How to Stop Time. Matt Haig
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virility. Though I have to say it can feel like you are stuck for ever when, according to your appearance, only a decade passes between the death of Napoleon and the first man on the moon.
One of the reasons people don’t know about us is that most people aren’t prepared to believe it.
Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview. So you could say ‘I am four hundred and thirty-nine years old’ easily enough, but the response would generally be ‘are you mad?’.
Another reason people don’t know about us is that we’re protected. By a kind of organisation. Anyone who does discover our secret, and believes it, tends to find their short lives are cut even shorter. So the danger isn’t just from ordinary humans.
It’s also from within.
Sri Lanka, three weeks ago
Chandrika Seneviratne was lying under a tree, in the shade, a hundred metres or so behind the temple. Ants crawled over her wrinkled face. Her eyes were closed. I heard a rustling in the leaves above and looked up to see a monkey staring down at me with judging eyes.
I had asked the tuk-tuk driver to take me monkey spotting at the temple. He’d told me this red-brown type with the near bald face was a rilewa monkey.
‘Very endangered,’ the driver had said. ‘There aren’t many left. This is their place.’
The monkey darted away. Disappeared among leaves.
I felt the woman’s hand. It was cold. I imagined she had been lying here, unfound, for about a day. I kept hold of her hand and found myself weeping. The emotions were hard to pin down. A rising wave of regret, relief, sorrow and fear. I was sad that Chandrika wasn’t here to answer my questions. But I was also relieved I didn’t have to kill her. I knew she’d have had to die.
This relief became something else. It might have been the stress or the sun or it might have been the egg hoppas I’d had for breakfast, but I was now vomiting. It was in that moment that it became clear to me. I can’t do this any more.
There was no phone reception at the temple, so I waited till I was back in my hotel room in the old fort town of Galle tucked inside my mosquito net sticky with heat, staring up at the pointlessly slow ceiling fan, before I phoned Hendrich.
‘You did what you were supposed to do?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, which was halfway to being true. After all, the outcome had been the one he’d asked for. ‘She is dead.’ Then I asked what I always asked. ‘Have you found her?’
‘No,’ he said, as always. ‘We haven’t. Not yet.’
Yet. That word could trap you for decades. But this time, I had a new confidence.
‘Now, Hendrich, please. I want an ordinary life. I don’t want to do this.’
He sighed wearily. ‘I need to see you. It’s been too long.’
Los Angeles, two weeks ago
Hendrich was back in Los Angeles. He hadn’t lived there since the 1920s so he assumed it was pretty safe to do so and that no one was alive who would remember him from before. He had a large house in Brentwood that served as the headquarters for the Albatross Society. Brentwood was perfect for him. A geranium-scented land of large houses tucked behind high fences and walls and hedges, where the streets were free from pedestrians and everything, even the trees, looked perfect to the point of sterile.
I was quite shocked, on seeing Hendrich, sitting beside his large pool on a sun-lounger, laptop on knee. Normally, Hendrich looked pretty much the same, but I couldn’t help notice the change. He looked younger. Still old and arthritic, but, well, better than he’d done in a century.
‘Hi, Hendrich,’ I said, ‘you look good.’
He nodded, as if this wasn’t new information. ‘Botox. And a brow lift.’
He wasn’t even joking. In this life he was a former plastic surgeon. The back story was that after retiring he had moved from Miami to Los Angeles. That way he could avoid the issue of not having any former local clients. His name here was Harry Silverman. (‘Silverman. Don’t you like it? It sounds like an ageing superhero. Which I kind of am.’)
I sat on the spare lounger. His maid, Rosella, came over with two sunset-coloured smoothies. I noticed his hands. They looked old. Liver spots and baggy skin and indigo veins. Faces could lie easier than hands could.
‘Sea buckthorn. It’s crazy. It tastes like shit. Try it.’
The amazing thing about Hendrich was that he kept thoroughly of the times. He always had done, I think. He certainly had been since the 1890s. Centuries ago, selling tulips, he’d probably been the same. It was strange. He was older than any of us but he was always very much in the current of whatever zeitgeist was flowing around.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘in California, the only way to look like you are getting older is to look like you are getting younger. If you can move your forehead over the age of forty then people become very suspicious.’
He told me that he had been in Santa Barbara for a couple of years but he got a bit bored. ‘Santa Barbara is pleasant. It’s heaven, with a bit more traffic. But nothing ever happens in heaven. I had a place up in the hills. Drank the local wine every night. But I was going mad. I kept getting these panic attacks. I have lived for over seven centuries and never had a single panic attack. I’ve witnessed wars and revolutions. Fine. But I get to Santa Barbara and there I was waking up in my comfortable villa with my heart going crazy and feeling like I was trapped inside myself. Los Angeles, though, is something else. Los Angeles calmed me right down, I can tell you . . .’
‘Feeling calm. That must be nice.’
He studied me for a while, as if I was an artwork with a hidden meaning. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Have you been missing me?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What is it? Was Iceland that bad?’
I’d been living in Iceland for eight years before my brief assignment in Sri Lanka.
‘It was lonely.’
‘But I thought you wanted lonely, after your time in Toronto. You said the real loneliness was being surrounded by people. And, besides, that’s what we are, Tom. We’re loners.’
I inhaled, as if the next sentence was something to swim under. ‘I don’t want to be that any more. I want out.’
There was no grand reaction. He didn’t bat an eye. I looked at his gnarled hands and swollen knuckles. ‘There is no out, Tom. You know that. You are an albatross. You are not a mayfly. You are an albatross.’
The idea behind the names was simple: albatrosses, back in the day, were thought to be very long-living creatures. Reality is, they only live to about sixty or so; far less than, say, the Greenland sharks that live to four hundred, or the quahog clam scientists called ‘Ming’ because it was born at the time of the Ming dynasty, over five hundred years ago. But anyway, we were albatrosses. Or albas, for short. And every other human on earth was dismissed as a mayfly. So called, because of the short-lived aquatic insects who go through an entire life cycle in a day or – in the case of one sub-species – five minutes.
Hendrich never talked of other, ordinary human beings as anything other than mayflies. I was finding his terminology – terminology I had ingrained into me – increasingly ridiculous.
Albatrosses. Mayflies. The silliness of it.
For all his age and intelligence, Hendrich was fundamentally immature. He was a child. An incredibly ancient child.
That