The Long Forgotten Read online

  Susan surveyed the stems of the Kadupul – some erect, some sprawling, all profusely branched – as if it were a fragile lake of ice.

  ‘This is it, huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is it. The shyest flower of them all.’

  ‘Then tell me about it.’

  ‘In Sri Lanka they believe that when the Kadupul blooms, a semi-mythical tribe known as the Nagas descend from heaven to present the flower as a gift to Buddha. The Chinese use it to describe someone who has an impressive but brief moment of glory . . . an instance of great luck. You know, like a lucky strike.’

  ‘I could sure do with a few of those.’

  ‘Wherever you go, people will interpret it differently. That’s what we do with things we can’t begin to understand. We give them magic, and so they become magic.’

  Susan lay back on the long grass, alive with the lullabies of insects, becalmed by the brilliance of stars. Even the mosquitoes seemed to sense her blood was too still to drink. ‘How do you interpret it?’ she asked.

  ‘I prefer its Japanese nickname. Beauty under the Moon.’

  ‘We’re not all as brave as you, y’know, Peter?’ The more she spoke, the more she spread out across the ground.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Other people settle. But you. No. A list of six flowers on a letter and you decide you’re gonna see them all.’

  This made him smile so broadly he couldn’t sleep for the ache in his cheeks. She was right, of course. But he didn’t use to be brave. It was the letter that emboldened him. It felt as if the list of flowers was a path he had to follow. As if it had been mapped out by whoever wrote the letter to guide him to something greater, something the writer himself had been seeking when he put pen to paper. Love.

  But that feeling was fading. They waited for three days. Peter used all the cash he had to buy food from opportunistic vendors who’d come from miles around to capitalize on the flower hunters’ hunger. He struggled with his own unwillingness to confront a growing number of possibilities. That the woman wouldn’t come. That Hens had found her first and spirited her away. Or, simply, that he’d been a fool. To yearn this way, for something that had never been his in the first place, hurt enough that he wouldn’t have minded if the volcano had erupted and lava had engulfed him while he slept.

  By the fourth day, they were both tired. Susan didn’t once complain, but Peter knew they’d need to return to the hostel soon. The Queen of the Night rewarded patience, but even his was thinning. Susan rubbed his shoulders with the balls of her thumbs and whispered, gently, that they should stay another night, just in case. He thought of the campion, how it waited. But he was spent.

  ‘This is stupid,’ he said, disconsolately squeezing his head between his knees. ‘If she was coming to see the Kadupul, she’d have been here by now. Or she came and left already, which is even worse.’

  ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘Come on, Peter, you’re just too tired.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m just too late.’

  They shook dirt from their belongings and packed them tightly into bags, until all that remained was the tent and the binoculars spilling out of their case. He wearily put them to his eyes for one last look at the flower. Strafing over the horizon, he saw, beyond the Kadupul, a sight that instantly soothed every ache in his limbs.

  She appeared, on the far side of the field, out of the trees that seemed to open for her like velvet stage curtains. Though she was miniature in the sight of the binoculars, he recognized her instantly. Not from her face or her hair, the way she moved or how her brown skin bathed in the celestial glow – a beauty under the moon indeed – but from the way his heartbeat pummelled his ribs. Without another word, or his crutches for support, he limped around the perimeter of the vast field, not once taking his eyes from her white shawl, until he arrived behind her, and placed a shaking hand on the soft apex of her shoulder.

  ‘My name is Peter Manyweathers,’ he said.

  ‘You’re alive!’ she said, and he was. Susan’s excited yelp cut through the night.

  A column of smoke pirouetted from the campfire, wood crackling. She sat barefoot on the ground and said her name was Harum. Susan, who’d barely spoken in an hour, apologetically gave her a peach that had browned on the journey.

  ‘Harum is a nice name,’ he said, everything that emerged from his mouth a mortifying cliché. He’d afforded hours of silent rehearsal to this moment, yet here he was, fluffing his lines.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s Indonesian for “smells good”.’ She laughed.

  ‘In truth,’ Susan said, inhaling, ‘you do smell good.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s me,’ Harum said, smiling. ‘It has been growing all night. The scent of vanilla. It means the Kadupul are coming.’

  Peter showed her his reference book of flowers and she nodded as if it were a yearbook of old friends. She pointed to a bright-pink bloom, with so many petals it looked like a hundred camellias in one flower.

  ‘The Middlemist’s Red. They say there is just one in the world now, in an English country garden. There is not a single one left in China, even though it is Chinese. I think it is proof that we do not belong to a certain place, but that we belong to the world. It is a flower I cannot die until I’ve seen.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘You’re a man after my own heart,’ she said, her face lifting whenever she used a phrase she’d heard from another culture, unsure whether she’d deployed it quite right. He nodded. What she’d said was perfect.

  She was thirty years old, with a pretty nose. Her silver necklace – two dainty birds – caught the firelight. When the wind filled her dress, billowing like the cloak of a jellyfish, she straightened it again with a single neat stroke. She described the buttery stamen of the Franklin tree she’d found in the Altamaha River valley, Georgia, the first recorded wild growth since the early nineteenth century, and the urgent red of the Koki’o flower in Hawaii, where only twenty-three are thought to exist.

  ‘Peter?’ Susan said. How long had he not been listening? Harum’s voice had entranced him. He swore the flames moved to it.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Harum’s asking you a question. I’m gonna go to sleep now, let you answer it.’ Susan climbed into the tent, clucking, the way she had as a girl when she found something cute.

  Harum sat beside Peter, and even the hairs on his legs seemed to reach out to her.

  ‘I was wondering how you survived,’ she said. ‘When I found you, I thought you were already dead.’

  ‘You were just in time.’

  ‘Then it was better than seeing the sheep-eater bloom.’ She held a hand across her heart.

  ‘I don’t remember any of it.’

  ‘I came to hospital with you until they found your friend.’

  ‘Hens.’

  ‘Yes, the Dane. He was very kind. He wanted to take me to lunch, to say thank you for finding you. I told him, he did not have to thank me. Perhaps he had to thank a higher power, but not me. But he insisted, and so, of course, I had to accept his offer. We got quite drunk.’ Peter prodded a stone through the dirt with the rubber tip of his crutch and imagined Hens’s hand on her back, guiding her through the swinging wooden doors of a Chilean restaurant. How big his fingers looked curled round her dainty waist. How they dwarfed the shot glass he forced into her hands. He could smell the stale musk of tobacco on Hens’s breath, stronger now than the vanilla in the air.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ he asked, picturing Hens’s expression, the way it went blank when he talked to a woman without listening to what was being said.

  ‘He was very interested in the flowers I have studied. Very charming. A real gentleman. In fact, we talked for most of the afternoon, swapping stories and sightings.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Oh yes. H
e told me about the Youtan Poluo, in China. I must admit, I was very jealous.’ Peter didn’t suppose she could ever experience a jealousy akin to his own at that moment. He tried to concentrate on his legs, but his time in hospital had left them so puny, an afterthought compared to the generous trunks Hens walked around on, that they embarrassed him, and he wrapped his arms around his aching knees.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that was a good find all right.’

  ‘And the campion of Gibraltar. He told me how he searched the cliffs for a whole week until he found one, just one, in the furthest possible place.’ Peter swallowed the bile climbing his throat. He was trapped. If he outed Hens as a liar now, it would seem bizarre. In her mind, they were friends, flower hunters bound by the brotherhood that supposedly united everybody else gathered here. Harum would doubtless run as fast as her feet could carry her over such hostile ground.

  ‘It was a difficult expedition.’

  ‘But I can see why he is driven to do it. I mean, finding the love letter in the library like that. It is so—’ she seemed to search her hands for the right words ‘— it is so romantic.’ Peter tossed his crutch aside. It bounced, then slid into a ditch. She jumped, and to save face he made it seem like the result of a spasm by affecting another.

  ‘It’s the painkillers they put me on.’

  ‘I can imagine. I just wanted to know you were surviving. And now I do.’ She pinched the bird necklace between her lips.

  ‘I like the birds,’ he said.

  ‘Doves,’ she said. ‘Dove is my father’s name. Tradition means that one day it shall also be my son’s.’

  Just then, the moon emerged from behind a purple swirl of cloud, lighting the field to its furthest corners. And it appeared, a blanket of delicate white flowers, as if it had been there all along, like snow that falls as you sleep. The Kadupul. The Queen of the Night. The beauty under the stars in blissful symphony. They had come to die together. Harum squealed, and they embraced, then waited, melded by this spectacle, for the dawn to come. When it did, the flowers wilted. No price could be put on them, or on the experience they’d just shared.

  Hens Berg arrived with the sun.

  His face was bloated and red. When the breeze picked up they could smell the alcohol that welled in his pores. But Hens had an ability to project a certain strength, and as he approached – chest puffed, shoulders straight – it was as though he’d come to save the day. Peter could barely watch but found his eyes disobeyed him as Hens kissed Harum’s tiny hand, then scooped her into a pelviscrushing bear hug. Susan seemed to sense her brother’s unease as she watched the giant man drenched in rust-coloured sweat pluck the cap off a beer bottle begged from the natives.

  ‘Peter!’ Hens said. ‘How amazing that you’re here! Last time I saw you it looked like you wouldn’t make it. To Mexico, I mean.’

  ‘Who’d have thought I’d get here before you,’ Peter said.

  Hens smiled and whispered, his mouth close to Peter’s ear.

  ‘The way you speak reminds me of a cat I had back in Denmark. It hissed when frightened. Had to put it down.’

  Peter spun away, keen for Hens not to see the goose-bumps rising up his neck.

  ‘My goodness,’ Hens said, turning back to Harum, ‘my journey here was not what I expected. But didn’t I tell you I’d come!’

  Nobody had reason to believe the story Hens told was anything other than plausible. That he’d been robbed not long after arriving in Mexico, losing all his money and the paperwork and maps he had telling him where to find the Kadupul. That he’d hitch-hiked the whole way, a procession of truckers having taken pity, and detours, across the Mexican wilderness. It certainly seemed true, the way he said it, standing there with only the clothes on his back. Peter stopped listening. He felt too sick to listen. Hens hadn’t once looked at the Kadupul, its dead petals fluttering to the dry ground. Harum would see through his pretence, Peter was sure of it. Ignoring all the times he’d poorly judged character in the past was the only way he avoided throwing up all over his feet.

  ‘Too late though, eh, Hens?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’m devastated.’ Hens inhaled a breath that for a time seemed never-ending. ‘Story of my life.’ Harum gave him a conciliatory stroke of the arm, which Peter could hardly bear.

  ‘I have a car,’ she said, ‘we could go to the airport together.’ Both men agreed in unison. Peter packed the remainder of his belongings. Hens loaded himself up like a packhorse, carrying almost everything down the long dirt track to the road, while Peter sidestepped to avoid his shadow.

  Claiming that he had the longest legs, Hens sat up front. Peter and Susan squeezed together in the back. In the rear-view mirror, Hens’s eyes flitted between Harum and Peter for the whole of the drive.

  ‘Where will you go next, Harum?’ Hens asked.

  ‘Namibia,’ she said. ‘To see the Welwitschia.’

  ‘The Welwitschia!’

  Peter kicked the back of Hens’s seat, an involuntary response, not hard enough for Hens to feel.

  ‘You should come!’ Harum said.

  ‘I should!’

  ‘And you, Peter? Don’t you think it would be a wonderful adventure?’ He leaned forward between the two front seats. Her hair smelled of smoke and wood. As bitter as the words tasted on his tongue, he said them anyway.

  ‘It certainly does.’

  ‘So you’ll come with us?’ she asked. Peter pretended to think about it a while, if only to keep Hens guessing.

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

  Hens rapped the club of his knuckles on the dashboard. ‘What about your cleaning job?’ he said.

  They locked eyes in the reflection. Peter couldn’t have felt more confident that Angelica was taking care of business back home.

  ‘There is nothing for you to worry about there.’

  ‘You know me, I do worry.’

  ‘I know,’ Peter said. ‘I know.’

  If Susan thought the exchange odd, she was apparently distracted. It was clear to Peter that the power and passion of the field of Kadupul had left her mind on other matters. She no longer seemed scared of the flight home, even though she’d be doing it alone.

  ‘Peter,’ she whispered as they unloaded their bags from the car, ‘do it. It’s a long way to go otherwise.’ Peter nodded, and when she kissed him goodbye he held her tightly, as though he’d never see her again, not knowing he wouldn’t.

  ELEVEN

  A loud, infuriatingly catchy jingle blares out around the studio, and that’s what first makes Professor Cole uneasy. If it hadn’t been for the unfailingly pleasant Dr Dash accompanying him on this ludicrous press tour these past few days he’d have given up and gone home a long time ago, as is his urge now – to get the hell out of this green room, where the sandwiches laid on by the production team are laughably small and unreasonably bland. He watches the monitor mounted on a metal arm in the top corner of the room, wondering if he can refrain from tearing it off the wall. An immaculately groomed female host, with popcorn-coloured hair and eyelashes as tidily splayed as the fan of a geisha, whips the studio audience into a manufactured frenzy. This, apparently, is his cue.

  Professor Cole and Dr Dash emerge from a recess built into the wall of the set, designed to look like a door. A famous television actor, James somebody or other, who Professor Cole swears on his wife’s precious life he’s never seen or heard of before, but whom he already feels inclined to punch, shuffles aside to make room at the fake breakfast bar where they sit in wait for the perfectly timed dissipation of applause. Cole already looks uncomfortable, as though he’d rather be anywhere else. An undeniable truth. I’d include in that, he thinks, being back at the bottom of the ocean. With oxygen, and probably without it.

  ‘Now. The Long Forgotten. We welcome two people who have found themselves at the centre of a story that has had everybody hankering for news 24/7, hasn’t it, James?’ The actor recounts how his fellow cast members discuss nothing but the black box of f
light PS570 during breaks in filming, much to Cole’s annoyance. Why the hell does it matter what a bunch of failed movie stars get up to in the queue for the catering truck?

  ‘It’s been a remarkable few weeks,’ Dash says. Cole fingers his collar, regretting wearing a woollen suit under the scrutiny of such hot studio lights. He retells the now well-rehearsed story of the whale and how the staff aboard his research vessel had posthumously named it Gobbler. The audience laugh. Buoyed by this, Cole adds a short anecdote about the pungent smell that is released when a whale’s carcass is sliced open.

  ‘Rotting flesh and burning sulphur,’ he says, ‘of a strength so powerful that one might question their own will to live, as if to have it enter the nose is to let death inside you.’ James scrunches his nose and wafts his hand in front of his face, but his ham-fisted attempt at silent comedy is met with Cole’s total indignation. ‘Oh, I’m serious,’ he says. ‘The senses are extraordinarily powerful things. To smell death and be disgusted is what makes us, us.’ Ever mindful of the lunchtime viewership, the host returns to Dr Dash.

  ‘And unlocking the secrets of The Long Forgotten’s flight recorder has been a difficult task?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, jiggling the tension out of her shoulders, ‘more difficult than we could possibly have imagined.’

  ‘But there have been successes?’

  ‘Oh yes. We can say for sure that we know where the flight entered the sea, off the coast of Cornwall. And using that information, with what we know about the movements of tides and weather conditions, we’ve been able to finally locate what remains of flight PS570 on the seabed, as you may have heard.’ Another round of applause. Professor Cole brings his chin to his chest, his mouth closer to the microphone clipped to his shirt.

  ‘What you’re actually clapping right now,’ he says, addressing the audience, ‘isn’t the discovery of a plane at all. You’re clapping the idea of a mass underwater grave.’ The host fixes on her autocue and swallows, her earpiece alive with the commotion of a panicked director’s gallery. Dr Dash swivels in her seat, resignedly coming to the flustered woman’s rescue.