How to Stop Time, Page 2

  He laughed. ‘A history teacher. What, like in a high school?’

  ‘They say “secondary school” in England. But, yes, a history teacher in a high school. I think that would be a good thing to do.’

  And Hendrich smiled and looked at me with mild confusion, as if I had ordered the chicken instead of the lobster. ‘That’s perfect. Yes. Well, we’ll just need to get a few things in place and . . .’

  And as Hendrich kept talking I watched the mouse disappear under the hedge, and into dark shadows, into freedom.

  London, now

  London. The first week of my new life.

  The headteacher’s office at Oakfield School.

  I am trying to seem normal. It is an increasing challenge. The past is trying to burst through.

  No.

  It is already through. The past is always here. The room smells of instant coffee, disinfectant and acrylic carpet, but there is a poster of Shakespeare.

  It is the portrait you always see of him. Receding hairline, pale skin, the blank eyes of a stoner. A picture that doesn’t really look like Shakespeare.

  I return my focus to the headteacher, Daphne Bello. She is wearing orange hoop earrings. She has a few white hairs amid the black. She is smiling at me. It is a wistful smile. The kind of smile no one is capable of before the age of forty. The kind that contains sadness and defiance and amusement all at once.

  ‘I’ve been here a long while.’

  ‘Really?’ I say.

  Outside a distant police siren fades into nothing.

  ‘Time,’ she says, ‘is a strange thing, isn’t it?’

  She delicately holds the brim of her paper cup of coffee as she places it down next to her computer.

  ‘The strangest,’ I agree.

  I like Daphne. I like this whole interview. I like being back here, in London, back in Tower Hamlets. And to be in an interview for an ordinary job. It is so wonderful to feel, well, ordinary for once.

  ‘I have been a teacher now for three decades. And here for two. What a depressing thought. All those years. I am so old.’ She sighs through her smile.

  I have always found it funny when people say that.

  ‘You don’t look it,’ is the done thing to say, so I say it.

  ‘Charmer! Bonus points!’ She laughs a laugh that rises through an entire two octaves.

  I imagine the laugh as an invisible bird, something exotic, from Saint Lucia (where her father was from), flying off into the grey sky beyond the window.

  ‘Oh, to be young, like you,’ she chuckles.

  ‘Forty-one isn’t young,’ I say, emphasising the ludicrous number. Forty-one. Forty-one. That is what I am.

  ‘You look very well.’

  ‘I’ve just come back from holiday. That might be it.’

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Sri Lanka. Yes. It was nice. I fed turtles in the sea . . .’

  ‘Turtles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I look out of the window and see a woman with a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform head onto the playing field. She stops, turns to them, and I see her face as she speaks unheard words. She is wearing glasses and jeans and a long cardigan that flaps gently in the wind, and she pulls her hair behind her ear. She is laughing now, at something a pupil is saying. The laugh lights up her face, and I am momentarily mesmerised.

  ‘Ah,’ Daphne says, to my embarrassment when she sees where I am looking. ‘That’s Camille, our French teacher. There’s no one like her. The kids love her. She always gets them out and about . . . Al fresco French lessons. It’s that kind of school.’

  ‘I understand you’ve done a lot of great things here,’ I say, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  ‘I try. We all try. It’s sometimes a losing battle, though. That’s my only concern about your application. Your references are amazing. And I’ve had them all checked . . .’

  I feel relieved. Not that she has checked the references, but that there had been someone who had picked up the phone, or emailed back.

  ‘. . . but this isn’t a rural comprehensive in Suffolk. This is London. This is Tower Hamlets.’

  ‘Kids are kids.’

  ‘And they’re great kids. But this is a different area. They don’t have the same privileges. My concern is that you’ve lived a rather sheltered life.’

  ‘You might be surprised.’

  ‘And many students here struggle hard enough with the present, let alone with history. They just care about the world around them. Getting them engaged is the key. How would you make history come alive?’

  There was no easier question in the world. ‘History isn’t something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn’t politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It’s that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.’

  ‘You’ve put me right off my drink.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. But the point is: history is everywhere. It’s about making people realise that. It makes you understand a place.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘History is people. Everyone loves history.’

  Daphne looks at me doubtfully, her face retreating into her neck as her eyebrows rise. ‘Are you sure about that?’

  I offer a small nod. ‘It’s just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.’

  I look out of the window. We are on the third floor and have quite a view, even in the grey London drizzle. I see an old Georgian building I have walked past many times.

  ‘That place, that place over there. The one with all the chimneys? That used to be an asylum. And over there’ – I point to another, lower brick building – ‘was the old slaughterhouse. They used to take all the old bones and make porcelain from them. If we had walked past it two hundred years ago we’d have heard the wails coming from the people society had declared mad on one side and the cattle on the other . . .’

  If, if, if.

  I point to the slate terrace rooftops in the east.

  ‘And just over there, in a bakery, on Old Ford Road, that’s where Sylvia Pankhurst and the East London suffragettes used to meet. They used to have a big sign, painted in gold, saying “VOTES FOR WOMEN” that you couldn’t miss, not far from the old match factory.’

  Daphne writes something down. ‘And you play music, I see. Guitar, piano and violin.’

  And the lute, I don’t say. And the mandolin. And the cittern. And the tin pipe.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You put Martin to shame.’

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Our music teacher. Hopeless. He’s hopeless. Can barely play the triangle. Thinks he’s a rock star, though. Poor Martin.’

  ‘Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I’d find it a hard thing to teach. I’ve always found it hard to talk about music.’

  ‘Unlike history?’

  ‘Unlike history.’

  ‘And you seem up to speed with the current curriculum.’

  ‘Yes,’ I lie, easily. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And you’re still on the young side of things.’

  I shrug, and make the kind of face I think you are meant to make.

  ‘I’m fifty-six so forty-one is young, trust me.’

  Fifty-six is young.

  Eighty-eight is young.

  One hundred and thirty is young.

  ‘Well, I am quite an old forty-one.’

  She smiles at me. She clicks the top of her pen. Then clicks it again. Each one is a moment. The first click, the pause between the click, and the second click. The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future.
To be actually here.

  Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?

  I am drifting away.

  It has been happening a lot recently. I had heard about this. Other albas had spoken about it. You reached the mid-point of your life, and the thoughts got too much. The memories swell. The headaches grow. The headache today isn’t so bad, but it is there.

  I try to concentrate. I try to hold on to that other now, a short few seconds ago, where I was enjoying the interview. Enjoying the feeling of relative ordinariness. Or the illusion of it.

  There is no ordinary.

  Not for me.

  I try to concentrate. I look at Daphne as she shakes her head and laughs, but softly now, at something she doesn’t disclose. Something sad, I feel, from the sudden glazing of her eyes. ‘Well, Tom, I am quite impressed by you and this application, I must say.’

  Tom.

  Tom Hazard.

  My name – my original name – was Estienne Thomas Ambroise Christophe Hazard. That was the starting point. Since then I have had many, many names, and been many, many things. But, on my first arrival into England, I quickly lost the trimmings and became just Tom Hazard.

  Now, using that name again, it feels like a return. It echoes in my head. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom.

  ‘You tick all the boxes. But even if you didn’t you’d be getting the job.’

  ‘Oh, really. Why?’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘There’s no other applicant!’

  We both laugh a little at that.

  But the laugh dies faster than a mayfly.

  Because then she says, ‘I live on Chapel Street. I wonder if you know anything about that?’

  And, of course, I do know about that, and the question wakes me like a cold wind. My headache pulses harder. I picture an apple bursting in an oven. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should never have asked Hendrich for this to happen. I think of Rose, the last time I saw her, and those wide desperate eyes.

  ‘Chapel Street. I don’t know. No. No, I’m afraid I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ She sips her coffee.

  I look at the poster of Shakespeare. He seems to be staring at me, like an old friend. There is a quote below his image.

  We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  ‘I have a feeling about you, Tom. You have to trust your feelings, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say, though feelings were the one thing I had never trusted.

  She smiles.

  I smile.

  I stand up, and head to the door. ‘See you in September.’

  ‘Ha! September. September. It will fly by. Time, you see. That’s another thing about getting older. Time speeds up.’

  ‘I wish,’ I whisper.

  But she doesn’t hear, because then she says, ‘And children.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Children are another thing that seem to make life go faster. I have three. Oldest is twenty-two. Graduated last year. Yesterday she was playing with her Lego; today she’s collecting the keys to her new flat. Twenty-two years in a blink of an eye. Do you have any?’

  I grip the door handle. This is a moment, too. And inside it, a thousand others come painfully alive.

  ‘No,’ I say, because it is easier than the truth, ‘I don’t.’

  She seems, for a brief moment, a little awkward. I think she is about to comment on this but instead she says, ‘See you soon, Mr Hazard.’

  I step out into the corridor that smells of the same disinfectant, where two teenagers lean against the wall, staring down at their phones as devoutly as old priests with prayer books. I turn back to see Daphne looking towards her computer.

  ‘Yes. See you soon.’

  As I walk out of Daphne Bello’s office, and out of the school, I am in the twenty-first century but also the seventeenth.

  As I walk the mile or so to Chapel Street – a stretch of betting shops and pavements and bus-stops and concrete lampposts and half-hearted graffiti – I am almost in a trance. The streets feel too wide. And when I get to Chapel Street I discover what I of course know: the houses that had once been there no longer are, replaced by ones built in the late 1800s, tall and red-bricked and as austere as the time of their design.

  At the corner, where I had known a small deserted church, and a watchman, there is now a KFC. The red plastic throbs like a wound. I walk along with my eyes closed, trying to sense how far along the street the house had originally been and I come to a stop after twenty or so steps. I open my eyes to see a semi-detached house that bears no physical relation to the house I had arrived at all those centuries ago. The unmarked door is now a modern blue. The window reveals a living room complete with a TV. Someone is playing a video game on it. An alien explodes on the screen.

  My headache pounds and I feel weak and I have to step back, almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity. I lean back against a car, lightly, but enough to set off the alarm.

  And the noise is loud, like a wail of pain, howling all the way from 1623, and I walk briskly away from the house, then the street, wishing I could just as easily walk away from the past.

  London, 1623

  I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

  And my point, for a while, was Rose.

  But after she was gone so many of the good memories were clouded by the last. An end that was also a terrible beginning. That final day I had with her. Because it is this day, the one where I headed to Chapel Street to see her, that has defined so many over the centuries.

  So . . .

  I was standing outside her door.

  I had knocked and waited and knocked again.

  The watchman, who I had passed at the corner of the street, was now approaching.

  ‘It is a marked house, lad.’

  ‘Yes. I know that.’

  ‘You must not go in there . . . It is unsafe.’

  I held out my hand. ‘Stand back. I am cursed with it too. Do not get any closer.’

  This was a lie, of course, but an effective one. The watchman stepped back away from me, with considerable haste.

  ‘Rose,’ I said, through the door. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Tom. I just saw Grace. By the river. She told me you were here . . .’

  It took a while, but I heard her voice, from inside. ‘Tom?’

  It had been years since I had heard that voice.

  ‘Oh, Rose, open the door. I need to see you.’

  ‘I can’t, Tom. I am sick.’

  ‘I know. But I won’t catch it. I have been around many plague sufferers these last months and I have had not so much as a cold. Come on, Rose, open the door.’

  She did so.

  And she was there, a woman. We were the same age, near enough, but now she looked like she was nearing fifty, while I still seemed a teenager.

  Her skin was grey. Sores patterned her face like territories on a map. She could hardly stand up. I felt guilty that I had made her leave her bed but she seemed pleased to see me. She talked, semi-coherently, as I helped her back into bed.

  ‘You look so young, still . . . You are still a young man . . . a boy, almost.’

  ‘I have a little line, in my forehead. Look.’

  I held her hand. She couldn’t see the line.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am sorry I told you to leave.’

  ‘It was the right thing. Just my existence was a danger to you.’

  I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how
I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

  Though I am absolutely sure, word for word, she then said: ‘There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.’ And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another’s pain as if our own.

  She drifted in and out of delirium.

  The illness was taking further hold, almost by the minute. She was now the opposite of me. While for me life stretched out towards an almost infinitely distant point in the future, for Rose the end was now galloping closer.

  It was dark in the house. All the windows had been boarded up. But as she lay on the bed in her damp night clothes, I could see her face shining like pale marble, the red and grey patches colonising her skin. Her neck was swollen with egg-sized lumps. It was terrible, a kind of violation, to see her transformed like this.

  ‘It’s all right, Rose. It’s all right.’

  Her eyes were wide with fear, almost as if something was inside her skull, slowly pushing from behind.

  ‘Soft, soft, soft . . . All will be well . . .’

  It was such a ridiculous thing to say. All was not going to be well.

  She moaned a little. Her body writhed in pain.

  ‘You must go.’ Her voice was dry.

  I leaned over and kissed her brow.

  ‘Careful,’ she said.

  ‘It is safe.’ In truth, I didn’t know for certain if that was true. I thought it was, but couldn’t know it, having only lived forty-two years on earth (and looking little more than the sixteen Rose first thought I was). But I didn’t care. Life had lost its value in the years away from her.

  Even though I hadn’t seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.

  ‘We were happy, weren’t we, Tom?’ The faintest echo of a smile was on her face now. I remembered walking past Oat Barn carrying heavy pails of water, on some long-lost Tuesday morning, content in our chatter. I remembered the joy of her smile and her body, when it had writhed from pleasure not pain, and of trying to be quiet so her sister wouldn’t wake. I remembered long walks back from Bankside, dodging the stray dogs and slithering in mud, comforted by nothing but the thought that she would be at the end of the journey home, and be the point of it.