The Long Forgotten Read online

  He’d guessed this might be coming. As selfish as it is to admit, he’d hoped his non-attendance might be overlooked.

  ‘Seems a little strange for me to be there, doesn’t it? I mean, a memorial service should be for the families. Maybe having “the whale man” there might attract the wrong kind of attention to what should be quite a solemn affair.’

  There is a pause, which he takes to signal dejection.

  ‘I think you’d be very welcome. In a way, you’ve helped to keep the memories of those people alive.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I’ll have to decline. I think it’s time to call it a day with regards to me and PS570, The Long Forgotten, whatever you want to call it. Let those people rest in peace.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she says. ‘You take care, Professor Co— Jeremiah. It’s been quite an enlightening experience for me, this whole thing. I hope to see you again sometime.’

  Cole bids Dr Dash goodbye and hangs up. He sits at the table and aggressively pulls apart a peach. A puddle of juice forms between his elbows. He flicks his fingers through it. When did he become this cantankerous? Wasn’t he once effervescent? He was the man who’d whisk his young fiancée away to Rome at a moment’s notice. He was the man who’d made love on the coarse black sand of an Italian beach. He was the man who’d stopped their honeymoon car on a hillside, opened the door, and let the confetti with which they’d been showered chase itself into the wind like a murmuration of tiny colourful birds. But it was gone now, wasn’t it? Replaced with the crotchety temperament of his father. The one he swore he’d never develop. How disappointingly obvious it seems now. How dull, to become that man, how sad, how inevitable.

  He dials, making a silent wish it will go to voicemail.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dr Dash? It’s me. Listen, I’ve thought about it, and it would be my pleasure to accompany you to the memorial service.’

  He gives her little time to respond and hangs up. There is every reason to believe she might still be holding the phone to her ear in disbelief as he walks towards his wife in the garden, arms outstretched.

  FIFTEEN

  Dove pushes Zachariah’s squeaking wheelchair through the glasshouses of Kew Gardens.

  ‘I hope this works,’ Rita says, gently massaging the old man’s shoulder – care for her more than a vocation; an impulse, even on her day off.

  ‘It will work,’ Dove says, because he knows them. He knows the beautiful flowers lining the walkways: giant, tiny, many and rare. He knows them because Peter knows them, remembers them because Peter does. Over thirty years ago, in a dusty corner of Brooklyn Library, Peter read about them all.

  The goblet-shaped Chilean crocus, its unusually deep gentian-blue petals as thunderous as the sky over the Andes its forebears reached towards. The double coconut palm, thirty-four metres tall, its fruit the largest found in the wild, fed into island gigantism by the electric-blue waters of the Seychelles. The Victoria amazonica, three metres wide, its flowers morphing from white to pink on opening – the largest water lily in the world.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Dove asks, face so close to the old man’s ear he can smell the sandalwood in his shaving cream. ‘What happened to my mother?’ Zachariah’s head lolls forward, his cheek resting on Dove’s palm, a rough film of stubble unevenly shorn that morning by an overworked nurse. Rita is standing over them both, protective of her charge, but also torn; should she be indulging Dove at all, when Dove’s presence could be causing Zachariah stress, even though his headaches have eased? This is in stark contrast to Dove’s own headaches, which are now so bad that the moment he snapped out of remembering the sickening wet thud of Hens Berg’s skull cracking under the weight of Lazrus’s rifle he’d run to the bathroom and spent the next hour vomiting into the toilet.

  ‘You’ve got another half an hour,’ Rita says. ‘Then I have to take him home.’

  ‘I can’t force him to remember,’ Dove says. ‘It just has to happen.’

  ‘And it has to happen soon.’ She checks her watch, taps it three times and huffs out her growing impatience. ‘I’ve a life, you know, outside of caring for old people. Not much of a life, but a life all the same. There are box sets I need to catch up on. I need my fix. I wanna know what happens next.’

  Dove wheels Zachariah outside, through the airborne pollen of a million blooms scenting the air: pickling spices, cinnamon and nutmeg, wool wash and lanolin. They sit on the grass by the Palm House, a vast Victorian structure of glass and iron that from a distance looks like the upturned hull of a stricken cruise liner. Rita removes Zachariah’s shoes and socks, to reveal his feet turned sepia by time. Dove feeds him ice cream, swirls of chocolate and vanilla dripping into his lap, while a light breeze dismantles Rita’s hairdo, still shaped like the hairnet she wore yesterday.

  Dove closes his eyes, holds Zachariah’s hand, wills the memory to appear. What happened to my mother? But it doesn’t come. He’s as still as the pagoda tree beside them: toughened, twisted and hollow.

  ‘Dove,’ Rita says, unpacking a picnic for three that strikes him as unusually prepared for someone so reluctant to be here. ‘Did it ever occur to you that he doesn’t want to remember?’

  Why would he not want to remember? He’d been falling in love with Harum, and after the encounter in her hotel bedroom in Windhoek, Dove felt as sure as Peter that it was reciprocated. It must have been. Dove himself was the proof.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he want to remember?’

  Rita takes a bite of her sandwich, butter smeared on her chin that she wipes clean with a hooked finger.

  ‘I remember what my ex-husband’s hands felt like when he put them on me. I remember what his voice sounded like. I remember what aftershave he wore. But it doesn’t mean I want to.’

  In the corner of his eye, Dove spots Zachariah’s hand quivering, his right index finger slowly rising from it, trembling.

  ‘That’s the thing about what you remember,’ Rita says. ‘You don’t get to choose. If you only remembered what you wanted to remember, there’d be no such thing as heartbreak.’

  The finger, straightening, pointing towards the Rose Garden.

  ‘But ain’t it always the way – the bad memories burn in deeper.’ And Dove is pushing Zachariah towards the Rose Garden, thinking of the things he can’t forget. He knows she’s right.

  The first weeks and months at university were the hardest, and Dove struggled with the thought of having left Maud all alone. He called her as often as he could, and as time passed he grew used to his new life. Things slowly began to get easier. Still, there were moments. He regularly dreamed of Len standing over him, as tall and broad as he’d been when they met, a reminder of Dove’s broken vow. Hadn’t he promised to look after Maud? Dove knew Len would have wanted him to go to university – and Maud herself had implored him to – but at any given moment there was a voice in his head asking him why he wasn’t with her. Instead he was studying for the bare minimum of time he could get away with, relaxing, enjoying himself even, successfully controlling the fits of rage that had blighted him for as long as he could remember and – he barely dared say it aloud – falling in love.

  Lara Caine was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met in the flesh, and the first time she spoke he almost cowered in his seat in the lecture theatre. What was it she’d asked? Something about the chair next to him being free. An everyday question she’d rendered exquisite to his ear.

  ‘So is it free?’

  ‘It’s free.’

  She smiled and sat down as the lights in the auditorium dimmed. For forty-five minutes Dove thought about what to say at the interval. The best he could come up with was: ‘You’re American?’

  She turned towards him, her hand already outstretched for him to shake.

  ‘Chicago. Ever been?’

  ‘I’m scared of flying.’ He winced so hard he heard the sinew in his forehead crunch.

  ‘You can get a boat to America.’

  �
��I don’t like the ocean much either.’ At least there was some self-respect to be found in not having lied, even if he did now seem a little pathetic. But the truth as Dove saw it was that hurtling through the sky in a jet-propelled tin can was to any rational being a fool’s errand. Fearing the ocean was harder to explain. The mere sight of the sea, a vast wall of blue diamond; foam on the waves like spittle in the corners of a madman’s mouth, struck him with a fright that punched through his body. If Lara thought him as pitiful as he now felt, she didn’t let it show. In fact, she seemed to delight in the absurdity of the exchange. Later, she’d tell him how most men tried only to impress her, and of the tailspins of arrogance she’d previously endured for want of decent conversation with strangers. Dove’s unfailing honesty proved unexpectedly endearing.

  ‘My name’s Lara,’ she said.

  ‘Dove,’ he said, acutely aware they were still shaking hands.

  ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  ‘Let’s catch up later.’ She tossed a glance over her shoulder at the lecturer, impatiently fingering his waxy grey moustache. ‘I’ve a feeling this guy is gonna bore us some more first.’ She was perhaps the only person Dove had ever met who hadn’t immediately dissected his name: why he had it, where it was from. It was as though it didn’t matter, as though nothing mattered but the moment and how they colluded to fill it.

  By the end of the first term they saw each other almost every day. They met for coffee to talk through their seminars, read each other’s essays, lent each other books. Soon they were no longer just studying together. Every Tuesday night they’d go to the cinema, taking it in turns to select which film they’d see. Dove found himself choosing films he thought she’d like and exaggerating how much he enjoyed them afterwards. On more than one occasion he was sure she’d done the same thing.

  They’d eat out together on Sunday afternoons and Dove was even invited for dinner when her parents were in town, though for the most part he couldn’t think of anything much to say, and he was shocked at the prices listed on the menu. It was perhaps the greatest relief of his life when Lara’s father pulled a silver credit card from his breast pocket at the end of the meal and insisted he pay.

  It was obvious they were becoming close, so much so that they even remarked on it from time to time.

  ‘I see you more than I see myself,’ Lara said one Sunday lunchtime as they sat in a Chinatown restaurant sharing noodles.

  ‘You should look in the mirror more,’ Dove said, pointing at the peppery sauce dripping down her chin. She wiped it clean with a napkin, laughing. He asked her about life in America, teased her over the mean weight of her countrymen, listened enthralled when she told him all about the size of a ranch her uncle owned near Denver. And she seemed equally fascinated by his life too, his natural instinct to reveal little about himself eroding as the waves of her intrigue crashed against it.

  ‘So you didn’t ever try to find your parents?’ she said.

  ‘Len and Maud?’

  ‘No, dummy.’ She jiggled a fist like she was rolling dice, an instinctive gesture that their smitten tutor had half joked marked her out as a great journalist of the future. ‘Your real parents.’ It was difficult to know how to respond. The answer was no, but he knew she’d push for far greater explanation than that. So he reverted to garbling the reasoning he’d read in sociological studies of people like himself.

  ‘It’s quite common for adopted children not to want to find their parents.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Often they resent their parents for abandoning them. Often they can’t overcome the guilt they feel towards their adopted parents. Like mine. All that love they gave me – it feels like kind of a betrayal.’

  ‘Really?’ He realized she was applying the intense focus on him he’d only seen her give to her writing.

  ‘Really. It’s just that those aren’t the versions of the abandoned-child story you see in films or read in books. In those versions they are happily reunited with their real parents and answer for each other the questions they’ve had all their lives.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Can you imagine the disappointment if it wasn’t exactly like that?’

  ‘Huh,’ she shrugged. ‘I never thought of it that way.’ She slurped down what remained of the noodles and he was warmed by having opened her eyes to a new perspective, by having planted a flag in her consciousness that he knew, whatever happened between them from then on, would always remain, flapping in the breeze of her thoughts. That part of him was part of her, forever. He’d never felt this way about anyone before, or even wanted to, but now it was happening he wanted more.

  ‘Do you want to go for a drink tonight?’ she asked, winding her fringe around a chopstick to curl it.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. He had a new shirt he’d been desperate to impress her with, unworn and not even to his taste (he’d overheard her remark favourably on one similar) but now hanging in his wardrobe, ready to go.

  ‘It’s me, you, Fiona, couple of the girls from netball club maybe and that French guy Aurélien from the news photography course.’ Dove liked all of these people, particularly Aurélien, who was smart, charming and softly spoken enough that Dove had cast him as a handsome, highly evolved romantic, even though it was plainly little more than a broad Parisian caricature. This was why Dove, usually when drunk, enjoyed mining Aurélien for advice on how he might one day change his relationship with Lara from best friend to girlfriend. Aurélien gamely encouraged him with pearls of wisdom – like ‘Tell her how you really feel’ – that in retrospect seemed completely obvious. But in those moments, and in that accent, Dove considered them perfect distillations of old French wisdom he feared he’d never be able to enact.

  ‘So,’ Lara said, looking at the time on her phone, ‘8 p.m. at the student union bar?’ Dove had already stopped listening and was mentally reassigning things he’d planned to do that evening. More research for his writing. Take a bath. Read a book. Call Maud. In light of her offer there was nothing that couldn’t wait.

  By midway through the third term he had an embryonic social life revolving entirely around the student union bar and a group of friends – Lara, Fiona and Aurélien – who were loyal, kind and constant. They enjoyed his company, and he enjoyed theirs. It was around then, and thanks largely to them, that he finally came to appreciate living in the city. What had seemed a dizzyingly complex and impenetrable metropolis had become, thanks to friendship, a patchwork of smaller, digestible pieces.

  Maybe this was the night. With Aurélien’s coaching, Dove was working up to revealing the extent of his feelings for Lara, a possibility that made every muscle in his body wriggle with nervousness. She was all he could think about. When he ate, he imagined it was with her. When he had a dream, she was in it. Everything he said, did and wore was precision-engineered to maximize the prospect of them one day having some kind of romance. Did love always feel so dangerous, so close to out of control? He wondered if he might ask Maud when he saw her next. He never got the chance.

  Maud was alone when she died.

  It was a peaceful passing, according to the care worker at the assisted living facility who called to tell Dove the news. It happened around midday. Maud had finished brunch, played cards with one of the other women residents and decided to go back to her room for a rest. There was nothing unusual about that. It was part of her routine. They found her body in her favourite armchair – the one that Len used to sit in at home and which Maud insisted stay with her when she moved. In her hand was a Polaroid photograph of Len, Dove and her, taken on the day Dove arrived in her life. The gloss had worn from it, she had held it so often.

  Dove sat in the little bedroom he had in the tiny flat he shared with two other students he barely knew, and tried to cry. Instead, he looked out of the window at the people going about their day and got angry. How could they? Didn’t they know she was gone? Hadn’t they heard he wasn’t there to hold her hand when she left?
The guilt made him sick.

  Eventually, and not wanting to sit on a train where other people could see him, Dove left home once night had fallen, hood drawn tight around his face. In amongst the shock, the sadness, the guilt, he felt lost. And now there was only one person in the world who might be able to find him. He needed to talk to her urgently and he knew where she’d be. The student union bar. Where she always was.

  Fiona was the first person he saw, another American, her Californian accent more nasal than Lara’s. She stood at her usual spot by the jukebox, pumping in the pound coins she still called fake money.

  ‘Holy shit, Dove,’ she said, ‘you look totally terrible. Are you OK?’

  ‘Where’s Lara?’ Fiona was so taken aback by his abruptness she waved her hand in the direction of the back room without saying another word.

  It took a few seconds for him to fully comprehend what he was seeing, because initially it appeared to be one body. One giant amorphous body, with four arms and four legs and two conjoined heads that writhed together like twins in the womb. But eventually he was able to focus and discern its individual parts. Lara’s hair. Aurélien’s shoulders. Hands and fingers and lips. The two of them at the back of the room, kissing, in that side-on pose only ever used by people kissing for the first time while seated. Dove’s fury came instantly. He was not a person then. He was a collision of forces. He was speed and heat, weight and movement. And he was crossing the room towards them, fists fused to his instincts. Aurélien didn’t even have a chance to open his eyes before Dove started to punch him, and if Dove had one clear thought as he unloaded this great, burning power through his hands, it was one that only enraged him more – he didn’t know what Lara’s lips felt like, but Aurélien did.

  Dove knew then that the version of himself he had in that moment become – angry, jealous, devoid of reason – was so deeply engrained, so far from the values Maud and Len had instilled in him, that it could only be a terrible echo of his real parents, built into his code. He hit Aurélien like he didn’t want his eyes to open again.