All those times, all those talks, all that everything, reduced to the simplest most elemental truth.
‘We were . . . I love you, Rose. I love you so much.’
I wanted to hold her up and feed her a rabbit pie and some cherries and make her well again. I could see she was in so much pain that she just wanted to die now but I didn’t know what that would mean. I didn’t know how the world would stay together.
There was also something else I wanted. An answer that I hoped dearly she would have.
‘Sweetheart, where is Marion?’ I asked.
She stared at me a long time. I readied myself for some terrible news. ‘She fled . . .’
‘What?’
‘She was like you.’
It took a moment to sink in.
‘She stopped growing old?’
She spoke slowly, between sighs and coughs and whimpers. I told her she didn’t have to say anything, but she felt she had to. ‘Yes. And people started to notice when the years went by and she didn’t change. I told her we would have to move again and it troubled her greatly, and Manning came to us—’
‘Manning?’
‘And that night she ran, Tom. I ran after her yet she had vanished. She never came back. I have no idea where she went or if she is safe. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . . Pray, be strong now, Tom. You find her. I shall be fine. I shall be joining my brothers . . .’
I had never felt weaker, and yet I was ready to give her anything, even the myth of my strength and future happiness.
‘I will be strong, my Rose.’
Her breath was a weak draught. ‘You will.’
‘Oh, Rose.’
I needed to keep saying her name and for her to keep hearing it. I needed her to keep being a living reality.
We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone . . .
She asked me to sing to her. ‘Anything in your heart.’
‘My heart is sad.’
‘Sing sadly, then.’
I was going to grab my lute but she just wanted my voice, and my unaccompanied voice was not something I was particularly proud of, even in front of Rose, but I just sang it for her.
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow, Her frowns the Winters of my woe . . .
She smiled a soft, troubled smile and I felt the whole world slipping away, and I wanted to slip with it, to go wherever she was going. I did not know how to be me, my strange and unusual self, without her. I had tried it, of course. I had existed whole years without her, but that was all it had been. An existence. A book with no words.
‘I will look for Marion.’
She closed her eyes, as if she had heard the final thing she had wanted to hear.
She was as grey, now, as a January sky.
‘I love you, Rose.’
And I searched her mouth, and the line between her pale, blistered lips for the slightest curve, the slightest response, but she was still now. The stillness was terrifying. Motes of dust were the only things moving.
I pleaded with God, I asked and begged and bargained, but God did not bargain. God was stubborn and deaf and oblivious. And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.
London, now
I still feel weak. My head throbs. I walk. I think it will help ease the memories of Chapel Street. I walk to the antidote: Hackney. Well Lane. Now called Well Street. The place where Rose and I first lived together, before the years of misery and separation and plague took over. The cottages and stables and barns and pond and fruit orchards are long gone. I know it isn’t healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over, but I need to see it.
I keep walking along. These must be among the busiest streets in Hackney. Buses and shoppers bustle past. I pass a phone shop and a pawnbroker’s and a sandwich bar. And then I see it, on the other side of the road – the spot where we must have lived.
It is now a windowless red-brick building, with a blue and white sign outside. HACKNEY PET RESCUE SERVICES. It is depressing to feel your life erased. The kind of depressing that requires you to rest against a wall near the cash machine, causing you to apologise to the old man guarding his PIN number, explaining that you don’t want to rob him, and deal with his stare as if he still isn’t sure.
I watch a man with a Staffordshire terrier leave the building. Then I realise what I can do. How I can make a little peace with my past.
I can cross the street and go inside.
Every other dog in the place is barking. But this one is just lying in its undersized basket. It is a strange grey creature with sapphire eyes. The dog, I feel, is too dignified for such modern garishness, a wolf out of its time. I related.
The dog has an untouched chew toy beside him. A bright yellow rubber bone.
‘What breed is it?’ I ask the dog shelter volunteer (name badge ‘Lou’). She scratches the eczema on her arm.
‘He’s an Akita,’ she says. ‘Japanese. Pretty rare. Bit like a husky, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
This is the spot, as far as I can tell. This kennel, this one with this beautiful, sad-looking dog inside, is where the room used to be. The room we slept in.
‘How old is he?’ I ask Lou.
‘Pretty old. He’s eleven. That’s one of the reasons it’s been hard to find a home for him.’
‘And why is he in here?’
‘He was picked up. He was living on a balcony to a flat. Chained up. Horrid state. Look.’ She points at a red-brown scar on his thigh where there is no hair growing.
‘A cigarette burn.’
‘He looks so depressed.’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘We never knew his name. We call him Abraham.’
‘Why?’
‘The tower block where we found him was called Lincoln Tower.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Abraham. It suits him.’
Abraham stands up. Comes over to me and stares up with those light blue eyes, as if trying to tell me something. I hadn’t intended to get a dog. That hadn’t been part of today’s plan. And yet, here I am, saying, ‘This is the one. I’d like to take him home.’
Lou looks at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want to see the rest?’
‘No.’
I notice the blotched skin on Lou’s arm – crimson and sore – and in my mind it was that cold winter’s day, in Dr Hutchinson’s waiting room, amid the other patients, as I nervously waited for a diagnosis.
London, 1860
There was a blizzard. After a relatively mild and inconsequential spell, during the previous few days in January the temperature had fallen sharply. It was the coldest I had known London to be since 1814, the year of Napoleon jokes and financial scandal and the last Frost Fair, when market traders had sold their wares on the frozen Thames.
As then, to be outside meant to be almost unable to move your face. You could almost feel your blood start to freeze. I could hardly see during my two-mile walk to Blackfriars Road, and my path was guided by the lampposts, those elegant black wrought-iron streetlamps that once seemed so modern. Blackfriars Road was the location of the hospital where Dr Hutchinson was working at the time, the London Cutaneous Institution for Treatment and Cure of Non-infectious Diseases of the Skin. Quite a catchy name, by Victorian standards.
Of course, I didn’t have a disease of the skin. My skin caused me no irritation. I had no rashes. There was nothing wrong with my skin other than that it was two hundred and seventy-nine years old, yet looked centuries younger; but then my whole body felt centuries younger. If only my mind could have felt thirty as well.
The reason I had contacted Dr Hutchinson was because of his work discovering and researching a similar, albeit opposite, affliction known as ‘progeria’.
The word is derived from the Greek words ‘pro’, meaning not only before but also early, and ‘geras’, which mea
ns old age. Premature old age. That’s what it is, essentially. A child is born and when they are still a toddler strange symptoms begin to emerge. These symptoms become more startling as the child ages.
The symptoms include those associated with ageing: hair loss, wrinkled skin, weak bones, prominent veins, stiff joints, kidney failure and often loss of eyesight. They die at a young age.
These ill-fated children have always existed. Yet the illness was never recognised until Dr Hutchinson first described it, in relation to a six-year-old boy who was losing his hair and suffering skin atrophy.
So, I was reasonably optimistic on my way to see him. If anyone could help me, he could. You see, I had, in truth, been struggling recently. I had spent most of the last two hundred years searching London and the rest of the country, looking for Marion, occasionally thinking I had seen someone who looked like her, then making a fool of myself. I remember, in particular, the beating I’d received from a drunken cobbler in York on the Shambles, who believed I was propositioning his wife, by asking her when she was born. I played music whenever I could get paid for it, moving on and changing my identity whenever anyone got suspicious. I had never accumulated wealth. The money I had made had always floated through like a draught, being spent on rent and ale.
There were many times I had lost all hope in my search. A search not just for a lost person, but for that other thing I had lost – meaning. For a point. It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.
Indeed, it was often enough to make you want to kill yourself. I sometimes thought about putting this desire into action. For years after Rose died, I would often catch myself in apothecaries, contemplating a purchase of arsenic. And recently I was back in that state. Standing on bridges, dreaming of non-existence.
And I possibly would have gone through with it, were it not for the promises I had made to Rose and my mother.
I just didn’t like my condition.
It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.
You see, in total, there had been three people I had properly loved in life: my mother, Rose and Marion. Of those, two were dead, and one was alive only as a possibility. And without love as an anchor, I had drifted. I had gone to sea, on two different voyages, drowning myself in drink, driven only by the determination to find Marion, and hopefully also myself in the process.
I walked through the blizzard. I was hungover. It took a lot to make me hungover, but I was always sure to put in the effort. The city seemed only half there, because of the snow, as if I was walking inside one of Monet’s fuzzy depictions of London, which he was soon to paint. There was no one about, except outside the Christian Mission where men in ragged, ill-fitting suits and flat caps waited for food. They were so still, so quiet, so despondent, stiff with cold.
There was a very good chance, I realised, that my journey would be wasted. Yet what could I do? I was quite desperate to see Dr Hutchinson, for if anyone in the world could tell me about my condition I was sure it would be him.
I had no idea if he would even be there, given the weather.
As soon as I arrived a nurse, Miss Forster, assured me that Dr Hutchinson was always here.
‘Never missed a day’s work in his life, I’d dare say,’ Miss Forster told me, as I am sure she had told many before. She looked so pristine and white with her immaculate cap and apron that she seemed to have been something made by the blizzard itself. ‘You are lucky today,’ she said. ‘Everyone in London seems to want to speak to Mr Hutchinson about their ailments.’ She studied me, trying to work out exactly what kind of skin complaint I had.
I followed Miss Forster up three flights of stairs and I was told to wait in a well-furnished room, full of expensive high-backed chairs with red velvet seats and damask wallpaper and a stately wall clock. ‘He’s still seeing someone,’ she told me, in the kind of reverential whisper you’d use in church. ‘You might have to wait a fair time, Mr Cribbs.’
(I was now Edward Cribbs, in honour of a former Plymouth drinking buddy.)
‘Waiting’s my speciality,’ I said.
‘Very good, sir,’ she said earnestly, and then left me. I remember sitting in that room with people whose faces were colonised by terrible blotches and rashes.
‘Awful out, isn’t it?’ I said to one woman, with a livid purple rash covering her face.
(One thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather, and whenever I have lived there I was no exception to this rule.)
‘Oh yes, sir,’ she said, but didn’t expand on this.
Eventually, the door I was waiting beside opened and out came a male patient. He was well dressed, like a dandy, but his face was covered in rough, raised blotches like a microscopic mountain range.
‘Good day,’ he said to me, smiling as broadly as his face allowed, clearly having experienced some miracle (or the promise of one).
There was that quiet lull unique to waiting rooms and the clock ticked away the silence until it was my turn.
I entered the room and the first thing I noticed was Dr Hutchinson himself. Jonathan Hutchinson was a very impressive-looking man. Even in the ultimate era of impressive-looking gentlemen, he was formidable. He was tall and smart and had a long beard. The beard, in particular, earned admiration. Neither Greek philosopher nor shipwrecked castaway, this was something very carefully thought out and pre-planned, the beard getting narrower and wispier as it descended until it reached a thin white line, a tail that faded imperceptibly into nothing. It may have been the intense nature of the morning that made me see in that beard a metaphor for mortal existence.
‘Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,’ I said, and instantly regretted it. It made me sound desperate.
Dr Hutchinson checked his pocket watch. He would do this a few times more, during this meeting. He probably wasn’t really bothered about the time. It just seemed like a habit. It was quite a common one, actually. The way people check smartphones today.
He stared at me. He picked up a letter from his desk. It was the one I had written. He read excerpts back to me.
‘Dear Dr Hutchinson’ – his voice was rich and dry, like port – ‘I am a great admirer of your work, and happened upon an article you had written on the subject of the new disease you discovered, whereby the body ages before its time . . . I myself have a strange condition, one similar in nature, though – if anything – even more unfathomable . . . it appears to me that you are the only man in all of Christendom who might be able to give me an explanation and thereby put a lifetime’s mystery to rest . . .’
He carefully folded the letter and put it aside on his desk. Then he studied me carefully.
‘Your skin is illuminated with health. It is the skin of a healthy man.’
‘I am healthy. In body. Healthier than most people.’
‘Where is your problem?’
‘Before I speak I must have assurance that I can remain unidentified. That if you were to publish any findings that arise due to what you discover my name will not be found in any journals. This is of the utmost importance. Do I have that a
ssurance?’
‘Of course. Now, you have aroused my curiosity. Tell me what is your problem.’
And so I told him. ‘I am old,’ I said simply.
‘I don’t—’
‘I am older than is meant to be.’
It took a second, but then he seemed to absorb it. His voice changed after that. Became a little less sure of itself. The question demanded to be asked, even though I could see he was scared to ask it. ‘How old?’
‘Older than is possible,’ I said.
‘Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is. Once it was impossible that this globe we are on wasn’t flat. It is not for science – and certainly not for medicine – to flatter our expectations of Nature. Quite the opposite.’ He looked at me for a long time. Then he leaned forward and whispered something. ‘Rotten fish.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
He sat back, pursed his lips. There was a mournful look to him. ‘No one sees the connection between rotten fish and leprosy, but it is there. If you eat too much rotten fish you will develop leprosy.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
(Of course, now, from the twenty-first century I can positively say that if you eat rotten fish you won’t get leprosy, though I have lived long enough to know that in another two hundred years it may be proven that eating rotten fish actually does cause leprosy and that Dr Hutchinson was actually right about this. If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again. When I was little, the average person, outside the scientific community, still believed the Earth was flat because they walked around and that is what they saw. Then people began to finally get to grips with the idea that the Earth was spherical. But then the other day I was skimming through a copy of New Scientist magazine in WH Smith’s and it was all about something called the ‘holographic principle’. It’s to do with string theory and quantum mechanics and how gravity acts like a hologram. So anyway, the mind-boggling bit is that the theory hints that the entire universe is just two-dimensional information on a cosmological horizon and that everything we think we see in three dimensions is really as much an illusion as a 3D movie, and it could all be a simulation. So really, the world (and everything) might be flat after all. And then again it might not be.)