How to Stop Time

London, now

Here I am.

I am in the car park. I have finished my second day at Oakfield School and am now in the process of unlocking my bicycle, which is attached to a metal fence next to the staff car park. I ride a bike because I have never trusted cars. I’ve ridden a bike now for a hundred years and I think they are one of the truly great human inventions.

Sometimes change is for the better, and sometimes change isn’t for the better. Modern toilets with a flush are definitely a change for the better. Self-service checkouts are definitely not. Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.

And a life is like that. There’s no need to fear change, or necessarily welcome it, not when you don’t have anything to lose. Change is just what life is. It is the only constant I know.

I see Camille head to her car. The woman who I had seen in the park. And the corridor, yesterday, where we hadn’t said much. But I had felt claustrophobic and needed to walk away.

But now, there is no escape. She reaches her car. Puts the key in her lock as I struggle with mine. Our eyes meet.

‘Hi there.’

‘Oh, hi.’

‘The history guy.’

The history guy.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just having a bit of trouble with the key.’

‘You can have a lift if you want.’

‘No,’ I say, a bit too quickly. ‘I’m . . . it’s . . .’

(It doesn’t matter how long you live. Small talk remains equally complex.)

‘Nice to meet you again. I’m Camille. Camille Guerin. I’m French. I mean, that’s my subject. Was also my nationality, too, though who lets nationality define them? Apart from idiots.’

I don’t know why, but I say, recklessly, ‘I was born in France.’ This goes against my CV, and Daphne is mere metres away. What am I doing? Why do I want her to know this?

Another teacher – someone I hadn’t been introduced to yet – walks out and Camille says ‘See you tomorrow’ to them and they return it.

‘So,’ she asks me, ‘do you speak French?’

‘Oui. But my French is a bit outdated . . . un peu vieillot.’

She tilts her head, frowns. I know this look. It is recognition. ‘C’est drôle. J’ai l’impression de vous reconnaître. Where have I seen you? I mean, the park, but before then, I feel sure of it now.’

‘It’s probably a doppelgänger. I have the sort of face people confuse easily with other faces.’

I smile, still polite, but distant. This conversation can’t really go anywhere but trouble. It isn’t making my head feel any better either.

‘I’m short-sighted. Hence the glasses. But I did a test once,’ she says, now adamant. ‘I came out as a “super-recogniser”. It’s a gift I have. The way my temporal lobe is wired. I was in the top one per cent, in terms of visual recognition. Strange brain.’

I want her to stop talking. I want to be invisible. I want to be a normal person with nothing to hide. I look away. ‘That’s wonderful.’

‘When were you last in France?’

‘A long time ago,’ I say, doubting she is old enough to remember me from the 1920s. My bike is free now. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘I will solve it,’ she says, laughing, as she gets into her little Nissan. ‘I will solve you.’

‘Ha!’ I say. Then, when her car door closes, I say, ‘Shit.’

She beeps me as she passes, giving a fast wave. I wave back and I bike away and I think how easy it would be to just not turn up tomorrow. To talk to Hendrich and disappear again. But there is a part of me – a small but dangerous part – that is keen to know where she knew me from. Or, maybe, a small part that simply wants to be solved.

Later, at home, Hendrich calls.

‘So, how is London?’ he asks.

I am sitting at the little IKEA desk, staring at the Elizabethan penny I have been carrying around for centuries. I normally just keep it in the wallet, in its little sealed polythene bag, but now I have it out on the desk. I stare at the fading coat of arms, and remember Marion’s fist tight around it. ‘It’s fine.’

‘And the job? Are you . . . settling in?’

There is something about his tone that’s annoying. Patronising. The way he said ‘settling in’ in a vaguely amused way. ‘Listen, Hendrich, forgive me, but I have a headache. I know it’s only brunch-time with you, but it’s getting late here and I have to be up early preparing lessons tomorrow. I really would like to go to bed now if that’s—’

‘You’re still getting the headaches?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘They’re par for the course. We all get them towards our middle years. It’s memory pain. You just need to be careful. Modern life doesn’t help. Cut down on your screen time. Our eyes weren’t made for artificial light. No one’s eyes were made for that. It’s all the blue wavelengths. Disturbs our circadian rhythms.’

‘Right. Yes. Exactly. Our circadian rhythms. Anyway, I better go.’

Barely a second later: ‘It could be seen as ungrateful, you know?’

‘What could?’

‘Your recent attitude.’

I place the coin back in the bag and seal it. ‘It’s not an attitude. There’s no attitude.’

‘I’ve been thinking a lot lately.’

‘About what?’

‘The beginning.’

‘The beginning of what?’

‘Of us. When I heard about the doctor. When I telegrammed Agnes. When she came to collect you. When I first met you. Eighteen ninety-one. Tchaikovsky. Harlem. Hot dogs. Champagne. Ragtime. All of that. I made every day your birthday. I still make every day your birthday. Or could do, if you weren’t so obsessed with living the most mundane kind of life on offer. If you could get over your obsession with finding Marion.’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘And it’s understandable. But look at what you’ve had. Look at the lives I have given you . . .’

I am in the kitchen now. I have the phone on speaker and am getting a glass of water. I drink the water down, taking big, continuous gulps, thinking of my mother, under the water, exhaling her last breath. Then, as Hendrich keeps talking I go and open up my laptop.

‘I’ve basically been your fairy godmother, haven’t I? You were Cinderella, shoeing horses or whatever you were doing, and now look at you. You can have the coach, the glass slippers, whatever you want.’

I log on to Facebook. I have set up a page for myself. It draws more suspicion not having a Facebook page than having one, so Hendrich was okay with the idea (even he, or the retired plastic surgeon he was currently playing, has one).

Obviously, the profile information is fiction. There isn’t even an option to put 1581 as your year of birth, anyway.

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, Hendrich, I’m listening. I’m listening. You are my fairy godmother.’

‘I’m just worried about you. Really worried, Tom. I’ve been thinking, ever since you came out here, there was something in your eyes. Something that worried me. A kind of yearning.’

I laugh a tired laugh. ‘A yearning?’

And then I notice something.

I have a friend request on Facebook. It is her. Camille Guerin. I accept the request. Then – as Hendrich keeps talking – I find myself looking at her wall.

She updates in a mixture of French and English and emoji. She quotes Maya Angelou and Françoise Sagan and Michelle Obama and JFK and Michel Foucault. She has a friend in France who is raising money for Alzheimer’s and she links to his donation page. She has written a few little poems. I read one called ‘Skyscrapers’ and another called ‘Forest’. I like them. Then, hardly thinking, I click through her photos. I want to find out more about her, and how she might have known me. Maybe she was an alba. Maybe I had met her a long time ago. But no. A quick look through her pictures shows that in 2008, when she joined Facebook, she looked, well, a decade younger. She had looked in her twenties. She was also with a man. Erik Vincent. A frustratingly good-looking man. In one photo he is swimming in a river. In another he is wearing a running vest with a number on it. He is tagged in the pictures. In almost every profile pic up till 2011, and then there is nothing at all until 2014. I wonder what happened to Erik. I look back at the poem ‘Forest’ and realise it is dedicated to him. His profile page is no longer there.

I feel like I am not the only mystery to solve.

‘You can’t lay down an anchor, Tom. You remember the first rule, don’t you, Tom? You remember what I told you, in the Dakota, you remember the first rule?’

In one photo, from 2015, Camille is just staring, sadly, out at the camera. She is out on a pavement café in Paris somewhere, a glass of red wine in front of her. This is the first photo of her in glasses. She is wearing a bright red cardigan, which she is tucking in close around her. A colder evening than she imagined. Her mouth is a smile, but a forced one.

‘The first rule,’ I say wearily, ‘is that you don’t fall in love.’

‘That’s right, Tom. You don’t. It would be a very foolish thing to do.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude but why are you calling? You know it helps, to get into the role.’

‘Of a mayfly?’

‘Yeah.’

He sighs. Makes a little throat-clearing growl sound. ‘I once knew a tightrope walker. A mayfly. He was called Cedar. Like the tree. Strange name. Strange man. Used to work at the funfair on Coney Island. He was very good at tightrope walking. Do you know the way you can tell if a tightrope walker is any good?’

‘How?’

‘They’re still alive.’

He laughs at his own joke before continuing. ‘Anyway, he told me the secret to managing the tightrope. He said people were wrong when they said the secret was to relax and to forget about the drop below you. The secret was the opposite. The secret was never to relax. The secret was never to believe you are good. Never to forget about the drop. Do you understand what I am saying? You can’t be a mayfly, Tom. You can’t just relax. The drop is too big.’

I take the phone into the bathroom and piss quietly against the inside of the toilet bowl, avoiding the water. ‘The drop. Right. I still don’t understand why you are calling me, Hendrich.’

I look in the mirror and I notice something. Something wonderful and exciting, just above my left ear. A grey hair! This is my second. The first one I got in 1979. By 2100 I might have so many they could be noticeable. It gives me a thrill like no other when I notice such a change (hardly ever). I save the flush till later and leave the room, feeling happily mortal.

‘I call you when I want to call you. And you answer. Or I will get worried. And you know that you don’t want me to get anxious, because then I will have to do something. So, just remember your place. Remember how much the society has helped you. Okay, we’d have liked to have found your daughter. But remember everything else. Remember that before eighteen ninety-one you were lost. You had no freedom. You had no choice. You were just a confused grief-stricken man, who had no idea who he was. I gave you a map. I helped you find yourself.’

I still haven’t found myself, I don’t say. I’m nowhere near.

‘Remember eighteen ninety-one, Tom. Keep it in mind.’

And when the phone call ends, I do what he instructs. As I click off Camille’s photo I think back to 1891, I think of that moment when my life stopped being one thing and started being another, and I try to understand it. I try to work out if I sailed into a trap or into freedom, or if, maybe, it could have been both at once.

St Albans, England, 1891

Jeremiah Cartwright had read the sky and declared, with a dark seriousness, that it was going to rain later and that he must go for iron while it was still dry. He wouldn’t be back for another hour. I was alone, by the forge, watching the metal as it glowed red, then orange. Yes, as in life, strike while the iron is hot, but not just any heat. You had to wait until the orange was starting to brighten, become that raw bright pink-yellow-orange. This was forging heat. The heat of change. The yellow quickly became white and as soon as it was white hot it was all over, so you had to watch and grab the moment before it was too late.

It was only when I took the metal and placed it over the anvil to begin to strike it that I realised someone was standing there.

A woman. A peculiar-looking woman.

I can still picture her, vividly, the way I first saw her. She looked about forty years old.

She was dressed in a long skirt and blouse, both black, and her face was shaded by a broad-brimmed hat. An outfit far too hot for the late June day, let alone for the hellish temperature of the forge. It took me a second, because of the shading over her face, to realise that she was wearing a jet-black silk eye patch over her left eye.

‘Hello there. How can I help you?’

‘You will find it is the other way around.’

‘What do you mean?’

She shook her head. She was wincing a little from the heat of the place. ‘No questions. Not just yet. Your curiosity shall be satisfied, I assure you. You must come with me.’

‘What?’

‘You can’t stay here.’

‘What?’

‘I said: no questions.’

The next thing I knew she was pointing a small wooden pistol straight at my chest.

‘Blazing fuck. What are you doing?’

‘You have outed yourself to the scientific community. There is an institute . . . I haven’t got time to explain this. But, if you stay here, you will be killed.’

The heat of the forge often made being in there a kind of delirium, a fever dream. For a moment, I thought this was a waking dream.

‘Dr Hutchinson is dead,’ she said. Her voice was composed, but there was a quiet force to it, as if not just stating a fact but an inevitable one.

‘Dr Hutchinson?’

‘Murdered.’

She let the word stay in the air, with nothing but the sound of the roaring fire for company.

‘Murdered? Who by?’

She handed me a news item that had been cut out of The Times.

Doctor’s Body Found in Thames.

I skimmed the piece.

‘You made a mistake. You should never have gone to see him about your condition. He had written a paper on you. On the condition. He had given it a name. Anageria. The paper would have, very possibly, been published. And that wouldn’t do. Not at all. So, I am afraid the society had no other recourse. He had to die.’

‘You killed him?’

Her face now shone from the heat. ‘Yes, I killed him, to save lives. Now, come with me. There is a coach waiting outside. It is ready to take us to Plymouth.’

‘Plymouth?’

‘Don’t worry, it is not to reminisce.’

‘I don’t understand. Who are you?’

‘My name is Agnes.’

She opened up her handbag and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to me. I put down the mallet and took it. It had no name, no address, but its blue paper bulged with contents.

‘What is this?’

‘It’s your ticket. And your identity papers.’

I was thrown. ‘What?’

‘You have lived long. You have a good survival instinct. But you have to leave now. You must come with me. There is a coach waiting. From Plymouth we head to America. You will find every answer you have ever wanted.’

And she walked out without another word.

Atlantic Ocean, 1891

Boats had changed.

I had been to sea before, but being at sea no longer felt like being at sea.

The progress of humanity seemed to be measured in the distance we placed between ourselves and nature. We could now be in the middle of the Atlantic, on a steam ship such as the Etruria, and feel as if we were sitting in a restaurant in Mayfair.

We were in first class. First class in those days really was first class, and you had to keep up appearances.

The woman, Agnes, had provided me with a suitcase full of new clothes and I was wearing an elegant cotton twill three-piece with a silk ascot tie. I was clean shaven. She had shaved me, with a razor blade, and as she did so I seriously contemplated the possibility that she was going to cut my throat.

From the restaurant window, we could see the lower decks, where crowds of people in second class and steerage were walking around in shabbier attire, the clothes I had been wearing last week, or were leaning against the rail and looking out to the horizon, with nothing but Ellis Island and American dreams awaiting them.

Of everyone I have ever met, I would say Agnes was the most difficult to put into words. She was an extremely rare concoction of forthright character, amoral habits and restrained manners. Oh, and she had the capacity for murder.

She was still in mourning black, Queen Victoria-style, and looked every part the upper-class lady. Even the eye patch seemed to have an elegance about it. Though her choice of drink – whisky – seemed a little eccentric.

Her name – her present name – was Gillian Shields. But she had been born Agnes Wade.

‘Think of me as Agnes. I am Agnes Wade. Never use that name again but think of it always. Agnes Wade.’

‘And think of me as Tom Hazard.’

She was born in York in 1407. She was older than me by more than a century. This managed both to trouble and to comfort me. I hadn’t yet got to hear about all of her various identities over the years, but she revealed that in the mid-eighteenth century she had been Flora Burn, the famous pirate who had operated off the coast of America.

She had just ordered the chicken fricassee and I had ordered the broiled bluefish.

‘Is there a woman in your life?’

I hesitated before answering, and she felt the abrupt need to qualify her question. ‘Don’t worry. I have no interest in you in that regard. You are too serious. I enjoy serious women, but prefer – when I partake – for a man to be as light as day. It was curiosity. There must have been someone. You can’t live as long as you have lived without there being someone.’

‘There was one. Yes. A long time ago.’

‘Did she have a name?’

‘She did. Yes. She had a name.’ That was as much as I was going to give her.

‘And no one since?’

‘Not really. No. No. No one since.’

‘And why was that?’

‘It just was.’

‘You’ve been nursing a broken heart?’

‘Love is pain. It’s easier not to.’

She nodded in agreement, and swallowed, as if my words had a taste, and she looked away into the distance. ‘Yes. Yes, it is. Love is pain.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you were going to tell me, why did you kill Dr Hutchinson?’

She looked around at the other diners, who were sitting stiff and upright in that overdressed upper-class way. ‘Would you kindly not air accusations of murder in the dining room? You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now. It is a true wonder you are alive.’

‘I know but—’

Agnes closed her eyes. ‘You need to grow up, do you understand? You are still a child. You may look like a man now, but you are still a wide-eyed boy and you need to become, quite urgently, a grown-up. We need to civilise you.’

Her attitude of indifference appalled me. ‘He was a good man.’

‘He was a man. That was all you really knew, wasn’t it? He was a man. A doctor, seeking glory out of misery, whose best work was behind him. A man who had happily cast you aside and dismissed you previously. He was sixty-eight years old. He was frail. He was a skeleton in tweed. At best he had only a few years to live. Now, if he had stayed alive to publicise his findings, to make his name as the man who discovered anageria, then it would have led to far more harm. And deaths of people who not only have years to live, but centuries. It is called the greater good, surely you understand that? Lives are lost in order to save more lives. That is what the society is fighting.’

‘The society, the society, the society . . . You keep talking about this society, but you haven’t told me anything. I don’t even know what it is called.’

‘The Albatross Society.’

‘Albatross?’

Our food arrived.

‘Is there anything else I could do for you?’ the smartly dressed, slick-haired waiter asked.

‘Yes.’ Agnes smiled. ‘You could disappear.’

The waiter looked taken aback, and smoothed his moustache for comfort. ‘Very well.’

I stared down at my exquisitely prepared fish and my stomach hungrily rumbled with the knowledge that I hadn’t eaten like this in over a century.

‘It is thought that albatrosses live a long time. And we live a long time. Hendrich Pietersen founded the society in eighteen sixty-seven as a means of uniting and protecting us – people like us – the “albatrosses” or “albas” – from outside threats.’

‘And who is this Hendrich Pietersen?’

‘A very old and very wise man. Born in Flanders but has been in America since it was America. He made money during the tulip mania and came to New York when it was still New Amsterdam. Traded furs. Built up his wealth. Amassed, ultimately, a fortune. He got into property. All kinds of things. He is America, that is who Hendrich is. He set up the society to save us. We are blessed, Tom.’

I laughed.

‘Blessed. Blessed. It is a curse.’

She sipped her red wine.

‘Hendrich will want to know that you appreciate the nature of the gift you have been given.’

‘I will find that hard to do.’

‘If you want to stay alive, you will do it.’

‘I don’t know if I actually care too much about staying alive, Agnes.’

‘Not Agnes,’ she whispered sharply. She looked around the room. ‘Gillian.’

She took something out of her bag. Some Quieting Syrup cough mixture. She poured it into her whisky. She offered to do the same to mine. I shook my head.

‘Do you understand how selfish you sound? Look at everyone else. Look around this dining room. Even better, think of all those émigrés in steerage. Most of them will be dead before they are sixty. Think of all those terrible illnesses we have known people to die from. Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, even plague – I know you are old enough to remember.’

‘I remember.’

‘That will not happen to us. People like us die in one of only two ways. We either die in our sleep aged around nine hundred and fifty, or we die in an act of violence that destroys our heart or brain or causes a profound loss of blood. That is it. We have immunity from so much human pain.’

I thought of Rose trembling with fever and delirious with pain as she was on that last day. I thought of the days and weeks and years and decades afterwards. ‘There have been times in my life when shooting myself in the head seemed profoundly preferable to the blessing of existence.’

Agnes gently swirled the cocktail of whisky and Quieting Syrup in her glass. ‘You have lived a long time. You must know by now that it is not just ourselves we endanger when our truth begins to surface.’

‘Indeed. Dr Hutchinson, for instance.’

‘I am not talking about Dr Hutchinson.’ She swiped back faster than a cat. ‘I am talking about other people. Your parents. What happened to them?’

I took my time, chewing on the fish, then swallowing, then dabbing the side of my mouth with a napkin. ‘My father was killed in France due to his religion.’

‘Ah. The Wars of Religion? He was a Protestant? A Huguenot?’

I nodded three times.

‘And your mother?’ Agnes’s eye stared at me. She sensed that she had me. And she did, I suppose. I told her the truth.

‘You see? Ignorance is our enemy.’

‘No one is killed for witchcraft now.’

‘Ignorance changes over time. But it is always there, and it remains just as lethal. Yes, Dr Hutchinson died. But if he had lived, if his paper was published, people would have come for you instead. And others.’

‘People? What people?’

‘Hendrich will explain. Don’t worry, Tom. Your life is not in vain. You have a purpose.’

And I remembered how my mother had told me I needed one – a purpose – and as I ate the tender fish I wondered if I was on the cusp of finding it.

New York, 1891

‘Look at her,’ said Agnes, as we stood outside on the upper deck of the Etruria. ‘Liberty Enlightening the World.’

It was my first sighting of the Statue of Liberty. Her right arm raising that torch high into the air. She was a copper colour back then, and shone, and looked most impressive. She glowed in the sun, as we got closer to the harbour. She seemed vast – epic and ancient – something on the scale of sphinxes and pyramids. I had only been alive since the world had become smaller, more modest again. But I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger. Clearing its throat. Getting some confidence. I put my hand in my pocket, held Marion’s penny between my fingers. It was, as ever, a comfort.

‘I’ve been up close,’ said Agnes. ‘It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She’s moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet. Like you, Tom. You’ll see. Your new life awaits.’

I stared up at the Dakota, a magnificent, ornate, seven-storey buttercream stone building with elegant balustrades and a steep gable roof. I had a feeling of dizziness caused by that rare sense that things were moving fast, not just in my life but in the world. I had been in New York for a few hours now, and the feeling had not waned. There was something about New York in the 1890s. Something exciting. Something so real you felt you could breathe it in. Something that made me feel again.

I paused for a moment on the threshold.

What would have happened if I had run away right then? If I had pushed Agnes away and disappeared into the park or sprinted fast along 72nd Street and somehow got away? But I was dizzy with it, I suppose, with all the novelty of the city. It was already making me feel more alive, after all those dead years of nothingness.

A statue of an American Indian – Agnes called him ‘the watching Indian’ – gazed solemnly down at us. In 1980, while on a job in São Paulo, I would watch the news of John Lennon’s assassination on a small colour television screen. The footage was of that same building, where Lennon was shot. I wondered if the building itself had a curse, affecting all who passed through its doors.

Standing outside, I was nervous. But at least it was a feeling. I wasn’t used to them recently.

‘He will be testing you, even when he isn’t testing you. It is all a test.’ We climbed the stairs. ‘He can read people – faces, movements – better than anyone I have met. Hendrich has developed, over the years, a seemingly unnatural aptitude.’

‘An aptitude for what?’

Agnes shrugged. ‘He just calls it aptitude. It’s an aptitude for people. An understanding of people. Apparently, between the ages of five hundred and six hundred, your cerebral talents become heightened to a point beyond a normal human range. He has dealt with so many people, in so many different cultures, that he can read faces and body language with an astounding accuracy. He knows if he can trust people.’

We were there, in the French flat – we didn’t use the word ‘apartment’ in America back then – on the top floor of the Dakota building, with Central Park spread beneath us.

‘I try to pretend it’s my garden,’ said the tall lean bald sharp-suited man at the window. He held a cane, which he clutched tightly. As much for show as for his arthritis, which hadn’t yet taken him over.

‘It’s a very impressive view,’ I told him.

‘Yes. And these buildings grow by the day. Please, sit down.’

Elegant was the word. There was an elegant Steinway piano and beside it an elegant, expensive-looking leather sofa. Standing lamps, a mahogany desk, a chandelier. Agnes made herself comfortable on the sofa and gestured to a chair near the desk. Hendrich was on the other side of the desk, but still standing, staring out of that window. She gave me a firm nod, to indicate that I had better sit right away.

Meanwhile Hendrich stayed staring at Central Park.

‘How have you survived, Tom?’ He turned to face me. He was old, I realised. If he had been an ordinary human – a ‘mayfly’ as Agnes called them, straight-faced – you would have guessed his age as seventy. In our days, right now, adjusting for inflation, you’d go higher. Eighty plus. He looked older then than I have ever known him to look.

‘You have lived such a long time. And from what I hear you haven’t been doing so in the best circumstances. What stopped you from jumping off a bridge? What drives you?’

I looked at him. His cheeks sagged and his eyes had so many bags under them he reminded me of a melting candle.

I didn’t want to say the real reason. If Marion was alive I didn’t want Hendrich knowing about her. I didn’t trust anyone.

‘Come on, we are here to help you. You were born in a château. You were made for fine things, Tom. We will restore you to that life. And to your daughter.’

I felt things contract around me. ‘My daughter?’

‘I read Dr Hutchinson’s report. About Marion. Don’t worry, we will search for her. We will find her, I promise you. If she’s alive we will find her. We will find all of us. And as new generations emerge we will find them too.’

I was scared, but also, I confess, a little thrilled at the idea that I could get help in my search for Marion. I felt, suddenly, less alone.

There was a decanter of whisky on his desk. And three glasses. He poured a round of whisky without asking if we wanted one. As it happened, I did, to calm my nerves.

He read the label. ‘Look at this. “Wexford Old Irish Malt Whiskey Liquor. A Taste of the Past.” A taste of the past! When I was a young man, whisky didn’t even exist.’ His accent was hard to place. Not fully American. ‘But I’m a good deal older than you.’

He sighed wistfully and sat down behind the vast mahogany desk.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? All the things that we have lived to see. In my case it’s quite a list: spectacles, the printing press, newspapers, rifles, compasses, the telescope . . . the pendulum clock . . . the piano . . . Impressionist paintings . . . photography . . . Napoleon . . . champagne . . . semi-colons . . . billboards . . . the hot dog . . .’

He must have seen the confused look on my face.

‘Of course, Agnes. The poor man has never had a hot dog before. We must take him to Coney Island. They have the best in the whole city.’

‘They sincerely do,’ said Agnes, who seemed to have lost a little of her sharpness around him.

‘Is it food?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ He laughed, drily. ‘It’s a sausage. A special sausage. A Dachshund sausage. A special little frankfurter. It’s heaven in a bun. It’s what all of civilisation has been heading towards . . . If I’d have known, growing up in Flanders, that one day I would get to taste a hot dog. Well!’

It seemed strange. Had I been sent across the ocean – leaving a man dead behind me – to indulge in a conversation about sausages?

‘Pleasure. That is the aim, isn’t it? To enjoy good things . . . fine things. Food. Liquor. Art. Poetry. Music. Cigars.’

He took a cigar from his desk, along with a chrome lighter.

‘Would you like a cigar?’

‘I don’t enjoy tobacco.’

He looked disappointed. Handed one to Agnes instead. ‘It’s good for the chest.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, sipping my whisky.

He lit their cigars and said, ‘The finer things. The sensual pleasures. There is no other meaning than that, I’ve discovered. There is nothing else.’

‘Love?’ I said.

‘What about that?’

Hendrich smiled at Agnes. When the smile returned to me there was a menace to it. He moved the topic on. ‘I have no idea why you took it upon yourself to visit a doctor about your condition. Maybe you thought, now superstitions like witchcraft aren’t so prevalent, that it was a safe time to do so?’

‘I thought it would help people. People like us. To have a medical explanation.’

‘I am sure Agnes has already indicated why this was naïve.’

‘A little, yes.’

‘The truth is this: there is more danger now than there has ever been. The advances being made in science and medicine are not advances to be welcomed: germ theory and microbiology and immunology. Last year they found the vaccine for typhoid. What you won’t know is that in pursuit of their research the inventors of the vaccine capitalised on the work of the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin.’

‘Surely a typhoid vaccination is a good thing?’

‘Not when the research was conducted at the expense of us.’ He clenched his jaw slightly, trying to keep his anger out of view. Agnes’ stiff silence made me worry even more. Maybe there was a gun in his desk. Maybe this had been a kind of test and I had failed and now he was going to put a bullet in my head.

‘Scientists’ – he said the word as if it tasted of sulphur – ‘are the new witchfinders. You know about witchfinders, don’t you? I know you do.’

‘He knows about witchfinders,’ assured Agnes, blowing a thin stream of smoke towards the standing lamp.

‘But what you don’t know is that the witch trials never ended. It just goes by a different name. We are their dead frogs. The institute knows of us.’ He leaned over the desk, dropping ash onto a fresh copy of the New York Tribune, his stare burning like the butt of his cigar. ‘Do you understand? There are members of the scientific community who do know about us.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Not many. But a few. In Berlin. They have no interest in us as human beings. Indeed, they don’t even see us as human beings. They imprisoned two of us. Tortured them in the laboratory where they kept their guinea pigs. A man and a woman. The woman escaped. She is part of the society now. She still lives in Germany, in a village in the Bavarian countryside, but we got her a new life and name. She helps us when we need her. And we help her.’

‘I didn’t know this.’

‘You’re not meant to.’

I noticed that the park was cluttered with fallen trees.

A bird landed on the windowsill.

I didn’t recognise it. Birds were different here. A small robust yellow creature with dull grey wings, it jerked its head towards the window. Then the other way. I never tired of the way birds moved when they weren’t in flight. It was a series of tableaux rather than continuous movement. Staccato. Stuck moments.

‘Your daughter could be in danger. We all could. We need to work together, you understand?’

‘I do.’

‘There is one last question I need to ask you,’ Hendrich said, after a sip of whisky.

‘Please do.’

‘Do you want to survive? I mean, really? Do you want to stay alive?’

I had long asked myself this question. The answer was usually yes, because I didn’t want to die while I still had a daughter, possibly still alive, and yet it was very difficult to say I wanted to survive. Ever since Rose, it had been a pendulum between the two possibilities. To be or not to be. But in that lavish apartment, with that yellow bird still on the ledge, the answer seemed clearer. From this height, with the hard blue sky and bold new city in front of me, I felt closer to Marion. America made you think in the future tense. ‘Yes. Yes, I do want to survive.’

‘Well, to survive we must work together.’

The bird flew away.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right. Work together.’

‘Don’t look so worried. We are not a religious sect. Our aim is to stay alive, yes, but only so we can enjoy life. We have no gods here, save maybe Aphrodite. And Dionysus.’ He looked wistful for a moment. ‘Agnes, are you heading up to Harlem?’

‘Yes. I’m going to see an old friend, and then sedate myself and sleep for a week.’

Light gleamed like a jewel on the decanter. The sight made Hendrich happy. ‘Look! The sun is out. Shall we take a walk in the park?’

An uprooted maple tree was in our path.

‘Hurricane,’ Hendrich explained. ‘Killed some people a few weeks ago, sailors mainly. The park keepers have been a bit slow to do the clear-up.’

I stared at the roots, spreading like tentacles. ‘Must have been ferocious.’

Hendrich smiled at me. ‘It was quite a show.’

He stared down at the scattered earth and leaves on the path.

‘The immigrant experience. Right there. The wind comes and suddenly you’re not in the ground any more. And your roots are out on show and looking strange and unfamiliar. But you’ve been uprooted before, right? You’ve uprooted yourself. You’ve had to, surely.’

I nodded. ‘Many times.’

‘It shows.’

I was trying to take this as a compliment. It was difficult.

‘The trick is to stay upright. You know how to move and stay upright?’

‘How?’

‘You have to match the hurricane. You have to be your own storm. You have to . . .’

He stopped. His metaphor was running out of steam. I noticed how shiny his shoes were. I had never seen shoes like them.

‘We are different, Tom,’ he said eventually. ‘We are not other people. We carry the past with us. We see it everywhere. And sometimes that can be dangerous, and we need to help each other.’ His hand was now on my shoulder, as if he was telling me something of the deepest importance. ‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

We walked slowly around the maple tree.

Manhattan rose out of the ground, ahead of us, like a new type of storm-proof forest.

‘We have to be above them. Do you understand? For our future survival, we have to be selfish.’

We passed a couple wrapped up in overcoats, laughing at some secret joke. ‘Your life is changing. The world is changing. It is ours. We just have to make sure most of the mayflies never know about us.’

I thought of a body floating along the Thames.

‘But to kill Dr Hutchinson . . .’

‘This is a war, Tom. It is an unseen war, but it is a war. We have to protect ourselves.’

He lowered his voice as two smart-suited men with identical moustaches rode by us on black bicycles. The bicycles had equal-sized wheels, which seemed a very modern development to me.

‘Who is this Omai?’ Hendrich whispered. His eyebrows raised like sparrow wings.

‘Sorry?’

‘Dr Hutchinson wrote about him. From the South Pacific. Who is he?’

I laughed nervously. It was strange having someone know your biggest secrets. ‘He was an old friend. I knew him back in the last century. He came to London for a while, but he doesn’t want to be found. I haven’t seen him for over a hundred years.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’

Then Hendrich opened his jacket and pulled out two beige tickets from the inside pocket. He handed me one.

‘Tchaikovsky. Tonight. The Music Hall. Hottest ticket in town. You need to see the bigger picture, Tom. All this time alive and you still can’t see it. But you will, you will. For the sake of your daughter. For the sake of yourself. Trust me, you will . . .’ He leaned in and grinned. ‘And if not, well, you might find yourself out of time altogether.’

We sat in the plush red seats, and when the woman with the extravagant claret-red dress – puff-sleeved, high-necked, bell-skirted, ornately embroidered décolletage – next to Hendrich stood up and left for the restroom, he tilted his head towards me and surreptitiously pointed out a celebrity in attendance.

‘Man on balcony . . . leaning over . . . next to the lady in the green dress. The one everyone is looking at while pretending they aren’t.’ I saw a genial rosy-skinned man with a round owlish face and a neatly trimmed white beard. ‘Andrew Carnegie. Titan of industry. Richer than Rockefeller. More generous too . . . But, look, he’s an old man. What’s he got left? Another decade? Maybe a bit more? Yet every single piece of Carnegie steel in every railroad across this country will be there long after him. This hall, built with spare change, will be standing when he is six feet under the earth. That’s why he built it. So his name will live long into the future. This is what the rich do. Once they know they can survive comfortably and their children can survive comfortably they set about working on their legacy. Such a sadness to that word, don’t you think? Legacy. What a meaningless thing. All that work for a future in which they don’t appear. And what is legacy, Mr Hazard? What is legacy but the most empty and mediocre substitute for what we have. Steel and money and fancy concert halls don’t give you immortality.’

‘We aren’t immortal.’

He smiled. ‘Look at me, Tom. I look the same age as him. But in reality I am younger than a baby. I’ll still be here in the year two thousand.’

I risked offending him. ‘But how do you feel inside? The thing that has always worried me is the idea of spending several lifetimes as an old man.’

And for a moment I thought I had offended him. I thought I had overstepped an invisible line. And maybe I had, but he just smiled at me and said, ‘Life is life. So long as I can hear music and so long as I can still enjoy oysters and champagne . . .’

‘So you aren’t in pain?’

‘I have some bone trouble, yes. It keeps me awake at night from time to time. And I am no longer entirely immune to colds and fevers. You will notice this as you get older. All those physical benefits of being an alba begin to fade. You catch things. You become more like them. The biological shield drops. But I am good with pain. Small price to pay for being alive.

‘Life is the ultimate privilege, so I am among the most privileged people on the planet. You should be grateful too. You will still be here deep into the next millennium. Beyond me. Beyond Agnes. You are a god, Tom. A walking god. We are gods and they are mayflies. You need to learn how to enjoy your deific existence.’

A frail-looking man with an intense expression and thinning hair walked towards the centre of the stage. He stood in front of the crowd and gave the semblance of a smile. The whole hall erupted in applause. He stayed there, silent, just staring out at us for a while. And then he – Tchaikovsky – turned towards the little lectern that was on the stage, picked up his baton and held it in the air. He paused a moment. It was like watching an old wizard with a wand, summoning the energy needed to cast the spell.

The hall fell silent. I had never heard a silence like it. The whole hall seemed to be holding its breath. It felt civilised and modern. It felt refined and tantalising all at once, like a polite collective pre-orgasm.

Time slowed, inside that moment.

Then the music began.

I hadn’t enjoyed music for years. So I sat in my seat waiting, as always, for nothing at all.

After a blast of trumpets the violins and cellos were left on their own for a while, creating a noise that started small and tender, and rose to create a kind of symphonic storm.

And, yes, it did nothing at first. But then, somehow, it got in.

No. Not got in. That’s the wrong way of putting it. Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.

There was such a yearning and energy to it. I closed my eyes. I could not describe here on the page how I felt. The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn’t be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly alive again.

As the trumpets and French horns and bass drum thundered in, it had such power my heart quickened and my mind felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes I saw Tchaikovsky with his baton, seemingly pulling the music right out of the air, as if music was something already in the atmosphere that you just had to locate.

Then, when it was all over, the composer seemed to deflate again. Even as the whole hall got to its feet and showered him with wave after wave of applause, and the odd roar of ‘Bravo!’, he gave the smallest of smiles and the smallest of bows.

‘He pisses over Brahms from a mountain, don’t you think?’ Hendrich whispered to me at one point.

I had no idea. I just knew it was good to be back inside the world of feeling.

I realised, even at the time, that the visit to Music Hall was all part of the sales technique. Hendrich’s way of getting me inside. Not only would he find my daughter, I would have a good life in the process. I didn’t yet understand what I was really being sold, but by the time that became clear I had already bought in. I had been sold, in reality, since he first mentioned Marion. But now I was starting to believe Hendrich’s hype. That the Albatross Society was a way not just to find my daughter, but also myself.

The next day, in Hendrich’s apartment, as we finished our champagne breakfast, the conversation happened. The one I always think of.

‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said, wiping a waffle crumb off the table with his finger before lighting a cigar. ‘There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.’

I stared through the curving smoke of his cigar. ‘I doubt I will ever love again.’

‘Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .’ He paused for a while. ‘Eight years, that’s the rule. That’s the most an alba can stay anywhere before things get really tricky. That’s the Eight-Year Rule. You have a nice life for eight years. Then I send you on a task. Then you have a new life. With no ghosts.’

I believed him. How could I not? Hadn’t I lost myself after Rose? Wasn’t I still, in a sense, waiting to find myself again? A nice life. Maybe it was possible. With a structure. With something to belong to. With a purpose.

‘Do you know your Greek myths, Tom?’

‘A little.’

‘Well, I am like Daedalus. You know, the creator of the labyrinth that held the minotaur safe. I’ve had to build a labyrinth to protect all of us. This society. But the trouble with Daedalus is that for all his wisdom people didn’t always listen to him. His own son, Icarus, didn’t listen. You know that story, don’t you?’

‘Yes. He and Icarus try to escape from the Greek island—’

‘Crete.’

‘Crete. Yes. But their wings are made of wax and feathers. And his father . . .’

‘Daedalus.’

‘His father tells him not to fly too close to the sun or to the sea, or his wings will catch fire or get soaked.’

‘And of course both things happen. He goes too close to the sun. The wax melts. He falls in the sea. Now, you are not too high. But you have lived too low. It’s a balance. I am here to help you get the balance right. How do you see yourself, Tom?’

‘Not as Icarus.’

‘Then who?’

‘That’s a big question.’

‘It’s a most important question.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?’

‘Both, I suppose. Watching, participating.’

He nodded. ‘What are you capable of?’

‘What?’

‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been around the world.’

‘No, I mean, where have you been morally? What have you done? How many lines have you crossed?’

‘Why are you asking me that?’

‘Because, within the structure of the rules, you need to be free.’

I was uneasy. I should have trusted that feeling, instead of just sipping champagne. ‘What do we need to be free to do?’

He smiled. ‘We live long lives, Tom. We live long lives. Long and secret lives. We do whatever’s necessary.’ The smile became a laugh. He had good teeth, considering how many centuries he’d had them. ‘Now, today, hot dogs.’

London, now

We live long lives, Tom . . .

There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.

Even to me, that pine seems old. In recent years, whenever I have despaired of my condition and needed to feel a bit more mortal and ordinary, I think of that tree in California. It has been alive since the Pharaohs. It has been alive since the founding of Troy. Since the start of the Bronze Age. Since the start of yoga. Since mammoths.

And it has stayed there, calmly in its spot, growing slowly, producing leaves, losing leaves, producing more, as those mammoths became extinct, as Homer wrote The Odyssey, as Cleopatra reigned, as Jesus was nailed to a cross, as Siddhartha Gautama left his palace to weep for his suffering subjects, as the Roman Empire declined and fell, as Carthage was captured, as water buffalo were domesticated in China, as the Incas built cities, as I leaned over the well with Rose, as America fought with itself, as world wars happened, as Facebook was invented, as millions of humans and other animals lived and fought and procreated and went, bewildered, to their fast graves, the tree had always been the tree.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.

I stand like a vertical headache in front of twenty-eight fourteen-year-olds, slumping back on chairs, playing with pens, surreptitiously checking their phones. It is a tough crowd, but I’ve had tougher over the years. This is certainly easier than playing to the drunken sailors, thieves and drifters of the Minerva Inn in Plymouth, for instance.

Everything changes and nothing changes.

‘The East End is a multicultural area because it has always been a multicultural area,’ I say, as an opener to the lesson focusing on Pre-Twentieth-Century Immigration. ‘No one was ever a native of Britain. People arrived here. The Romans, the Celts, the Normans, the Saxons. Britain was always a place made of other places. And even what we think of as “modern” immigration goes quite a long way back. Well over three hundred years ago, you had Indians who came here after being recruited on ships run by the East India Company. Then came Germans and Russian Jews and Africans. But it is true that, while immigration has always been a part of English society, for a long time visibly different immigrants were treated as exotic oddities . . . For instance, in the eighteenth century a man called Omai arrived here from the Pacific Islands. He arrived back on Cook’s second voyage . . .’ I pause. I remember sitting on the deck of the boat with him, Omai, my old friend, showing him my daughter’s coin and teaching him the word money. ‘And when Omai came here he was seen as so unique that every celebrity of the day, from the king down, went to meet him and have dinner with him . . .’ I remember his face, flickering in the shadow of a flame. ‘He even had his portrait painted by the most famous artist of the time, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was a celebrity, for a time. Omai . . .’

Omai.

I hadn’t said his name out loud for a long time. Not since I had spoken to Hendrich about him, in 1891. But I often thought about him. About what happened to him. Thinking of him now, though, seems to add to my headache. Everything spins a little.

‘He was . . .’

A girl on the front row, Danielle, chewing gum, frowns at me. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

Cue laughter. Danielle turns around. Soaks it up.

Steady thyself.

I try to smile at the class. ‘Fine. I’m fine . . . This part of London in particular has always been defined by immigration. For instance, over there’ – I point out of the window, westwards – ‘back in the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds you had the French. They were the first immigrants in great numbers of the modern age. Not all of them stayed in London. A lot went to Canterbury. Others went into rural areas. Kent . . .’ I pause. Breathe. ‘. . . Suffolk. But many based themselves in Spitalfields, and a real community built up. They started the silk industry here. Many of them were silk weavers. Many were former aristocrats who were suddenly having to make a new life for themselves in very different circumstances to the life they knew at home.’

There is a boy sitting on one of the middle tables. Anton. A quiet boy with a brooding and serious look about him. He raises his hand.

‘Yes, Anton?’

‘Why did they come here? I mean, if they had it so good at home?’

‘Well, they were Protestants. Huguenots, they were called, though they didn’t call themselves that. They followed the teachings of Jean Cauvin – John Calvin. And at that time it was a dangerous thing to be a Protestant in France, just as it was to be a Catholic in England. So many of them . . .’

I close my eyes, trying to blink away a memory. The pain in my head becomes too much.

They sense my weakness. I hear their laughter flare up again.

‘So many of them had to . . . had to escape.’

I open my eyes. Anton isn’t laughing. He gives me a small smile of support. But I am pretty sure he, like the rest of the class, thinks I am not quite there.

I feel my heart beat a frenzied jazz rhythm as the room starts to tilt.

‘Just one minute,’ I say.

‘Sir?’ Anton seems concerned.

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . . I’ll be back in a minute.’

I walk out of the room, down the corridor. Past one classroom. Past another. I see Camille through a window. She is standing in front of a whiteboard full of verb formations.

She looks so calm and in control of the class. She sees me and smiles and I smile back, despite my panic.

I go into the bathroom.

I stare at my face in the mirror.

I know my own face too well to actually see it. Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

‘Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?’

I splash my cheeks with water. I breathe slowly.

‘My name is Tom Hazard. Tom Hazard. My name is Tom Hazard.’

The name itself contains too much. It contains everyone who has ever called me it and everyone I have ever hid it from. It contains my mother and Rose and Hendrich and Marion. But it isn’t an anchor. Because an anchor fixes you in one place. And I am still not fixed. Could I just keep sailing through life for ever feeling like this? A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat? I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.

I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.

I had, in short, lost myself.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell my reflection. I think of Omai. I wish I knew where he was. I wish I hadn’t just let him go without trying to keep in touch. It is lonely, this world, without a friend.

The slow breaths get my heart rate down. I dry my face on a paper towel.

I walk out of the toilets and back down the corridor and make an effort to keep looking ahead, to not look into Camille’s classroom as I make my way back to my own. To act like a normal non-shitty teacher with only, say, forty years of memories inside him.

I head back into the classroom.

‘Sorry about that,’ I say, trying to smile. Trying to be light. Trying to say something amusing. ‘I took a lot of drugs when I was younger. I get the occasional flashback.’

They laugh.

‘So don’t do drugs. It can lead to a life of mental torment and history teaching in later life. Right, okay, on with the lesson . . .’

I see Camille again that day. Afternoon break. We are in the staff room. She is talking to another language teacher, Joachim, who is Austrian, and teaches German, and whose nose makes a whistling sound when he breathes. She breaks off and comes over while I sit on my own drinking a cup of tea.

‘Hello, Tom.’

‘Hi,’ I say. The smallest available word accompanied by the smallest of available smiles.

‘Were you okay earlier? You looked a bit . . .’ She searches for the word. ‘Intense.’

‘I just had a headache. I get headaches.’

‘Me too.’

Her eyes narrow. I worry that she is trying to work out where she knows me from. Which is probably why I say, ‘I’ve still got it . . . the headache. That’s why I’m just sitting on my own.’

She looks a bit hurt and awkward. She nods. ‘Oh, right. Well, I hope it gets better. They have ibuprofen in the First Aid cupboard.’

If you knew the truth about me your life would be in mortal danger.

‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’

I stop looking at her, and wait for her to go away. Which she does. I feel her anger. And I feel guilty. Actually, no, it isn’t just that. There is something else. A kind of homesickness, a longing for something – a feeling – I haven’t known for a very long time. And when she goes and sits down on the other side of the staff room, she doesn’t smile, or look at me, and I feel like something is over before it has a chance to begin.

Later that night I am walking Abraham back from the park via Fairfield Road. I don’t normally go this way. I have avoided it since arriving back in London.

The reason I have been avoiding it is because this is where I first met Rose. My ventures to Chapel Street and Well Street had been too painful. But I need to get over her. I need to get over everything. I need ‘closure’ as people say these days. Though you can never close the past. The most you can do with it is accept it. And that is the point I want to reach.

I am on Fairfield Road, outside the illuminated despair of the bus station, putting my hand in a plastic bag to pick up Abraham’s shit, then placing it in the bin. The history of London could be charted by the steady and consistent decline of visible faeces in public streets.

‘You know, Abraham, you shouldn’t really do this on the street. That is why we go to the park. You know, that green place, with the grass?’

Abraham feigns ignorance as we carry on walking.

I look around. Trying to work out where it is that I first saw her. It is beyond impossible. There is nothing recognisable. As with Chapel Street and Well Lane, not a single building that is there now was there then. I see, through a window, a row of people running on treadmills. They are all staring up at what I assume is a row of TV screens above their heads. Some of them are plugged into headphones. One is checking her iPhone as she runs.

Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.

I try to work out where the geese stalls used to be, and where she had been standing with her fruit basket.

And then I find it.

I stand still a moment, with Abraham tugging on the lead as traffic whooshes by, oblivious. The headache ups a notch and I feel dizzy enough to need to stand back against a brick wall.

‘Just a minute, boy,’ I tell Abraham. ‘Just a minute.’

And the memories break through like water bursting a dam. My head pulses with a pain even stronger than I’d had in the class earlier, and for a moment, in a lull between the sound of cars, I feel it, I feel the living history of the road, the residue of my own pain lingering in the air, and I feel as weak as I did in 1599, when I was still heading west, delirious and ready to be saved.