The Long Forgotten Read online

  The car was packed and they had held one another. It was time to leave. Maud moved back into the shadows but her eyes were still dewy and shone. Dove would be the last of her children to leave her, and the hardest one to lose.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  She looked down at the floor and he saw a brief glimpse of a different woman altogether. A version of her she’d never let him see before. This new Maud was solemn and tired. This was the version of Maud that worried herself sick Dove would be OK every night after she went to bed. The version of Maud who harboured a secret guilt for having adopted a young boy when she herself was old. The version of Maud who hadn’t coped so well after Len’s death, but who knew she must hold it together for his sake. All these things to protect him, behind the mask worn by a mother.

  ‘Thank you for being our son.’

  The old man is standing by the window looking at the flowers outside, his palm pressed flat against the glass. It’s been almost an hour.

  ‘I’m surprised his legs still work,’ Rita says. They sit at the back of the room and Dove tells her all about the memories. Of meeting Harum, of the man he is sure is his father, of the woman he is sure is his mother. Rita’s face freezes, equal parts compelled and incredulous.

  ‘Why else would I be getting them?’ Dove says. ‘The headaches. Why else would they be coming to me?’

  The nurse who dropped the fire extinguisher comes back into the room with a dusty plastic tub of disorganized paperwork, which he places at Rita’s feet as he scowls in Dove’s direction.

  ‘Out of the loft,’ he says, ‘and not easy to get to either.’ He hovers for a while, his hand extended like a tip-fishing bellboy. Rita waits for him to leave, then spreads the tattered files across the carpet.

  ‘Here,’ she says, opening a folder worn at the binding. Dove peers over her shoulder at the two crumpled sheets of paper inside it, the ink so faint it’s barely legible.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. Nineteen eighty-four. Zachariah Temple. Says here police found him wandering the streets, confused. Couldn’t speak. Didn’t know who he was. Identified by the passport in his pocket: the only thing he had on him.’ Rita lifts the first piece of paper to reveal a photocopy of the passport, so faded it’s almost impossible to make out the features of the man in the photograph, except for one stark detail. He is wearing an eyepatch.

  ‘But he has both eyes?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And no one came to find him?’

  ‘Apparently not.’ She flicks back to the first page, traces a scrawled bottom paragraph with the tip of her index finger. ‘Says they turned up no next of kin, no friends, no missing persons. Nothing. Zachariah Temple became the responsibility of the state.’

  ‘But his name is Peter,’ Dove says, still looking at the document in her hand.

  ‘Not according to his passport. He’s been called Zachariah the entire time he’s been here, so that’s the name we’ll use, thank you very much. He doesn’t need to be any more confused than he already is.’

  Dove slouches in his seat. He’s sure the old man is Peter Manyweathers, but has no idea how to convince Rita she is wrong, especially not with a copy of his passport in her hand.

  ‘And no one ever came for Zachariah?’ he asks.

  ‘That’s what I said. Not a soul’s been interested in him since the day he arrived. Until you turned up this morning, that is.’

  As if in response to the sad truth of his time here, Zachariah slowly retreats back to his chair. His eyes glaze over again. Everything is as it was, except Dove has a father.

  This is when it strikes him: he’s devoted his entire life to the dismemberment of this man’s character. It has only been possible to comprehend the duality of his existence and absence by imagining his real parents as, at best, negligent oafs, and at worst, latent evils. He’d only ever known his father as a man who looked into the eyes of his newborn son and gave up on him; gifted his future to the wind.

  Equally, it’s only been possible for Dove to countenance his own flaws by allowing himself to believe they’re a reflection of his father’s. This is his anger. This is his fear. I am who I am because of him. A shadow, doomed to imitation. Wasn’t that why he’d so rarely allowed himself to get close to anyone? Not because they might one day abandon him, but because he might one day abandon them – just as his parents did. Is that what he’d done to Maud?

  But this is not the man falling asleep in the armchair before Dove now. He knows because he remembers. Because he felt it too and still does. This man is honest. This man is kind. This man loved Dove’s mother with an instant and utter totality. Yet this is a man whose life is ending in loneliness, sadness and silence, and so who maybe, just maybe, knows even more about abandonment than Dove.

  ‘I need to get him out of here,’ Dove says to Rita, who is straightening the folders and loading them back into the tub, quietly thanking God for the advent of computers.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I need to get him out of here.’ She searches his eyes for an indication this is a joke – a sign that doesn’t appear. ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘Not according to the paperwork. You’d have more luck talking me out of my life savings.’

  ‘So I have to leave him here?’ Rita drapes an arm over Dove’s shoulder as she ushers him towards the door.

  ‘What do you think?’

  An old woman, who until now hasn’t opened her eyes, stands from her seat. She says something about her daughter not having visited, crosses the room and exits in entirely the wrong direction, chased by a day nurse just arriving for her shift.

  ‘Where is her daughter?’ Dove asks.

  Rita sighs. ‘She doesn’t have a daughter.’ And he sees how, in her line of work, it’s easier to sidestep reality in a way in which her patients have no choice but to do.

  They’re almost at the door before she speaks again, quietly and with her head at an angle that tells him she could get into serious trouble for this.

  ‘Tomorrow’s my day off. Can you make it your day off too?’ Dove thinks of Cliff, of the Pit, of the emergencies that will happen whether he is there or not.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t do Zachariah any harm to have a little while out of here, and in some company, given how he seems to react to you.’

  ‘Really?’ Dove feels like falling to his knees in gratitude, but the other nurse watches from the far end of the corridor.

  ‘Chaperoned, of course.’ He nods and she closes the door behind him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says through the glass, knowing that if he recovers another of the memories it’ll be of how his mother and father fell in love. Of how he came to exist. He can’t wait.

  That night, head squeezed in his hands, he remembers how his father and mother ran away from Hens Berg. And their fear is his own: it is coming and vast.

  THIRTEEN

  As their plane flew towards a pinkish Namibian dawn, Peter watched the sunlight strobe on Hens Berg’s skin. They’d barely spoken since leaving Mexico. The silence was souring fast. Though Hens hogged the armrest and leg space, Peter was glad when Hens finally fell asleep.

  He reread his notes on the Welwitschia. The living fossil. All of his research concluded it existed in mastery of adaptation and resilience, the two essential components of survival. Survival, for the Welwitschia, was an art form, and that – he had no doubt – was how it had earned its place in the love letter. But that word, adaptation, jarred. Grievously bending a laminated crash safety instruction card, he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  The flight landed with a short screech as the wheels kissed the runway. They disembarked together – Harum had enjoyed a whole row of empty seats behind them – and waited for a snaking conveyor belt to bring their bags, Hens bursting into action as Harum’s trundled into view.

  ‘Let me get that for you.’

  ‘It�
�s OK,’ she said, but it was too late to stop him snatching it from the belt, and they could only watch as he made a great, apparently effortless, show of hoisting it over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll carry it for you – it’s not a problem.’

  ‘I can carry it, Hens.’

  ‘Please. It would be my pleasure.’ Remnants borrowed from a gentleman’s lexicon tripped clumsily off his Nordic tongue. That’s when Peter was struck by why that word, adaptation, bothered him so. It applied to Hens every bit as much as it did the Welwitschia. Hens was adapting too. As ignorant as he seemed, he wasn’t ignorant enough not to realize that Harum’s heart couldn’t be won with the bullishness he’d applied to previous conquests. So he was being kinder, more thoughtful. His old braggadocio was still detectable, but had been shorn of its brashness, applied with a lightness of touch. It was almost (though it pained Peter to think it as he dragged his rickety case towards the escalator) charming, enough even to smother the phoniness at its heart.

  He toyed with giving it to him straight.

  ‘Hens. Would you mind leaving us alone? I think Harum might be “the one”.’ But standing before Hens now he just couldn’t say the words. It would be wrong. This wasn’t some dumb lust. He had no right to Harum just because he cherished her company, because he liked the way she looked. Ultimately this choice would be hers, if indeed she chose either of them, and he knew it.

  In a bathroom at Hosea Kutako International Airport’s arrivals lounge, Peter splashed his face with cold water and searched the glitter of drips in the sink for perspective. All he could do was adopt the Welwitschia’s other great quality: resilience. Because he was sure in the depths of his being that Harum would pay no mind to the impression of the man Hens was trying to build. Someone strong. Someone dependable. Someone heroic. All things Peter knew Hens wasn’t, in his soul. She was too pure for his lies to stick. She moved in the pursuit of truth. That’s why he could feel himself falling for her so tumultuously. Surely she would hold that filter over Hens, see him for what lay beneath, pick away the petals and survey the rotted stem.

  He quickly dried his face on the sleeve of his jacket and ran to catch them up in the arrivals lounge. Leaving them together for longer than a few minutes bolstered his paranoia. Hens could have said anything in the time he’d been away. Truth was not such a preoccupation of his as it was of Harum’s.

  As he rejoined them, Peter could hear Harum’s laughter waning.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Hens said, clenching his jaws until the muscles pulsed, and the battle lines were drawn in their unspoken, shaky truce.

  Windhoek’s sprawl lapped at the feet of steep rocky mountains on each side of the city, hints of the inhospitable terrain they’d traverse in the days ahead. The Ceiling of Africa Hotel in the east of the capital was shabby but charming, taller than the buildings around it, as if presiding in judgement over a street teeming with people and traffic. Whatever concoction they’d washed the walls in mostly worked to ward off flying insects the size of cotton reels. Bats hung from the trees above the courtyard, biding their time before an unknown duty.

  They took a room each. Peter responded first when the hotelier tossed the keys onto the counter, artfully choosing the middle room for himself, a physical barrier between Hens and Harum. Spinning the key around his finger, he could rest a little more easily in the knowledge this space existed, whether or not it was of any use.

  The cauldron of the hotelier’s paunch had torn the buttons from his shirt; material flapped at his hips. Glimpses of a coffee-blackened tongue could be caught between his lips, and his fulsome laugh seemed to echo inside itself.

  ‘What brings you to Windhoek?’

  ‘The Welwitschia,’ Harum said. ‘This is the place to be for the real big ones, we hear.’

  ‘You hear correct.’

  ‘We’re going searching tomorrow,’ Peter said, and the hotelier smiled at the sound of his accent like a man for whom a dollar went a long way.

  ‘Tomorrow? You Americans. You are always rush rush rush. First you must acclimatize. In Namibia, we don’t rush for train. We only rush to get out of train’s way.’

  ‘We’ll decide what we do,’ Hens snapped, stepping forward to rest a giant fist on the counter. ‘And for future reference, I am not an American.’

  The hotelier was unmoved. Peter noticed a shotgun by his feet. Black holes peppering the door arch were testament to that, if not to his aim. There was little likely to intimidate him about a brusque Scandinavian, even if he was the width of a buffalo.

  ‘Actually, Hens,’ Harum said, her hand on his back, ‘acclimatizing might not be such a bad idea.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Peter said, and smiled so that only Hens could see it. Hens removed his hand from the counter, picked up his bag from the floor and tossed it over his shoulder, narrowly missing Peter’s head with a force that would have shattered his cheekbone had it hit.

  ‘My name is Lazrus,’ the hotelier said. ‘Like the saint. I’m here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And sometimes more. If you need anything you know where to find me.’ He slapped a scuffed gold bell on the desk, a chime hanging in the air around it. ‘Ding ding, I come running.’ Peter couldn’t imagine Lazrus running, not after seeing the star chart of stretch marks round his navel.

  They drank chilled cucumber water while Harum unfolded a large map across the table in a small dining room, and plotted the point in the Namib Desert where she’d heard on good authority the largest recorded specimen of the Welwitschia was found.

  ‘Apparently there is nothing like it. They say it’s a living fossil. Can you imagine?’

  ‘No,’ Peter and Hens said together. A small electric fan moved the hot, dry air between them. Harum hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  ‘I’m Sumatran,’ she offered by way of explanation. ‘This is nothing.’ Hens sat in the corner and removed his shirt. Peter’s feet tapped with delight when Harum didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Know what I want?’ he said. ‘An ice-cold towel draped across my face.’

  ‘You’ve picked the wrong pastime,’ she said.

  Hens stood, arching his back.

  ‘You guys put your feet up and kick back,’ he said. ‘I’ll go find us all something to eat.’

  He returned with an impressive tray of food. Only then did Peter realize how long it had been since he’d consumed anything more substantial than a biscuit. They shared veldt bread freshly baked on the premises, the choicest cinnamon any of them had ever tasted, sweetened with honey that lingered in the throat. Afterwards they rested, their stomachs gurgling in delight.

  ‘Hens and I,’ Peter said to Harum, ‘we know each other inside out. But you. What’s your story? Why are you hunting flowers?’

  Harum blushed. ‘It’s boring, really.’

  ‘And I’ve already heard it,’ Hens said, after which the room fell quiet for a few seconds. It fell to Peter to lift the mood.

  ‘Well, I haven’t. And I’m willing to bet it’s not boring, too.’ When she started to speak he leaned towards her like he’d take an exam when she was done.

  Harum told them she had fled Indonesia after the anticommunist purge of 1965–6, which her progressively politicized parents died protesting. Though she had been heartbroken to go, and vilified for questioning the acts of her own people against the ethnic Chinese who lived among them, she had used her exemplary command of the English language to get private teaching work in China, tutoring for the children of rich Western families that had moved their factories there, taking advantage of the cheap labour and negligible workplace law.

  Peter felt suddenly embarrassed by his relative privilege – even though he was just a cleaner – but Harum selflessly moved to put him at ease, joking about how she ended up teaching the daughter of a celebrated botanist whose husband mass-produced the grotesque tie-dye T-shirts worn by only the most annoying travellers. It was the botanist who turned Harum on to the magnific
ence of the plants she had grown up beside, but never appreciated. A passion for flora was born.

  ‘They show me peace,’ she said, ‘when I come from war. One day I would like to go home and teach others what this peace is. My people should know of the beauty that surrounds them in Sumatra, the land they destroy.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Hens said, nodding, and Peter wondered if he’d already stopped listening.

  After stints in Japan and Vietnam, Harum returned to China in search of the Udumbara. But it was a catastrophically unlucky hunt. Rumours, misunderstandings and lies led her down many fruitless paths. After a year of looking, which included two months in a Chinese hospital fending off a nasty infection, and an incident in which she’d either given all of her money to a monk, or been robbed by a man pretending to be one (she still wasn’t sure which), she had conceded it was time to give up, heeding the words of the Lotus Sutra:

  Such people too, are rare,

  Like the Udumbara flower,

  In which all take delight,

  Which the gods and humans prize,

  For it blooms but once in a long, long time.

  Peter remembered what pleasure he’d taken when he’d read these words for himself back in Brooklyn Library. He wanted to tell Harum, but couldn’t, preferring to believe that deep down she’d know he had read these same words too as she continued her story.

  She travelled to Europe, settling in Venice where she studied botany with some pioneers of the science. One of her tutors took a liking to her and offered cheap lodgings in his enormous, draughty house overlooking the city’s higgledy sprawl. ‘We became lovers,’ she said, blushing. Peter, disguising his own jealousy by looking anywhere but at her, noticed Hens was suddenly paying full attention again. ‘Then we were engaged to be married. But he liked to fight. We argued all the time. Eventually we split up after an argument about a rose.’

  ‘A rose?’ Peter couldn’t help but laugh, and she joined him.

  ‘A humble rose. He dismissed it as a cheap prop for the troubadours who sold them to tourists in the piazza. I told him he had a tin heart.’