This week’s story is for paid subscribers, but I would like it if all my subscribers were to read (and I hope enjoy) the opening, before the shutters come down
According to a past life regression therapist who claims to be able to tell who or what people were in a previous incarnation without hypnotising them, I was once a tortoise who went by the name of Tarquin, never married, and had few friends.
‘And you can tell that just by looking at me?’
‘I can.’
‘What’s the give-away?’
‘The time it takes you to cross the road.’
‘You’ll need more powerful proof than that,’ I said.
He laughed the spiritually knowing laugh of all those who believe against the evidence of everyone else’s eyes - religious initiates, flying-saucer freaks, end of the worlders, Covid conspiracists, Loch Ness monster witnesses, Trumpists. . .
Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘As I thought - you have no proof. And you can’t disprove that in an earlier life I was a cheetah, the fastest of all land animals.’
He took a Polaroid camera out of his briefcase, which I should have found suspicious. In the age of the smart phone, who carries a Polaroid Camera around?
‘Say fruit and fungi,’ he ordered me. Then twenty seconds later showed me the photograph he’d taken, or said he’d taken. I reproduce it below -
I scrutinised it. Held it up to the light. Brought it close to my face. ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘For starters,I’m sitting down. I don’t like sand. I don’t have red eyes. I file my nails. And I don’t have a shell.’
‘The shell we can come back to,’ he said. ‘All novelists have shells. But this isn’t you as you appear now. My camera captures who you were. The essence of you. Close your eyes and try to remember. Brighton beach in Sussex. Nineteen hundred years ago. You are doing a lap of honour after completing the 2 mile journey from Hove in a record time of a year and six weeks . . . Anything coming back to you?’
He knew my weak spot, I had to give him that. He knew I was bound to be transfixed by any mention of my winning something. ‘I do think I hear applause,’ I said.
‘Anything else?’
‘Tauber. They are calling a name. Tauber, Tauber!’
Richard Tauber was one of my favourite singers of Viennese schmaltz and Mozart. If I was to be the reincarnation of someone I would like it to have been Richard Tauber performing ‘You Are My Heart’s Delight’ at the Met after fleeing wartimeVienna.
‘What you’re hearing is Tarquin! Tarquin!’
‘No. Can’t be. The crowds are shouting Bravo!’
‘Of course they are. You have just beaten Héloïse, the fastest hare in Roman Sussex.’
‘I don’t see her in the photograph.’
‘Exactly. You beat her out of sight. It was so famous a win that the Greek poet Aesop wrote about it.’
‘Didn’t Aesop live before the Romans invaded Britain?’
‘I’m not saying he saw you win. He just knew it was going to happen. He’d been a prophet in an earlier life.’
I thought I had him here. This was his trick - to play fast and loose with time. Well, I was hot on prophets. ‘Which prophet?’ I asked.
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Philetas of Ephesus.’
Ah well, you win some, you lose some. And at least as Tarquin I’d won something. You can’t pick and choose who you were in another life. I could have been a mass murderer. I could have been the village idiot. Tarquin was not so bad. After thinking about it for a day or two I came to the conclusion that Tarquin was more than not so bad; for the flâneur I aspired to be, he was my perfect earlier self.