Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  He said, ‘I should have been booked into a mental home before I left. Don’t they call this “The Green Hell”?’

  ‘Depends what paper you take,’ Hannie said, ‘The Guardian calls it the Brazilian bit of the Mato Grosso.’

  ‘Shut up, smart-arse, and check the compass,’ said Spinelli.

  Hannie checked and found that her usually accurate sense of direction had again betrayed her. It was easy to avoid a vine here and a fallen log there and end up going miles off course. All around were curtains of thick, green vegetation on either side of the narrow, overgrown trail they followed. The high trees met overhead, blotting out the light. Nets of thick vines ran up, down and across. Hannie, hacking at a thick stem of liana which made a trip wire across the trail, said, ‘People nurture things like this in England. They get upset if they die.’ The stem gave, and she straightened up.

  ‘Want a rest?’ asked Joe Spinelli.

  ‘Standing up with sweat pouring off us—no thanks. Let’s push on to the campo.’

  They were only four miles from the base camp, and it was still early morning, but an hour and a half of plodding over stems of vine, cutting back vegetation and stumbling over fallen trees, all in a sauna bath laden with insects, made the day seem farther advanced than it was. The heat was intensifying, even now, although only occasional patches of light came through the tangle of leaves and vines overhead. They went on.

  ‘Space suits would tear,’ came Joe’s voice from behind her.

  ‘Well, it’s an experience,’ said Hannie.

  ‘Ain’t no more cane on the brazou,’ came Joe’s wailing song from behind. ‘It’s all been ground up to molasses—’ Hannie bore the singing with fortitude. After all, Joe had taken her presence on the team in good part, even though she was not well enough qualified. He had made it easy for her. As it happened, she had suddenly become useful when his real assistant, incautiously reaching up a tree trunk for a botanical specimen, had disturbed a nest of the notorious Afro-Brazilian bees, which can kill a horse. Dragged away, still indignantly saying that the bees should not have been found in that spot in the first place, he was nevertheless severely stung. She had stepped in to help Joe while Paul was recovering back at the camp, although her hastily boned-up knowledge of Brazilian flora and fauna was not really adequate.

  As she went, she looked round and up continually for the flower-bearing tree, the plant she was looking for. According to the rough map in Roderick Kyte’s notes—which, she was now sure, must have been obtained by breaking into his laboratory—he had found the original tree some twelve miles from where she and Spinelli were. It had been discovered at this time of year, which helped. The bad news was that there were rumours of an extreme Protestant sect which had bought land near the area involved and was rapidly burning off the jungle to make arable land. There were also tales of a diamond find in the same area. If any of these tales were true it could mean encounters with religious fanatics or even arriving unexpectedly in a diamond boom town full of shanties with a rough air strip and rougher bars. Worse than that, she might meet no one but the Indians each of these groups had antagonized. And they still killed people, she’d learned.

  As she looked from side to side, checking for the tree, she felt discouraged. Her reading had not prepared her for the sheer abundance of the vegetation or its variety. Of course, she was sceptical about the efficacy of the plant and always had been. There was something so basically improbable about a cancer-cure found in the jungle that it was hard to take seriously. On the other hand, the basis for the contraceptive pill had been a Mexican cactus, and from Kyte’s original scientific paper she knew that he at least claimed to have discovered a narcotic drug, an effective antiseptic and a useful insecticide among the plants he had collected on the same trip.

  It was an extraordinary tale he told. He had, waking up in the Indian village which he and another member of the team were staying in, found the village deserted except for the very young and the very old. After a search they discovered every able-bodied Indian from the village in a clearing, tearing purple flowers from two trees and throwing them to the ground. Others dug frantically at the roots of the same tree with their knives. When he tried to find out what they were doing, and why, they had been secretive. He had finally got something out of an old woman. She seemed to be saying that, pounded together, root and flower had some effect on tumours. Of course he had snatched the substance, analysed it and tried the mix in various combinations on experimental animals. At this point, to Hannie’s annoyance, the purloined scientific notes gave out.

  At this point she rang Duncan Kyte and told him that she had looked at the papers. She had no doubt that if his brother had come up with anything that seemed even halfway promising to the government, the drug firms and the research departments of universities would have given him no peace until he handed over the information. These experiments, she said, had been conducted in the middle of the 1960s. If Roderick Kyte’s results had been any good, the papers would not have been standing about for the last fifteen years, and he would not have been experimenting in his own laboratory, and seemingly in his own time, in a small provincial university not renowned for its Department of Biology. She said she thought she would be going to the Mato Grosso on a wild goose chase. But, as she spoke, she knew he would not hear of her turning back. Her main aim had been to cover herself, in case she failed. She really needed the money. Her one worry as she spoke was that Duncan Kyte would die before she got back to England and that would put a stop on the postdated cheques awaiting her at her solicitor’s office.

  What she did find out from Roderick Kyte’s work was something about the man himself. At the end of a scribbled note suggesting as a working hypothesis that the substance he was using might make cell changes possible by inhibiting or stimulating hormones, possibly in the pituitary, he added, to himself evidently, ‘Courage, Kyte. Courage.’ At the end of one of the earlier experiments, carelessly conducted when he thought results would come quickly, he was left with what had once been two baby rabbits, which had rapidly grown to the size of Yorkshire terriers and then died. After stating that one had died of an embolism and the other of no cause he could determine, he wrote, ‘Evidently these experiments were conducted without the proper earlier procedures being carried out. There will be no more.’

  And for a long time there were not. He had worked on the structure of the plant patiently from then on. Experiments had been done on tissue after that, not on living creatures. In the margin of one paper Hannie read, ‘We are dealing here with two sets of ignorant people—the Indians, who know nothing, except by trial and error, and the endocrinologists, who know nothing by scientific methods.’ Poor, patient, frustrated Roderick Kyte, Hannie thought. He really did not seem like the kind of man who would deny his brother life.

  Meanwhile, she and Spinelli lunged on until, suddenly breaking through the humid darkness, they left the forest and found themselves on the edge of a natural clearing of grass and fern. The bright light made them blink. They dropped their rucksacks on the ground and took out the jars for the specimens. In the centre of the clearing Hannie arranged several knives, some heaps of beads and two shirts. They had no way of telling if there were any Indians in the vicinity or what their previous contacts with white people had been like. The gifts were a sign of friendship. The shirts were in sterilized packages. It was easy to infect a whole group with a germ or virus which could kill.

  ‘Come on, Hannie,’ shouted Spinelli from the forest edge, ‘bring me the pointed trowel.’

  She sweated over with it and began to help him dig at a huge yellow mushroom the size of a dinner plate. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said crossly. ‘I want it all.’ Hannie started patiently digging near the base, thinking that she would have to carry it back undamaged through the forest. ‘Get on with it,’ he said. ‘I want several of these. And I want to hurry—they could go off fast. I wish fucking Paul was on his feet again.’

 
All right, Joe Spinelli, thought Hannie, but the next time I hear something prowling round my hammock at night I’ll assume it’s a jaguar and shoot it. He shook his head. Huge blobs of sweat flew off. Hannie’s clothes felt like damp towels. He brushed her aside to complete the uprooting. ‘Better do this bit myself,’ he muttered.

  She had loved him wildly for three months, Hannie thought as he eased up the mushroom and handed it to her, saying, ‘Wrap it in a bit of polythene and don’t damage a hair of its lovely head, or else.’ That was in the days when he still had some hair. Suddenly it began to rain, and she laughed. Joe’s head was like a billiard ball under a tap. Grey battering water came down. Spinelli straightened up and said, ‘Let’s get that mushroom under cover, shall we? It could get damaged.’ They got under the thick trees, and Spinelli said, ‘Nip back for the gifts, Han. Those shirts will get soaked.’ So Hannie ran through the downpour and picked up the gifts. Under the trees Spinelli was looking fondly at his mushroom. ‘I knew we’d get one if we came out between rains,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to come here in the rainy season.’

  Hannie, dripping, stared out at the sheets of rain and then glanced back into the green interior. She wondered if there were any Indians about. Some of the groups in this choked forest were even now unknown and unrecorded. They were invisible, moving like spirits through the trees and creepers. There was no sound but the heavy drumming of the rain. A bird shrieked. And yet, she thought, it was no more savage here than parts of New York. Just different.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ she said. ‘If it stops, we can see what comes up after, and how long it takes.’

  ‘I think this one’s keeping off the worst of these insects,’ said Spinelli. ‘Remind me not to tell Paul. I can’t stand his homeopathic medicine rubbish.’

  They made big pads of leaves to sit on. They dug in their rucksacks. Spinelli poured coffee from a flask and said, ‘A picnic. I keep thinking of you and me, in the lab, in the old days.’ He gazed romantically at her. Hannie, blowing a drip from her nose and eating some nuts, remembered just how unsentimental Joe Spinelli was. And neither of them had, at the time, thought much about his wife, stranded outside Cambridge in a small house with two children, where people would drop in to tell her about her husband’s affair with his wild, twenty-year-old, red-headed student. They hadn’t thought about her, that is, until she’d tried to kill herself. Even then Spinelli had remarked, with his usual humanity, Take no notice. She’s done it before. She only does it to get attention.’

  Meanwhile, he said, pouring himself more coffee from the flask, ‘Eh?’ He must want some reaction before this evening’s prowl round the hammocks, thought Hannie. She said, ‘Mm. Fifteen years ago, that was. A lot of water’s come down over the Mato Grosso since then.’ She was thinking about several things at once, and none of them was Joe Spinelli. She remembered his wife falling down in the court at King’s College, lying flagrantly on the lawn on which only fellows of the college were supposed to tread. And she was wondering whether, in the New York jungle, any of the local Indians had got into her hotel room, and if so, why? There had been no signs that anyone had been there, and yet it suddenly occurred to her that she had had the sensation the room had been entered while she was out. What was it? A smell she was not even conscious of, or tiny trackmarks she, like an Indian herself, had noticed without really recording? She had delivered Duncan Kyte’s letter to his associate, a well-tanned businessman with an open-air face and executioner’s eyes. She had lunched with a former enemy from the CIA. The lunch had turned itself into an afternoon in a cocktail bar and a long evening at a party. She had come back to her room to pack and leave for the airport, and that was the point when she felt, without taking much notice of the thought, that someone had been in the room before her. In the flurry of departure, the flight to Rio, the plane hops and final helicopter trip to the base camp she had not worried about it. Now she was wondering. And all the time came the barely suppressed thoughts of Adam and her children and the shocking fact of the supplanter in her home. She stared at the teeming rain and imagined Victoria bringing home a labrador puppy to make her children’s lives complete. She sighed. Joe Spinelli was saying, ‘I remember your wedding. You had this big maroon hat on. I wanted to stand up and shout at the registrar. I wanted to call out, “This woman’s mine, really. Tell that man to go away.”’

  ‘Rain’s stopping,’ said Hannie. ‘We might as well dash out and get another mushroom.’

  ‘Come on, Hannie,’ said Spinelli acutely. ‘We’ve all had marriage problems. No need to let it get you down. I never have.’

  ‘How many is it now?’ asked Hannie.

  ‘Three,’ he told her. ‘But there’s always room for one more.’

  They went back to the spot in the clearing where they had found the mushroom. Spinelli dug up earth and put it into little plastic bags Hannie held out. He dug up another mushroom. Then he started to take more samples of earth and grass. It began to rain heavily again, and when the little bags Hannie held out began to get more water in them than earth or specimens they decided to leave.

  Later they were talking at supper time at the long table outside the huts which served as accommodation and work places. It was dark. The generator had failed again, and while it was being repaired they had lamps, which threw pools of light over the bags set on the table. All the biologists were sitting together, including Spinelli’s assistant, Paul, whose face was still like a purple cauliflower.

  ‘Shut up, Paul,’ said Spinelli. ‘I don’t want to hear any of your old hippie folk-medicine ideas. We’re supposed to be here doing growth cycles, looking at the flora and fauna, not interviewing witch doctors.’

  ‘That mushroom’s keeping the insects off, isn’t it?’ said Paul. ‘What are you going to do about it? Ignore it?’ It was true that the large mushroom, now lying rotting under the lamp, was deterring the worst of the insects that plagued them. Lower down the table, where it was less effective, plans were being made to grow the mushroom from spore if necessary in order to be free of the constant irritation of bites and stings.

  ‘I say we’ve lost our own herbalism,’ said Spinelli. ‘Let’s not rush around trying to grab everyone else’s. Let’s just turn to science and let folk wisdom rot, like that confounded mushroom.’

  ‘We can easily spend ten years developing an insect repellent like that,’ said Hannie. ‘It’s not economical to waste information.’

  She was hoping to persuade Spinelli to give a little of the team’s time to hunting for therapeutic plants. That way she might get hold of some of the purple flowers Kyte wanted. Her ruse failed. Spinelli burst out, ‘Yes, start thinking like that, making a few experiments on the side into interesting phenomena of that kind and you wind up getting obsessed, like poor old Roderick Kyte. He’s spent near on twenty years on his wonder cure, the magic mixture which is supposed to cure cancer, abolish evil and solve the problem of Britain’s poor rate of industrial growth. That idiot was a serious scientist once with a solid reputation. Have you ever read the papers he wrote on mosses in the fifties before he came here and became a crank? Did you know he did all the preliminary work on the Hardiman-Baker stuff about that disease in rice which was wiping out harvest after harvest? He’d have made the Royal Society by now, no question about it, if only he’d kept his head down and not spent his life on phoney cancer cures. What did he get? The largest rabbit in the world—and lost his scientific reputation completely. They wouldn’t let him sweep up in the Royal Society now. He’s wasted his training, his life and from what I hear he’s never without some poor dying bugger, pleading for help. All this is a dangerous path to take, Paul, and since I’m in charge of this section and I say what goes, I say you work on the project, the whole project and nothing but the project. If you stray one iota from the brief, if you totter off the trail for a quarter of a second to pick the celebrated Wicki-Wocki headache cure, I’ll have you on the ’copter and back in Rio with a bad reference before you can say mumbo-jumbo.
I do not want anyone here to discover anything—all they ever find is two undetectable poisons and twenty things which make you high if you chew them, smoke them or stuff them in your ears. The world doesn’t need any more poisons or any more narcotics or hallucinogenics. We can manage quite well with what we’ve got, thanks very much. All this is the Third World’s Revenge—we give them VD and typhoid, grab their territory, force them into towns where they hang around getting drunk. They retaliate by handing on their age-old secrets—poisons, dope and the magic plant that drives sane scientists to their ruin. One bud, one stalk, one spore, Paul, with anything like that in mind, and you’re out on your ear. That’s my final word.’

  ‘You’re insane on this subject,’ said Paul. ‘All I can say is that if you’d spent a week drinking through a straw, in pain all over, you’d be more interested in local cures.’

  ‘The local cure for what you’ve got,’ Spinelli said savagely, ‘is not stuffing your hand in a bloody bees’ nest in the first place.’

  Paul stood up. At first Hannie thought he was going to hit his boss. Then he said, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  There was a silence. Hannie felt depressed. After Spinelli’s tirade there seemed little chance of getting official support for her quest for Kyte’s plant. Spinelli muttered, ‘It’s like El Dorado, that’s what it is. Instead of an instant fortune in gold they want an instant scientific reputation. Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hannie. She stood up. She knew now she would have to go and get the flowers by herself, on the sly. If Spinelli found out what she was doing, she would be sent packing straight away. As they walked in darkness towards the camp’s perimeter, towards the curtains of vines, the tall, staggering trees, the sharp points of the thorns, the snakes, she said, ‘Joe, even the Indians don’t wander about in the forest at night.’