Tigerlily's Orchids (28 page)

‘Why bother with this environment business,' he asked rhetorically, ‘when Chinese are building a new power station each single day?'

Could this be true? Duncan didn't know if it was but the remark reminded him of Springmead and its inhabitants. Those girls would be swimming in their uncle's pool now, Mr Deng smoking a cigar with his brother on a shady patio, or enjoying a sake in the pagoda. He walked up to the end of Kenilworth Parade, crossed Kenilworth Avenue and turned into the lane. If the Audi had been there it was gone now and the up-and-over door was wide open. Because Mr Deng meant to come back? At any rate no one was there now. Duncan looked longingly at Springmead but what he contemplated doing must wait until dark.

*

M
argaret was visiting her friend next door. These days she went there more and more and stayed longer and longer. When Olwen remained in her bedroom her stepdaughter stayed at home but the moment she appeared in the living room, Margaret was off to see Helen, murmuring that she would ‘just pop next door for five minutes'. Olwen didn't mind. She was accustomed to being no one's favourite person, in fact accustomed to being generally disliked and avoided. It was many years now that she had come to terms with the truth that she was first in no one's world or, come to that, second or third.

Now it was simply a matter of choosing her time for what she meant to do. Afternoon would be best and immediately after Margaret had gone to have tea or coffee or something stronger with Helen. It brought Olwen a small amount of grim amusement to listen to Margaret's sanctimonious comments on alcohol consumption stories in the
Evening Standard
while the smell of gin was apparent on her breath.

‘Do you know that it says here the British drink more wine than the French and Italians put together?' Or, ‘It says here that binge drinking has doubled in the past five years.'

Mostly all this just bored Olwen. However much of a hypocrite Margaret might be, however much drink she consumed on her own or in her conspiracy with Helen, she wasn't and would never be in Olwen's league. Although it was many weeks since anything alcoholic had passed her lips, now that the best of it was past, she felt a strange pride in the consumption she had achieved over what was only a few months. She hadn't been a drinker, she had been a drunk, and as a drunk she meant to die. One afternoon, when Margaret, poor pathetic thing that she was, had gone next door to visit Helen, then it should be done.

In Margaret's absence she once more opened the drinks
cupboard and looked at the bottles. Her throat opened and she gasped, yearning, even placing a hand on the neck of the blue bottle and the brown bottle and clutching their necks, but she went no further than that and she closed the cupboard door again.

A
t about nine in the evening when it was still quite light, Duncan went out of his gate into the lane. The Springmead garage door was still raised and the Audi was missing. Duncan returned to his recliner, scratching his insect bite, the remains of his chicken, peas and chips supper still on the table. Mr Deng and the boy would be back in Totteridge, possibly sitting by the pool and eating a delicious meal of butterfly-prawn delight and lemon chicken and luxury fried rice. Or they had all gone out in the Bentley to Mr Deng's brother's restaurant – would he also be called Deng or didn't it work that way?

He carried the tray indoors and opened the kitchen drawer where he kept his house keys. There was a different key for every room as well as a spare front-door key and a back-door key. The houses, his and Deng's, were identical. It seemed likely that one of these keys would open Deng's back door or the French windows – well, not
likely
but possible. They all looked alike but for some minute difference in the bit of the key that went into the lock that Duncan didn't know the name of. He put all the keys into his pocket, returned to the recliner and lay there, sleepless but calm. At one point he dozed off and when he awoke he saw that it was almost one thirty in the morning.

He got up and then he did something quite alien to him. It was seldom he drank anything alcoholic. He didn't much like the taste. But now he needed courage and he poured himself a small whisky. Shuddering, he drank it down neat.
Almost immediately it galvanised him, charging him with energy.

The torch might be needed. He put a new battery in it to be on the safe side. Better enter their garden by the gate into the lane. Would it be locked and if it was would one of his keys unlock it? He checked that they were still in his pocket. The night was dark, moonless and overcast. Duncan made his way down the garden, slapping at the insects which homed in on him. The air was heavy with heat and humidity and utterly still. He let himself out into the lane and tried the next-door gate. It was locked. He began trying his keys, one after another. The fourth one turned in the lock and the gate opened. Duncan saw it as a good omen. It surely meant that one of the other keys would open the back door.

As he had expected the house was in absolute darkness. He approached the back door and paused, telling himself that he was about to commit a felony. Not breaking and entering, there would be none of that, not the breaking anyway, but entering was what he intended to do. He found himself almost hoping that none of the keys would work. At first it looked as if none would; none at least unlocked the back door. He moved along to the French windows and started again. This time the last key he tried turned in the lock. He was pleased but angry too. It wasn't right that they would do that, make keys for people which opened neighbours' doors. He didn't ask himself who ‘they' were.

With his hand grasping the knob but not turning it, he stood there, assailed now by doubts. That black curtain will be inside, he thought, and I shall have to draw it back. I shall have to find what's on the other side and it may be something dreadful. Don't talk rubbish, he muttered to himself, don't be stupid … Why am I doing this? I'm not really going to turn off their heating, am I? Go back, go home, complain to the council …

But he didn't go home. He stood there in the warm humid stillness, stood for a minute or two. Then, drawing in his breath, he turned the knob, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He was between the window and the curtain. It was hot and dark, stuffy and airless, and he could see nothing but thick black cloth. Carefully, in the dark, he felt along the curtain until he came to its left-hand side. Switching on the torch, he held it in his left hand, and with his right drew the curtain aside. It slid easily as on rungs, rattling slightly, an alarming sound in the silence.

Before he lifted up the torch to shine it into the place that was on the other side of the curtain he could feel leaves brushing against him just as the insects' wings had done. He raised the light and heard himself gasp aloud. He was standing in a forest or plantation, filling what had once been a room, the same size and measurements as his living room. The entire space between the French windows and the front window, also black-curtained, had been taken over by these plants, row upon row of them, green, flowerless, as far from orchids as could be imagined. They looked rather like tomatoes but somehow he knew they weren't tomatoes. He knew, without knowing quite how, that they lacked the
innocence
of tomatoes or sunflowers or artichokes or any other of those plants they slightly resembled. And a scent came from them, very faint but one he had smelt before in the street, long ago when he was young, a scent that even then he had been afraid of.

He was afraid now, fearful of walking among them, of damaging them. It was as if, bruised by his passing them, their leaves would emit a stronger substance or gas into the hot air. And now he was aware of how extremely hot it was, hotter than his own house, hotter than it had been even in the noonday sun of the past days. He began to lose his fear of them and as he walked round the outer row to the door into the hallway,
or where the door had been, for it had been removed from its hinges, he picked off the top of one of the plants. Then he picked another, about four inches of stem with leaves on it shaped like splayed hands, and put both pieces in his pocket. The hallway too was full of plants, and the dining room. The kitchen was full of plants but for a passage to the fridge and sink. Sweat began spouting from his forehead and cheeks. Now his eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness and he could see as well as he had in the garden. He stared in wonderment at the hundreds – thousands? – of plants, the long stalks, the green leaves, and passed his hand across his forehead, wiping away sticky moisture.

A cupboard on the wall here, exactly where there was a cupboard on his kitchen wall, would contain the electricity meter. Why hadn't he thought of that before? Never mind. He thought of it now. He opened the door and there was the meter, where it ought to be. But the reading on the gauge was so much less than his own that it was laughable. A low figure preceded by three noughts. How could that be? Duncan remembered reading somewhere that unscrupulous householders who didn't want to pay exorbitant electricity bills somehow bypassed the meter and connected a supply for themselves from a source in the street.

But was that controlled from a temperature gauge and time clock in a cupboard on the landing as his was? Keeping gingerly to the narrow space between the outer row of plants and the wall, he reached the stairs and began to climb them. His progress was necessarily slow because the heat was almost too much for him and sweat actually dripped from his cheeks on to his shirt. That there might be more plants upstairs he hadn't expected but there were: plants along the landing, plants in three of the bedrooms, a motionless sea of dull green. The doors to these rooms had been removed but the
one to the fourth, and smallest, bedroom was still there and it was shut.

Duncan didn't know what might be in that room. Not plants, though. He would look inside and then he would find the cupboard where the boiler must be. He opened the door very slowly and cautiously. The floor was covered with quilts and what he thought were called futons. There was also a pair of bunks, again laden with quilts. No black curtain here but only the blind which was pulled down. He retreated, leaving the door open, and began stepping gingerly through the rows of plants to find the source of this overpowering heat.

I
n the small room, naked but for a thin pair of shorts, Tao woke up when he heard someone downstairs. Not Deng Wei Xiao.
He
would have phoned first and come in by the front door. The girls would never be allowed to come alone. Besides, Deng had beaten Xue so badly when she'd been going to meet that man, that she was afraid to step an inch out of line, afraid to move out of the room she now shared with Li-li in the flat. The boy sat up in his bunk and listened. Whoever it was, that person was coming up the stairs, had reached the top. Tao shivered when he thought how the plants must be getting crushed, bruised, spoilt.

The door moved a little, came open. By then Tao was under the quilt, as still as a stone. But he could just see out. The intruder was the old man next door. Tao had often seen him staring into the Springmead garden and gazing down from a window at the back of his house, when he and Xue had been on their way to the cool plant-free summer house. The old man moved away, leaving the door open. Tao got up very quietly, very stealthily.

For just this eventuality Deng Wei Xiao left whoever might be here a selection of weapons, a hammer, a knife, a baseball bat. No guns. Whatever must be done must be done silently. Tao chose the bat. He squatted down in the doorway and watched the old man go into the boiler cupboard and turn off the heating. If that happened, Deng said, if it happened for more than half an hour, the plants would die and they would lose thousands.

Tao watched the old man begin to descend the stairs. Being so old, he was probably deaf. Tao remembered his grandfather in Chang-Sha who had gone deaf when he was this man's age. The old man lumbered down, clutching hold of the banister rail. He didn't seem to hear someone following him down the stairs as Tao moved softly, waiting for him to reach the bottom. Then, as he waded between the plants, and reached the inner glass door inside the front, Tao struck. He brought the baseball bat down on the old man's head and watched him drop with a long-drawn-out groan to the floor.

He lay on the floor, crushing the plants. Never, never damage a single plant, was the warning that had been instilled into Tao and the girls. But what was worse, sacrificing five or six plants or leaving the old man to call the police? The old man mustn't be here, though. He mustn't be found in here. Tao got both doors open, the inner glass door and the front door. In moving Duncan he saw with horror and some panic how many more of the plants he was crushing and spoiling, but there was no help for it. Deng would understand, wouldn't he? It was three in the morning, still and silent. He dragged Duncan or Duncan's body – was he dead? – out into the street and and laid him on the pavement, close up against the low hedge. Taking his mobile and his money
would make it look more like a mugging but Duncan didn't have a mobile or any money on him beyond a few copper coins. His pockets were full of nothing but keys.

Then Tao went upstairs very fast and switched the heat on.

M
arius was having less than his usual luck with the
sortes
. He had opened
Paradise Lost
the evening before at Rose's request. She wanted to know if the man who was buying her flat would sign the contract next day. Marius's saying the
sortes
were only a bit of fun and not to be taken seriously, made no difference. The page at which he opened the volume was halfway through Book X and what he read was: ‘But death comes not at call; Justice Divine / Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.'

‘Nothing to do with buyers or house agents, I'm afraid, sweetheart.'