The Long Forgotten Page 15

  ‘Not all living things share your notion of romance.’

  ‘Shame,’ he said, ‘shame.’

  Harum was on the far side of the Welwitschia where she’d found sticky traces of nectar. The heat was affecting Peter now, and he sought shelter in the shade of a boulder, where Hens came to join him.

  ‘Don’t suppose you brought any whisky, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even after getting yourself stuck in the sheep plant. Need to learn your lesson, man. A good drink might have kept you going another few nights.’

  ‘You’re talking like I died out there.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Peter closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the rock. When he opened them, it was because Hens had two fingers in his sock and was removing the flick knife. Seeing it now, in the plate of Hens’s palm, it was obvious how it would hardly have nicked him. It could barely have fought off a fox.

  ‘Thinking of catching your own dinner?’ Hens asked. Peter licked his lips, nice and slow. Even here, thirty kilometres or so from the coast, he could taste the sharp salt of Atlantic Ocean air.

  ‘Like you said. Gotta learn my lesson. If I’d had that knife in my sock in Mexico, maybe I could have cut myself free and I wouldn’t be feeling as shitty as I do right now.’

  Sprinkles of stone drizzled over Peter’s hair. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he peered up to see Hens carving initials into the face of the boulder.

  ‘This’ll be here long after the Welwitschia.’

  ‘Probably so.’

  ‘My name. Hens Berg. Forever and ever, amen.’ He slipped the sheathed blade into his pocket. Peter pretended he hadn’t noticed, smoothing the stretched material where the knife had sat in his sock.

  ‘Oh, by the way . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With the bet.’

  ‘The bet?’

  ‘Yes, the bet,’ Hens said. He walked back to the bed of browned leaves, the letters HB now behind him for eternity. ‘Fact is, Peter, I saw her first.’

  Though the hike back was slow it was direct, and done with confidence they’d make it to their transport by nightfall. Harum talked incessantly about the Welwitschia. Peter could see how gleeful it had made her to behold it, and did his best not to prick the bubble of her high with a smile he had to force.

  ‘Are you not thrilled?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I’m thrilled.’

  ‘And you, Hens?’ Hens was far ahead of them, windmilling car keys on the tip of his thumb.

  A cola-coloured sandstorm rumbled across the plain. They gathered pace. Peter walked as fast as he could, but his calves burned. The wind kicked up the smell of copper from the land, the scent of drought and death, and he could feel the dust in his lungs. He fantasized about coconut milk, a mirage of the senses; he could taste its sweetness, a chill on his lips. It only stopped when they reached the truck, which was coated in thick sand and hidden against the landscape like a frightened chameleon. Peter climbed in and lay across the back seat, glugging from the spare water they’d left warming in the trunk, kneading his thigh muscles, while Hens and Harum brushed the windscreen clean with old rags. A nausea he mistook for exhaustion came over him, before he conceded it was a sense of defeat. He slept all the way back to Windhoek, where he was woken by the nearside blast of horns. Hens weaved the truck through heavy traffic. There was something reassuring to Peter about the busyness of the roads. As unpredictable as Hens was becoming, there was a limit to what he could do around so many other people.

  Lazrus was pleased enough to see them that he rose from his seat.

  ‘You’re back!’ he said. ‘And alive! I was wondering when to send a search party.’

  ‘It’s only been a couple of days,’ Peter said.

  ‘Sometimes people leave my hotel to visit the market for souvenirs and get lost for a month.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Oh no. You Americans. Not understanding of the size of the desert. How it can eat you up.’ Peter knew the jibe was aimed squarely at him. His lips had shrivelled and cracked. Windburn pinked him from his chin to his ears. He looked every inch the tourist he was, whereas Harum and Hens could have walked straight out of a spa, but for a little dust in their hair.

  ‘I appreciate your concern,’ he said drily, and Lazrus gave him a firm, not unpleasant embrace.

  ‘Did you find your flower?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harum said, peeling off her boots and socks to leave dainty footprints of sand on the wooden floor. ‘It was enormous. The best that I have ever seen.’

  ‘And you, big man?’ Either Hens hadn’t heard Lazrus, or he was more pig-headed than Peter had given him credit for. Lazrus poked a stiff finger into his shoulder blade. ‘Big man? You are too high to hear me up there, uh? Like I am shouting to the top of a mountain.’

  ‘I heard you,’ Hens said. ‘Do you have a bar?’ Lazrus lifted his arms aloft, the ripped flap of his breast pocket revealing a chewed-up brown nipple hung in a state of permanent disconsolation.

  ‘I have a kitchen full of food and drink, big man. You must want to celebrate after your success with the Welwitschia. If you like, for a few dollars only, I can give for you a table of meat and champagne. It will be a, how do you say . . . a banquet!’ Buoyed by Lazrus’s wobbly gelastics, Harum broke into spontaneous applause, then headed to her room to shower. Peter whispered to Hens.

  ‘Listen, man, I don’t have much money left.’

  ‘I will pay for this.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘A parting gift.’

  Peter picked his bag up from the floor and held it to his chest. When he turned back, Hens was gone.

  ‘You should shower too, Mr Manyweathers,’ Lazrus said as he disappeared through the swinging kitchen doors. ‘To eat like a king, a man must be clean like a king.’

  Peter undressed in his room, flinging his filthy clothes across the dented metal bedstead. The wound above his hip had healed nicely into a scar the shape of Jamaica. He prodded the shiny new skin, let the shower jet beat hard on it, and paddled in the brown water that cascaded down his dirty body to pool by his feet. He turned the tap off. The pipes shrieked and soon the water stopped. No more than four or five inches away from where he stood, he could hear Harum – also stepping out of the shower – gently humming the melody of a song he half recognized. He could imagine her, just as clearly as if the wall had disappeared. How the water made her skin glitter. Nudity only compounded his longing. With a surge of defiance he decided to apply to himself what he’d applied to so many forgotten homes, and the possessions left behind by those that had passed. A gift for restoration.

  Lazrus had worked through his laundry while they’d been gone, and it felt luxurious to pull clean jeans onto his legs; to feel the kiss of a fresh cotton shirt against his chest for the first time in over a week. He combed his hair into a smart side-parting, flossed, shaved, then dabbed a little of his most summery cologne on his neck. He buffed his nails, cleaned his ears. Finally, he shone his shoes with a vigour that reminded him how good he’d been at his job. The feeling of defeat had vanished. He held his chest high and stretched it wide: a king indeed. Angelica would have been proud.

  ‘Harum?’ He drummed three fingers against the door of her bedroom, loud enough that she might hear, quiet enough that it would not alert Hens down the corridor, but competed unsuccessfully with the drone of her hairdryer. ‘Harum?’

  It was a full five minutes before she eventually answered.

  ‘Peter. I apologize. How long have you been standing here?’

  ‘A few seconds.’

  ‘Come in.’ She opened the door and he saw her fully. An exquisite emerald-green dress that clung to her body like oil. What gumption he’d been building escaped with his breath.

  ‘I can meet you downstairs?’

  ‘You are being silly.
Come in and wait. As long as you do not mind me putting on my make-up.’

  He closed the door behind him as quietly as possible and sat on the bed while she highlighted her cheekbones with small streaks of opal-coloured powder. The rooms had seemed reasonably sized before, but with two people in them he was suddenly aware of their closeness, as if his arm might spontaneously reach out to touch the slender curve of her shoulder and sate the smallest percentile of his desire, if he didn’t concentrate hard on it remaining by his side.

  ‘Harum,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to tell you something.’ A waver in his voice must have alerted her to his seriousness, because she set down her brush, twisted to face him and took his hand in hers, as was customary in Indonesia when entering into deep conversation. Rather than swelling his confidence, this made him feel like a teenager again, fuel leaping from the bucket filled at Alice’s gas station to make flammable the baseball jersey his father forced him to wear. An inner monologue hit overdrive, the words ‘Pull yourself together, man,’ again and again, every repetition coaxing a new bead of sweat to form on his brow. Though outside it was nighttime, it was hot, too hot.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the death flower.’

  ‘The Rafflesia?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been thinking how they grow in Sumatra, and that if you went home I could come with you to find one. With it being the last flower on the list in the love letter and all.’ He mistook her silence for distaste at what suddenly seemed a grand imposition on his part, and was instantly prepared to carpet the room with apologies. Instead he found relief in her arms, a garland around him.

  ‘You would come?’

  ‘If you’d take me.’

  ‘I know so few people there now. It would be a dream to take a companion.’

  ‘Then it’s a deal,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’ He put his hand out, reflexively, as if he’d just done a business deal on a condo-cleaning contract, and she awkwardly shook it, before they both toppled back on the mattress in a laughter intertwined, divine in his ears. There, pressed lightly together, he’d happily have remained for two thousand years, a living fossil of their own.

  ‘And Hens shall come too?’ she said. He blinked twice, three times, as if closing his eyes would rewind time to a few precious seconds before.

  ‘Hens?’

  ‘He found the love letter. I am sure that he would want to come also.’ Peter shook his head, but it did nothing to right the wobbly tandem of the conversation.

  ‘Hens didn’t find the love letter,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘I found the love letter. I found it in a book in Brooklyn Library. It is mine.’

  ‘But Hens said . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what he said.’ Peter reached into the back pocket of his trousers and produced the love letter, worn in transit, but unmistakeable. She rose and walked to the door of the bathroom, switching on a small fan that oscillated creakily around the room. Peter was grateful when its cool blast roamed across his lap. It was in disappointment, the way she twisted the balls of her thumbs against her temples, he was sure of that. But disappointment at what? That Hens had lied? Or that Peter seemed so keen to split their convenient triumvirate? And to what end?

  ‘Why would he make it up?’

  ‘Oh, you know Hens.’ Peter’s inner monologue had reverted to its default position, chastising himself, over and over, for showing compassion to the Dane when it was so patently undue. Truth was, he still felt sorry for Hens. Whether he deserved to be alone was irrelevant. He was lonely. Does any human being deserve that? Of course not. But thinking this way seemed foolish. There was another thing Hens didn’t deserve, even more than loneliness, and that was sympathy. He should have been running Hens’s name into the centre of the earth. ‘When he has a drink he just talks and talks. It was probably a slip of the tongue.’

  ‘So you think he wouldn’t come?’

  Peter floundered in the quiet.

  ‘Do you want him to come?’ In that moment, with the simplest shift in inflection of a four-letter word, he had opened his chest and shown her his tiny beating heart. He didn’t know how she felt about Hens, and was too scared to guess.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘I have something to tell you . . .’

  She stepped towards him, just as a powerful thud rattled the door.

  ‘Harum!’ It was Hens, mouth pressed against the wood, as though he might bore through it with his teeth. Peter sucked his breath deep down inside him, locked it up.

  ‘Yes?’ She moved from one side of the room to the other so quickly it was as if she’d jumped over the bed. She rested her full weight against the door, and the sound of his voice muffled as it passed through her body.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Not at the moment, I am naked!’ Outside, the floorboards groaned as he shifted from his right foot to his left.

  ‘I can wait?’

  ‘Thank you, Hens, but there is no need. You should go downstairs and join the others.’ Peter might have admired her restraint, were it not for the great fear swirling through his insides, one she had apparently overcome effortlessly, or at least that was how it looked to him. They hadn’t taken their eyes off one another.

  ‘Peter is downstairs?’ Another silence, the room getting smaller still.

  ‘He is not in his room?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then yes, he must be downstairs.’

  ‘And I will see you there?’

  ‘You will see me there.’

  ‘We must celebrate.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘To the Welwitschia!’

  ‘To the Welwitschia!’

  Only when she was completely convinced Hens had gone did Harum open the door for Peter to leave, softly placing her lips on his cheek as he passed.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said.

  Peter heard Hens coughing in the garden.

  Lazrus hadn’t developed that paunch without knowing how to feast. It was a banquet big enough for nine, spread over a table in the courtyard that divided the bedrooms from the small apartment he called home. Peter limped towards it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘Understandable,’ Hens said, gargling then swallowing a mouthful of fizzy amber beer. ‘Must be tiring, being you.’

  Peter let it pass and took a seat at the opposite end of the table. Lazrus appeared with Harum close behind. He took a glistening roast chicken in a tango hold, then tore its legs off and let its body land back on the platter with a plop.

  ‘Eat,’ he said. And they did, until all were low in their seats, their hands shining with sticky meat glaze. Harum sucked sweetness from her moist fingertips, doing her best not to make eye contact with anyone but Lazrus, who threw the chicken carcass to a skinny brown cat that had adopted a sentry position on the wall. The bats above it clicked in unison. Hens removed a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket, opened it and poured. His helping, the lion’s share, was gone in two big gulps.

  ‘More?’ Lazrus said, rising, belching and shuffling towards the kitchen.

  ‘Actually, Lazrus, I think we’re OK for drink,’ Peter said. Lazrus looked back at him as if he’d heard the world’s funniest joke but forgotten how to laugh.

  ‘Come on,’ Hens said, emptying the flute Lazrus had left behind. ‘I think tonight it is OK to celebrate.’ He flicked the butt of a cigarette into the grass, its impact exploding in orange rain. ‘Lazrus, bring all the bottles you have. I’m paying!’

  Lazrus clapped a hand against his stomach and the bats fled. ‘Not a problem,’ he said.

  On his return, Hens proposed a toast.

  ‘To what?’ Harum asked.

  ‘To friendship.’

  ‘To friendship!’ they all said. Hens held his glass in the air until she clinked hers against it. Before Peter was even a quarter of the way down his own, Hens was wresting the cork from another bottle, rocking back in his chair as if gravity had ce
ased to apply.

  ‘You know how to tell if a champagne is a quality one, Lazrus?’

  ‘When you drink it?’

  ‘No. When you remove the cork from a decent bottle of champagne it is supposed to sound like the fart of a princess.’ Hens smiled at his own wit. Lazrus slapped the table in agreement, compelling the cat to drag the chicken bones into the bushes.

  ‘I thought you Scandinavians were like the Russians, but I was wrong. You are funny.’

  ‘Ever marry, Lazrus?’

  ‘Me? Oh no.’

  ‘Why not?’ Hens was twisting the cork, but still it wouldn’t give.

  ‘It just didn’t happen. You know how these things are.’

  ‘Oh, I know how they are.’

  ‘Almost though, a few times.’ Lazrus lolled in a warm reminiscence.

  ‘Why didn’t it happen?’ The cork burst to sudden freedom, pumping a small fountain of foam to the ground, before Hens took the neck of the bottle in his mouth.

  ‘I’m sure Lazrus doesn’t want to talk about marriages that didn’t happen,’ Harum said. Peter found that if he concentrated solely on the splendid alignment of her features, everything about this awful situation seemed somehow manageable, though it was one that had, in that very moment, turned as black as the night sky above them, and without the bright punctuation of stars.

  ‘Come on, Lazrus, what was it?’ Hens said. ‘The Namibian women not doing it for you?’

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘The opposite, huh? Too many for you to want to settle down.’

  ‘Not that either.’ Lazrus’s demeanour had changed now, and he gripped the table’s edge.

  ‘What, then? Can’t be another man in the world suffering from the same bad luck as me.’

  ‘Hens,’ Peter said, with as much firmness as he could summon up, ‘seriously, man, Lazrus doesn’t want to talk about it.’ Hens looked at Lazrus, who was studying a baby cockroach crossing the paving slabs beneath his feet.

  ‘Then he should buy better-quality champagne.’ He tossed the grenade of an already-empty bottle onto the lawn, where it bounced and rolled to the wall. ‘This one made a dumb sound when I opened it.’