The Long Forgotten Read online

  ‘You did well,’ he said.

  ‘Do I get the job?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Of course you get the job.’ They shook hands, each as dirty as the other. ‘Do you want me to talk to your parents or anything?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your parents. I can talk them through it.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’m old enough to have a job.’

  ‘Well, if you were my daughter, and you got this kind of a job with a man old enough to be your father, I’d want to know a little about it. About him.’ She put her hands on her hips, tilted her head to the side. It made her seem older than her years.

  ‘Really, Mr Manyweathers, that isn’t something you need to do.’ He nodded and said goodbye. It was the eighties. Things had changed. He’d heard of fiercely independent teenagers. He just hadn’t expected them to be so fierce.

  Cleaning Mr Bertrecht’s house took weeks, even with two of them at it all day every day. They’d scoured the floor until their backs locked in spasm. They’d lifted dust from ornate diamond chandeliers with a lightness of touch more commonly expected of archaeologists. Out of decay was emerging beauty unlike any that either of them had ever seen. Out of decay was emerging a home. Before long Peter couldn’t remember how he’d ever done the job alone.

  The upstairs bathroom was the last room to be cleaned. Nothing shocked Peter any more. Rarely did he see anything he hadn’t already seen. But in that bathroom, black with grime from the floor to the ceiling, was something he’d truly never laid eyes on before. Behind the toilet cistern, in the foul crust that caked the porcelain, grew a flower so vivid that when he saw it, he jumped, as though it were a tropical spider with its front legs raised to strike. A small flash of purple, white at the centre, shining in the blackness – it was its own source of light. There, where it was cold and dark and there was nothing else of life, it had survived. But more, it had grown. It was beautiful, irresistible. He plucked it and pressed it in the only book he had in the bottom of his bag – the book of hazardous chemicals used for cleaning.

  ‘Peter?’ Angelica said, lifting the muzzle-shaped plastic mask from her mouth and nestling it in her hair. He stopped where he was, sodden overalls sticking to his skin. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’ He tossed the mangled scouring sponge he’d been using into a bucket. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything, as though she’d changed her mind. ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s just, kind of selfish, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To have a house this big and not share it with anyone.’

  ‘I guess,’ he said. It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before.

  ‘I think I’d like to live here,’ she said. ‘Maybe one day I will.’

  ‘You have a home already,’ he said, checking the watch he kept in a sealed plastic bag in his pocket. ‘Let’s go. It’s Saturday. Half day. I’ll buy you pizza.’

  ‘Nah.’ She flipped the mask back over her nose. He tried to argue, but couldn’t make himself heard over the noise of her coarse brush on the tiles. At the end of the day she only downed tools when he threatened to lock her in. He got the distinct feeling, as he did most nights, that she didn’t want to go home.

  It was a stormy evening. The rain turned to steam as it hit the sidewalk. Peter insisted he drive her to where she needed to be.

  ‘I can get the train,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I go your way.’ He divided his equipment into piles he could easily transport to the car.

  ‘I don’t mind getting wet.’

  ‘I mind you getting wet.’ They stared at one another for a while, before she sulkily helped him load the trunk.

  They’d been stuck in traffic on Brooklyn Bridge for more than an hour. He honked the horn, sparking a chorus of others running both ways across the river. She’d asked him how he got into cleaning, and he told her it was all he’d ever been good at, which was a lie. In truth he was adept at most things he put his mind to. Most things that didn’t involve other people, anyway.

  ‘How old are you?’ she said.

  ‘Forty-four.’ She whistled like he’d broken a record.

  ‘Then why aren’t you married?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just didn’t happen.’ Peter couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with someone who’d just left school.

  ‘Didn’t happen yet,’ she said, and smiled. Angelica opened the glove compartment, shot a pitying look at its only contents – a pair of Marigolds – then closed it again. ‘I think you’re a nice guy.’

  ‘Nice?’ he said, and laughed. ‘What about your parents? How long they been married?’

  ‘They’re not.’ She turned to look at the Manhattan skyline. ‘Mom’s not around. Dad’s a total asshole. Drinks a lot. Gets mad.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Don’t be. Just keep paying me so I can move out as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ve a spare room if you ever need it,’ he said, only afterwards considering it might be a wildly inappropriate suggestion. She didn’t respond and he didn’t know what to say next.

  They arrived at the lockup, the drains already flooded and the rain hitting the puddles with such force it seemed the ground was boiling.

  ‘I can walk from here,’ Angelica said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s unload the car and then I’ll take you. Otherwise you’ll catch pneumonia. What use will you be to me then?’

  She clenched her fists, her knuckles nudging at her skin like carp at the surface of a pond.

  ‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘it’s fine. But thank you, Mr Many-weathers.’

  ‘Peter,’ he said, and watched her walk down the street. She paused briefly at the end, far enough away that he could only just see her grubby skin against the dirty concrete walls. She looked up at an ugly steel bridge as a train passed overhead and shook nesting pigeons from the stanchions, then disappeared round the corner as a snowfall of feathers spun around her.

  Instead of going back to his apartment, Peter went to Brooklyn Library, where in recent months he’d been trying to better himself. His mind whirred with thoughts of Angelica enough that he couldn’t name a single book he wanted to read.

  He approached the front desk, where the librarian, an old man with a full, reddish beard that appeared to contain slivers of brass, looked him over with a disapproving sigh. Peter opened his bag to return the four novels he’d borrowed last time, none of which he’d managed to finish, and to pay the fine for them being late.

  ‘This isn’t one of ours,’ the librarian said, pushing a small black book back across the desk. Peter’s instruction manual of cleaning chemicals. As he was putting it back in his bag, the delicate purple flower he’d found in Mr Bertrecht’s bathroom slipped into his hand. His heart fluttered with excitement.

  Peter took from the shelf a dusty encyclopedia of flowers that didn’t appear to have been opened in many years. He retired to a quiet corner, where he usually went so he couldn’t be spied upon by visiting schoolkids. Leafing through the pages, it wasn’t long before he recognized that same vivid purple. The bog violet. As he did, a small slip of paper fell out of the book, onto the table in front of him. On it was a letter, in handwriting neater than he had ever seen. Minute and measured movements looped in ink about the page, lines that swooped and circled the point where they began, like petals themselves. This is what it said.

  My darling,

  As my studies take me far away, this time to the Pacific (how’s that for adventure?), I write this letter for you to find in this book of yours. Feel free to tease me on my return with how dreadfully soppy I’ve become since we met. Every time you look at it, you will know I am thinking of you. This also applies when you’re not looking at it, because I am thinking of you all the time. In fact, I’m starting to wish I’d never taken a course that would have me travel so much, and for so long. Perhap
s if we had met before I had enrolled I never would have enrolled at all. Maybe we would be studying flowers together. Yes, yes, I know you think I give botany short shrift in favour of my own more lively pursuits . . . but you’d be wrong! I’ve done my research (you can stop laughing now) and found six flowers so unique, so fantastic that when I think of them, they could only ever remind me of you. Here to prove it is a list.

  The Gibraltar Campion

  Sheep-eating plant

  Kadupul Flower

  The living fossil

  The Udumbara

  The Death Flower

  I already know what you’re thinking. The sheep-eater! The death flower! How can these suggestions come from the mouth of a man who professes to adore me so much, to know so much about romance? And so when I come home I will tell you exactly how every last one of them is emblematic of our love. How you and I are the sum of them. How they make up a heart. I can’t wait.

  Oh I miss you. Oh I love you.

  Jx

  Peter stood in the library with the letter scrunched in his hand, rapt by the bliss of new obsession. Children stared down from the mezzanine, half convinced he was a mannequin, until he called over the librarian and asked him to retrieve the best reference book on flowers in the building. The librarian relished a challenge, and set about pursuing his prey with the tenacity of an expert marksman. The heavy tome he returned with made Peter’s hands tremble. Sitting down in the quiet reading area, at a table well worn by scholars’ elbows, he started with the last flower on the list.

  The death flower was not its real name. Its real name was Rafflesia arnoldii – or, more commonly, the corpse flower. Though he hadn’t seen the flower until now, instinct, or the mischievous fuzz in his gut he guessed was such, told Peter that ‘death flower’ was far more apt a moniker. Corpses were merely a by-product of death, the bones at the end of a meal. Death itself was the great unlockable. That’s why he supposed the Rafflesia arnoldii took a place in the letter. Perhaps the writer of the note knew, even then when their love was fledging, that he wanted them to die together. Perhaps that was what he was trying to say. Peter had never heard of anything so romantic in his life. He had to stop reading for a second, just to breathe, just to be.

  Rafflesia arnoldii, technically speaking at least, was the single largest individual flower in the world. It could reach up to six feet in height and three feet in diameter, bigger than a hippopotamus, and was endemic to the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, where it was especially difficult to find because the buds took many months to develop and the flower lasted for just a few days. There was more chance of playing midwife at the birth of a panda cub than there was of stumbling across the death flower in bloom. And yet it was unlike any other flower on the list. Most of them were scarce. But its scarcity was not what made it special.

  The death flower was special because it defied everything a flower should be. Bodiless, stemless, leafless and rootless, its survival was dependent on the Tetrastigma vine, which it required for nourishment and support. Better still, it emitted the pungent funk of rotten flesh – hence the name – so that beetles and flies might mistake it for the carcass of a dead animal and land there long enough to pollinate. In fact, the death flower was not like a flower at all. It was free and precious and changing, without form or reason. It couldn’t exist alone, and yet seemed to know the sadness of its own fate. It was almost human: beautiful, curious and brief.

  Peter closed the book, overwhelmed, and headed home, forgetting to buy milk.

  When he arrived, Angelica was waiting on his doorstep in the rain, her sodden bag a collapsed lung at her side.

  ‘Can I stay here a while?’ she asked.

  ‘Your dad?’ he said. She nodded.

  He didn’t know how to put his arms around her. They stood together until the time and the weather combined to mean nothing any more.

  FOUR

  Usually, Dove wakes to the squall of his alarm. Usually he picks splinters of a shattered dream from the supple flesh of a new day. Usually he showers, a part of him hoping that the water will wash away – as it does the grease from his hair or the dirt from his nails – an emptiness compounded by the fug of just waking. Usually he picks yesterday’s clothes from the bedroom floor where they lie like a stranger vaporized in the night. Usually he puts them on again. Usually the day begins like all the days before, his passage through it little more than an act of muscle memory. Usually.

  But today he can recall just as readily as he can the contours of his own face, or the route to work he shouldn’t take, a memory that belongs not to him, but to Peter Manyweathers, a man he doesn’t know. A fraction of another life entirely. He remembers Peter’s excitement on finding the bog violet. He remembers the affection Peter felt for Angelica. He remembers the longing stirred in Peter by the love letter. He remembers it all with such startling clarity, it’s as if it happened yesterday, and to him. So this is how it feels to be someone else. Not blurred, like looking at the world through the wet window of a car in traffic. Explicit. In focus. Wonderful.

  Where has it come from? He’s never been to New York, his fear of flying almost as great as a hardwired phobia of the sea that cripples him with tension at the mere scent of briny air. He hasn’t met or heard of anyone with the name Peter Manyweathers or Angelica Meek. In fact, he can count the people he interacts with on a regular basis on one hand.

  He sits up in bed and opens his laptop. As he waits for it to load he’s confronted with the transitory, infantilizing nature of his habitation. The table. The wardrobe. The sofa. Possessions that don’t belong to him in a space he doesn’t own, a studio flat, little roomier than a standard garage. But the rent is as cheap as it gets in the city, if it can be classed as such at the very north of London’s suburbs. From the window at the front, a view of the capital receding. From the back, a splay of green fields, messily stitched by weathered hedgerows and the motorway’s humming concrete seam.

  He opens Google and searches for the name Peter Manyweathers. It returns 11,000 results. But there is no sign of a Peter Manyweathers who could possibly have been a cleaner in New York in 1983. He scrolls through the first page of links, then the second, the third and the fourth. How short a time ago it had been when the lives of ordinary people were not chronicled. No testament to their existence but the memories of others, which would die with them and be gone. How short a time ago there was nothing to know. A past where everyone was just like him.

  About his own past, Dove knows only what he’s been told.

  Dove’s earliest memory is of meeting Len and Maud. Many years later they would be the ones who’d explain to him that he’d been found as a baby in a Moses basket, written on which was the label ‘Dove’ (and so they presumed he was the abandoned child, or more likely grandchild, of a breeder or fancier of birds). Wrapped around the handle was a silver necklace with two tiny birds dangling from it and a silver ring threaded onto it. But when he first met Len and Maud he knew nothing of this. He was five years old and presumed this was how all children met their mothers and fathers, standing in the doorway of their home framed by a warm light that bled out into the evening. Len was taller and rounder and wider than Maud, his silhouette reminiscent of a snowman. He bent to greet Dove out of the car, squeezing the young boy’s delicate chin between his fingers like he was plucking a berry from a bush. The man’s breath smelled not unpleasantly of tobacco, which he’d tried and failed to disguise by sucking on a mint so strong the scent tingled in Dove’s nostrils.

  ‘You must be Dove,’ he said. ‘You’re a big one, huh? Normally they’re so scrawny when they get here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maud said, a hand on her husband’s shoulder, ‘but never for long.’ Dove’s head was filled with fairy tales where children were fed until they were fat enough to be eaten. In other houses he’d lived in he turned to storybooks for escape – once from beatings but mostly from being ignored – and he always knew, somehow, this would be his fate: to be eaten, surely the f
ate of all orphans in the end. It’s a scenario he must have imagined a thousand times. In the fantasized version he found the closest blunt object he could lift and hit his would-be eater over the head before running away so quickly that lightning exploded from his shoes. Now his grisly destiny was coming to pass, fear turned his leg bones to the consistency of treacle.

  But because he’d been told to, and mesmerized by the pendulum of her hips as they swung to negotiate the gate, Dove followed Maud into the house. She had much softer features than Len, and an asthmatic wheeze he initially mistook for a cat hidden behind the threadbare velveteen curtains. This is what he pretended he was looking for when they eventually coaxed him out from behind the sofa with a cube of chocolate, impossible to resist for a child who’d known the bladed gnaw of hunger as often as he had.

  In the intrepid glare of electric light he saw them properly for the first time. Maud’s hair was grey and thin. Len’s jowls slooped below his jawline like torn sails on a decommissioned boat. Dove’s best guess was that they were a hundred years old or more. He’d heard about grandparents from a boy in a previous home. How they’re older than real parents, slower and less able to play, but make up for it by always buying you presents. And now Dove was finally getting grandparents of his own it felt like a strange and brilliant dream, which is why he didn’t trust it to last. He’d never been one for play. Even at this tender age he preferred his own company. But he imagined he’d enjoy receiving gifts.

  ‘I’m Maud,’ she said, ‘and this is Len.’ The man smiled to reveal a missing tooth through which his tongue was a fat, caged grub. ‘And over there, that’s Doggle.’ Doggle was a basset hound that until that moment Dove hadn’t noticed asleep and snoring in the corner. It had a wispy silver beard, and ears like the chewed soles of worn-out slippers. It made absolute sense to Dove that even the dog was old in a house where everything appeared ancient, ragged and warm.

  ‘He likes walking and eating,’ Len said, ‘and so do I. I hope that you do too, because we do plenty of both around here.’ Now they were indoors his voice filled the room, which was small and overloaded with trinkets and the scent of brass polish. On the far wall was a corkboard peppered with photographs, all identically posed: Len and Maud standing either side of various children roughly Dove’s age, arms round their shoulders, grins on their faces so broad they almost split in two.