‘So tell me,’ he said, reminding me of the question that was still in the air. A question that I knew had to be answered. ‘How old are you?’
So I told him. ‘I was born on the third of March, in the year fifteen eighty-one. I am two hundred and seventy-one years old.’
I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He stared at me for a long, long time as snow flurries danced busily outside the window, as if to mirror my swirling mind. His eyes widened and he pinched his lower lip between his fingers. And then he said, ‘Well. There. That settles the matter quite conclusively. Now I can set about and give you a diagnosis.’
I smiled. This was good. A diagnosis was precisely what I was after.
‘But, for proper help, you will need to go to Bethlem.’
I remembered passing the place. Hearing the dull screams from inside. ‘Bethlem Hospital? As in . . . Bedlam?’
‘The very same.’
‘But that’s a place for lunatics.’
‘It is an asylum, yes. It will give you the help you need. Now, please, I have more appointments today.’
He nodded to the door.
‘But—’
‘Please, I recommend that you visit Bethlem. It will help with your . . . delusions.’
The most fashionable philosopher at this time was the German Arthur Schopenhauer, who was still (just) alive. I had been reading a lot of him, which was probably inadvisable. Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
I had thought, in coming to Dr Hutchinson, I was coming to the man with the broadest field of scientific vision, the one most likely to understand my condition, and having this belief slip away felt like a kind of grief. The death of hope itself. I was beyond every field of vision. I was a kind of invisible man.
As a result, I became quite animated. I pulled a coin from my pocket.
‘Look at this. Look at this penny. It is Elizabethan. Look. Look. My daughter gave it me when I had to go away.’
‘That is an antique coin. I have a friend who has a silver coin from the reign of Henry the Eighth. A halfgroat, I think it is called. And I assure you, my friend was not born in the age of the Tudors. And that a halfgroat is rarer than a penny.’
‘I am not deluded. I promise you. I have been alive for a long time. I was there when the British found Tahiti. I knew Captain Cook. I worked for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men . . . Please, sir, you must tell me. Has someone else been to see you? A girl . . . a woman . . . talking of the same condition. Her name was Marion but she could have called herself something else. She might have been masquerading under another identity. In order to survive, we often need to—’
Dr Hutchinson looked worried now. ‘Please, go. I see you are getting agitated.’
‘Of course I am agitated. You are the only man who can help me. I need to understand myself. I need to understand why I am like this.’
I grabbed his wrist. His hand shrank away, as though my madness could be contagious.
‘We are a stone’s throw from the police station. If you don’t see yourself out, I will call for help and the police will come and take you away.’
There were tears in my eyes. Dr Hutchinson clouded into a ghost of himself. I knew I had to leave. I knew I had to give up hope, for a little while at least. So I stood up and nodded and left without a single word more, and kept myself, and my history, a secret for another thirty-one years.
London and St Albans, 1860–1891
After that first meeting with Dr Hutchinson I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive. I had tried to fight this, forcing myself into life and noise. I had gone, on my own, to a few of the new music halls, always sitting near the front, right in the heart of the noise and laughter, and I laughed or sang along, trying to feel some of the joy that filled the room. But I was immune.
So one baking hot August day in 1880 I walked from Whitechapel to St Albans. London was too much for me. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn’t seen from the outside but is still there.
For years I thought the key was to keep building new shells on top of the old ones. To keep moving, to keep changing, to keep transforming into something else in the eyes of society.
St Albans wasn’t far from London but it was far enough. It was as new a place to me as any place in England could be, and I found work as a farrier. People now think of the early 1880s being an industrial time of smoke and factories but, as with every age, it was a carousel of many periods at once. The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead. It was still the age of the horse and cart, and blacksmiths were thriving as much as they had ever been.
But in St Albans, things became worse. I would sometimes lose myself completely, and just stare into the orange heat of the forge, hardly aware of myself – or anything at all. On occasion my manager, Jeremiah Cartwright, would elbow me or slap me on my back and tell me ‘to climb down from the clouds’.
Once, when I was on my own, I took a desperate action in the pursuit of feeling. I pulled up my sleeve, took a searing piece of iron, curved into a horse-shoe from the flames, and pushed it against the top of my left forearm. I held it there, as my skin hissed and cooked beneath it, and I clenched my jaw and eyes tight, and contained the scream.
I still have that scar, like a half-smile, and I get a strange comfort when I look at it. Though it is another thing I have to be careful about. Another thing I have to conceal. A distinguishing mark, interfering with my anonymity.
It worked, I suppose. I felt the pain. It had come in and screamed through me, with mind-pulsing intensity. I had to exist, I realised, because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it. And there was a reassurance in that knowledge, that proof of my own reality.
But I still sought proof that I wasn’t mad.
Then, one day, a thought occurred to me. The thought was this: maybe I did have the proof. I, myself, was the evidence, and time was the proof.
And so it was that I decided to take that evidence, one final time, to Dr Hutchinson.
London, 1891
Dr Hutchinson didn’t know it was me. I mean, he wouldn’t have recognised the name from the list of appointments because the last time he had seen me I was Edward Cribbs and now I was back, for the first time since my youth, with my true name again. Well, true first name. I was Tom. Not the Huguenot Hazard or the dull Smith but the rather more symbolic Winters.
It was a warm day – the fourth of June – and I had ridden into town on a horse-dragged cart that belonged (both the cart and the horse) – to my sullen boss Jeremiah.
The London Cutaneous Institution for Treatment and Cure of Non-infectious Diseases of the Skin was now called the London Skin Clinic, but otherwise everything was still much as I remembered it. The fine furnishings, the three flights of stairs. Even Dr Hutchinson’s office was much as before, though somewhat more cluttered. His desk now overflowed with papers and open books, and his leather chair had a rip in it. It was still essentially the same place, but it looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind.
Dr Hutchinson, like most humans, had aged far ahead of his environment. His once distinguished beard was now wispy and grey and sparse. The whites of his eyes were yellowing and his hands were twisted with arthritis and spotted from time. And that rich plum voice now came with raspy intakes of breath. He was, in short, an ordinary human and time was doing its work.
‘So, Mr Winters. Now, I don’t seem to have any notes for you.’ He hadn’t loo
ked up since I had entered the room. He just stared down at the chaos of papers on his desk.
‘When I arranged the appointment I didn’t give any information.’
And it was then that he looked at me. At first he noticed my unclean clothes and blackened hands, and might have wondered what a rough-dressed man like myself was doing in his office.
‘I settled the payment downstairs,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I am now wondering if you recognise me.’
He looked up. His eyes met mine.
‘The last time I came to see you I did so under the name of Edward Cribbs. Do you remember that name? Do you remember? You advised me to go to the lunatic asylum.’
The rasping of his breath grew louder. He stood up out of his leather chair and came over to me. He stood ten inches from my nose. He rubbed those aged eyes.
A whisper. ‘No.’
‘You remember, don’t you? You do. I can see. Thirty-one years ago.’
He was out of breath, as if the realisation was a hill he had climbed. ‘No. No, no, no. It can’t be. It is an illusion. You might be Maskelyne or Cooke.’ (Maskelyne and Cooke were the illusionist double act of the day, who’d just been doing a host of London shows.)
‘I assure you it is I, sir.’
‘I must have taken leave of my senses.’
It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.
‘No, sir, I assure you that you haven’t. The condition I told you about, my condition, the condition of holding back the tide of years, the condition that sounds like a blessing but which is also a curse – is real. I am real. My life is real. This is very real.’
‘You are not a ghost?’
‘No.’
‘You are not a spectre of my mind?’
‘No.’
His hand reached out to touch my face.
‘What was the day of your birth?’
‘I was born on the third of March in the year fifteen eighty-one.’
‘Fifteen eighty-one.’ He repeated it not as a question but as something so incredible it needed saying before it could be absorbed. ‘Fifteen eighty-one. Fifteen eighty-one. You were eighty-five years old when the Great Fire of London—’
‘I felt its heat. Its sparks singed my skin.’
He stared at me in a new way, as if he was a palaeontologist and I was a fresh dinosaur egg, ready to hatch. ‘Well, well, well. This changes everything. Everything.
‘Tell me, are you the only one? Have you ever known anyone else like you? With this . . . condition?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘There was a man I met once, during Captain Cook’s second voyage. A man from the Pacific Islands. His name was Omai. He became the rarest of things – a friend to me. And also . . . my daughter Marion. I have not seen her since she was a girl. Her mother told me that she had inherited my condition. That she stopped ageing normally around eleven years of age.’
Dr Hutchinson smiled. ‘This is a gigantic thing to comprehend.’
And I smiled too, and felt the soul-anchoring joy of being understood.
And this joy stayed inside me right up until Dr Hutchinson’s body was found floating in the Thames thirteen days later.
London, now
I still have a headache.
Sometimes it is almost not there, while at other times that is all there is, and the pain always coincides with memories. It is less a headache and more a memory ache. A life ache.
No matter what I do, it never goes completely. I have tried everything. I’ve taken ibuprofen, drunk litres of water, had lavender-scented baths, lain in the dark, rubbed my temples in slow circles, slow-breathed, listened to lute music and the sound of waves on a beach, meditated, did a stress-relief yoga video course where I repeated the mantra ‘I am safe, it’s okay to let go’ about a hundred times until I felt terrified of my own voice, watched brain-dead TV, stopped drinking caffeine, turned the brightness down on my laptop, but still the headache stays, as stubborn as a shadow.
The one thing I haven’t properly tried is sleep. I have a trouble with sleep that has been growing over the decades.
Last night I couldn’t sleep so I watched a documentary about turtles. They aren’t the longest-living species but they are one of them, and some turtles ‘live to over one hundred and eighty’. I put that in inverted commas because mayfly estimates such as these always turn out to be underestimates. Just look at how wrong they were about sharks. Or, well, humans. My bet is that there is at least one turtle out there approaching her five hundredth birthday.
Anyway, the thing that was depressing me was that humans weren’t turtles. Turtles have been around for two hundred and twenty million years. Since the Triassic period. And they haven’t really changed that much. Humans, in contrast, have been around only a short while.
And you don’t have to be a genius to switch on the news and conclude: we probably don’t have long. The other human sub-species – such as the Neanderthals, the Denisovans in Asia, the casually named ‘hobbits’ of Indonesia – had proven crap at the long game and so, most likely, would we.
It is all right for the mayflies. It is all right if you know you only have another thirty or forty years. You can afford to think small. You can find it easy to imagine that you are a fixed thing, inside a fixed nation, with a fixed flag, and a fixed outlook. You can imagine that these things mean something.
The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human.
Turtles don’t have nations. Or flags. Or strategic nuclear weapons. They don’t have terrorism or referendums or trade wars with China. They don’t have Spotify playlists for their workouts. They don’t have books on the decline and fall of turtle empires. They don’t have internet shopping or self-service checkouts.
Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.
So here I am, with my head full of human fears and pains, my chest tight with anxiety, thinking about how much future I have in front of me.
I am lucky these days if I manage three hours of sleep. In the old days I used to take Quieting Syrup – a kind of cough mixture recommended by Hendrich – but Quieting Syrup contained morphine, and so they stopped making it when they prohibited opiates a hundred years ago. So now I have to make do with Beecham’s Night Nurse, which never really hits the spot.
I should have gone to the doctor, of course, but I didn’t. It was a rule of the Albatross Society. No doctors. Not for anything. And it was easy, after my guilt over Dr Hutchinson, to follow this through. I have wondered if it was a tumour, though I have never heard of an alba having a tumour. And obviously if I have one it would be very slow-growing. One that would give me at least an average human lifespan ahead of me. But no, the symptoms aren’t even close.
Anyway, the headache is there with only one day to go before the new job. I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don’t want to judge him. He has enough issues already.
I suppose I needed a dog with problems, in order to think less about my own. Akitas were made for the Japanese mountains, so I knew that he was a comrade of sorts, someone made for more noble surroundings, reduced to the grime and pollution and concrete streets of east London. No wonder he pissed on the carpet and ate the sofa. This wasn’t the life he’d asked for.
So we walk along, myself and Abraham, with all the exhaust fumes in
our faces.
‘There used to be a well here,’ I tell him, as we pass a betting shop. ‘And here, right here, that’s where all the men used to play skittles after church on a Sunday.’
A teenage boy passes us, in turned-up trousers and an oversized ‘The Hundreds’ T-shirt, looking like an oblivious distant echo of a seventeenth-century London boy of his age in rhinegrave breeches and overskirt. The boy looks up from his phone and glances at me with quizzical and disapproving eyes. To him I am just another loose-screwed London loner, talking to myself. Maybe he is going to be one of the pupils I will be teaching on Monday.
We cross over the road. We pass a lamppost with an advert tied to it. THE CANDLELIGHT CLUB. Relive the Roaring Twenties at London’s top speakeasy-themed cocktail bar. My headache intensifies, and I close my eyes and a memory rises like a cough – playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ at Ciro’s piano bar in Paris, with a stranger’s hand resting softly on my shoulder.
I am in the park now. I hadn’t played the piano for years, I realise. I am fine with that, most of the time. I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I wonder if I will ever play again. I unclip the lead from Abraham’s collar and he stays by my side and looks up at me, confused, as if perplexed by the concept of freedom.