How to Stop Time(82)

The shock is not from the sight of the gun.

The shock is from the sight of her.

On the face of it she looks so different. Her hair is dyed blue, for one thing. She is tall. Taller than I thought she would ever be. She has tattoos on her arms. She looks entirely twenty-first century, with her T-shirt (‘People Scare Me’) and jeans and lip-ring and orange plastic watch and her anger. She looks, also, like a woman in her late thirties, and not the girl I said goodbye to four hundred years ago. But it is her. Eyes are their own proof.

‘Marion.’

‘Don’t say that name.’

‘It’s me.’

‘Look back at the water.’

‘No, Marion, I’m not going to.’

I stand up and keep looking at her. The shock is immense. I try so hard not to think of the gun that is inches in front of my face or the death that could be seconds away. I try to see nothing except my daughter.

‘You are the reason I am still alive. Your mother told me to find you. And I knew you were somewhere. I knew it.’

‘You left us.’

‘Yes, I did. I left you and I regret it. I left you to save your life. To save your mother’s life. She wanted me to go. It was the only way. We’d escaped London but we couldn’t escape the reality. I had watched my mother drown because of me. Do you know what it’s like, to have that guilt inside you, Marion? You don’t want it. You don’t want to kill me for the same reason. Is this Hendrich? Did he tell you to do this? Has he recruited you? Has he brainwashed you? Because that’s what he does, Marion, he brainwashes people. He can be persuasive. He’s been around for nearly a thousand years. He knows how to manipulate.’

‘You never wanted me. That’s what you told Hendrich. You never wanted to be a father.’

This is shock on top of shock. Hendrich had found Marion and he hadn’t told me. The one thing he knew I desperately wanted to know – where she was – he had hidden. How long had we been in the same society, without my knowing?

I could hardly get the air required to speak.

‘No, no, that’s not the truth. Marion, listen, I’ve been trying to find you. Please? When was . . . when did?’

The gun is still there. I contemplate grabbing her arm and seizing it. But this is my daughter, this is Marion, this is the absence I have always felt. I can talk to her. If Hendrich can talk to her so can I.

‘You wanted to find me because I was the one person in this world who knew about you who you didn’t trust. You didn’t care about me, you hadn’t seen me for centuries. You just wanted to protect yourself and you asked the Albatross Society to find me and get rid of me.’

‘That is the exact opposite of the case.’

‘I saw the letter you wrote to Hendrich decades ago.’

‘What letter?’

‘I saw it. In your own handwriting. I saw the envelope. I saw what you said. I saw your conditions of joining the society. It killed me inside. It sent me fucking insane. Depression. Panic disorder. Psychosis. I’ve had it fucking all because I found out my own father who I loved more than anything in the world wanted me dead. You see, I wanted to find you too. You were the thing that kept me going. To know that the one thing that kept me going wanted to kill me was too much. I don’t owe you a fucking thing, Dad.’

She is crying now. Her face is steel but she is crying, and I love her so much I feel the force of it like the ever-flowing waterfalls and I want everything to be okay. I want her to know that it could be.

‘Hendrich lies. He fakes things. Gets other people to fake things. Sometimes that works for us and sometimes it works against us. He has connections and money, Marion. Got rich by hyping up the tulip trade and never lost it.’

‘Agnes verified it. Agnes told me it was true. She said that I was the reason you had to leave and you hated me for it. You fuck.’

‘I have never said I hated you. Agnes is so deep inside his pocket she can’t see daylight. Marion, I love you. I am not a perfect person. I wasn’t a perfect father. But I have always loved you. I have been searching for you for ever. For ever, Marion. You were such an amazing child. I have looked for you for ever. Every day I have missed you.’

I picture her, close to the window, grabbing the last light of the day so she could finish reading The Faerie Queene. I picture her sitting up in her bed, playing the pipe, determined to get the notes right.

She is still crying, but the gun stays targeted at me. ‘You said you were coming back. You never came back.’

‘I know, I know. Because I was the danger, remember? The signs and words they scratched on the door? The witchfinder? The gossip? You knew what was happening. You knew what had happened to my own mother. I was the problem. So I had to go away. Like you had to go away.’

She clenches her eyes closed, as if making a fist with her face. ‘Motherfucker,’ she says.

I could make an easy grab for the gun now, but I don’t.

For centuries she has been my only reason to go on living. But now, I realise, I actively want to live. For the sake of life itself. For the sake of possibility and the future and the possibility of something new.

‘I remember you playing “Under the Greenwood Tree”,’ I tell her. ‘On that little pipe. The one I got from Eastcheap market. Can you remember? Can you remember when I taught you to play that thing? You struggled at first. You never seemed to be able to cover the holes with your fingers, not fully, but then one day you just got it. And you played the pipe in the street, even though your mother didn’t want you to . . . She never wanted attention. For reasons you can probably now understand.’