It is about time Ilived.
So I inhale the east London air, which feels purer than usual, and I walk, among the teenagers, into the rather uninspiring 1960s school building with a strange and long-forgotten feeling.
I feel at the beginning of something.
I feel ready to care and be hurt and take a risk on living.
And within two minutes I see her. Camille.
‘Hello,’ she says. Business-like, polite.
I can see now from her eyes she wants me to say something. And I was going to. In the moment after this one, I am going to try to do what has always been so hard.
I am going to try to explain myself. And a peculiar feelinghappens when I am right in front of her. It is a sense of total understanding, as though inside this one moment I can see every other one. Not just the moments before but those lying ahead. The whole universe in a grain of sand. This is what Agnes had been talking about in Paris almost a century ago. And Mary Peters. I had finally had this experience of total understanding of time. What is and what was and what will be. It is just a single second, but inside it I feel as though, just staring into Camille’s eyes, I can see for ever.
La Forêt de Pons, France, the future
Two years from that moment in the school corridor.
France.
The forest near Pons that still remains. The one I once knew.
Abraham is old now. He had a kidney stone removed last month, but still isn’t exactly in great shape. Today, though, he seems happy sniffing a thousand new scents.
‘I’m still scared,’ I say, as we walk Abraham among the beech trees.
‘Of?’ Camille asks.
‘Time.’
‘Why are you the one scared of time? You’re going to live for ever.’
‘Exactly. And one day you won’t be with me.’
She stops. ‘It’s strange.’
‘What’s strange?’
‘How much time you spend worrying about the future.’
‘Why? It always happens. That’s the thing with the future.’
‘Yes, it always happens. But it’s not always terrible. Look. Look right now. At us. Here. This is the future.’
She grabs my wrist and places my hand on her stomach. ‘There. Can you feel her?’
I feel it – the strange movement – as you kick. You. Marion’s little sister. ‘I feel her.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And one day she might look older than me.’
She stops, right then. Points through the trees. There is a deer.It turns and looks at us, holding our gaze for a moment, before darting away. Abraham tugs on the lead half-heartedly.
‘I don’t know what will happen,’ Camille says, staring at the space where the creature had been. ‘I don’t know if I will make it through the afternoon without having a seizure. Who knows anything?’
‘Yes. Who knows?’
