“As we have done.”
He nodded. “And we are strolling home. We have just left the beach behind us and we are strolling towards our tourist apartment to do what holiday makers do. We pass beneath the curling stalks of flowering jasmine. We breathe in...” He took a theatrically-deep breath that whistled in his nose. “And there is the smell. Describe it.”
“Sweet. Perfumed.”
Cartwright let go of her and slumped down in his chair. “You’ve got the imagination of a tailor’s dummy.”
“And a similar number of limbs.”
They both laughed.
“Has it ever occurred to you that the smell of jasmine is quite remarkably like the smell of sewers? Sweet, yes, but also decaying, reminiscent of overripe fruit.”
“Can’t say I’ve noticed...” Christine paused for a moment. I can always tell when my wife is thinking. “Tom, there are perfumes, expensive eaus de cologne, even brand names for every cosmetic under the sun that contain the word ‘jasmine’. Are you telling me that they are happy to be associated with the whiff of sewers?”
“The trouble is, Chris, that you have no imagination.”
“Tom, if names are de rigueur..:”
“Haji Salleh, if you don’t mind.”
“Fuck off! I’m not going through that charade again! Tom! Tom! Tom! Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom! Tom-tom! I don’t need an imagination to smell sewers. And I guarantee that the jasmine-flavoured eau de cologne on my dressing table in London SW7 - oh how I long for it! - does not smell one little bit of toilets.”
Cartwright laughed. “Thank you, Miss Gardiner, for your thoughtful contribution.”
Christine turned to her left and slapped him hard, leaning across with her right arm so she could flat-palm him on the crown of his head.
“I’m serious,” he said, moving sharply to his left and laughing. There is little that is more embarrassing to witness than a pair of third-agers behaving like teenagers. “It’s by design. There is a sweetness in the odour, but it is still reminiscent of sewers, of decay.” He was back to his normal seated position now. Christine turned to refill the water glass she had just upset. “It’s all about attraction. The plant needs insects, because they are going to visit the flowers and pollinate them. The jasmines - especially the night flowering types - specialise in the same types of insects that are attracted to decaying things, hence the smell, which is reminiscent of sewers.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
He turned to look at her and gave her a perfunctory tap on the arm with his right hand. “That’s what everyone says when they don’t believe a word of what’s being said.”
“Probably. And keep your hands to yourself. You don’t know where they might have been.”
“I’m serious. It’s the same with the flower up in the forest. It smells of decay to attract the insects it wants.”
“How can you say, ‘It wants?’ The plant hasn’t sat around trying out the whole tropical rain forest range of perfumes and then consciously opted for the bottle branded, ‘Sewers and Shit’.”
“But that’s the whole point.” Christine looked perplexed. “That’s what we call evolution. Once upon a time there were probably loads of different plants with myriads of different smells. This particular approach, however, is marked out from the others by proving to be relatively successful, indicated by the survival of the species. It’s called evolution.”
“I’d hardly call a few specimens embedded deep in an inaccessible forest as being particularly successful.”
“In biological terms, it may be rather specialised, but it has its niche.”
“And where we went is not supposed to be its niche. Is that correct?”
“Correct. We went over there.” He pointed to some indeterminate place directly off the balcony. We went up that river[5], changed boats, of course, took the left fork after the rapids and then parked about a kilometre up the tributary. You will then remember that we walked.”
“How could I forget?”
“You do make a meal of things...”
“Tom... Tom, I have only one leg, precisely one leg!”
“It has been known...”
“Shut up! I have one leg. I have never been one for forest trekking, and you drag me halfway up a mountain, where there isn’t even a proper path. Then you tell me not to pull myself up using the plants because they are poisonous...”
“Not all of them.”
“But not having a PhD in botany means that they are all potential threats! I don’t know which one I can grab and which one I can’t!”
“It’s best to avoid the thorns.”
“Oh, screw you!” She turned again to slap him, but he ducked away to his left. “There’s no wonder it took a day and a half to get up there. Seriously, Tom, how long would it normally take you?”
“A few hours.”
“When we set off I thought we might be away for half a day. I didn’t even take a change of clothes...”
“But you enjoyed yourself?”
Christine scowled, but also smiled. She clearly had.
“As I was saying... we went up a river and then to the top of a hill, where we found our flower...”
Christine interrupted. “...having stayed overnight to look at a pile of compost that smells of shit. And we got bitten to death in the process. There’s tourism for you.”
“But it only flowers at night. You have to be there overnight to see it at all. And timing is everything, because each time the flower only lasts a few days.”
“Big deal. Pile of shit if you ask me.”
“Christine...”
She laughed. Her manner had been consistently and aggressively playful throughout. Every comment was delivered tongue in cheek, but with latent joy. There was no other way to describe her manner, except perhaps near-ecstatic. I do remember seeing her in such a mood, but it was certainly many years ago. I was already starting to regret sending my second email.
“Seriously, Tom, it was a wonderful trip. The destination could have been pleasanter, but it scored on originality. But I really didn’t expect to be away for four days...”
“You were a little slow in the forest.”
“I wasn’t slow. I was often stationary, trying to think how I might take the next step, just one. And I was often baffled.”
“But you got there.”
“I did. I did indeed. I got there.” They were both silent for a moment. It was a reflective silence, like the respect that Russians share before a departure. “Precisely where I got, I cannot be sure.”
“Well, look over there.” He raised his arm to point directly off the balcony towards the forested horizon. “Over there, up to the north is where we see the big mountain every morning and evening.” Christine squinted as she strained to see over the balcony rail. “Now move a little south, five degrees or so. We were on that line, on which is also, eventually, the national park that runs south from the mountain, a place famous for its groups of tourists trekking up hill and down dale in search of a blooming flower of the type you and I have just seen.”
She stayed quite silent.
“Don’t you see what I have been hinting at?”
“See what? I was hoping we might get a chance to dissect this most recent experience you have inflicted on me. It didn’t take me until the fourth day of the escapade to begin asking why the hell we had set off in the first place. I was drenched before we had reached the coastline. I was covered in mud from head to toe at least a dozen times. I fell so many times I stopped counting. I was bitten to pieces, came close to drowning several times, almost lost my remaining limbs, encountered a number of snakes, had my blood sucked by leeches, got stuck up to my knee in a swamp, quicksand, no doubt, and to cap it all lost at least two night’s sleep. And all to see a co
mpost heap that smelled of shit. And I didn’t even take a change of clothes.”
“You don’t need a change of clothes when the ones you are wearing can be washed - and get washed! - at least ten times a day. And you have already learned that when you walk in this part of the world, the concept of dry clothing is just that, a concept, one that never occurs in reality.”
“But why? I’ve tried to ask you just about every hour of every day since we left. I can understand why we might have called in at your home over there so I could meet your wife and family. Now that did help me assemble a picture of Tom Cartwright, the man, the family man, that had been lacking thus far. But why on earth did we then set off up that river?”
“Look, Chris. You have come here to examine just why I can be so lucky, extraordinarily so, in my market trades. I have told you repeatedly that it’s not luck, but also that, in the normal way we express such things, it’s not planning either.”
“Flowers, smells, sewers, financial markets, uncountable wealth... I begin to see the connections...” Her tone was facetious. Cartwright scoffed. She continued. “I am beginning to think that we must be participants in some bizarre, reality-television, random association exercise.”
Cartwright sat bolt upright and then leaned forward. His tone became theatrical and his My Fair Lady voice sounded practiced, but only partially convincing. “My God, I think she’s got it!”
Christine stopped him again as he laughed, her outstretched arm grabbed his right wrist. “Got what, you idiot? It feels like you are trying to torture me!”
“You used the God word, Chris,” he said, half turning towards her in his seat, a momentary overbalancing on the stump of his right leg causing his voice to reach a passing falsetto. “The God word unlocks everything. You said it: ‘random’, unless I was mistaken.”
Christine looked merely confused. The words, ‘then it is all a matter of luck’ were waiting to be spoken, but remained unsaid.
“How do you think I was able to take you to a place where no textbook says you can find something as noticeable as the world’s biggest flower, a rarity even where it’s supposed to be common? Do you think I plucked the place and time out of a map and a calendar at random, and then had you trek up a mountain for three days on the off chance that we might see something? Think about it, Chris, the flower we saw probably isn’t there tonight because it’s already died back. I was that specific.”
She thought for a moment. “Local knowledge?”
“Okay, I accept that plays a part and a big part. But in this case its role is largely functional. There are lots of people with local knowledge hereabouts, but only I knew there would be flowering plants in that location.” He paused again to point at the distant horizon, roughly towards the north-east. “The best-known area for the plants is over there. That’s where the tourists trek through national park in search of their prey. Now if you go there and look around, you will notice other species, sub-species, terrain types, topology et cetera et cetera... The pollinators, the ones that our plant likes, also like these other characteristics of the place. That’s why they live there. And where the pollinators prevail, so does our plant, and thus it flowers. Now I have spent a few decades tramping these forests and rivers, but I am a mathematician, not a botanist or a biologist. I have looked around with a mathematician’s eye, and an eye with a keen interest in the relationship between the random and the particular, event and non-event, circumstance and contradiction.”
“It started like logic and finished like theology. Could you translate, please?”
He laughed and leaned across to pat her arm again. “I don’t want to patronise you, dear.” He was now speaking to her as if he had known her all his life. “I took you up there to see the flower to prove to you that I knew it would be there, this week, in that place. It’s what I have been working on for some time, what I have been doing back there since you arrived.” A gesture of the thumb over his left shoulder indicated his office inside. I presumed he was now referring to the papers of scribble our specialists had consistently described as gibberish.
“Wait... wait...” Christine was clearly not following this. She was not alone. “How could you be sure? You told me that the plant is not even catalogued as living in that area.”
“Precisely. Just because someone has not seen something, there is no reason to assume it doesn’t exist, especially with our plant, which for most of its existence is invisible, because it’s a parasite that lives inside its host. It only shows itself when it flowers, and that’s only for a day or two.”
“So it can be there all the time, but most people miss it.?”
“Precisely.”
“So you are telling me that you knew the plant lived there in a place where no-one else has recorded it?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“...and you also knew it was about to flower... and you took us to the exact place to record the fact...”
He nodded and then spoke quietly, as he looked directly across the wide channel before them. “Nails have been firmly knocked on the head. Well done.”
Christine smiled at him alongside a shake of the head. It was a gesture that expressed both acceptance and familiarity, blended with affection and profound disbelief. “Are you clairvoyant or something? The something being dilettante, perhaps?” she asked, her choice of terms obviously calculated to provoke.
“As I have told you, Chris, it’s a question of trading off the two concepts of randomness and expectation. I have scrambled through these forests over the decades. And in recent times I have become engrossed in the possibility that my ideas might be applied to biological systems, as well as to the easier-to-predict world of finance.”
Christine was listening with intent interest, but offered only the merest nod in response.
“I have been sharing data and techniques with researchers in biology and then chose a problem I thought might be solvable, a problem where such a solution would be both definitive and demonstrable.”
“...such as identifying a place where the flower is thought not to exist, but yet it does.”
He stopped, pausing abruptly as if replaying her words. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “not at all. End of stick, wrong one, you have got. The whole point is that it has to be there. It’s not a case of ‘thought to exist’: it’s more like no-one has bothered to look.” He paused. She was rapt. “Everything, habitat, associated species, nutrient, climate, chemistry, rainfall, temperature, et cetera, everything, if you like, most things, most important things, if you are realistic, are there, and so what I am looking for is also likely to be there. People have been looking for oil and gas in such a manner, at least partially, for generations. I didn’t find the flower at random. Neither did I know it would be there. But it was more than merely worth a try. Now translate that approach to financial matters, apply a little Black-Scholes equation on the side, but as a mere tool, and Robert becomes avuncular.”
Christine had framed the question some time before. It still troubled her. “But Tom, that’s all the other pundits do, surely... And they are nowhere near as successful as you have been... And one smelly flower doesn’t make a sewage farm...”
“Again, like everyone else, Chris, you miss the point. What I do might look like what others do, at least superficially, sometimes, and from some perspectives.” He got up from his chair and began to hop purposefully towards the back of the house. He was a man in a hurry.
“And while you’re there, get me a drink, will you? The usual.” Christine was making a good show of trying to enjoy herself. My heart leapt a little as she turned to her right to retrieve the laptop she had obviously not used for some days. She had stored it in the sealed plastic bag that our logisitics people had wisely demanded should travel with it. This was clearly to be the crunch time.
By the time Cartwright returned, somehow carrying
a tray laden with heavy items, Christine’s machine was halfway through its start-up process. He had not even spilled her drink, as he had hopped his way in his little shuffles across the bamboo floor all the way from the back of the house. He set the glass down on the table between their chairs.
“Look,” he said, standing before her and placing the tray and the rest of its contents on his own chair. “Now most people are absolutely useless at this. Let’s see if you can do it.”
Christine took a long, slow and satisfied sip of her drink, and let out an audible, slightly ecstatic sigh, as Cartwright began to perform before her. He reached down to the tray to select a lemon, which he held up, calyx first, for her perusal.
“What can you see?”
“A lemon.”
He dropped his hands to his sides in desperation. A glance skyward was surely an appeal for help. “I know it’s a fucking lemon...”
“Then why did you ask me?”
He muttered under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.” He was fighting off an impatience that was largely theatrical. “Chris, please place your mind in conceptual mode. Please exclude the literal from this exercise. I’m a mathematician. I deal in shapes, ideas, relationships...” He held up the lemon again, calyx first. “What shape do you see?”
“It’s a circle...more or less,” said Chris, her conclusion almost triumphal.
Cartwright gave gentle applause. He placed the lemon on the balustrade, its long axis along the rail. He then took up the gin bottle, which was of a variety rarely seen in shops at home, an upmarket brand named after birds. It was a plain, clear-glass bottle that he held before her, but with its bottom pointing towards her. “And this shape?”
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