The next day, in Hendrich’s apartment, as we finished our champagne breakfast, the conversation happened. The one I always think of.
‘The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,’ he said, wiping a waffle crumb off the table with his finger before lighting a cigar. ‘There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.’
I stared through the curving smoke of his cigar. ‘I doubt I will ever love again.’
‘Good. You are, of course, allowed to love food and music and champagne and rare sunny afternoons in October. You can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits. Do you hear me? Don’t attach yourself to people, and try to feel as little as you possibly can for those you do meet. Because otherwise you will slowly lose your mind . . .’ He paused for a while. ‘Eight years, that’s the rule. That’s the most an alba can stay anywhere before things get really tricky. That’s the Eight-Year Rule. You have a nice life for eight years. Then I send you on a task. Then you have a new life. With no ghosts.’
I believed him. How could I not? Hadn’t I lost myself after Rose? Wasn’t I still, in a sense, waiting to find myself again? A nice life. Maybe it was possible. With a structure. With something to belong to. With a purpose.
‘Do you know your Greek myths, Tom?’
‘A little.’
‘Well, I am like Daedalus. You know, the creator of the labyrinth that held the minotaur safe. I’ve had to build a labyrinth to protect all of us. This society. But the trouble with Daedalus is that for all his wisdom people didn’t always listen to him. His own son, Icarus, didn’t listen. You know that story, don’t you?’
‘Yes. He and Icarus try to escape from the Greek island—’
‘Crete.’
‘Crete. Yes. But their wings are made of wax and feathers. And his father . . .’
‘Daedalus.’
‘His father tells him not to fly too close to the sun or to the sea, or his wings will catch fire or get soaked.’
‘And of course both things happen. He goes too close to the sun. The wax melts. He falls in the sea. Now, you are not too high. But you have lived too low. It’s a balance. I am here to help you get the balance right. How do you see yourself, Tom?’
‘Not as Icarus.’
‘Then who?’
‘That’s a big question.’
‘It’s a most important question.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you someone who watches life, or someone who participates?’
‘Both, I suppose. Watching, participating.’
He nodded. ‘What are you capable of?’
‘What?’
‘Where have you been?’
‘I’ve been around the world.’
‘No, I mean, where have you been morally? What have you done? How many lines have you crossed?’
‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘Because, within the structure of the rules, you need to be free.’
I was uneasy. I should have trusted that feeling, instead of just sipping champagne. ‘What do we need to be free to do?’
He smiled. ‘We live long lives, Tom. We live long lives. Long and secret lives. We do whatever’s necessary.’ The smile became a laugh. He had good teeth, considering how many centuries he’d had them. ‘Now, today, hot dogs.’
London, now
We live long lives, Tom . . .
There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.
Even to me, that pine seems old. In recent years, whenever I have despaired of my condition and needed to feel a bit more mortal and ordinary, I think of that tree in California. It has been alive since the Pharaohs. It has been alive since the founding of Troy. Since the start of the Bronze Age. Since the start of yoga. Since mammoths.
And it has stayed there, calmly in its spot, growing slowly, producing leaves, losing leaves, producing more, as those mammoths became extinct, as Homer wrote The Odyssey, as Cleopatra reigned, as Jesus was nailed to a cross, as Siddhārtha Gautama left his palace to weep for his suffering subjects, as the Roman Empire declined and fell, as Carthage was captured, as water buffalo were domesticated in China, as the Incas built cities, as I leaned over the well with Rose, as America fought with itself, as world wars happened, as Facebook was invented, as millions of humans and other animals lived and fought and procreated and went, bewildered, to their fast graves, the tree had always been the tree.
That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.
I stand like a vertical headache in front of twenty-eight fourteen-year-olds, slumping back on chairs, playing with pens, surreptitiously checking their phones. It is a tough crowd, but I’ve had tougher over the years. This is certainly easier than playing to the drunken sailors, thieves and drifters of the Minerva Inn in Plymouth, for instance.
Everything changes and nothing changes.
‘The East End is a multicultural area because it has always been a multicultural area,’ I say, as an opener to the lesson focusing on Pre-Twentieth-Century Immigration. ‘No one was ever a native of Britain. People arrived here. The Romans, the Celts, the Normans, the Saxons. Britain was always a place made of other places. And even what we think of as “modern” immigration goes quite a long way back. Well over three hundred years ago, you had Indians who came here after being recruited on ships run by the East India Company. Then came Germans and Russian Jews and Africans. But it is true that, while immigration has always been a part of English society, for a long time visibly different immigrants were treated as exotic oddities . . . For instance, in the eighteenth century a man called Omai arrived here from the Pacific Islands. He arrived back on Cook’s second voyage . . .’ I pause. I remember sitting on the deck of the boat with him, Omai, my old friend, showing him my daughter’s coin and teaching him the word money. ‘And when Omai came here he was seen as so unique that every celebrity of the day, from the king down, went to meet him and have dinner with him . . .’ I remember his face, flickering in the shadow of a flame. ‘He even had his portrait painted by the most famous artist of the time, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was a celebrity, for a time. Omai . . .’
Omai.
I hadn’t said his name out loud for a long time. Not since I had spoken to Hendrich about him, in 1891. But I often thought about him. About what happened to him. Thinking of him now, though, seems to add to my headache. Everything spins a little.
‘He was . . .’
A girl on the front row, Danielle, chewing gum, frowns at me. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
Cue laughter. Danielle turns around. Soaks it up.
Steady thyself.
I try to smile at the class. ‘Fine. I’m fine . . . This part of London in particular has always been defined by immigration. For instance, over there’ – I point out of the window, westwards – ‘back in the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds you had the French. They were the first immigrants in great numbers of the modern age. Not all of them stayed in London. A lot went to Canterbury. Others went into rural areas. Kent . . .’ I pause. Breathe. ‘. . . Suffolk. But many based themselves in Spitalfields, and a real community built up. They started the silk industry here. Many of them were silk weavers. Many were former aristocrats who were suddenly having to make a new life for themselves in very different circumstances to the life they knew at home.’
There is a boy sitting on one of the middle tables. Anton. A quiet boy with a brooding and serious look about him. He raises his hand.
‘Yes, Anton?’
‘Why did they come here? I mean, if they had it so good at home?’
‘Well, they were Protestants. Huguenots, they were called, though they didn’t call themselves that. They followed the teachings of Jean Cauvin – John Calvin. And at that time it was a dan
gerous thing to be a Protestant in France, just as it was to be a Catholic in England. So many of them . . .’
I close my eyes, trying to blink away a memory. The pain in my head becomes too much.
They sense my weakness. I hear their laughter flare up again.
‘So many of them had to . . . had to escape.’
I open my eyes. Anton isn’t laughing. He gives me a small smile of support. But I am pretty sure he, like the rest of the class, thinks I am not quite there.
I feel my heart beat a frenzied jazz rhythm as the room starts to tilt.
‘Just one minute,’ I say.
‘Sir?’ Anton seems concerned.
‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . . I’ll be back in a minute.’
I walk out of the room, down the corridor. Past one classroom. Past another. I see Camille through a window. She is standing in front of a whiteboard full of verb formations.
She looks so calm and in control of the class. She sees me and smiles and I smile back, despite my panic.
I go into the bathroom.
I stare at my face in the mirror.
I know my own face too well to actually see it. Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.
‘Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?’
I splash my cheeks with water. I breathe slowly.
‘My name is Tom Hazard. Tom Hazard. My name is Tom Hazard.’
The name itself contains too much. It contains everyone who has ever called me it and everyone I have ever hid it from. It contains my mother and Rose and Hendrich and Marion. But it isn’t an anchor. Because an anchor fixes you in one place. And I am still not fixed. Could I just keep sailing through life for ever feeling like this? A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat? I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.
I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.
I had, in short, lost myself.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell my reflection. I think of Omai. I wish I knew where he was. I wish I hadn’t just let him go without trying to keep in touch. It is lonely, this world, without a friend.
The slow breaths get my heart rate down. I dry my face on a paper towel.
I walk out of the toilets and back down the corridor and make an effort to keep looking ahead, to not look into Camille’s classroom as I make my way back to my own. To act like a normal non-shitty teacher with only, say, forty years of memories inside him.
I head back into the classroom.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say, trying to smile. Trying to be light. Trying to say something amusing. ‘I took a lot of drugs when I was younger. I get the occasional flashback.’
They laugh.
‘So don’t do drugs. It can lead to a life of mental torment and history teaching in later life. Right, okay, on with the lesson . . .’
I see Camille again that day. Afternoon break. We are in the staff room. She is talking to another language teacher, Joachim, who is Austrian, and teaches German, and whose nose makes a whistling sound when he breathes. She breaks off and comes over while I sit on my own drinking a cup of tea.
‘Hello, Tom.’
‘Hi,’ I say. The smallest available word accompanied by the smallest of available smiles.
‘Were you okay earlier? You looked a bit . . .’ She searches for the word. ‘Intense.’
‘I just had a headache. I get headaches.’
‘Me too.’
Her eyes narrow. I worry that she is trying to work out where she knows me from. Which is probably why I say, ‘I’ve still got it . . . the headache. That’s why I’m just sitting on my own.’
She looks a bit hurt and awkward. She nods. ‘Oh, right. Well, I hope it gets better. They have ibuprofen in the First Aid cupboard.’
If you knew the truth about me your life would be in mortal danger.
‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’
I stop looking at her, and wait for her to go away. Which she does. I feel her anger. And I feel guilty. Actually, no, it isn’t just that. There is something else. A kind of homesickness, a longing for something – a feeling – I haven’t known for a very long time. And when she goes and sits down on the other side of the staff room, she doesn’t smile, or look at me, and I feel like something is over before it has a chance to begin.
Later that night I am walking Abraham back from the park via Fairfield Road. I don’t normally go this way. I have avoided it since arriving back in London.
The reason I have been avoiding it is because this is where I first met Rose. My ventures to Chapel Street and Well Street had been too painful. But I need to get over her. I need to get over everything. I need ‘closure’ as people say these days. Though you can never close the past. The most you can do with it is accept it. And that is the point I want to reach.
I am on Fairfield Road, outside the illuminated despair of the bus station, putting my hand in a plastic bag to pick up Abraham’s shit, then placing it in the bin. The history of London could be charted by the steady and consistent decline of visible faeces in public streets.
‘You know, Abraham, you shouldn’t really do this on the street. That is why we go to the park. You know, that green place, with the grass?’
Abraham feigns ignorance as we carry on walking.
I look around. Trying to work out where it is that I first saw her. It is beyond impossible. There is nothing recognisable. As with Chapel Street and Well Lane, not a single building that is there now was there then. I see, through a window, a row of people running on treadmills. They are all staring up at what I assume is a row of TV screens above their heads. Some of them are plugged into headphones. One is checking her iPhone as she runs.
Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.
I try to work out where the geese stalls used to be, and where she had been standing with her fruit basket.
And then I find it.
I stand still a moment, with Abraham tugging on the lead as traffic whooshes by, oblivious. The headache ups a notch and I feel dizzy enough to need to stand back against a brick wall.
‘Just a minute, boy,’ I tell Abraham. ‘Just a minute.’
And the memories break through like water bursting a dam. My head pulses with a pain even stronger than I’d had in the class earlier, and for a moment, in a lull between the sound of cars, I feel it, I feel the living history of the road, the residue of my own pain lingering in the air, and I feel as weak as I did in 1599, when I was still heading west, delirious and ready to be saved.
PART THREE
Rose
Bow, near London, 1599
I had been walking near continuously for three days. My feet were red and blistered and throbbing with pain. My eyes felt dry and heavy from the short doses of sleep I had managed to steal beside forest paths and on grass verges by the highway. Though, in reality, I had hardly slept at all. My back was sore from carrying the lute. I was hungrier than I had ever been, having had nothing in the last three days but berries and mushrooms and a small end of bread thrown to me by a pitying squire who passed me on his horse.
But all of that was fine.
Indeed, all of that was a welcome distraction from the intensity of my mind. The intensity seemed to have spilled out of me, infecting the grass and the trees and every brook and stream. Every time I closed my eyes I thought of my mother on that last day, high in the air, her hair blowing in the wind towards me. And her cries still echoed in my ears.
I had been a ghost of myself for three days. I’d gone back to Edwardstone a free man, but I couldn’t stay there. They were murderers. Every single one of them. I went
back to the cottage and picked up mother’s lute and searched for some money but there was none. Then I left. I just ran. I couldn’t be in Edwardstone. I never wanted to see the likes of Bess Small or Walter Earnshaw again, just as I never wanted to walk by the Giffords’ cottage. I wanted to run away from this feeling of terror and loss inside me, of infinite loneliness, but of course there was no running away from that.
But now I was getting close to London. I had been told by a man with a lisp in the village of Hackney that if I was heading in to London I would pass by the Green Goose Fair, at Fairfield Road in Bow, and there would be food there, and ‘various madness’. And now here I was. Fairfield Road. And there was the start of the madness: a cow, standing square in the road, eyeballing me. As if trying to communicate something that was too easily lost in the chasm between animals and people.
As I carried on walking, beyond the cow, there were houses on either side of me. And unlike in other villages, the houses just kept going on and on, in a straight line, on either side of the road. There was hardly any space between them. This was London, I realised. And I saw crowds and crowds of people ahead of me, filling the street.
I remembered how much my mother hated crowds, and felt her fear inside me, like a ghost emotion.
And then, as I got closer I noticed the noise. The competing shouts and cries of traders. The drunken laughter of the ale-sozzled. The grunts and moos and hisses of assorted animals.
Pipes. Singing. Mayhem.
I had never seen anything like it. It was chaos. The scene was made more intense by my delirium.
There were so many people. So many strangers. Laughter flapped out of people like bats from a cave.
An old red-cheeked woman sighing like a carthorse as she carried two panniers dangling from a wooden brace and loaded with fish and oysters.