How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
‘How?’
A man walks by, a late middle-aged man in a faded Quiksilver T-shirt and frayed cut-off jeans and flip-flops. He is on the beach path, heading onto the sand with a joint and can of Coke. He is mumble-singing a sad but indiscernible tune. He is a peaceful, oblivious stoned drunk who wants nothing to do with us. He sits heavily on the sand, to smoke and watch the waves, well out of earshot.
Omai sits down too, placing his wet board on the sandy grass and sitting cross-legged on it. I join him.
He stares out at the sea with sad fondness, as if it is a memory. Moments pass, unregistered. ‘I fell in love.’
Obviously this raises questions but I keep them silent for now.
‘You used to tell me about love, didn’t you? You used to tell me about that girl you fell in love with. The one you married. The mother of Marion. What was she called?’
‘Rose.’ To say her name, on a beach in Australia in the twenty-first century, makes me feel a strange and dizzy sensation. The distance of time and place fuses with the closeness of emotion. I place my hands on the grass and the sand, as if needing to feel something solid, as if there are elemental traces of her there.
‘Well, I found my Rose. She was beautiful. Her name was Hoku. I get headaches, nowadays, when I think of her.’
I nod. ‘Memory headaches. I’ve been getting a lot of them too, recently.’
I wonder, for a moment, if Hoku is the old woman with the tin opener that I had seen in the house, though this idea is quickly put to rest.
‘We were only together seven years. She died in the war . . .’
I wonder which one. And where. Second World War, I assume, and I’m right.
‘That was when I moved to New Zealand and got some fake papers and signed up to fight. There was never an easier time to fake your identity. They accepted anyone then. They didn’t pry too deeply. Not that I did much fighting. Was sent to Syria and sat and baked there for a bit. Then Tunisia, for more baking with a bit of actual action thrown in. Saw some things. It was intense. What about you? Did you fight in that one?’
I sigh. ‘I wasn’t allowed. Hendrich thought the combination of science and ideology was the most dangerous thing for us. And he was right, but there were the Nazis, with all their deluded obsessions about creating the perfect race. Their pseudo-science eugenics people were onto us. They’d taken over the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin and discovered their research into us, into albas, and they were after as many of us as possible . . . Anyway, Hendrich was going through a paranoid phase. He didn’t want any of us involved in the war. And, yes, while you were saving civilisation I was being a short-sighted asthmatic librarian in Boston. I still hate myself for that. I suppose I have tried to avoid love the way Hendrich has wanted us to avoid war. To try to stay alive without any more pain.’
A distant siren wails on a road somewhere beyond.
Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’ I think of Camille, sitting on the bench in the park, reading Tender Is the Night, as Omai continues. ‘I’ve been trying to find the point of it all. I used to believe in mana. Everyone did in those days, on the islands. I think I still do, you know, in a sense. Not as a superstition but as an idea of something. Something inside us. Something still not explained that doesn’t come from the sky or the clouds or some palace in Heaven but from inside here.’ He pats his chest. ‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’
We fall quiet after that.
The drunk man is now lying down, staring up at the stars. He stubs his joint out on the sand.
A minute passes. Maybe two. Then Omai feels ready to say it.
‘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
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.’
‘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
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 . . .’