And then it happens.
The peak of the crescendo. A cascade of everything. All the paths of my life intersecting in one spot.
As I begin to run towards Hendrich, a voice rings out, puncturing the night: ‘Stop!’
It is, of course, Marion.
And then Hendrich stops, for a moment, and seems suddenly weak and vulnerable, like a little boy lost in the woods. He glances from Marion to me and back again. Simultaneously, Omai steps barefoot out of the house, carrying his aged daughter in his arms.
‘Look at this. Isn’t it so sweet? A father and daughter get-together. That’s your weakness, you see. That’s what separates you from me. This desire to be like them. The mayflies. I never had that. I knew, before I acquired my first fortune,yearsbefore I sold my first tulip, that the only way to be free was to have no one at all.’
A shot rings out. The noise of it shakes from the sky. Marion’s face looks hard – yes, hard as a walnut – but her eyes are now filled with tears and her hands are shaking.
She’s hit her target. Black lines of blood trickle from his shoulder down his arm. But he is raising the can of petrol and tilting it, pouring the fluid over himself.
‘In the end, it turns outIwas Icarus after all.’
He drops the can as he brings the flame close to his chest. I think, or imagine, I see a small smile, a faint signal of contented acceptance, the moment before he violently blooms into fire. His flaming body staggers away from the house. He keeps walking across the grass towards the sea. The cliff.
He is heading to the edge, his feet pushing through the grass that grows wilder nearer to the edge. The grass smokes and singes and glows at its tips, like a hundred tiny fireflies. He keeps walking; there is no moment of pause or reflection, but nor is there a scream of pain. Just a continued staggering momentum. A determination, a last act of control.
‘Hendrich?’ I say. I don’t know why his name comes out as a question. I suppose because, even in his last moments, he is a collection of mysteries. I have lived a long life but it is never long enough to be entirely free from surprise.
‘Oh, man,’ Omai keeps saying. ‘Oh, man, oh, man . . .’
And his instinct, as a good person, is to go over to him. So he places his daughter down on the grass.
‘No!’ Marion says. Still holding the gun. I sense now that Hendrich is not only the man who wanted her to kill me, but the man who spat on her mother’s face, the one whose guts she’d wanted to see. He is the unavenged William Manning. He is every single person who has hurt her in the space between, and I sense there have been a lot. ‘Leave him. The motherfucker. Stand back. Stay where you are. Leave him.’
So we leave him. And all is silent. No cars pass by, no one sees a thing. The only witness is our side of the gape-mouthed moon, as always. And the vertical fire of Hendrich walks and walks and then isn’t walking at all. He is gone. The ground that had been glowing and shifting from the light of the fire is now in sudden darkness. He has fallen. The temporal distance between him walking and him not being there is so minute it is imperceptible.
There is a world in which he lives and there is a world in which he is dead. And the move between the two happens with no greater ricochet than the whisper of waves crashing onto distant rocks.
And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?
So, it took me only 437 years, but I finally realised how to go about answering all this. I didn’t quite know what the answerwasbut I knew the process. In a way the process was not knowing the answer, and being fine with that. I knew the fear that had been stopping me. So, it was time to live. I had reached a start and an ending and so – there, in that Australian night, as we said farewell to Omai and headed to the airport, I did not feel the fear I should have felt. Neither for me, nor Marion, my unfathomable daughter. We were survivors and, being such, we would survive. The known has gone and the unknown awaits – the story ends and the story begins, over and over, as we dangle eternally in the present. There is nothing more to add, and yet there is always a little more. Life spills over.
London, now
The unfathomable 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.
