Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

‘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.’