The Other Tree (2 page)

“Chris!” A scruffy student with multidirectional hair loped across the quadrangle.

Chris continued pushing the trolley as the student fell into irregular step beside her.

“Not now, Tyler,” said Chris.

“My hamster’s sick.”

“Take it to a vet.”

“I will, but that stuff you gave me last time—” Tyler rummaged in his pockets. “I can give you something. I found these really cool plants.”

Tyler proffered a handful of moist, wilted leaves.

“Those are geraniums,” said Chris.

Tyler looked momentarily crestfallen, then pulled out another handful of stems.

“I found these at a mate’s house—” said Tyler hopefully.

“You’ll get expelled for having those on campus,” said Chris flatly, wheeling the trolley towards the library loading ramp.

“Chris…”

Chris sighed and glanced around the empty bay. She quickly crouched beside the trolley and reached into the covered lower half, rummaging around with a soft clinking noise. After a moment, Chris pulled out two thin, scarlet leaves and stuffed them into Tyler’s shirt pocket.

“Stop overfeeding it,” said Chris.

“But she always looks so hun—”

“Stop. Overfeeding. It. Or next time, I’ll give you something that’ll make it explode.”

Tyler nodded furiously, then jogged away with a wave.

“Thanks, Chris!”

This is my life
, thought Chris as she trundled the trolley back into the library. Writing failed proposals and saving hamsters from lethal indigestion.

The afternoon passed in a sagging blur. Her brain felt like pudding as she shelved the trolley of books written by people who had obviously submitted successful grant applications. As evening drifted on, students filtered away to pub crawls and late-night cram sessions. Chris finally wheeled the empty trolley into the lift, punching the cracked button for the basement.

The basement level was where the old books used to be kept. Not the old, rare books, hand-bound in palomino leather with engraved name plates. These were the old books that no one ever borrowed, leaving generations of librarians wondering why their predecessors thought they would need a book on knitting plush medieval siege weapons.

Eventually, even these old books had been moved after the seeping damp and the millipedes had started causing problems. No one knew how the millipedes got down here, but everyone was too afraid to have it investigated. That was how horror movies started.

Chris wheeled the trolley down the sticky linoleum corridor, fluorescent rods flickering on the low ceiling. She stopped at a door. Her door.

There was a handwritten paper sign stuck to the bloated wood:
Miscellaneous Academic
.

The sign covered the original door plate, which read:
Bio-Hazardous Lab Waste. Do Not Eat
.

At least she had an office. It was a cramped, windowless, bare brick room, but she had managed to wire it up with several large flood lamps, which made all the difference.

The tiny room was brimming with potted plants, cuttings, grafts, bowls of seeds, and dried, hanging specimens. Jars, half-filled with water, covered several shelves, bristling with assorted leaves and stems. Along one wall, a creeping vine with star-shaped berries was making a break for freedom towards a low vent. In a corner, a startlingly large bush had burst into multicoloured flowers. Books and papers poked out from between leaves and under clay pots, and the room smelled of damp earth.

There’s so much more than this
, thought Chris, as she parked the trolley against the far wall and unloaded pots and jars from the covered tray.

The things she could show them, the things she could change, if only the fools would realise that “quantum” was just a word, and that antechinuses rarely, if ever, imploded. If they wanted imploding antechinuses,
she
could give them imploding antech—

Chris turned around and froze mid-reach. She hadn’t heard the door open, let alone close. Standing in her office was the spectacled man from the quadrangle.

“Nice office,” he said.

He pushed aside a hanging frond as he stepped over to the desk between them. It was a very small step.

“They said I could use the trolley,” said Chris.

The man looked vaguely like an auditor. No, he looked like someone wearing the hollowed-out skin of an auditor. He was wearing a tie, but Chris had the uncomfortable impression that it was only so he could use it to strangle people. She shook the thought from her head.

“Do you like it here?” he asked casually, glancing around at the dripping foliage.

A spider started crawling across the desk, then gently expired halfway across.

“It’s…fine,” said Chris.

The man looked around, quietly reassessing his definition of “fine.”

“I’d like to make you an offer,” he said.

“Can I refuse?” Chris glanced at the durian she kept under the desk.

“If you want to stay here for the rest of your life.”

Chris didn’t particularly believe in serendipity, but she did believe in hidden cameras and cruel humour.

“Go on,” she said carefully.

The man took a smooth step around the desk. Chris noted with some unease that he moved with controlled precision, as though every movement were lining up the next four.

“I work for a company with a large pharmaceutical research and development division,” he said. “We’re about to commence a research expedition to investigate the potential medical properties of an extremely rare plant. We’re looking for someone with significant botanical experience to join our team for an immediate start. The remuneration is excellent, and you will be credited third on the initial journal paper.”

And the million-dollar question.

“Why me?” asked Chris.

The man’s expression didn’t waver.

“I understand you’re a qualified cryptobotanist,” he said.

Chris returned the gaze, edged with razor wire.

“Most people don’t think it’s a real qualification.”

“I know better.”

Chris studied his calm, businesslike demeanour.

“What’s the plant?” said Chris.

“The Tree of Life. Genesis. Chapter Two. Verse Nine.”

The man was straight-faced, his grey eyes steady.

Something in Chris snapped, like a broken spring in a watch wound too tight. A sad smile. A closing door. A phone call. The smell of damp earth. Silence.

“Who do you work for?” Chris’s voice was like a blade being drawn.

“A thirty-percent down payment can be deposited into—”

“Who do you work for.” It was less of a question now.

“The expedition is being funded by SinaCor—”

“Get out.”

The vehemence behind those words could have levelled a small fishing village. Chris’s eyes blazed as she stepped forward.

The man fixed Chris with a faintly reproachful expression, then reached into his jacket. Chris grabbed the durian from under her desk and braced to hurl it. She had a pretty good arm from hefting textbooks, and at point-blank range a durian could do a hell of a lot of damage.

He withdrew his hand slowly from his jacket, holding a slim business card between two fingers. He slid the card delicately onto the desk, beside the dead spider.

“If you change your mind.” He paused at the door. “I’m sorry about your father.”

Chris’s heart skipped several beats.

“What do you mean?”

There was a brief, theatrical pause.

“Oops,” said the man.

The door closed softly.

2

Softly glowing laptop screens lit the room, and shadowy objects glinted on the floor. Several figures occupied indistinct surfaces, although one may have been in a hammock. The man entered the room, discarding his wire-rimmed glasses and pulling off his tie with a grimace.

“No joy?” said a lanky man with blond hair.

“It’s not important,” said the man, shrugging off his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster.

“You owe me twenty,” said the lanky man to a woman studying a laptop screen.

She ignored him.

“I told you not to go, Docker,” continued the lanky man. “You creep people out. So does Roman.”

The woman looked up, her red irises catching the light.

“It’s a congenital disorder, Stace,” she said flatly.

Stace shrugged. “So, do we just go?”

Docker glanced towards a shadowy figure leaning against a wall.

“Almost,” said Docker.

* * *

Chris pounded her fist on the flaky front door, her heart racing, stomach trying to crawl somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. She felt as though she’d leapt from a cliff, hanging in that awful moment just before you started to fall.

Not again
, thought Chris.
I can’t… Not again…

A chain rattled, and the door opened to reveal a man in his fifties with a permanently sceptical expression.

“Dad!” Chris pushed inside. “Are you okay? Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“It’s Wednesday,” said Mr. Arlin.

“You don’t answer your phone on Wednesdays?”

“You don’t visit on Wednesdays. I probably had my phone off.”

Chris felt tears of relief pricking at her eyes.

“I just finished baking a custard,” said Mr. Arlin. “Take your shoes off.”

Chris followed him into the small kitchen, the comforting smell of sweet baked goods filling the air. Framed sketches of small reptiles and frogs hung on the yellow-papered walls.

“Dad, is everything okay?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Arlin. “You could do something about the cat next door, though. Got any plants that eat cats?”

“Let me get that.”

Chris gently took the baking tin from the oven. Words ran circles through her head, repeatedly bypassing her mouth.

“Dad. Are you… Are
you
okay?”

Mr. Arlin opened the kitchen cupboard, taking out two white china plates. The silence stretched a little too long, and Chris suddenly knew, in that heart-stopping moment just before he answered—

“Doctor Phisbe said maybe there’s something up with my lungs,” he mumbled.

Mr. Arlin rummaged through the kitchen drawer for clean forks, and his mumbling decreased further in volume.

“Maybe some kind of cancer.”

Chris stood perfectly still as the world turned nauseatingly wobbly, and then sank slowly in on itself like a deflating soufflé. There was a sense of floating unreality as the room seemed to burst into swarms of brightly coloured goldfish, bubbling through the air.

“I was waiting for the right time…” said Mr. Arlin.

The imaginary fish all went belly-up. Chris swayed, putting down the baked custard. Mr. Arlin steered Chris gently towards the living room, guiding her to the couch.

“At least it’s not Ebola,” said Mr. Arlin.

Chris’s brain got a foothold as it slid towards deranged grief, and it started climbing.

“There’s medication, they have—”

“Chris, it’s—”

“I’ll find a way,” said Chris. “I can find a way—”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Mr. Arlin, a faint edge in his voice. “New treatments take generations to develop. It takes decades, and sometimes centuries, of scientists building on the work of the scientists before them. Your mother never understood that.”

Desperation spilled through Chris as she gripped her father’s hands. Mr. Arlin’s bravado bent a little.

“Just come for dinner more often.”

* * *

She cried that night, all night, for the first time in years. Her throat throbbed raw and her chest panged with every breath, as though she’d been hit by an elephant driving an eighteen-wheeler. Every memory of happiness seemed to evaporate, overwhelmed by the terrible sense of being finally, utterly alone.

The next day was pale and washed out, like a day that lacked the conviction to be real. Everything was too bright and too brittle, seeming to have shape and colour but no substance. Chris’s dreams had been full of ornately patterned snakes coiled around dark, twisted trees. Bright red apples rolled through carpeted corridors, while breezes blew through sunlit halls.

Yesterday’s drama at the notice boards seemed incomprehensibly insignificant.
Everything
seemed insignificant. The pain had boiled everything into a numb morass, and there was a certain soothing quality to letting her body carry out mindless tasks while her brain remained catatonic.

Therefore, it was with some surprise that Chris found herself standing in front of a grey laminate door, slotted with the nameplate
Religious Guidance – Miscellaneous Christian
. She stared blankly at the door for some time before she realised it was open. Inside the small office, a slim blond man in his mid-twenties sat behind a spartan desk, studiously ignoring her. Chris found this mildly insulting, particularly as the man was a wearing a clerical collar.

Chris had never been particularly religious, and personal experience had left her disinclined to believe in miracles. To Chris, religion was something that just floated around, like airborne bacteria—you didn’t really think about it, but there was probably some stuck to you, anyway.

“Are you the campus priest?” she found herself saying.

The young man didn’t look up from his magazine.

“If you’re here to tip over the altar, you should have gotten here before the grad celebrations started,” he said.

Chris glanced around the monochromatic office. The room was bare, aside from a small rack of faded leaflets and a shelf of assorted Bibles, including a Theatrical Bible for Mimes.

“Actually, I just had some ques—” Chris began.

Without looking up, the young man flicked out a plain business card. It was printed simply with the words “Christian FAQ” and a website address.

“The online FAQ covers the usual things, like ‘Will my dog go to Heaven?’” he said, still not looking up from his reading.

“Do
dogs go to Heaven?”

“Read the FAQ.”