I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.
I had, in short, lost myself.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell my reflection. I think of Omai. I wish I knew where he was. I wish I hadn’t just let him go without trying to keep in touch. It is lonely, this world, without a friend.
The slow breaths get my heart rate down. I dry my face on a paper towel.
I walk out of the toilets and back down the corridor and make an effort to keep looking ahead, to not look into Camille’s classroom as I make my way back to my own. To act like a normal non-shitty teacher with only, say, forty years of memories inside him.
I head back into the classroom.
‘Sorry about that,’ I say, trying to smile. Trying to be light. Trying to say something amusing. ‘I took a lot of drugs when I was younger. I get the occasional flashback.’
They laugh.
‘So don’t do drugs. It can lead to a life of mental torment and history teaching in later life. Right, okay, on with the lesson . . .’
I see Camille again that day. Afternoon break. We are in the staff room. She is talking to another language teacher, Joachim, who is Austrian, and teaches German, and whose nose makes a whistling sound when he breathes. She breaks off and comes over while I sit on my own drinking a cup of tea.
‘Hello, Tom.’
‘Hi,’ I say. The smallest available word accompanied by the smallest of available smiles.
‘Were you okay earlier? You looked a bit . . .’ She searches for the word. ‘Intense.’
‘I just had a headache. I get headaches.’
‘Me too.’
Her eyes narrow. I worry that she is trying to work out where she knows me from. Which is probably why I say, ‘I’ve still got it . . . the headache. That’s why I’m just sitting on my own.’
She looks a bit hurt and awkward. She nods. ‘Oh, right. Well, I hope it gets better. They have ibuprofen in the First Aid cupboard.’
If you knew the truth about me your life would be in mortal danger.
‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’
I stop looking at her, and wait for her to go away. Which she does. I feel her anger. And I feel guilty. Actually, no, it isn’t just that. There is something else. A kind of homesickness, a longing for something – a feeling – I haven’t known for a very long time. And when she goes and sits down on the other side of the staff room, she doesn’t smile, or look at me, and I feel like something is over before it has a chance to begin.
Later that night I am walking Abraham back from the park via Fairfield Road. I don’t normally go this way. I have avoided it since arriving back in London.
The reason I have been avoiding it is because this is where I first met Rose. My ventures to Chapel Street and Well Street had been too painful. But I need to get over her. I need to get over everything. I need ‘closure’ as people say these days. Though you can never close the past. The most you can do with it is accept it. And that is the point I want to reach.
I am on Fairfield Road, outside the illuminated despair of the bus station, putting my hand in a plastic bag to pick up Abraham’s shit, then placing it in the bin. The history of London could be charted by the steady and consistent decline of visible faeces in public streets.
‘You know, Abraham, you shouldn’t really do this on the street. That is why we go to the park. You know, that green place, with the grass?’
Abraham feigns ignorance as we carry on walking.
I look around. Trying to work out where it is that I first saw her. It is beyond impossible. There is nothing recognisable. As with Chapel Street and Well Lane, not a single building that is there now was there then. I see, through a window, a row of people running on treadmills. They are all staring up at what I assume is a row of TV screens above their heads. Some of them are plugged into headphones. One is checking her iPhone as she runs.
Places don’t matter to people any more. Places aren’t the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have at least one foot in the great digital nowhere.
I try to work out where the geese stalls used to be, and where she had been standing with her fruit basket.
And then I find it.
I stand still a moment, with Abraham tugging on the lead as traffic whooshes by, oblivious. The headache ups a notch and I feel dizzy enough to need to stand back against a brick wall.
‘Just a minute, boy,’ I tell Abraham. ‘Just a minute.’
And the memories break through like water bursting a dam. My head pulses with a pain even stronger than I’d had in the class earlier, and for a moment, in a lull between the sound of cars, I feel it, I feel the living history of the road, the residue of my own pain lingering in the air, and I feel as weak as I did in 1599, when I was still heading west, delirious and ready to be saved.
PART THREE
Rose
Bow, near London, 1599
I had been walking near continuously for three days. My feet were red and blistered and throbbing with pain. My eyes felt dry and heavy from the short doses of sleep I had managed to steal beside forest paths and on grass verges by the highway. Though, in reality, I had hardly slept at all. My back was sore from carrying the lute. I was hungrier than I had ever been, having had nothing in the last three days but berries and mushrooms and a small end of bread thrown to me by a pitying squire who passed me on his horse.
But all of that was fine.
Indeed, all of that was a welcome distraction from the intensity of my mind. The intensity seemed to have spilled out of me, infecting the grass and the trees and every brook and stream. Every time I closed my eyes I thought of my mother on that last day, high in the air, her hair blowing in the wind towards me. And her cries still echoed in my ears.
I had been a ghost of myself for three days. I’d gone back to Edwardstone a free man, but I couldn’t stay there. They were murderers. Every single one of them. I went back to the cottage and picked up mother’s lute and searched for some money but there was none. Then I left. I just ran. I couldn’t be in Edwardstone. I never wanted to see the likes of Bess Small or Walter Earnshaw again, just as I never wanted to walk by the Giffords’ cottage. I wanted to run away from this feeling of terror and loss inside me, of infinite loneliness, but of course there was no running away from that.
But now I was getting close to London. I had been told by a man with a lisp in the village of Hackney that if I was heading in to London I would pass by the Green Goose Fair, at Fairfield Road in Bow, and there would be food there, and ‘various madness’. And now here I was. Fairfield Road. And there was the start of the madness: a cow, standing square in the road, eyeballing me. As if trying to communicate something that was too easily lost in the chasm between animals and people.
As I carried on walking, beyond the cow, there were houses on either side of me. And unlike in other villages, the houses just kept going on and on, in a straight line, on either side of the road. There was hardly any space between them. This was London, I realised. And I saw crowds and crowds of people ahead of me, filling the street.