How to Stop Time(80)

‘I don’t need your protection.’

‘Who is the woman, Omai? The woman in your house?’

‘That’s none of your business. And stay away from my house.’

‘Omai. Jesus, Omai. Fuck. This is important.’

He stops on the rough grass at the fringe of the beach. ‘I have a good life. I don’t want to hide any more. I just want to be myself. I want to live a life of integrity.’

‘You can move anywhere in the world. Hawaii. Indonesia. Anywhere you want. They have good surf in a lot of places. The thing with the ocean is it all joins up. It’s all the same mass of water.’ I try to think. I try to find something in our shared past that will break through the stubborn walls of his mind. ‘Can you remember what Dr Johnson told us, that first week after the voyage? At that meal they did for you, at the Royal Society. About integrity?’

Omai shrugs. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Come on, don’t you remember? We ate partridge. He told us that you always had to be ready for new knowledge. While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless. I’m trying to give you knowledge and all you are giving me back is integrity. Integrity that is going to get you killed and risk everything.’

‘And do you want some knowledge, Tom?’

I gesture a ‘go ahead’.

He closes his eyes, as if taking a shard of glass from his foot. ‘All right, I will give you some information. I have been like you. I moved around. All over the Pacific. Anywhere questions wouldn’t be asked. Samoa. The Solomon Islands. Lautoka in Fiji. Sugar City. New Zealand. Even went back to Tahiti. Hopping around. Where necessary I formed the right connections. Found little ways into the underground. Got fake documents. Always starting afresh. Wiping the slate twice a decade. Then things started to change.’

‘How?’

A man walks by, a late middle-aged man in a faded Quiksilver T-shirt and frayed cut-off jeans and flip-flops. He is on the beach path, heading onto the sand with a joint and can of Coke. He is mumble-singing a sad but indiscernible tune. He is a peaceful, oblivious stoned drunk who wants nothing to do with us. He sits heavily on the sand, to smoke and watch the waves, well out of earshot.

Omai sits down too, placing his wet board on the sandy grass and sitting cross-legged on it. I join him.

He stares out at the sea with sad fondness, as if it is a memory. Moments pass, unregistered. ‘I fell in love.’

Obviously this raises questions but I keep them silent for now.

‘You used to tell me about love, didn’t you? You used to tell me about that girl you fell in love with. The one you married. The mother of Marion. What was she called?’

‘Rose.’ To say her name, on a beach in Australia in the twenty-first century, makes me feel a strange and dizzy sensation. The distance of time and place fuses with the closeness of emotion. I place my hands on the grass and the sand, as if needing to feel something solid, as if there are elemental traces of her there.

‘Well, I found my Rose. She was beautiful. Her name was Hoku. I get headaches, nowadays, when I think of her.’

I nod. ‘Memory headaches. I’ve been getting a lot of them too, recently.’

I wonder, for a moment, if Hoku is the old woman with the tin opener that I had seen in the house, though this idea is quickly put to rest.

‘We were only together seven years. She died in the war . . .’

I wonder which one. And where. Second World War, I assume, and I’m right.

‘That was when I moved to New Zealand and got some fake papers and signed up to fight. There was never an easier time to fake your identity. They accepted anyone then. They didn’t pry too deeply. Not that I did much fighting. Was sent to Syria and sat and baked there for a bit. Then Tunisia, for more baking with a bit of actual action thrown in. Saw some things. It was intense. What about you? Did you fight in that one?’

I sigh. ‘I wasn’t allowed. Hendrich thought the combination of science and ideology was the most dangerous thing for us. And he was right, but there were the Nazis, with all their deluded obsessions about creating the perfect race. Their pseudo-science eugenics people were onto us. They’d taken over the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin and discovered their research into us, into albas, and they were after as many of us as possible . . . Anyway, Hendrich was going through a paranoid phase. He didn’t want any of us involved in the war. And, yes, while you were saving civilisation I was being a short-sighted asthmatic librarian in Boston. I still hate myself for that. I suppose I have tried to avoid love the way Hendrich has wanted us to avoid war. To try to stay alive without any more pain.’

A distant siren wails on a road somewhere beyond.

Omai strokes water off his board. ‘No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn’t stand a chance. That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.’ I think of Camille, sitting on the bench in the park, reading Tender Is the Night, as Omai continues. ‘I’ve been trying to find the point of it all. I used to believe in mana. Everyone did in those days, on the islands. I think I still do, you know, in a sense. Not as a superstition but as an idea of something. Something inside us. Something still not explained that doesn’t come from the sky or the clouds or some palace in Heaven but from inside here.’ He pats his chest. ‘You simply can’t fall in love and not think there is something bigger ruling us. Something, you know, not quite us. Something that lives inside us, caged in us, ready to help us or fuck us over. We are mysteries to ourselves. Even science knows that. We have no fucking idea how our own minds work.’