Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

It is ridiculous, given that I have brought her here to tell her the truth, but I am now scared of doing so. My instinct is to lie. I am, after all, quite a good liar. Smooth and natural. I should just laugh and look disappointed, and say it is a bit of a shame, because I thought for a minute that she had really recognised me, and that now I know she is joking. Photographs could lie. Especially photographs from the 1920s.

But I don’t do that. I suppose part of it is because I really don’t want her to be embarrassed. Another part of me, I think, wants her to know the truth. Needs her to.

‘So,’ she says, into my silence.

She then makes a kind of gesture that is hard to capture. She sticks her chin out a little and does a slight nod and closes her eyes and pulls her hair back behind an ear. It is a gesture of mild defiance. I don’t know what she is defying. Life? Reality? Epilepsy? It is over in two seconds but I think this is the moment in which I have to admit to myself that I am in love for the first time in four centuries.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

‘So,’ I say, tentatively, testing how much she believes versus what she thinks she believes. ‘You not only like science fiction, you think I could be science fiction. You think I could be a time traveller or something.’

She shrugs. ‘Or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, any truth that people aren’t ready to believe sounds like science fiction. The earth going around the sun. Electromagnetism. Evolution. X-rays. Aeroplanes. DNA. Stem cells. Climate change. Water on Mars. It is all science fiction until we see it happen.’

I have that urge to get out of here, out of the restaurant. It is almost as strong as the urge to want to talk to her for all eternity. But not quite.

I clench my eyes closed, as if pressing forge-hot iron against my skin.

‘You can tell me. You can tell me the truth.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I know it was you in that picture.’

‘It was staged. The picture was staged. It wasn’t from the twenties.’

‘You’re lying. Don’t lie to me.’

I stand up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘No, you don’t. Please. Please. I like you. You can’t run away from everything.’

‘You’re wrong. You can. You can run and run and run. You can run your entire life. You can run and change and keep running.’

People stop chewing to look at me. I am making a scene. Again, here in Southwark. I sit back down in my chair.

‘I have the photo,’ she says. ‘I have it on my phone. A photo of a photo. But it’s good quality. I know that sounds weird. But if you don’t tell me, I will have this question in my head for ever and I will try and find other ways to answer it.’

‘That would be very unwise.’

‘Sounds exactly like me. I believe that every truth should be known. Do you see? Because I’ve lived with epilepsy and it’s a mystery. They know so fucking little about it. There is a truth and it isn’t known. We should know all the truths. Especially these days. And you promised. You promised if I came here you would tell me. If you don’t tell me I’ll keep asking questions.’

‘And if I tell you the truth and say you must not say a thing – even a hint of a thing – to anyone? What then?’

‘Then I will say nothing.’

I look at her face. You can tell only so much from a face. But I trust her. I have been trained, especially for the past century or so, not to trust anyone except Hendrich, and yet I trust her. Maybe it is the wine. Or maybe I am developing aptitude.

For a terrible, bewildering moment I know her completely. I know her as if I had spent whole lifetimes with her.

‘Yes, it was me. It was me.’

She stares at me for a while, as if at something slowly emerging from a mist. As if she hadn’t really been so sure before, as if she had wanted to be told it was all an elaborate illusion. I enjoy this look. I enjoy her knowing.

I will worry, later, about what I have just said. The truth that has passed between us. But right now, it is nothing but a release.

Our food arrives.

I watch the waiter disappear into the noise of the restaurant.

And then I look at her and I tell her everything.

Two hours later, we are walking by the Thames.

‘I am scared to believe this. I knew it was you. I knew it. But there is knowing something and knowing something. I feel like I may be mad.’

‘You’re not mad.’

There is a young man, near where the Cardinal’s Hat used to be, hopping about on a BMX to the delight of a crowd.

I look at Camille and see her intense seriousness juxtaposed with the happy tourists around us and I feel guilty, as if I haven’t just told her a secret, but infected her with my own emotional weight.

I had told her about Marion. And now I was taking the polythene bag holding her penny out into the light.

‘I remember the day she was given it. I remember times with her more than I remember things that happened a year ago.’

‘And you think she is still alive?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard enough being a man and living for four hundred years. And no one ever thinks we’re witches or worries why we don’t have children. But I have always sensed it. She was a clever girl. She could read. She could quote Montaigne when she was nine. My worry is her mind. She was always a very sensitive child. Quiet. She would pick up on things. Get upset easily. She’d brood on things. Be lost in her own world. Have nightmares.’

‘Poor girl,’ said Camille, but I can see she is a bit dazed from all the information.

The one thing I haven’t told her about is the Albatross Society. I sense that even to talk about it is to endanger her somehow. So when she asks me if I know of any others like me, apart from Marion, I don’t mention Agnes or Hendrich. But I do tell her about Omai, my old friend from Tahiti.

‘I haven’t seen him since he left London. He went on Cook’s third voyage. Cook wanted him as translator. I never saw him again. But he didn’t come back to England.’

‘Captain Cook?’

‘Yes.’

She grapples enough with this that I don’t throw her with my stories about Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Not just yet.

We talk some more.

She asks to see the scar again. She traces it with her finger, as if to make all this more real. I look out at the river, where Dr Hutchinson had been found, once upon a time, and I realise I need to tell her something.

‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘you can’t tell anyone about this. I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s just that you were asking lots of questions. You thought you knew me. And that thinking, that curiosity, was possibly more dangerous than knowing. So now you know, you’ll have to keep quiet about it.’

‘Dangerous? This isn’t the age of witches. Surely you could go public about this. Get DNA tests. Proof. It might be able to help people. Help, you know, science. Fighting illnesses. You said your immune system is—’

‘There is a history of bad things happening to people who know. Doctors who were about to publish evidence, and so on. They have had a habit of disappearing.’

‘Disappearing? Who made them disappear?’

The truth comes with its own lies. ‘I don’t know. It’s a shadowy kind of world.’

We talk some more, and keep walking. We walk over the Millennium Bridge and head east through the City. We are, informally, walking home. Our conversation is carrying us there.