The Long Forgotten Read online

  Peter and Hens followed Li Min into the kitchen. There it was, on the ground in a divot of dirt, where the washing machine once juddered above it. Rootless, it appeared to float, a tiny, delicate and impossible cloud. It was no more than two inches across in all, yet entire belief systems bent to its existence. This was the Udumbara, signifying the reincarnation of Buddha. It was the most beautiful thing Peter had ever seen. It didn’t need a name. There wasn’t one worthy. He retreated to the far corner of the room, as though his excited breath might blow the Udumbara out of the window. It was a clear day, and through the gap that winked between the oval-shaped mountains, he could see a glinting sliver of the Yangtze River far below to the north. Above them, the mighty rock fist of Dahanyang Peak, the grandeur it imposed over the Flower Path, noted home to awestruck poets and the occasional white deer.

  He pictured the house after Li Min’s death. How the grime would collect first in the corners. How the rain would soften the skirt of the wooden walls until they ballooned, then gave, with a rot you could taste in the air. How her bones would hold together, shaped in prayer.

  Li Min and the translator went for a walk while Peter and Hens photographed the flower, sketched and measured it. A part of him would forever be amazed that they didn’t try to take it home. But no, it belonged where they saw it, underneath a Chinese lady’s washing machine, and where they left it, with her, searching inside herself for God.

  Back home, Peter’s mind was flushed of dirt and filled with rare bloom. Sitting in a sunken leather armchair, he stared at the love letter for so long that Angelica joked it had hypnotized him. And in a way it had. He knew he’d never learn what happened to the man who wrote it or the woman he wrote it for. He could only hope it resulted in a long and loving union. But still the letter pulled on him. Angelica smiled. There he was, lost in thought again. He threw a cushion, a lucky shot that hit her right in the mouth, and they both laughed so hard their ribs ached.

  Peter began to fastidiously read books on the topic of flowers, plotting the countries he might find them in on a dog-eared world map that covered his desk.

  Hens was busy finishing a paper on how humans shared memories with each other. Peter asked him about it once, as they sat together in the library, Hens researching while Peter pored over maps and charts and photographs of flowers. Hens leant over Peter’s textbook and pointed to a picture of the Parrot’s Beak, an extraordinary bloom of bright oranges and solar yellows. In shape and size it looked exactly as its name would suggest, with the top petal forming a claw over the bottom one to make a pincer.

  ‘Take the Lotus berthelotii.’ Peter rolled his eyes but Hens paid little attention. ‘The Lotus berthelotii, native to the Canary Islands, has been classified as exceedingly rare since 1884 because it was originally pollinated by sun-birds, and sunbirds are extinct there. Some people, like me, believe it to be extinct in the wild . . .’

  ‘Not me. I think it might still exist.’

  ‘Precisely. We are approaching the flower with two very different attitudes. Now, say that you and I went to the Canary Islands and came across the Lotus berthelotii nestled behind some rock. My memory of discovering it might be one of shock, because I have been proven wrong. Your memory of discovering it might be one of relief and satisfaction because you have been proven right. But it is the same memory, that of discovering the flower, and we both lay claim to it as the definitive version of events, even though the feelings it arouses are significantly different. We might even alter the event, and both lay claim to have been the person to actually first discover the flower . . .’

  ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

  ‘Memory is not made of clay. You can’t always do with it what you want. But I could convince you that my memory is the definitive one, or vice versa. It will not be pinned down.’

  ‘Your point being?’

  ‘Other people’s memories are never your own, no matter how much you might think they are. But you can still share them. That is what my research is concerned with. Can we truly share memories, or are we doomed to communicate in two entirely different languages?’

  Peter was still looking at the photograph of the Parrot’s Beak and didn’t realize Hens had finished talking. He rolled back his sleeve to check his watch, the silent chamber of the library amplifying the ticking of the second hand enough that he quickly rolled it down again.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I have to meet Angelica.’

  ‘Who the hell is Angelica?’

  ‘My assistant.’

  ‘You have an assistant?’ It was a gut feeling of discomfort that had prevented Peter introducing Hens to Angelica, one he hadn’t quite come to terms with. And anyway, he was running late. Punctuality was something he prided himself on. He pushed his chair beneath the table and buttoned his jacket up to the neck until it pinched his Adam’s apple.

  ‘This Angelica. Is she . . .’

  ‘Hens, I have to go.’

  He was almost at the revolving doors by the time Hens caught up with him.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Hens said, holding a finger in the air. Peter shuffled impatiently.

  ‘What? She’s waiting for me.’

  ‘They think they found a Silene tomentosa.’

  ‘Jeez, Hens. Save the Latin for your university friends. I was out of school by the time I was fifteen years old. I barely did basic math.’

  ‘A Gibraltar campion, you ignoramus. They think they found a Gibraltar campion. Just like in your stupid love letter.’

  Peter spent the next five nights after work reading everything he could find on the Gibraltar campion. On three different evenings he was the last person ushered out of the building by the librarian. When the library opened late on a Thursday he stayed until it shut and then took what books he was allowed to borrow home with him, where he read until four in the morning and fell asleep at the kitchen table, bruising his cheek. He was two hours late for work on the Friday, and found Angelica quietly seething. She’d cleaned much of a dead woman’s kitchen on her own and remained unappeased when he told her what a good job he thought she’d done. He gave her a pay rise, and didn’t care that she now felt duty-bound to listen to him tell her all about the Gibraltar campion.

  The Gibraltar campion was a pretty flower with five petals that were each cleft in two at the tip. Its form was round and curious and when spun it beguiled as easily as any kaleidoscope. It was not like the common campion, which was undiscerning, white and dirty, growing on wasteland and clustering on graves. No other flowers grew where the Gibraltar campion did. It was unique, endemic to the island. It grew only in the furthest reaches of the rock face, in holes where it could have the sun to itself. It was not plain, but the colour of pale violet found in the sunsets of Turner. It, too, was the work of a maestro.

  Peter spoke of the flower so passionately, Hens agreed to accompany him to Gibraltar if only to shut him up.

  A man had apparently spotted the Gibraltar campion from a passing boat, through binoculars, on a day when the water was too tempestuous to get any closer to the rocks. Today, the sea stilled to record the sun’s vanity, but travelling this far to an unconfirmed sighting was a huge risk, one that none of the other botanists Hens knew had been willing to take.

  Hens had a little climbing experience and friends who kindly lent their equipment. Eager that he be the one to test it out, Peter let Hens go first and he spent the entire morning on the cliff face, dipping his hands into the rock’s nooks and scaring resting seabirds. Peter’s job was to maintain the security of the rope and help hoist Hens back up to the top of the cliff when he tired. But Hens never tired. His muscles were a show of beauteous harmony, slinking beneath his skin like a puma’s.

  Lying on that clifftop, fine grass tickling his back, listening to the staccato song of Iberian gulls hovering in feathered crucifixes, part of Peter hoped that Hens would find the campion, take the glory, and that he would be told exactly where to look.

  A solitary cloud stray
ed across an otherwise unblemished sky. Peter let a stiff brown beetle search his navel. A welcome breeze swilled his ears.

  ‘It’s not here,’ Hens said from below. ‘I think the old bastard’s crazy.’ Peter leaned over the edge, saw the wash on the rocks and instantly felt dizzy. Hens dangled, grumpily kicking his legs against the cliff face. ‘I told you this was stupid. We might as well go home.’

  ‘It’s the first morning. We’ve barely covered any ground. Did you think we’d be presented with the flower in a gift set when we arrived?’

  Hens rubbed his shoulder. All that time at the mercy of the sun and still he hadn’t burned – some Scandinavian he’d turned out to be. ‘Then you try.’

  ‘Gladly,’ Peter said. He hoisted Hens up to the top and unbuckled his harness, before slipping his own legs through the holes. An inch-wide gap hung around the circumference of his thighs. ‘Wait a second. Is it meant to be this loose?’

  ‘No,’ Hens said, ‘it’s just that you have legs made of twine.’ Presuming this was a Danish saying, Peter let it go.

  Hens tightened the harness and lowered Peter over the edge, where the waves were louder than he’d ever heard. For ten minutes, fifteen perhaps, he hung as steadily as possible some twenty feet down, fighting the urge to summon the hotel continental breakfast he’d eaten that morning and make it answer to daylight. Eventually the movement of the water beneath him made a perverse sense. His inner compass settled and he was able to traverse the rock face, though nothing of his movement proved nimble and the sun scorched his skin.

  Ninety minutes – less than half the time Hens had spent searching – were all that Peter could manage before his buttocks numbed.

  As a preliminary outing, it could be deemed successful. Neither of them had died, he had learned how to use the ropes, hadn’t vomited, and Hens had an impressive tan he might be able to put to work on the women in the tango class their hotel was hosting that evening, which was all he’d talked about since the moment they’d checked in.

  Peter tugged three times on the auxiliary cable.

  ‘Hens!’ Nothing. He waited for a small flock of noisy gulls overhead to move on, then shouted again. Still nothing. Peter began to panic, a fear he could only liken to that a child experiences after losing sight of a parent in a crowd – the feeling that all as it was would now be lost forever. ‘Hens!’

  He began to fiddle with the clips that fastened him to the rope, thinking he’d remembered how to manipulate the pulley system and slowly lift himself up the cliff face. But he knew as soon as he’d unfastened it what it was that he had done wrong.

  The rope began to feed through the buckle, faster and faster, going up as he was moving downwards, dropping, not quite free fall, still attached to something. Thirty, forty feet, fast enough to smash his bones like china.

  He thought of Angelica. He thought of his sister, Susan, how she’d always warned him to be careful. How he’d scoffed. How he loved her.

  At fifty feet he was overtaken by an impulse to save himself. Suddenly, everything seemed obvious. As happens in proximity to death, Peter remembered why life was worth living. Still falling, ropes whipping at his thighs, he reattached the secondary clasp. Its metal teeth bit the rope and he came to a halt six feet above the rocks with a bounce and a snap that echoed off the cliff face. Gulls scattered. Speckles of sea foam dripped down his calves.

  There was peace down there by the water, eighty feet from the top. He dangled for a minute, catching his breath, and spun in circles as the rope unwound. Then he saw it.

  There, on a ledge no bigger than an upturned hand, was the Gibraltar campion. It was about forty centimetres high, with sun-kissed green leaves, no more interesting to the casual observer than any houseplant, quite ugly even. But nestled amongst the leaves, swaying, Peter found a small and beautifully detailed bilobed flower. White from a distance, up close an ethereal explosion of colour washed across the petals, from pink to purple. Elegant and soft, but surviving here, battered like a lighthouse by the wind and waves, a candle lit inside a tempest.

  Peter was overcome by the sheer unlikeliness of its existence, and felt a kinship with the flower that seemed to distort him for a second. Above them, an infinite number of galaxies, planets and possibilities. Unknowns of a number that cannot be expressed. Yet here, on a protruding ledge and at the end of a rope, endless variables had colluded to bring him and the flower together. He was sure then that if anything could happen, then anything would.

  And better yet, there was not one flower, but two, rocking gently on the breeze.

  ‘Are you OK!?’ Hens’s head appeared five minutes later, leaning over the edge of the cliff.

  ‘Pull me up!’ Peter shouted, his rage disguised by the smash of the tide. Inch by inch he rose, until Hens was lying back on the grass exhausted, whilst Peter counted the lashes scored into his legs. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I didn’t think you would want to come up this early. I’d only just lowered you down. But I was here . . . I was here.’ Had Peter not known Hens was lying, he’d have guessed from the way he couldn’t make eye contact for more than a second. He chose not to argue the point now. He just wanted to get away from the clifftop.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘Did you find the campion?’ Hens asked. Peter’s teeth clenched in anger. Hens didn’t deserve to see it.

  ‘I don’t think it’s here.’

  ‘I knew it. Didn’t I tell you? I knew it.’

  In the car park, beside the rental vehicle, was a Volkswagen camper van that hadn’t been there when they’d arrived. Inside it were two women. They waved at Hens and he pretended he hadn’t seen them. Peter loaded the car with the gear and stood in silence eating the sandwiches the hotel kitchen had kindly prepared that morning. Nothing made a man homesick like stale bread and waxy cheese.

  They searched the other cliff faces on the remaining days and found nothing. Hens knew the campion was extinct. Peter knew it wasn’t. They each had their own memory. They each had their own truth.

  SIX

  Just two days after finding the flight recorder of The Long Forgotten, Professor Cole looks out at the reporters convened for a press conference on the matter in the garish lobby of a Sydney hotel. His hair is combed neatly to one side to disguise the fact it’s all but disappeared at the back, he is wearing a suit one size too small, and only a glinting gold tooth identifies him as the same man who stood on the deck of a boat covered in whale blood, the black box of PS570 held above his head.

  That stupid whale. Cole is starting to wish he’d tossed it back into the sea like a rod-caught Atlantic salmon. Concerned that he looks like he isn’t taking the press conference seriously enough, he sits up straight. A dozen or more photographers jostle for position. This is one of many times over the last couple of days he’s noted a lack of respect for the lost passengers of The Long Forgotten. Relief that his wife isn’t there to see it only just overrides the myriad ways in which he misses her.

  He imagines himself in his kitchen, carefully dividing some of her delicious homemade Key lime pie so that they have exactly half each. Any more of that, though, and he definitely won’t fit into this suit. These days suits are so unspeakably dull. As a student at university he had one made of a deep-purple velvet, with bell-bottoms wide enough to swallow an entire boot.

  Beside him is Dr Nipa Dash. She is in her forties but younger looking – her skin babyishly smooth, eyes as round and brown as the knots in an imperfect plank of wood. She addresses the throng of reporters, flashbulbs and microphones thrust intrusively towards her.

  ‘It is still early days. The black box recorder of flight PS570 had considerable damage done to it on its journey, even before it ended up inside the whale.’ An animal rights campaigner who has sneaked into the press conference stands up at the back of the room and shouts something, too far away from the closest microphone to be decipherable. The camera catches a fleeting glimpse of her T-shirt, emblazoned with a photograph of the whale,
belly sawn open, glistening on the deck of the ship. Next to that is a target transposed over the image of Professor Cole’s head, shown on television for a split second before the protestor is quickly bundled from the room by men who move along the wall like shadows. Cole watches the drama unfold on a monitor, snapping the pen in his hand.

  ‘As you already know,’ Dash says, recovering well, ‘we have assembled a team of specialists, experts in air disaster recovery, in an international effort to retrieve the data and conclusively establish what happened to flight PS570 from Jakarta to London, thirty years ago. It was immediately clear to the team that the challenge is a new one, a unique one, and they need to approach it in ways they haven’t considered before. To that end we’ve had to use all of the considerable resources at our disposal to develop new methods, new systems, of data extraction. You’re already aware that we have been able to feed power into the flight recorder. I can now announce that we have been able to plot the plane’s final movements . . . information available to us for the very first time.’

  A large digital display behind Dr Dash blinks into life – a map of the world. A yellow line links Indonesia to England with an angled course running below China, above India, over Turkey and through the heart of Western Europe.

  ‘This,’ she says, ‘was the scheduled flight path of PS570.’ A new line appears, in red, reaching Romania and then taking a southerly path over the north of Italy, where it stops. ‘This is the course we know that the plane took, and here, close to the Swiss border, is where we inexplicably lost all contact with the flight.’ A third line appears, this time in green, flying over the north of France, just shy of the south coast of England. ‘This is the trajectory we have plotted from the new data.’ A big blue dot flashes west of Cornwall, England, a few miles into the Atlantic Ocean. ‘And this is where we now have reason to believe that flight PS570 came down.’ Her face strobes in a sudden explosion of camera flashes. Professor Cole shields his eyes with a clipboard. The journalists caw, until a lone voice speaks.