Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

Daphne brings some water. ‘Let’s all give her some room,’ she says to the parents and staff. ‘Come on, guys and gals, let’s all step back a little . . .’

‘It’s okay,’ I tell Camille. ‘You just had a seizure.’

Just. That sounds terrible.

‘Where . . . where . . . I . . . ?’

She looks around a little. She gets up, on her elbows, then sits up fully. She is weak. Something has been taken from her. Along with Daphne I help settle her back in her seat.

‘Where am I?’

‘The sports hall.’ Daphne’s smile is reassuring. ‘You’re at work. At the school. It’s all right, lovely, it’s just a . . . You’ve had some kind of a seizure . . .’

‘School,’ she says sleepily, to herself.

‘An ambulance is coming.’ This is one of the parents, putting their iPhone away.

‘I’m okay,’ she says. She doesn’t seem in the slightest bit self-conscious. Just tired and confused.

She stares up at me, frowning, not understanding who I am, or maybe understanding too much.

‘You’re okay,’ I tell her.

Her eyes are fixed on me. ‘I do know you.’

I smile at her, then, with more awkwardness, at Daphne. And I gently tell her, ‘Of course you do. We work together.’ I then, perhaps foolishly, underline my point for the crowd. ‘The new history teacher.’

She is leaning back. She sips the water. She shakes her head.

‘Ciro’s.’

The name hits my heart like a hammer. Hendrich’s words, that day years ago in a hurricane-ravaged Central Park, come back to me. The past is never gone. It just hides.

‘I—’

‘You played piano. When I saw you the other day, at the pub . . . I . . .’

Two thoughts: I am dreaming. It is possible. I have dreamed of Camille before.

Or: maybe she is old too. Old, old, old. As in, ancient. An alba. Maybe somehow the photos I have seen on Facebook of her younger self have been photoshopped. Maybe this is what I had felt for her. Maybe this was the connection. Maybe I just have a sense of our exotic sameness. Or maybe she knows some other way.

The one thing I am sure of is that I have to stop her talking. If she carries on she not only risks exposing me, but herself. I feel for her. There is no point denying that any more. The lie I had told myself for so long – that I could exist without caring for anyone new – was just that. A lie. I have no idea why Camille was the one to make me realise this, but I can no longer deny I care for her. And, in caring for her, I feel an overwhelming need to protect her. After all, Hendrich has had people permanently silenced for less than a mutter in a school hall. If she knows about albas, and is talking about it in public, she is automatically risking more than my identity. She’s risking her life.

‘Just relax. We’ll . . . nous allons parler plus tard . . . I’ll explain everything. But quiet, now. I can’t tell you here. Please understand.’

She looks sleepy with the effort of sitting up. She stares at me, the confusion clearing. ‘Okay. I understand.’

I lift the cup of water and help her take a sip. She smiles at Daphne and the other concerned faces. ‘I’m sorry . . . I have a seizure every few months. It’s my epilepsy. They make me tired for a while. I’ll be fine. The tablets were meant to stop the seizures. So I probably need some new ones . . .’

She stares at me. Her eyelids seem heavy. She looks vulnerable and invincible all at once.

‘You okay?’ I ask her.

She gives a small nod, but looks almost as scared as I am.

It was around seven in the evening. Beside the vast empty dance floor, men in dinner jackets and women in low-necked tassel-fringed shift dresses and bobbed hair were drinking apéritifs and listening to the music I was playing.

Jazz was what Ciro’s was known for. But, by 1929, the sophisticated clientele didn’t just want jazz-jazz-jazz, because jazz was everywhere. So I sometimes mixed it up a little. Sometimes, if people were on the dance floor, I’d drop in an Argentine tango or some gypsy flavours, but early evening you could get away with playing anything soft and thoughtful, so I was playing some Fauré, from his melancholic period, and feeling every note.

‘Prétendez que je ne suis pas ici,’ the photographer had told me as I was playing.

‘Non,’ I whispered, remembering Hendrich’s no-photographs rule. ‘Pas de photos! Pas de—’

But it was too late. I had been so lost in the music he had been taking photos of me without my realising.

‘Merde,’ I whispered to myself, switching to Gershwin to try to better my mood.

We are in a smart gastropub in the new Globe Theatre.

I feel nervous. The reason isn’t the location. It is Camille herself. The mystery is terrifying. How does she know about Ciro’s? How could she? I am scared of all the answers I have thought of, and the unknown ones I haven’t. I am scared for her. I am scared for me. I am twitching and looking around like an ominous bird on a windowsill. But there is also another reason I am scared. I am scared because up until now I have been surviving.

I mean, I haven’t actively wanted to kill myself for a long time. The last time, precisely, was in a bunker near Tarragona in the Spanish Civil War when I placed a pistol in my mouth and prepared to blow my head off. Only by forcing myself to stare and stare at Marion’s lucky penny had I managed to keep my brains on the inside of my skull. But that was 1937. That was a long time of not actively trying to die.

I have recently thought I wanted out from Hendrich but maybe, actually, this was a mistake. Yes, I am ‘owned’ by Hendrich but there is a comfort in that. Free will might be overrated.

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’

I had ached from the death of Rose for centuries, and that pain had faded into the neutral monotony of existing, and moving on before I had time to gather any emotional moss. I’d been able to enjoy music and food and poetry and red wine and the aesthetic pleasures of the world and that, I now realised, was perfectly fine.

Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.

I try to tell myself I am just meeting her for what she is going to tell me, and that I don’t have to tell her anything in return. But it is strange being here. Especially as it is here .

I haven’t been to this specific place since the day I jumped onto the stage from the musicians’ gallery. The day I landed on Will Kemp’s back and saw Manning again. It had been the day of another confession, of course, to Rose. And now I can feel the faint echo of that day, amid the polite middle-class theatre chatter and clinking of cutlery around me.

The famous image of Shakespeare stares up at me from the front of the menu. I used to think it looked nothing like him – the image being all forehead and bad hair and wispy beard and lobotomised expression – but now the eyes seem to be his eyes. Watching me, wryly, as I continue through life. As if it amuses him, watching the man he helped to escape that day carry on in an interminable endless living tragicomedy.

The waiter is here now and Camille is smiling up at him.

She is wearing a midnight blue shirt. She looks pale, a little tired, but also beautiful.

‘I would like the skate wing,’ she tells the waiter, pushing her glasses a little further up her nose.

‘Very good,’ says the waiter, who turns to me.

‘I’ll have the gnocchi in kale pesto.’