Мэтт Хейг - How to Stop Time

‘Omai!’ I shout. ‘Omai! Omai! Get out of the house!’

And then it happens.

The peak of the crescendo. A cascade of everything. All the paths of my life intersecting in one spot.

As I begin to run towards Hendrich, a voice rings out, puncturing the night: ‘Stop!’

It is, of course, Marion.

And then Hendrich stops, for a moment, and seems suddenly weak and vulnerable, like a little boy lost in the woods. He glances from Marion to me and back again. Simultaneously, Omai steps barefoot out of the house, carrying his aged daughter in his arms.

‘Look at this. Isn’t it so sweet? A father and daughter get-together. That’s your weakness, you see. That’s what separates you from me. This desire to be like them. The mayflies. I never had that. I knew, before I acquired my first fortune, years before I sold my first tulip, that the only way to be free was to have no one at all.’

A shot rings out. The noise of it shakes from the sky. Marion’s face looks hard – yes, hard as a walnut – but her eyes are now filled with tears and her hands are shaking.

She’s hit her target. Black lines of blood trickle from his shoulder down his arm. But he is raising the can of petrol and tilting it, pouring the fluid over himself.

‘In the end, it turns out I was Icarus after all.’

He drops the can as he brings the flame close to his chest. I think, or imagine, I see a small smile, a faint signal of contented acceptance, the moment before he violently blooms into fire. His flaming body staggers away from the house. He keeps walking across the grass towards the sea. The cliff.

He is heading to the edge, his feet pushing through the grass that grows wilder nearer to the edge. The grass smokes and singes and glows at its tips, like a hundred tiny fireflies. He keeps walking; there is no moment of pause or reflection, but nor is there a scream of pain. Just a continued staggering momentum. A determination, a last act of control.

‘Hendrich?’ I say. I don’t know why his name comes out as a question. I suppose because, even in his last moments, he is a collection of mysteries. I have lived a long life but it is never long enough to be entirely free from surprise.

‘Oh, man,’ Omai keeps saying. ‘Oh, man, oh, man . . .’

And his instinct, as a good person, is to go over to him. So he places his daughter down on the grass.

‘No!’ Marion says. Still holding the gun. I sense now that Hendrich is not only the man who wanted her to kill me, but the man who spat on her mother’s face, the one whose guts she’d wanted to see. He is the unavenged William Manning. He is every single person who has hurt her in the space between, and I sense there have been a lot. ‘Leave him. The motherfucker. Stand back. Stay where you are. Leave him.’

So we leave him. And all is silent. No cars pass by, no one sees a thing. The only witness is our side of the gape-mouthed moon, as always. And the vertical fire of Hendrich walks and walks and then isn’t walking at all. He is gone. The ground that had been glowing and shifting from the light of the fire is now in sudden darkness. He has fallen. The temporal distance between him walking and him not being there is so minute it is imperceptible.

There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.

And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?

Marion.

My daughter. Rose’s daughter.

She’s still the same little girl .

That’s what people say, isn’t it? About children grown up. Well, in truth, I can’t say it about Marion. She is not the same little girl.

Yes, the intensity had always been there. The sensitive intelligence. The bookishness. The desire – once no more than a child’s fantasy – to exact bloody vengeance on those who wronged her.

But there are a thousand new things there now.

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.

For instance, she is scared of Abraham. She now has ‘a thing about dogs’. I daren’t ask her what happened.

Abraham likes her straight away, from the moment we pick him up from the dog sitter, but Marion sits well away from him, casting nervous glances in his direction.

She is very open about the things she has done.

She tells me some of the places she has lived, other than London and Heidelberg and LA. Rouen, that had been her first trip overseas. Then Bordeaux. She knew the language, and both had strong Montaigne associations, so that had guided her. But there had been other places in more recent times: Amsterdam, Vancouver, Scotland. She had lived in Scotland for about a hundred years, apparently, from the 1840s onwards. She had moved around. The Highlands. The East Neuk of Fife. Shetland. Edinburgh. She had been a weaver. She’d had a loom. ‘A travelling loom,’ she says, and laughs a little, which is rare.

She is on Citalopram for depression. ‘It spaces me out, but I need that.’ She says she gets strange dreams all the time, and often has panic attacks. Sometimes she has panic attacks about having panic attacks. Vicious circles. She had one on the plane, coming back from Australia, but I hardly even noticed, except she became quite still.

We had left Australia with no problems at all. She had not flown there with Hendrich, and his body hadn’t yet been discovered, so no questions were asked. He had changed his identity, of course, to arrive in Australia, so in a sense he didn’t exist at all. He had disguised his life so well his death became, like every other aspect of him, one more secret.

I had said goodbye to Omai. I had told him that at some point it might be a good idea to move and he said he’d think about it and that was that. He wasn’t going to move. He was going to stay still and, well, only the future knows what that means.

I write an email. I type it out and keep very nearly pressing ‘send’. The email is to Kristen Curial, who heads up StopTime, the leading part-government-funded biotech company that is investigating ways to halt the cellular damage behind illness and ageing. One of the ones Hendrich was paranoid about.

Dear Kristen,

I am 439 years old. And I can prove it. I believe I can help you with your research.

Tom

And then I attach the Ciro’s picture and a selfie of me now, complete with arm scar. I stare at the email and see how ridiculous it looks and then save it in drafts. Maybe later.

Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word ‘motherfucker’ in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt’s day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a motherfucker. (There is ‘never anything on the motherfucker’.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a motherfucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.