Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Absently Leon undid his belt and stepped out of his fatigue trousers, shed his underwear and stood naked in the tropical heat. Then he walked quickly to the place where he kept his spraygun and a few tools, including a couple of old but well honed pruning knives. The syringe was there, as were the hank of raffia and the jar of cigarette ends, but his stealthy hand could find only one of the knives. He tried to remember when he had last seen both together. The assistants were always using them, dabbing them down on ledges where they worked and forgetting to bring them back. One could have been missing for a week without his noticing – since before Myroxylon’s bark was cut, in fact. How often must Felix have got up in the night to stoke the boiler, waited until Leon had gone back to sleep and then prowled the leafy sanctuary beyond the wall, learning where everything was, planning this very event? No; that was surely too intentional, too contrived and silly … Nevertheless, he hid the remaining knife and as an afterthought wrapped a yard or two of raffia about his own waist. Thus clad he stepped forth, unarmed but robed in the full majesty of the jungle.

  Far away it was snowing again on the sleeping city so that before first light next morning the early trams all over northern Europe would moan softly across unbroken sheets on invisible rails like icebreakers opening paths across the Barents Sea. The Palm House had meanwhile fallen out of this continuity, or had floated free of it. Trapped in their bubble, this gigantic Wardian case, drenched in heat and breathing the humid stew of molecules – foetor of gums and mulch, resins and mould – Leon and Felix stalked one another. Each had his particular advantage: Felix a youth’s agility and night vision, Leon his wiriness and peculiar memory for sound. The boy who had once distinguished between the noise made by wind through marram grass or samphire was the gardener who could make inspired guesses in the dark as to whether the sibilance from near the staircase was that of a body pushing past sugar canes or pandans. Though the night sky was uniformly clouded the available light did vary slightly from one part of the House to the other. Like many glasshouses built in these latitudes it had been oriented roughly along a north-south axis to take advantage of both morning and afternoon light. Accordingly the western transept felt the day’s last warmth and was also slightly protected from northeasterly winds. Here the panes were freer of ice along their lowest sections, admitting more of the snowy gardens’ dim blanch. So it was that Leon, moving towards the screwpines, caught his first full sight of Felix. He was standing at the edge of a path with his back three-quarters turned to his pursuer in an oddly meditative posture, head bowed, arms loose at his sides. It took the gardener a long moment to perceive that Felix, too, was naked. Just then the outline of the downcast face, slender figure and inky fall of hair froze Leon with something he could not name. Trying to imagine what that sidelong musing might be seeing he thought of the water tank into which the visitor’s child had recently fallen. He stared and stared in its direction to make out the least gleam of reflection and without seeing anything but darkness and more darkness. When he looked back at Felix there was only the crabby silhouette of Encephalartos. The boy had melted away, taking with him the impression of having been holding something desolate in his head as well as an object in one hand. A pruning knife, maybe.

  So when a weight crashed on to his back, knocking him to the gravel, flailing the outside of one forearm against a brick plinth and numbing all the nerves in that hand, his first impression was that the boy had an accomplice or had split into two. For an instant he lay beneath the slippery weight and felt a peculiar rasping at the back of his skull. Then suddenly the weight was off him, there was a skitter of gravel, the wocking sound of a large leaf wobbling about its midrib, then silence. This strange attack brought on a mild bout of coughing as the gardener was climbing to his feet, but whether by means of fear or the vitalising damp heat he controlled it. The uncanniness of Felix’s assault had shaken him quite as much as his impact with the ground. As he rubbed sensation back into his hand he wondered if the boy had really seen him reflected, however dimly, in the tank. In any case it was inventive and quite easy for him, once alerted, to have gone around the central stand of palms and come up behind.

  Following an aural lead back to the bo tree Leon had his head abruptly grabbed, quickly noosed under the chin and drawn upwards so that he rose reflexively on tiptoe. Simultaneously he felt again that rasping sensation at his skull, in a different quarter this time, before the noose slackened and he stumbled involuntarily to a crouch. A light thud on the far side of the pipal marked Felix’s departure from the tree. The tickling at Leon’s neck was a loose length of raffia draped about his shoulders. He felt at his waist. No raffia there now. Evidently Felix had taken it during his first attack and had just used it to try to strangle him. Yet that made no sense because the boy had let go almost at once, immediately after that odd tugging and grating. He put up a hand and felt his skull. Great lumps of hair were missing. He ran both hands anxiously over his head. There was no mistake: ragged hanks had been shorn off the back and one side.

  Leon’s impatience with other people’s physical vanity had always allowed him to be nonchalantly smug about his own hair which was, admittedly, unusual. Though unmistakably Nordic it was not a pale, flaxen blond but somewhat yellow – golden he might have preferred it called – as yet unmarred by a single grey hair. It flapped atop his tallish, gauntish frame in a distinctive manner, as well he knew. Its despoliation was upsetting and unnerving, a precise attack on a vulnerability he only now fully acknowledged. He moved nervously away from the Ficus religiosa through the leaves’ long drip tips which brushed his face. He must keep moving; this was no place for idle meditation. He wasn’t safe beneath any shrub which could support the gypsy’s slight weight. Time passed. Heart sighing, he prowled uneasily, now and then fumbling at his head in dismay.

  That he finally caught Felix was largely due to the boy’s bad luck or ignorance. A sound had brought the gardener back to the general area of the first attack and, watching, he saw small repeated movements in the same patch of shrubbery. He smiled then, an excited, rat-catcher’s smile. The boy had somehow blundered or dropped into a thick growth of Acacia farnesiana. Barefoot and barelimbed among its thorns he must now take each step with tentative, slow-motion care while crouching to disengage those spines already embedded. Oh, the cassia flower was a nasty one, all right. It grew all over Indo-Pacific littorals in dense mats high up the beach, the creepers of bushes which tangled into thickets against cliff faces (or so the book said). Even as he stole forward Leon thought off at a tangent, wondering whether the more excruciating counterpart of an emblematic crown of thorns might not be slippers of thorn. Reaching out a long bony arm from behind an adjacent bush he enlaced a handful of the preoccupied youth’s own black tresses and yanked him out on to the path. He heard Felix gasp as his stumbling feet trod full weight on to the long spikes, adding to his own exultation. Vandal, mutilator, ingrate … Thief? That snouted dog-face, that scum gang leader (now a respectable bemedalled bureaucrat) had accused Felix of stealing, but Leon had never believed in the charge as anything other than metaphorical. Supposing the gypsy had made himself vulnerable, not by being caught asleep but by some imprudent proposition, some desperate suggestion? Supposing further that dog-face had agreed and then in order to swagger away with his pride intact had trumped up the charge of robbery for his cronies’ ears? More still, mightn’t that add a new, private twist to the idea of stealing from the gypsy (‘let’s nick his jewels’)? Wasn’t Leon (as he wrestled on the path with the squirming boy) really dealing with a common prostitute, street trash such as even now ought to be hanging around the occupying forces’ barracks and pawing hungrily through the refuse barrels of mess and canteen? But Leon no longer knew what to think, lacked the time and spare energy to do anything but weigh his captive towards the ground at a brisk stagger, finally tripping him into a plunge half in and half out of the water tank, then all the way in.

  At which Felix’s struggles became galvanic with a
non-swimmer’s terror, interspersed with whooshes of air and water coughs. Leon was struck by how cold it was by comparison with the ambient heat, but it was after all groundwater and reached the Palm House from the freezing universe outside. Still grasping the handful of gypsy hair he smacked the face repeatedly into the surface until Felix’s struggles became weaker, then paused in his fury.

  Kill or kiss? These are not human decisions when taken naked in a heated glasshouse in a delusory tropic beneath snow and in the aftermath of war. They are no longer even true alternatives for comrades in a shared prison. Strange indeed the land in which these comrades tracked each other to perform their spiteful acts of love, where playfulness might elide into murder without once leaving the same trancelike register and crossing no border on the way. It was then that half-starved Leon’s strength became effortless and cost him not a cough to haul the cold eel beneath his hands bodily out of the tank and cradle it in his arms amid the plants’ silence, in the heavy perfumed dark, while the slopping ripples died, leaving two thudding hearts. He walked with his burden to the newly turned earth at the foot of the tallest palm, Cocos nucifera, laid it on the ground and stroked the water from its quaking back. Then, drenched in the scent of flowers he himself had sown, for the last time he vented his muddled love into Felix in an act which was indeed the last thing he should have done and for which, having done, he leaned his brow upon the trembling nape and weeping begged forgiveness. Later, and for the rest of that night, no drops fell more heavily from the Palm House roof on to the waxy leaves beneath than those the repentant gardener shed by the boilers’ hellish glow.

  At dawn Leon went into the House to retrieve the hanks of his hair and smooth the soil at the coconut’s foot before the first of the labourers arrived. As he raked over the mould his ears burned with guilt to hear the tree – evidently similarly unrested – let fall its sardonic remarks from on high:

  ‘An intolerable night, quite intolerable, and culminating in a spectacle which prompted the thought that if one knew enough about it one would probably be disgusted. True of most things, no doubt. As it was, there was quite enough disturbance going on to make one positively cross. It’s bad enough anyway to stand with one’s head stuffed up into a glass cupola so that year by year the crick in one’s neck grows worse. But to be deprived of sleep into the bargain by hubbub and commotion simply won’t do at all. The militaristic excesses taking place outside this House until recently – of which I had, perforce, a grandstand (not to say perilously exposed) view – seem now to have been transferred indoors. This new, harebrained scheme of our gardener’s to allow members of the public in here after dark is simply not on. We’re not creatures in a zoo but a tender community which needs its peace and quiet. The dismal lindens and planes I can spy from up here lining the nearby avenue are presumably adapted to non-stop traffic noise night and day. They are low breeds with but rudimentary nerves. We are mostly not.

  ‘In particular one can’t imagine what our gardener thought he was doing tonight. They come and go, these people, becoming odder all the time. It was different in the old days. The one who planted me – Brunswik, did they call him? – was here until I was mature. He became old or sick or something and according to a conversation I overheard in 1913 they put him on a bonfire. Alas, poor Brunswik; we shall all come to it. But in the meantime one is disinclined to be hurried into an early grave by increasingly bad behaviour on the part of the very people who ought to be looking after us. What are they after all if not servants? There’s been a good deal of rot talked since the turn of the century about egalitarianism, which as any fool knows is the thin edge of complete anarchy. It’s pure drooling lunacy to pretend that all men are equal, just as it would be to claim all trees were equal. Certainly none of the trees in this House believes that. Under normal circumstances one would be only too happy to leave that sort of jejune ideological wrangling to the human element, but unfortunately it affects us too. Egalitarianism leads directly to hooliganism, as tonight’s spectacle shows. It’s precisely what happens when natural hierarchies are allowed to break down.

  ‘I suppose if one is sixty feet tall disdain does come easily, but what is one to think when such things take place at one’s very foot? Our gardener appeared to be wrestling with that strange child who is alleged to creep about in the dead of night committing unprovoked attacks on members of this House with a horrible little knife. One’s first thought was that the gardener was inflicting some sort of punishment on him, though it’s unclear why they both felt obliged to take their clothes off. Apparently humans need to climb on top of each other in order to punish, and the gardener was pulling this other chappie’s head back by the hair so he was staring straight up at me. His eyes and mouth kept opening and closing and after a while it struck me as more a matter of enjoyment than punishment. But of course one never really has a clue about these creatures’ facial expressions. They seem to register pleasure and agony in pretty much identical fashion. Maybe they’re isomorphic forms of each other? It might be quite interesting to do a bit of speculative research on this: Homo sapiens sapiens is so inscrutable it might repay us to try and fathom him. At any rate these two worked themselves into a terrible state, completely wet and howling, all smeared with earth and whatnot. At last they went away, leaving me with the distinct impression that the man was sorry for having punished the boy. One simply can’t imagine what goes on in these people’s heads, it’s so messy and unclear. In any case we all hope the little vandal learned his lesson.

  ‘Enough of these creatures. That envious and acrimonious old cycad, altensteinii, has recently put himself in the position of deserving a sharp retort. One might overlook some of his remarks about palm trees just as one physically overlooks his frowsty head and obscene professorial neck – gnarled and twisted as it is and needing the support of a collar and wire. The name “Encephalartos”, of course, derives from the Greek and means “bread-brain” – as unappetising a prospect as one can imagine. Certainly one is scarcely prompted to take sides on the question of his ancestry. That may safely be left to him and Seneschal with their conflicting theories of genetics, Mendelism, racial purity et al.. As to whether he might, in another universe, have become either palm or pine remains a matter of indifference rather than debate. Speaking as a palm of not inconsiderable pedigree I’m happy to say I can see no remotest family resemblance – certainly not to my family, who unquestionably run to height and can hold their heads up without recourse to prostheses. No, all that claptrap can be sidestepped as just one more of those areas which attract lunatics as a flower bees: a mishmash of pseudophilosophy and pseudoscience which brings out the Professor Seneschals with their trunk calipers, their leaf gauges and their dotty botanometry. They’re all as mad as each other. Linnaeus, de Candolle, George Bentham, Joseph Hooker … The presumption of these people! All ordering and reordering what they call Nature (note the capital) according to their own pet theories, with none of them the first idea. Humans! One despairs.

  ‘The point lies elsewhere: to begin with, in altensteinii’s allegation of what he calls our “crude height” having led to a “Master Race complex”. It is indeed a small mind which resorts to such ad plantam logic and then attempts to back it up by appeals to some kind of notional popular vote. “Anyone in this House would readily agree with this opinion.” If this is what longevity does to the intelligence one prays to die in one’s prime. Besides, who wants to be popular? The very word betrays its egalitarian allure. One’s interested in thought, not in worrying endlessly about being liked. Second, and far more important, is the issue of those tendentious quotations about how Homo turned coconut palms into objects of veneration – our supposed physical commonality with men’s bodies, the deities living in our heads and so forth. All these quotations, incidentally, were cribbed straight out of the gardener’s memory. Altensteinii never opened a book in his life. “Volume twenty-five, I fancy.” What a hoary old schoolboy ploy that is! None the less there’s ingenuity in the way he
selected those particular passages. At first sight it might appear he was attacking Homo for what is, admittedly, preposterous and anthropocentric drivel. Gods in the hair, mystical emblems, men’s whole abject desire to discern tokens of themselves as well as pledges of their own immortality in every damn thing they lay their eyes on. Why aren’t they interested in anything other than themselves and their own deaths? It’s most peculiar. Altensteinii appears to cite this stuff to make the same point about Homo’s foolishness but a second reading reveals his hidden argument, which is profoundly anti-palm. All that piousness about our noble bearing is undercut the moment one remembers that this is merely man’s opinion and manifestly not that of old altensteinii. Moreover, by his quoting a list of the ways in which we are useful to man we palms find ourselves in the patronised position of the servant whose services are suddenly discovered to be indispensable and is thereby accorded the status of holy fool.

  ‘If it were harder to expose, altensteinii’s method might be described as cunning. Having bared it and left it where it lies, however, one draws oneself up with this noble loftiness for which we’re apparently so renowned and turns one’s gaze outward through the steam-blinded glass to speculate about more interesting things. The truth is that I’m a critic at heart, a didact, a lecturer, and it has taken me all this time to cultivate my skill. One more thing to guarantee my unpopularity.

  ‘Dawn has broken over a landscape which in my heart I know to be utterly foreign. That’s of no account; one’s used to it while becoming ever more apprehensive of the moment when one’s head bursts through the glass and out. Into what? That’s the main preoccupation: trying to decide the nature of the world we’re in as well as that of the world exterior to it. The first logically presupposes the second, but isn’t to say there might not be an infinite number of worlds out there. I can, for instance, easily see how the House could itself be subdivided by enclosing diminishing patches of soil under smaller and smaller glass shells. Indeed I can remember seeing just such a cloche arrangement used years ago to protect seedlings temporarily from the nicotine fumigations. But this raises a disturbing idea, which is that as one was able to look down at the seedlings under glass, taller than they by a factor of thousands, so it’s possible to suppose a palm many tens of miles high beneath a roof enclosing half the sky looking down on oneself at this very moment. It’s not a reassuring thought and leaves one’s position equivocal, to say the least. Nevertheless it could be so, and the mere fact that I can conceive but not perceive it is no hindrance to its possibility. All perceptions – and notoriously vision – are easily deceived, as dependent on learned habits and expectation as on neural activity. I don’t expect to see a greater universe itself enclosed enclosing mine, therefore I don’t see it. I see only what convention tells me is the sky, dotted with points of light, larger and smaller, brighter and fainter. “I don’t much want to see the real tropics,” I heard the gardener tell Nyctanthes only last night. But what are the real tropics, mister gardener? And where, if not at least partly rooted in Flinn? These exotic ladies of yours: where are they really from? Exactly. And knowing that, of course you don’t want to follow the bird of paradise to its nest and find a heap of twigs and shit.