The Long Forgotten Read online

  It was a warm night. Moths amassed around street lamps. Peter, dressed in a thin white linen shirt already translucent on his back and a pair of jeans he’d cut at the knee with garden shears, walked from the station to a bar near Prospect Park, where he was one of three men and seven women who had congregated. Dr Hens Berg was the last to arrive.

  Peter hoped it might be a good place to hear about some rare and interesting flowers, but in reality it was full of show-offs and bores, intent on proving to others how much more meaningful their experiences had been than those of the others present. He should have known better than to dismiss a theory he’d long held: in pastimes lie the best of men, but more frequently the worst.

  After a lady with a plump bouffant delivered a tedious thirty-minute talk about how moisture affects bark (and thus how it’s etched), which turned out to be little more than an excuse to show her holiday snaps, there was a short break. Peter found himself standing next to Hens. They introduced themselves and shook hands, Hens with such force that Peter thought his arm might be pumped out of its socket. Hens was broad-shouldered, reminded Peter of sturdy furniture, with a jaw square enough to absorb the gloved jab of a heavyweight. Atop that wide, muscular head, a light tuft of blond hair was cropped short. He worked at New York University and said he’d turned up for the same reasons as Peter – to see if a fledgling interest in botany might beget something bigger.

  Once he had got to know him a little better over a sharp beer at the bar, Peter discovered that Hens was also single, and liked to sign up for groups where the women outnumbered the men by at least three to one. As a result he had become a proficient pastry chef, weaver of wicker baskets, folder of paper into the form of a swan, and, lastly, so he claimed, lover. He was also in his early forties and lived alone. That’s why they got on, Peter supposed. Even though Hens was a doctor of psychology and he was a cleaner, they both worked with other people’s shit.

  ‘So you think you’ll stick out the second half?’ Hens asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Peter said, wiping a thin strip of froth from his top lip. ‘I’ve come all this way.’

  ‘But there aren’t any women. No decent ones, anyway.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I’m here to see the flowers.’ It wasn’t a lie. The second half promised a slide show of photographs taken by a man who had followed his love of etching to South America, exotic-sounding enough to persuade Peter not to go home and run a bath. ‘You’re going to leave?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Hens said. ‘But if you’re sticking around afterwards, maybe I’ll just prop up the bar.’

  It wasn’t until he sat back down that Peter realized Hens had asked him no questions. In fact, he knew nothing beyond his name and the fact that he was interested in flowers. Yet, despite his boorishness, Peter liked Hens. It was a relief not to have to make small talk, and he was happy to be with someone who’d tell stories while he listened over a drink – anything that took his mind off Angelica, at home in his apartment. A part of him was convinced her father would turn up one day. But as the days and weeks passed, the likelihood of this happening seemed less and less. Angelica had grown more relaxed. She was even starting to remove her coat and shoes, and leave her few possessions lying around so it looked as though she was actually resident there, rather than disappearing without a trace every time she left a room. Maybe her father truly didn’t care.

  Peter sat watching the South American slide show, which featured far fewer photographs of flowers than it did pictures of the speaker sunbathing in his shorts, pretending he hadn’t seen Hens feigning a yawn at the bar. He almost yelped with joy when the man finally stopped talking, and Hens had a cold beer waiting for him in a small, otherwise empty garden, dotted with lit candles, their flames bullied by a light breeze.

  ‘You were right. That was tedious,’ Peter said. They laughed together, the rambunctiousness of Hens’s boom making Peter’s voice sound like it hadn’t broken.

  ‘So you won’t be coming back?’

  ‘Probably not. I’m sure there are other groups. Maybe I should start one.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ Hens said. ‘You have the bug, huh?’

  ‘I think so,’ Peter said, showing Hens the love letter he found in the library, and recounting how it had captured his imagination, woken something in his soul. Hens’s nose concertinaed in confusion.

  ‘Why would anyone write a letter like that and put it in a book?’ he said. His Danish accent kneaded the syllables in a way Peter found quite relaxing.

  ‘Who knows why people do certain things? Makes for a good discovery, though, right?’ As easily as Peter might recite the colours of the rainbow, Hens reeled off the Latin names for four or five of the flowers on the list.

  ‘So you do know a thing or two about flowers,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not all about the women after all.’

  ‘I know a thing or two about everything,’ Hens said, rolling a cigarette that seemed brittle and tiny against his fingertips. ‘You should try to find one.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Not a woman, for crying out loud. One of the flowers.’ Hens took another sip, then licked white slugs of froth from his stubble.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. They’re mostly all but extinct.’

  ‘Extinct just means they’ve not been found. And anyway, where’s your spirit of adventure?’

  This rankled Peter. His past was a litany of opportunities he feared he’d missed. Yet while he acknowledged he should act on impulse more often, something held him back, a dead weight of dread in his core. Another excuse tumbled from his lips.

  ‘And they’re all the way around the world.’

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t give me that.’ Hens folded his arms and leant back in his chair, cheeks square as book-ends.

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  ‘So instead you go to etching groups to hear boring botanical lectures and try to meet women?’

  ‘I told you. I wasn’t here to meet women. I was here to find out more about flowers from something other than a book.’

  ‘If you’re happy with that, fine. But a little airplane food won’t kill you.’ The air filled with the burning vanilla scent of extinguished candle wicks. Hens drank fast, and had already ordered another round before Peter was two-thirds of the way through his own. Regardless, he was more drunk than he had been in some time. The colours of Hens’s clothes and skin blended into one another, a trick of intoxication not altogether displeasing, but one Peter wished would stop.

  He went to the bathroom, washed his face with a sobering jet of cold water, and drunkenly rued the fact that he wasn’t a man like he imagined Hens to be. Peter’s reaction when he found the love letter in the library book was to get more library books. To join a club for botanical etching enthusiasts, for pity’s sake! But Hens’s first thought had been to track down a flower itself. Peter was in his mid-forties already. If his life was boring and lonely, did he really have anyone to blame but himself?

  When he returned from the bathroom, Hens was trying to give his number to the barmaid. Uninterested, she went back to work and Peter pretended he hadn’t noticed, launching back into the conversation as though he’d actually given the matter serious thought, rather than coming up with an excuse to save face.

  ‘Anyway, I can’t just disappear looking for a flower. I have a business to run. It’d be impossible.’

  ‘What if I went with you?’ Hens said. Peter knew that this was the alcohol talking, but he was having fun and so chose to indulge it.

  ‘You came to a group for botanical etching enthusiasts to meet women and ended up planning a holiday with a cleaner from Brooklyn. That’s the most tragic thing I ever heard.’ Their laughter was so loud and obnoxious that the barman called time. They clinked glasses. Booze wet their fingers. Continuing up Peter’s arm, the warmth found its way to his neck and face. It had been a long time since he’d made a new friend his own age. In fact, he wasn’t sure whether men his age did make new friends. Ageing was the s
hedding of old bark, wasn’t it? Not the time to grow it anew.

  When Peter woke the next morning, he found the words Dr Hens Berg – finder of flowers and women, and a phone number, written on a napkin folded into his breast pocket.

  Peter and Hens met regularly over the next two months, and while Hens never mentioned the trip again, Peter started to think it might not be such a terrible idea. Despite his occasional arrogance, Hens was good company. And he knew far more about flowers than he let on. Peter enjoyed picking his brain about the rare blooms he’d read about in the library, testing Hens’s knowledge, expanding his own. He spent fewer evenings at home, and, now that Angelica was proving herself more than capable of helping him run the business, less time consumed by thoughts of dirt and what to do with it. On Saturday evenings Hens encouraged Peter to try things he’d never done before, usually occasions he enjoyed only in retrospect, but which made him realize how small his breadth of experience actually was.

  It was after an aborted attempt at a samba dancing class that Peter woke with the worst hangover he’d had since he was twenty-two. The phone rang, loud and shrill like a bird desperate to mate. It was Sunday, and because of a night-time heat so intense he could have argued the sun was still up, he’d barely slept at all. He ignored it, but the caller was persistent. After a few minutes his patience evaporated, and he picked up the receiver without saying hello.

  ‘The Udumbara,’ Hens said by way of greeting.

  ‘Jesus, Hens, what the hell?’ Peter said, his dry lips stuck together at the edges.

  ‘You’re hung-over, huh?’

  ‘You mean you’re not?’

  ‘I don’t really get hangovers.’

  ‘But you drank all that tequila!’ Peter could still taste it in the back of his throat.

  ‘Forget about tequila. They found the Udumbara.’

  The Udumbara flower, according to Buddhist legend, blooms once every three thousand years, when the Sage King of the future visits the present world. Peter had little time for tardy gods. All he knew was that the Udumbara was a flower from the list and a sketch in a Sanskrit book – the ‘auspicious flower from heaven’.

  ‘It’s underneath a Chinese woman’s washing machine.’

  ‘What do you mean, “it’s underneath a Chinese woman’s washing machine”?’

  ‘The Youtan Poluo.’ Hens liked to refer to a bloom by its oldest, most unused name, a bad habit bestowed on him by academia. Peter didn’t care for Latin or Greek. He loved a flower for what it meant, not what an understanding of its etymology said about him.

  ‘Jeez, Hens, can you make this conversation a little easier to follow?’

  ‘The Udumbara, you imbecile, it’s been found underneath a Chinese woman’s washing machine!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I have botanist friends at the university. They’re a community. They share this stuff.’ Peter doubted that news from China could ever reach him in New York City, but Hens’s tone was serious and Peter’s hangover didn’t facilitate argument.

  ‘You’re going to China?’ Angelica faced the wall of small drawers Peter had built inside the lockup, neatly folding and filing the company expenses. Peter had worried about telling her, and lay on a skateboard beneath the car pretending to fix it in the hope she wouldn’t notice the tic that tremored in his neck when a matter was causing him stress.

  ‘Yes. But not for long. You can stay at my place. I mean, I still think you should tell your father where you are . . .’

  ‘My father doesn’t care where I am. That’s kinda why I’m staying at yours.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, realizing then his concern hadn’t been the business, but her. ‘And I’ve complete faith you can handle the work.’ He looked down to see she was standing by his feet, and tapped a spanner against a pipe to make himself sound busy.

  ‘I know I can. I was just saying, you’re going to China.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘You never do anything.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ He wheeled himself out until he was on the ground looking up at her. She noticed the spanner in his hand, the size that might fix a radio-controlled car rather than an actual one.

  ‘It’s totally true. You never do anything. Except go to the library and talk about flowers.’ He raised a hand and she helped him to his feet.

  ‘You’d do well to listen more often. Might be an education.’

  ‘Have you met a woman?’ she said. He couldn’t help but be delighted by the mischievous kink in her tone.

  ‘No. I’m going with a friend.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘He’s a doctor,’ Peter said. ‘His name is Hens Berg.’ She shook her head. ‘You think I should stay?’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met anyone who needs to go do something exciting more. It’s just that I’ll miss you, is all.’ He embraced her, and she clung to him in a way that made him feel needed for the first time in as long as he could remember. ‘Don’t go dying out there hunting flowers, OK? It feels like we only just met. And, obviously, I need a place to stay.’

  Peter bought himself a new suitcase and breathed in the rich chestnut smell of leather. Packing almost all the clothes he owned, he was overcome with an anxiety that weighted his head to the pillow. What if a property needed urgent cleaning whilst he was gone? Then, the whisper of reason. There was nothing urgent about what he did. The moment for urgency had passed by the time he got there. They were already dead. But still he couldn’t settle. What if someone needed him? Who? he asked himself. His brief relationship with the woman down the hall had collapsed long ago, after she decided she wanted horses in her life more than she did men and moved to snowy Colorado. Peter took deep breaths, the leather scent still a warm novelty in his lungs, and sat on the corner of the mattress looking at the wardrobe. Only his overalls hung there, a bodiless ghost imploring him to go.

  The journey was long. Air hostesses served the aisle with a poise Peter couldn’t help remark upon more than once. When they passed, their hairspray made him sneeze into his hands. His nervousness mounted as they bounced through turbulence, and he sought reassurance from whichever hostess was closest. Usually it was the one with the perfectly sculpted bun semi-visible beneath her hat, who’d taken a liking to Peter, and kept him topped up with free wine.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am?’ he said, his voice leaping through the octaves.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I just wondered, to put my mind at rest, if you’d ever been in a plane crash?’ The hostess laughed, her immaculate red lips exposing exquisitely white teeth, and continued down the aisle.

  ‘You old dog,’ Hens said, jabbing a stiff finger into Peter’s right thigh. Peter hoped it meant accidents were rare, rather than there being a conspiracy of silence on such matters which he’d now have to uphold for the rest of the trip.

  He and Hens bonded over their non-existent command of Chinese, and by the time they touched down they were united in wonder at the mystical sprawl of Shanghai. Old markets lurked in the corridors between rising glass spires. Bunting bridged the passages where neon fought the dark. The newness of Shanghai’s cityscape had co-opted the old into its architecture, and to them it was otherworldly, a near-future metropolis. In a restaurant apparently catering exclusively to exhausted businessmen, Hens tucked into what could well have been a bat on a stick. To his credit, it had looked like a steak in the photograph accompanying its listing in the menu. Peter’s soup was watery and tasteless, but he took great comfort in knowing it had never beaten wings.

  Jet-lagged and unable to sleep, they walked the waterfront of the Yangtze River mouth late into the evening. The rain was a thin and pleasant wash, not the clatter that bombed the streets outside his apartment in the fall. When Hens’s cheap umbrella buckled he dumped it into a bin and they let the drops dance upon their skin.

  Boarding buses involved blind faith and guesswork. With the good fortune bestowed on them by an after-dinner cookie, they
only went wrong twice. Once Peter was suitably convinced they were heading in the right direction, and Hens had stopped caring, they slept the rest of the way. The humidity in the air made Peter dream of being crushed beneath a boulder shaped like a man.

  In the morning, a translator that Hens’s botanist colleagues had helped arrange met them at the bus station as planned. She was young, eager to help and would drive them the rest of the way. Both men were relieved that she might open up the shell of a world they knew they’d never really penetrate, if only enough for them to peek in. Hens made lewd jokes about what else she could show him. Peter suspected she’d pretended not to understand.

  Li Min, who lived in a modest home on the Lushan Mountain, Jiangxi Province, was astonished when the translator told her how far the two men had travelled, but she gave them her blessing to enter the house without hesitation and they took one last look at the view, where outside Mount Lu was beheaded by milky cloud. They removed their shoes and sat on the floor, struggling to fit their legs beneath the table, and drank tea. The flower had waited three thousand years to be seen. A few more minutes wouldn’t kill anyone.

  The translator listened intently to Li Min, and then recounted her story to the two men. She had filled a bucket with soapy water and decided to clean the kitchen. It was there, beneath the washing machine, that she saw what she thought was a cluster of worm eggs, each no more than one millimetre in diameter. Where most would have boiled water and flushed out the ground, or swept hard through the nest with a stiff, unforgiving broom, she paused for reflection. Her life had been lived by one virtue above all others – to never knowingly harm another living thing. So, she left the washing machine where it was, in the middle of the kitchen, finished wiping down the wall behind the sink and prayed, as she did every night, for the reincarnation of Buddha.

  The next morning she glanced down at the cold ground and found that the barely there stems had grown eighteen tiny white flowers on top and smelled fragrant. As frail as frost. As tiny and white as the eggs of a lacewing. The plant had no root, no link to any living thing outside of it. It was as if it had just landed there. A Sage King had answered her call.