How to Stop Time

Plymouth, England, 1768

The story of how I met Omai began on a rainy Tuesday in March on the cobbles of Plymouth harbour. I was hungover. I was always hungover in Plymouth. Well, either hungover or drunk. It was a wet place. Rain, sea, ale. It felt like everyone was slowly drowning.

When I found Captain Samuel Wallis, I recognised him from the portrait I had seen hanging in the Guildhall. He was wearing his fine royal blue coat and walking along the jetty, deep in conversation with another man.

I had arrived in Plymouth only a month before. At this time my hope seemed to ebb ever further out to sea. I had stopped believing in ever finding my daughter and instead I found myself trying to solve the riddle that plagued me: what is the point of living when you have no one to live for? I still had no answer to that. I think, looking back, I was suffering from a kind of depression.

I ran over to him, to Wallis, and stood in front of his path, walking backwards as he walked forwards.

‘I heard you were a man short,’ I said. ‘For the voyage. On the Dolphin.’

The men carried on walking. Captain Wallis looked at me. He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. Short, pudgy, purple-cheeked. A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring. And yet he was only two years away from having an island named after him. In the meantime, his small green eyes viewed me with disdain.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, in a deep snorting kind of voice.

‘John Frears.’ It was the first time I had ever said that name.

Captain Wallis’ companion lightly touched his arm. A quiet gesture but one which did its purpose. This man seemed very different to Mr Wallis. Sharp-eyed but with a kind mouth, his lips curling at their edges with interest. He was wearing a coal-black coat despite the weather. This was Tobias Furneaux, a man I would get to know quite well over the years. Both men now stopped still amid the busy harbour, near crates of speckled grey freshly killed fish, shining in the June sunlight. ‘And why should we have you on our vessel?’

‘I have skills, good sirs, that might be wanting elsewhere.’

‘Like what?’ asked Mr Furneaux.

I dug deep into my bag and took out my black wooden three-holed galoubet and put it to my lips. I began to play a few notes of a folk tune, ‘The Bay of Biscay’.

‘You play the pipe well,’ said Mr Furneaux, suppressing a smile.

‘I can also play the mandolin.’ I didn’t mention the lute, obviously. It would have been like, these days, saying you could use a fax machine in a job interview. It simply wasn’t something people did any more.

Mr Furneaux was impressed, and said something along those lines.

‘Hmm,’ said Mr Wallis, humming a more doubtful tune and turning to his companion. ‘We are not arranging a concert, Mr Furneaux.’

Mr Furneaux inhaled the damp air sharply. ‘If I may be so bold, Mr Wallis, I would like to proffer that musical ability is an invaluable skill on long voyages such as ours.’

‘I have other skills too, sir,’ I said, addressing Mr Wallis.

He gave me a quizzical look.

‘I can hook a sail and oil the masts and repair the rigging. I can read both words and maps. I can load a gun with powder, and fire it with reasonable aim. I can speak in the French tongue, sir. And the Dutch, though with less proficiency. I am sound on a night watch. I could go on, sir.’

Mr Furneaux was suppressing a laugh by now. Captain Wallis looked no happier than he had a minute before. In fact, he looked like he seriously didn’t like me now. He began walking away, his velvet coat flapping in the breeze like the sail of a retreating ship.

‘We sail early. Six of the clock, tomorrow morning. We’ll see you harbourside.’

‘Aye, sir, six of the clock. I’ll be there. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

London, now

I am teaching more social history to the class of year nines when Camille walks past the window, like a tormenting dream.

‘In Elizabethan England, no one carried bank notes in their pocket. It was all coins until the establishment of the Bank of England . . .’

I raise my hand instinctively, but Camille doesn’t respond, even though she sees me. Anton watches as my hand falls.

It stays that way the whole week. I am invisible to Camille. Her eyes never meet mine in the staff room. She never says hello when we pass each other outside. I have hurt her. I know that. So I make no attempt to make it worse by talking to her. My plan is simply to see the week out, go to Australia, and then ask to go somewhere far away from here.

Once, though, crossing diagonal paths across the school hall, seeing her looking sad, I can’t help but say, ‘Camille, I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.’ And she gives a nod so small it might not have been there at all, and carries on walking.

That evening, as Abraham tries to shake off a Maltese terrier a quarter of his size, I stare over at the empty bench and remember putting my arm around Camille. The bench exudes a sadness, almost as if it remembers too.

The following Saturday is the start of the half-term break. I am due to fly to Australia and drop Abraham off at the dog sitter’s the following day but right now I am in the supermarket. I am chucking a travel-size tube of toothpaste in my basket when I notice Daphne, bright-bloused and wide-eyed, behind her trolley.

I don’t want her to know I am going away, so I hide the toothpaste and a bottle of sun tan lotion under a copy of New Scientist.

‘Hey, Mr Hazard!’ she says, laughing.

‘Mrs Bello, hi!’

Unfortunately, we get talking. She says she has just seen Camille on her way to Columbia Road flower market.

Daphne’s eyes dance a little mischievously. ‘If I wasn’t your boss – which I am – if I was just your next-door neighbour – which I am not – I would say that, well, Madame Guerin has, for some crazy reason, a bit of a thing for a certain new history teacher.’

I feel the unnatural brightness of the supermarket.

‘But obviously I wouldn’t say that, because I am a headteacher and headteachers shouldn’t say that sort of thing. It would be totally unprofessional to encourage inter-staff romances. It’s just . . . she’s been very quiet this last week. Have you noticed?’

I force a smile. ‘Fake news, I’m afraid.’

‘I just thought that maybe you’re the person to cheer her up.’

‘I think I may be the last person for that job.’

There is an awkward silence. Well, it is awkward for me. I don’t think Daphne does awkward. I notice a bottle of rum lying in her trolley, next to a bag of pasta.

‘Having a party?’ I ask, trying to initiate a new topic.

She sighs. ‘I wish. No, no, the bottle of Bacardi is for my mum.’

‘She isn’t going to share it?’

‘Ha! No. Bless her. She’s quite a hog with her rum. She’s in an old folk’s home in Surbiton – her choice, she likes the company – and she always gets me to sneak in a bottle of the good stuff. She’s a bit naughty, my mum. I always feel like a bootlegger or something, like in America during Prohibition, you know . . .’

I remember playing ragtime tunes on the piano in Arizona, a bottle of moonshine on the dusty floor beside me.

‘She’s had a bit of kidney trouble and has had a stroke so she should be off the booze completely, but she always says she’s here for a good time not a long time, though she has been here for a long time, because she’s eighty-seven and she’s a right tough old bird. Ha!’

‘She sounds great.’ I try my hardest to engage in the conversation, but my painful, overactive hippocampus is now making me think of Camille at school. How pale she’d been looking. How she had deliberately placed herself at the opposite end of the staff room to me.

But then Daphne says something that snaps me out of my despair.

‘Yeah, she’s a good chick, my mum. Mind you, she’s with a right motley crew in the home. There’s one woman there who reckons she’s so old she was born in the reign of William the Conqueror! She should be in a psychiatric ward, really.’

I stop in my tracks. My first thought is Marion. This is irrational. If Marion was alive she wouldn’t look like an old person. She’d look younger than me. And she was born in the reign of King James, not William the Conqueror.

‘Poor Mary Peters. Mad as a box of frogs. Gets scared of the TV. But a lovely old dear.’

Mary Peters.

I shake my head at Daphne, even as I remember the gossip that surrounded the disappearance of the Mary Peters we knew in Hackney. The one who Rose knew at the market. Who used to get Hell-turded by Old Mrs Adams and had arrived ‘from nowhere’.

‘Oh. Oh really? Poor woman.’

When Daphne has gone I leave my trolley in the aisle and walk with brisk determination out of the supermarket. I get out my phone and start looking up train times to Surbiton.

The care home is set back from the road. There are trees crowding out the whole front of the place. I stand outside on the pavement and wonder what I should do. There is a postman on the other side of the road, but other than that – no one. I inhale. Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this. Decades. Centuries, even. It’s not a simple rhythm. But the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns. It’s baffling. Like when you first hear John Coltrane on the saxophone. But if you stick with it, the elements of familiarity become clear. The current rhythm is speeding up. I am approaching a crescendo. Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, ‘I can’t do this life any more, I need to change.’ And one thing happens that you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no say over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.

I take a deep breath, inhale the air.

Ash Grange Residential Care Home. The logo is a falling leaf. A generic leaf. The sign is pastel-yellow and blue. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. The building itself is nearly as bad. Probably only twenty years old. Light orange brick and tinted windows and a muted quality. The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.

I go inside.

‘Hello,’ I say to the woman in the office after she has slid the Perspex window open for me to speak. ‘I’m here to see Mary Peters.’

She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. The kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.

‘Oh yes, you called a short while ago, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. That was me. Tom Hazard. I knew her when she was younger, in Hackney.’

She stares at her computer screen and clicks the mouse. ‘Oh yes. She wants to see you. Through there.’

‘Oh good,’ I say, and as I walk over the carpet tiles I almost feel like I am walking backwards through time.

Mary Peters looks at me with eyes made pink and weak by time. Her grey hair is as frail as dandelion seeds and the veins under her skin like routes on a secret map, but she is recognisably the woman I met in Hackney, four centuries ago.

‘I remember you,’ she says. ‘The day you came into the market. The fight you had with that slimy bastard.’

‘Mr Willow,’ I say, remembering him disappear in a cloud of spice.

‘Yes.’

There is a rattle to her breath. A kind of scraping sound on every in-breath. She winces a little, and her crooked fingers faintly caress her brow.

‘I get headaches. It’s what happens.’

‘I’m starting to get them too.’

‘They come and go. Mine have come back recently.’

I marvel at her. How she can still care enough to speak. She must have been an old woman for two hundred years now.

‘I don’t have long,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘That is why I came here. There is no risk for me.’

‘No risk?’

‘I only have about two years left.’

‘You don’t know that. You could have another fifty.’

She shakes her head. ‘I hope not.’

‘How are you feeling?’

She smiles as if I have told a joke.

‘Near the end. See, I’ve had a variety of ailments. When the doctor told me I only had a matter of weeks I realised I . . . I only have two more years. Three at the most. So I knew it was safe, you know, to come here. Safer . . .’

It doesn’t make sense. If she is still bothered about safety, then why did she talk openly to people here about her age?

There are other people in the room. Mainly sitting in chairs, lost in crosswords or memories.

‘You were Rose’s love. She spoke of nothing else but you. I had a flower stand next to where she and her little sister used to sell fruit. Tom this. Tom that. Tom everything. She came alive after she met you. She was a different girl.’

‘I loved her so much,’ I tell her. ‘She was so strong. She was the greatest person I ever knew.’

She smiles in faint sympathy. ‘I was a sad old thing in them days. Suffered my own heartache.’

She stares around the room. Someone switches on the TV. The opening credits of a show called A New Life in the Sun start to play. Then images of a couple inside their Spanish restaurant, the Blue Marlin, looking stressed as they rinse mussels in a pot.

When Mary’s face returns to mine she is pensive, almost trembling with thought. And then she tells me: ‘I met your daughter.’

It is so out of context that I don’t really understand what she has said.

‘What did you say?’

‘Your child, Marion.’

‘Marion?’

‘Quite recent. We were in hospital together.’

My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.

‘What?’

‘The psychiatric hospital in Southall. I was a day patient, just a mad old bird crying in a chair. She was there all the time. I came to know her. I had left before she had been born, hadn’t I?’

‘So how did you know it was my daughter?’

She looks at me as if it is a silly question. ‘She told me. She told everyone. That was one of the reasons she was there in the first place. No one believed her of course. She was mad. That’s what they thought . . . She used to talk in French sometimes, and she sang a lot.’

‘What did she sing?’

‘Old songs. Old, old songs. She used to cry when she sang.’

‘Is she still there?’

She shakes her head. ‘She left. It was strange, how it happened—’

‘Strange? How do you mean?’

‘One night she just went. People who were there said there was a lot of noise and commotion . . . Then, when I came in the next day she was gone.’

‘Where? Where?’

Mary sighs. She takes a moment. Looks sad and confused as she thinks about it. ‘No one knew. No one said. They just told us she’d been discharged. But we never knew for sure. That sounds strange, but we didn’t always know what was going on. That was the nature of the place.’

I can’t let go. For so long I have been waiting for hope, and then hope has come along for ten seconds only to be dashed again. ‘Where would she have gone? Did she ever give you any clues as to where she might end up? She must have.’

‘I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.’

‘Did she talk about places?’

‘She’d travelled. She talked about places she’d been. She’d been to Canada.’

‘Canada? Where? Toronto? I was in Toronto.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She’d also spent a lot of time in Scotland, I think. Her voice was very Scottish. I think she’d travelled around, though. Through Europe.’

‘Do you think she’s in London?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

I sit back. Try to think. I am simultaneously relieved that Marion is still alive – or had been until recently – and worried for whatever torments she has known.

I wonder if the society has caught up with her. I wonder if someone has tried to silence her. I wonder if Hendrich knows about this and hasn’t told me. I wonder if someone has taken her. The institute in Berlin. Or someone else.

‘Listen, Mary,’ I say, before I leave, ‘I think it’s important that you don’t talk about the past any more. It may have been dangerous for Marion, and it is dangerous for you. You can think about it. But it’s dangerous to talk about your age.’

She winces at some invisible pain as she shifts, with careful effort, in her seat. A minute goes by. She is mulling my words, and dismissing them.

‘I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn’t talk about that love . . . because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love.’

I nod. I understand.

‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’

I hold Mary’s hand. ‘You have helped me more than you know.’

One of the nurses comes over and asks if I want a cup of tea and I say I am fine.

And then I ask Mary, in a low voice, ‘Have you ever heard of the Albatross Society?’

‘No. Can’t say I have.’

‘Well, just be careful. Please, don’t talk about, you know . . .’

I look at the clock on the wall. It is a quarter to three. In three hours’ time I need to be on a plane to Dubai, en route to Sydney.

‘Be careful,’ I tell Mary.

She shakes her head. Closes her eyes. Her sigh sounds closer to a cat’s hiss. ‘I am too old to be scared any more. I am too old to lie.’ She leans forward in her chair, and clasps her walking stick until her knuckles whiten. ‘And so are you.’

I step outside and phone Hendrich.

‘Tom? How are things?’

‘Did you know she was alive?’

‘Who?’

‘Marion. Marion. Have you found her? Did you know?’

‘Tom, calm down. No, Tom. Have you got a lead?’

‘She is alive. She was at a hospital in Southall. And then she disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? As in, taken?’

‘I don’t know. She might’ve run away.’

‘From a hospital?’

‘It was a mental hospital.’

A postman trundles along the pavement. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I whisper into the phone. ‘But I can’t go to Australia. I need to find her.’

‘If she has been taken . . .’

‘I don’t know that.’

‘If she has been taken you will not find her alone. Listen, listen. I will get Agnes to put her ear to the ground in Berlin. After Australia this will be our chief operation. We will find her. If she’s been taken she’ll probably be in Berlin, or Beijing, or Silicon Valley. You won’t find her alone. I mean, you’ve been in London and you haven’t found her.’

‘I haven’t been looking. I mean, I’ve been side-tracked.’

‘Yes, Tom. Yes. You finally see it. You’ve been side-tracked. That is exactly it. Now, we will sort this. But you have a flight to catch.’

‘I can’t. I can’t.’

‘If you want to find Marion, you need to focus again, Tom. You need to go and bring your friend in. Who knows? He himself might have information for us. You know how it is. Albas are the people to ask about albas. You need to get back on track, Tom. The truth is: you don’t know where Marion is. But we know where your friend is. And so does Berlin. Marion has survived for over four hundred years. She’ll still be alive for another week. Just do this in Australia and I swear – I swear – we will work together and we will find her. You have a lead, yes?’

I can’t tell him about Mary Peters. I don’t want to endanger a woman who clearly would never agree to be a part of the society. ‘I, just, I need to find her.’

‘We will, Tom,’ he says, and I hate him almost as much as I believe him. I have doubted him many times, but the truth is, I feel it too. I feel every word as he says it. ‘I can sense it. I have experienced so much past that I can sense the future. I know. I know. We are nearly there, Tom. You will see her again. But, first, if you want to save your friend, you really need to get to the airport. Omai needs you.’

And the conversation ends and, as always, I do what Hendrich wants me to do. Because he is the best hope I have.

Tahiti, 1767

I was meant to set fire to the village.

‘Light it!’ roared Wallis. ‘If you ever want a trip home you will light the savage’s hut, Frears! Then light the others!’

I held the flaming torch in my hand, my arm weak from the weight, my whole body weak from just standing up. It would have been easy to let it down, but I couldn’t light the hut. I just stood there, in the black sand, as the islander stared at me. The young man said nothing. He did nothing. He just stood in front of the hut and stared at me. His eyes were wide, and he looked at me with a mixture of horror and defiance. He had long wispy hair, down to his chest, and was wearing more jewellery than most of the other islanders. Bracelets made with bone. Necklaces too. I would have said he was about twenty years old. But I also knew, better than most, that when it came to matters of age, appearances could be deceptive.

Centuries later, watching this same man step out of the ocean in a YouTube video, I would see those eyes stare out with a similar expression. Somewhere between defiance and bewilderment.

I was no saint. I saw no shame in the discovering of new lands or the forging of empire. I was thoroughly a man of a different age, even to the one I was then inhabiting. And yet, I could not set fire to the man’s home. Whether it was the eyes, whether I could recognise in him a fellow outsider, or whether I knew the damage that was caused to the soul by the accumulation of sin in a long life, I still do not know.

But even as Wallis barked at me I walked away. I carried the torch to the smooth wet sand and let the sea take it. I walked back to the man whose hut was still standing and pulled out the pistol – given to me before treading onto the shore, by a scurvy-weakened officer – from my belt and placed it on the sand. I don’t think the man understood the pistol, or what it was for, but he understood the knife, and I put that on the ground too.

I had a small mirror in my pocket and I showed it to him and he stared at it, at his own face, with fascination.

Wallis was now right at me.

‘What the devil are you doing, Frears?’

I tried to stare at Wallis with the quiet dignity the islander had stared at me.

Luckily, Furneaux was also there. ‘If we destroy their homes, we will never be welcome here. We need to tempt them, not scare them any more than we have. Sometimes the beast only needs to roar.’

And Wallis just mumbled and looked at me and said, ‘Don’t make me regret having brought you,’ and the huts were burned to the ground anyway. And so it was that the island that would one day be known as Tahiti was first witnessed by Europeans. A mere two years later it would be used by Captain James Cook on his first voyage as the site on which he and his astronomer would observe the transit of Venus as it crossed the sun. It was indeed this reason – the convenient positioning of the island from which to observe something – that would advance not only scientific knowledge but the calculation of longitude.

While the village was ablaze the only two naturalists to survive the voyage, along with the artist Joe Webber, set about exploring the rainforest. We weren’t there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover.

And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

Dubai, now

The airport in Dubai is very bright, even though it is the middle of the night. I wander through a shop where a woman wants to spray aftershave on me.

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I say. But the woman doesn’t believe me. She sprays the scent – Sauvage – onto a thin and perfectly rectangular strip of card and hands it to me. She smiles so forcefully I find myself taking the piece of card and walking away with it. I smell the paper. I imagine all those plants where the scent comes from. Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it. The smell does nothing for my head. I walk on and find myself in the airport bookshop. Some of the books are in Arabic but most are in English.

I look for something to read but at first see nothing but business books. I stare at the cover of one of them. It has the author on the front. He is wearing a suit and an unnatural pseudo-presidential smile. His teeth have an Arctic glare. He is called Dave Sanderson. The book, The Wealth Within You, has a subtitle: How to Harness Your Inner Billionaire.

I stare at it for quite some time, in a kind of trance. It is a popular modern idea. That the inner us is something different to the outer us. That there is an authentic realer and better and richer version of ourselves which we can only tap into by buying a solution. This idea that we are separate from our nature, as separate as a bottle of Dior perfume is from the plants of a forest.

As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered.

No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.

Ah.

I am, I realise, in a bad mood.

My eyes are dry from tiredness and from seven hours on an aeroplane. I don’t like flying. It isn’t so much the being in the air that bothers me. It is the arriving in a different country, with a wholly different culture and weather system, just a few hours after you have left Gatwick. Maybe it is because I still remember the size of things. No one understands that any more. People didn’t feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.

I move to a different section in the bookshop. The section, mainly books in English or English translation, is titled ‘Thought’. It is a much smaller area than the one for business books. Confucius. The ancient Greeks. Then I see a book, face out, with a simple academic cover.

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.

It nearly turns me to ash. I even say my daughter’s name out loud, to myself, as if I am close to her again, as if a part of us is contained in every book we’ve loved. I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’ – and I begin to feel the onset of potential tears.

My phone beeps. I hastily put the book down. I check my phone. A text message. It is from Omai: ‘Been too long. Can’t wait to catch up. Have booked us in for dinner at a place called the Fig Tree restaurant at 8. Should give you time to nap off your jetlag a bit.’

Jetlag.

It seems funny him writing the word. He belongs, in my mind, to a time when the idea of humans flying was as fantastical as, to us now, humans living on Neptune. Maybe even more so.

I text back: ‘See you there.’

I leave Montaigne and the airport bookshop and head over to a large window and wait for them to announce my flight. I lean my head against the glass and stare out beyond my reflection at the infinite darkness of the desert.

Plymouth, England, 1772

After our return I stayed around Plymouth. I liked it there. As with London, it was an easy place to disappear into. A town of seafarers, ragamuffins, criminals, runaways, drifters, musicians, artists, dreamers, loners, and I was, at various points, any and all of those things.

One morning I left my lodgings at the Minerva Inn and went to the new dockyard. There was a large naval warship sitting high on the water.

‘Impressive, ain’t she?’ said a man on the dockside, seeing my awe.

‘Yes. Yes, she is.’

‘Set to find new worlds.’

‘New worlds?’

‘Aye. That’s Cook’s ship.’

‘Cook?’

Then I heard footsteps behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder. I jumped.

‘My goodness, Mr Frears, you seem a little shaken.’

I turned to see a tall lean finely dressed gentleman, smiling kindly at me.

‘Oh, Mr Furneaux . . . it is a pleasure, sir.’

His astute eyes studied me a moment. ‘You never look a day older, Frears.’

‘Sea air, sir.’

‘Fancy more of it? Want to go back out there?’

He gestured towards the horizon beyond the harbour. ‘It will be different this time. Cook has prepared things a little better than Wallis.’

‘Are you sailing on Cook’s boat?’

‘Not exactly. I am accompanying him,’ he told me. ‘On the voyage. As a commander on the Adventure. I am assembling a crew. Would you like to be part of it?’

Somewhere above Australia, now

I am on a connecting flight between Sydney and the Gold Coast, feeling tired. I have spent most of the last two days either in aeroplanes or at airports. There is a baby crying at the back of the plane. It makes me think, momentarily, of Marion, when she was teething, and how worried Rose had been, imagining the pain could be fatal. In the same way every dog is similar to every other dog, every baby’s cry echoes every crying baby there has ever been.

And, on that note, there is a young couple in front of me. A head sleeping on a shoulder. A man’s head on a man’s shoulder, the way you never used to see. It is a touching sight, I suppose, but makes me jealous. I want a head on my shoulder, like Camille’s had been on mine, just before Hendrich’s call. Is this how I had once felt about Rose, at the beginning? Or is this something different? Maybe this is a different kind of love. Did it matter?

I think about how we have barely spoken a word to each other during the last week at school. I think about an awkward moment near the kettle in the staff room. She was rummaging through the teas, looking for chamomile. The silence screamed.

My mother had told me to live. After she had gone, I had to live. It was easy for her to say, but of course she was right. And it was an understandable wish. When you die the last thing you want is for your death to leak out and infect those left behind, for those loved ones to become a kind of living dead. And yet, inevitably, that often happens. It has happened to me.

But I sense it is getting closer. Life. I sense it, just inches ahead of me. Marion is part of it. The suddenly very real idea of finding her. I sleep and I dream of Omai. I dream of seeing him standing on a South Pacific beach staring out at sunset. And when I get to him I grab his arm and he crumbles away like sand and there is someone else, someone smaller, there beneath him, like a Russian doll. A child. A child with a long braid in her hair and wearing a green cotton dress.

‘Marion,’ I say.

And then she, too, crumbles into sand, into the beach itself, and I try to keep her intact even as the water washes her away.

And when I wake up, the baby is no longer crying and I am there – here. The plane has landed, and I know that in a matter of hours I will be seeing someone I haven’t seen for centuries. And I can’t help but feel terrified.

Huahine, Society Islands, 1773

Arthur Flynn, second lieutenant of the Adventure, sunburnt, sweltering in his once white shirt, knelt on the sand, holding bright red and white ribbons in his hands and, in clumsy, emphatic sign language, mimed tying them in his hair. He smiled an imitation of a pretty girl, quite a reach given his scorched face and scalp and untamed beard.

But still, his audience of little children seemed impressed. I had travelled enough to understand that laughter was pretty universal, at least among children. Even the older islanders, standing a little more po-faced behind, were suddenly smiling at this strange red-skinned Englishman playing the fool. Arthur handed a ribbon to the long-haired girl nearest to him – she could have been no more than six years old – and, after confirmation from her mother, she took it.

Then Arthur turned, and said to me, in a voice softer than his usual, ‘Frears, do you have the beads?’

Behind them, the two ships sat like inanimate elegant beasts transferred from another reality.

As we stayed there, giving out gifts and peace-brokering with ribbons, I saw a face in the crowd that I recognised. It was a man I had seen before.

He was holding a wooden board and he was wet from the sea. I had seen similar wooden boards on my last visit to the Pacific Islands. They were used by fishermen to go out to sea. They would stand up on them, riding waves. Sometimes they had seemed to do this wave riding simply for fun. But none of this explained how I could know this man. How could this be? I had never visited this island before. I tried to think. It didn’t take long before it came to me. It was the man whose hut I had refused to torch. The handsome one with the long hair and wide eyes. But that had been on Tahiti. It wasn’t a vast stretch of ocean he had travelled over, but it seemed ridiculous to imagine he’d done it on nothing but a board of wood. And in Tahiti he had been bedecked with necklaces and bracelets, denoting a status his unadorned chest and arms would suggest he no longer had.

He looked exactly as I had remembered him. I supposed four years wasn’t that long. His face looked at me with a kind of longing, a desperate need to communicate something.

I looked around, at Arthur and some of the other men, hoping perhaps that the man’s attention might be diverted elsewhere. But no. It stayed solely on me. He spoke words I couldn’t understand. Then, with his right hand, he pinched the ends of his fingers together and brought them to his chest. The fingers beat against his chest in rapid staccato succession. I understood the mime.

I.

Me.

Him.

Then he pointed to the sea, to the boats, then beyond to the horizon. Then he looked down at the sand and gave a look of either fear or disgust. He kept that expression as he turned to look behind him, towards the breadfruit trees and lush green jungle beyond the beach, before looking again to the boats and the ocean. He did this a few times until I was clear about what he was saying.

I heard boots in sand walking towards me. I saw Captain Cook and Commander Furneaux, together, sharing a mutual frown.

‘What is happening here, Fines?’ asked Cook.

‘Frears,’ corrected Furneaux, with soft authority.

Cook shook the correction away as if it were a midge-fly. ‘Tell us. There seems to be some sort of minor commotion with this . . . gentleman.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Well?’

‘I believe he wants to come with us.’

Pacific Ocean, 1773

His name was Omai.

We later learned, when his English was better, that his name was actually Mai, and what he had been saying was ‘I am Mai’ in Tahitian. Anyway, the name stuck, and he never corrected us.

When we stopped off at other islands he would try to get me to stand on his board. The use of ‘surf’ as a verb was still a long way away, but that is what he was doing, and he could stay upright for as long as he seemed to want to, whatever size the wave. Unlike myself, of course, who fell off to great laughter every time I tried to stand up on it. Still, I often like to think I was the first European ever to use a surfboard.

Omai was a quick learner. He grasped English with remarkable speed. I liked him, not least because he enabled me to escape the more mundane duties on deck. We would sit in the shade, or find a quiet corner below deck, and run through nouns and verbs and share a jar of pickled cabbage.

I talked to him a little about Rose and Marion. I showed him Marion’s coin. Taught him the word ‘money’.

He educated me about the world as he saw it.

Everything contained something called mana – every tree, every animal, every human.

Mana was a special power. A supernatural power. It could be good or evil but it always had to be respected.

One fine day we were out on deck and he pointed at the boards. ‘What is this called?’ he asked.

I followed the line of his finger. ‘That is called a shadow,’ I told him.

He told me mana lives in shadows and that there are lots of rules about shadows.

‘Rules? What kind of rules?’

‘It is very bad to stand on the shadow of a . . .’ He looked around, as if the word he was searching for was somewhere in the air. Then he saw Furneaux heading sternwards over the poop deck and pointed to him.

I understood. ‘Commander? Leader? Chief?’

He nodded. ‘When I first saw you, you did not stand on my shadow. You came near. But you did not stand on it. This was a sign that I could trust you. The mana inside you respected the mana inside me.’

I found it interesting that this seemed of more significance to him than my decision not to set fire to his home. I shifted a little distance away from him.

He laughed at me. Put a hand on my shoulder. ‘It is not bad when you know someone, just when you first meet them.’

‘Were you a chief?’

He nodded. ‘On Tahiti.’

‘But not on Huahine?’

‘No.’

‘So why did you move from Tahiti to live on Huahine?’

He was generally quite a light-hearted person, and remarkably relaxed for a man heading away from all he had ever known, but when I asked this his brow creased and he chewed on his top lip and he seemed almost hurt by it.

‘It is all right,’ I assured him. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

This is when he told me.

‘I know I can trust you,’ he said. ‘I know it as much as I know anything. You have been a good teacher. And you are a good friend. I also sense something about you. The way you talk about the past. The look in your eyes. The penny you have which you tell is old. All the knowledge you have. I think you are like me. You are a good friend.’ He kept saying it, as if needing confirmation.

‘Yes. We are good friends.’

‘Muruuru. Thank you.’

There was some understanding that passed between us then – a confidence to move out into the open.

Hollamby walked by. Hollamby, who I slept next to, had already told me that he thought it was a bad idea to have Omai on board: ‘He is a burden, eating the rations and bringing unknown curses with him.’ He gave us a sideways look, but let his eyebrows do the talking and walked on by.

‘I am older than other men,’ he said. ‘And I think you are too. Your face has not changed in five years. Not one bit.’

‘Yes,’ I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. I was too shocked to say anything else. It felt like the most terrifying and wonderful release, a century before seeing Dr Hutchinson, to find someone like me, and to be able to tell the truth. It was like being shipwrecked on an island for decades and then finding another survivor.

He stared at me and he was smiling. There was more relief than fear with him now. ‘You are like me. I am like you. I knew it.’ He laughed with relief. ‘I knew it.’

He hugged me. Our shadows merged. ‘It does not matter! Our mana is the same. Our shadows are one.’

I cannot express the magnitude of that moment enough. Yes, Marion was like me but I still hadn’t found her. And so Omai made me feel less alone. He made me feel normal. And I immediately wanted to know everything. Looking around, making sure the other crew were below deck or elsewhere, we began to talk.

‘Is this why you came? Is this why you wanted to leave the islands?’

He nodded. Nodding, it seemed, was universal. So was superstition. ‘Yes. It was difficult. At the beginning when in Tahiti it was good. They saw me as . . . as the special One. That is why I became a . . . a chief. They saw it as . . . proof that the mana inside me was good. That I was good. That I was half a man and half a god. No one ever dared come too close to me in the daylight in case they stepped on my shadow.’ He laughed, and stared out to sea, as if the memory was something he could almost see on the horizon. ‘And I did my best and I think I was a good chief but after many, many moons had passed things changed. Other men. They wanted to be chief. And I could not stop being chief. The only way to stop being a chief was to die. So I was . . .’

He mimed claustrophobia. Hands throbbing in the air near his head.

‘Trapped.’

‘Yes, I was trapped. So I had to go. I had to begin like the dawn. But a day is only meant to last so long and then they want the night. I had run out of places to go. I just wanted to live.’

I told him what had happened to my mother. About Manning. About Marion, being like us. I told him how Rose had been in danger because of me. I told him how much I missed her.

He smiled softly. ‘People you love never die.’

I had no idea of the sense of his words, but they stayed with me for centuries.

People you love never die.

‘In England they do not accept us either,’ I told him, returning to our topic. ‘You can tell no one on this ship about your condition. When I return to England, I must become someone else again. Already Mr Furneaux is a little suspicious.’

Omai looked a little worried. Touched his face. He was probably wondering how on earth he was going to hide.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You are exotic.’

‘Exotic? What is that word?’

‘Different. From far away. Far. Far. Like a pine-apple.’

‘A pine-apple? You don’t have pine-apples in England?’

‘There are probably about thirty in England. On mantelpieces.’

He looked confused. The sea splashed gently against the bow of the boat. ‘What is a mantelpiece?’

Byron Bay, Australia, now

We sit out on a veranda, surrounded by fairy lights and the indistinct buzz of happy conversation.

The last time I saw Omai, Australia was, to my mind, a new discovery. And yet Omai is still so recognisably the same. His face has broadened slightly – not fattened, just that broadening that happens with age – and there are a few lines around his eyes that stay there even when he stops smiling, but I think an innocent bystander would put his age at thirty-six. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt with a print of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, advertising an exhibition of her art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

‘It has been a long time,’ Omai says wistfully. ‘I missed you, dude.’

‘I’ve missed you too. Wow. And you say dude now? Suits you.’

‘Since the sixties. It’s kind of compulsory here. Surf thing.’

We are kicking things off with coconut chilli Martinis which Omai has tried before and insists I try too. I can see the sea from here, beyond the stubby palms and the vast beach, glimmering softly under the half moon.

‘I’ve never had a coconut chilli Martini before,’ I tell him. ‘That’s the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, still the optimist. ‘I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It’s the mana, you see. It’s everywhere. It’s never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.’

I laugh.

‘So how long have you been Sol Davis?’

‘Seventeen years, I guess. That’s when I came to Byron.’

I look around at all the happy Australians enjoying their Friday evening. A birthday is being celebrated. A collective roar of excitement erupts as the cake arrives with three sparklers sticking out of it. There is a shower of applause as the cake lands in front of a woman at the end of the table. She has an oversized badge pinned to her vest top. She is turning forty.

‘Just a baby,’ I say.

‘Forty,’ says Omai wryly. ‘Remember that?’

I nod. ‘Yes,’ I say sadly. ‘I remember. You?’

A sorrow on his face too. ‘Yeah, that was the year I had to leave Tahiti.’

He looks off into the distance, as if that other time and space could be seen somewhere in the darkness beyond the veranda. ‘I was a man god. The sun shone because of me. I was in league with the weather and the ocean and the fruit in the trees. And you’ve got to remember, back then, before the people of Europe came to Christianise us, well, men gods weren’t so uncommon. God wasn’t something up in the clouds. I mean, look at me, I could pass for a god, right?’

‘These Martinis are strong,’ I offer.

‘I have probably told you all this before.’

‘Probably. A long time ago.’

‘Long, long, long, long, long, long.’

A waitress comes over. I order a pumpkin salad to start and red snapper for main and Omai goes for dishes which, according to the waitress, ‘both have pork belly in them’.

‘I know,’ he says, flashing his smile. He is still the best-looking man I have ever seen.

‘Just thought I’d point it out, in case you want some variety.’

‘It’s still variety. Two different dishes.’

‘All right, sir.’

‘And two more of these,’ he says, raising his glass.

‘Gotcha.’

He holds the waitress’s gaze. She holds it back.

‘I know you,’ she says. ‘You’re the surfer, aren’t you?’

Omai laughs. ‘It’s Byron Bay. Everyone’s a surfer.’

‘No. Not like you. You’re Sol Davis, aren’t you?’

He nods, looks at me sheepishly. ‘For my sins.’

‘Wow. You’re pretty famous around here.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘No, sure you are. I saw you surf that tube. It was amazing. It’s on the internet.’

Omai smiles politely, but I can sense his awkwardness. After the waitress has gone he stares down at his right hand. He spreads the fingers wide, as if miming a starfish, then closes them together, makes a fist, turns his hand over. His skin is smooth and caramel and young-looking. Ocean-preserved. Anageria-preserved.

We chat some more.

Our starters arrive.

He begins to tuck in. He closes his eyes on the first mouthful and makes appreciative noises. I envy his easy access to pleasure.

‘So,’ he says, ‘what have you been up to?’

I tell him. About my life as a teacher. About my life before. Recent history. Iceland, Canada. Germany. Hong Kong. India. America. Then I talk about 1891. About Hendrich. The Albatross Society.

‘It’s people like us. There are lots of us. Well, maybe not lots.’

I explain about the help you’re given. About the Eight-Year Rule. About albas and mayflies. Omai stares at me, wide-eyed and baffled.

‘So what do you do?’ he asks. ‘I mean you?’

‘I go where Hendrich, the boss, tells me to go. I do assignments. I bring people in. Even that isn’t so bad. I recently went to Sri Lanka. It’s a comfortable life.’

Even to my ears ‘comfortable’ sounds like a euphemism.

He laughs, concerned. ‘Bring them in where?’

‘It’s not a particular place. What I mean is: I make people members.’

‘Make? How?’

‘Well, normally it’s a no-brainer. I explain how the society can protect them, handle identity switches – Hendrich has all kinds of contacts. It’s like a union. Insurance. Except we get paid, just for living.’

‘You’re quite the salesman. You really move with the times, don’t you?’

‘Listen, Omai. This isn’t a joke. We’re as unsafe now as we’ve ever been.’

‘Yeah. And yet, here we still are. Still breathing. In and out.’

‘There are dangers. You – right now – are in danger. There is an institute in Berlin. It knows about you. It has, over the years, taken people.’

Omai laughs. He is actually laughing. I think of Marion, missing, possibly, for all I know, taken, and I feel angry. I feel like he is challenging me, like an atheist in front of a Catholic. ‘Taken people? Wow.’

‘It’s true. And it’s not just them these days. There are biotech firms in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who want the ultimate competitive advantage, and we could give it them. We’re not human to them. We’re lab rats.’

He rubs his eyes. He looks tired, suddenly. I am tiring him.

‘Okay. So what do you do for this “protection”? What’s the catch?’

‘The catch is, there are certain obligations.’

He laughs, rubbing his eyes, as if my words are sleep to be shaken off. ‘Obligations?’

‘Once in a while you have to do something for the Albatross Society.’

He laughs louder. ‘That name.’

‘Yeah, it is a bit antiquated.’

‘What kind of things do you have to do?’

‘Different things. Things like this. Talk to people. Try to get them to sign up.’

‘Sign up? Are there pieces of paper?’

‘No, no, there’s no paper. Just good faith. Trust. The oldest kind of contract.’ I realise how like Hendrich I sound. The last time I had that feeling was Arizona, and that didn’t end well.

‘And what happens when people say no?’

‘They don’t, generally. It’s a good deal.’ I close my eyes. I remember firing the gun in the desert. ‘Listen, Omai, I am telling you. You are not safe.’

‘So what do I have to do?’

‘Well, the whole idea is for people not to gather moss. Hendrich, he’s always on about not getting too attached to people. And it makes sense for people to move on every eight years. Start somewhere new. Become someone else. And you’ve been here more than—’

‘I can’t do that. The moving thing.’

He looks pretty adamant. I know I have to be straight.

‘There is no choice. All members of the society have—’

‘But I haven’t chosen to become a member of the society.’

‘You become a member automatically. As soon as an alba is located they become a member.’

‘Alba, alba, alba . . . yada, yada, yada . . .’

‘To know of the existence of the society is to be part of it.’

‘A bit like life.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And what precisely does happen if I say no? If I refuse?’

I wait too long with the answer.

He leans back in his chair and shakes his head at me. ‘Wow, dude. It’s like the mafia. You’ve joined the mafia.’

‘I never opted in,’ I tell him. ‘That’s the whole point. But trust me, it makes sense . . . You see, if one alba is exposed, it endangers all albas. But you know you have to hide. You’ve been hiding. You told me . . .’

He shakes his head. ‘For thirty years I’ve been in Australia.’

I contemplate that.

For thirty years I’ve been in Australia.

‘I was told it was twenty.’

His face hardens a little. This isn’t good. None of this is good. I think of us on the ship, laughing. I think of afterwards, at the Royal Society in London, when Omai insisted I stay there with him. The fun we had. Drinking gin and telling lies to Samuel Johnson and the celebrities of the day. ‘Told? Who by? Have I been watched?’

‘I just don’t understand how you managed thirty years. Have you been moving around?’

‘Was in Sydney for thirteen years but been in Byron seventeen. Travelled the coast a little. Went up the Blue Mountains. Mainly, though, I’ve been in the same house.’

‘And no one’s been suspicious?’

He stares at me. I can see his nostrils expand and contract with the intensity of his breath.

‘People generally see what they want to see.’

‘But you’re on the internet, the waitress has even seen it. Someone filmed you. You’re attracting too much interest.’

‘You. You still think you have the fire in your hand. I am still the “Other” you want to steer to your will. Well, you can take that fire and put it in the ocean.’

Steady thyself.

‘Jesus, Omai. I’m trying to help you. This isn’t me. I’m just the middle man here. It’s Hendrich. He knows things. He can stop terrible things happening, but he can also’ – the terrible truth of it occurs to me – ‘he can also make very terrible things happen.’

‘Do you know what?’ He pulls out his wallet and delves inside and places some notes on the table and stands up. ‘If it’s not really you I’m talking to, this won’t be rude, will it?’

And I just sit there after he has walked away. The food comes and I tell the waitress I think he is coming back. But, of course, he doesn’t.

In honesty, I thought it was going to go differently. I thought we were going to catch up on old times and talk about all the good and horrifying things that had happened that we could once never have imagined. I thought we were going to talk about bicycles or cars or aeroplanes. Trains, telephones, photographs, electric lightbulbs, TV shows, computers, rockets to the moon. Skyscrapers. Einstein. Gandhi. Napoleon. Hitler. Civil rights. Tchaikovsky. Rock. Jazz. Kind of Blue. Revolver. Does he like ‘The Boys of Summer’? Hip-hop. Sushi bars. Picasso. Frida Kahlo. Climate change. Climate denial. Star Wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Beyoncé. Twitter. Emojis. Reality TV. Fake news. Donald Trump. The continual rise and fall of empathy. What we did in the wars. Our reasons to carry on.

But, no, we talked about none of that.

I had blown it.

I was, in short, a fucking idiot. And a friendless one.

People you love never die.

That is what Omai had said, all those years ago.

And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

Omai lives on the edge of town, at 352 Broken Head Road. A one-storey clapboard house.

You can see the sea from here. Of course you can. Omai would have lived in the sea if he could have done.

I wait a couple of minutes after knocking. My head is a dull ache. I hear soft noises from inside the house. The door opens a little. An old woman with short white hair peers out from behind the latch chain. Late eighties, I would have said. Face as lined as a map. Standing asymmetrically from arthritis and osteoporosis. Worried, cataract-infested eyes. Luminous yellow cardigan. She is holding an electric tin opener.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I think I might have the wrong address. Sorry for bothering you so late.’

‘Don’t worry. I never sleep these days.’

She is closing the door. Hastily I say it: ‘I’m looking for Sol. Sol Davis. Is this the right address? I’m an old friend. I was having a meal with him tonight and I’m worried I’ve upset him.’

She hesitates a moment.

‘Tom. My name is Tom.’

She nods. She has heard of me. ‘He’s gone surfing.’

‘In the dark?’

‘It’s his favourite time to do it. The ocean never goes home. That’s what he always says.’

‘Where does he surf?’

She thinks. Looks down at the cement path in front of her door, as if there is some kind of clue there. ‘Damn my old brain . . . Tallow Beach.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

I sit on the sand and watch him, lit by the full moon. A small shadow rising up a wave. And then I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.

Hendrich.

To not answer it would only make him suspicious.

‘Is he with you?’

‘No.’

‘I can hear the sea.’

‘He’s surfing.’

‘So you can talk?’

‘I won’t have long. I’m meeting him later.’

‘Is he sold?’

‘He will be.’

‘Have you explained everything?’

‘In the process. Not everything.’

‘The film of him on YouTube now has four hundred thousand views. He needs to disappear.’

Omai vanishes under a wave. The head rises up again. It seems the perfect way to live. Riding a wave, falling off, getting back on. So much of life seems to be based around the idea of rising, of building something up – income or status or power – of living a kind of upward life, as vertical as a skyscraper. But Omai’s existence seems as natural as the ocean itself, as wide and open as the horizon. He is on his board again, on his front, paddling with his arms over the swell of the water.

‘He will, I’m sure.’

‘Oh, I know he will. For all our sakes. It’s not just Berlin. There’s a biotech research firm in Beijing and they’re—’

I have heard this stuff for over a century. I know I should be concerned, especially with Marion out there somewhere, but it is just another noise in the world. Like water against sand.

‘Yes. Listen, Hendrich, I’d better go. I think he’s coming out of the water.’

‘Plan A. That’s all you are, Tom. Remember, there’s always a Plan B.’

‘I hear you.’

‘You’d better.’

After the call I just sit there, on the sand. From here the waves sound like breath. Inhale. Exhale.

Twenty minutes later Omai is out of the water.

He sees me and keeps walking, carrying his board.

‘Hey!’ I follow him up the beach. ‘Listen, I’m your friend. I’m trying to protect you.’

‘I don’t need your protection.’

‘Who is the woman, Omai? The woman in your house?’

‘That’s none of your business. And stay away from my house.’

‘Omai. Jesus, Omai. Fuck. This is important.’

He stops on the rough grass at the fringe of the beach. ‘I have a good life. I don’t want to hide any more. I just want to be myself. I want to live a life of integrity.’

‘You can move anywhere in the world. Hawaii. Indonesia. Anywhere you want. They have good surf in a lot of places. The thing with the ocean is it all joins up. It’s all the same mass of water.’ I try to think. I try to find something in our shared past that will break through the stubborn walls of his mind. ‘Can you remember what Dr Johnson told us, that first week after the voyage? At that meal they did for you, at the Royal Society. About integrity?’

Omai shrugs. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Come on, don’t you remember? We ate partridge. He told us that you always had to be ready for new knowledge. While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless. I’m trying to give you knowledge and all you are giving me back is integrity. Integrity that is going to get you killed and risk everything.’

‘And do you want some knowledge, Tom?’

I gesture a ‘go ahead’.

He closes his eyes, as if taking a shard of glass from his foot. ‘All right, I will give you some information. I have been like you. I moved around. All over the Pacific. Anywhere questions wouldn’t be asked. Samoa. The Solomon Islands. Lautoka in Fiji. Sugar City. New Zealand. Even went back to Tahiti. Hopping around. Where necessary I formed the right connections. Found little ways into the underground. Got fake documents. Always starting afresh. Wiping the slate twice a decade. Then things started to change.’

‘How?’

A man walks by, a late middle-aged man in a faded Quiksilver T-shirt and frayed cut-off jeans and flip-flops. He is on the beach path, heading onto the sand with a joint and can of Coke. He is mumble-singing a sad but indiscernible tune. He is a peaceful, oblivious stoned drunk who wants nothing to do with us. He sits heavily on the sand, to smoke and watch the waves, well out of earshot.

Omai sits down too, placing his wet board on the sandy grass and sitting cross-legged on it. I join him.

He stares out at the sea with sad fondness, as if it is a memory. Moments pass, unregistered. ‘I fell in love.’

Obviously this raises questions but I keep them silent for now.

‘You used to tell me about love, didn’t you? You used to tell me about that girl you fell in love with. The one you married. The mother of Marion. What was she called?’

‘Rose.’ To say her name, on a beach in Australia in the twenty-first century, makes me feel a strange and dizzy sensation. The distance of time and place fuses with the closeness of emotion. I place my hands on the grass and the sand, as if needing to feel something solid, as if there are elemental traces of her there.

‘Well, I found my Rose. She was beautiful. Her name was Hoku. I get headaches, nowadays, when I think of her.’

I nod. ‘Memory headaches. I’ve been getting a lot of them too, recently.’

I wonder, for a moment, if Hoku is the old woman with the tin opener that I had seen in the house, though this idea is quickly put to rest.

‘We were only together seven years. She died in the war . . .’

I wonder which one. And where. Second World War, I assume, and I’m right.

‘That was when I moved to New Zealand and got some fake papers and signed up to fight. There was never an easier time to fake your identity. They accepted anyone then. They didn’t pry too deeply. Not that I did much fighting. Was sent to Syria and sat and baked there for a bit. Then Tunisia, for more baking with a bit of actual action thrown in. Saw some things. It was intense. What about you? Did you fight in that one?’

I sigh. ‘I wasn’t allowed. Hendrich thought the combination of science and ideology was the most dangerous thing for us. And he was right, but there were the Nazis, with all their deluded obsessions about creating the perfect race. Their pseudo-science eugenics people were onto us. They’d taken over the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin and discovered their research into us, into albas, and they were after as many of us as possible . . . Anyway, Hendrich was going through a paranoid phase. He didn’t want any of us involved in the war. And, yes, while you were saving civilisation I was being a short-sighted asthmatic librarian in Boston. I still hate myself for that. I suppose I have tried to avoid love the way Hendrich has wanted us to avoid war. To try to stay alive without any more pain.’

A distant siren wails on a road somewhere beyond.

Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’ I think of Camille, sitting on the bench in the park, reading Tender Is the Night, as Omai continues. ‘I’ve been trying to find the point of it all. I used to believe in mana. Everyone did in those days, on the islands. I think I still do, you know, in a sense. Not as a superstition but as an idea of something. Something inside us. Something still not explained that doesn’t come from the sky or the clouds or some palace in Heaven but from inside here.’ He pats his chest. ‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’

We fall quiet after that.

The drunk man is now lying down, staring up at the stars. He stubs his joint out on the sand.

A minute passes. Maybe two. Then Omai feels ready to say it.

‘We had a baby.’ His voice rolls as soft as the sea. ‘We called her Anna.’

I try to absorb this. The significance of it. I think of Marion. Then it clicks.

‘That was her, wasn’t it? The woman in your house is . . .’

The smallest of nods.

‘She’s not like your daughter. She aged. In real time. She got married. But her husband, my son-in-law, he died of cancer thirty years ago. She’s lived with me ever since.’

‘So she knows about you?’

He laughs. It is, admittedly, a stupid question, but I still find it such an alien idea, that a mayfly could know such a thing about a loved one, and be fine with that, and not feel the risk. Of course, Rose knew about me, and my mother too, but that knowledge was torment, and drove me apart from both of them. ‘She knows. She knows. Her husband knew too.’

‘And the secret didn’t get out?’

‘Who would believe a secret like that?’

‘Some people. Dangerous people.’

The way he looks at me right then makes me feel weak, pathetic. A coward on the run.

‘A wave can kill you. Or you can ride it. It’s sometimes more dangerous to shy away. You can’t live your life in fear, Tom. You have to be prepared to get on your board and stand on your feet. If you are in the barrel of a wave you have to ignore the fear. You have to be in that moment. You have to carve on through. You get scared, and the next thing you know you are off your board and smashing your head on a rock. I’m never going to live in fear. I can’t do it for you, Tom, I just can’t. I have run away too often. I feel at home now. I love you, man, I do, but I don’t care if Captain Furneaux’s ghost comes walking along the sand, I’m not going anywhere with you.’

And then he stands up, and takes the board with him.

‘I’m going to put this right,’ I find myself saying. ‘I’m going to put this right.’

He nods but keeps walking, his bare feet now on the concrete path, and I turn to see the stoner on the beach raising his hand at me and I give a small wave back. I lie back in the sand and think of the war Omai fought in that I didn’t, because of Hendrich. I sense it is nearing my time to fight again. My phone starts to vibrate, buzzing against my thigh like something alive, and I just let it ring and wonder what the hell I am going to do.

I fall asleep on the beach. When I wake up, the morning light is bleeding into the sky and I go back to the hotel and eat and check my messages and find it weird that Hendrich only tried to call once. I go back to the room and have a little trouble with the wi-fi but eventually get online and go on Facebook and see that Camille hasn’t updated. I want to talk to her. I want to message her. But know I can’t. I am dangerous. While I am still a part of the Albatross Society I am the thing I need to protect her from.

I curl up into a foetal ball on the bed and cry shuddering tears and wonder if I am having a breakdown.

‘Fuck you, Hendrich,’ I whisper up to the ceiling. ‘Fuck this.’

I leave the hotel on foot and I keep walking around trying to pace away my tears, and think. I need to think. I walk along the clifftop and along the beach. I head to the Cape Byron lighthouse and stare out at the sea.

I remember staring out at the Antarctic Ocean from the deck of the Adventure, caught up in Cook’s foolish greedy quest for a land larger than Australia.

There comes a moment in every life when we realise there is no land beyond the ice. There is just more ice. And then the world we know continues again.

You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love.

I think of Camille. I think of her voice. I think of her head tilting up to the sun. I think of the fear as she fell off her chair.

I suddenly realise it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that we age differently. It doesn’t matter that there is no way of resisting the laws of time. The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.

I walk inland and find a lagoon. The water is a deep delicious green with rocks and lush vegetation all around. I have lived a long time but I don’t know the names of most of the plants. Nor do I know the name of the lagoon itself. It is so nice to be somewhere I don’t know. To be somewhere new, when the world has felt so stale and familiar. Two small waterfalls pour into the lagoon, cancelling all other noise. I look at the falling water until it seems like a bride’s veil.

I have no wi-fi. No phone reception. It is calm here. The air fragrant. Even the water sounds like a shush to the world. I sit down on a log and notice something. My head stays painless.

I know something absolutely.

There is no way I am going to convert Omai. And there is also no way I am going to kill him. I inhale the fresh flower-scented air and close my eyes.

I hear a noise that isn’t water.

A rustle, from a bush near the narrow path behind me. Maybe it is an animal. But, no, I get the sense of someone approaching. Someone human. A tourist, maybe.

I turn around.

I see a woman and she is holding a gun and she is pointing it at me. I feel a pulse of shock.

The shock is not from the sight of the gun.

The shock is from the sight of her.

On the face of it she looks so different. Her hair is dyed blue, for one thing. She is tall. Taller than I thought she would ever be. She has tattoos on her arms. She looks entirely twenty-first century, with her T-shirt (‘People Scare Me’) and jeans and lip-ring and orange plastic watch and her anger. She looks, also, like a woman in her late thirties, and not the girl I said goodbye to four hundred years ago. But it is her. Eyes are their own proof.

‘Marion.’

‘Don’t say that name.’

‘It’s me.’

‘Look back at the water.’

‘No, Marion, I’m not going to.’

I stand up and keep looking at her. The shock is immense. I try so hard not to think of the gun that is inches in front of my face or the death that could be seconds away. I try to see nothing except my daughter.

‘You are the reason I am still alive. Your mother told me to find you. And I knew you were somewhere. I knew it.’

‘You left us.’

‘Yes, I did. I left you and I regret it. I left you to save your life. To save your mother’s life. She wanted me to go. It was the only way. We’d escaped London but we couldn’t escape the reality. I had watched my mother drown because of me. Do you know what it’s like, to have that guilt inside you, Marion? You don’t want it. You don’t want to kill me for the same reason. Is this Hendrich? Did he tell you to do this? Has he recruited you? Has he brainwashed you? Because that’s what he does, Marion, he brainwashes people. He can be persuasive. He’s been around for nearly a thousand years. He knows how to manipulate.’

‘You never wanted me. That’s what you told Hendrich. You never wanted to be a father.’

This is shock on top of shock. Hendrich had found Marion and he hadn’t told me. The one thing he knew I desperately wanted to know – where she was – he had hidden. How long had we been in the same society, without my knowing?

I could hardly get the air required to speak.

‘No, no, that’s not the truth. Marion, listen, I’ve been trying to find you. Please? When was . . . when did?’

The gun is still there. I contemplate grabbing her arm and seizing it. But this is my daughter, this is Marion, this is the absence I have always felt. I can talk to her. If Hendrich can talk to her so can I.

‘You wanted to find me because I was the one person in this world who knew about you who you didn’t trust. You didn’t care about me, you hadn’t seen me for centuries. You just wanted to protect yourself and you asked the Albatross Society to find me and get rid of me.’

‘That is the exact opposite of the case.’

‘I saw the letter you wrote to Hendrich decades ago.’

‘What letter?’

‘I saw it. In your own handwriting. I saw the envelope. I saw what you said. I saw your conditions of joining the society. It killed me inside. It sent me fucking insane. Depression. Panic disorder. Psychosis. I’ve had it fucking all because I found out my own father who I loved more than anything in the world wanted me dead. You see, I wanted to find you too. You were the thing that kept me going. To know that the one thing that kept me going wanted to kill me was too much. I don’t owe you a fucking thing, Dad.’

She is crying now. Her face is steel but she is crying, and I love her so much I feel the force of it like the ever-flowing waterfalls and I want everything to be okay. I want her to know that it could be.

‘Hendrich lies. He fakes things. Gets other people to fake things. Sometimes that works for us and sometimes it works against us. He has connections and money, Marion. Got rich by hyping up the tulip trade and never lost it.’

‘Agnes verified it. Agnes told me it was true. She said that I was the reason you had to leave and you hated me for it. You fuck.’

‘I have never said I hated you. Agnes is so deep inside his pocket she can’t see daylight. Marion, I love you. I am not a perfect person. I wasn’t a perfect father. But I have always loved you. I have been searching for you for ever. For ever, Marion. You were such an amazing child. I have looked for you for ever. Every day I have missed you.’

I picture her, close to the window, grabbing the last light of the day so she could finish reading The Faerie Queene. I picture her sitting up in her bed, playing the pipe, determined to get the notes right.

She is still crying, but the gun stays targeted at me. ‘You said you were coming back. You never came back.’

‘I know, I know. Because I was the danger, remember? The signs and words they scratched on the door? The witchfinder? The gossip? You knew what was happening. You knew what had happened to my own mother. I was the problem. So I had to go away. Like you had to go away.’

She clenches her eyes closed, as if making a fist with her face. ‘Motherfucker,’ she says.

I could make an easy grab for the gun now, but I don’t.

For centuries she has been my only reason to go on living. But now, I realise, I actively want to live. For the sake of life itself. For the sake of possibility and the future and the possibility of something new.

‘I remember you playing “Under the Greenwood Tree”,’ I tell her. ‘On that little pipe. The one I got from Eastcheap market. Can you remember? Can you remember when I taught you to play that thing? You struggled at first. You never seemed to be able to cover the holes with your fingers, not fully, but then one day you just got it. And you played the pipe in the street, even though your mother didn’t want you to . . . She never wanted attention. For reasons you can probably now understand.’

She says nothing. I stare out at the water, and at the trees on the other side of the lagoon. I can hear her breathing.

I put my hand in my pocket.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks, her voice so quiet it is almost drowned by the water.

I take my wallet out. ‘Just wait one second.’ I pull the small sealed polythene bag out and hold it in the air. She looks at the thin dark fragile coin inside.

‘What is that?’

‘Can’t you remember that day in Canterbury? The sun was shining. You were playing the pipe and someone placed this in your hand. And you gave it to me that last day and said I had to think of you. This here, this penny, it gave me hope. It kept me alive. I wanted one day to return it to you. So here. Here you go.’

I hold it out for her. Slowly she raises the arm not holding the pistol. I place the coin on her palm. Uncertainly she lowers the gun. Her fingers curl around the coin, slowly, like a lotus flower closing its petals.

She looks dazed. She says something which I don’t hear, as she leans into me, and then before I know it she is crying in spasms on my shoulder and I hold her and want to press away all the lost centuries between us.

I want to know everything. I want to spend the next four hundred years hearing about her life to now in real time. But when she pulls away and wipes her eyes she has an anxious look to her.

‘He’s here,’ she says, staring at me with her mother’s green eyes. ‘Hendrich. He’s here.’

Hendrich had decided to escort Marion to Australia. He had booked into the same hotel as her, the Byron Sands. He had been worried, from when he first asked me, that I wouldn’t be able to do the Omai job. He had – and in truth I knew this – been worried about me for a while. Ever since Sri Lanka, and the moment I had decided I wanted to return to London.

Marion had been told to follow me unseen. She wasn’t expected to kill me which was the one thing we had on our side.

‘It’s going to be fine, Marion,’ I had told her, petrified I was telling her another lie. ‘All of it. It’s all going to be fine.’

It is evening now. Marion and Hendrich are eating dinner together in the Byron Sands.

‘You must not even flicker,’ I told her. ‘You must be the person you were an hour ago. In front of him you must absolutely believe you want me dead.’

I stay out. I am walking along a coastal road near the Byron Sands, in case Marion needs me, with the evening calm of grass and beach and sea juxtaposing with the intensity of my mind, roaming beyond the streetlamps into darkness.

I am on the phone. I am trying to call Camille. Hendrich had heard her voice, that day when I was drunk in the park. For all I know he might have an alba on assignment in London now – Agnes or another – ready to kill her and mask her death as a suicide.

‘Pick up,’ I say, uselessly into the air. ‘Pick up, pick up . . .’

But she doesn’t. So I send her a text.

‘I’m sorry about the way I was. There is more I need to explain. And I will. I just want to tell you that you should get away. You might be in danger. Leave your flat. Go somewhere. Somewhere public.’

I send the text.

My heart beats wildly.

All my life, I realise, I have been dogged by fear. Hendrich had promised to be an end to those fears but all he had done was accentuate them. He controlled people by fear. He had controlled me by fear and he controlled Marion by fear. When it was just me, it was hard to see, but seeing how he had manipulated Marion, lying to her and me in the process, had made me realise the Albatross Society ran on secrets and the manipulation of its members, all to serve Hendrich’s increasing paranoia about external threats. Biotech companies aiming to stop the ageing process were his latest area of concern: one called GeneControl Therapies and another called StopTime that were both investing in stem cell technology that could one day prevent humans ageing.

Hendrich held on to the idea that those scientists at the Berlin institute had been killers, and he always had some new conspiracy theory to work with. Albas knew it was hard to be their true selves, and often had memories of horrific injustices, as I did. But I was no longer prepared to let the long shadow of William Manning shroud my judgement. The more I thought about the threat, the more I realised the threat was Hendrich himself.

He had tainted everything. Even the reunion with Marion.

I get a text from Camille. The text says: ‘????’

A taxi rolls by. The only car on the road.

Then my phone vibrates.

It is not Camille, but Marion.

‘He’s going to see Omai.’

‘What?’

‘He’s just leaving the restaurant. He’s going. He’s just got in a taxi. He’ll be at the house in ten minutes.’

A large yellow-striped lizard scuttles amid palm trees.

‘I just saw the taxi. What’s he going to do?’

‘He didn’t say. He told me to wait. I couldn’t push it. He was suspicious enough.’

‘Marion, has he got a gun?’

‘I don’t know. But—’

I am already running north to Broken Head Road before she finishes her sentence.

Canterbury, England, 1617

‘Father.’

Marion was looking up at me from her pillow. Her eyes were heavy with worry. She sighed. I’d been telling her about the birds that disappeared to the moon and lived there, on the side we couldn’t see.

‘Yes, Marion?’

‘I wish we were on the moon.’

‘Why is that, Marion?’

She frowned, deeply. As deep as only she could frown. ‘Someone spat at Mother. He came up to the stall and he stood there. He was wearing nice gloves. But he made a face like a gargoyle, and said no more words than a gargoyle, and he gave Ma the most horrid look, and then he gave me the same eyes and Ma didn’t like the way he was looking at me so she said, “Do you want any flowers, mister?” And I suppose she asked it a little harshly but that was because she felt nervous.’

‘So he spat at her?’

Marion nodded. ‘Yes. He waited a moment more and then he spat in her face.’ She clenched her jaw so tight I could see the muscles shift beneath her face.

I took this in. ‘And did the man say anything more? Did he explain himself?’

Marion frowned. The anguish in her eyes made her look older. I could easily picture the woman she would become. ‘He said nothing. He left Ma wiping herself, with all the hawkers and folk from town staring at us.’

‘And did he act peculiar to anyone else?’

‘No. Only to us.’

I kissed her forehead. I pulled the blanket up.

‘Sometimes,’ I told her, ‘the world is not how we wish it to be. Sometimes people can disappoint us. Sometimes people can do terrible things to others. You must be careful in this life. You see, I am different. You know that, don’t you? The rest of the world ages forwards and I age to the side, it appears.’

Her face sharpened. She was lost in violent imaginings. ‘I hope that man gets sick. I hope he dies in agony for shaming Ma like that. I’d like to see him hanging and his legs kicking wild and have him sliced into quarters and his innards slip out. I’d like to pull out his eyes and feed them to a dog.’

I looked at her. The fury was a force that you could almost feel in the air.

‘Marion, you are still a child. You must not think this way.’

She calmed a little. ‘I was scared.’

‘But what is it that Montaigne teaches us? About fear?’

She nodded slowly, as if Montaigne himself was also in the room. ‘“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”’

I nod. ‘Now, hear me, Marion. If anything were to happen to you, if you were ever to become like me, if you were different, you must learn to build a shell around yourself. A shell as hard as a walnut. A shell no one else can see, but one you know is there. Do you understand what I am saying?’

‘I think I might.’

‘Be a walnut.’

‘People crack walnuts. And eat them.’

I suppressed a smile. There was nothing I could say to Marion sometimes.

A little later, after a jar of ale, I lay beside Rose, fearing for a future I already knew was against us. And I felt sick, knowing the time would arrive when I’d have to leave them. When I’d have to run away, and keep running, for however much life I had been given. Away from Canterbury. Away from Rose. Away from Marion. Away from myself. I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living. And I lay there, trying to find a route to a far distant future, where things might be better. Where somehow the course of my life had re-routed and headed homewards once more.

Byron Bay, Australia, now

You can hear the crashing of waves quite clearly on Broken Head Road. Where they break against the side of the cliff. It is quite easy for the sound of petrol splashing against timber to be disguised. I smell it before I see what he is doing.

‘Hendrich,’ I say, ‘stop!’

In the dark he almost looks his age. Stooped and thin and withered, like a Giacometti sculpture in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. One of his arms hangs down, crooked, struggling awkwardly with the weight of the petrol can. But there is an urgent energy to his movement.

He stops for a second and looks at me with blank eyes. He isn’t smiling. I note this because I have rarely seen Hendrich without a smile.

‘You told me you couldn’t be the one to burn his house down in Tahiti. You were never really a finisher, were you, Tom? Well, history has a way of correcting its mistakes.’

‘Don’t do this. Omai isn’t a danger.’

‘As you get older you not only get a certain aptitude for people, Tom, you also get an insight into time itself. You’re probably not quite there yet but there are moments where the understanding is so profound that you see time both ways. Forwards and back. When they say “to understand the future you must understand the past”, I don’t think they know the real truth of it, Tom. You can actually see the future. Not the whole of it. Just pieces. Flashes. Like reverse memories. We forget some of our future just as we forget some of our past, it seems. But I’ve seen enough. I knew you weren’t to be trusted any more to finish a job. I’ve sensed it for some time. I knew where this was going.’

‘It doesn’t matter. None of this matters.’

‘Of course it matters. We need to protect ourselves.’

‘Fuck, Hendrich. That’s bullshit. You mean protect yourself. That’s all you’ve ever meant. The society is a society of one. Come on, Hendrich. It’s not the eighteen hundreds any more. You knew about Marion. You lied to me.’

He shakes his head. ‘I did something you find hard. I kept my promise. I told you I would find her and I found her. Something you were unable to do. I keep people safe.’

‘By setting fire to their homes?’

‘You have your nose against the canvas, Tom. Stand back and see the whole picture. We are under threat like never before. Berlin, biotech, everything. Things don’t get better. Look at the world, Tom. It’s all fucked. Mayflies don’t live long enough to learn. They are born, they grow up, they make the same mistakes, over and over. It’s all a big circle, spinning around, creating more destruction every time. Look at America. Look at Europe. Look at the internet. Civilisation never stays around for long before the Roman Empire is falling again. Superstition is back. Lies are back. Witch hunts are back. We’re dipping back into the Dark Ages, Tom. Not that we ever really left them. We need to stay a secret.’

‘But all you’ve done is replace superstition with more superstition. You lie. You found my daughter and you sent her to kill me.’

‘I’m not the only one who lies, Tom, am I now?’

He pulls a chrome lighter from his pocket. It was the same lighter he’d had the first time I met him, back in the Dakota. ‘Gave up smoking years ago. They lynch you in LA for less. But I kept this memento. You know, like you with that stupid penny. The petrol, though, the petrol I had to buy.’

He flicks a flame into life. Suddenly, I understand this is real. There is no surprise, really, that Hendrich is willing to kill Omai, or me, or that he kept Marion’s whereabouts secret. Ever since I joined the society I have known what he is capable of. The surprise is that he is willing to expose himself like this, endanger himself, be this close to the heat.

‘Omai!’ I shout. ‘Omai! Omai! Get out of the house!’

And then it happens.

The peak of the crescendo. A cascade of everything. All the paths of my life intersecting in one spot.

As I begin to run towards Hendrich, a voice rings out, puncturing the night: ‘Stop!’

It is, of course, Marion.

And then Hendrich stops, for a moment, and seems suddenly weak and vulnerable, like a little boy lost in the woods. He glances from Marion to me and back again. Simultaneously, Omai steps barefoot out of the house, carrying his aged daughter in his arms.

‘Look at this. Isn’t it so sweet? A father and daughter get-together. That’s your weakness, you see. That’s what separates you from me. This desire to be like them. The mayflies. I never had that. I knew, before I acquired my first fortune, years before I sold my first tulip, that the only way to be free was to have no one at all.’

A shot rings out. The noise of it shakes from the sky. Marion’s face looks hard – yes, hard as a walnut – but her eyes are now filled with tears and her hands are shaking.

She’s hit her target. Black lines of blood trickle from his shoulder down his arm. But he is raising the can of petrol and tilting it, pouring the fluid over himself.

‘In the end, it turns out I was Icarus after all.’

He drops the can as he brings the flame close to his chest. I think, or imagine, I see a small smile, a faint signal of contented acceptance, the moment before he violently blooms into fire. His flaming body staggers away from the house. He keeps walking across the grass towards the sea. The cliff.

He is heading to the edge, his feet pushing through the grass that grows wilder nearer to the edge. The grass smokes and singes and glows at its tips, like a hundred tiny fireflies. He keeps walking; there is no moment of pause or reflection, but nor is there a scream of pain. Just a continued staggering momentum. A determination, a last act of control.

‘Hendrich?’ I say. I don’t know why his name comes out as a question. I suppose because, even in his last moments, he is a collection of mysteries. I have lived a long life but it is never long enough to be entirely free from surprise.

‘Oh, man,’ Omai keeps saying. ‘Oh, man, oh, man . . .’

And his instinct, as a good person, is to go over to him. So he places his daughter down on the grass.

‘No!’ Marion says. Still holding the gun. I sense now that Hendrich is not only the man who wanted her to kill me, but the man who spat on her mother’s face, the one whose guts she’d wanted to see. He is the unavenged William Manning. He is every single person who has hurt her in the space between, and I sense there have been a lot. ‘Leave him. The motherfucker. Stand back. Stay where you are. Leave him.’

So we leave him. And all is silent. No cars pass by, no one sees a thing. The only witness is our side of the gape-mouthed moon, as always. And the vertical fire of Hendrich walks and walks and then isn’t walking at all. He is gone. The ground that had been glowing and shifting from the light of the fire is now in sudden darkness. He has fallen. The temporal distance between him walking and him not being there is so minute it is imperceptible.

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?

London, now

Marion.

My daughter. Rose’s daughter.

She’s still the same little girl.

That’s what people say, isn’t it? About children grown up. Well, in truth, I can’t say it about Marion. She is not the same little girl.

Yes, the intensity had always been there. The sensitive intelligence. The bookishness. The desire – once no more than a child’s fantasy – to exact bloody vengeance on those who wronged her.

But there are a thousand new things there now.

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.

For instance, she is scared of Abraham. She now has ‘a thing about dogs’. I daren’t ask her what happened.

Abraham likes her straight away, from the moment we pick him up from the dog sitter, but Marion sits well away from him, casting nervous glances in his direction.

She is very open about the things she has done.

She tells me some of the places she has lived, other than London and Heidelberg and LA. Rouen, that had been her first trip overseas. Then Bordeaux. She knew the language, and both had strong Montaigne associations, so that had guided her. But there had been other places in more recent times: Amsterdam, Vancouver, Scotland. She had lived in Scotland for about a hundred years, apparently, from the 1840s onwards. She had moved around. The Highlands. The East Neuk of Fife. Shetland. Edinburgh. She had been a weaver. She’d had a loom. ‘A travelling loom,’ she says, and laughs a little, which is rare.

She is on Citalopram for depression. ‘It spaces me out, but I need that.’ She says she gets strange dreams all the time, and often has panic attacks. Sometimes she has panic attacks about having panic attacks. Vicious circles. She had one on the plane, coming back from Australia, but I hardly even noticed, except she became quite still.

We had left Australia with no problems at all. She had not flown there with Hendrich, and his body hadn’t yet been discovered, so no questions were asked. He had changed his identity, of course, to arrive in Australia, so in a sense he didn’t exist at all. He had disguised his life so well his death became, like every other aspect of him, one more secret.

I had said goodbye to Omai. I had told him that at some point it might be a good idea to move and he said he’d think about it and that was that. He wasn’t going to move. He was going to stay still and, well, only the future knows what that means.

I write an email. I type it out and keep very nearly pressing ‘send’. The email is to Kristen Curial, who heads up StopTime, the leading part-government-funded biotech company that is investigating ways to halt the cellular damage behind illness and ageing. One of the ones Hendrich was paranoid about.

Dear Kristen,

I am 439 years old. And I can prove it. I believe I can help you with your research.

Tom

And then I attach the Ciro’s picture and a selfie of me now, complete with arm scar. I stare at the email and see how ridiculous it looks and then save it in drafts. Maybe later.

Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word ‘motherfucker’ in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt’s day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a motherfucker. (There is ‘never anything on the motherfucker’.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a motherfucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.

She also tells me that she had a ‘short spell’ on hard drugs from 1963 to 1999.

‘Oh,’ I say, feeling like fatherhood is something I have lost the knack of. ‘That’s . . . uh . . .’

She is staying with me for a little while. Right now she is sitting on the chair, away from Abraham, vaping, and humming an old tune. Very old. ‘Flow My Tears’ by John Dowland. A tune I used to play on the lute when she was a little girl, before she ever played the pipe. She doesn’t say anything about it, and nor do I. There is a vibration to her voice. A softness. There is still a soft nut beneath the shell.

‘Do you miss Ma?’ she asks me.

‘I miss her every day. Even after all these years. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

She smiles sadly, then sucks on her e-cigarette. ‘Has there been anyone else?’

‘No . . . mainly.’

‘Mainly?’

‘Well, there hasn’t been. For centuries. But there is someone at school. Camille. I like her. But I feel like I might have messed it up.’

‘Love is a motherfucker.’

I sigh. ‘Of course it is.’

‘You should just shoot for it. Tell her you messed up. Tell her why you messed up. Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’

‘Honesty is a motherfucker,’ I say, and she laughs.

She goes quiet for a little while. Remembers something. ‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’

‘Is that . . . ?’

‘Montaigne himself.’

‘Wow. You still like him?’

‘Some of it’s a bit dodgy nowadays, but yeah. He was a wise man.’

‘What about you? Has there been anyone?’

‘There was. Yes. There have been a few. But I’m fine on my own. I’m happier on my own. It always got too complicated. You know, the age thing. I have generally found men to be quite a disappointment. Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am working on that. Reading, painting, playing the piano. Shooting nine-hundred-year-old men.’

‘You play the piano?’

‘I find it offers more than the tin pipe.’

‘Me too.’ I am enjoying this. This is our first real proper conversation since Australia. ‘When did you get your lip pierced?’

‘About thirty years ago. Before it was a thing everyone had.’

‘Does it ever hurt?’

‘No. Are you judging me?’

‘I’m your father. That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I also have tattoos.’

‘I can see.’

‘I have one on my shoulder. Want to see it?’ She pulls down her jumper and shows me a tree. Beneath it are the words: ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. ‘I got it to remember you. You taught me the song, remember.’

I smile. ‘I remember.’

She is a bit jetlagged, still. So am I. I want her to stay but she says London gives her panic attacks and she doesn’t want to go back to hospital. She says there’s a house on Fetlar, one of the Shetland Islands where she had lived in the 1920s, which is still there and abandoned. She says she wants to go back. She says she has some cash. And that by next weekend – after my week back at school – she will go. It saddens me, but I understand, and promise to visit as soon as I can.

‘Time doesn’t move there,’ she says. ‘On the islands. It used to make me feel normal. Being surrounded by all that unchanging nature. The city is harder work. Things happen in cities.’

Her hands have a slight tremble to them. I wonder at the horrors she has been through. The stuff she has blocked out. I wonder about the future, about what will happen to her, and to me, now that the secret of the albas is likely to be revealed. Now that we, or Omai, might be the ones to reveal it.

But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.

Abraham slides off the sofa and slopes off into the kitchen. Marion comes and sits next to me. I want to put my arm around her, like a father would a daughter. I don’t think she wants me to, but then she places her head on my shoulder and says nothing. I remember that same head resting on that same shoulder, when she was ten years old, that night in the coach. That had felt, then, like the end of everything. This, now, feels like a beginning.

Time can surprise you sometimes.

I cycle to school.

I see Anton walking into the main building on his own. He has his headphones in and he is reading a book. I can’t see what the book is called but it is a book. Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer. He looks up. Sees me. Raises his hand.

I like this job. I can’t right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it. It isn’t playing the lute for Shakespeare, or the piano at Ciro’s, but it’s something as good. And goodness has its own kind of harmony.

Sure, I have no idea how long I will stay as one, once I go public about who I am. I might have the job for a week or a month or a decade. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.

And it’s good to think of the past.

Those who cannot remember the past, observed the philosopher George Santayana in 1905, are condemned to repeat it. And you only need to switch on the news to see the dreadful repetitions, the terrible unlearned lessons, the twenty-first century slowly becoming a crude cover version of the twentieth.

But, although you can gaze at the past, you can’t visit it. Not really. I can’t sit by a tree in a forest and have my mother sing to me. I can’t walk along Fairfield Road and see Rose and her sister again, selling fruit out of a basket. I can’t cross the old London Bridge and enter Elizabethan Southwark. I can’t go back and offer more words of comfort to Rose in that dark house on Chapel Street. I can’t ever see Marion as a little girl again. I can’t go back to a time when the world’s map wasn’t known. I can’t walk snowy streets lined with beautiful Victorian streetlamps and choose not to visit Dr Hutchinson. I can’t go back to 1891 and tell myself not to follow Agnes onto the Etruria.

The yellow bird sits on a windowsill for a while and then it flies away. That is nature. There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

I no longer have my headache. I haven’t had it since Australia. And yet, I am still worried.

I can see Camille staring at me through the staff-room window. She is smiling and then she notices me and suddenly she looks cross, or scared; it’s hard to tell. I stand there and wait. I will speak to her. I will explain things. I will tell her who I was on the phone to. I will tell her about Hendrich. I will tell her about Marion. Maybe someday soon we can try another park bench. I don’t know. I can’t know.

But from now on, I am going to exist in the open. I am not going to let secrets hurt people any more.

Yes.

It is about time.

It is about time I lived.

So I inhale the east London air, which feels purer than usual, and I walk, among the teenagers, into the rather uninspiring 1960s school building with a strange and long-forgotten feeling.

I feel at the beginning of something.

I feel ready to care and be hurt and take a risk on living.

And within two minutes I see her. Camille.

‘Hello,’ she says. Business-like, polite.

I can see now from her eyes she wants me to say something. And I was going to. In the moment after this one, I am going to try to do what has always been so hard.

I am going to try to explain myself. And a peculiar feeling happens when I am right in front of her. It is a sense of total understanding, as though inside this one moment I can see every other one. Not just the moments before but those lying ahead. The whole universe in a grain of sand. This is what Agnes had been talking about in Paris almost a century ago. And Mary Peters. I had finally had this experience of total understanding of time. What is and what was and what will be. It is just a single second, but inside it I feel as though, just staring into Camille’s eyes, I can see for ever.

La Forêt de Pons, France, the future

Two years from that moment in the school corridor.

France.

The forest near Pons that still remains. The one I once knew.

Abraham is old now. He had a kidney stone removed last month, but still isn’t exactly in great shape. Today, though, he seems happy sniffing a thousand new scents.

‘I’m still scared,’ I say, as we walk Abraham among the beech trees.

‘Of?’ Camille asks.

‘Time.’

‘Why are you the one scared of time? You’re going to live for ever.’

‘Exactly. And one day you won’t be with me.’

She stops. ‘It’s strange.’

‘What’s strange?’

‘How much time you spend worrying about the future.’

‘Why? It always happens. That’s the thing with the future.’

‘Yes, it always happens. But it’s not always terrible. Look. Look right now. At us. Here. This is the future.’

She grabs my wrist and places my hand on her stomach. ‘There. Can you feel her?’

I feel it – the strange movement – as you kick. You. Marion’s little sister. ‘I feel her.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And one day she might look older than me.’

She stops, right then. Points through the trees. There is a deer. It turns and looks at us, holding our gaze for a moment, before darting away. Abraham tugs on the lead half-heartedly.

‘I don’t know what will happen,’ Camille says, staring at the space where the creature had been. ‘I don’t know if I will make it through the afternoon without having a seizure. Who knows anything?’

‘Yes. Who knows?’

I keep staring between the trees at the air that had been inhabited by the deer and realise it is true. The deer isn’t there, but I know it had been there and so the space is different than it would otherwise have been. The memory made it different.

‘“You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”’

‘What’s that? A quote?’ I ask.

‘Fitzgerald.’

We carry on walking. ‘I met him, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I knew Shakespeare too. And met Dr Johnson. And once saw Josephine Baker dance.’

‘Name dropper.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Speaking of names,’ she says slowly, as if considering her words as carefully as her steps on this uneven path. ‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t know what you would say. Now we know it’s going to be a girl I think we should call her Sophie. After my grandmother. Sophie Rose.’

‘Rose?’

She holds my hand. Then, just so she is clear: ‘I have always loved the name. The flower, but also the sense of having risen . . . Like you now, now you’re free to be who you are. And yes, I know it’s weird for someone to name their baby after, you know . . . But it’s quite hard to be jealous of someone from four centuries ago. And, besides, I like her. She helped you become you. I think it would be nice. To have that thread through things.’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

We kiss. Just standing there, in the forest. I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to love her has beaten that fear of losing her. Omai is right. You have to choose to live.

‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’

I see now how right she is. Sometimes I can see futures beyond this one. I can see her try and fail to remember my own face, even as I am there in front of her. I can see her holding my hand as Rose had done, pale and ill at the end of life. I can feel the fringes of a pain that will one day overwhelm me, after she has gone. She knows I know this. But she doesn’t want me to tell her any more. She is right. Everything is going to be. And every moment lasts for ever. It lives on. Somewhere. Somehow. So, as we keep walking back down the path from where we came we are in a way staying there, kissing, just as I am also congratulating Anton on his exam results and drinking whisky with Marion in her Shetland home and shuddering from the sound of artillery fire and talking to Captain Furneaux in the rain and clutching a lucky coin and walking past the stables with Rose and listening to my mother sing as sycamore seeds spin and fall in this same forest.

There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.

Yes.

It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?

The future is you.