How to Stop Time

  ‘How?’

  ‘They’re still alive.’

  He laughs at his own joke before continuing. ‘Anyway, he told me the secret to managing the tightrope. He said people were wrong when they said the secret was to relax and to forget about the drop below you. The secret was the opposite. The secret was never to relax. The secret was never to believe you are good. Never to forget about the drop. Do you understand what I am saying? You can’t be a mayfly, Tom. You can’t just relax. The drop is too big.’

  I take the phone into the bathroom and piss quietly against the inside of the toilet bowl, avoiding the water. ‘The drop. Right. I still don’t understand why you are calling me, Hendrich.’

  I look in the mirror and I notice something. Something wonderful and exciting, just above my left ear. A grey hair! This is my second. The first one I got in 1979. By 2100 I might have so many they could be noticeable. It gives me a thrill like no other when I notice such a change (hardly ever). I save the flush till later and leave the room, feeling happily mortal.

  ‘I call you when I want to call you. And you answer. Or I will get worried. And you know that you don’t want me to get anxious, because then I will have to do something. So, just remember your place. Remember how much the society has helped you. Okay, we’d have liked to have found your daughter. But remember everything else. Remember that before eighteen ninety-one you were lost. You had no freedom. You had no choice. You were just a confused grief-stricken man, who had no idea who he was. I gave you a map. I helped you find yourself.’

  I still haven’t found myself, I don’t say. I’m nowhere near.

  ‘Remember eighteen ninety-one, Tom. Keep it in mind.’

  And when the phone call ends, I do what he instructs. As I click off Camille’s photo I think back to 1891, I think of that moment when my life stopped being one thing and started being another, and I try to understand it. I try to work out if I sailed into a trap or into freedom, or if, maybe, it could have been both at once.

  Skyscrapers

  I

  Like

  The way

  That when you

  Tilt

  Poems

  On their side

  They

  Look like

  Miniature

  Cities

  From

  A long way

  Away.

  Skyscrapers

  Made out

  Of

  Words.

  Forest

  I want you to

  Slow down

  I just want it all

  To slow down;

  I want to make a forest

  Of a moment

  And live in that forest

  For ever

  Before you go.

  St Albans, England, 1891

  Jeremiah Cartwright had read the sky and declared, with a dark seriousness, that it was going to rain later and that he must go for iron while it was still dry. He wouldn’t be back for another hour. I was alone, by the forge, watching the metal as it glowed red, then orange. Yes, as in life, strike while the iron is hot, but not just any heat. You had to wait until the orange was starting to brighten, become that raw bright pink-yellow-orange. This was forging heat. The heat of change. The yellow quickly became white and as soon as it was white hot it was all over, so you had to watch and grab the moment before it was too late.

  It was only when I took the metal and placed it over the anvil to begin to strike it that I realised someone was standing there.

  A woman. A peculiar-looking woman.

  I can still picture her, vividly, the way I first saw her. She looked about forty years old.

  She was dressed in a long skirt and blouse, both black, and her face was shaded by a broad-brimmed hat. An outfit far too hot for the late June day, let alone for the hellish temperature of the forge. It took me a second, because of the shading over her face, to realise that she was wearing a jet-black silk eye patch over her left eye.

  ‘Hello there. How can I help you?’

  ‘You will find it is the other way around.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shook her head. She was wincing a little from the heat of the place. ‘No questions. Not just yet. Your curiosity shall be satisfied, I assure you. You must come with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said: no questions.’

  The next thing I knew she was pointing a small wooden pistol straight at my chest.

  ‘Blazing fuck. What are you doing?’

  ‘You have outed yourself to the scientific community. There is an institute . . . I haven’t got time to explain this. But, if you stay here, you will be killed.’

  The heat of the forge often made being in there a kind of delirium, a fever dream. For a moment, I thought this was a waking dream.

  ‘Dr Hutchinson is dead,’ she said. Her voice was composed, but there was a quiet force to it, as if not just stating a fact but an inevitable one.

  ‘Dr Hutchinson?’

  ‘Murdered.’

  She let the word stay in the air, with nothing but the sound of the roaring fire for company.

  ‘Murdered? Who by?’

  She handed me a news item that had been cut out of The Times.

  Doctor’s Body Found in Thames.

  I skimmed the piece.

  ‘You made a mistake. You should never have gone to see him about your condition. He had written a paper on you. On the condition. He had given it a name. Anageria. The paper would have, very possibly, been published. And that wouldn’t do. Not at all. So, I am afraid the society had no other recourse. He had to die.’

  ‘You killed him?’

  Her face now shone from the heat. ‘Yes, I killed him, to save lives. Now, come with me. There is a coach waiting outside. It is ready to take us to Plymouth.’

  ‘Plymouth?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it is not to reminisce.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Agnes.’

  She opened up her handbag and pulled out an envelope. She handed it to me. I put down the mallet and took it. It had no name, no address, but its blue paper bulged with contents.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘It’s your ticket. And your identity papers.’

  I was thrown. ‘What?’

  ‘You have lived long. You have a good survival instinct. But you have to leave now. You must come with me. There is a coach waiting. From Plymouth we head to America. You will find every answer you have ever wanted.’

  And she walked out without another word.

  Atlantic Ocean, 1891

  Boats had changed.

  I had been to sea before, but being at sea no longer felt like being at sea.

  The progress of humanity seemed to be measured in the distance we placed between ourselves and nature. We could now be in the middle of the Atlantic, on a steam ship such as the Etruria, and feel as if we were sitting in a restaurant in Mayfair.

  We were in first class. First class in those days really was first class, and you had to keep up appearances.

  The woman, Agnes, had provided me with a suitcase full of new clothes and I was wearing an elegant cotton twill three-piece with a silk ascot tie. I was clean shaven. She had shaved me, with a razor blade, and as she did so I seriously contemplated the possibility that she was going to cut my throat.

  From the restaurant window, we could see the lower decks, where crowds of people in second class and steerage were walking around in shabbier attire, the clothes I had been wearing last week, or were leaning against the rail and looking out to the horizon, with nothing but Ellis Island and American dreams awaiting them.

  Of everyone I have ever met, I would say Agnes was the most difficult to put into words. She was an extremely rare concoction of forthright character, amoral habits and restrained manners. Oh, and she had the capacity for murder.

  She was still in mou
rning black, Queen Victoria-style, and looked every part the upper-class lady. Even the eye patch seemed to have an elegance about it. Though her choice of drink – whisky – seemed a little eccentric.

  Her name – her present name – was Gillian Shields. But she had been born Agnes Wade.

  ‘Think of me as Agnes. I am Agnes Wade. Never use that name again but think of it always. Agnes Wade.’

  ‘And think of me as Tom Hazard.’

  She was born in York in 1407. She was older than me by more than a century. This managed both to trouble and to comfort me. I hadn’t yet got to hear about all of her various identities over the years, but she revealed that in the mid-eighteenth century she had been Flora Burn, the famous pirate who had operated off the coast of America.

  She had just ordered the chicken fricassee and I had ordered the broiled bluefish.

  ‘Is there a woman in your life?’

  I hesitated before answering, and she felt the abrupt need to qualify her question. ‘Don’t worry. I have no interest in you in that regard. You are too serious. I enjoy serious women, but prefer – when I partake – for a man to be as light as day. It was curiosity. There must have been someone. You can’t live as long as you have lived without there being someone.’

  ‘There was one. Yes. A long time ago.’

  ‘Did she have a name?’

  ‘She did. Yes. She had a name.’ That was as much as I was going to give her.

  ‘And no one since?’

  ‘Not really. No. No. No one since.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘It just was.’

  ‘You’ve been nursing a broken heart?’

  ‘Love is pain. It’s easier not to.’

  She nodded in agreement, and swallowed, as if my words had a taste, and she looked away into the distance. ‘Yes. Yes, it is. Love is pain.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you were going to tell me, why did you kill Dr Hutchinson?’

  She looked around at the other diners, who were sitting stiff and upright in that overdressed upper-class way. ‘Would you kindly not air accusations of murder in the dining room? You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now. It is a true wonder you are alive.’

  ‘I know but—’

  Agnes closed her eyes. ‘You need to grow up, do you understand? You are still a child. You may look like a man now, but you are still a wide-eyed boy and you need to become, quite urgently, a grown-up. We need to civilise you.’

  Her attitude of indifference appalled me. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘He was a man. That was all you really knew, wasn’t it? He was a man. A doctor, seeking glory out of misery, whose best work was behind him. A man who had happily cast you aside and dismissed you previously. He was sixty-eight years old. He was frail. He was a skeleton in tweed. At best he had only a few years to live. Now, if he had stayed alive to publicise his findings, to make his name as the man who discovered anageria, then it would have led to far more harm. And deaths of people who not only have years to live, but centuries. It is called the greater good, surely you understand that? Lives are lost in order to save more lives. That is what the society is fighting.’

  ‘The society, the society, the society . . . You keep talking about this society, but you haven’t told me anything. I don’t even know what it is called.’

  ‘The Albatross Society.’

  ‘Albatross?’

  Our food arrived.

  ‘Is there anything else I could do for you?’ the smartly dressed, slick-haired waiter asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Agnes smiled. ‘You could disappear.’

  The waiter looked taken aback, and smoothed his moustache for comfort. ‘Very well.’

  I stared down at my exquisitely prepared fish and my stomach hungrily rumbled with the knowledge that I hadn’t eaten like this in over a century.

  ‘It is thought that albatrosses live a long time. And we live a long time. Hendrich Pietersen founded the society in eighteen sixty-seven as a means of uniting and protecting us – people like us – the “albatrosses” or “albas” – from outside threats.’

  ‘And who is this Hendrich Pietersen?’

  ‘A very old and very wise man. Born in Flanders but has been in America since it was America. He made money during the tulip mania and came to New York when it was still New Amsterdam. Traded furs. Built up his wealth. Amassed, ultimately, a fortune. He got into property. All kinds of things. He is America, that is who Hendrich is. He set up the society to save us. We are blessed, Tom.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Blessed. Blessed. It is a curse.’

  She sipped her red wine.

  ‘Hendrich will want to know that you appreciate the nature of the gift you have been given.’

  ‘I will find that hard to do.’

  ‘If you want to stay alive, you will do it.’

  ‘I don’t know if I actually care too much about staying alive, Agnes.’

  ‘Not Agnes,’ she whispered sharply. She looked around the room. ‘Gillian.’

  She took something out of her bag. Some Quieting Syrup cough mixture. She poured it into her whisky. She offered to do the same to mine. I shook my head.

  ‘Do you understand how selfish you sound? Look at everyone else. Look around this dining room. Even better, think of all those émigrés in steerage. Most of them will be dead before they are sixty. Think of all those terrible illnesses we have known people to die from. Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, even plague – I know you are old enough to remember.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘That will not happen to us. People like us die in one of only two ways. We either die in our sleep aged around nine hundred and fifty, or we die in an act of violence that destroys our heart or brain or causes a profound loss of blood. That is it. We have immunity from so much human pain.’

  I thought of Rose trembling with fever and delirious with pain as she was on that last day. I thought of the days and weeks and years and decades afterwards. ‘There have been times in my life when shooting myself in the head seemed profoundly preferable to the blessing of existence.’

  Agnes gently swirled the cocktail of whisky and Quieting Syrup in her glass. ‘You have lived a long time. You must know by now that it is not just ourselves we endanger when our truth begins to surface.’

  ‘Indeed. Dr Hutchinson, for instance.’

  ‘I am not talking about Dr Hutchinson.’ She swiped back faster than a cat. ‘I am talking about other people. Your parents. What happened to them?’

  I took my time, chewing on the fish, then swallowing, then dabbing the side of my mouth with a napkin. ‘My father was killed in France due to his religion.’

  ‘Ah. The Wars of Religion? He was a Protestant? A Huguenot?’

  I nodded three times.

  ‘And your mother?’ Agnes’s eye stared at me. She sensed that she had me. And she did, I suppose. I told her the truth.

  ‘You see? Ignorance is our enemy.’

  ‘No one is killed for witchcraft now.’

  ‘Ignorance changes over time. But it is always there, and it remains just as lethal. Yes, Dr Hutchinson died. But if he had lived, if his paper was published, people would have come for you instead. And others.’

  ‘People? What people?’

  ‘Hendrich will explain. Don’t worry, Tom. Your life is not in vain. You have a purpose.’

  And I remembered how my mother had told me I needed one – a purpose – and as I ate the tender fish I wondered if I was on the cusp of finding it.

  New York, 1891

  ‘Look at her,’ said Agnes, as we stood outside on the upper deck of the Etruria. ‘Liberty Enlightening the World.’

  It was my first sighting of the Statue of Liberty. Her right arm raising that torch high into the air. She was a copper colour back then, and shone, and looked most impressive. She glowed in the sun, as we got clo
ser to the harbour. She seemed vast – epic and ancient – something on the scale of sphinxes and pyramids. I had only been alive since the world had become smaller, more modest again. But I looked at the New York skyline and felt like the world was dreaming bigger. Clearing its throat. Getting some confidence. I put my hand in my pocket, held Marion’s penny between my fingers. It was, as ever, a comfort.

  ‘I’ve been up close,’ said Agnes. ‘It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She’s moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet. Like you, Tom. You’ll see. Your new life awaits.’

  I stared up at the Dakota, a magnificent, ornate, seven-storey butter-cream stone building with elegant balustrades and a steep gable roof. I had a feeling of dizziness caused by that rare sense that things were moving fast, not just in my life but in the world. I had been in New York for a few hours now, and the feeling had not waned. There was something about New York in the 1890s. Something exciting. Something so real you felt you could breathe it in. Something that made me feel again.

  I paused for a moment on the threshold.

  What would have happened if I had run away right then? If I had pushed Agnes away and disappeared into the park or sprinted fast along 72nd Street and somehow got away? But I was dizzy with it, I suppose, with all the novelty of the city. It was already making me feel more alive, after all those dead years of nothingness.

  A statue of an American Indian – Agnes called him ‘the watching Indian’ – gazed solemnly down at us. In 1980, while on a job in São Paulo, I would watch the news of John Lennon’s assassination on a small colour television screen. The footage was of that same building, where Lennon was shot. I wondered if the building itself had a curse, affecting all who passed through its doors.