How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
She was so dumbfounded by what I was saying she could only utter, ‘I am not a tree.’
‘You will look fifty years old and I will still look like this. It is best you leave me. It is best I go. It is best I—’
And she kissed me, then, simply because she wanted me to stop talking.
And she could only half believe it. For days, she thought I was insane. But, as the weeks and months passed by, she realised it was true.
It was something she couldn’t comprehend, yet there it was. There it was.
My truth.
London, now
I have no idea if anything I have said to Anton has got through. I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.
So, it is pretty late, twenty past twelve, when I finally make it into the staff room for lunch break. I sit there inhaling the scent of instant coffee and processed ham. My headache is bad today. Also, I have tinnitus. I get that too, sometimes. Have had it on and off since the near-deafening artillery fire I heard in the Spanish Civil War.
I no longer go to the supermarket at lunch. Instead I make my own sandwich in the morning. But I’m not even hungry, so I just sit there, eyes closed.
When I open them I see Isham, the geography teacher, busy working out which sachet of herbal tea to put in his mug.
I also see Camille.
She is on the other side of the room and is peeling open her carton of salad. She has apple juice too, and a book, which she is using as a kind of makeshift little tray.
Daphne, taking a clementine from the communal fruit bowl, gives me a smile that might be a smirk. ‘How are you, Tom? How are things going?’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I feel good.’
She nods, knowing it is a lie. ‘It will get better. The first ten years here are always the hardest.’ She laughs, and heads out of the staff room to her office.
I feel bad about Camille. I had been rude to her the last time we had spoken. I notice now that she is taking something out of her pocket. A pill. She swallows it down with the help of some apple juice.
I should just stay in my seat.
That is what Hendrich would want me to do. I mean, it is now – from an Albatross Society point of view – perfect. Camille will probably never speak to me again.
Yet, here I am, crossing the room.
‘I just want to say sorry,’ I tell her.
‘What for?’ she says, which is good of her.
I sit down, so I can speak to her at a lower volume, and less suspiciously. Another teacher, a maths teacher called Stephanie, is frowning at us as she eats a plum.
‘I didn’t mean to be so weird. So rude.’
‘Well, some people can’t help it. Some people are just like that.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean to be.’
‘What we are and what we mean are different things. It’s fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.’
She just says it casually, gently. I have never been so insulted so delicately.
I try to explain without explaining. ‘I’m just . . . I have a lot of stuff going on, and I have one of those faces. Generic. I get a lot of people thinking I’m a friend of a friend. Or some actor they’ve seen on TV.’
She nods, unconvinced. ‘That’s probably it, then. Let’s say it’s that.’
I then notice the book beneath Camille’s salad. It is a novel. I wonder if it is the novel she had been reading that day I saw her in the park. A Penguin Classic. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a photograph of the author on the front cover.
She must have seen me staring. ‘Oh, have you read it? What do you think?’
I find it hard to talk. The memories jam my mind, like too many open windows on a computer, or too much water in a boat.
My headache rises.
‘I . . . I . . . don’t know . . .’ Each word feels like an oar in the water. ‘Boats against the current,’ I say aloud.
‘Boats against the current? Gatsby?’
I hold my breath and I am now in a staff room in London and a bar in Paris all at once, torn between centuries, between place and time, now and then, water and air.
Paris, 1928
I was on my own, walking the long walk home from the grand hotel where I had been doing my shift, playing the piano for the rich Americans and Europeans who were enjoying tea or cocktails. I felt alone. I needed to be around people, to mask the loneliness inside myself. So I headed into the thronging buzz of Harry’s Bar, as I did on occasion. Almost everyone in there was from somewhere else, which was always the kind of crowd I liked.
I fought my way to the bar and found a place next to a glamorous couple with matching centre partings.
The man looked at me, and maybe sensed my loneliness.
‘Try the Bloody Mary,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the thing. A cocktail. Zee loves it, don’t you, sweetheart?’
The woman looked at me with sad, heavy eyes. She was either drunk or ready for sleep or both. They both looked pretty drunk, now that I thought about it. She nodded. ‘It is a great ally in the war.’
‘Which war is that?’ I wondered aloud.
‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’
I ordered the Bloody Mary. I was surprised to see it involved tomato juice. The man eyeballed the woman sternly. It was hard to tell if it was fake stern or the real deal. ‘I have to say I feel mildly insulted when you talk like that, Zee.’
‘Oh, not you, Scott . . . you haven’t been too dull. This has been one of your better evenings.’
It was then he held out his hand. ‘Scott Fitzgerald. And this is Zelda.’
The great thing about being deep into your fourth century was that you rarely got star struck, but even so it was quite something to accidentally happen upon the author of the book that was beside your bed.
‘I’ve just finished reading your book, The Great Gatsby. And I read This Side of Paradise when it came out.’
He suddenly seemed sober. ‘What did you make of it? Of Gatsby? Everyone prefers Paradise. Everyone. My publishers struggle on with the poor thing, out of pity mainly.’
Zelda made a face as if she was about to be sick. ‘That dust jacket. Ernest is so seldom right about anything but he was right about that. It is a war against eyes.’
‘Not everything is a war, sweetheart.’
‘Of course it is, Scott.’
They looked like they were about to squabble, so I interjected: ‘Well, I thought it was exceptional. The book, I mean.’
Zelda nodded. She looked like a child, I realised. They both did. They looked like children dressing up in grown-up clothes. There was such a fragile innocence to them.
‘I try to tell him it is good,’ she said. ‘You can tell him and tell him and tell him but it is just raindrops against the roof.’
Scott seemed relieved I liked it, though. ‘Well, that makes you a better person than the guy at the Herald Tribune. Now, there’s your drink . . .’ He handed me the Bloody Mary.
‘They invented it here, you know,’ said Zelda.
I sipped the strange drink. ‘Did they really?’
And then Scott interrupted and said, ‘Tell us, what do you do?’
‘I play piano. At Ciro’s.’
‘As in the Paris Ciro’s?’ he asked. ‘Rue Daunou? How wonderful. You win already.’
Zelda took a long mouthful of some kind of gin cocktail. ‘What are you scared of?’
Scott smiled apologetically. ‘It’s her drunk question. Every time.’
‘Scared of?’
‘Everyone is scared of something. I’m scared of bedtime. And housekeeping. And all the things you have housemaids for. Scott is scared of reviews. And Hemingway. And loneliness.’
‘I am not scared of Hemingway.’
I tri
Zelda smiled, leaning her head in a kind of glazed sympathy, or resignation. ‘You mean growing old?’
‘No, I mean—’
‘Scotty and I don’t plan to grow old, do we?’
‘The plan is,’ Scott added, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘to hop from one childhood to the next.’
I sighed, hoping this would make me appear thoughtful and serious and in possession of a great Golden Age intelligence. ‘The trouble is, if you live long enough, you end up running out of childhoods eventually.’
Zelda offered me a cigarette, which I accepted (I was smoking now – everyone was smoking now), and then placed one in Scott’s mouth, and another in her own. A kind of wild despair flared suddenly in her eyes as she struck the match. ‘Grow up or crack up,’ she said, after the first inhale. ‘The divine choices we have . . .’
‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’
Zelda was now looking across the crowded bar. ‘The trouble is they stick pins in butterflies. And then they are dead . . .’ She seemed to be looking for someone. ‘Sherwood’s gone. But, oh, look! It’s Gertrude and Alice.’
And within moments they had disappeared through the packed room with their cocktails and, though they made it perfectly clear I could join them, I stayed there with nothing but vodka and tomato juice for company, staying in the safe shadows of history.
London, now
It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.
The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faces and the covers of books. Sometimes just the sight of a tree or a sunset can smack you with the power of every tree or sunset you have ever seen and there is no way to protect yourself. There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.
‘Are you okay?’ Camille asks me, her hand resting on the cover of her book, so only the word ‘tender’ is visible.
‘Yes. I’m still getting these headaches, though.’
‘Have you been to the doctor?’
‘No. But I will.’ Going to the doctor, of course, is the last thing I am going to do.
I look at her. She has the kind of face that makes you want to speak, to tell things to. It is a dangerous face.
‘Maybe you need some more sleep,’ she says.
I wonder what she means, and she can see me wondering, because then she says: ‘I saw on Facebook that you liked my post at three in the morning. That’s an interesting time for you to be awake on a school night.’
‘Oh.’
There is a sliver of mischief in her smile. ‘Is it a habit of yours? Spying on women’s Facebook pages in the middle of the night?’
I feel ashamed.
‘It . . . wh . . . came up on my feed.’
‘I’m only joking with you, Tom. You need to lighten up a little bit.’
If only she could understand the weight of things. The gravity of time. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘for the heaviness.’
‘It’s all right. Life is like that sometimes.’
Maybe she does understand. ‘I’m just a bit awkward around people.’
‘I get it. L’enfer, c’est les autres.’
‘Sartre?’
‘Oui. Dix points. Sartre. Mr Comedy himself.’
I force a smile and don’t say anything because the only thing I have in my head is that the sight of her face comforts me and scares me all at once. So instead I ask her something. It is a question I have often asked over the years. The question is: ‘Do you know anyone called Marion?’
She frowns. I really confuse her.
‘A French Marion or an English one?’
‘English,’ I say. ‘Or either.’
She thinks. ‘I went to school with a Marion. Marion Rey. She told me about periods. My parents were prudes. They never told me. And it is quite a thing not to be told about, you know, this blood coming out of you.’
She says this at a normal volume. There are still other people in the room. Stephanie is still frowning at us, holding the stone of her plum between her fingers. Isham is on his mobile phone, two seats away. I like her lack of shame.
I know I should engage in chit-chat. I know all the signs that chit-chat is required are there. But I ignore the signs.
‘Any other Marions?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right. I’m sorry. That is all I really wanted to say.’
She smiles and looks at me, and finds something in my gaze that troubles her. I feel she is trying to think where she knows me from again.
‘Life is always mysterious,’ she says. ‘But some mysteries are bigger than others.’
And then there is a little silence, and I force another smile and I walk away.
PART FOUR
The Pianist
Bisbee, Arizona, 1926
It was August. I was in the living room of a small timber house on the edge of town, on assignment for Hendrich. Every eight years there was an assignment. That was the deal. You did the assignment and then you moved on to the next place and Hendrich helped you change your identity and kept you safe. The only time you were ever in danger was during the assignment itself. Though I had been lucky. I had done three assignments before this one and they had all been successful. In other words: I had managed to locate the albas in question and convince them to join the society. No violence had been necessary. No real test of character. But here, in Bisbee, everything changed. Here, I was about to find out who I was. And the lengths I would go to, to find Marion.
Even though it was now evening and the dark was quickly dissolving the red mountains outside the window, the heat was intense. It was like the burning air outside but concentrated, like someone had decided to squeeze all of the desert heat into that timber house.
Sweat dripped off my nose and onto the nine of diamonds.
‘Y’aint used to heat much, are ya? Where you been hiding? Alaska? You been gold digging up in Yukon?’ That was the skinny toothless one who asked that. The one with two fingers missing on his left hand. The one who went by the name of Louis. He took another slug of whisky and swallowed it down without a flinch.
‘Been hiding all over,’ I said. ‘I have to.’
Then the other one – Joe – the one who’d just surprised me with a royal flush, the larger, cleverer one, started to laugh ominously. ‘This is all very interessin’ an’ all, and we always appreciate suppin’ moonshine with strangers. ’Specially ones wi’ some green in their pockets. But y’aint from Cochise County. Can always tell. Just from your clothes. See, everyone round here has a taint to ’em. From the dust. From the mines. You don’t see no cotton that white ’round Bisbee. And look at your hands. Clean as snow.’
I looked down at my hands. I was very used to the sight of them, these days, from all the music I had been playing. I had taught myself piano. That is what I had done with the last eight years.
‘Hands are hands,’ I said pathetically.
We had been playing poker for over an hour. I had already lost a hundred and twenty dollars. I drank some more of the whisky. It felt like fire. Now was the time, I realised. Now I had to say what I had come here to say.
‘I know who you two are.’
‘Oh?’ said Joe.
A clock ticked. Outside, far away, something howled. A dog or a coyote.
I cleared my throat. ‘You are like me.’
‘Sure doubt that.’ Joe again, with a laugh as dry as the desert.
‘Joe Thompson, that’s your name, is it?’
‘What you diggin’ at, mister?’
‘Not Billy Stiles? Not William Larkin?’
Louis then sat up tall. His face hardened. ‘Who are you?’
‘I have been many people. Just like you. Now, what should I call you? Louis? Or Jess Dunlop? Or John Patterson? Or maybe Three-fingered Jack? And that’s just the start, no?’
Four eyes and two guns were now staring hard at me. Never seen anyone so quick on the draw as those two. It was them all right.
They pointed at the pistol I was carrying. ‘Place it on the table, nice and slow . . .’
I did so. ‘I’m not here for trouble. I’m here to keep you safe. I know who you are. I know at least some of the people you have been. I know you haven’t always been working in a copper mine. I know about the train you robbed at Fairbank. I know about the Southern Pacific Express you took for more than most can ever dream of. I know neither of you need to be mining for copper.’ Joe was clenching his jaw so hard I thought he was going to lose teeth, but I kept going. ‘I know the two of you were meant to have been shot twenty-six years ago in Tombstone.’ I dug in my pocket and pulled out the pictures Hendrich had got hold of. ‘And I know these photographs of you were taken thirty years ago, and you have hardly aged a day.’
They didn’t even break away to look at the photos. They knew who they were. And they knew I knew who they were too. I had to talk.
‘Listen, I’m not trying to get you into any trouble. I’m just trying to explain that it’s all right. There are lots of people like you. I don’t know your whole story, but you both look about the same age. I’m guessing you were born shortly after seventeen hundred. Now, I don’t know if during that time you have come into contact with other people with this condition, apart from each other, but I can assure you there are many of them. Many of us. Thousands, possibly. And our condition is dangerous. It has been called by a doctor in England, anageria. When it becomes public – either because we decide to tell people, or people find us out – then we are in danger. And the people we care for are in danger. We are either locked away in a madhouse, pursued and imprisoned in the name of science, or murdered by the servants of superstition. So, as I am sure you know, your lives are at risk.’