Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

It was dark now. Desert-dark.

The air was turning chill, but I was sweating and sore and aching and my whisky-sour mouth was as dry as the grave I had been digging for over an hour.

Bullets weren’t infections. They weren’t the plague or one of the other hundred or so illnesses albas were able to resist. As with ultimate old age, there was no immunity from a bullet. And I didn’t want to die. I had to stay alive for Marion. Hendrich had convinced me we were getting closer to finding her.

At least one of them had had their revolver fixed on me the whole time I’d been digging. This situation didn’t change as they beckoned me out of the hole. And all the time their two dark Saddlebred horses stayed nibbling and whispering at each other.

‘Now,’ said Joe, as I hauled myself out, making sure I kept hold of the shovel as I did so. I leaned on it, as a kind of resting aid. ‘We ain’t buryin’ your money with ya. Empty those pockets and place all you have on the ground.’

I knew this was the moment. The only one I would get. I gave a curious glance towards the horses, causing the men to do the same. By the time Joe’s cold hard eyes were back upon me, the shovel was swinging fast towards his face. He fell back, semi-conscious, losing his hold of the gun, which landed with a thud in the dust.

‘Kill ’im,’ slurred Joe.

Louis, the one I’d gambled on being a little more cowardly, a little slower on the trigger, fired a shot as I was scrambling for Joe’s gun. The noise echoed around the desert as I felt the pain in my back, near my right shoulder. But I had Joe’s gun and one good arm, and I turned and shot Louis in the neck and he fired again but only hit the night that time. Then I shot Joe a couple of times too and there was blood slick black in the dark, and somehow inside my pain I managed to kick and roll them into the grave I had dug and put the earth back on them. I slapped the rump of one of the horses, causing it to gallop away, before I hauled myself on the other one.

The pain was beyond anything I had known, but somehow I made it away and I kept going and I kept going and I kept going across the desert and over dry hills and mountains and past a large quarry that seemed to my delirious mind like the blackness of death itself calling me towards it like the River Styx. I resisted and the horse kept walking through that night until I reached Tucson as the morning sun slowly bled its light into the sky and I found the Arizona Inn where Agnes poured alcohol on my wound and I bit into a wet towel to mask my screams as she tweezered the bullet out of my flesh.

My bullet wound was healing, but there was still pain in my shoulder. I was at the Garden Court Apartments and Hotel, on Hollywood Boulevard, in the restaurant they had there. All marble and columns and grandeur. A mesmerising-looking woman with dark painted lips and a ghostly pale face sat at a table not too far away, talking to two fawning men in business suits. It was Lillian Gish, the movie star. I recognised her from Orphans of the Storm , a film set during the French Revolution.

For a moment or two, I was entranced.

I had come to love the cinema during my time in Albuquerque, where I had been stationed for the last eight years. The way you could just sit on your own in the dark and forget who you were, just let yourself feel what the film was telling you to feel for an hour or so.

‘They have them all in here,’ Hendrich was explaining discreetly as he set about his halibut in shrimp sauce. ‘Gloria Swanson, Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, Valentino. Just last week Chaplin was at this very table. In your seat. He just had the soup. That was his entire meal. Just soup.’

Hendrich grinned. I had never hated that grin until now. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Is it the beef? It can be a little overdone.’

‘The beef is fine.’

‘Oh, so it’s about what happened in Arizona?’

I almost laughed at this. ‘What else would it be about? I had to kill two men.’

‘Quiet now. I doubt Miss Gish wants to hear such things. Discretion, Tom, please.’

‘Well, I don’t see why we had to do this in the restaurant. I thought you had an apartment upstairs.’

He looked confused. ‘I like the restaurant. It’s always good to be around people. Don’t you enjoy being around people, Tom?’

‘I will tell you what I don’t enjoy . . .’

He glided his hand through the air, as if inviting me through a door. ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you don’t enjoy. If that makes you happy.’

I leaned forward to whisper. ‘I don’t enjoy fleeing a murder scene on a horse with a bullet lodged in my shoulder. A bullet. And . . . and . . .’ I was losing my flow. ‘I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to kill them.’

He sighed philosophically. ‘What was it Dr Johnson said? He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn’t even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have a purpose.’ He waited a beat or two. ‘This shrimp sauce is really divine.’

The waiter came over and poured some more wine. We concentrated on our food until he disappeared again. A piano started to play. Some of the diners leaned over the backs of their seats to have a look at the pianist for a moment or two.

‘I’m just saying I didn’t like it. Those men were never going to join the society. You should have known that. I should have been told that, Hendrich.’

‘Please, try to call me Cecil. They know me as Cecil here. My story is that I made my money in San Francisco. Property development. I helped rebuild the city. After the quake. Don’t I look like a Cecil? Call me Cecil. They’ll think I’m Cecil B. DeMille, I can make them a star. It might get me some action . . .’

He drifted off into more thought. ‘I love this town. They are all coming here now. All these young farm girls from South Dakota or Oklahoma or Europe. This city has always been the same apparently. In the Ice Age animals used to come and get stuck in the tar pits that looked like shimmering lakes and the smell of the meat would bring other animals there to be trapped in that thick black tar. Anyway, I’m a safe kind of predator. They think I’m past it at seventy-eight. Seventy-eight! Imagine that. At seventy-eight I was fucking my way around Flanders. I was incorrigible. The amount of marriage proposals I made. I was the Valentino of the Lowlands . . .’

I took a big gulp of wine. ‘I can’t do this, Hendrich, I can’t do it.’

‘Cecil, please .’

‘I am sorry I went to Dr Hutchinson. Seriously, I am. But I want my old life back. I just want to be me again.’

‘I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can’t reverse it. We can’t stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies. You can’t simply cut away from the society any more than you can be unborn. You do understand that, don’t you, Tom? And what about your daughter, Tom? We are going to find her. We will.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘Yet, Tom, we haven’t yet . I sense she is out there, Tom. I know she is out there. She is there , Tom.’

I said nothing. I was angry, yes, but as was so often the case with anger, it was really just fear projecting outwards. The society was nothing – it had no physical presence in the real world, there was no stone plaque outside a grand building announcing its existence. It was just Hendrich and the people who had faith in him. And yet . . . Hendrich was enough. His aptitude. Indeed, maybe it was that aptitude that caused him to reel me in again with just the right words. Maybe it wasn’t just words, either. Maybe he actually could sense she was out there.