The Long Forgotten

by David Whitehouse

  The ward was small and crowded. Three beds down a woman screamed at perfectly timed four-minute intervals, while directly across the aisle another seemed intent on giving birth in complete silence, as if it were a vow she’d taken. Later that morning Peter glimpsed her daughter, squirming and waxy white. He watched another two women come and go before Harum neared the end.

  ‘You should leave, Mr Manyweathers,’ the midwife said. Compared to the others she was a tall woman. Her arms were long, as though she’d evolved to extract babies from birth canals.

  ‘He’s not leaving,’ Harum said, with a determination that briefly hushed the ward. The midwife whispered to a doctor, who looked too tired to argue the finer points of hospital protocol. He sighed as the doors opened to admit another woman, this one with a belly big enough to contain a litter.

  There was nothing Peter could say to ease the pain for Harum, who’d lost enough blood now to be locked in an unstoppable, protracted shiver. Concealing a fresh surge of fear that dried his throat, he looked at the monitors, each with their own electronic heartbeat. Not one of them had turned red, or flatlined, or any of the things he’d seen in movies that meant a patient was in trouble. Yet when he leaned over to kiss Harum he saw the bluish tinge of her lips, and in her wrist as he gripped it her pulse was faint, buried deep in the flesh, almost undetectable, a maggot in an apple. Maybe she was just exhausted.

  ‘Bersetubuh! Bersetubuh!’ she screamed. By now he’d learned a little of the local profanity. He smiled awkwardly at the other mothers, who were already bothered by his presence.

  Out of the third-floor window he watched a group of young men in the square below smoking cigarettes around two of their number playing chess. He was briefly overcome by a daydream of a simpler time, when it was just him and Angelica, and Hens Berg was only a man he knew who pretended to appreciate rare flowers. Despite everything, he wouldn’t have swapped it for this. A black car drove slowly around the edge of the square. Peter closed the bent plastic blinds.

  ‘Peter,’ Harum said through clenched teeth. He brought his ear close to her mouth and, as though she had willed it, it came to rest on her chest, where her heart thumped to reach him. ‘Promise me when this is over, life will be calm.’

  ‘I promise you life will be calm.’

  ‘And we’ll do all the things we want to do.’

  ‘I promise, we’ll do all the things we want to do.’

  ‘I won’t let you forget.’

  ‘I shall never forget.’

  One of the midwives walked away. Peter noticed that when she reached the doors of the maternity ward, she started to run. Minutes later she returned a little out of breath and with two doctors he hadn’t seen before. They stood between Harum’s legs, stroking their chins as though coming to some telepathic consensus. Peter spoke softly, slowly, so that Harum turned towards him.

  ‘You won’t be sick any more. You won’t be frightened. You’ll be perfect. We’ll be perfect.’

  ‘Bersetubuh! Sialan bajingan!’ she screamed.

  Peter heard a shift in the doctor’s tone, and, for Harum’s sake, did his best to stay calm. But he was in no doubt. They were near the end. This baby would be born soon, Harum would get better, and he’d keep the promise he had made. She’d bring into the world not just a new life, but a new future for them all.

  ‘Talk to me,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll take our baby to find the Middlemist’s Red, in a glasshouse in England, the only one in the world.’

  ‘Tell me what it’ll look like.’

  ‘As pink as your heart, and with so many petals you’ll think it’s a hundred camellias in one.’

  A shorter midwife took Peter’s arm. It was coming. He turned to kiss Harum again, left his lips against hers a second just to warm them.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, and in no time at all he was out on the ward, watching through a thin gap in the curtain around the bed as the medical team moved in a synchronized flurry. The beeps of machinery sped. The sound of Harum’s screaming grew so urgent the other birthing women stopped to listen.

  For all the wait and the patience and the pain that came before it, the arrival of the baby itself was swift. A miracle made in blood. He was prouder of her now than ever. The little boy Harum named Dove in memory of her father was new, and like no one else before.

  Peter held the child’s perfect form in his arms, and knew that though Dove was Hens’s son and not his, he would always be his father. Always.

  If it had been possible to describe to Harum how it felt to hold him, he could not have, for she was no longer there.

  ‘Can I get you anything to drink, sir?’ Peter stared at the back of the seat in front of him until the woman noticed the baby, swaddled in canary-yellow cloth, swinging punches at the abstract shapes in his dreams. ‘Oh my! What a cutie! What’s his name?’ He tapped the handle of the Moses basket, where it was written. ‘Dove,’ she said, continuing to the back of the plane where another passenger had switched on a light to get her attention. ‘Cute name.’ Peter was relieved. The last thing he wanted was to repeat the rigmarole of explaining through inadequate hand gestures alone that he couldn’t talk without crying, though he was too exhausted to find it humiliating any longer. It was more an inconvenience. Everything, his own grief included, was insignificant next to the boy.

  He placed his nose against the baby’s neck and inhaled the sweet honeyed scent of his skin. This usually worked to stop the sadness from overwhelming him, and it worked again now. What magic ingredient ran through the blood of a newborn? What instant salve?

  Whether all babies slept this much he wasn’t sure, but it was a stroke of good luck he accepted, for sleep had evaded him almost as much as language these last few weeks. Foremost on his mind was the transfer at London Heathrow to New York JFK. Sumatran airport security was famously lax. He was sure the British and American equivalents would be more stringent. But what man would have the gall to lift an eyepatch and check behind it for an eye?

  Dove had pudgy baby cheeks and a tiny nose, but there wasn’t one specific feature that reminded Peter of Harum. It was everything. She peered out through his eyes. Peter felt an unparalleled tenderness. The moment the seat belt light was switched off he lifted the boy onto his chest, over his heart, so that Dove might feel it for himself.

  Jayakatong had filled his rucksack with herbal sleeping remedies and sandwiches. Peter’s appetite was sated by a nibble of the crust, and he washed down a tiny blue pill with what remained of his water. Night had fallen outside. Droplets of rain on the window began to freeze into bullets of ice. He felt sure that, though at a shallow gradient, the aircraft was still in the ascent a full half-hour after take off.

  ‘Crazy, huh?’ The man in the aisle seat had gelled his hair into a smooth wave, hardened to the point of indestructibility. He wore a pinstripe suit, and had the ability some young, poorly suited men do to exude a confidence underpinned by nothing that came out of his mouth. ‘Flying, I mean. They reckon one day it’ll be so cheap everyone will be able to do it. I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’ Peter shrugged, and the man only imagined he’d asked why. ‘It’s a social contract. If you get in a tin can with a couple of rockets strapped to it and fly through the sky for twelve hours and you have to share it with other people, you want to be sure those people can be trusted, know what I mean? They could be criminals.’ Peter stayed perfectly still, but even without encouragement the stranger proved his dogged capacity to not be dissuaded. ‘I’m a great judge of character. They should give me that job. I could vet people, tell you whether they should be able to fly or not.’ It sounded exactly like something Hens Berg might have said in a fit of arrogance, and Peter thought of his corpse feeding the foul-smelling flower above it. He watched the man drain his glass of red wine, imagined him choking on a pretzel, then closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

  As happened every time he closed his eyes, he saw Harum’s face so vividly he could map the atoms of her constructio
n. Her arms were shaped like a cradle that she rocked gently to and fro, though there was no baby in it. Peter desperately wanted to pass the baby to her, but he had no arms of his own. When she opened her mouth to speak she didn’t make a sound. She was neither alive nor dead, but trapped in a third state of presence in his mind, where she’d remain forever, his love and grief for her one and the same thing. Still she said nothing as he slipped into a sleep that was needed, real and deep.

  The stranger was asleep, a wine stain on his shirt blooming to the twist of a cackling purple mouth. It was the motion that had woken Peter, a rocking from side to side that reminded him more of steam trains than aeroplanes, though he’d never been on one. He briefly imagined himself holding Dove as they crossed the Potomac Creek Bridge, Stafford County, Virginia, sometime just before the Civil War, so vividly that it in fact became a brief, colourful hallucination. The potency of Jayakatong’s medicines had surprised him again, even after he’d vowed never to let it. He’d caught flu when Harum was seven months pregnant, and after Peter had been bed-bound for three days Jayakatong slipped him a drug that, within an hour, had him on the roof convinced he was in a fit state to scrub all the dirt from the tin. The hallucination faded and he gradually became alert to the fact he’d experienced turbulence before, but never for as sustained, or as violent, a spell as this. The cabin lights were switched off, and from his seat at the front of the compartment he couldn’t quite make out whether the hostess was still loitering in the shadows at the back. The only other person he could see who appeared to be awake was a young woman in the row behind, her hair black and tousled, mouth frozen into a grimace. It troubled Peter to witness the natural toffee hue in her cheeks fading, closer to the pale of nougat.

  ‘Bagaimana menurutmu yang terjadi?’ she asked, of which Peter now knew enough to understand. What do you think is happening? He shook his head and pulled Dove tighter to his chest. ‘Bagaimana menurutmu yang terjadi? Bagaimana menurutmu yang terjadi!?’

  The hostess appeared from behind the curtain of the compartment in front, dragging herself up the aisle by the seat tops, knees locked at doe angles. He yearned for her to spout the name of a weather system he’d never heard of, some phenomenon which might explain a lurch in the plane’s altitude that made him feel as though he were floating and falling simultaneously, for it was simpler to pin fate to the inexplicable – it was why people believe in God, a folly in which he briefly allowed himself to see merit.

  ‘The seat belt! Put the seat belt on!’ He showed her the belt, already fastened around his waist. ‘Not yours,’ she said, ‘the baby’s.’

  ‘Bagaimana menurutmu yang terjadi? Kita akan jatuh? Kita akan mati!?’ the Indonesian woman screamed. Peter looked at the stranger, who still hadn’t woken. He poked the man’s shoulder with a stiff index finger and he fell forward, the dead weight of his head only kept from his lap by the belt round the tub of his paunch. Peter could hear his own heart above the screaming, and the roar of air cut in two by the wings.

  He removed the eyepatch and used it to tie Dove into the Moses basket, then threaded the seat belt through the handles to secure it to the base of the seat. Finally, after kissing the baby’s head once more, he fastened Harum’s necklace around the handle of the basket, taking the silver ring from his finger and threading it through. He wasn’t superstitious and didn’t believe in ghosts, but in that moment truly believed Harum would keep Dove safe, that this was the reason she had died, so that Dove would not.

  The plane nosedived, firing the hostess and anything not tied down into the ceiling. She fell back to the floor like a stringless marionette. There was more screaming from the back of the compartment, but still the stranger remained unconscious. From the cockpit, the hiss of a radio, its button depressed but no one talking, as though the limp weight of the pilot’s body had come to rest against it. Peter turned to see the woman clambering over the seats behind her, the heel of her shoe piercing the soft flesh above a man’s collarbone. Oxygen masks fell like stirred tree snakes. Peter attached his own, and then Dove’s, surprised by how vividly he’d remembered the safety procedure. As he became aware that only the belt and not gravity held him to his seat, the woman flew over his head backwards, or forwards, and crashed through the curtain. Peter lowered his face – or was he moving sideways now? – so that it was close to the baby’s head and inhaled a final time before slipping into unconsciousness, thinking of Harum.

  He was underwater. The stranger clawed at his seat belt. The floor lights of the aisle remained on, and for a moment they all seemed to concentrate on the man’s face. His eyes dulled. Peter watched as the man stopped flailing and drowned where he sat.

  Just before the lights were extinguished, Peter turned and saw through a field of belongings – handbags, dolls, wallets, passports, airline meal trays – that the Moses basket was still tied to the bottom of the seat. But the seat had come loose and, acting as a flotation device, was carrying both Dove and the basket towards a pocket of air in the far corner of the cabin that, even through the gloom of ice-cold water, Peter could see diminishing. He reached out to grab it but was seconds too late. His belt would unlock no more easily than the stranger’s. Dove was gone.

  There was a great clunk, and the cabin was cast into a sinewy blackness. All Peter could see as water filled his lungs was the glint of Harum’s necklace, two small silver birds above him, moving further away, as though in flight towards the sun.

  As the plane sank, it was pulled in two like a huge metal cracker. Unsure what was up, what was down, Peter used all that remained of his will to squeeze the clip of the seat belt a final time. It came undone in his hands and the seat sank into the dark with only enough time for him to grab the life jacket beneath it. He was free, floating and spinning through the water, to see below him flight PS570, halved, taking all that had travelled aboard it into the dark far beneath. He’d seen death at close quarters more than once, but few would witness it on such an unfathomable scale as this. He might have remained numb forever, given up and died himself, were he not overtaken in that moment by a powerful urge to live and find the boy. He frisked the life jacket for the emergency buoyancy cord and pulled. It inflated in his arms and he shot upwards, towards whatever was above. Life, or a semblance of it. This would remain to be seen.

  He broke the surface and was welcomed by a generous morning as he emptied his lungs into a gentle sea. Somewhere nearby he heard a baby crying, a noise as beautiful as any. He swam towards it to find Dove, wet and cold but warming in the sun, and, above all else, alive. He could still smell the scent of his skin. Of her.

  There was debris floating all around them. Seat bottoms, metal sheets, the plastic doors of the luggage holds. Peter hoisted himself across the biggest piece of it he could find and held on to the basket, drifting aimlessly until he found enough strength to kick his legs, while the sun dried his shirt. Dove quickly fell asleep again and Peter wrapped him in the warm cloth. He had no perception of where in the world he was, or in which direction he should head, only that the sun would go down before long. How cruel an irony it seemed that where a plane crash could not kill them, the spinning of the planet might. Paramount now was getting Dove to land, and he rubbed dry the birds on the necklace between his thumb and forefinger for the strength he’d need to start swimming.

  Lowering his right leg into the water he tore an inch-long gash in his thigh. It was only then he noticed what it was he’d climbed atop. A sheet of metal from the plane’s fuselage, about the diameter of a school desk. The metal was layered and sandwiched around a hollow, hence its buoyancy. Engineering wasn’t Peter’s forte, but he knew enough to see that this wasn’t a part of the plane’s wing or belly. When he turned the metal over he found, bolted to the other side, the black box recorder of flight PS570. It was floating, and that was all that mattered. He could use it. They could try to live.

  He kicked and swam, the basket strapped to his back, and, if only to keep himself awake, he decided to tell Dove a stor
y. The story of how he came to meet his mother. It all started with the day he found a small purple flower in a dirt-caked bathroom. And from there he told him about the Udumbara and the campion. He told him about the sheep-eater and the Kadupul. He told him about the Welwitschia and the corpse flower. He told him how he’d fallen for the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and what became of Dr Hens Berg.

  He told him the story from the beginning, hoping for nothing more than to make it to the end. And as the words left his mouth, it was as though they were being deleted from his memory. In the shock and the grief and the pain, he was vanishing. It didn’t matter that the child wouldn’t understand the meaning of the words being said. By hearing them, they’d be recorded, embossed on his soul. Nothing there can be forgotten.

  It was two hours until he saw land, over four until he reached it. When he sensed a mass beneath him, he abandoned the large chunk of fuselage with the black box attached to it, which he figured would wash up close behind him, and allowed the waves to nudge him onto the sand, where for a minute or so – long enough to dream for a final time of Harum breathing air from her lungs into his – he lost consciousness.

  When he woke again, he remembered nothing of his life or what had gone before.

  Dove was hungry, but otherwise alive as Peter dragged the basket up the beach.

  Peter was now so exhausted that the density of his bones tripled. He was aware, and then not aware, that he was entering a state of some delirium – the combined effect of exhaustion, blood loss and shock had not only robbed him of the power of speech, but had also convinced him he was little more than a ship made of flesh, that he was being captained by another who’d failed to keep him from careering into rocks. Was he hallucinating the little girl, face white and round and smooth, a bucket full of shells in her arms?

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and wary of sirens he ignored her and carried on walking.