There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.
Even to me, that pine seems old. In recent years, whenever I have despaired of my condition and needed to feel a bit more mortal and ordinary, I think of that tree in California. It has been alive since the Pharaohs. It has been alive since the founding of Troy. Since the start of the Bronze Age. Since the start of yoga. Since mammoths.
And it has stayed there, calmly in its spot, growing slowly, producing leaves, losing leaves, producing more, as those mammoths became extinct, as Homer wrote The Odyssey, as Cleopatra reigned, as Jesus was nailed to a cross, as Siddhartha Gautama left his palace to weep for his suffering subjects, as the Roman Empire declined and fell, as Carthage was captured, as water buffalo were domesticated in China, as the Incas built cities, as I leaned over the well with Rose, as America fought with itself, as world wars happened, as Facebook was invented, as millions of humans and other animals lived and fought and procreated and went, bewildered, to their fast graves, the tree had always been the tree.
That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes.
I stand like a vertical headache in front of twenty-eight fourteen-year-olds, slumping back on chairs, playing with pens, surreptitiously checking their phones. It is a tough crowd, but I’ve had tougher over the years. This is certainly easier than playing to the drunken sailors, thieves and drifters of the Minerva Inn in Plymouth, for instance.
Everything changes and nothing changes.
‘The East End is a multicultural area because it has always been a multicultural area,’ I say, as an opener to the lesson focusing on Pre-Twentieth-Century Immigration. ‘No one was ever a native of Britain. People arrived here. The Romans, the Celts, the Normans, the Saxons. Britain was always a place made of other places. And even what we think of as “modern” immigration goes quite a long way back. Well over three hundred years ago, you had Indians who came here after being recruited on ships run by the East India Company. Then came Germans and Russian Jews and Africans. But it is true that, while immigration has always been a part of English society, for a long time visibly different immigrants were treated as exotic oddities . . . For instance, in the eighteenth century a man called Omai arrived here from the Pacific Islands. He arrived back on Cook’s second voyage . . .’ I pause. I remember sitting on the deck of the boat with him, Omai, my old friend, showing him my daughter’s coin and teaching him the word money. ‘And when Omai came here he was seen as so unique that every celebrity of the day, from the king down, went to meet him and have dinner with him . . .’ I remember his face, flickering in the shadow of a flame. ‘He even had his portrait painted by the most famous artist of the time, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was a celebrity, for a time. Omai . . .’
Omai.
I hadn’t said his name out loud for a long time. Not since I had spoken to Hendrich about him, in 1891. But I often thought about him. About what happened to him. Thinking of him now, though, seems to add to my headache. Everything spins a little.
‘He was . . .’
A girl on the front row, Danielle, chewing gum, frowns at me. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
Cue laughter. Danielle turns around. Soaks it up.
Steady thyself.
I try to smile at the class. ‘Fine. I’m fine . . . This part of London in particular has always been defined by immigration. For instance, over there’ – I point out of the window, westwards – ‘back in the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds you had the French. They were the first immigrants in great numbers of the modern age. Not all of them stayed in London. A lot went to Canterbury. Others went into rural areas. Kent . . .’ I pause. Breathe. ‘. . . Suffolk. But many based themselves in Spitalfields, and a real community built up. They started the silk industry here. Many of them were silk weavers. Many were former aristocrats who were suddenly having to make a new life for themselves in very different circumstances to the life they knew at home.’
There is a boy sitting on one of the middle tables. Anton. A quiet boy with a brooding and serious look about him. He raises his hand.
‘Yes, Anton?’
‘Why did they come here? I mean, if they had it so good at home?’
‘Well, they were Protestants. Huguenots, they were called, though they didn’t call themselves that. They followed the teachings of Jean Cauvin – John Calvin. And at that time it was a dangerous thing to be a Protestant in France, just as it was to be a Catholic in England. So many of them . . .’
I close my eyes, trying to blink away a memory. The pain in my head becomes too much.
They sense my weakness. I hear their laughter flare up again.
‘So many of them had to . . . had to escape.’
I open my eyes. Anton isn’t laughing. He gives me a small smile of support. But I am pretty sure he, like the rest of the class, thinks I am not quite there.
I feel my heart beat a frenzied jazz rhythm as the room starts to tilt.
‘Just one minute,’ I say.
‘Sir?’ Anton seems concerned.
‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . . I’ll be back in a minute.’
I walk out of the room, down the corridor. Past one classroom. Past another. I see Camille through a window. She is standing in front of a whiteboard full of verb formations.
She looks so calm and in control of the class. She sees me and smiles and I smile back, despite my panic.
I go into the bathroom.
I stare at my face in the mirror.
I know my own face too well to actually see it. Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.
‘Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?’
I splash my cheeks with water. I breathe slowly.
‘My name is Tom Hazard. Tom Hazard. My name is Tom Hazard.’
The name itself contains too much. It contains everyone who has ever called me it and everyone I have ever hid it from. It contains my mother and Rose and Hendrich and Marion. But it isn’t an anchor. Because an anchor fixes you in one place. And I am still not fixed. Could I just keep sailing through life for ever feeling like this? A boat has to stop eventually. It has to reach a port, a harbour, a destination, known or unknown. It has to get somewhere, and stop there, or what is the point of the boat? I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.
I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.
I had, in short, lost myself.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell my reflection. I think of Omai. I wish I knew where he was. I wish I hadn’t just let him go without trying to keep in touch. It is lonely, this world, without a friend.