But she doesn’t. So I send her a text.
‘I’m sorry about the way I was. There is more I need to explain.
And I will. I just want to tell you that you should get away. You might be in danger. Leave your flat. Go somewhere. Somewhere public.’
I send the text.
My heart beats wildly.
All my life, I realise, I have been dogged by fear. Hendrich had promised to be an end to those fears but all he had done was accentuate them. He controlled people by fear. He had controlled me by fear and he controlled Marion by fear. When it was just me, it was hard to see, but seeing how he had manipulated Marion, lying to her and me in the process, had made me realise the Albatross Society ran on secrets and the manipulation of its members, all to serve Hendrich’s increasing paranoia about external threats. Biotech companies aiming to stop the ageing process were his latest area of concern: one called GeneControl Therapies and another called StopTime that were both investing in stem cell technology that could one day prevent humans ageing.
Hendrich held on to the idea that those scientists at the Berlin institute had been killers, and he always had some new conspiracy theory to work with. Albas knew it was hard to be their true selves, and often had memories of horrific injustices, as I did. But I was no longer prepared to let the long shadow of William Manning shroud my judgement. The more I thought about the threat, the more I realised the threat was Hendrich himself.
He had tainted everything. Even the reunion with Marion.
I get a text from Camille. The text says: ‘????’
A taxi rolls by. The only car on the road.
Then my phone vibrates.
It is not Camille, but Marion.
‘He’s going to see Omai.’
‘What?’
‘He’s just leaving the restaurant. He’s going. He’s just got in a taxi. He’ll be at the house in ten minutes.’
A large yellow-striped lizard scuttles amid palm trees.
‘I just saw the taxi. What’s he going to do?’
‘He didn’t say. He told me to wait. I couldn’t push it. He was suspicious enough.’
‘Marion, has he got a gun?’
‘I don’t know. But—’
I am already running north to Broken Head Road before she finishes her sentence.
Canterbury, England, 1617
‘Father.’
Marion was looking up at me from her pillow. Her eyes were heavy with worry. She sighed. I’d been telling her about the birds that disappeared to the moon and lived there, on the side we couldn’t see.
‘Yes, Marion?’
‘I wish we were on the moon.’
‘Why is that, Marion?’
She frowned, deeply. As deep as only she could frown. ‘Someone spat at Mother. He came up to the stall and he stood there. He was wearing nice gloves. But he made a face like a gargoyle, and said no more words than a gargoyle, and he gave Ma the most horrid look, and then he gave me the same eyes and Ma didn’t like the way he was looking at me so she said, “Do you want any flowers, mister?” And I suppose she asked it a little harshly but that was because she felt nervous.’
‘So he spat at her?’
Marion nodded. ‘Yes. He waited a moment more and then he spat in her face.’ She clenched her jaw so tight I could see the muscles shift beneath her face.
I took this in. ‘And did the man say anything more? Did he explain himself?’
Marion frowned. The anguish in her eyes made her look older. I could easily picture the woman she would become. ‘He said nothing. He left Ma wiping herself, with all the hawkers and folk from town staring at us.’
‘And did he act peculiar to anyone else?’
‘No. Only to us.’
I kissed her forehead. I pulled the blanket up.
‘Sometimes,’ I told her, ‘the world is not how we wish it to be. Sometimes people can disappoint us. Sometimes people can do terrible things to others. You must be careful in this life. You see, I am different. You know that, don’t you? The rest of the world ages forwards and I age to the side, it appears.’
Her face sharpened. She was lost in violent imaginings. ‘I hope that man gets sick. I hope he dies in agony for shaming Ma like that. I’d like to see him hanging and his legs kicking wild and have him sliced into quarters and his innards slip out. I’d like to pull out his eyes and feed them to a dog.’
I looked at her. The fury was a force that you could almost feel in the air.
‘Marion, you are still a child. You must not think this way.’
She calmed a little. ‘I was scared.’
‘But what is it that Montaigne teaches us? About fear?’
She nodded slowly, as if Montaigne himself was also in the room. ‘“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”’
I nod. ‘Now, hear me, Marion. If anything were to happen to you, if you were ever to become like me, if you were different, you must learn to build a shell around yourself. A shell as hard as a walnut. A shell no one else can see, but one you know is there. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘I think I might.’
‘Be a walnut.’
‘People crack walnuts. And eat them.’
I suppressed a smile. There was nothing I could say to Marion sometimes.
A little later, after a jar of ale, I lay beside Rose, fearing for a future I already knew was against us. And I felt sick, knowing the time would arrive when I’d have to leave them. When I’d have to run away, and keep running, for however much life I had been given. Away from Canterbury. Away from Rose. Away from Marion. Away from myself. I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living. And I lay there, trying to find a route to a far distant future, where things might be better. Where somehow the course of my life had re-routed and headed homewards once more.
Byron Bay, Australia, now
You can hear the crashing of waves quite clearly on Broken Head Road. Where they break against the side of the cliff. It is quite easy for the sound of petrol splashing against timber to be disguised. I smell it before I see what he is doing.
‘Hendrich,’ I say, ‘stop!’
In the dark he almost looks his age. Stooped and thin and withered, like a Giacometti sculpture in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. One of his arms hangs down, crooked, struggling awkwardly with the weight of the petrol can. But there is an urgent energy to his movement.
He stops for a second and looks at me with blank eyes. He isn’t smiling. I note this because I have rarely seen Hendrich without a smile.
‘You told me you couldn’t be the one to burn his house down in Tahiti. You were never really a finisher, were you, Tom? Well, history has a way of correcting its mistakes.’
‘Don’t do this. Omai isn’t a danger.’
‘As you get older you not only get a certain aptitude for people, Tom, you also get an insight into time itself. You’re probably not quite there yet but there are moments where the understanding is so profound that you see time both ways. Forwards and back. When they say “to understand the future you must understand the past”, I don’t think they know the real truth of it, Tom. You can actually see the future. Not the whole of it. Just pieces. Flashes. Like reverse memories. We forget some of our future just as we forget some of our past, it seems. But I’ve seen enough. I knew you weren’t to be trusted any more to finish a job. I’ve sensed it for some time. I knew where this was going.’
‘It doesn’t matter. None of this matters.’
‘Of course it matters. We need to protect ourselves.’
‘Fuck, Hendrich. That’s bullshit. You mean protect yourself. That’s all you’ve ever meant. The society is a society of one. Come on, Hendrich. It’s not the eighteen hundreds any more. You knew about Marion. You lied to me.’
He shakes his head. ‘I did something you find hard. I kept my promise. I told you I would find her and I found her. Something you were unable to do. I keep people safe.’
&n
bsp; ‘By setting fire to their homes?’
‘You have your nose against the canvas, Tom. Stand back and see the whole picture. We are under threat like never before. Berlin, biotech, everything. Things don’t get better. Look at the world, Tom. It’s all fucked. Mayflies don’t live long enough to learn. They are born, they grow up, they make the same mistakes, over and over. It’s all a big circle, spinning around, creating more destruction every time. Look at America. Look at Europe. Look at the internet. Civilisation never stays around for long before the Roman Empire is falling again. Superstition is back. Lies are back. Witch hunts are back. We’re dipping back into the Dark Ages, Tom. Not that we ever really left them. We need to stay a secret.’
‘But all you’ve done is replace superstition with more superstition. You lie. You found my daughter and you sent her to kill me.’
‘I’m not the only one who lies, Tom, am I now?’
He pulls a chrome lighter from his pocket. It was the same lighter he’d had the first time I met him, back in the Dakota. ‘Gave up smoking years ago. They lynch you in LA for less. But I kept this memento. You know, like you with that stupid penny. The petrol, though, the petrol I had to buy.’
He flicks a flame into life. Suddenly, I understand this is real. There is no surprise, really, that Hendrich is willing to kill Omai, or me, or that he kept Marion’s whereabouts secret. Ever since I joined the society I have known what he is capable of. The surprise is that he is willing to expose himself like this, endanger himself, be this close to the heat.
‘Omai!’ I shout. ‘Omai! Omai! Get out of the house!’
And then it happens.
The peak of the crescendo. A cascade of everything. All the paths of my life intersecting in one spot.
As I begin to run towards Hendrich, a voice rings out, puncturing the night: ‘Stop!’
It is, of course, Marion.
And then Hendrich stops, for a moment, and seems suddenly weak and vulnerable, like a little boy lost in the woods. He glances from Marion to me and back again. Simultaneously, Omai steps barefoot out of the house, carrying his aged daughter in his arms.
‘Look at this. Isn’t it so sweet? A father and daughter get-together. That’s your weakness, you see. That’s what separates you from me. This desire to be like them. The mayflies. I never had that. I knew, before I acquired my first fortune, years before I sold my first tulip, that the only way to be free was to have no one at all.’
A shot rings out. The noise of it shakes from the sky. Marion’s face looks hard – yes, hard as a walnut – but her eyes are now filled with tears and her hands are shaking.
She’s hit her target. Black lines of blood trickle from his shoulder down his arm. But he is raising the can of petrol and tilting it, pouring the fluid over himself.
‘In the end, it turns out I was Icarus after all.’
He drops the can as he brings the flame close to his chest. I think, or imagine, I see a small smile, a faint signal of contented acceptance, the moment before he violently blooms into fire. His flaming body staggers away from the house. He keeps walking across the grass towards the sea. The cliff.
He is heading to the edge, his feet pushing through the grass that grows wilder nearer to the edge. The grass smokes and singes and glows at its tips, like a hundred tiny fireflies. He keeps walking; there is no moment of pause or reflection, but nor is there a scream of pain. Just a continued staggering momentum. A determination, a last act of control.
‘Hendrich?’ I say. I don’t know why his name comes out as a question. I suppose because, even in his last moments, he is a collection of mysteries. I have lived a long life but it is never long enough to be entirely free from surprise.
‘Oh, man,’ Omai keeps saying. ‘Oh, man, oh, man . . .’
And his instinct, as a good person, is to go over to him. So he places his daughter down on the grass.
‘No!’ Marion says. Still holding the gun. I sense now that Hendrich is not only the man who wanted her to kill me, but the man who spat on her mother’s face, the one whose guts she’d wanted to see. He is the unavenged William Manning. He is every single person who has hurt her in the space between, and I sense there have been a lot. ‘Leave him. The motherfucker. Stand back. Stay where you are. Leave him.’
So we leave him. And all is silent. No cars pass by, no one sees a thing. The only witness is our side of the gape-mouthed moon, as always. And the vertical fire of Hendrich walks and walks and then isn’t walking at all. He is gone. The ground that had been glowing and shifting from the light of the fire is now in sudden darkness. He has fallen. The temporal distance between him walking and him not being there is so minute it is imperceptible.
There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.
And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?
So, it took me only 437 years, but I finally realised how to go about answering all this. I didn’t quite know what the answer was but I knew the process. In a way the process was not knowing the answer, and being fine with that. I knew the fear that had been stopping me. So, it was time to live. I had reached a start and an ending and so – there, in that Australian night, as we said farewell to Omai and headed to the airport, I did not feel the fear I should have felt. Neither for me, nor Marion, my unfathomable daughter. We were survivors and, being such, we would survive. The known has gone and the unknown awaits – the story ends and the story begins, over and over, as we dangle eternally in the present. There is nothing more to add, and yet there is always a little more. Life spills over.
London, now
The unfathomable Marion.
My daughter. Rose’s daughter.
She’s still the same little girl.
That’s what people say, isn’t it? About children grown up. Well, in truth, I can’t say it about Marion. She is not the same little girl.
Yes, the intensity had always been there. The sensitive intelligence. The bookishness. The desire – once no more than a child’s fantasy – to exact bloody vengeance on those who wronged her.
But there are a thousand new things there now.
After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.
For instance, she is scared of Abraham. She now has ‘a thing about dogs’. I daren’t ask her what happened.
Abraham likes her straight away, from the moment we pick him up from the dog sitter, but Marion sits well away from him, casting nervous glances in his direction.
She is very open about the things she has done.
She tells me some of the places she has lived, other than London and Heidelberg and LA. Rouen, that had been her first trip overseas. Then Bordeaux. She knew the language, and both had strong Montaigne associations, so that had guided her. But there had been other places in more recent times: Amsterdam, Vancouver, Scotland. She had lived in Scotland for about a hundred years, apparently, from the 1840s onwards. She had moved around. The Highlands. The East Neuk of Fife. Shetland. Edinburgh. She had been a weaver. She’d had a loom. ‘A travelling loom,’ she says, and laughs a little, which is rare.
She is on Citalopram for depression. ‘It spaces me out, but I need that.’
She says she gets strange dreams all the time, and often has panic attacks. Sometimes she has panic attacks about having panic attacks. Vicious circles. She had one on the plane, coming back from Australia, but I hardly even noticed, except she became quite still.
We had left Australia with no problems at all. She had not flown there with Hendrich, and his body hadn’t yet been discovered, so no questions were asked. He had changed his identity, of course, to arrive in Australia, so in a sense he didn’t exist at all. He had disguised his life so well his death became, like every other aspect of him, one more secret.
I had said goodbye to Omai. I had told him that at some point it might be a good idea to move and he said he’d think about it and that was that. He wasn’t going to move. He was going to stay still and, well, only the future knows what that means.
I write an email. I type it out and keep very nearly pressing ‘send’. The email is to Kristen Curial, who heads up StopTime, the leading part-government-funded biotech company that is investigating ways to halt the cellular damage behind illness and ageing. One of the ones Hendrich was paranoid about.
Dear Kristen,
I am 439 years old. And I can prove it. I believe I can help you with your research.
Tom
And then I attach the Ciro’s picture and a selfie of me now, complete with arm scar. I stare at the email and see how ridiculous it looks and then save it in drafts. Maybe later.
Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word ‘motherfucker’ in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt’s day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a mother fucker. (There is ‘never anything on the motherfucker’.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a mother-fucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.
She also tells me that she had a ‘short spell’ on hard drugs from 1963 to 1999.