Blood Rose

thirty-five

In the cool sanctuary of his laboratory, thirty kilometres north of Walvis Bay, Tertius Myburgh picked up a cloth and wiped down his microscope, though his equipment was immaculate. His prepared solutions waited for him, labelled, ordered. His heart beat faster. It always did before he plunged into the secret world of plants. He set to work on the pathetic bundles Clare Hart had brought. The dead boys’ shoes were covered in pollen. Invisible hieroglyphs that mapped the journeys they had made.

He prepared his first slide and placed it on the stage, leaning in to the eyepiece and adjusting the lens to bring the grains of pollen into focus. He exhaled. They floated before him, the cellulose grains that carried the fragile male plants to a waiting female, if there was one. More often, they were stranded on un-receptive surfaces. Like a murdered boy’s shoes. Myburgh prepared another slide, then another, and another. He matched the pollen grains against what he already had, checking off the species that flowered in response to the desert’s waterless spring.

No Sarcocornia. The humble, stubby-fingered plant grew in profusion in the shallow, saline water around the lagoon and in the river mouths along the coast. It occurred for about two kilometres inland. If there was none on the boy’s shoes, then it meant that their Calvary was further inland.

Plenty of Tamarix pollen. Not surprising, as tamarisks grew in profusion in the Kuiseb. They also grew from Cape Town to Jerusalem. He would need more.

There were traces of Acanthosicyos horridus, the seasonal!nara plant that crept from the Orange River in the south over the dunes to the Kuiseb. The spiny melons provided food for the Topnaars, the desert people, and their animals, and the inherited stands were as valuable as the secret sources of water in the desert. Myburgh paused to admire their distinctive pollen walls covered with exquisite striations, which, under his microscope, looked as if someone had drawn meditative fingers through sand.

He found Trianthema hereroensis pollen, a tough plant that occurred from the Kuiseb River for about a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north. The overlap of the plant distribution was bang on the Kuiseb Delta.

Myburgh was beginning to see the outline of a map for Clare Hart, but he needed more coordinates. One distinctive, triangular pollen pattern eluded him. There were traces of it on all four pairs of shoes. He checked back through Clare’s samples.

Nothing.

He picked up Mannheimer and Dreyer’s classic Plants and Pollens of the World and flicked through, finding the matching pattern that would help him place the pollen. Fear dry-tonguing his neck, Myburgh propped a ladder against the bookcase so that he could reach the top shelf, which held the stained, cloth-bound book that he had hidden months earlier and tried to forget. He opened Virginia Meyer’s blue journal. It was still filled with her detailed drawings, her cramped notes on ethno-botany, gleaned from Spyt, the wary old Topnaar man who had shared what he knew about the plants of the Namib, the desert’s secret treasure trove. Myburgh paged through it until he came to the last page of entries. Times, abbreviations, Latin names. He ignored those. Instead, he cracked the book open and swabbed the margin. He wiped what he had collected onto a glass slide. A thin yellow smear appeared down the centre of the pane. He placed this on the microscope’s stage, the eyepiece cold against his skin once more. His hands shook as he adjusted the lens. They appeared with magical precision, the distinctive triangular pollen grains, perfect equilateral triangles.

Myrtaceae: Eucalyptus. The ghost gum.

The scientist lifted his head and stared at the surf. He heard again Virginia Meyer’s soft voice, telling him of secrets too dirty, conspiracies too complex, which she had unearthed in the heat-raddled desert. He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against his lids, but he failed to block the memory of a car upturned, its wheels spinning against the blue sky.

In the back, the boy Oscar sits in wordless terror. In the front, his mother’s life trickles down her face, into her hair, the same colour as the boy’s halo of curls. It runs into her unblinking eyes, over her hands and pools on the floor. Eventually, it seeps into the orange sand at the base of a tall alien tree.

Myburgh shook off the memory with an effort and returned to his desk to type up his findings, the routine of recording method, results and conclusions soothing him. He printed the document and put it into a large envelope with the journal. He thought for a long time about what his discovery might mean for pretty Dr Hart; then he locked his laboratory and slipped away, taking care not to be seen.