The Long Forgotten Page 16

  ‘Lazrus, how about you put some music on?’ Harum said, and Peter was pleased she’d successfully changed the subject. Lazrus agreed it might be a good idea, and had been gone only a few moments when they heard a gramophone hiss trickle into the fidgety opening bars of Steely Dan’s ‘Kid Charlemagne’. Hens sprang to his feet.

  ‘That’s more like it! Dancing music!’ He spun around the courtyard, taking off his shirt and flinging it into the awning’s rafters. Now he was wearing just a white cotton vest embracing the curvature of his muscles, a taut, unrelated footnote to the puffiness of his face, his handsomeness lost in this new, boozy composition.

  ‘You really remember some moves,’ Peter said, the best attempt he could muster at lightening the mood. Hens ignored him.

  ‘Come, Harum, dance. Dance!’ he said, shuffling past the ice bucket, taking and opening a beer in one swift motion, the cap dispensed behind him like a bullet casing. He approached her, his chest expanding, the eagle tattooed across it stretching its wings to full span. In that simple exchange, Peter had become no more powerful a presence than the lizards congregating at the cloud of flies around the bulb. But, he had to admit, Hens could dance, and was doing so now, pulling Harum from her seat into an uneasy rhythmic alliance she took on without any hint of a smile. She reluctantly jerked her hips in time to the music.

  A low gurgle came from inside Peter’s chest, chambers of acid angrily bubbling. Lazrus watched proceedings from the safety of the doorway to the porch. A new song began.

  ‘I can’t dance any more, Hens,’ Harum said. Hens plucked a blue garden lily, sucked down its sweet scent, and thrust it into her hand.

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘Can’t, Hens, my legs will barely move from all the walking.’ He hadn’t let go of her fingers.

  ‘Then perhaps you’ll dance with Lazrus?’ Lazrus dismissed the idea with a waft of his hand. It was clear his enthusiasm for Hens’s drunken little show was waning fast. Peter wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d closed the doors and left them out there with an audience of hungry bats for company. He was suddenly overcome with tiredness.

  ‘Lazrus doesn’t want to, and neither do I.’

  ‘Maybe if Lazrus danced some more, he’d have less difficulty with women.’

  Peter turned to observe Lazrus’s reaction and found he’d already gone.

  ‘Hens!’ Harum tugged her arm sharply, but still it was in his grip.

  ‘If you won’t dance with me, maybe it’s because you’d like to dance with Peter instead?’

  ‘Hens!’ Another sharp pull and she was free, leaving Hens swaying as he leant against a waist-high stone statue of a German corporal on horseback, an exact recreation of the controversial Reiterdenkmal which stood in the centre of post-colonial Windhoek a few kilometres away.

  ‘Dance with her, Peter!’ he said, rocking the statue so it crashed to the ground. ‘If she wants to dance with you, then you should oblige!’ Peter moved to put himself between them, thinking: the bottle. He would use the bottle. Smash it on the far wall where the geckos nest, ward Hens off with the fractured glass, like a ringmaster taming a lion with a chair.

  ‘Please, Hens. Maybe we should all go to bed.’ Hens planted both hands against Peter’s chest, and with one strong push repelled him across the lawn as though they had opposing magnetic fields. Peter skidded across the grass on his rear, coming to a halt at Harum’s feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ Hens said, ejecting an arrow of sputum into the stagnant pond water where cats had helped themselves to the carp long ago.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Peter said, staring wistfully at the narrow bumps of his biceps.

  ‘I think that we must sober up and see each other again in the morning,’ Harum said. Peter could hear her fury. She helped Peter stand, then left, slamming the door behind her in disgust.

  Hens muttered under his breath, pausing only to squint at the moon as he lifted another cold beer to his lips.

  ‘What did you say?’ Peter asked.

  ‘You heard me,’ Hens said, swaying from side to side like a tree almost felled. But Peter hadn’t heard him, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. It was time for him to go to bed too. ‘I fucked her. That’s what I said. I fucked her. Your little girlfriend. When you were in hospital. Bet she didn’t tell you that, huh? We went for dinner, we got drunk and we did everything you dream about doing.’

  Peter couldn’t turn around. He didn’t know if he wanted to, but he couldn’t. He concentrated on climbing the steps to his room, unable to feel any emptier than he did.

  ‘A toast!’ he heard Hens say. ‘To friendship!’

  At 4.30 in the morning, the blackness in Peter’s room had a velvetiness to it, full and rich. The bulb in the hallway had flickered and died some hours before. But despite the still and the quiet, and the fatigue in his limbs, Peter couldn’t sleep and didn’t intend to. Instead he sat at the foot of the door, wondering what best to do next.

  What Hens had said didn’t make Peter like Harum any less. He couldn’t pretend it didn’t hurt, of course. But it was up to her who she chose to go to bed with. Besides, he was more upset for Harum than for himself. He could barely imagine how awful it must feel to sleep with someone only for them later to reveal themselves as Hens had, when faced with the prospect of her rejecting him. True, Peter couldn’t stop visualizing it – the two of them together, their clothes in a heap on the floor – he could almost hear the lies Hens must have told her while Peter himself lay comatose in a Chilean hospital bed. But he couldn’t let it dampen his elation either. That was the past. He’d been offered a glimpse of Harum’s affection. Friend or lover, he wasn’t sure he much cared. He just wanted to be near her, to burst through the thin wall that divided them now. For that, he’d have scratched through it until his fingers bled.

  He looked out of the hallway window into the courtyard – a mess of smashed empties. It seemed Hens had finally gone to sleep. Maybe the smother of a bad hangover might compound what guilt he’d feel for his behaviour come the morning. They could never be friends again, that much was clear. But they might at least part cordially. Peter considered leaving right this moment, and taking Harum with him, but Windhoek was not an easy city to cross by day, let alone at night, and particularly without speaking the language. Besides, it seemed excessive. No. He would wait until the booze was slept off. Hens wouldn’t be easy to deal with when the sun was up, but he would be easier. And anyway, maybe Peter would derive a little joy from telling Hens to his face that he and Harum were leaving together. Didn’t he at least deserve that?

  It sounded like air being blown between teeth. It wasn’t unusual to come across puff adders in Namibia, even in built-up areas like Windhoek. With their stout, strong bodies, they had little difficulty entering warm buildings through their foundations, pumping mice and rats with a yellowish haemotoxic venom. Evolution had gifted them brazenness too. Unlike most other serpents, they didn’t take flight at the slightest tremor in the ground or recede at intrusion, which is why they were often found underneath beds and in lavatories, and while they weren’t particularly aggressive, they did bite, and would hurt. Peter’s instinct was to stand on a chair like the woman in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, and remain there as he tried to light a candle with the matches that had finally been rendered defunct by sweat on the trek back from the desert.

  But then he heard it again. Closer. Clearer. Not a hiss, but the sound made by the dragging of a weight across the floorboards in the hallway. He struck a match, then another. A brief spark, but nothing. The drag moved slowly past his door. Another match, this one snapping, falling in two pieces and lost in the dark. Peter could feel the surge of his blood. Pinching the last match between thumb and forefinger, close to the head, he brushed it hard against the strike strip. It took, and the room was brought to life by a bopping yellow flame. Again, the drag, but shorter, further away, and stopping outside Harum’s room. Peter assured himself that Lazrus was simply doing his rounds. But he knew better than th
at, even before he heard the jiggle of the handle on Harum’s door.

  Peter stepped onto the landing with the match held up. Weak though the light from the flame was, the silhouette of Hens Berg outside Harum’s door was unmistakeable. He was opening it and about to step inside her room.

  ‘Where are you going, Hens?’ Peter said.

  ‘What?’ Hens slurred. Peter could smell the alcohol on his breath, even from this distance.

  ‘I think you have the wrong room.’ There was still the chance it could be an innocent mistake, and while there was, Peter had to believe it. The flame was nearing his skin. Soon it would burn. Hens turned towards him, but fell drunkenly against the wall. Harum’s door clicked shut behind him.

  ‘Shut up,’ Hens said. ‘Go back to bed.’

  ‘Not until you tell me where you’re going,’ Peter said, more firmly this time. Hens began to fumble through the pocket of his trousers.

  ‘I’ve got something that belongs to you,’ he said. They both looked down – Hens was holding Peter’s flick knife, the blade already exposed.

  ‘Jesus, Hens, put that away, you’ll hurt yourself.’ Hens smiled, sighed and managed to stand up straight, but he didn’t respond. ‘Hens?’

  The flame licked Peter’s fingertips. He shook the match dead and all he had then was the sense of a giant shadow moving towards him. It was only now, as the blade came to rest against the side of his ribcage, that he allowed himself to believe Hens might actually hurt him. When it was happening. When it was too late.

  ‘Hens!’

  Peter didn’t notice Lazrus appear, only heard him, or rather heard the thump the butt of his shotgun made as he brought it down on Hens’s skull with a force that seemed to turn him off by a hidden switch. Hens first fell to his knees, then his face hit the floor, two front teeth skittering across the wood.

  Harum had switched on the lamp in her room, and when she opened her door wide it filled the landing with light. Hens’s hair was matted with blood, a trickle dripping around his left ear.

  ‘You should go,’ Lazrus said, breathing so rapidly that air seemed to enter and leave his lungs at the same time.

  ‘Go?’ Peter took the knife from Hens’s limp clutch, tucking it behind the elastic of his waistband.

  ‘Go.’

  ‘What will happen?’ Harum said. It was plain that a clock had been set in motion. They might as well have been standing over a bomb while a spark chewed its way up the fuse. He would wake. Lazrus shrugged.

  ‘I shall take care of your drunken friend here.’

  ‘He’s going to be angry,’ Peter said.

  ‘He was already angry. That is his problem.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Please, no buts. He will sleep this off, and when he eventually wakes up I am sure he will be more amenable.’ Lazrus patted the shotgun, supported in his arms like a baby. The first sight of the sun through the window shimmered down the length of both barrels. Peter tongued the cracks in his lips. Was leaving right or wrong? Could he really ditch Hens in the middle of Namibia with an offended, gun-toting hotelier, albeit one that had potentially saved his life? Then he saw Harum, expectant, and he knew. Yes, he could. He had to. It was time to go. To adapt. To survive.

  ‘We shall pack our things,’ she said. Lazrus nodded sorrowfully.

  ‘Your bill is taken care of. Your friend here gave me his credit card. I am sorry your time at the Ceiling of Africa has been cut short, but we hope you have enjoyed your stay here as guests and that you shall again return soon.’

  ‘We will, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘The big man would have no way of knowing where you are going, would he?’

  ‘No,’ Peter said, as sure as he could possibly be. ‘Not at all.’

  FOURTEEN

  Professor Cole pushes a slice of his wife’s delicious homemade Key lime pie around a plate with a spoon and imagines himself guiding a hockey puck towards the goal. Hobbies men in retirement are supposed to enjoy sounded frightfully boring. Steam trains? Philately? Lapidary? To hell with all that.

  He sits by the window and looks out over the garden. His wife has done a fantastic job of tending it while he’s been away, not that he can take any credit for its majesty. It was she that designed it. It was she that dug the earth. She that planted the seeds, watered them, coaxed them to grow. His wife hunkers over a bed of soil. Twin dimples duel like thumbprints at the base of her spine. He watches her turn the mud with a silver trowel, scattering pink and yellow begonia seeds. All these years later and still he wants her fingers all over him. When he feels her touch, his skin is tight and young again. She remakes him, every time. He is as contented as he can possibly be watching the shade slink across the grass, his sundial for the rest of the day.

  His granddaughter will be visiting later that evening, no doubt pestering him to watch another awful television talent show. But he’ll be true to his word: the promise he made in the submersible as his oxygen supply diminished would stand. She can watch whatever she likes. He’s already seen in her glimmers of the verve, the acumen, the intelligence that means one day in the future, when she is the beautiful young woman she’s already becoming, she too will be a scientist. She is his greatest achievement. She is his finest discovery. She is his biggest joy. Nothing Simon Cowell can say that will change that.

  He pulls on the new slippers his son bought for him as a ‘staying alive present’, and walks slowly around the house. Its orderliness pleases him, and he allows himself a moment, eyes closed, to enjoy the peace and quiet found in each room. It forms a stark contrast to the weeks before, which now seem like a hellish psychotropic nightmare he’d been forced to endure. Is it possible his hair has turned even greyer since? His wife is too kind to say, but he is confident something about his appearance has been changed by the stresses of having such a grotesque duty of public performance foisted upon him. And in such unlikely circumstances. He’d even been recognized by a gap-toothed gentleman old enough to know better while out to buy milk.

  ‘Excuse me . . . are you the whale guy?’ It had taken every fibre of composure not to unscrew the lid and splash the whole carton in the man’s face. The indignity of celebrity. What a wretched aspiration. Makes him shudder to think of it.

  He runs his finger along the mantelpiece and whistles the second movement of Brahms’ Double Concerto in A minor. Most think it a rather mournful piece, with its lilting strings brattishly refusing to peak, but Cole considers it a perfect expression of true happiness. Perhaps it is because Brahms, unlike most composers, was a sceptic. He understood, as Cole does, that happiness in human beings is never complete, because we are just that: humans, by nature flawed, by nature wanting. If anyone ever dares ask Cole about belief – it happens rarely, but sometimes – he always takes time to explain how it is those who don’t accept this notion that turn to God, blame Him for their shortcomings, just because they don’t exist in a state of constant and unbridled bliss. It’s far more likely their own fathers are to blame than the heavenly father. Ha, he thinks. Chumps. Cole knows this is as close as he’ll get to happiness. It doesn’t matter that he’ll never discover new species of hydrozoans. He is pleased to leave them behind, along with all that talk of the flight recorder from The Long Forgotten. When he heard that they couldn’t retrieve any more information from it specific to the plane’s engineering, and therefore the reason for the crash, he allowed himself a wry smile. Some things are best left unknown.

  The phone rings. Half hoping it will stop before he gets there, he ambles back through to the kitchen. No such luck.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Professor Cole?’

  ‘This is he.’

  ‘This is Nipa Dash.’

  He’s already identified her voice, and it’s good to hear it. He does, however, fear whatever it is she has to say enough that he takes up the slack from the phone lead as though he might yank it from the wall. Whatever it is, a newspaper interview, another damn chat show, he’ll just tell her, firmly
but fairly. Absolutely not. Never in a million years.

  ‘I’m sorry your efforts came to nothing more. That was some marvellous work you were doing with the flight recorder,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you. The chances of us ever actually finding out what caused the crash were slim.’

  He clears his throat. Is it mawkish to ask? Or as a friend of Dash’s, which he now considers himself to be, is it simply inquisitive? ‘Do you have your own suspicions about why it might have happened? Privately, I mean.’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. There’s a theory the pilot was a spurned lover. Took everyone up to 40,000 feet, knocked them out, drove the whole lot into the sea.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he said, and yet he believed it. More than that, though he’d never say it aloud, he could identify in it a certain romance. ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I suspect standard engine failure. Seems more likely than a hijacking. There was no intelligence on that kind of activity at the time, not even from Libya. Chances are it was a catastrophic power outage, much like the one you suffered when you found the black box.’

  ‘Funny how the universe works.’

  ‘You’re not saying it was the work of a higher power, are you, Professor Cole?’ She laughs nervously, and he can hear the relief through the phone when he allows himself to join in.

  ‘Hardly. And please. Call me Jeremiah.’ He peers out of the window just in time to see his wife blow a kiss, which he imagines fluttering towards him on the back of a butterfly. ‘So how can I help you today, Dr Dash? Do you have something you’d like me to get grumpy about and storm off again?’

  She laughs once more, loud enough that he moves the receiver an inch from his ear. ‘I don’t think this occasion will afford you any of the opportunities for grumpiness you seem to relish so much.’

  ‘Then I’m all yours. What is it?’

  ‘There’s a memorial service for flight PS570. I guess with all the press attention, and finding the plane . . . and then the disappointment of not knowing why it came down, it might be a way of laying all this to rest.’