Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

‘That is the exact opposite of the case.’

‘I saw the letter you wrote to Hendrich decades ago.’

‘What letter?’

‘I saw it. In your own handwriting. I saw the envelope. I saw what you said. I saw your conditions of joining the society. It killed me inside. It sent me fucking insane. Depression. Panic disorder. Psychosis. I’ve had it fucking all because I found out my own father who I loved more than anything in the world wanted me dead. You see, I wanted to find you too. You were the thing that kept me going. To know that the one thing that kept me going wanted to kill me was too much. I don’t owe you a fucking thing, Dad .’

She is crying now. Her face is steel but she is crying, and I love her so much I feel the force of it like the ever-flowing waterfalls and I want everything to be okay. I want her to know that it could be.

‘Hendrich lies. He fakes things. Gets other people to fake things. Sometimes that works for us and sometimes it works against us. He has connections and money, Marion. Got rich by hyping up the tulip trade and never lost it.’

‘Agnes verified it. Agnes told me it was true. She said that I was the reason you had to leave and you hated me for it. You fuck.’

‘I have never said I hated you. Agnes is so deep inside his pocket she can’t see daylight. Marion, I love you. I am not a perfect person. I wasn’t a perfect father. But I have always loved you. I have been searching for you for ever. For ever, Marion. You were such an amazing child. I have looked for you for ever. Every day I have missed you.’

I picture her, close to the window, grabbing the last light of the day so she could finish reading The Faerie Queene . I picture her sitting up in her bed, playing the pipe, determined to get the notes right.

She is still crying, but the gun stays targeted at me. ‘You said you were coming back. You never came back.’

‘I know, I know. Because I was the danger, remember? The signs and words they scratched on the door? The witchfinder? The gossip? You knew what was happening. You knew what had happened to my own mother. I was the problem. So I had to go away. Like you had to go away.’

She clenches her eyes closed, as if making a fist with her face. ‘ Motherfucker ,’ she says.

I could make an easy grab for the gun now, but I don’t.

For centuries she has been my only reason to go on living. But now, I realise, I actively want to live. For the sake of life itself. For the sake of possibility and the future and the possibility of something new.

‘I remember you playing “Under the Greenwood Tree”,’ I tell her. ‘On that little pipe. The one I got from Eastcheap market. Can you remember? Can you remember when I taught you to play that thing? You struggled at first. You never seemed to be able to cover the holes with your fingers, not fully, but then one day you just got it. And you played the pipe in the street, even though your mother didn’t want you to . . . She never wanted attention. For reasons you can probably now understand.’

She says nothing. I stare out at the water, and at the trees on the other side of the lagoon. I can hear her breathing.

I put my hand in my pocket.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks, her voice so quiet it is almost drowned by the water.

I take my wallet out. ‘Just wait one second.’ I pull the small sealed polythene bag out and hold it in the air. She looks at the thin dark fragile coin inside.

‘What is that?’

‘Can’t you remember that day in Canterbury? The sun was shining. You were playing the pipe and someone placed this in your hand. And you gave it to me that last day and said I had to think of you. This here, this penny, it gave me hope. It kept me alive . I wanted one day to return it to you. So here. Here you go.’

I hold it out for her. Slowly she raises the arm not holding the pistol. I place the coin on her palm. Uncertainly she lowers the gun. Her fingers curl around the coin, slowly, like a lotus flower closing its petals.

She looks dazed. She says something which I don’t hear, as she leans into me, and then before I know it she is crying in spasms on my shoulder and I hold her and want to press away all the lost centuries between us.

I want to know everything. I want to spend the next four hundred years hearing about her life to now in real time. But when she pulls away and wipes her eyes she has an anxious look to her.

‘He’s here,’ she says, staring at me with her mother’s green eyes. ‘Hendrich. He’s here.’

Hendrich had decided to escort Marion to Australia. He had booked into the same hotel as her, the Byron Sands. He had been worried, from when he first asked me, that I wouldn’t be able to do the Omai job. He had – and in truth I knew this – been worried about me for a while. Ever since Sri Lanka, and the moment I had decided I wanted to return to London.

Marion had been told to follow me unseen. She wasn’t expected to kill me which was the one thing we had on our side.

‘It’s going to be fine, Marion,’ I had told her, petrified I was telling her another lie. ‘All of it. It’s all going to be fine.’

It is evening now. Marion and Hendrich are eating dinner together in the Byron Sands.

‘You must not even flicker,’ I told her. ‘You must be the person you were an hour ago. In front of him you must absolutely believe you want me dead.’

I stay out. I am walking along a coastal road near the Byron Sands, in case Marion needs me, with the evening calm of grass and beach and sea juxtaposing with the intensity of my mind, roaming beyond the streetlamps into darkness.

I am on the phone. I am trying to call Camille. Hendrich had heard her voice, that day when I was drunk in the park. For all I know he might have an alba on assignment in London now – Agnes or another – ready to kill her and mask her death as a suicide.

‘Pick up,’ I say, uselessly into the air. ‘Pick up, pick up . . .’

But she doesn’t. So I send her a text.

‘I’m sorry about the way I was. There is more I need to explain. And I will. I just want to tell you that you should get away. You might be in danger. Leave your flat. Go somewhere. Somewhere public.’

I send the text.

My heart beats wildly.

All my life, I realise, I have been dogged by fear. Hendrich had promised to be an end to those fears but all he had done was accentuate them. He controlled people by fear. He had controlled me by fear and he controlled Marion by fear. When it was just me, it was hard to see, but seeing how he had manipulated Marion, lying to her and me in the process, had made me realise the Albatross Society ran on secrets and the manipulation of its members, all to serve Hendrich’s increasing paranoia about external threats. Biotech companies aiming to stop the ageing process were his latest area of concern: one called GeneControl Therapies and another called StopTime that were both investing in stem cell technology that could one day prevent humans ageing.

Hendrich held on to the idea that those scientists at the Berlin institute had been killers, and he always had some new conspiracy theory to work with. Albas knew it was hard to be their true selves, and often had memories of horrific injustices, as I did. But I was no longer prepared to let the long shadow of William Manning shroud my judgement. The more I thought about the threat, the more I realised the threat was Hendrich himself.

He had tainted everything. Even the reunion with Marion.

I get a text from Camille. The text says: ‘????’

A taxi rolls by. The only car on the road.

Then my phone vibrates.

It is not Camille, but Marion.

‘He’s going to see Omai.’

‘What?’