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“Any chance you could give me a contact number for this Saturday of yours?”
“Sure, but I’m not sure she’s going to be pleased to hear from you.”
“Why?”
“You’re the bloke that developed the Kellen wetlands, right?”
Gavin nodded, remembering the wave of public condemnation he had incurred—an outrage he hadn’t calculated into the overall costs of the development.
“Saturday Honeywell ran the campaign to save them,” Stanley Jervis said a trifle smugly.
Great, Gavin thought ruefully, funny how things come back to haunt us. He wondered if it was a side-effect of living a long life or one of ruthless ambition.
Standing behind a glass partition, the radiologist watched the large feet covered by white nylon socks slowly disappear into the humming apparatus. Inside, the light filtered in at Gavin’s feet, but the tube he lay in was illuminated as well. The machine droned as the CAT scan edged its way slowly down his body and radio wave after radio wave painlessly and invisibly deciphered each section of his brain.
Gavin attempted to distract himself with thoughts of the immediate future: the next meeting with Cathy; his legal position; making love with Amanda and the disturbing possibility of further emotional involvement. But he couldn’t keep his mind from the notion of cancer. Could he have a tumor? Surely not. The doctor didn’t think any of the symptoms indicated a brain tumor—there had been no headaches, no blurring of vision, just the infernal hallucinations. He had to be okay, he would be okay….
The machine stopped suddenly and the radiologist’s voice came through a speaker, tinny and distant. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it, Mr. Tetherhook?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. You’ll be out in a nanosecond.”
The bed he lay on slid forward smoothly. Gavin, hating the vulnerability of being prostrate, swung himself back onto his feet.
“Now if you sit here for five minutes I’ll print out the results, but from what I could see on the screen everything looks absolutely normal.”
Normal. He inadvertently glanced at his palm—the outline had faded slowly over a period of twelve hours and finally disappeared leaving nothing, not even a rash. Regardless of circumstances, Gavin had decided he would not go to a psychologist. A pragmatic man who had always regarded therapy as an indulgence for people who hadn’t grown up with priests, he was convinced that whatever was bombarding him with these visual and aural hallucinations was too real to be explained as a psychological reaction to his divorce. No, the CAT scan was the last physical check—and if anything else manifested he planned to take more radical action.
The radiologist looked up from his screen.
“Just as I thought, totally normal, both hemispheres showing absolutely no sign of lesions or tumors. I’ll have the scans sent over to your doctor in the next week, Mr. Tetherhook. By the way, I love that new building of yours, Bridgeport. It really is stunning.”
Gavin stepped out of the hospital doors. Normal, I’m normal—the phrase ran through his head like a new marketing campaign. Gavin Tetherhook, property developer supreme, was recently vindicated in his fight for full control of the Bridgeport development after a long legal battle with his ex-wife Cathy Tetherhook. Gavin could see the headlines now, could see himself post-divorce: independent, handsome, healthy. Hell, he might even start the Pilates class Amanda had been nagging him about to combat the middle-age spread that had started to thicken around his hips. Yep, the vision of the yacht was coming back: himself on deck with his kids, but this time with wife number two—blond, groomed, but a good fifteen years younger than wife number one.
His reverie was interrupted by his mobile vibrating with delicious intimacy against his thigh. He reached into his pocket and checked the number. Amanda again, as if she’d intuited his sudden change of heart. He almost answered, then changed his mind. Let her wait, he’d ring later that night.
He reached the car, which he’d parked under a jacaranda tree. As he bent to pull open the door he felt an unexplained chill. The hairs prickled at the back of his neck. Resisting the immediate instinct to look behind him he ran his gaze across the ground. The car and the pavement surrounding it was enveloped in a bizarre shadow that seemed to have an emerald tinge to its darker parts. Gavin froze, his hand still on the door handle, trying to muster up the courage to look up. The shadow had the jagged outline of something vast, something organic…. It was wrong, terribly wrong.
Clutching at his polyester jacket, desperately seeking comfort from the synthetic weave that caught at his fingernails, Gavin took a deep breath and looked up.
The jacaranda tree was small—there was no way it could be casting a shadow of such magnitude. His heart suddenly racing Gavin leaped into the Merc and sped off. He bent over the wheel, eyes glued to the road as the car swallowed the tarmac faster and faster. For one horrific moment he thought the shad
ow had followed him like a massive hovering bird but just then the car drove into sunlight. It flooded the plush interior like sudden comfort. Three blocks later Gavin pulled to the side of the road and wept.
“She’s a live wire is old Saturday Honeywell, that’s for sure. But she’s the best man for the job, there’s not a paleobotanist in the country that can match her expertise.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. Gavin could tell that his colleague—a civil servant in the Ministry of Planning and Environment who specialized in land clearance and contra-deals with corrupt developers such as Gavin—was wondering what the hell a notorious antienvironmentalist like himself wanted with a radical botanist.
“Found something, have you? ’Cause if it’s of national significance you’re gonna have to fess up. Times have changed, there’s a lot of green dollar now in native flora.”
“Don’t worry, Jeff, I’m not hiding anything.” They laughed together and some of the tension crackling along the phone line dissipated. “It’s a private matter, nothing the ministry need worry about. By the way, how is that charity of yours getting along?”
After Gavin put the phone down he made a note to donate a couple of thousand dollars to the Barrier Reef Foundation—unspoken barter for the ministry to leave him alone for a few more months.
Saturday Honeywell’s phone number stared up at him, her name round in his mouth. Wishing for the impossible he evoked an image of a svelte scientist with her hair neatly scraped back, indicating a pragmatism he anticipated would anchor his fears forever rather than the typical ratbag environmentalists he was used to dealing with.
He felt a twinge in his balls. It reminded him that he hadn’t had sex for over a month. He gazed out his office window across the river that snaked lazily through the city. Perhaps he would see Amanda that night—what harm could it do? It might even take his mind off his growing anxieties. He shouted to his assistant to put a call through.
