‘So tell me,’ he said, reminding me of the question that was still in the air. A question that I knew had to be answered. ‘How old are you?’
So I told him. ‘I was born on the third of March, in the year fifteen eighty-one. I am two hundred and seventy-nine years old.’
I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He stared at me for a long, long time as snow flurries danced busily outside the window, as if to mirror my swirling mind. His eyes widened and he pinched his lower lip between his fingers. And then he said, ‘Well. There. That settles the matter quite conclusively. Now I can set about and give you a diagnosis.’
I smiled. This was good. A diagnosis was precisely what I was after.
‘But, for proper help, you will need to go to Bethlem.’
I remembered passing the place. Hearing the dull screams from inside. ‘Bethlem Hospital? As in . . . Bedlam?’
‘The very same.’
‘But that’s a place for lunatics.’
‘It is an asylum, yes. It will give you the help you need. Now, please, I have more appointments today.’
He nodded to the door.
‘But—’
‘Please, I recommend that you visit Bethlem. It will help with your . . . delusions.’
The most fashionable philosopher at this time was the German Arthur Schopenhauer, who was still (just) alive. I had been reading a lot of him, which was probably inadvisable. Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
I had thought, in coming to Dr Hutchinson, I was coming to the man with the broadest field of scientific vision, the one most likely to understand my condition, and having this belief slip away felt like a kind of grief. The death of hope itself. I was beyond every field of vision. I was a kind of invisible man.
As a result, I became quite animated. I pulled a coin from my pocket.
‘Look at this. Look at this penny. It is Elizabethan. Look. Look. My daughter gave it me when I had to go away.’
‘That is an antique coin. I have a friend who has a silver coin from the reign of Henry the Eighth. A halfgroat, I think it is called. And I assure you, my friend was not born in the age of the Tudors. And that a halfgroat is rarer than a penny.’
‘I am not deluded. I promise you. I have been alive for a long time. I was there when the British found Tahiti. I knew Captain Cook. I worked for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men . . . Please, sir, you must tell me. Has someone else been to see you? A girl . . . a woman . . . talking of the same condition. Her name was Marion but she could have called herself something else. She might have been masquerading under another identity. In order to survive, we often need to—’
Dr Hutchinson looked worried now. ‘Please, go. I see you are getting agitated.’
‘Of course I am agitated. You are the only man who can help me. I need to understand myself. I need to understand why I am like this.’
I grabbed his wrist. His hand shrank away, as though my madness could be contagious.
‘We are a stone’s throw from the police station. If you don’t see yourself out, I will call for help and the police will come and take you away.’
There were tears in my eyes. Dr Hutchinson clouded into a ghost of himself. I knew I had to leave. I knew I had to give up hope, for a little while at least. So I stood up and nodded and left without a single word more, and kept myself, and my history, a secret for another thirty-one years.
London and St Albans, 1860–1891
After that first meeting with Dr Hutchinson I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive. I had tried to fight this, forcing myself into life and noise. I had gone, on my own, to a few of the new music halls, always sitting near the front, right in the heart of the noise and laughter, and I laughed or sang along, trying to feel some of the joy that filled the room. But I was immune.
So one baking hot August day in 1880 I walked from Whitechapel to St Albans. London was too much for me. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. It was time to be someone else again. I suppose the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn’t seen from the outside but is still there.
For years I thought the key was to keep building new shells on top of the old ones. To keep moving, to keep changing, to keep transforming into something else in the eyes of society.
St Albans wasn’t far from London but it was far enough. It was as new a place to me as any place in England could be, and I found work as a farrier. People now think of the early 1880s being an industrial time of smoke and factories but, as with every age, it was a carousel of many periods at once. The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead. It was still the age of the horse and cart, and blacksmiths were thriving as much as they had ever been.
But in St Albans, things became worse. I would sometimes lose myself completely, and just stare into the orange heat of the forge, hardly aware of myself – or anything at all. On occasion my manager, Jeremiah Cartwright, would elbow me or slap me on my back and tell me ‘to climb down from the clouds’.
Once, when I was on my own, I took a desperate action in the pursuit of feeling. I pulled up my sleeve, took a searing piece of iron, curved into a horse-shoe from the flames, and pushed it against the top of my left forearm. I held it there, as my skin hissed and cooked beneath it, and I clenched my jaw and eyes tight, and contained the scream.
I still have that scar, like a half-smile, and I get a strange comfort when I look at it. Though it is another thing I have to be careful about. Another thing I have to conceal. A distinguishing mark, interfering with my anonymity.
It worked, I suppose. I felt the pain. It had come in and screamed through me, with mind-pulsing intensity. I had to exist, I realised, because for pain to be felt there must be a living presence – a me – to feel it. And there was a reassurance in that knowledge, that proof of my own reality.
But I still sought proof that I wasn’t mad.
Then, one day, a thought occurred to me. The thought was this: maybe I did have the proof. I, myself, was the evidence, and time was the proof.
And so it was that I decided to take that evidence, one final time, to Dr Hutchinson.
London, 1891
Dr Hutchinson didn’t know it was me. I mean, he wouldn’t have recognised the name from the list of appointments because the last time he had seen me I was Edward Cribbs and now I was back, for the first time since my youth, with my true name again. Well, true first name. I was Tom. Not the Huguenot Hazard or the dull Smith but the rather more symbolic Winters.
It was a warm day – the fourth of June – and I had ridden into town on a horse-dragged cart that belonged (both the cart and the horse) – to my sullen boss Jeremiah.
The London Cutaneous Institution for Treatment and Cure of Non-infectious Diseases of the Skin was now called the London Skin Clinic, but otherwise everything