He laughs, shakes his head. ‘I read a paper on the pollination of cacao by midges. But don’t ask me another one, I won’t be able to impress you.’
Impress me? All I want to do is impress him. I watch him walk back to his seat, pick up the journal and, before the sixteenth-century cacao plant, I decide. I want to be him. I want to be part of this, always. ‘Daniel? Can I come here again?’
‘Any time you want.’
A few days later, Mama receives a wooden crate, outrageously large, packed with fruit I know only from browsing Oriental Supermarket with her – spiky red lychees, aubergine mangosteens, an almost ripe papaya, the skin still green. Mama is ecstatic, she tells me again that Daniel has grown up in the Philippines, how he knows all the Asian fruit she misses. She presses a starfruit to her cheek. ‘This is my favourite,’ she says and then she calls Daniel to thank him while scooping armfuls of fruit into the kitchen. She pushes a knife through the starfruit, the blade slick with translucent flesh, holds out a slice to me. But I am moving away from her. I’ve glimpsed something in the wooden crate.
I roll away a pineapple and four lime-green guavas. There. A cacao pod. Monstrous and ugly, it is the shape of a deflated rugby ball, the husk a deep rust. I cradle it with one hand, with the other, I press my fingers over my mouth, trying to stop repeating the same words my mother has just said.This is my favourite. This.
From: Kit McDermott
07:41
She’s still asleep. I’m looking at her perfect face, her eyelashes, her hair and you know what, Laurie, you need to stop. If you want to leave me, you could’ve just told me, rip my heart out, I can take it.
But not her. You can’t mess with her. Did you think about what this would do to her? She’s already lost her sister.
I didn’t know you could be so selfish.
10
Tess
Then
He tells Mama I can go to the museum any time I want.
I want to go every Saturday.
He says come when the museum is closed. ‘It’s different when everyone’s gone, you’ll see,’ he says. He’s right, I feel it standing behind him on the long escalator up through the centre of the giant metal earth sculpture, not just that the museum is mine but that the world is, the constellations on the walls, the rings of planetary orbit. He feels it too. Inside the earth’s core, he looks at me and smiles.
He is different with me than he is with Mama. I listen to them whisper when they come home from their dates, bickering happily about whether the performance they’ve just heard is technically flawed, whether the cellist transitioned smoothly into the last movement – and I think he is perfectly suited to Mama. He is exactly how I imagine my father would be – intelligent, musical, unawed by Mama’s beauty, equal to it. But when he’s with me, I don’t think of him like that at all.
He feeds my hunger for the secret insides of things, he buys me botany books, orders up illustrations from the museum’s collections, he even introduces me to a pimply PhD student who teaches me the correct way to preserve plants.
‘You’re talented,’ he repeats. He never mentions music. Only butterflies and botany.
One week later, he puts a wooden drawer in front of me. ‘This one was hard to get,’ he says. ‘It’s from Sloane’s vegetable substances collection.’
He has been talking to me about Hans Sloane for weeks now. How his herbarium, while not the oldest or the largest, is unparalleled in scope and geographical range. How Sloane wasn’t just a doctor, he was an apothecary, interested in the use of plants for medicinal purposes. Daniel requested specimens from the herbarium weeks ago, but apparently, the plants department is terse and uncooperative, unconvinced that his requests have anything to do with lepidoptery. Now, it seems as if they’ve relented. He pushes a drawer across the counter.
It holds about a hundred tiny boxes, each covered in marbled decorative paper with glass lids and backs. Inside are seeds, beans, skeletonised leaves, dried hard and brittle over the centuries. I pull on my gloves. What is it like to have such a collection? To have it outlive you?
‘You shouldn’t get too attached to Sloane.’ He is watching me lay the boxes out on the desk.
‘Why?’
‘How do you think he amassed all of this?’
‘I’ve never thought about it.’
‘Think about it now.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He was extremely wealthy and, in the 1700s, only one industry guaranteed profits.’
‘What?’