How to Stop Time. Matt Haig

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      ‘Maman, I cannot help the way I look.’

      ‘It is as though time has stopped for you, Estienne.’

      She still called me Estienne at home, even if I was always Thomas in public.

      I tried to hide my own worry and reassure her. ‘Time hasn’t stopped. The sun still sets and rises. Summer still follows spring. I have been working as hard as anyone my age.’

      Mother stroked my hair. She could see only the child I still seemed to be.

      ‘I don’t want more bad things to happen.’

      One of my earliest memories came to me: of her howling with grief and burying her face in a tapestry hanging in the hall of our vast home in France, on the day we found out my father had been killed by cannon-fire on a battlefield near Reims.

      ‘I will be fine.’

      ‘Yes. I know the money from thatching is good, but maybe you should stop working for Mr Carter. Everyone can see you, up on the Giffords’ roof, thatching. And they talk. Everyone is talking now. It’s a village.’

      The irony was that, during my first thirteen years of life, I aged quickly. Not unnaturally quickly but certainly quicker than average. This was why Mr Carter had recruited me. I had been young, so he could pay me cheap, but I had been tall and broad and strong-armed for a thirteen-year-old. The trouble was, that after such fast development to suddenly slow to what seemed like no change at all must have made it more noticeable.

      ‘We should have gone to Canterbury,’ I said. ‘Or London.’

      ‘You know what I am like in towns.’ She paused, reconsidered, smoothed her petticoat. I looked at her. It seemed wrong that my mother, who had lived most of her life in one of the finest houses in France, was reduced to living in a two-room cottage in a village full of suspicious minds in this faraway corner of England. ‘Maybe you are right. Maybe we should—’

      There was a sound outside. A terrible wailing.

      I quickly put on my trousers and shoes and went to the door.

      ‘No, son, stay inside.’

      ‘Someone is hurt,’ I told her. ‘I had better see.’

      I ran out, and the day was at that last point before night, after sunset, where the sky is a fragile finch-egg blue. There was enough light to see people doing what I was doing, rushing out of their cottages further along the lane, all trying to see what the commotion was.

      I kept running. And I saw it.

      Him.

      John Gifford.

      He was a long way off but he was easy to recognise. He was as large as a haystack. He was walking along with his arms hanging by his sides, in a strange fashion, as if they were dead things attached to him. He vomited, twice, violently, leaving rancid puddles on the lane, and then staggered forward.

      His wife Alice and the three children followed, like panicking cygnets, letting out wails of their own.

      By the time he had made it to the green the whole of Edwardstone seemed to be there. We could see the blood now. It was pouring out of his ears, and, after a cough, it streamed out of his mouth and his nose too, flowing into his beard. He fell to the ground. His wife was there, next to him, placing a hand over his mouth, and another over his ear, desperately trying to plug the flow of the blood.

      ‘Oh John, oh Lord save you, John. Oh Lord . . . John . . .’

      Some of the crowd were praying. Others were shielding their children from the sight, pressing their faces into their clothes. Most, though, were staring in grim fascination.

      ‘Lucifer’s work,’ said wide-eyed Walter Earnshaw, the knife-grinder. He was standing next to me. Stinking of hops and what we would now call halitosis.

      John Gifford was still now, lying face up, except for a shaking in his arms, which became less and less. And then he died, right there on the green, on the black, blood-sodden grass.

      While Alice collapsed on top of him, the sudden grief convulsing out of her, the villagers just stood there, by and large, in a numb kind of silence.

      It felt wrong, being witness to such private pain, so I turned away.

      But, as I walked past the familiar faces, I saw the baker’s wife, Bess Small, staring right at me with accusing eyes.

      ‘Yes, Thomas Hazard, mind you stay away now.’

      At the time the words confused me. But, not long after, I would remember them as a warning.

      I turned, once, and saw John Gifford, still as a mound, his large dead hands shining, then I kept walking, watched by the moon, which stared from the sky like another horrified face.

      London, now

      ‘Witches,’ I say, in the voice of a teacher. That is, a voice that isn’t really heard.

      So, this is the life I have chosen above all others. The life of a man standing in a room of twelve-year-olds ignoring him.

      ‘Why do you think people four hundred years ago wanted to believe in witches?’

      I survey the room. The faces are smirking or embarrassed or checking their phones or all three. It is 9.35 a.m. We are only five minutes into the lesson. It is going badly. The lesson, the day, the job. It is all going badly.

      Maybe being a teacher wasn’t a new beginning for me. Maybe it was just the newest in a line of disappointments.

      I had – right up until Sri Lanka – spent eight years in the north of Iceland, ten miles north of the fishing village of Kópasker. I had wanted Iceland because before that I had spent a few years in Toronto. Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that – maybe because of that – it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that had made me want to go to Iceland. And all that living alone in Iceland had done was make me want an ordinary life.

      But an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness. And, of course, this – being a teacher – was just a pretence. Maybe everyone was pretending something. Maybe every teacher and pupil at this school was pretending something. Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

      And, right then, staring at those smirking twelve-year-olds, I think: this is the wrong lie.

      ‘Why did people believe in witches?’ I repeat. Daphne walks along the corridor outside. She gives me a smile and two thumbs up as she passes by at a busy pace. I smile back, acting as if this is great fun and I am doing it well, like a natural, like someone who had done this before, many times, and not like the oldest of dogs learning a new trick.

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