She nodded. Death was nothing remarkable. ‘So who do you have?’
‘I have myself.’
‘And where do you live?’
‘Nowhere now.’
‘You have no home?’
I shook my head and felt the shame of it.
‘Do you play?’ She pointed to the lute on my back.
‘I do.’
‘Then,’ she said resolutely, ‘you will come and live with us.’
‘I couldn’t do that.’
A young girl came and stood next to her, with an identical but unbroken basket. It was the cherry seller I had seen further along the street. She looked about ten or eleven. Sisters, clearly. The same dark hair and fierce stare. A drunk tried to grab a cherry, but she had quick reflexes and turned her basket away from him, and made daggers with her eyes.
‘This is not charity,’ said the older girl. ‘You will come and live with us until you have paid what you owe. For the fruit and the basket. And you can pay for your lodging too.’
The younger girl stared at me with eyes as direct as arrows.
‘This is Grace,’ the older girl explained. ‘And I am Rose Claybrook.’
‘Hello there, Grace.’
‘He sounds peculiar, and smells like a horse’s arse,’ Grace said, unimpressed. Then, to me, ‘Where did you spring from?’
‘Suffolk,’ I croaked. And very nearly added: and France. But I sensed I wouldn’t have to. Suffolk would be foreign enough.
I felt dizzy again.
Rose came to hold me up.
‘Suffolk? You walked from Suffolk? We will take you home. Grace, help me hold him. And give him some cherries. It’s a long walk in this state.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as soft as the air, concentrating hard on placing one foot in front of the other, as though learning to walk again. ‘Thank you.’
And that is how my second life began.
London, now
Maybe I had been leaning against the wall too long in the gentle rain. Maybe you couldn’t be still any more in a relentlessly frantic city, without the city seeking some kind of soft unconscious revenge.
I hadn’t seen them approach. I had been lost, thinking about Rose, feeling the intense story of the road. But I hear Abraham growl and I look up and they are there.
Five of them. Boys, or men, or something in between. They have stopped to look at me, as if curious, as if I am a sculpture in a museum. One of them, tall and gym-shouldered, comes close, in my face. Another boy, behind him, says, ‘Ah, don’t be a psycho, man, ’s’ late. Let’s go.’
But the large one isn’t going anywhere. He pulls a knife. The blade shines yellow under the streetlight. He expects to see fear in my eyes, but he doesn’t. You get to the point, after everything has happened to you, that nothing can surprise you.
Abraham growls and bares teeth.
‘Set your dog on me and he gets it too . . . Phone and wallet. Then we go.’
‘You don’t want to do this.’
The boy – he is a boy, I now realise, despite his height – shakes his head. ‘Quiet. Phone, wallet. Phone, wallet. Now. We got things to do.’ He looks around. The wet whisper of a car sloshes by in the rain. Keeps moving. It is then I recognise one of the boys. The youngest one. His face is half hidden, inside his hood. He has scared wide eyes. He is hopping from foot to foot, eyes darting, uttering words of panic under his breath, taking out his phone, pocketing it, taking it out again. It is the boy I had seen in class today. Anton.
‘Leave him,’ he says, his voice muffled, backing away, and my heart breaks for him. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’
Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.
‘It’s small,’ I say, referencing the knife.
‘What?’
‘Everything gets smaller over time. Computers, phones, apples, knives, souls.’
‘Stop talking, man, now or for ever.’
‘Apples used to be giant. You should’ve seen them. They were like green pumpkins.’
‘Fucking shut up, you dead cunt.’
‘Have you ever killed someone?’
‘Fuck, man. Phone and wallet. Or I slice your throat.’
‘I have,’ I told him truthfully. ‘It’s horrible. You don’t want that feeling. It’s as though you become dead yourself. Like their death inhabits you. It sends you insane. And you carry it, you carry them, inside you, for ever . . .’
‘Stop talking.’
My eyes lock with his. I press the invisible force of centuries into him.
Abraham growls again. A growl that becomes a bark.
‘He’s basically a wolf. Very protective. If you stab me you just better make sure I don’t let go of the lead.’
The knife trembles a little, with the boy’s fear. Maybe it is this. This shame of his own fragility that makes him lower his arm.
‘Fuck this, man,’ he says. He walks away, backwards, then fast, with the other boys following. Anton steals a glance back at me and I smile and confuse him more. I understand. The way you can get caught up in things, find yourself floating, heading towards trouble you can hardly avoid.
Hackney, near London, 1599
They didn’t live in Bow. They lived further out, in a small narrow house on Well Lane, in the village of Hackney. There were a lot of strawberry fields and fruit orchards in Hackney at that time. Compared to much of the areas in and around London, Hackney smelled quite inoffensive, and the air healthy to inhale, though it was very different to the countryside I had known in Suffolk. For one thing, there had been a theatre there. It had been dismantled a few months before I arrived, but Rose told me it had been wonderful and that Richard Burbage himself had performed there and Lord Brown the bear.
I don’t know if it was the result of having a theatre but Hackney seemed to be a more open-minded kind of village than Edwardstone. There was no palpable fear of the outsider. Well, except for a lady called Old Mrs Adams who spat at people she walked past and often shouted ‘Shit-arse’ or ‘You walking Hell turd’ at them, but people laughed it off. And that didn’t really feel like fear of the outsider so much as general hatred for everyone, which was at least a non-discriminatory attitude.
‘She spat on my apples once and Grace went for her like a wild cat,’ Rose said, the first time I was Hell-turded, which was on my first walk to their cottage.
Their cottage was a timber and plaster affair, near a small stone wall that had its own overly ambitious name – the Great Stone Wall – and was a pebble’s throw from a modest stretch of water known as the Great Horsepond. The horses in question could mainly be found in a barn called – I kid you not – the Great Barn.
There was another barn behind that – called, alas, Oat Barn – and beyond there were the fruit orchards, with trees crammed close together for acres and acres. Further along was the stone circle of the well itself, tucked amid beech trees. To a twenty-first- century gaze it would all look quite rustic but to mine, then, the various walled partitions of the land and the close proximity of the trees in the orchard made it seem a very modern kind of place.
Rose and Grace had a deal with one of the local fruit farmers, whereby they would pick and sell the fruit of the season – plums and damsons and cherries, but also apples and greengages and gooseberries – and split the money they made unevenly in the favour of the farmer, Mr Sharpe, ‘a tight-fisted miser’, who had cultivated the fruit.
The cottage had more windows than I had seen in a house for a long time. It was nothing at all to what I had known in France, but it was a more advanced kind of lodging to the one I’d known in Edwardstone.