PART III
Monday
37
Pollen
Now
My pulse is strong and rhythmic when I wake up, thrumming with purpose. Today is the day. Today, I’ll show him. Today, I’ll go home. I’ll make Millie all her favourite foods, pancakes with chocolate spread, foamy milk with sprinkles, cheesy pasta, I’ll do bedtime, I’ll sing all the made-up verses of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, let her fall asleep in my arms. Then, I’ll go downstairs and watch an action movie with Kit, all I want is for us to have the same conversation we’ve had since we met. ‘I could have a body like that,’ he’ll say, as we watch the Marine/warrior/gladiator leap off a building.
‘If you didn’t have a job.’
‘If I didn’t like pizza.’
‘If you went to the gym for seven hours every day.’
He’ll smile at me. ‘Not worth it.’
I’ll smile back. ‘Not worth it.’
My strategy is simple. No more talking about the law, Daniel is immune to the logic of it. No talking about Kit either, he willtwist everything. I’ll simply show him why he doesn’t know me at all. I’ll tell him the secret I’ve kept from him in the place I kept it.
You don’t trust him, he hurled at me yesterday. But it’s Daniel I can’t trust. With the biggest secret of all.
On the desk, the angel’s trumpets bulge against the tape, straining to be loose. I pull on a pair of gloves, run a finger along the neck of one flower from sepal to petal. Carefully, carefully, I peel back the tape.
I’ve pollinated the flowers dozens of times. Kit bought my first pair of angel’s trumpets for my birthday years ago, since then, I’ve been fertilising, cultivating, feeding until I have ten more shrubs. Still, my hands are shaking, the tweezers tremble between my fingers. I wait until I’m calm. Then, I ease back the petals to expose the insides of the flower. It’s so quiet. All I can hear is the snap of the filaments as I transfer the sunshine-bright anthers into test tubes.
If I was fertilising, it would be easy, I would dab the pollen directly onto the stigma. But I am not pollinating, I am collecting. I turn out the tube of anthers onto a folded piece of hotel paper, use a paintbrush to coax off the grains and then tip the pure pollen back into the tube.
It’s the scopolamine that makes the pollen so poisonous. In the eighteenth century, scopolamine was used as an anaesthetic, in higher doses, it causes dry mouth, blurred vision, tachycardia, arrhythmia. And that’s just one of the tropane alkaloids in the pollen. The others – atropine, hyoscyamine – can lead to paralysis, delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, death. I read once that a man who drank a tea made from two flowers stumbled out of his grandmother’s garden house, blood streaming downhis body. He’d amputated his tongue and his penis with a pair of pruning shears.
I like this story; my mind turns it over and over. Perhaps it’s the garden house, I can imagine it so clearly, the pots of seedlings, the buckets, the loamed scent of soil, it blurs so seamlessly with my own greenhouse. Other times, I think I like it because of what he amputated. Why not a finger or a toe? Why his tongue, his penis? I think he hurt someone. The amputation, then, a self-inflicted punishment. A silencing. And an unmanning.
From: Kit McDermott
05:35
You know those few seconds between waking and sleeping where you don’t quite know where you are? It was like that when I woke up just now, and then Mills rolled into me and I remembered why I’m in her bedroom and that you’d disappeared and that Faye is dead and I felt it right in my chest, the enormity of my grief.
You would freak out if you saw her bedroom. It’s a lair. I’ve pulled Mills’ mattress onto the floor beside me because she keeps coming to sleep on the floor with me, but that means the entire floor is now our bed, we share it with countless rabbits and unicorns, the names only you and her know. Their noses dig into my back, their tails sprouting from between the pillows.
We’ve reverted to our primal selves, no rooms between us, no walls, nothing as civilised as her pillow and mine. My body is hers – blanket, pillow, mattress – right now, she issleeping in the crook of my arm, her heels flung over my ribs. I wake up at strange times in the night by her burrowing upwards, to lay her cheek against mine, I’ve started shaving twice a day because I’m worried about prickling her. I am exhausted but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t know who needs who more.
I feel like I am in hibernation. That I will sleep and when I wake up this will all be over.
38
Pin
Then
He says I can come to the field with him but he warns that things are different now. We will not be alone. The field is swarming with researchers and assistants; the Blues will start to lay their eggs in the next few days and everyone is waiting, under Daniel’s orders, to track the caterpillars’ path from hatching to ant colony. We can’t hold hands or touch on the coastal path either; it’s the only way to get to the thyme. Every day, at least one person Daniel knows joins us on our walk to the field.
The older researchers – McPherson, David – with their balding heads and floppy hats, don’t bother me, they clap Daniel on the back and talk about publications inInsect Conservation and DiversityandProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The assistants, on the other hand, make me feel awkward, out of place. Wildly overqualified with their degrees in zoology, their masters in conservation ecology, they net the Blues with carefree precision. Suzanna is Lithuanian, with pale skin that burns easily, she is constantly smoothing suntan lotion over her arms whilecracking jokes with Daniel. Imogen has a wholesome, English prettiness and improbably large breasts, which she squeezes into tight, ribbed tank tops. But the worst is dark-haired Rachael, who is not pretty at all but is some kind of entomological prodigy, always making some opaque comment about the growth strategy of larva. She has a small, grave voice and whenever she speaks, Daniel quietens the others to listen to her. It is she who finds the first egg, a tiny pearl at the base of an unopened bud. Daniel calls everyone over to congratulate her. I want to tread on her sandwiches. Open her cage of Blues.
It is very bad in the field. He has no time to help me perfect my netting, he has real assistants to net, identify, log data. I dare myself to not go with him in the afternoons – I could stay at home, go swimming, see Alex – because the fact that he is within touching distance, the sheer proximity to him makes my skin ache. But I never do. I live for the moments when he catches my gaze across the thyme, when he asks me if I’m drinking enough, if I’m bored, what I’m sketching. When he calls for me, I always bring my illustrations. Shielded by my sketchbook, he draws a finger down the back of my hand or clutches my knee.