I fell a long way and I thought I was dead. I remember thinking: I wonder who I’ll be next? But I didn’t die. About a hundred feet down I hit the crook of a jujube tree and was pinned there as the road upon which I had been walking fell past me. When it stopped, I found myself stuck, waist-deep in mud. Water streamed down in newborn rivers, and the mud rose to my chest. I felt as if I was tied to a mast in a sinking ship.
I thought: I still might die.
But I did not die. Something much worse was about to happen. As I struggled in vain to pull myself from the mud, I heard a sound, a human sound. I looked to my right, and through the hot mist I saw the vague outline of a man. He was small and skinny and held a tall stick of some kind. I could not make out his face, but I could see that he was wearing little in the way of clothing and his hair spread out in thick, wild tendrils from his head. He was standing on a rock, with the brown water flowing around him. And he was looking at me.
At first I thought he might be one of the locals from the village. Some of them kept goats, and the staff might make him a herd. I tried to get a closer look. Then the mist cleared momentarily and my heart lost its footing. I saw his face. It was painted blue.
I panicked and renewed my struggle. Falling or drowning — these had seemed easy deaths. But death by having your head boiled was something I might fight to avoid. I kicked my legs, clawed at the mud with my hands. But everything I did sent me deeper within it.
I looked over at the rock. To my horror, he had hopped down and was wading through the water towards me. I cried no. I cried for my mother, my father, my brothers, for God, Jesus, Vishnu, Shiva, Allah and even the devil himself to save me. But my cries were lost in the rain and nobody came to help me. I was trapped. The wizard was near.
Then, from above, I saw a log dancing on the water. I reached out and grabbed it as it passed. It yanked me left, then stopped, straining between my weight and the current. Slowly I felt myself being pulled out. The slow battle of suction played out beneath the mud, and I gripped with all my strength, hoping beyond hope that gravity would favour me. I heard movement in the branches above, a shuffling and snapping of twigs. I shut my eyes tight. I could tell he was there. Just hold on, I thought. Just keep holding on.
Then I felt my right leg come free. I gasped with hope as the log renewed its pull, and I felt my left leg shifting too. Not long, and I would be away down the hillside, free of the wizard.
But before this could happen, I felt a sharp blow to my fingers. I looked and saw the end of the wizard’s staff banging against them, knocking them off. Before I knew it, one hand was free. Then, with two more blows, he had done the same to the other. I felt the log slide from my grip and slip down the hillside, with all my hopes for escape.
I looked up, suddenly cold and resigned to my fate, and there he was, crouching in a branch, looking pleased with himself. I blinked away tears of hatred and fear.
He nodded down in the direction of the log.
‘That would have been very dangerous,’ he said, in perfect English. ‘A long, long way to fall.’
I frowned and turned to look down the hillside where, not far beyond the tree, the ground had fallen away. I craned my neck and saw a huge drop, now a natural waterfall that would have sent me crashing against the rocks below. The blue-faced wizard had saved my life.
The blue-faced wizard, as it turned out, was not a wizard at all. He was a recluse who lived in a hut deep in the jungle, where he took me to recover from my experience. He fed me soup, sat me by his fire and showed me how to burn away the leeches that had begun to feast upon my thighs.
As I waited for my clothes to dry out, I could sense him watching me.
‘What is it?’ I said at last.
‘You can see things,’ he said. ‘Feel things.’
He leaned closer.
‘Remember things.’
In my sudden terror, I thought that perhaps he was a wizard after all, and feared for my head again. But he sensed my unease and smiled as kindly as a blue-faced, naked old man possibly could.
‘It is all right,’ he said. ‘It shows in your eyes. Old souls are heavy burdens.’
Then he showed me a path that led back to my house, clear of the mudslide. I thanked him and he nodded.
‘Come visit me if you want to share your burden.’
Then he turned and scampered back the way we had come.
That summer my sister died from a mosquito bite. My mother’s grief was too much for a young boy to bear, so I kept away as much as I could. I visited the old man, whose name was Mr Ganesh. I wrote every memory down and shared with him everything I could remember. He sat, cross-legged and rapt as we drank tea and I talked. Even the dullest things he found intensely interesting. I felt a weight lifting as I spoke.
He told me that everyone had lived before — reincarnation was part of the Hindu belief system after all — but that not many really understood what this meant, and that fewer still could genuinely remember. He said that he himself had been a Christian soldier in the Crusades, an ice dweller in the north — the smell of seal pelt had haunted his dreams since he was a baby — and a woman in a huge house on an endlessly flat land and in a time he could not place. Everyone, he said, had lived before.
I asked him — how could this be? Surely some had not, or else where had this all begun?
This made him laugh for what seemed like hours.
‘Now that is an excellent question,’ he said at last. ‘Try not to stop asking yourself it.’
I wrote everything down. He said that reincarnation was a fundamental truth of life, and that my life would be lonely because very few people would accept this truth. Despite this, I had a duty to try and find others like me, because they would need to share their burden as well. To do this was an almost impossible task.
‘You cannot shout this truth,’ he said. ‘Or people will think you mad. You can only suggest it in the hope that those others like you will see it. Keep what you have written safe and hide it in plain sight for others like you to find.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Point to them,’ he said.
I told him that I didn’t understand. He said that one day I would.
And that was the last thing he said to me.
We moved back to Britain the following month and set up home here in Marshfields. I went to see Mr Ganesh before we left, but I found only an empty hut and a long-dead fire.
It was three years later that I had the first inkling of what he had meant. My memories and dreams were taking new shapes. Sometimes I would have memories of other memories — images of other lives seen through other lives. It was like looking in two opposing mirrors. The years stretched endlessly in both directions.
One in particular kept coming back to me. I could see me and I could see Emily Havers, side by side, but motionless. I was neither, but I could see us both looking back at us. It gave me an idea, one of many that I have had throughout my life.
I told somebody once. It was on a dark and fearful day in Normandy, with death ringing everywhere, and all its blood, mud and screams. I didn’t know the chap very well. He was from another unit, but we’d both found cover behind a burned-out tractor. We thought we were dead men. He was more frightened than me, only twenty or so, and I told him, right then and there. I think I was trying to comfort him in some way. ‘I’ve lived before,’ I said. ‘So don’t be afraid. There’s another life after this.’
He looked at me, horrified.
‘You’ll live again,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’
Then he turned and ran out into fire. His head and one shoulder span off in the blast from a shell.
I’ve never told anybody since.
I am, no doubt, dead and gone to wherever I am to go next. I might be living in your time, you might even know me.
I might be you.
Either way, the chances are you have some questions, and perhaps the contents of this box will help you answer them.
Emily H
avers is still my brightest memory, and I have written her story often. Each time it becomes brighter, as if the writing itself oils the memories out, and each time it feels more like it is her speaking and not me.
The first time I wrote it like this:
It was cold and I died.
Then:
The big house was cold and I died, but I shouldn’t have.
I sometimes read the final version — at the top of this pile, where it should remain — and marvel at how different it sounds. They’re not my words at all, they’re hers.
Please read it. Please look after this box. And please, if you can, find somewhere safe for it where others like you can find it. Because Mr Ganesh was right — old souls make heavy burdens.
EMILY HAVERS
THE HOUSE WAS ALWAYS so terribly cold and dark. As a child, I remember being punished for being late one afternoon before tea. It was blazing hot outside and I was made to sit in the Empty Room — Aunt Magda’s old room, which we called empty because that’s what it was. Aunt Magda had passed two years ago, and it had remained as she had left it, false teeth and bed pan aside. Even her smell remained, warm and sickly, a dying old lady.
She had not the need for things. She was blind as a bat and completely doolally, so apart from a few dusty pieces of furniture and some stiff dresses hanging together by threads in the closet, there had been nothing in there. No ornaments to inspect, no books to occupy a child’s mind, not even a Bible, and certainly no toys. Nanny had closed the door and locked it, and I had been left in the window seat with nothing to do but gaze out of the tiny window down onto the lawn, where my cousins frolicked with ribbons in the summer sun.
And it was terribly cold and terribly dark. I do believe that house had wishes, and that one of those wishes was to be nothing more than a tomb.
On such a hot day, you would be forgiven for making the assumption that at least the cold air provided relief from the heat, and the darkness from the glare of the sun. But you would be wrong. The temperature was not like a cool flannel to your wet brow, but like a cloak of icicles digging into your spine. The dark was not the calming shade of a willow’s branches, but a dank, stifling blanket thrown over your head like a dog catcher’s sack. I couldn’t stand it inside, not one bit.
And that was summer. In winter, the howling winds, sea fogs, blizzards and frosts that assaulted the coast beyond Sheerton Estate’s borders were positively balmy compared to the freezing hell inside the walls. Even with the furnaces on full blast, which Father rarely allowed — special times he called them, which usually only meant Christmas Day — I shivered and shuddered in the candlelit halls, searching for some nook or cupboard which was not utterly devoid of heat. There was a place I favoured beneath the servants’ staircase that had a wall behind a stove. It was just a space, it had no door, so every Saturday morning, when I would wake to find my sheets hard with ice from the wall against which my bed stood, I would gather my blankets and books and bears, take a candle, and creep to it. Sometimes a maid would be up, scrubbing the kitchen, and she might give me milk and cake from Friday supper. Then I would huddle into the space, seeking comfort in the warm wall, sugary crumbs and the words of a story.
I wanted to leave that house as soon as possible. I did not want to be some lonely young waif, alone and unmarried, drifting restlessly through its bitter halls and having turns. I was not the eldest, so therefore not the priority when it came to marriage partners. At dances — which were welcome events because they were some of my father’s aforementioned ‘special times’ and therefore less freezing than usual — suitors were guided directly to my sister, Camilla, who was, whilst only one year older, a far taller, far prettier and far less clever girl than I, and therefore had far more chance of success. My younger sister, Molly, was the prettiest of the three, of course, and therefore very easily drew the attention of almost every gentlemen she passed, and got up to things with them in pantries.
I spied her one spring morning through a crack in the gardener’s shed, one leg up against a rake and the other quivering whilst the Earl of Burnshott’s youngest son moved his face between them. I froze, telling myself I could not move for the shock, but really knowing that this was not the case at all. I watched them for some time, witnessing my sister’s breathless squirm and feeling myself dampen with the thrill. My hand was already near to that hot place when, very slowly, the little harlot turned her head towards me and opened her eyes. She smiled and held a finger to her lips, and I bolted through the apple trees, up the steps and into the library, where I pulled the first book I could find from the shelves and buried my head in it. It was about pastry.
Such effortless joy, my sister. I wish I had been more like her.
Anyway, with Camilla at the front with the richer, eldest sons, and Molly banging shelves and gardening tools with the younger bucks, I was left in the middle, hands clasped, alone. It is the common curse of the middle daughter, and I knew that my only way out would be to find love, or some approximation of it, on my own.
And I did find it. I did, with all my heart.
My father’s brewery was extremely profitable, and he employed many men from Lasswick and the surrounding villages. At weekends, wherever we went, whether it be a stroll by the sea or a carriage into town, men would doff their caps to him and women would curtsy.
‘Tidings, Mr Havers, sir’ or ‘Morning, Mr Havers, sir’ or just ‘Sir’.
It was as much a chore for him as it must have been for them. A buggering pain he called it, muttering it through his stretched grin as each sycophant ducked by.
But, of course, woe betide the man who ignored my father, whatever buggering pain he might have spared him.
I first saw John Maine by the harbour one Sunday afternoon. He was twenty years old, with black hair as slick as the sea, a tight chest, skinny arms and legs bandy like a sailor. We were walking home from church, and he was helping a group of fishermen free a net that had tangled on a fender. As we passed, Molly, who was walking next to me, nudged my arm.
‘Gosh,’ she whispered. ‘Will you look at that?’
I turned and followed her shameless gawp as John bent over his side of the net, laughing at the panicked orders of the fishermen as they struggled in the widening gap between the boat and the harbour wall. The objects of my sister’s attention were his buttocks, which were straining against their trousers like two apples in a picnic cloth.
‘Molly,’ I said, nudging her back. ‘Behave yourself or I’ll tell Mother.’
‘But really,’ said Molly. Her face was flushed and I knew mine was too. ‘I mean, Emily, really, look at them.’
There was a roar from the boat as the net was finally freed. John stood up and stretched his back, taking off his cap and cheering with the rest. Then he turned. And he saw me, and he looked away, and then he looked back again. His face was, I believe, not what you would call handsome. The proportions of his brow, cheeks and jaw were all askew, and his hair was an unruly mess full of God knows what. But his smile was the freest, happiest, most wonderful thing I had ever seen, and his eyes were pools of warm, brown chocolate into which I wanted to dive and never return.
His grin from the success of the recent venture weakened and re-formed itself into something else. He replaced his cap, then tipped it in my direction.
Molly gasped.
‘Really,’ said Camilla.
John’s eyes were on me for far too long a time, a thrilling and frightening gaze. The temperature of my own blood and of my father’s rose in tandem under very different flames.
‘John Maine!’
My father’s voice boomed across the harbour-side. John jumped and looked back.
‘Mr Havers, sir,’ he said. He glanced at me, gulped, then removed his cap. ‘A lovely afternoon.’
My father stepped forwards, eyeing me as he did. He was an imposing man, tall with a cane and a thick moustache. He ate and drank well. There was much of him to fear.
‘Ely,’ warned my moth
er. ‘Be kind.’
‘I’ll be what I am, woman!’ snapped my father.
He turned back to John, who was now running his cap between his hands like a rope.
‘And what business do you have down at the harbour on a Sunday afternoon? You have no family to attend to? Eh?’
John stammered.
‘Mr Havers, sir, I…’
‘Speak up, man!’
‘None sir. Only my father and mother. They are at my uncle’s. And my brother is out of town.’
My father swept his gaze around the harbour, swinging his cane with it. A rabble of men murmured and swayed outside the Ship Inn, tankards rocking.
‘Are you drunk, then? I’ll have no drunks working at my brewery, John Maine.’
The irony of this order found a light in John’s eyes, as it did in mine. But he controlled himself.
‘No, sir. I am just enjoying the afternoon. I like to walk the coast.’
My father looked him up and down. Then he walked up to him and leaned down to his face, taking a long breath through his nose.
With a grunt, he stood back again.
‘Very well,’ he said. He lowered his voice to a growl and glared at him. ‘But you will not eye any of my daughters like that ever again, understand?’
John looked back at his master, trying to nod.
‘Do you hear me, John Maine?’ my father barked.
‘Yes,’ said John. ‘Yes, sir, I understand. I promise. Begging your pardon, sir.’
My father straightened up and stared down his nose.
‘I want you at the gates at five a.m. tomorrow. Not a minute later.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said John.
My father led us away. The harbour, which had quietened to a near silence to witness the scene, renewed its hubbub. I glanced over my shoulder, and caught John already breaking his promise.
We found each other again through a rush of looks and scribbled notes — a glance in church, nods, letters passed through friends and finally a quiet early evening where we met in secret by the wide bay north of the harbour. From then on, we met when and where we could. In the woods, by the rocks near Castle Point, in the caves near Dermouth Sands, where we would allow ourselves to be trapped by the tide and spend afternoons by the rock pools, roaring and surging with the waves.
The Other Lives Page 18