)

‘Waiting’s my speciality,’ I said.

‘Very good, sir,’ she said earnestly, and then left me. I remember sitting in that room with people whose faces were colonised by terrible blotches and rashes.

‘Awful out, isn’t it?’ I said to one woman, with a livid purple rash covering her face.

(One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.)

‘Oh yes, sir,’ she said, but didn’t expand on this.

Eventually, the door I was waiting beside opened and out came a male patient. He was well dressed, like a dandy, but his face was covered in rough, raised blotches like a microscopic mountain range.

‘Good day,’ he said to me, smiling as broadly as his face allowed, clearly having experienced some miracle (or the promise of one).

There was that quiet lull unique to waiting rooms and the clock ticked away the silence until it was my turn.

I entered the room and the first thing I noticed was Dr Hutchinson himself. Jonathan Hutchinson was a very impressive-looking man. Even in the ultimate era of impressive-looking gentlemen, he was formidable. He was tall and smart and had a long beard. The beard, in particular, earned admiration. Neither Greek philosopher nor shipwrecked castaway, this was something very carefully thought out and pre-planned, the beard getting narrower and wispier as it descended until it reached a thin white line, a tail that faded imperceptibly into nothing. It may have been the intense nature of the morning that made me see in that beard a metaphor for mortal existence.

‘Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,’ I said, and instantly regretted it. It made me sound desperate.

Dr Hutchinson checked his pocket watch. He would do this a few times more, during this meeting. He probably wasn’t really bothered about the time. It just seemed like a habit. It was quite a common one, actually. The way people check smartphones today.

He stared at me. He picked up a letter from his desk. It was the one I had written. He read excerpts back to me.

‘Dear Dr Hutchinson’ – his voice was rich and dry, like port – ‘I am a great admirer of your work, and happened upon an article you had written on the subject of the new disease you discovered, whereby the body ages before its time . . . I myself have a strange condition, one similar in nature, though – if anything – even more unfathomable . . . it appears to me that you are the only man in all of Christendom who might be able to give me an explanation and thereby put a lifetime’s mystery to rest . . .’

He carefully folded the letter and put it aside on his desk. Then he studied me carefully.

‘Your skin is illuminated with health. It is the skin of a healthy man.’

‘I am healthy. In body. Healthier than most people.’

‘Where is your problem?’

‘Before I speak I must have assurance that I can remain unidentified. That if you were to publish any findings that arise due to what you discover my name will not be found in any journals. This is of the utmost importance. Do I have that assurance?’

‘Of course. Now, you have aroused my curiosity. Tell me what is your problem.’

And so I told him. ‘I am old,’ I said simply.

‘I don’t—’

‘I am older than is meant to be.’

It took a second, but then he seemed to absorb it. His voice changed after that. Became a little less sure of itself. The question demanded to be asked, even though I could see he was scared to ask it. ‘How old?’

‘Older than is possible,’ I said.

‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn’t flat. It is not for science – and certainly not for medicine – to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.’ He looked at me for a long time. Then he leaned forward and whispered something. ‘Rotten fish.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

He sat back, pursed his lips. There was a mournful look to him. ‘No one sees the connection between rotten fish and leprosy, but it is there. If you eat too much rotten fish you will develop leprosy.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

(Of course, now, from the twenty-first century I can positively say that if you eat rotten fish you won’t get leprosy, though I have lived long enough to know that in another two hundred years it may be proven that eating rotten fish actually does cause leprosy and that Dr Hutchinson was actually right about this. If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again. When I was little, the average person, outside the scientific community, still believed the Earth was flat because they walked around and that is what they saw. Then people began to finally get to grips with the idea that the Earth was spherical. But then the other day I was skimming through a copy of New Scientist magazine in WH Smith’s and it was all about something called the ‘holographic principle’. It’s to do with string theory and quantum mechanics and how gravity acts like a hologram. So anyway, the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation. So really, the world (and everything) might be flat after all. And then again it might not be.)

‘So tell me,’ he said, reminding me of the question that was still in the air. A question that I knew had to be answered. ‘How old are you?’

So I told him. ‘I was born on the third of March, in the year fifteen eighty-one. I am two hundred and seventy-one years old.’

I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He stared at me for a long, long time as snow flurries danced busily outside the window, as if to mirror my swirling mind. His eyes widened and he pinched his lower lip between his fingers. And then he said, ‘Well. There. That settles the matter quite conclusively. Now I can set about and give you a diagnosis.’

I smiled. This was good. A diagnosis was precisely what I was after.

‘But, for proper help, you will need to go to Bethlem.’

I remembered passing the place. Hearing the dull screams from inside. ‘Bethlem Hospital? As in . . . Bedlam?’

‘The very same.’

‘But that’s a place for lunatics.’

‘It is an asylum, yes. It will give you the help you need. Now, please, I have more appointments today.’

He nodded to the door.

‘But—’

‘Please, I recommend that you visit Bethlem. It will help with your . . . delusions.’

The most fashionable philosopher at this time was the German Arthur Schopenhauer, who was still (just) alive. I had been reading a lot of him, which was probably inadvisable. Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I had thought, in coming to Dr Hutchinson, I was coming to the man with the broadest field of scientific vision, the one most likely to understand my condition, and having this belief slip away felt like a kind of grief. The death of hope itself. I was beyond every field of vision. I was a kind of invisible man.

As a result, I became quite animated. I pulled a coin from my pocket.

‘Look at this. Look at this penny. It is Elizabethan. Look. Look. My daughter gave it me when I had to go away.’

‘That is an antique coin. I have a friend who has a silver coin from the reign of Henry the Eighth. A halfgroat, I think it is called. And I assure you, my friend was not born in the age of the Tudors. And that a halfgroat is rarer than a penny.’

‘I am not deluded. I promise you. I have been alive for a long time. I was there when the British found Tahiti. I knew Captain Cook. I worked for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men . . . Please, sir, you must tell me. Has someone else been to see you? A girl . . . a woman . . . talking of the same condition. Her name was Marion but she could have called herself something else. She might have been masquerading under another identity. In order to survive, we often need to—’

Dr Hutchinson looked worried now. ‘Please, go. I see you are getting agitated.’

‘Of course I am agitated. You are the only man who can help me. I need to understand myself. I need to understand why I am like this.’

I grabbed his wrist. His hand shrank away, as though my madness could be contagious.

‘We are a stone’s throw from the police station. If you don’t see yourself out, I will call for help and the police will come and take you away.’

There were tears in my eyes. Dr Hutchinson clouded into a ghost of himself. I knew I had to leave. I knew I had to give up hope, for a little while at least. So I stood up and nodded and left without a single word more, and kept myself, and my history, a secret for another thirty-one years.

London and St Albans, 1860–1891

After that first meeting with Dr Hutchinson I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive. I had tried to fight this, forcing myself into life and noise. I had gone, on my own, to a few of the new music halls, always sitting near the front, right in the heart of the noise and laughter, and I laughed or sang along, trying to feel some of the joy that filled the room. But I was immune.

So one baking hot August day in 1880 I walked from Whitechapel to St Albans. London was too much for me. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn’t seen from the outside but is still there.

For years I thought the key was to keep building new shells on top of the old ones. To keep moving, to keep changing, to keep transforming into something else in the eyes of society.

St Albans wasn’t far from London but it was far enough. It was as new a place to me as any place in England could be, and I found work as a farrier. People now think of the early 1880s being an industrial time of smoke and factories but, as with every age, it was a carousel of many periods at once. The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead. It was still the age of the horse and cart, and blacksmiths were thriving as much as they had ever been.

But in St Albans, things became worse. I would sometimes lose myself completely, and just stare into the orange heat of the forge, hardly aware of myself – or anything at all. On occasion my manager, Jeremiah Cartwright, would elbow me or slap me on my back and tell me ‘to climb down from the clouds’.

Once, when I was on my own, I took a desperate action in the pursuit of feeling. I pulled up my sleeve, took a searing piece of iron, curved into a horse-shoe from the flames, and pushed it against the top of my left forearm. I held it there, as my skin hissed and cooked beneath it, and I clenched my jaw and eyes tight, and contained the scream.

I still have that scar, like a half-smile, and I get a strange comfort when I look at it. Though it is another thing I have to be careful about. Another thing I have to conceal. A distinguishing mark, interfering with my anonymity.

It worked, I suppose. I felt the pain. It had come in and screamed through me, with mind-pulsing intensity. I had to exist, I realised, because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it. And there was a reassurance in that knowledge, that proof of my own reality.

But I still sought proof that I wasn’t mad.

Then, one day, a thought occurred to me. The thought was this: maybe I did have the proof. I, myself, was the evidence, and time was the proof.

And so it was that I decided to take that evidence, one final time, to Dr Hutchinson.

London, 1891

Dr Hutchinson didn’t know it was me. I mean, he wouldn’t have recognised the name from the list of appointments because the last time he had seen me I was Edward Cribbs and now I was back, for the first time since my youth, with my true name again. Well, true first name. I was Tom. Not the Huguenot Hazard or the dull Smith but the rather more symbolic Winters.

It was a warm day – the fourth of June – and I had ridden into town on a horse-dragged cart that belonged (both the cart and the horse) – to my sullen boss Jeremiah.

The London Cutaneous Institution for Treatment and Cure of Non-infectious Diseases of the Skin was now called the London Skin Clinic, but otherwise everything was still much as I remembered it. The fine furnishings, the three flights of stairs. Even Dr Hutchinson’s office was much as before, though somewhat more cluttered. His desk now overflowed with papers and open books, and his leather chair had a rip in it. It was still essentially the same place, but it looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind.

Dr Hutchinson, like most humans, had aged far ahead of his environment. His once distinguished beard was now wispy and grey and sparse. The whites of his eyes were yellowing and his hands were twisted with arthritis and spotted from time. And that rich plum voice now came with raspy intakes of breath. He was, in short, an ordinary human and time was doing its work.

‘So, Mr Winters. Now, I don’t seem to have any notes for you.’ He hadn’t looked up since I had entered the room. He just stared down at the chaos of papers on his desk.

‘When I arranged the appointment I didn’t give any information.’

And it was then that he looked at me. At first he noticed my unclean clothes and blackened hands, and might have wondered what a rough-dressed man like myself was doing in his office.

‘I settled the payment downstairs,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I am now wondering if you recognise me.’

He looked up. His eyes met mine.

‘The last time I came to see you I did so under the name of Edward Cribbs. Do you remember that name? Do you remember? You advised me to go to the lunatic asylum.’

The rasping of his breath grew louder. He stood up out of his leather chair and came over to me. He stood ten inches from my nose. He rubbed those aged eyes.

A whisper. ‘No.’

‘You remember, don’t you? You do. I can see. Thirty-one years ago.’

He was out of breath, as if the realisation was a hill he had climbed. ‘No. No, no, no. It can’t be. It is an illusion. You might be Maskelyne or Cooke.’ (Maskelyne and Cooke were the illusionist double act of the day, who’d just been doing a host of London shows.)

‘I assure you it is I, sir.’

‘I must have taken leave of my senses.’

It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.

‘No, sir, I assure you that you haven’t. The condition I told you about, my condition, the condition of holding back the tide of years, the condition that sounds like a blessing but which is also a curse – is real. I am real. My life is real. This is very real.’

‘You are not a ghost?’

‘No.’

‘You are not a spectre of my mind?’

‘No.’

His hand reached out to touch my face.

‘What was the day of your birth?’

‘I was born on the third of March in the year fifteen eighty-one.’

‘Fifteen eighty-one.’ He repeated it not as a question but as something so incredible it needed saying before it could be absorbed. ‘Fifteen eighty-one. Fifteen eighty-one. You were eighty-five years old when the Great Fire of London—’

‘I felt its heat. Its sparks singed my skin.’

He stared at me in a new way, as if he was a palaeontologist and I was a fresh dinosaur egg, ready to hatch. ‘Well, well, well. This changes everything. Everything.

‘Tell me, are you the only one? Have you ever known anyone else like you? With this . . . condition?’

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘There was a man I met once, during Captain Cook’s second voyage. A man from the Pacific Islands. His name was Omai. He became the rarest of things – a friend to me. And also . . . my daughter Marion. I have not seen her since she was a girl. Her mother told me that she had inherited my condition. That she stopped ageing normally around eleven years of age.’

Dr Hutchinson smiled. ‘This is a gigantic thing to comprehend.’

And I smiled too, and felt the soul-anchoring joy of being understood.

And this joy stayed inside me right up until Dr Hutchinson’s body was found floating in the Thames thirteen days later.

London, now

I still have a headache.

Sometimes it is almost not there, while at other times that is all there is, and the pain always coincides with memories. It is less a headache and more a memory ache. A life ache.

No matter what I do, it never goes completely. I have tried everything. I’ve taken ibuprofen, drunk litres of water, had lavender-scented baths, lain in the dark, rubbed my temples in slow circles, slow-breathed, listened to lute music and the sound of waves on a beach, meditated, did a stress-relief yoga video course where I repeated the mantra ‘I am safe, it’s okay to let go’ about a hundred times until I felt terrified of my own voice, watched brain-dead TV, stopped drinking caffeine, turned the brightness down on my laptop, but still the headache stays, as stubborn as a shadow.

The one thing I haven’t properly tried is sleep. I have a trouble with sleep that has been growing over the decades.

Last night I couldn’t sleep so I watched a documentary about turtles. They aren’t the longest-living species but they are one of them, and some turtles ‘live to over one hundred and eighty’. I put that in inverted commas because mayfly estimates such as these always turn out to be underestimates. Just look at how wrong they were about sharks. Or, well, humans. My bet is that there is at least one turtle out there approaching her five hundredth birthday.

Anyway, the thing that was depressing me was that humans weren’t turtles. Turtles have been around for two hundred and twenty million years. Since the Triassic period. And they haven’t really changed that much. Humans, in contrast, have been around only a short while.

And you don’t have to be a genius to switch on the news and conclude: we probably don’t have long. The other human sub-species – such as the Neanderthals, the Denisovans in Asia, the casually named ‘hobbits’ of Indonesia – had proven crap at the long game and so, most likely, would we.

It is all right for the mayflies. It is all right if you know you only have another thirty or forty years. You can afford to think small. You can find it easy to imagine that you are a fixed thing, inside a fixed nation, with a fixed flag, and a fixed outlook. You can imagine that these things mean something.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

Turtles don’t have nations. Or flags. Or strategic nuclear weapons. They don’t have terrorism or referendums or trade wars with China. They don’t have Spotify playlists for their workouts. They don’t have books on the decline and fall of turtle empires. They don’t have internet shopping or self-service checkouts.

Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

So here I am, with my head full of human fears and pains, my chest tight with anxiety, thinking about how much future I have in front of me.

I am lucky these days if I manage three hours of sleep. In the old days I used to take Quieting Syrup – a kind of cough mixture recommended by Hendrich – but Quieting Syrup contained morphine, and so they stopped making it when they prohibited opiates a hundred years ago. So now I have to make do with Beecham’s Night Nurse, which never really hits the spot.

I should have gone to the doctor, of course, but I didn’t. It was a rule of the Albatross Society. No doctors. Not for anything. And it was easy, after my guilt over Dr Hutchinson, to follow this through. I have wondered if it was a tumour, though I have never heard of an alba having a tumour. And obviously if I have one it would be very slow-growing. One that would give me at least an average human lifespan ahead of me. But no, the symptoms aren’t even close.

Anyway, the headache is there with only one day to go before the new job. I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don’t want to judge him. He has enough issues already.

I suppose I needed a dog with problems, in order to think less about my own. Akitas were made for the Japanese mountains, so I knew that he was a comrade of sorts, someone made for more noble surroundings, reduced to the grime and pollution and concrete streets of east London. No wonder he pissed on the carpet and ate the sofa. This wasn’t the life he’d asked for.

So we walk along, myself and Abraham, with all the exhaust fumes in our faces.

‘There used to be a well here,’ I tell him, as we pass a betting shop. ‘And here, right here, that’s where all the men used to play skittles after church on a Sunday.’

A teenage boy passes us, in turned-up trousers and an oversized ‘The Hundreds’ T-shirt, looking like an oblivious distant echo of a seventeenth-century London boy of his age in rhinegrave breeches and overskirt. The boy looks up from his phone and glances at me with quizzical and disapproving eyes. To him I am just another loose-screwed London loner, talking to myself. Maybe he is going to be one of the pupils I will be teaching on Monday.

We cross over the road. We pass a lamppost with an advert tied to it. THE CANDLELIGHT CLUB. Relive the Roaring Twenties at London’s top speakeasy-themed cocktail bar. My headache intensifies, and I close my eyes and a memory rises like a cough – playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ at Ciro’s piano bar in Paris, with a stranger’s hand resting softly on my shoulder.

I am in the park now. I hadn’t played the piano for years, I realise. I am fine with that, most of the time. I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I wonder if I will ever play again. I unclip the lead from Abraham’s collar and he stays by my side and looks up at me, confused, as if perplexed by the concept of freedom.

I relate.

As I stare around the park I see a man with a Bichon Frise discreetly scoop up shit with a plastic bag. A squirrel darts in jerky zigzags up the trunk of a beech tree. The sun climbs out from behind a cloud. Abraham trots away.

It is then that I notice her.

A woman sitting on a bench, reading, a short distance away. I recognise her, which itself is rare. I hardly pay much attention to what people look like any more. Faces blur into other faces. But I know instantly this is the woman I saw out of the window of Daphne’s office. The French teacher. As then, she seems wholly herself. It takes a lot to be unique in a species of so many. She has style. I don’t mean in what she is wearing (corduroy blazer, jeans, glasses), though that is perfectly fine. I mean in the easeful way in which she places the book down beside her on the bench and stares around at the park. In the way she puffs out her cheeks a little and blows and closes her eyes and tilts her head up to invite the sun. I look away. I am a man in a park looking at a woman. I could be anyone. It isn’t 1832 any more.

But then, as I look away from her, she calls over.

‘Your dog is lovely.’ She has a French accent. The new French. Yes. It is definitely the same woman I had seen. She holds out the back of her hand for Abraham to smell. Abraham licks his gratitude, and even wags his tail.

‘You’re honoured.’

And then she looks up at me in a rather unsettling way. A little too long. I am not arrogant enough to believe I am so attractive it is difficult for her to turn away. In reality, I haven’t had those sort of looks from anyone for at least a hundred years. In the 1700s, when I looked in my twenties and wore my grief like a scar, I was often the subject of long, lingering gazes, but not these days. No. She is looking at me for another reason. And that troubles me. Maybe she had seen me too, at the school. Yeah. That was probably it.

‘Abraham! Abraham! Here, boy! Here!’

The dog pants his way to me and I clip on his lead and I walk away, even as I feel her eyes on the back of my neck.

At home, I start looking at lesson plans for the year sevens, and the first topic to appear on the dim-lit screen is ‘Witch Trials in Tudor England’, which I already know is integral to the syllabus.

I realise there is a reason I am doing this. Why I want to become a history teacher. I need to tame the past. That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.

My brain suddenly hurts.

I rise and walk kitchenward and find myself making a Bloody Mary. Basic. No stick of celery. I play some music, simply because music sometimes helps. I resist Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, and Billie Holiday, and my sea shanty Spotify playlist, and go for ‘The Boys of Summer’ by Don Henley, which was written yesterday (actually, 1984). I have liked this song ever since I first heard it – in Germany in the eighties. I don’t know why. It always makes me think of my childhood, even though it was made centuries after it. It reminds me of the poignant French chansons Maman used to sing, the ones she chose after we had moved to England. The sad, nostalgic ones. And I think, as the headache continues, how the pain in John Gifford’s head all that time ago must have been a whole infinity worse. And I close my eyes and feel those early memories come rolling back, with the power to thin the air.

Suffolk, England, 1599

This is what I remember. My mother sat beside my bed, singing in French and playing her cherrywood lute, her fingers running fast across the strings as if escaping something.

Normally, music was her escape. I never saw my mother more calm than when she was gently singing an air de cour, but this evening something was troubling her.

She was a beautiful singer, and always closed her eyes when she sang, as if songs were dreams or memories, but today her eyes were open. She was staring at me with that vertical crease in her forehead. It was the crease that always appeared whenever she thought about Father, or the trouble in France. She stopped playing. She set down the lute. A gift from the Duke of Rochefort, when I was still a baby.

‘You do not change.’

‘Maman, please. Not again.’

‘There is not a hair on your face. You are eighteen now. But you still look much as you did five years ago.’

‘Maman, I cannot help the way I look.’

‘It is as though time has stopped for you, Estienne.’

She still called me Estienne at home, even if I was always Thomas in public.

I tried to hide my own worry and reassure her. ‘Time hasn’t stopped. The sun still sets and rises. Summer still follows spring. I have been working as hard as anyone my age.’

Mother stroked my hair. She could see only the child I still seemed to be.

‘I don’t want more bad things to happen.’

One of my earliest memories came to me: of her howling with grief and burying her face in a tapestry hanging in the hall of our vast home in France, on the day we found out my father had been killed by cannon-fire on a battlefield near Reims.

‘I will be fine.’

‘Yes. I know the money from thatching is good, but maybe you should stop working for Mr Carter. Everyone can see you, up on the Giffords’ roof, thatching. And they talk. Everyone is talking now. It’s a village.’

The irony was that, during my first thirteen years of life, I aged quickly. Not unnaturally quickly but certainly quicker than average. This was why Mr Carter had recruited me. I had been young, so he could pay me cheap, but I had been tall and broad and strong-armed for a thirteen-year-old. The trouble was, that after such fast development to suddenly slow to what seemed like no change at all must have made it more noticeable.

‘We should have gone to Canterbury,’ I said. ‘Or London.’

‘You know what I am like in towns.’ She paused, reconsidered, smoothed her petticoat. I looked at her. It seemed wrong that my mother, who had lived most of her life in one of the finest houses in France, was reduced to living in a two-room cottage in a village full of suspicious minds in this faraway corner of England. ‘Maybe you are right. Maybe we should—’

There was a sound outside. A terrible wailing.

I quickly put on my trousers and shoes and went to the door.

‘No, son, stay inside.’

‘Someone is hurt,’ I told her. ‘I had better see.’

I ran out, and the day was at that last point before night, after sunset, where the sky is a fragile finch-egg blue. There was enough light to see people doing what I was doing, rushing out of their cottages further along the lane, all trying to see what the commotion was.

I kept running. And I saw it.

Him.

John Gifford.

He was a long way off but he was easy to recognise. He was as large as a haystack. He was walking along with his arms hanging by his sides, in a strange fashion, as if they were dead things attached to him. He vomited, twice, violently, leaving rancid puddles on the lane, and then staggered forward.

His wife Alice and the three children followed, like panicking cygnets, letting out wails of their own.

By the time he had made it to the green the whole of Edwardstone seemed to be there. We could see the blood now. It was pouring out of his ears, and, after a cough, it streamed out of his mouth and his nose too, flowing into his beard. He fell to the ground. His wife was there, next to him, placing a hand over his mouth, and another over his ear, desperately trying to plug the flow of the blood.

‘Oh John, oh Lord save you, John. Oh Lord . . . John . . .’

Some of the crowd were praying. Others were shielding their children from the sight, pressing their faces into their clothes. Most, though, were staring in grim fascination.

‘Lucifer’s work,’ said wide-eyed Walter Earnshaw, the knife-grinder. He was standing next to me. Stinking of hops and what we would now call halitosis.

John Gifford was still now, lying face up, except for a shaking in his arms, which became less and less. And then he died, right there on the green, on the black, blood-sodden grass.

While Alice collapsed on top of him, the sudden grief convulsing out of her, the villagers just stood there, by and large, in a numb kind of silence.

It felt wrong, being witness to such private pain, so I turned away.

But, as I walked past the familiar faces, I saw the baker’s wife, Bess Small, staring right at me with accusing eyes.

‘Yes, Thomas Hazard, mind you stay away now.’

At the time the words confused me. But, not long after, I would remember them as a warning.

I turned, once, and saw John Gifford, still as a mound, his large dead hands shining, then I kept walking, watched by the moon, which stared from the sky like another horrified face.

London, now

‘Witches,’ I say, in the voice of a teacher. That is, a voice that isn’t really heard.

So, this is the life I have chosen above all others. The life of a man standing in a room of twelve-year-olds ignoring him.

‘Why do you think people four hundred years ago wanted to believe in witches?’

I survey the room. The faces are smirking or embarrassed or checking their phones or all three. It is 9.35 a.m. We are only five minutes into the lesson. It is going badly. The lesson, the day, the job. It is all going badly.

Maybe being a teacher wasn’t a new beginning for me. Maybe it was just the newest in a line of disappointments.

I had – right up until Sri Lanka – spent eight years in the north of Iceland, ten miles north of the fishing village of Kópasker. I had wanted Iceland because before that I had spent a few years in Toronto. Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that – maybe because of that – it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that had made me want to go to Iceland. And all that living alone in Iceland had done was make me want an ordinary life.

But an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness. And, of course, this – being a teacher – was just a pretence. Maybe everyone was pretending something. Maybe every teacher and pupil at this school was pretending something. Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

And, right then, staring at those smirking twelve-year-olds, I think: this is the wrong lie.

‘Why did people believe in witches?’ I repeat. Daphne walks along the corridor outside. She gives me a smile and two thumbs up as she passes by at a busy pace. I smile back, acting as if this is great fun and I am doing it well, like a natural, like someone who had done this before, many times, and not like the oldest of dogs learning a new trick.

I repeat my question.

‘What made people want to believe in witchcraft?’

At first it looks like a girl on the front row is putting up her hand to answer, but it is just a yawn.

So I answer my own question. I try my best not to remember what this topic makes me remember. I try to cement over the cracks in my voice.

‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it’s often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?’

‘Stupid people,’ someone says. It is a mumble, hard to locate.

I smile. There are fifty-five minutes left of the lesson.

‘You’d think so. But no. It was all kinds of people. Queen Elizabeth the First passed a law against them. Then the one after her – King James – he considered himself an intellectual and he even wrote a book about them. The first technology to lead to fake news wasn’t the internet, it was the printing press. Books solidified the superstition. Almost everybody believed in witches. And there were witchfinders who travelled around the country, finding . . .’ There is a sudden sharp pain, an intensifying of the headache, radiating from my inner brain, causing me to hesitate, dangerously, mid-sentence.

The yawning girl on the front row now looks concerned. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘Yes, I’ve just got a bit of a headache. I’ll be fine.’

Then someone else. Another girl, near the back: ‘So how did they find out if someone was a witch or not? What did they do?’

And the question flaps around my head like a crow in a dark room.

What did they do?

What did they do?

What did they do?

Suffolk, England, 1599

My mother was, in the tradition of parents, quite a complicated and contradictory human being. Moralistic but a devout lover of pleasure (food, music, the aesthetics of nature). Deeply religious but seemingly as comforted by singing a secular chanson as by prayer. A lover of the natural world who was visibly anxious every time she left the castle. Fragile, but also tough and stubborn. I never knew how many of her oddities had sprung from grief and how many from her own inherent nature. ‘There is not one blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,’ my mother told me once, shortly after arriving in England. ‘That is what Monsieur Cauvin says.’

I didn’t like Monsieur Cauvin. Or Calvin, I should say. Because he seemed to be the source of all our problems. Well, he had been. But I had taken the baton. And our problems were getting worse now, quite quickly, and I knew – when they came and knocked on the door – that there was nowhere for us. Nowhere in the world where we could be safe.

The witchfinder, the ‘pricker’ as his job was known, was called William Manning. He was a tall solid square-faced man, from London. Thinning hair but broad-shouldered and strong, with thick butcher’s hands. He was half blind, or appeared to be, on account of the cataract over his left eye. We never saw him arrive in the village, though I do remember waking to hear two galloping horses heading east past our house.

The rider of the other horse was the Justice of the Peace. I never knew him as anything other than Mr Noah. He was dressed in fine clothes and fancied himself a gentleman. He was also tall, but grey-skinned. Death-like. Cadaverous (a word I wasn’t to pick up for another two hundred years or so).

We were county-level news now, though we had no accurate idea of our importance until the hard quick knock on the door.

William Manning grabbed my wrist. He had a tough grip. He pointed with his free hand to a small pink blotch on my skin, but was careful not to touch it.

‘The devil’s spot!’ Manning said, with grim triumph. ‘Mark there, Mr Noah.’

Mr Noah looked. ‘I see it. Most sinister.’

I laughed. I was scared. ‘No,’ I told them. ‘It’s a flea bite.’

I still looked thirteen. They expected the obedience of a boy, not the insolence of a young man. Manning glowered at me. There was no other verb, then or now. But then his attention turned to my mother.

‘Undress yourself,’ he said, his voice quiet and stern. I hated him. Right then. I had never really known hate before. Only in the abstract, for the men who killed my father. But I had never known what they looked like. Hate needs a face.

‘No,’ I said.

My mother was confused. Then, when she understood, she said no and insulted them in French. Manning was an ignorant man, masquerading as a man of learning, and had no idea of the language she was speaking.

‘Mark her. She speaks like a devil. She is invoking foul spirits.’

It was at this point that he asked for the door to be closed, as an assortment of villagers – including Bess Small herself, her face full of gleeful disapproval, standing next to poor Alice Gifford – were now there on our doorstep, excited by the unfolding drama. Mr Noah closed the door. I stood between Manning and my mother. Manning pulled out a dagger and held it at my throat.

Mother undressed. She cried. I felt my eyes warm up too. Fear and guilt. This was all my fault. The fault of my physical strangeness, of my body’s inability to age.

‘If you say another word, your witchmother will be killed right where she is, before you or Marbas can see it different.’

Marbas. The infernal spirit who could cure all diseases. I was going to hear the name a lot over the coming hours, as that nightmare day unravelled itself.

My mother was naked. There by the table and the tin pottage bowls. And I saw Manning’s eyes feast on her, hating her for his own temptation. He stuck the tip of his dagger against her skin and pricked her, first on her shoulder, then her forearm, then near her navel. Little bulbs of blood.

‘Look at the darkness of the blood, Mr Noah.’

Mr Noah looked.

The blood was blood colour. Because it was ordinary human blood. But Mr Noah saw something else in it, or imagined he did, as he was impressed by Manning’s air of authority. ‘Yes. It is most dark.’

People only see what they have decided to see. I have learned this lesson one hundred times over, but it was still new to me then. My mother winced every time that dagger touched her, but to Manning she was faking it.

‘See her cunning? Mark the counterfeit of pain on her face. She has made some kind of trade, it would appear. The most unusual death of John Gifford appears to be the price of her son’s eternal youth. Quite a malevolent trade.’

‘We have nothing to do with John Gifford’s death. I helped thatch his roof. That is all. My mother never even knew him. She stays in the cottage most of the time. Please, stop doing that!’

I couldn’t watch any more. I grabbed Manning’s arm. He hit the dagger handle against my head, then his other hand grabbed my throat and he repeatedly struck the handle in the same spot as my mother wailed and I thought my skull might smash open. I was on the floor. Dazed and silent and wishing my body was as strong as an eighteen-year-old’s body should have been.

And then he, Manning, spotted another flea bite, this time on my mother, near her belly button, like a little red moon above a planet.

‘The same mark as on the boy.’

My mother trembled. Robbed of her clothes she could no longer speak.

‘It’s a flea!’ I said, my voice pained and desperate and cracked. ‘An ordinary flea bite.’

And I pressed my hands into the stone of the floor, to stand back up. But there came another stamp against the back of the skull.

And after that, everything went dark.

I sometimes repeat this in a dream. If I fall asleep on the sofa I remember that day. I remember the bulbs of blood on my mother’s skin. I remember the people at the doorway. And I remember Manning and his foot, stamping down, jolting me awake through the distance of centuries.

You see, everything changed after that. I am not saying my childhood had been perfect before this point but now I often want to climb back into that time before. Before I knew Rose, before I knew what would happen to my mother, before, before, before . . . To cling to who I was, right at the beginning when I was just a small boy with a long name who responded to time and grew older like everybody else. But there is never a way into the before. All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.

London, now

At lunch break I nip to the supermarket down the street and buy myself a pastrami sandwich, some salt and vinegar crisps and a small bottle of cherry juice.

There is a queue for the checkout assistant so I do what I normally resist and use the self-service checkout.

Like the rest of the day so far, it does not go well.

The disembodied female voice keeps telling me of an ‘unidentified item in bagging area’, even though the only items in the bagging area are the items I had just scanned.

‘Please ask a member of staff to assist you,’ she – the robot future of civilisation – adds. ‘Unidentified item in bagging area. Please ask a member of staff to assist you. Unidentified item in bagging . . .’

I look around.

‘Hello? Excuse me?’

There are no members of staff. Of course there aren’t. There is, however, a group of teenage boys all wearing variations of the Oakfield uniform (white shirts, and a few green and yellow ties) all in the queue, holding drink cans and packets of food and looking in my direction. They say something, identifying me as a new teacher. And then there is some laughter. I feel the most familiar feeling of all: that I am living in the wrong time. And I stand there, just staring at the screen and listening to the voice, my head aching, and my soul slowly wondering if Hendrich was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back to London.

As I walk along the corridor to the staff room I pass the woman with glasses. The one who I had seen in the park, reading. The French teacher Daphne had told me about. The one who had stared at me in that disconcerting way. She is wearing red cotton trousers and a black polo-neck and shiny patent flat shoes. Her hair is pulled back. A confident, civilised look. She smiles.

‘It’s you. From the park.’

‘Oh yes,’ I say, as if I was only just remembering at that moment. ‘That was you. I’m the new history teacher.’

‘How funny.’

‘Yes.’

Her smile is also a frown, as though I confuse her. I have lived long enough to know this look. And fear it.

‘Hello,’ I say.

‘Hello there,’ she says, with a slight French accent. I think of the forest. My mother singing. I close my eyes and see a sycamore seed spiralling beneath a hard blue sky.

I feel a familiar sense of claustrophobia. Confinement. As if this world is never big enough to hide in.

And that is it.

I have to keep walking, as if I can also walk away from what she might be thinking.

After my first day teaching, I sit at home next to Abraham with his head on my lap. He is asleep, lost in dog dreams. He flinches and twitches, like a stuttering image, stuck between two moments. He whimpers a little. I wonder what memories he is reliving. I put my hand on him, stroking to soothe him. Slowly, the movement stops. He makes no sound but that of his breath.

‘It’s all right,’ I whisper. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right . . .’

I close my eyes and I see the towering form of William Manning as clear as if he is in the room.

Suffolk, England, 1599

William Manning stared at the darkening sky, his expression severe. There was something theatrical about him, as if this was just a show. This was very much the nature of the times – this era of Marlowe and Jonson and Shakespeare – everything was theatre. Even justice. Even death. Especially that. We were nearly ten miles from Edwardstone but the whole village was there. You might imagine that in the sixteenth century witch trials were a regular occurrence. They were not, not really. They were a rare entertainment, and people came from miles around to watch and jeer and feel safe in a world where evil could be explained and found and killed.

Manning spoke to me, but also the crowd. He was an actor. He could have been one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

‘Your fate will be decided by your mother. If she drowns, her innocence shall be shown, and you shall live. If she lives, and survives the stool, then you – as the progeny of a witch – will be sent to the gallows alongside your mother and dealt with there. Do you understand?’

I stood by my mother, on the grassy bank of the River Lark, with my legs and wrists in irons, just as hers were. She – dressed again – was shaking and shivering like a wet cat despite the warm day. I wanted to talk to her, to comfort her, but knew any communication between us would be seen as a plot or a plan to conjure malevolent forces.

Only when they pulled her closer to the riverbank, closer to the stool, did words burst out of my mouth.

‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

‘It’s not your fault, Estienne. It’s not your fault. I am sorry. It is mine. We should never have come here. We should never have come to this place.’

‘Mother, I love you.’

‘I love you too, Estienne,’ she said, a sudden defiance bursting fast out of her, even as she cried. ‘I love you too. You must be strong. You are strong, as your father was. I want you to promise: you must stay alive. Whatever happens. You must stay alive. Do you understand me? You are special. God made you this way for a purpose. You must find your purpose. Do you promise to live?’

‘I promise, Mother. I promise, I promise, I promise . . .’

I watched as they fastened her into the wooden chair. She pressed her legs together, not wanting to part her knees, as a last futile defence. So two men took a leg each and pulled her into position, pressing her back against the seat. She wriggled and screamed as the metal strap was fixed across the seat.

I didn’t watch as they raised her in the air. But when she reached the highest point Manning told the wild-haired man holding the rope to halt.

‘Wait, wait there . . .’

And it was then I looked and saw my mother against that hard blue sky. Her head dropped and she looked down at me, and I can still see those terrified eyes all these centuries later.

‘Start the ordeal,’ said Manning, who had walked to the edge of the riverbank.

‘No!’

I closed my eyes and heard the noise of the chair touching the water. And then I reopened my eyes. I watched her disappear, become a blur of green and brown, and then nothing at all. A rush of air bubbles rose to the river’s surface. William Manning held his hand up and open, the whole time, telling the man who held that horribly slack rope to keep her under.

I looked at that large meaty red hand, a brute’s hand, praying for the fingers to close. Of course, whatever happened, she would die. And yet still – even as my own life hung in the balance – I wanted her to emerge from the water alive. I wanted her to speak again. I couldn’t imagine a world without her voice.

When they hoisted the chair and her dripping dead body out of the water there was an answer left as a secret in the river. Had she pushed the air out of her in panic or deliberately? Had she sacrificed her life for mine? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t ever know.

But she had died, because of me. And I stayed alive, because of her. And for years I regretted the promise I had made.