How to Stop Time(31)

‘Mr Sharpe?’

‘So, you can pay me now.’

‘I have no money.’

She was red-faced with humiliation and anger. She looked confused about the money situation. Maybe it was because, despite the dirt on my clothes and compared to most of the crowd around us, I was quite well dressed. My mother had always made sure that, even though our circumstances had drastically changed since moving to England, we looked as noble as we could afford. Which was, with hindsight, one of the many reasons we had struggled to fit in among the raggedy villagers of Edwardstone. Not the main reason, obviously.

‘That,’ she said, pointing to the lute on my back.

‘What?’

‘Give me that. That can be your payment.’

‘No.’

She picked up a rock. ‘Well, I shall break it then, the way you broke my basket.’

I raised my hands. ‘No! No.’

She must have seen something in my face that made her think twice. ‘You have no food but you are worried about a lute.’

‘It was my mother’s.’

Her face softened, went from anger back to confusion. ‘Where is your mother?’

‘She died three days ago.’

She folded her arms. Yes. She looked around eighteen or nineteen years of age. I can tell you that she wore an ordinary white dress, a ‘kirtle’ as folk used to call it, and a simple red neckerchief, worn at an angle, with the knot tied at the left side of her neck. I can tell you that she had very clean skin – a rarity among this crowd – and had two moles on her right cheek, one smaller than the other, like a moon in a planet’s orbit, and a small constellation of freckles over her nose. Her dark hair was half inside a little white cloth cap, half free and wild.

She had the kind of face that had spent most of its time frowning, but there was also a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind. I can tell you she was tall too. A quarter head taller than me at that time, if shorter than me when I became, physically, a ‘grown up’.

‘Died?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded. Death was nothing remarkable. ‘So who do you have?’

‘I have myself.’

‘And where do you live?’

‘Nowhere now.’

‘You have no home?’

I shook my head and felt the shame of it.

‘Do you play?’ She pointed to the lute on my back.

‘I do.’

‘Then,’ she said resolutely, ‘you will come and live with us.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

A young girl came and stood next to her, with an identical but unbroken basket. It was the cherry seller I had seen further along the street. She looked about ten or eleven. Sisters, clearly. The same dark hair and fierce stare. A drunk tried to grab a cherry, but she had quick reflexes and turned her basket away from him, and made daggers with her eyes.

‘This is not charity,’ said the older girl. ‘You will come and live with us until you have paid what you owe. For the fruit and the basket. And you can pay for your lodging too.’

The younger girl stared at me with eyes as direct as arrows.

‘This is Grace,’ the older girl explained. ‘And I am Rose Claybrook.’

‘Hello there, Grace.’

‘He sounds peculiar, and smells like a horse’s arse,’ Grace said, unimpressed. Then, to me, ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘Suffolk,’ I croaked. And very nearly added: and France. But I sensed I wouldn’t have to. Suffolk would be foreign enough.

I felt dizzy again.

Rose came to hold me up.

‘Suffolk? You walked from Suffolk? We will take you home. Grace, help me hold him. And give him some cherries. It’s a long walk in this state.’

‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as soft as the air, concentrating hard on placing one foot in front of the other, as though learning to walk again. ‘Thank you.’

And that is how my second life began.





London, now



Maybe I had been leaning against the wall too long in the gentle rain. Maybe you couldn’t be still any more in a relentlessly frantic city, without the city seeking some kind of soft unconscious revenge.

I hadn’t seen them approach. I had been lost, thinking about Rose, feeling the intense story of the road. But I hear Abraham growl and I look up and they are there.

Five of them. Boys, or men, or something in between. They have stopped to look at me, as if curious, as if I am a sculpture in a museum. One of them, tall and gym-shouldered, comes close, in my face. Another boy, behind him, says, ‘Ah, don’t be a psycho, man, ’s’ late. Let’s go.’

But the large one isn’t going anywhere. He pulls a knife. The blade shines yellow under the streetlight. He expects to see fear in my eyes, but he doesn’t. You get to the point, after everything has happened to you, that nothing can surprise you.

Abraham growls and bares teeth.

‘Set your dog on me and he gets it too . . . Phone and wallet. Then we go.’

‘You don’t want to do this.’

The boy – he is a boy, I now realise, despite his height – shakes his head. ‘Quiet. Phone, wallet. Phone, wallet. Now. We got things to do.’ He looks around. The wet whisper of a car sloshes by in the rain. Keeps moving. It is then I recognise one of the boys. The youngest one. His face is half hidden, inside his hood. He has scared wide eyes. He is hopping from foot to foot, eyes darting, uttering words of panic under his breath, taking out his phone, pocketing it, taking it out again. It is the boy I had seen in class today. Anton.