How to Stop Time(86)

London, now



Marion.

My daughter. Rose’s daughter.

She’s still the same little girl.

That’s what people say, isn’t it? About children grown up. Well, in truth, I can’t say it about Marion. She is not the same little girl.

Yes, the intensity had always been there. The sensitive intelligence. The bookishness. The desire – once no more than a child’s fantasy – to exact bloody vengeance on those who wronged her.

But there are a thousand new things there now.

After all, we aren’t just who we are born. We are who we become. We are what life does to us. And she, born four hundred years ago, has had a lot of it, has done a lot of living.

For instance, she is scared of Abraham. She now has ‘a thing about dogs’. I daren’t ask her what happened.

Abraham likes her straight away, from the moment we pick him up from the dog sitter, but Marion sits well away from him, casting nervous glances in his direction.

She is very open about the things she has done.

She tells me some of the places she has lived, other than London and Heidelberg and LA. Rouen, that had been her first trip overseas. Then Bordeaux. She knew the language, and both had strong Montaigne associations, so that had guided her. But there had been other places in more recent times: Amsterdam, Vancouver, Scotland. She had lived in Scotland for about a hundred years, apparently, from the 1840s onwards. She had moved around. The Highlands. The East Neuk of Fife. Shetland. Edinburgh. She had been a weaver. She’d had a loom. ‘A travelling loom,’ she says, and laughs a little, which is rare.

She is on Citalopram for depression. ‘It spaces me out, but I need that.’ She says she gets strange dreams all the time, and often has panic attacks. Sometimes she has panic attacks about having panic attacks. Vicious circles. She had one on the plane, coming back from Australia, but I hardly even noticed, except she became quite still.

We had left Australia with no problems at all. She had not flown there with Hendrich, and his body hadn’t yet been discovered, so no questions were asked. He had changed his identity, of course, to arrive in Australia, so in a sense he didn’t exist at all. He had disguised his life so well his death became, like every other aspect of him, one more secret.

I had said goodbye to Omai. I had told him that at some point it might be a good idea to move and he said he’d think about it and that was that. He wasn’t going to move. He was going to stay still and, well, only the future knows what that means.

I write an email. I type it out and keep very nearly pressing ‘send’. The email is to Kristen Curial, who heads up StopTime, the leading part-government-funded biotech company that is investigating ways to halt the cellular damage behind illness and ageing. One of the ones Hendrich was paranoid about.

Dear Kristen,

I am 439 years old. And I can prove it. I believe I can help you with your research.

Tom

And then I attach the Ciro’s picture and a selfie of me now, complete with arm scar. I stare at the email and see how ridiculous it looks and then save it in drafts. Maybe later.

Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word ‘motherfucker’ in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt’s day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a motherfucker. (There is ‘never anything on the motherfucker’.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a motherfucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.

She also tells me that she had a ‘short spell’ on hard drugs from 1963 to 1999.

‘Oh,’ I say, feeling like fatherhood is something I have lost the knack of. ‘That’s . . . uh . . .’

She is staying with me for a little while. Right now she is sitting on the chair, away from Abraham, vaping, and humming an old tune. Very old. ‘Flow My Tears’ by John Dowland. A tune I used to play on the lute when she was a little girl, before she ever played the pipe. She doesn’t say anything about it, and nor do I. There is a vibration to her voice. A softness. There is still a soft nut beneath the shell.

‘Do you miss Ma?’ she asks me.

‘I miss her every day. Even after all these years. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’

She smiles sadly, then sucks on her e-cigarette. ‘Has there been anyone else?’

‘No . . . mainly.’

‘Mainly?’

‘Well, there hasn’t been. For centuries. But there is someone at school. Camille. I like her. But I feel like I might have messed it up.’

‘Love is a motherfucker.’

I sigh. ‘Of course it is.’

‘You should just shoot for it. Tell her you messed up. Tell her why you messed up. Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’

‘Honesty is a motherfucker,’ I say, and she laughs.

She goes quiet for a little while. Remembers something. ‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’

‘Is that . . . ?’

‘Montaigne himself.’

‘Wow. You still like him?’