The Long Forgotten Page 8

  On this day, he was in a Grace Church mood, which is why he didn’t mind too much when Susan ate half his eggs and links. Regulars sat at the dirty tables by windows cloaked with condensation, and the chef scraped burnt fat from the griddle. Peter made a mental list of the hygiene regulation contraventions on display. Perversely, without them, the diner might have lost both its charm and his custom.

  They were so clearly siblings; the same stubby nose, the same tiny ears, like pasta shells. Susan’s mousy hair was flat and unkempt, and yet she was somehow perfect. He could have watched her steal his food all day.

  Susan said she worried about him every time they met. Usually, that he worked too much, or that he didn’t get out enough, and apparently the worry was enough that it ruined her appetite. She took a bite from his final slice of toast, then slid the plate back across the table. Of more pressing concern was his new hobby, which she hoped he’d drop as quickly as he had all those when they were young. She swore often and loudly these flower expeditions would get him killed one day, that he’d be kidnapped by an unknown tribe in a jungle somewhere, impaled on a spit and roasted on a fire.

  ‘I worry myself sick,’ Susan said. ‘And I worry that you’ll pick up some deadly virus at work, in all that dirt. You don’t know what bacteria is in there.’

  ‘Actually, I know exactly what bacteria is in there. And anyway, don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. When she overthought things her chin puckered, like their mother’s, the dimpled peel of an overripe fruit.

  ‘And now you’re off around the world trying to kill yourself.’

  ‘I’m not trying to kill myself.’

  ‘What about the time you almost fell down that cliff?’

  ‘What cliff?’

  ‘Don’t tease me. In that place . . . the place with the monkeys.’

  ‘Gibraltar?’

  ‘Yes, Gibraltar.’

  ‘I was attached to a harness. It was perfectly safe. I wouldn’t call it falling down a cliff.’

  ‘You need to find yourself a woman, Petey.’

  ‘Don’t call me Petey.’

  ‘There’s a lady who uses the same dry cleaners I do. Pretty. Looks ten years younger than she is. Beautiful brown skin. Think her parents are from the Indian subcontinent somewhere. Divorced . . . but no children.’ Through the window, he watched an enraged taxi driver climbing out of his car to throttle a cyclist and was able to empathize with them both.

  It had been three weeks since they had returned from Gibraltar, but Peter had not heard from Hens, nor wanted to, though he’d thought of him daily. Hens’ guilty conscience belatedly awoke. He called and invited Peter out for dinner. Peter accepted, expecting a more conventional apology than the one he would receive.

  Hens chose the restaurant, somewhere on the Upper West Side. Peter was sure he wouldn’t like it the moment he stepped out of the cab. Inside, it was gaudily decorated, expensive and badly lit.

  ‘Here,’ Hens said, sliding a brown envelope across the table.

  ‘What’s this? A bribe so I don’t tell people what a thoughtless rock-climbing companion you are?’

  ‘A gift, to say sorry for being a thoughtless rock-climbing companion.’

  ‘Oh, Hens, I’m joking. This meal is enough.’

  ‘Just open it.’ Hens placed his hand over Peter’s and Peter was struck by the difference in their sizes, like a crab concealing her young from a gull. In the envelope, a plane ticket. Destination: Chile.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You know what it is.’

  ‘And you’re giving it to me?’ Hens nodded. ‘How much did it cost?’

  ‘Don’t argue with me. It’s being covered by the university as part of a research grant. There is a woman who lives there. It’s unconfirmed but apparently she’s 116 years old. And she looks it, too. Like a tortoise. But she’s got this amazing history. This woman has seen Chile through revolutions, dictatorships, everything. But she’s got all of her, how do you say, faculties?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She remembers all of it. Face of a tortoise, memory of an elephant. So I am going to interview her about what she remembers and, more importantly, why. And you’re coming with me as my glamorous assistant. Except, not glamorous at all, you understand.’

  ‘Where is your actual glamorous assistant?’ Peter had seen Hens talking to a demure-looking woman in spectacles when he’d met him from work on a cloudy Friday evening. Overcome with shyness at her beauty, he hadn’t dared approach.

  ‘She’s not my assistant. She’s just some woman who works in the offices.’

  ‘That’s very kind, Hens,’ Peter said, ‘but I know nothing about your work, you know that.’

  ‘No, you ass! You’re not really coming to interview the old woman. That’s my job. You, my friend, have other work to be concerned with.’ He opened the envelope further and a passport-sized photograph of a plant fell out into a patch of Béarnaise sauce on the tablecloth. Peter already knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the offer that was coming. A chance to put another tick on the list. And on someone else’s dime? He might as well lie down in the palm of Hens’s hand. ‘While I work, you go find this. When you find it, we go see it together. I give you . . . the Puya chilensis.’

  ‘The what?’

  Hens made a clicking sound with his tongue against his bottom teeth.

  ‘The sheep-eating plant.’

  A fortnight later, Peter watched as the copper-rich deserts of northern Chile gave way to thick forests, then became vast volcanoes and lakes, fjords, inlets, islands and great twisting peninsulas.

  They checked into a drab hotel in Santiago, sharing a noisy twin room off the old town’s main drag. While Hens took a cold shower, Peter called Angelica, who reassured him that business would be fine, that he should enjoy himself and his stupid hobby, that this was no time to be calling her on the other side of the world. He gave her the number for the hotel, just in case.

  Hens wanted to go drinking but Peter was too exhausted from the journey. Rest, for Hens, was a chore and he could survive perfectly happily on four hours’ sleep a night. This might have been useful, were he a head of state. But his primary interests were drinking and meeting women, and the women that were awake at four in the morning in Chilean bars were not the calming influence Peter thought Hens needed. Hens came back seventeen hours later, blind drunk, without his wallet and with his nose now a botched, swollen prism, bleeding in the middle of his face. He talked incoherently about the woman in the university office who had spurned his advances – how dare she!? – while Peter half listened, then vaulted into unconsciousness. It was already morning, so Peter showered, then waited for the hotel manager – who’d told him she could locate a knowledgeable tour guide – to ascend the rickety stairs outside the door.

  The landlady introduced Peter to a driver who knew the plant well. Max Sosa drove him out of the city, into the arid hillsides of the Chilean Matorral. The journey was longer than Peter had predicted by examining the map, and though the heat was stultifying, they had no choice but to keep the windows up to fend off the red dust that coated their hair.

  Max was a young man whose eyelids hung at half mast, so he appeared to be just shy of sleep at all times. For the first hour they didn’t trade a word. Peter’s command of the dialect was non-existent, and Max apparently found it funny to watch the inappropriately dressed passenger in the back, sweat collecting in the grooves of the seat, like it would be a story he’d tell his sons when he returned home.

  The back wheels bucked as the car hit a pothole, and the two men seemed momentarily weightless. Though Max was a clear half a foot shorter than Peter, both banged their heads on the roof with a thump when it found the ground again. Struggling to bring the car under control, Max yanked the steering wheel left, then right, almost tipping the entire vehicle onto its side before it came to a stop in the middle of the road, an undulating S-shaped track stretched through the dirt behind it. Peter looked into the rear-view mirror, wh
ere he caught Max’s eye, and they crumpled into laughter, bonded by the universal language of a close escape.

  ‘The roads,’ Max said, the words clipped. ‘They are shit.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Peter said, mopping his brow with his sleeve. Max straightened the car in the road, took a deep breath, and they carried on, slower than before.

  ‘It’s no trip to Chile if you don’t cheat death.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘And where are they now?’

  ‘Dead.’ The men laughed again, louder this time, and Peter clambered over the seat into the front.

  After another hour’s driving in which the conversation never faltered, Max dropped Peter off with some water, a map and a compass, and told him to meet back at the same spot in six hours’ time.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, grinning, his accent a twanged string. ‘Remember, Mr Manyweathers, you are not the little sheep. You don’t get snagged in the Puya or I bring knife to cut you out!’

  Sharp leaves on the roadside lashed Peter’s legs beneath the hem of his shorts, raised red scratches flecking the skin. He pictured his trousers, neatly folded on a shelf beside the bed, and wanted them with the same tired lust these tropical shrubs had for the contents of his water bottle. He laughed, if only to mask the profound sense of regret he was experiencing, then seriously considered sitting down on the spot for six hours and pretending that he had fruitlessly searched for his quarry. But no, he had come too far to stop now.

  ‘You’re sure it’s here?’ he said.

  ‘If it is anywhere in the world growing wild, it is here in this square kilometre. The question is not if, Mr Manyweathers, it is when!’

  After Max had driven away, Peter took a reference book from the rucksack Susan had given to him as a gift. Already well thumbed, it fell open at the page he was looking for – a picture of the plant that he now saw all around him. The sheep-eater. Max was right. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. The sheep-eater was an evergreen perennial bromeliad, native to these unforgiving climes. It stood up to two metres high and at the top formed a large dense rosette of grey-green, swathe-like leaves covered in hooked spikes, so that it resembled a mace. They were everywhere.

  Peter approached one, dabbing a finger against the weaponized tips. Though the plant is not uncommon, the sheep-eater flowers just once every twenty years, and only for a week at most, a flash of green and yellow as pretty as a picnic in a meadow. But the beauty of the flower betrayed the grisly means it had adopted to live. The outer two-thirds of the leaves’ blade bore spines and were so tough that Chilean fishermen used their fibres to weave robust nets. This prevented herbivores from reaching the thick fleshy stalk at the centre. The plant had evolved to defend itself, just as a child grows to learn that fire burns, and pins prick, and not everything in the world – other humans included – will be its friend.

  But more than that, the plant had learned to attack. It used these sharp spines to snare and trap animals – sheep – that slowly starved to death, bleating their last under the hot sun that rose behind the Andes to the east. They then decayed at the base of the plant, acting as a fertilizer in the otherwise parched ground. The plant feasted on the nutrients, drawing the good from all the bad around it. They stood as proud monuments to nature’s merciless dependence on death for as far as the eye could see. But to find one in bloom would take tremendous good fortune. And a decent pair of walking boots.

  Peter headed north-west in as straight a line as possible, through the rocks and leaf-daggers. When half the time had elapsed he’d scaled eight hundred metres. The air was thin, his lungs dented ping-pong balls, battered and reluctant to reassert their shape. He’d found nothing but a new lexicon of profanity to describe the pain of the blister that had appeared on his right heel from nowhere, and a new-found respect for the Sherpa. Anxious not to miss the lift back into town, he rested for a few minutes and then began a slow and steady descent.

  He was perhaps an hour back down the slope, a little confused and looking at his compass when he heard it, the noise: one note, distorted but sustained for four, five seconds or more.

  Brrrrrrrrrrrr. He’d no idea where it had come from, and though he looked all he could see were rocks, shrubs and monolithic stalks.

  Brrrrrrrrrrrr. Not so loud this time. He took a few short steps back.

  Brrrrrrrrrrrr. To his left was a bank of spiky, hard-skinned bush leaves, so thick and sturdy they looked as though they could survive a nuclear blast. The sound was coming from beyond them, but there was no getting through it. He would have to climb around them, up the steep incline that penned them in to the north, and shimmy across the sheer face for a good fifteen minutes. It would blow his timing. He’d be late, with no guarantee that Max would wait. He had already been paid, and it wouldn’t be the first time Peter had mistakenly placed his trust in someone else. But he’d seen in Max’s eyes, when they’d almost flipped the car, a kindness: a shared belief in what is precious far stronger than his word.

  It came again, shorter, more urgent. Brrrrrr. He began to climb.

  The rock face was solid and simple, if laborious, to navigate. He managed it faster than predicted and dropped onto a thin patch of flat ground on the other side of the scrub, no more than a metre in width. This formed the lip of an almighty crevice, unseen before, now splitting the landscape in two. The rocky valley bent the buzzing sound, so that it became sourceless and infinite. But it was in there somewhere. He took a torch from his rucksack and shone it into the void. Two eyes lit up, staring back at him from the blackness. ‘Hello! I can see you!’ he shouted.

  Brrrrrrrr.

  With utmost care he lowered himself over the precipice and eased down, slowly, carefully, thinking of the close call in Gibraltar, while the torch in his mouth picked face-shaped pools of shade from the rocks.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he mumbled, reaching the bottom, jaw aching, sweat stinging his eyes. He let his sight adjust. There was light at the bottom from a thin split in the rock. Plants, unseen before, thrived in the gloom. Emerging. Surviving. Finding a way on their own. Central among them was the Puya chilensis, in glorious bloom. Its flowers glistened like coral jostled by a Caribbean tide. Frail yellow petals, bursting forth from delicate lime buds, intricate little buttons on the face of a peculiar monster.

  And at its base, snared in the vicious spikes, a sheep. Wizened by weeks of hunger, wool damp and bloody from where, driven crazy by starvation, it had begun to eat its own flesh.

  Peter clutched his stomach, more through shock than sickness. He poured water from the bottle into his left hand and put it to the sheep’s mouth. Weakly lolling over the crumbling brown slabs of its teeth, its tongue felt like a dying animal in its own right. The stench of shit and infected flesh didn’t bother Peter – his work had prepared him for worse. No, it was the dawning of an awful truth that turned his stomach. The sheep was beyond saving. Mercy, or something similar, meant killing it. He had never knowingly killed anything, let alone something so big as a sheep, which in that moment, shivering, scared, tired and in pain, seemed human. It was just as he’d always said to Angelica: we’re all nothing more than organic matter. We’re all just the same, in the end. There was, he supposed, a little comfort in that, so he clung to it.

  He lay with the sheep a while, until its bleats collapsed under the weight of silence, stroking its knotted wool and hoping it might find peace. Its breath faded, then returned, then faded again. When he thought it might perish, and its eyes blanked and watered, from somewhere it found life in the grey. It could have survived another hour, another day, but he could sense its frustration in the to and fro of its weight shifting on his lap. It wanted an ending. It wanted him to kill it.

  Peter lifted the torch above his head with both arms, as if he were fishing in a low river with a spear. The sheep turned its head into the leaves. They had conspired, together, in what was coming. Or so he thought.

  He quickly
brought the torch handle down towards the sheep’s skull. Filled with a sudden energy, the sheep flinched, its last survival instinct jerking from its body, leaping the gap between life and death. With one final almighty kick it shifted, still stuck in the leaves but a foot or more lower, and Peter’s momentum, now unstoppable, toppled him over onto the plant. The spines of the Puya chilensis tore open the skin on his legs, arms and chest, exposing the squirming pink of muscle. He was impaled on a leaf, sharp as a boning knife, stabbed through the soft flesh just above his hip. His rucksack, out of reach, taunted him from the ledge where he’d rested it, though his water bottle was still clipped to his belt. Pain rose slowly through his body, as if he was lowering himself into a bath of it. When it reached his head he took a final look at the sheep, recognized what he took to be sympathy in a gentle nod, then felt his own consciousness flit wildly away.

  When he woke, a cold sweat was soaking through his clothes. At night the valley sky was a velvet curtain, peppered with the moth holes of stars. A stalactite of coagulated blood clung to his back. The pain had plateaued, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t twist the key of the spike through the muscle. Looking down to the lower of the two bunks he had accidentally made, he saw the sheep was dead. He cried for it, or that’s what he told himself.

  Were it not for the freakishly warm summer nights the area had been subjected to, he’d have frozen to death at the foot of the Puya chilensis. Over the next eight days Peter watched its flower bloom, wither, then die, from below. It was beautiful, to be witness to this brief and wondrous lifetime of colour. Just as the sheep had enriched it, so it had enriched him. He prepared to die with the flower and had just one regret. That he couldn’t share this glorious sight with someone just as ecstatic to see it.

  On the ninth morning, water long gone, he knew his body only as an endless piano of ribs.