The Long Forgotten Read online

  ‘Don’t be upset when he doesn’t speak to you,’ Rita says, guiding Dove down the thin corridor. ‘Zachariah has been here many years. Longer even than me. He doesn’t speak at all. Never has.’

  She stops outside a set of double doors, behind them the deafening television, and shrugs. She plugs her ears with cotton wool, jewellery wobbling on the lobes. Dove declines two plugs of his own and enters the room.

  There are armchairs, thirty or more, but none of them match. Half are full, but empty ones hold the shape of whoever sat there last, the prints of their hands tightly gripping the arms. They hold on.

  ‘You didn’t come here to watch TV,’ she says from behind him. ‘Did you?’

  He looks from one person to the next, each face lined with the puzzles of age. Not one of them acknowledges his presence. He feels no more than air.

  Rita taps her foot against the skirting board to a skittish, impatient rhythm. He turns to see her pointing towards an old man in the corner of the room with his chair facing the window.

  ‘Mr Zachariah Temple,’ she says.

  And the first thing Dove thinks about is Len.

  He was twelve by then, and the years he’d been with Len and Maud had ironed out many of the issues he’d arrived with. He was less shy around strangers. More trusting of others. There were still problems with his mood – he became jealous and angry easily – though he could largely control sudden fits of temper, and his sullen episodes were fewer and further between. He still feared abandonment, but no longer feared Len and Maud leaving the room and never coming back. It had become a background radiation, always there, only sometimes building to an all-consuming nausea, like the one he was experiencing sitting in the hospital room, Maud beside him, their hands pressed together.

  The room opposite had a light box screwed to the wall, and if Dove craned his neck he could see the image pinned to it: a cauliflower print of brain, blackness surrounded by the dense white of bone – a tiny galaxy.

  ‘See,’ he said, squeezing the sodden fabric round her wrist, ‘looks like outer space, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it does if you look at it a certain way,’ Maud said, huffing on her inhaler, a rattle in her lungs. She stared at the door like she did at the dog flap in the kitchen. As though it might open at any minute, the corners of her mouth curled upwards in hope.

  Len lay perfectly still on the hospital bed, a likeness of a man carved atop his own tomb. His eyes were caves in his skull. A fury of tubes ran from his arms and nose. A doctor explained: the tumour that felled him had been there for some time, lurking in the black space of his brain.

  ‘It’s pressing on the temporal lobe,’ he said. He was young and handsome, a cleft in his chin. ‘It could explain any loss of cognitive ability he was suffering. It would certainly explain any pain he was in.’

  ‘He wasn’t in any pain,’ Maud said.

  ‘That he mentioned.’

  ‘I’m his wife. He’d have told me if he was.’ The doctor didn’t lift his eyes from a form he’d been filling in since he entered the room.

  ‘What about memory loss?’

  ‘No more than anyone else our age.’ Dove knew that to be true. They’d spend many evenings, especially on nights when he didn’t have school the next day, with Len telling him all about the wild things he got up to as a young man. His stories were rich and colourful, recounted in a level of detail so fantastic that, as Dove had grown into the first flushes of adolescence, he sometimes wondered if they were inventions. Like the time Len was a fireman during the war and he and two friends had to wrap themselves in a mattress and jump from the third-floor window of a burning building. Or the time he hitchhiked all the way home from the Mull of Kintyre with a man he convinced himself was an escaped prisoner, only for a newspaper article three days later to confirm his suspicions were correct. Maybe it was the way he told them, or how he pinched the back of Dove’s neck as they drew towards their climax, but the stories excited him. He couldn’t wait to grow up. For the first time in his life, he wanted to reach the future. To see what happened next.

  ‘That’s good,’ the doctor said. ‘The mind is a fragile instrument. Almost anything else there are pills for.’ Dove scowled at the doctor from his seat in the corner of the room, unappreciative of his manner. Too flippant. Too functional. Did he think they were discussing the engine of a broken-down car? Only years later did he see that what he’d assumed to be nonchalance was in fact a coping mechanism, deployed to help not only Maud, but the doctor himself. How else could a man hold the lives of others in his hands?

  ‘And you,’ he said to Dove. ‘Don’t you be worrying about your grandad.’

  ‘He’s my dad,’ Dove said. But his voice was quiet and tired and the doctor spoke over him, more from efficiency than ignorance, as he tapped his pen against various machines and recorded what it said on their displays.

  ‘He’s in the best possible care here. If he does what I tell him to, everything will be just fine.’

  That was when Dove knew the very opposite was true.

  It was early evening – the thin curtains couldn’t keep out the milky glare of the moon – when Maud fell asleep in the armchair at the foot of the bed and Dove was the only one awake. Yearning for closeness, he stood on the tips of his toes to kiss Len’s forehead, then his chest. He took Len’s fingers and caressed them with his lips. They were brittle. Len opened his mouth, so slightly his tongue stayed trapped inside, a dying animal, peering through the bars.

  ‘Dove,’ he said, a low grumble.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dove said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘She’ll kill me if she knows I woke you up. The doctor says you need to rest.’

  ‘Pffft. Rest? And who will put the bread on the table if I do that?’ Len often used analogies involving bread and butter. Dove was astonished at the range of things he could apply them to: moving furniture, rebuilding a car’s engine, even worming the dog.

  Fighting an urge to scoop Len into his arms, Dove shoved his hands into his pockets. At twelve he was big for his age, but his muscles were still slight and sinewy. And yet, with Len before him, the tumour having shorn the weight from his bones, carrying him home seemed not just possible, but something he should definitely attempt.

  The nurse came with a plastic cup and, in it, the jumping bean of a fluorescent sedative. Maud woke and forced Len to eat the solid round lump of mashed potato they served him. The gravy was thin, with suspended crystals of salt, giving everything on the plate the same anaemic hue.

  ‘I’m thinking of going to a nightclub tonight,’ Len said to her as she wiped a thin band of dribble from his chin.

  ‘Is that so?’ Maud asked, and they laughed together. ‘Then I’d better get you cleaned up.’

  ‘I can get you some help,’ the nurse said, straightening the blue paper curtains. Maud smiled.

  ‘Thank you, but it’s fine. I’ve been looking after Len in one way or another since the day I met him. I could do it with my eyes closed.’ There was truth to this too. Dove had seen her rub his skin with moisturizer until he smelled of cloves. She had a way of lifting him, turning him, almost one-handed, so that they were one body, each an extension of the other.

  Len waited until the nurse left.

  ‘Maud, go home and get some rest, will you? I’m meant to be the one in hospital. Not you.’

  ‘Fat chance,’ she said, pinning another photograph to the wall beside his bed; the two of them with a little girl named Annabel, who was an adult now and had promised a visit yet to materialize.

  ‘Then go get yourself something to eat in the canteen. Something. Anything. Put up those bloody feet of yours.’

  ‘My feet don’t need putting up.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ he said, ‘get out of here. Go. Dove can keep me company for a while.’ Eventually Maud left – a wiggle in her walk concession that yes, maybe a sit-down and a hot meal was a good idea after all – but not before kissing Len on the lips
with a teenage enthusiasm that made Dove want to hide beneath the bed.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she said, gently closing the door behind her.

  After a while of Dove holding Len’s hand in a sad but pleasant silence, Len pressed the back of Dove’s to his cheek and he felt wetness on it.

  ‘Are you being good?’ he asked.

  ‘Being good?’

  ‘For Maud. Helping around the house. Doing what she tells you to do.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ It was true, he had been. In Len’s absence he’d quickly realized she needed him every bit as much as he needed her.

  ‘You’re a good boy. I always said keeping you with us was the best decision we ever made.’

  Dove stood then, looked Len in the eye through a glaze of tears.

  ‘You’re coming home, aren’t you? Maud said you were coming home.’ He laughed, but it quickly petered into nothing.

  ‘You think I’m staying here eating biscuits all day, staring out of the window like in some old folks’ home? Come on, Dove. Of course I am. Of course I’m coming home.’

  Dove approaches Zachariah from the side so as not to startle him, but the old man doesn’t move, even when Dove’s shadow falls across his face.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, lowering himself to head height. ‘Zachariah?’ No answer. ‘Mr Temple?’

  The man stares straight ahead and Dove is nothing in his vision. ‘Mr Temple?’ His hand, pallid and limp. Nothing. Though right in front of him, he could leave now and believe this man had never seen his face.

  ‘Mr Temple. I’m here to talk to you about flowers.’ Still nothing.

  Rita appears at Dove’s side and hands him a biscuit. They walk together, to what feels like a polite enough distance.

  ‘Not who you thought it was?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know who I thought it was.’

  ‘God bless you for trying.’

  ‘He has Alzheimer’s?’

  ‘You can call it whatever you want. But like most of our residents here, what he doesn’t have is himself. That’s the only important thing.’

  ‘Who was he, though? I mean, before he was here.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know. I know that he likes to be clean, and he likes his surroundings to be clean. So I do that for him. He likes to be positioned by the window so that he can see the garden outside, and that’s the only time I ever see a smile in those old eyes. But maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe thinking someone is in there helps me get through the day.’ Rita wanders slowly away, her trolley wheels squealing. ‘I’ll give you a minute to say goodbye.’

  Dove draws back towards the chair and quietly crouches down beside the old man’s legs.

  It is not his features Dove recognizes. His face, layers upon layers, folded like the head of a dying rose. No, he does not look like Peter Manyweathers, not the Peter Manyweathers in the memories. But, in the tilt of his head, the vague clue of an outline – the same otherly sense by which a lover can be spotted across a crowded room – he also does.

  ‘Mr Manyweathers?’

  The old man’s pupils hang in the centre of his eyes like targets on the back wall of an abandoned shooting range. ‘My name’s Dove.’ Taking his hand, running a fingertip over the electric-blue map of his veins.

  The old man snatches back his arm and presses his knuckles hard into the front of his skull, while at his feet, Dove does the same. The pain is more intense than before, sharper, faster, a blade carving open the space inside him, splaying it out, and filling it with something new.

  A memory of his mother.

  TEN

  They were on a flight to Mexico. The plane was full. Cigarette smoke snaked across the ceiling and slithered into the vents. Susan’s fingernails were mottled by the imprint of her bite. The magnitude of her snap decision was taking hold. She stared out of the window at the cloud tops, whipped to form ranges in the sky, convincing herself that at any moment they might crash.

  ‘Do you know how rare plane crashes are?’ Peter asked. His teeth punctured the apple she shoved into his mouth.

  The way she gripped her seat when the plane banked reminded him of how she’d clutch his arm as a child, whenever they crossed a busy road. When she did it, he felt like the only other person alive.

  They landed in Guadalajara, and a relentless Mexican heat blasted the cool film of plane sweat from their skin. Susan carried the bags while he limped along on crutches borrowed from a neighbour. They let the arrivals lounge clear, then approached a tour guide with a map he’d had annotated by the more knowledgeable members of the etching group.

  ‘I’m looking for the Kadupul flower,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in one of these areas, somewhere.’

  ‘You are serious?’ the tour guide said, a laugh drowning out the flight announcements. The circled areas of the map covered over two thousand miles. Jalisco lay in the transition area between the temperate north and the tropical south, on the northern edge of the Sierra Madre del Sur at the Trans-Mexican Belt, home to all five of Mexico’s natural ecosystems. Arid and semi-arid scrublands, tropical evergreen, deciduous and thorn forests, mesquite grasslands and temperate forests with oaks, pines and firs. Finding a specific flower, or even a field of them, was as futile as hunting a solitary, bashful flea on the body of a dog.

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said, ‘I’m serious.’

  Keen to understand what his colleague had found so funny, an older man approached the counter, where this apparently impossible quest was translated. The conspiratorial sound of their conversation, combined with the curt way a stamp had been punched into her passport, had convinced Susan they were going to be arrested and imprisoned forever in a cell with thirty strange, sweaty, sporadically violent men. Peter told her to calm down, but in reality he was almost as anxious as his sister. To relax, he found an opportunity to remove the love letter from his pocket. Still it inspired him, and again he lost himself in its romance. The thought of finding the flowers, but more than that, the slightest chance of seeing the woman again who’d rescued him from the sheep-eater, left him bristling with determination.

  The older man whispered something in his native tongue, then picked up the telephone.

  ‘You might have a lucky day,’ the first man said, guilt for having mocked the Americans drawing his face into a frown. ‘Irving might know someone who knows.’

  Irving was tall, with owlish grey eyebrows that looked almost metallic against his brown skin. He was a slow conversationalist, and spent almost fifteen minutes on the telephone as the heat closed in. By the time he’d finished, Susan was hyperventilating into a sick bag she’d picked up on the plane. But Irving came good. A friend of a friend of his, a keen botanist, had heard about the field of Kadupul, somewhere at the foot of the Volcán de Tequila, the flower perhaps lulled into delusions of safety by the 200,000 years that had passed since the volcano’s last eruption. Irving helped them board a bus in the right direction, Peter tipped him five dollars, and Susan complained about how uncomfortable the seats were for the next two and a half hours.

  They dumped their excess luggage at a hostel, where Peter quickly cleaned the room while Susan showered. The volcano’s shadow grew as the moon rose over the town. Tequila train tourists pigeon-stepped through the tight adobe corridor of the main strip, with stucco, ochre lime-washed walls, arches, quoins and odd-shaped window frames. Three bells marked 9 p.m., when the parish priest emerged from the honeycomb brickwork of his church to bless the town. Everyone stopped what they were doing, even turning off their radios to mark the moment, as if it was the first or the last night of their existence. For the Kadupul, it could have been both.

  Late the next afternoon, the hostel owner’s wife kindly drove them out of town, dropping them where the volcano’s gargantuan silhouette loomed like an incarnation of the devil. Susan stopped to look up, and her breath was robbed by its majesty. He realized she was wearing heels – the first time he’d seen her in them since she graduated – and that they were sinking into the mud.
/>
  ‘I don’t care if they’re inappropriate,’ she said.

  ‘Susan,’ he said, staring down at his crutches, ‘it’s going to be a long old walk.’

  If they were in the right place there would be many other flower hunters ahead of them. As with any clique, they perpetuated their own existence with the promotion of a strict and exclusive code, assuming others didn’t understand the grace of an orchid, or the siren song of a sweet lily. Peter found them to be dullards, unable to comprehend that the recognition of a flower’s beauty was, in all ways, enough. To his ear, calling the Kadupul an Epiphyllum oxypetalum was grossly unedifying. He wished his arms were stronger, so that when they inevitably noticed his sister’s inappropriate shoes and rolled their eyes at the amateur in their midst, he could spark them straight out.

  They walked the path for two hours, guided by the wonky torch of the moon. Susan was quiet, moving her hands through the warm night air, letting it wash over her skin. Fields of blue agave swayed on the breeze, giving way to the shivering leaves of a forest canopy. And then, without warning, a clearing, and a swathe of resting Kadupul, stretching as far as the eye could see. There was no sign of one in bloom. Yet. They had made it in time, for this at least. Setting up their tent beneath a wide night sky, Peter used binoculars to scan the undulating hats of the flowers. Dotted around the field, two here, three there, were other tents, flagged by balls of dim lamplight. Outside some sat lone searchers, and outside others small groups, huddled together over reference books, keeping watch on the field for the first showing of a petal. But there was no sign of Hens or the woman who had rescued him.