Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

‘Do you like music?’

He seems confused by the question. He’d been expecting another one. Everything about him was playing it cool except his eyes. ‘Yeah. Yes, sir.’

‘Do you play?’

He nods. ‘Yeah, piano, a bit. My mum taught me when I was younger.’

‘You have to be careful with that. It can screw you up. Messes with your brain chemistry. The emotion.’

He looks at me quizzically.

I move on. ‘Does your mum know about your friends?’

He shrugs sheepishly.

‘Because you could do better.’

He knows he can’t sulk, but he almost does. Pouts a little. ‘Si isn’t my friend. He’s just the older brother of someone I know.’

‘Someone? A school someone? Someone from here?’

He shakes his head. ‘Used to be.’

‘Used to be?’

‘He got expelled.’

I nod. It made sense.

There is a pause. His face clenches, building up to something. ‘Did you mean what you said last night? About killing someone.’

‘Oh yes. Yes, I did. In a desert. Arizona. Quite a long time ago. I don’t advise it.’

He laughs, doesn’t quite know if it is a joke. (It isn’t.) ‘Did you ever get caught?’

‘No, not in the way you mean. No, I didn’t. But as you get older, Anton, you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own. . . prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.’

‘Yeah. I’ve worked that one out, sir.’

‘You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.’

‘I suppose.’

‘It’s true. You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versailles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.’

‘Seems that way.’

‘People talk about a moral compass and I think that is it. We always know the right and wrong for ourselves, the north and south. You have to trust it, Anton. People can tell you all kinds of wrong directions, lead you around any corner. You can’t trust any of that. You can’t even trust me. What do they say in car adverts? About the navigation system? Comes as standard . Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard. It’s like music. You just have to listen.’

He nods. I have no idea if any of this has gone in, or if he is just bored or frightened and wants to get out of the room as quickly as he can.

‘Okay, sir. Good speech.’

‘Okay.’

Strange saying this to a mayfly. As if I care. Hendrich has always told me there is nothing more dangerous than caring for an ordinary mortal human, because it ‘compromises our priorities’. But maybe Hendrich’s priorities are no longer my priorities, and maybe they need to be compromised. Maybe I just need to feel vaguely human again. It has been a while. It has been four hundred years.

I decide to lighten the tone. ‘Do you like school, Anton?’

He shrugs. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes it seems . . . irrelevant.’

‘Irrelevant?’

‘Yeah. Trigonometry and Shakespeare and shit.’

‘Oh yes. Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth .’

‘ Part One .’

‘Yes, you said. So you don’t like it?’

He shrugs. ‘We went to see it. School trip. Was pretty boring.’

‘You don’t like theatre?’

‘Nah. It’s for old posh people, innit?’

‘It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be for everyone. It used to be the maddest place in London. You’d get everyone there. You’d get the posh old people, sure, up on the balconies, dressed to be seen, but then you’d get everyone else. You could get in for a penny, which even then wasn’t so much. A loaf of bread, that’s all. There used to be fights too, sometimes knife fights. People used to throw stuff at the actors if they didn’t like what they saw. Oyster shells. Apples. All kinds of stuff. And Shakespeare used to be on the stage too. William Shakespeare. That dead man from the posters. There. On stage. It’s not that long ago, not really. History is right here, Anton. It’s breathing down our necks.’

He smiles a little. This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist. ‘You almost sound like you were there.’

‘I was,’ I say.

‘What, sir?’

I smile this time. It is tantalising, to be this close to revealing your own truth, like holding a bird you are about to set free.

‘I knew Shakespeare.’

And then he laughs like he knows I am joking.

‘All right, yeah, Mr Hazard.’

‘See you tomorrow.’ Tomorrow. I have always hated that word. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t grate too much. ‘Tomorrow. Yeah.’

I sat in the gallery high above the stage next to an old, snooty, cadaverous man named Christopher, who played the virginal. I say ‘old’. He was probably no more than fifty, but he was the oldest of any man working for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We were visible to much of the audience, should they have cared to look up in our direction, but we were in shadow, and I felt safely anonymous. Christopher rarely said a word to me, either before or after the performance.

I remember one conversation with him.

‘You are not from London, are you?’ he asked me with disdain.

It was a peculiar disdain, really. Then, as now, much of London was from elsewhere. That was the whole point of London. And, given that there were far more deaths about than births, it was the only way London kept going, and growing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I am from France. My mother sought refuge here. From the king’s forces.’

‘The Catholics?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where is your mother now?’

‘She passed.’

Not a flicker of sympathy. Or curiosity. Just a long studious look. ‘You play like a Frenchman. You have foreign fingers.’

I stared at my hands. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes. You stroke the strings rather than pluck them. It makes a strange noise.’

‘Well, it is a strange noise that Mr Shakespeare likes.’

‘You play well for your age, I suppose. It is a novelty. But you shan’t stay young for ever. No one does. Except that boy out east.’

And there it was.

The moment I realised, even in a place as large as London, I still had to be on my guard.

‘They killed his mother. She was a witch.’

My heart started beating uncontrollably. It took every ounce of effort to fake a semblance of calm.

‘Well, if she drowned, that proved her innocence.’

He looked with suspicion. ‘I never said drowned .’

‘I assumed it was the ducking stool, if it was for witchcraft.’

His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘You seem most excited about this. Look, your French fingers tremble. To be honest, I don’t have the details. It was Hal who told me.’

Hal, the mild-mannered flautist, sitting on the bench in front of ours, didn’t really want to be dragged into the conversation. They had known each other for quite a while, and worked on other productions together.

‘The son didn’t age.’ Hal, pale and mousy and small-mouthed, relayed. ‘She had cast a charm and killed a man to give her boy eternal life.’

I had no idea what to say.

Christopher was still scrutinising me. And then we heard footsteps on the galley.

‘Is this an open conversation?’

It was Shakespeare himself. Standing there, opening an oyster shell, then sucking the mollusc out, careful not to make any mess on the quilted taffeta of his costume. As he savoured the taste his eyes stayed on Christopher.