The Long Forgotten Read online

  Via the dense black forests of Germany and the velvety countryside of southern France, Harum hunted the hardy gems of shrubs withstanding the Greenlandic tundra, then criss-crossed the Americas, collecting sightings of everything from Minnesota snow flowers to the punishing spines of Nevadan desert cacti. South to Chile, where she’d rescued Peter from a sheep’s fate and spent a long evening in the company of Hens – which she quickly skirted over while Hens smirked to himself – to Paraguay, a wasted trip, and Mexico for a rumoured field of Kadupul, the reality of which far exceeded her dreams.

  ‘That’s how I got here,’ she said. ‘The short version, anyway.’

  Once they retired, Peter showered, swept the floor of his small beige-walled room with a brush he always carried in his hand luggage, and repaired a rip in the insect net flimsily hung across the window. When they’d arrived the street outside buzzed with commotion. Now it was silent. This allowed his fears to take form. Twice he closed his eyes and heard the heavy footsteps of the Dane padding past his door. Twice he checked the corridor and saw nothing. He drained a glass bottle of water with the full intention of resting it in the darkness on the floor in the middle of the landing where Hens would surely kick it over if he passed to reach Harum’s room, but as he opened the bedroom door it seemed somehow pathetic, certainly unbecoming to a grown man, to lay a booby trap this way, as though Harum was a possession and could be stolen.

  When he wasn’t being charming, Hens was a lot of things. Brash. Selfish. Self-indulgent. Underhand, maybe. But was he truly worse than that? Am I suggesting he’s evil, Peter wondered. He hadn’t acted this irrationally since he was a teenager, when he’d had such a crush on the tomboyishly beautiful Alice, whose father ran the local gas station, that he’d waited for the days she worked and spent his last dollars on fuel, which he carried home in buckets, even though he didn’t have a car.

  He finally got to sleep three hours later, and only once he’d locked the door, it having occurred to him that if Hens was awake and in the mood for walking, it wasn’t necessarily Harum he’d try to visit.

  A thud. Peter woke with a start, as if he’d suddenly been born of particles colliding in the air. His watch said 4.16 a.m. The thud again, fainter than before, but nearer. Sitting bolt upright, he took the bottle from the side table, his fingers curled tight around its neck, and held it down by his side as though trying to convince himself it wasn’t a weapon, even as he rehearsed in his mind how he might bring it down on a human skull. He’d never fought in his life. In fact it was now a matter of some regret that no one had made his blood hot with the anticipation of violence quite like this.

  He slid across the floorboards to the door. The handle had creaked when he opened it before. If he pressed it slowly he’d be heard. But if he pressed it quickly the door would swing open and he’d be cast out on the landing clutching this glass club, and what of Hens’s temper then? What if he was wrong? All he could be sure of was that he had to act fast, so he turned the key in the lock – click – and put an ear to the wall. But the movement had ceased. That’s when, with his head pressed flat to the edge, he realized he could see through a narrow split in the old wooden beam in the corner. He brought his eye to it. On the landing he saw the shape of a man, detail erased by the dark, moving slowly towards Harum’s end of the corridor. Peter’s sweating hand slipped against the glass of the bottle. The shape dithered outside her door. Peter knew he must make a decision, that he couldn’t falter. He slammed down the handle, pulled the door towards him and burst onto the landing, the bottle brandished close and high, like a knife he was pulling from his chest.

  ‘Hey!’

  The shadow of the shape twisted to face him, and moved forward into the thin patch of starlight bounced off a mirror, only stopping when its gut came to rest against the thick glass of the bottle bottom.

  ‘Can I help you, my friend?’ Lazrus asked.

  ‘Thought I heard something.’

  ‘Just me, doing my rounds. Same every night. We have many problems with intruders in the past.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Please accept my apologies if I woke you.’

  ‘Not at all. Sorry to have startled you.’ Peter heard Hens’s door click shut behind him, but when he turned to see, there was no one there.

  The next day neither man mentioned what had happened, and Peter began to believe he’d imagined hearing Hens’s door after all. When Hens slept he slept deeply. There was little chance of him hearing Peter’s quiet conversation with Lazrus, and even less of him bothering to climb out of bed and check. Hens was too lazy for that. Peter put it down to paranoia clouding his judgement. Tiredness had set him on edge.

  The three of them spent the afternoon adjusting to the heat and altitude, visiting the springs of Windhoek and drinking cheap wine. They wandered the Zoo Park in as few clothes as was reasonable, Harum in a white linen dress that danced with the breeze blown through a lion’s cage. The evening brought a coolness to the air. Harum retired to bed early. Peter and Hens sat in the courtyard drinking cold beers in near silence.

  ‘You will go back to New York after we see the Welwitschia,’ Hens said eventually.

  ‘Huh?’ Peter said. It hadn’t sounded like a question.

  ‘New York. When we’ve seen what we came for.’

  ‘Maybe. What about you?’ Hens slugged his drink and watched the bubbles in the backwash pop.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, slinging his bottle into the tall grass on the roadside, ‘please. Don’t you be concerning yourself with me. You’re not even back to full health yet. You’re weak.’

  Early next morning, Lazrus helped them hire a truck, scarlet rust chewing through the sky-blue paintwork. So began the hunt for the living fossil.

  The bowl of the Messum Crater, arid, vast and red, could have been Mars. Namib chameleons congregated on the high rocks, stabbing tongues at the air. Lonesome springboks skirted the rim, and a pair of oryx sauntered with a grace out of time. The volcano once arisen there, that provided basalts for the surrounding Goboboseb Mountains, had long collapsed in on itself like an overbaked pie.

  Hens insisted on driving, too recklessly for Peter’s liking, though he didn’t dare complain. They left the car to the mercy of the dust by the dry bed of the Swakop River, then shouldered their rucksacks, laden with water. According to the map, it would be some hike into the mountains. Depending on pace it might take two days, though with Peter still weary from his stay in hospital, and having chosen to leave his crutches behind, he privately suspected three. They walked ten minutes and already his shirt needed to be wrung of sweat. He flirted with the idea of squeezing it straight into his mouth.

  ‘Do you think this is a stupid thing to be doing?’ he asked. Harum was already ahead of him, charging into a steep first ascent.

  ‘If we find it, I’ll make sure you don’t get stuck in it,’ she said. Ahead of her, Hens was setting a brisk pace Peter already knew he couldn’t match.

  ‘Hens,’ he said, ‘can you slow down a little?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We don’t want to exhaust ourselves too early.’

  ‘I won’t get exhausted.’

  The words echoed behind them, gave chase.

  By late afternoon, with little more than Harum’s compass to thank, they’d reached the band of fog where the cold, north-flowing Benguela Current met the constant rub of the Namib Desert’s hot air. By night it turned the sky a mysterious, rich purple. These were ideal conditions for the growth of enormous Welwitschia. Its lumbering, downward-pointing leaves collected the fog as condensation, allowing it to drip feed its roots in the scorching summer months, when the rain refused to come.

  Dust united them in ochre skin, the matt colour of mannequin plastic. As the shroud of darkness fell they set up camp in a cave of billion-year-old rock. The air inside felt reverent, the cave a church to an earlier form of man. Peter arranged a circle of black stones to hold a fire. Hoping the matches in his pocket weren’t too soaked with
sweat to spark, he rolled a kindling ball from paper and dried tumbleweed. Outside he could hear a jet of Hens’s piss oafishly hammering the hard ground. He turned to Harum, who was massaging her shoulders with a smooth, hypnotic twizzle of her thumbs.

  ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘couldn’t he have done that further away?’

  ‘It’s a man thing.’

  ‘A man thing?’

  ‘Passed down from the monkeys.’

  ‘What, taking a piss?’

  ‘Marking your territory.’ Shamed though he was to admit it, there was an overtly animalistic quality to their behaviour. Even this, the building of a fire, was part of a choreographed mating dance, and thinking of it now made him rigid with self-awareness. He could see the beam of Hens’s torchlight outside, bouncing off the yellow river coursing round his boots.

  ‘He could at least mark it round the corner, though, huh?’

  ‘It would be preferable.’ She laughed. He closed his eyes and hoped she would never stop.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Hens asked as he came back.

  ‘Nothing,’ Peter said, crouching by the fire.

  ‘Nothing? Why would nothing be funny?’

  ‘It’s just a figure of speech, Hens. Don’t sweat it.’ From below, Peter saw Hens’s sharp knuckles, protruding like sawn-off tusks. Only when the plump blister on his heel burst – a sharp sting – did he realize he’d edged backwards out of Hens’s reach and was almost flat on his buttocks.

  ‘Don’t sweat it?’

  ‘Another figure of speech. It means don’t . . .’

  ‘I know what it means.’ Hens nudged the kindling with his foot. ‘We won’t be sweating anything if you don’t build a fire properly. We’ll be freezing to death in our sleep.’ It wasn’t that Peter didn’t have time to respond, more that he couldn’t. Hens ground his sole onto the lit red ends of straw. The fire was extinguished before it had begun. A thin wisp of smoke drifted out of the cave mouth.

  ‘Hens!’ Harum said. For a second it seemed as if they’d forgotten she was there. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘To start again,’ Hens said, slugging another shot of whisky from a worn silver hip flask engraved with the name of a woman he’d never mentioned.

  Perched on a barrel-sized boulder at the rear of the cave, Peter watched Hens build a fire that he admitted, though only to himself, was better than his own effort by any conceivable measure. Flames filled the space with heat and light, animating the textured rock roof above.

  ‘Better?’ Hens asked. Harum shrugged.

  ‘The first one would have been fine before if you’d gently blown on it a little.’

  ‘And wait in the cold and dark?’

  ‘I’m going to the toilet now. Far enough away that I can’t be heard.’

  Peter watched her go through the short lifetime of sparks leaping from the flames. The soreness in his limbs vanished with them.

  ‘Wanna make a bet?’ Hens asked, turning his hands above the fire as if they were lambs on a spit.

  ‘A bet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t have much money left, Hens. All these flights are draining my account. Not sure I should go frittering the rest of it away on a stupid bet.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is yet.’

  ‘OK,’ Peter said. It had seemed silly when he’d put it there back at the hotel, histrionic even, but right then he was gladdened by the cool of a flick knife’s blade against his ankle. Maybe he’d learned his lesson from the incident with the sheep-eater. ‘What’s the bet?’

  ‘The winner is the first person to spot the Welwitschia tomorrow.’

  ‘And the stake?’

  ‘You know what the stake is.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘The loser leaves Windhoek. Goes home.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hens,’ Peter said. He couldn’t lift his eyes from the stones in the gut of the fire, glowing red.

  ‘I think you do.’ He had the hotness of his hand against Peter’s cheek now, caressing it almost, pushing heat into him, feeling the chatter of his teeth through the skin.

  Just then, Harum returned. When Peter lifted his head, Hens was back in the firelight, twisting the tip of a cigarette against the flames.

  ‘Keep this lit,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna go smoke.’ And he went.

  ‘You OK, Peter?’ Harum asked. He nodded a little too exuberantly. The trembling wouldn’t stop.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You are cold. Come closer to the fire.’ He did as he was told and she sat down beside him, casting a blanket over their shoulders.

  He didn’t feel it happen. Perhaps the shock numbed his senses. But when he looked down, they were holding hands. He had to concentrate to make sure that one of them was his. And as soon as the synapses aligned to send a signal to his brain that, yes, it was, Harum was across the other side of the fire, lowering herself into a sleeping bag that swallowed her up like a hungry python, and it was as if their hands hadn’t been pressed together at all.

  Hens was drunk when he returned. Peter could tell by the way his pupils rolled back, and the whites of his eyes smiled beneath them.

  ‘What happens now?’ he said.

  ‘Now?’ Peter said, unsure exactly what ‘now’ meant in this context. After something? Something he had seen?

  ‘Yeah, now.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We sit around the fire singing camp songs or something?’

  ‘Actually, Hens, we have an early start,’ Harum said. ‘We could just go to sleep.’ Hens swung his arms over the fire. Flames licked his cuffs. Peter heard a drumbeat of hooves in the distance, running away.

  They set off before dawn sprayed the sky gold. These were the few weeks of the year when prolonged missions around the crater were possible. Rain came in occasional bursts, meaning grass and tsamma melon plants could grow down by the Messum River. The rest of the time, the crater was an unforgiving host, where only specialists in extremely arid ecotopes dared venture.

  Occasionally Harum stopped to caress the X scrawled onto the map. It was now clear that the pen had been too thick relative to scale, and the ink, where the two lines met on the page, obscured an area in reality three or four miles square. Peter did his best to help navigate, but could think only of Hens, which dizzied him like a sugar craving. Hens was pale, plainly mired in a swampy hangover, the likes of which he wasn’t used to, and had barely said a word all morning. Peter preferred him vocal – he could feel Hens’s mood darken in the silence – and encouraged conversation wherever he could.

  ‘Hot, huh, Hens? You know, you don’t have to walk at the back all the way if you don’t like?’ Hens grunted, and the offer was rebuffed. Soon, he was fifty metres or more behind Harum and Peter.

  ‘I thought it would be you holding us up,’ she said. ‘But look at you, strong as an ox.’ Peter took it as a compliment, though it was clear she could outrun him over any distance whether he was injured or not.

  ‘I think ox might be overstating it a little.’

  Hens was a third of a mile behind them now. Peter observed him through the binoculars. He’d been wrong when they met. Yes, they were both lonely, but in their own very different ways. Peter’s was where he’d found himself, looking for an exit. Hens’s was a construct of his own. A house without a door.

  He swung the binoculars to Hens’s left. Cracked red terrain flooded the view. Somewhere out there he’d find dirty black vultures, fighting over the starved corpse of an antelope. Then to the right, past a full sun crowning a midday sky, and the direction they were headed. That’s where he saw it, in the distance. The exact centre of the X.

  ‘Harum?’ he said. ‘You might want to see this.’ She put the binoculars to her eyes, almost garrotting him with the strap, and shrieked. There it was. The living fossil.

  They skipped across the next mile, and along a precarious ridge to a short flat in the cleft between two mighty boulders. Harum helped lower Peter
from a thin pass to the plant’s level. He caught her bag and she joined him at what he realized was the most breathtakingly bizarre thing, living or otherwise, he had ever come across. An adult Welwitschia. Harum fell to the ground in amazement.

  At 1.8 metres high and 8.7 wide, the Welwitschia hadn’t shed its leaves in two thousand years of continued existence. Now they were huge and leathery, carpeting the ground around it and tattered with age. Thick, corky bark encased a rigid, hollow stem. This was it all right. The biggest specimen ever discovered. This plant, looking more like a B-movie alien, had adapted to survive the most extreme weather and the harshest terrains. It had survived eras, empires and billions of men. It was one of the oldest trees on earth, every one of its grooves a trophy from its ongoing fight against adversity. A second spent in its company was a reminder of the fleeting nature of existence. Overcome with exhaustion, Peter sank to his knees behind Harum while she photographed the shallow roots. It had granted them an audience, and was in the ground beneath them, holding them, like a hand rising from the earth, offering them to the heavens.

  After what seemed like a Welwitschia’s glorious lifetime, Hens appeared at the top of the pass. He climbed down the ridge, glugged a mouthful of whisky, then held the flask upside down above the leaves. Three drips and it was gone.

  ‘Ugly old brute,’ he said. Harum moved around it, taking photographs from every reachable angle.

  ‘It’s not meant to be pretty,’ she said.

  ‘A monotypic gymnosperm genus. The Welwitschia mirabilis. Division: Gnetophyta. Class: Gnetopsida.’

  The dial clicked beneath her thumb as she wound the camera on and continued taking pictures.

  ‘Know what I think?’ Hens said, tossing the hip flask into the middle of the growth, where it couldn’t be retrieved without injuring the stem. ‘I think what’s the point?’

  ‘The point?’

  ‘Of existing in complete isolation.’

  ‘It breeds. It’s dioecious. There are male and female plants. This one is male.’

  ‘It waits hundreds of years’ – Hens was staring at Peter now, spitting to get his attention – ‘for a bug to come along, to carry pollen to a mate it will never even see.’