What I Was Read online

  We were wrong about time, wrong to believe it would move forward in an orderly fashion filled with promise and opportunity and progress forever. We know now that time leaps and skids and suddenly stops short, as it will soon for me, as it did once on a day in the middle of the twentieth century when I met the person I wanted to be, and asked him for something to drink.

  Despite the fact that Finn never blamed me, I paid my penance into a bank account every month for nearly eighty years. He never thanked me and I never wanted to be thanked, so we were in agreement. For reasons I find hard to explain, even now, I paid it in memory of Reese. There was so much of me in him, and I have often wondered whether he may have been the truer friend.

  I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

  There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

  I know you are unable to imagine this.

  Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake some day to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday, and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.

  And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man’s brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else’s gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another’s eyes.

  Time erodes us all.

  The coast is gone now, submerged and continuing to sink. Even dear old St Oswald’s has been lost at sea, like my Roman fort. I am pleased to say that I’ve survived long enough to rejoice, at least, in this small aspect of hope amidst our disaster, at the drowning of those mean little classrooms, those mean little aspirations, that mean little history. I have one goal left in life, and that requires me to row my boat over what is left of those towers.

  So this is where my story ends. Here, bobbing quietly in a reliable little skiff over the past. I am an old man with a head full of memories, and there is always a part of me that looks backwards, that flows in reverse past the twentieth century, past the nineteenth, eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and keeps on flying backwards, back, back and further still, until it slows, and finally stops in the middle of the seventh century where I live in a hut by the sea and fish for a living and make stew in an iron pot and collect wood for my fire on the beach and fish and fight in wars to protect what is mine, despite that not being very much.

  For many years we had an arrangement. I travelled to see Finn, self-contained and poised as ever, with the same rare smile, still with short hair like a boy’s. She always welcomed me gladly, a little absently, secure in my affections while offering only the smallest sliver of herself in return. And what would be different about that?

  Sometimes the softness of her eyes and mouth made me wonder how I ever missed the truth about what she was. Though to be fair, she was never anything more nor less than she always had been.

  The door was never locked and I was the one who put the kettle on, stirred the tea, fetched the biscuits and laid them on a plate. She was often busy in the garden, and wouldn’t come in to me at once.

  When eventually we sat down together, she would look at me with the same amused affection as ever, and allow me to gaze into her grave dark eyes and once again feel the familiar tug at my heart. She always asked how I was, and I never once, in all those years, told the truth.

  I smile now, knowing that this is all in the past, that I have outlived her; that the story is finished and can never change. I am the only person left on earth with memories of what happened between us and what didn’t.

  The girl I met at the market came back into my life a few years later. She had cut her hair to shoulder length and I barely recognized her until I saw those coppery cat’s eyes.

  She tapped me on the shoulder in the queue for the bakery, and we chatted about the weather and the bread and Finn’s cat, who still lived with me, and still followed me around in its imperious way.

  ‘I’m Lara,’ she told me, and held out her hand.

  ‘My name is Finn,’ I told her. It was the only time I said it out loud.

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  Years later I asked another woman to marry me, but she turned me down, not unkindly, merely wanting something more than I could offer. I never asked again, but my life was not empty of incident or affection, which I sought where I could find it, like a man seeks food who has been starved at an early age. I have written books about the coastline, great texts filled with geological observations, meticulously researched and recorded in case some day somebody might care. When I die they will call my contribution invaluable, but my books will slowly fade into history and eventually my life story will be written, if at all, by someone like me who occasionally thinks about such things.

  You will have to excuse an old man for conduct you may consider sentimental, but I have made my point and now have a job to do. It is one that I do not with joy or sadness, but resolve.

  I am not where I need to be yet, and will not pretend that I have managed to row row row this boat all on my own. My strong and capable boatswain, the godson whom I have loved as a son and who never knew the coast as it was then, follows my trembling finger with great patience as I point and look for landmarks that no longer exist, and estimate distances and study the map, and search for a marker.

  Do I sense his relief, now, that my story is done?

  What I seek is a Gothic tower, collapsed now. And there, I’ve found it! Just the base, more or less where I expected it to be. This way, I tell my patient boy (who is no longer a boy, and no doubt thinks me mad), out of the school gate turn right and row along the path just here, now right again that we’ve come to the dunes. He pulls hard on the oars and looks at me fondly and moves as I direct him, over the featureless sea where once upon a time there was an island, and once upon a time there was a boy who lived on that island, and once upon a time I was young.

  And here (approximately, though something in me says here) is where we stop for a moment, while I throw a handful or two of dust and bone into the wind and say a prayer to the spirit of the sea and sky. And in my prayer (which I pray silently, so as to embarrass neither of us) I give thanks for all that has passed, and all that is passing, and all that is yet to come.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  What I Was

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

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