Griefwork (20 page)

‘No, Felix,’ he sternly told the hot spaces before him. ‘Stop that! It’s gone beyond a joke. Not the plants.’ A second object struck No Admittance with a hollow knock. ‘Did you hear what I said, boy? Have you gone mad?’ But again his own bluster burned in his ears and enraged him with its impotence.
He walked along the aisle to the point from which he judged the missiles had been thrown. It was hopeless to be moving into deep bulks flawed by only the dimmest mercuric sheen of snowlight, sensing that they closed behind him once he had passed. Leon, who knew every inch of his domain, soon passed into unknown territory. Never before had he been so aware of the heat, pressing and yielding and dripping as though by merely leaning his body against it, moving into its illusory resistance, he could squeeze actual water from the air. He shed his jacket, suddenly heavy and sodden, then his galoshes. Now in silence he squatted beside a tall shrub and again caught movement above him where none should have been. Felix was up on the clerestory walkway.

Hoping to cut him off he made his way at a silent semi-crouch along the track to where the spiral staircase rushed upwards on wings of iron. His naked feet doing likewise he found himself in the jungle’s canopy, wheezing, heart clicking in his throat. Now his prey was surely trapped, for although this main landing crossed the House and linked the two clerestories there was no corresponding gallery at the other end. There had, he knew, been architect’s plans for one but for some reason it had never been built, perhaps further evidence of the builders’ ambivalence about the place’s true function. Church or glasshouse? Temple of nature, maybe. At any rate only three sides of the rectangle remained viable upstairs. Down one of these the temple’s presiding spirit, the master gardener, now pursued his quarry, his rogue secret, hoping to suppress, capture, stifle it before it could escape. From the faint signs of movement at the far end of this narrow walkway he knew his stratagem was working. Felix was cornered now, up under the curved panes. Unless he tried a suicidal climb across one of the spans to the other side there was no way down. At which moment the dim snowlight fell with muffled gleam on a torso, washed in the smouldering
chemicals of panic and desire, before it sprang outwards with simian carelessness. Instead of the expected sound of a body hitting a plinth thirty feet below the pursuer heard only a sharp swish of leaves and the creak of wood bending.

This savage, accomplished leap at once bridged the gap between Leon’s knowing and refusing minds. Just as only an agile climber could have severed the banana’s flower, so only Felix could have judged and made that jump into space. He must have had bad luck indeed to fall into the hands of a dismal gang of street louts. His splendid litheness had been caught unawares, probably dog tired and asleep in a doorway. Only in this way could so skilled an animal have been dragged down by an urban pack. Now he was loose and roaming the dark spaces below, pupils dilated to full night vision. But what was his plan, his purpose? To mock? To tantalise? What imaginary grim crime could this fond vandal be repaying? Leon, who had retraced his steps, stood uncertainly at the head of the winding stairs. Suddenly the forest at his feet contained real menace. Too much was opaque. He remembered the cleanness of the cuts in the flower stalk and tree bark. A very sharp knife precisely wielded. He knew nothing of madness except being able to assign it conventionally to unkempt souls who gibbered in public places (and who had largely disappeared under the German occupation). He wondered whether Felix might genuinely have taken leave of his senses. The boy had made a remarkable recovery from his injury and in the months since had been docile and tractable. Affectionate, he thought; of course Felix was affectionate. They had shared too much, too much sacrifice and fear and mutual indebtedness for there not to be affection. And hardly a firelit night had passed without the boy’s wordless accommodation. But were there not things more important than words? Dumb of mouth didn’t mean dumb of gesture, still less of brain. Without speaking a syllable Felix
had mastered the heating system’s idiosyncracies. He was no prisoner, either. Had he wished to leave he could have walked out at any time since the war’s ending. So what was happening now?

Such novelistic representations of a pondering mind did not, of course, enter Leon’s, though all were more or less thoughts he hadn’t put into words at one time or another. He did, however, stand in indecision, fearful of going down. The heat was extraordinary. Surely the temperature was too high? The ironwork was hot to the touch, slick with moisture. The pattering of drops was a light shower passing over a forest, lost and primordial and extending far into the distance. He was aware of these events’ sheer wrongness. The botanical world was holding itself apart from the crude human plots and motives being played out among its trunks and leaves. It was retreating.
‘Shuuuff
,’
sighed the gardener without knowing it, but no charm worked. He was left with no alternative but to go down, to play out this doltish piece of theatre.

‘We’re stopping this at once, Felix,’ he said as he descended, speaking conversationally down into the threatening arena. He had just decided that light was the most important thing. Playing cat and mouse in the dark with a demented street arab was absurd. How could he, a man of his professional standing, have been drawn into this game even for an instant? He should have gone straight to the fuse box where he kept a torch. He would now do just that, relying on the armour of rational behaviour to get him along the aisle of the Palm House –
his
Palm House – and through No Admittance. After all, Felix wasn’t chasing him, and of course was being mischievous rather than murderous. Purposefully he stepped to the ground and walked back along the aisle, making no particular attempt to watch or listen. Reaching the door he found, with the sense of having known in advance had he only been able to put the thought
together, that it was locked.

Reduced once more to bluster he rattled the handle angrily. ‘Damn you, Felix! Come on, open up. I know you’re in there.’ But by the steady pattering at his back, by the chirp and murmur of unseeable things, the vacant bark of his own voice, he knew there was nobody in the rooms beyond and that just now they were part of another universe. On the far side of the door lay a utilitarian realm of sinks and cupboards and boilers. It was in the world behind him that an outcome awaited. (Somewhere just out of sight and at some other intersection of time two figures stalked each other through a dream forest, two animals in human guise driven out of their wits by hunger or hatred or pure inaction. Whatever was in their hearts tugged at each other with the power of a moon’s gravitational pull. Wordless, blind, and irresistibly attractive, it turned them into archetypes or candidates for war.)

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.