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?’
‘Some of it’s a bit dodgy nowadays, but yeah. He was a wise man.’
‘What about you? Has there been anyone?’
‘There was. Yes. There have been a few. But I’m fine on my own. I’m happier on my own. It always got too complicated. You know, the age thing. I have generally found men to be quite a disappointment. Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am working on that. Reading, painting, playing the piano. Shooting nine-hundred-year-old men.’
‘You play the piano?’
‘I find it offers more than the tin pipe.’
‘Me too.’ I am enjoying this. This is our first real proper conversation since Australia. ‘When did you get your lip pierced?’
‘About thirty years ago. Before it was a thing everyone had.’
‘Does it ever hurt?’
‘No. Are you judging me?’
‘I’m your father. That’s what I’m here for.’
‘I also have tattoos.’
‘I can see.’
‘I have one on my shoulder. Want to see it?’ She pulls down her jumper and shows me a tree. Beneath it are the words: ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. ‘I got it to remember you. You taught me the song, remember.’
I smile. ‘I remember.’
She is a bit jetlagged, still. So am I. I want her to stay but she says London gives her panic attacks and she doesn’t want to go back to hospital. She says there’s a house on Fetlar, one of the Shetland Islands where she had lived in the 1920s, which is still there and abandoned. She says she wants to go back. She says she has some cash. And that by next weekend – after my week back at school – she will go. It saddens me, but I understand, and promise to visit as soon as I can.
‘Time doesn’t move there,’ she says. ‘On the islands. It used to make me feel normal. Being surrounded by all that unchanging nature. The city is harder work. Things happen in cities.’
Her hands have a slight tremble to them. I wonder at the horrors she has been through. The stuff she has blocked out. I wonder about the future, about what will happen to her, and to me, now that the secret of the albas is likely to be revealed. Now that we, or Omai, might be the ones to reveal it.
But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.
Abraham slides off the sofa and slopes off into the kitchen. Marion comes and sits next to me. I want to put my arm around her, like a father would a daughter. I don’t think she wants me to, but then she places her head on my shoulder and says nothing. I remember that same head resting on that same shoulder, when she was ten years old, that night in the coach. That had felt, then, like the end of everything. This, now, feels like a beginning.
Time can surprise you sometimes.
I cycle to school.
I see Anton walking into the main building on his own. He has his headphones in and he is reading a book. I can’t see what the book is called but it is a book. Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer. He looks up. Sees me. Raises his hand.
I like this job. I can’t right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it. It isn’t playing the lute for Shakespeare, or the piano at Ciro’s, but it’s something as good. And goodness has its own kind of harmony.