Christina Rose looked cross when I
finally entered the glasshouse, or at least she made the face of it.
I had kept her waiting and the air was hot, thick with the scent of
orange blossom and wafting pollen. Beneath the new tendrils of the
kiwi vines, speckled shade was dotted with the cheerful citrus hues
of marigolds. Hoverflies trembled the still air as they danced
between the limnanthes, the flowers spilling across the beds like
heaped platters of poached eggs.
“You took your time, Michael,” in a
not-quite-chiding tone.
“Distillation is a finicky business,
Chris. My apprentice is doing well, but I can't leave her alone with
it yet.”
“Distilling?” A raised eyebrow,
more inquisitive than inquisitorial.
“Peppermint,” I began.
“It's a bit early in the year for
that, isn't it?”
“The crop was ready. Mint doesn't
understand the calendar, only the weather.”
Chris gave a wry half-laugh. “I'm
glad someone understands it. I certainly don't any more.”
“No,” I sighed, “And the lavender
won't be long either.”
A dark shadow appeared to cross her
face, a misgiving, maybe. “I know it's a busy time for you,
Michael, but I need you to do something for me, for the farm.”
She paused.
“A candidate. Check him out.”
New Alchemy Farm – my home,
workplace, refuge, call it what you will - is a closed community,
nominally a cooperative, but one in which all its members invariably
defer to Christina Rose. We have a written constitution and
democratic forms, but that's mostly honoured in the breach. Christina
decides, we agree. It works for us.
We don't take new members lightly;
after all, there's only so much land. Any new candidates have to
bring something to the table. It's hard, but it's a hard world now.
Refugees get a meal, shelter for the night, and a speedy farewell, and
that's a meal and a rest more than they get anywhere else. Unless
they can bring something to the table, of course, in which case we'll
extend the welcome for a week or so. We don't tell them they are
candidates, but if we – that is Christina – are happy, then
they're invited to stay. Candidates usually come to us, which is why
I was so surprised at Christina's request. It had been decades since
I last went into the city and I must admit I felt some trepidation at
the prospect.
The travelling party was small. Myself,
of course, Jake, the laconic Scot who had served in some
never-specified regiment during an equally unspecified war, and
Yusuf, a recent refugee who'd arrived one day with a haunted look and
an unusual facility for weaving and tailoring which we appreciated
enough to let him stay.
Jake is a wily old coot, and if you
ever need anyone watching your back, then Jake's your man. That's why
he was with us. Going into the city these days, it's good to have
someone to watch your back. Jake always keeps one ear to the ground, and some might think him over-cautious, but it's a caution that has kept him alive in some tough situations.
Yusuf was wearing more than one hat,
though. His well-muscled six-foot frame and steely gaze were
deterrent enough for the sort of miscreant the road might offer, but
more importantly, he was our introduction to the candidate. For all
that I was wearing a few items of his handiwork, I still didn't
really know Yusuf by then, he tends to the quiet side, but there's
nothing like a journey to get to know someone. Jake I've known for
years, almost since he was first stranded south of the border during
the troubles that followed the dissolution of the Union.
It's only seven miles to the city but
we gathered as the sun rose over the rolling fields. In my youth I
could walk there in a couple of hours. In my youth I didn't need to,
though, because buses still ran and then later I could drive. Now
only military vehicles could be seen on the road, though rarely this
far from London.
“You've decided on a route?” Jake
asked as I locked up the workshop.
“I was thinking of the old railway
line, then the old A50 as we may as well stop off at Dr. John's and
deliver this.” I held up the rucksack full of supplies. Jake looked
dubious.
“That's under. I prefer over.”
“It all depends, Jake. You told me
yourself that the Squire's men have been patrolling recently.
No-one's been robbed down there for months.”
Yusuf was looking confused. “Under or
over what?”
“The motorway,” I explained. “We
have to cross the M1 somewhere between here and the city. It's a
choice between who's lurking in the shadows or a detour of a few
miles. You'll be carrying the rucksack, Yusuf, seeing as Jake's going
to be scouting ahead, and I'm too old.”
“Fine, fine, but I don't like it,”
Jake grumbled.
In the event, it was fine as we passed
from the dappled sunlight of the overgrown track into the cool, damp
shade beneath the motorway bridge. Blackened scorch marks and smoke
trails obscured some of the decades old graffiti on the concrete, and
a ring of boulders marked a fire pit. Whoever left it there hadn't
cleared up after them, and I couldn't help wondering if I'd been
overconfident after all. The enclosed space echoed with distant
memories from my childhood.
Once the potential trouble spot was
cleared, Jake forged ahead on the path, senses alert for any danger.
I turned to Yusuf, wanting to break the silence that had fallen over
me in the bridge's chilly underbelly.
“I remember when that motorway was
newly built,” I said, pointing back with my thumb. “I saw the
last train on this track before it was ripped up and made into a
footpath. I was only a toddler, but I saw it.”
“You are a local man, then?” Yusuf
replied, politely.
“Oh, yes. This used to be my
playground as a boy. That bridge was my limit. My parents always said
I should never go any further from home than there.”
“And you obeyed?”
“Did I heck! The best blackberry
picking was always on the far side of the bridge,” I laughed.
“What
about you, Yusuf? Where did you grow up?”
“My parents came over from Pakistan,
but I was born in Leicester. They would be about your age, I guess.”
“Would?” I asked, tentatively.
“They were on the Last Hajj.”
“I'm sorry.” I didn't know what
else to say. What can you say?
“We weren't close,” he added. “They
disowned me.”
“Even so...”
“They said Allah hates gays,” Yusuf
continued, the revelations coming thick and fast, I thought.
“Otherwise I would have been with them. On the Hajj, I mean.”
“You miss them, though, surely?” It
felt trite, even as I spoke.
“They put me out of their hearts. I
returned the favour. I got used to being alone.” There was a
vehemence to his voice, as though he was trying to convince himself,
too.
“So that's why you wound up at New
Alchemy?”
“Yes. At first the community just
shunned me when they found out I was gay, but after … that
... I couldn't go to the mosque any more. How could I pray when I
literally had to face what had happened, what my fellow Muslims had
done? I helped protect our neighbourhood from the nationalist thugs
and then the rioters, but it was my own neighbours who burnt my house
and chased me out. So here I am. A lonely, gay, apostate outcast. I
feel like I'm everyone's scapegoat some days.”
The last ten years or so haven't been
easy for anyone, but I could understand how difficult it had been for
Yusuf.
“Well, there'll be none of that at
the farm,” I said.
“No. I'm glad of that, you're the first people to treat me like I'm not everything that's gone wrong in the world. It feels like
a bubble of sanity in a sea of crazy.”
“We've had our share of crazy, too,
but it seems to be calming down again now.” At least, as long as
Christina stays on the right side of the Squire, I thought to myself.
I'm still not quite sure what sort of a deal she's done, but he's
someone we need inside the tent, as they say, and he has brought back
some sense of order around the villages. Not exactly law, but order
at least. That's a start.
We paced side by side for a few minutes
in silence, then bumped up against Jake crouching beneath the
cascading foliage overhanging the path. He gestured for us to be
quiet and edged forward, pulling out his treasured binoculars. Jake
spent a couple of minutes scanning the surrounding area, then,
satisfied, he waved us on once more. We broke cover on to the street
of what used to be a quiet country town. A boarded up pub, opposing
rows of once-desirable houses, then on the bend in the road, the
irony of a petrol station, forlorn and silent.
This had once been a good
neighbourhood, with the misfortune of lying too close to a bad one.
We would be skirting the bad neighbourhood for a while after we made
it to the A50, but that had become just as depopulated as this town.
The area had suffered disproportionately during the second wave of
fuel protests. I'd heard the stories, but I hadn't seen it with my
own eyes. In the year 2000 the truckers' blockades had come close to
toppling the government, but in the second wave a few years ago they
didn't stop the protests after three days. The government had learnt
from previous experience, though, and troops hit the streets once the
riots began.
Yusuf barely batted an eyelid at the
damage. He'd been in the city at the time, and had seen much worse,
he told me. Luckily we'd been reasonably isolated on the farm, except
that it was about this time the Squire had started making a name for
himself, but he was strictly poacher then, his conversion to
gamekeeper still ahead of him.
Jake had us through the burnt out
streets in next to no time, and the wide avenue of the A50 opened out
before us. Up ahead a small band of travellers were also on their way
towards the city, clearly traders heading for the market. Thursday
had been market day since Domesday, a thousand-year tradition
persisting through all the tumults and disruptions of English
history, and persisting still, regardless of any central authority to
uphold the ancient Royal Charter. There had been a market on the
Thursday before Richard III marched his army out of the city towards
Bosworth Field, and again on the Thursday after his naked and broken
corpse returned, draped across a horse's saddle. Neither Cromwell
nor the Luftwaffe had broken the rhythm of commerce, but the fuel
protesters had come close. People still trudged to the city with
their wares, and we trudged along with our own. The land rose steeply
here, and Yusuf groaned quietly and shucked the rucksack on his
shoulders until it sat more comfortably.
“Cheer up, laddie,” Jake called.
“The doc's just ahead now.” The Scottish veteran had relaxed somewhat on seeing the other travellers, further indication
that the recent banditry had been suppressed, for a while at least.
The cluster of low, squat buildings
where Dr. John Jackson runs his clinic still glories in the title of
hospital, although most of the abandoned buildings were mothballed in
the austerity years, whilst others fell into disuse more chaotically
as the services became impossible given the constrained resources
available more recently. What began under the guise of
regionalisation, the concentration of services into 'centres of
excellence', amounted to little more than the withdrawal of the
legions and an off-hand note that us provincials should 'look to our
own defences' as the centre, that is to say London, looked out for
itself. A generation of medics raised and trained in the high-tech
NHS of the early 21st century found their skills too
abstract and specialised to cope. Front-line healthcare fell to an
ever ageing cadre of GPs with memories and training from a less
sophisticated time, and they struggle on, training the few driven
acolytes willing to relearn medical basics and adapt to a new
reality. Dr. John was at least ten years my senior, any thought of
retirement long gone, erased by the need to pass on the torch before
it sputtered out.
We halted at the gate to the grounds,
and a guard with all the looks of another veteran peered through the
chain link at the three of us.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he growled,
wary eyes looking us up and down. “State your business, please.”
“Supplies for Dr. Jackson,” I told
him, but he still eyed Yusuf suspiciously, the bulging backpack
evidently causing him some concern.
“He's in surgery. Got an
appointment?”
We hadn't, so I gave the guard my name.
“Step back from the gate, gentlemen.”
A quick whistle summoned a boy from the shade of the ramshackle shed
that stood nearby, and the guard spoke a few words into his ear
before the youngster scampered off towards a curve in the path and
disappeared between the overgrown rhododendrons that grew in patches
throughout the grounds.
We sat on the verge and passed around
the water bottle as we waited. We didn't speak much, Yusuf just
muttered a comment about being everyone's scapegoat once again, and
Jake quietly surveyed the small groups of people passing along the
road to the weekly market. Occasionally guards passed us as they
patrolled inside the hospital fence, each casting a wary eye over us
and exchanging meaningful glances with the gate keeper. Resounding
footsteps heralded the return of the message boy and we were
admitted.
“Michael, so good to see you in
person. How are you keeping? What have you got for us today?” Dr.
John's greeting was effusive, and the man had a nervous energy,
almost birdlike with his thin frame and flapping voluminous white
coat. He had come into his waiting room to meet us. Before leading us
through to the dispensary he had a quick, reassuring word with the
next waiting patient. The young woman sported a ragged mass of
bandages on her forearm, and she nodded apprehensively as Dr. John explained that
his assistant, Martyna, would redress her burns.
The dispensary was a large room, edged
with cupboards, the walls lined with shelves above the work surfaces.
Although the hospital could still generate a trickle of electricity,
there was only enough for a few lights. Old, yellowed power sockets
clustered redundantly around the work spaces, and all the equipment
was manual. Where once digital scales had stood, a glass-cased
apothecary balance with brass weights held pride of place. Beside it,
a polished tablet press, a rack of ointment spatulas and marble
mixing slabs. Mortars nestled in a stack like Russian dolls. An
ancient autoclave sat atop a gas burner, fed by a rubber tube which
snaked its way from a hole hacked into the wall and crudely resealed
with plaster of Paris.
The shelves would once have held
phalanxes of cardboard boxes, their bright colours and commercial
logos lined up in a parade of proprietary synonyms and intellectual
property rights. Now, nearly all the blister-packed petrochemical
by-products were gone, replaced by the hand-labelled bottles and jars
of dried herbs. The few staple medicines that occasionally found
their way out of London filled no more than two or three shelves.
Jake found himself a chair and promptly
nodded off to sleep, as old soldiers are wont to do when they can.
Yusuf gratefully shed the burden of his backpack, and under Dr. John
Jackson's eager eyes, decanted the containers inside on to a clear
patch of the bench.
Dr. John instantly eyed the dark brown
glass bottle. “Iodine?”
“Yes," I replied. "Alcoholic tincture. You
mentioned in your last letter that antiseptics were getting scarce.”
“I did, I did, thank you! But
how...?”
“Not easy. We had to trade for this.
We could make it ourselves, but we can't haul enough kelp this far
inland, and there's still sulphuric acid to find. Anyway, that's going
to cost you some silver.”
“Not a problem, Michael. It's worth
its weight in gold and not a moment too soon. Did you get a whiff of
that bandage when you came through?”
Two clear glass bottles containing
distilled alcohol were next, and Dr. John nodded eagerly, already
seeing uses for the new materials.
“These are our own,” I said as
Yusuf placed out the smaller bottles containing essential oils.
“Peppermint, lavender, eucalyptus and wintergreen. You will need to
assay them to sort out doses,” I cautioned. We do what we can to
standardise the products, but variations in the weather and
individual plants mean it's always an imprecise art. Precision was one
more of the luxuries that went away with the loss of industrial
pharmaceutics.
Next followed the salves and ointments
in screw-top jars. “Arnica, calendula, echinacea,” I announced
each tub as Yusuf reached into the pack. “There's also some
echinacea extract,” I added.
By now there were only the paper wraps
of dried herbs left.
“We've got something new for you this
time.” I beamed. “For your insomniacs, neurotics and worriers.
Valerian root. We managed to acquire some seed a couple of years ago
and have finally gone into production. Treat it as a mid-range
sedative. More potent than chamomile, and saves your opium for
pain-relief.”
“I'll file it under 'valium', then,”
the aged medic laughed. “There's not been much to replace the
benzodiazepines to date.”
The backpack was nearly empty by now,
and Yusuf placed the final bags of herbs on the counter top. Dr. John
read off the labels. “Chamomile, good. Digitalis, feverfew, willow
bark, excellent. And these?” He held up the last two small bags,
which were unlabelled.
I spoke quietly. “You mentioned
some... ah, delicate... requirements when you wrote last.”
Dr. John nodded gravely as he peered
into each bag and sniffed at the contents. The bitter tang of rue and
the aromatic pungency of pennyroyal assailed his nostrils and he
slipped the herbs into a nearby drawer, which he locked with a small,
brass key. Regardless of the need, given the moral climate, some
things are best left unspoken.
The medic was as good as his word and
handed over the silver coins. I woke Jake and he stashed the payment
in an inside pocket.
“Is there anything else you need,
John?” I asked.
“Apart from everything?” he replied
ruefully. “We really need quinine, but there's none to be had. The
malaria is spreading northwards, you know. I don't know if quinine is
even still being imported or if it's something else they're hoarding
in London.”
“There's nothing we can do for that,
I'm afraid. We can produce citronella for mosquito repellent, but
nothing more.”
“No, I guessed as much. It's getting
harder every day, Michael,” he confided. “Some days I feel like
the little Dutch boy with my finger in the dike, holding back the
tide of diseases we thought we'd defeated. A lot of the time
palliative care is the best we can offer. Sometimes I find myself
wishing for the old days, when the surgery was filled with the
worried well, when everyone wanted antibiotics for their colds and
sniffles.”
“So what do you give them now?
Rose-hip syrup?” I asked.
“Exactly, but there's not many who
come in with colds nowadays. They save their silver for the children.
Since we've had no vaccines, childhood illnesses are back in force.
So many of my younger colleagues had never seen them before. We are
all learning forgotten lessons all over again. Let's face it, we're
almost back to Culpeper, Michael. We've just dropped the astrology in
favour of germ theory.”
We took our leave of the medic and he
hurried back to Martyna in the surgery, clutching the iodine tincture
almost as a talisman. Back on the road, the market traffic was steady
and I could see a donkey cart ahead of us, heaped with new potatoes,
standing proud above the scattered walkers with their packs. Clearly
some groups had travelled together for mutual protection, but the
huddles were loosening somewhat now the city was in sight. As we
crested the hill we could see out across the rooftops, hazy with the
wood smoke which settled in the valley. We had made good time after
all, and it was not yet noon.
Yusuf, free of his burden, had more of
a spring in his step, but Jake was more guarded with his own burden
of a pocketful of silver. We walked on towards our next meeting.
There were a few stationary figures posted at intervals along the
road. Hard looking men squinted in the sunlight, a preponderance of
red showing in their clothing. Most sported lengths of polished wood
that could serve as clubs or staves, some of which resembled, and
probably were, old police truncheons.
Jake caught my sidelong gaze as we
passed one group. “The Mayor's men,” he hissed. I felt no more
comfortable for their reassuring presence than I had felt driving
past the speed camera vans that had used to lurk on the verge. Yusuf,
I noticed, was gazing intently at his feet as we passed the watchmen.
Occasionally we saw small children
sitting on a garden wall, bucket and shovel to hand, ready to dive
out and retrieve anything the few horses or other draught animals may
deposit on the ancient, pot-holed tarmac. In an isolated island
struggling to feed itself, every scrap of fertility is valuable,
either for the family garden or to exchange for food with others.
The changes in the city, the
destruction and dereliction, were shocking to me, but then so were
some of the things that had survived the troubles of the past decade.
Between the highway and the slum estate, the large allotment gardens
still produced, barricaded behind rusted wire and unruly hawthorn
hedges, busier now with gardeners than ever I saw in my youth.
As we crossed the first of the bridges
that marked the ancient boundary of the city, I was reminded of Dr.
John's revelation. The water was turgid and mud showed along the
edges, the Soar's flow reduced dramatically. Sure enough, there
amongst the silted islands and willow regrowth, stagnant water
pooled, lying in wait for mosquitoes and malaria.
Beyond the bridge, on the island formed
between the river's natural course and the canalised, navigable
route, lay what used to be a vibrant light industrial zone. I can
just about remember it being vibrant, anyway, but the fires in vacant
factories had started long before the last recession, when it was
still possible to insure the buildings. After that it went through a
twilight phase of car-washes on vacant lots, a half-hearted
redevelopment scheme that embarrassed a few city councillors and saw
a few more incarcerated, and finally it had become a haven for urban
wildlife, largely ignored as the windblown buddleias had worked their
roots into powdery mortar. The shuffling figures I could see amongst
the debris and rubble were being watched over by more of the
hard-faced men in red. Picks and hammers worked at the stone and
brick, whilst carts trundled in empty, and out again laden with
beams, girders and carefully sorted masonry. As I peered through the
fence I could see the ropes hobbling the workers and binding them
into teams. They clearly were not there voluntarily.
I was roused from my musings by a shout
from one of the watchmen on the bridge. “Keep moving there!” Jake
pulled at my arm, and I stumbled after him.
“Don't draw attention,” he
whispered. “They'll think we're planning a breakout.”
We moved on quickly, until we reached
the second bridge where the mayor's salvage wagons and the market
traffic combined to form a snarling bottleneck in the narrow
carriageway. Once we had cleared the crush, it was time for us to
part from the crowd, as our route wouldn't be taking us to the
market.
“OK, Yusuf, which way now?” I asked
“The Muslim enclave. When we get
there, please, let me do the talking.”
Christina hadn't told me much about the
candidate, just that she was very keen he should join us. I'd asked
her why, but she'd just said 'You'll see'. I had pressed her on how
she could be so sure about someone she'd not even met. She had just said that she didn't want to raise my hopes and that the final decision was mine.
The enclave was a neighbourhood of
two-up two-down terraces, and as we approached, I could see
barricades across the narrow street. Yusuf walked ahead, Jake and I
following close behind.
“Salaam elaikum,” he called
out. At first there was no answer, then an upstairs window opened
just beyond the barrier, someone peered out and a brief exchange in Urdu followed.
“We must wait, my grandfather is
coming,” Yusuf translated.
Hafiz, the grandfather, the candidate
although he didn't know it yet, led us through the silent street to
his home. Yusuf was looking nervous, as well he might entering a
neighbourhood that had once turned against him. For my part, I was
dismayed. Hafiz must have been older even than Dr. John, and less
sprightly, too. Had Christina realised his age? My intention to be
back at the farm by nightfall was beginning to look impractical, to
say the least. Even Jake raised a querying eyebrow at me. I couldn't
see this working out well, any way I looked at it. We were going to
have to hire a cart, and staying overnight would mean we'd miss the
market traders heading out of town.
The small, terraced house was cool
inside, a relief from the sun that was finally burning through the
haze outside.
“So, Yusuf, you have come back to
us.” The tone in Hafiz's voice seemed more reproachful than welcoming.
“Not to stay, grandfather.”
“You can if you want. Why not?”
“You know why not. For the same
reason I had to leave in the first place.”
The grandfather looked wistful. “Things
have changed. In the community, I mean, a lot can be forgiven. We
need young men, Yusuf, you belong with other Muslims.”
“There are no Muslims, grandfather!”
Yusuf almost shouted. “It's over. How can you still believe
after...”
“He was my son!” Hafiz snapped
back. “You think I don't feel it, too?”
“I'm sorry. I didn't come here to
argue. You're all the family I have left, we should stick together,
not fight.”
Hafiz nodded, assenting to the truce. “So why are you here? You and your
friends.”
“I, we, want you to join us,” Yusuf
began. “It's not safe for you here. We have a farm, outside the
city. Your experience would be valued, more than it is here.”
“I'm safe enough here, Yusuf,” the
older man countered. “You've been gone two years. It's safer now.”
Yusuf snorted. “Hnnn! Safer? Why are
the barricades still standing? Why else do you need young men?”
“It's years since the last riots,”
Hafiz said. “It's true, the nationalists still cause some trouble,
but we can protect ourselves. I'm too old for farm work now, anyway.”
“We need you as a teacher, not a
labourer. Teach me. Let me look after you.”
At this, Hafiz turned to me, scepticism
clear in his voice. “So what is this farm my grandson is talking
about? What use is an old man like me?”
I was beginning to wonder about that
myself, and suddenly found myself in the spotlight. “Well, as Yusuf
said, it's outside the city. We've been running over twenty-five
years now, ever since the big recession. A few of us were out of
work, so we got together and tried to make a living growing food, but
the fuel crisis made us rethink things quite a bit.”
Hafiz nodded. “Everyone had to
rethink things then. I had just moved to England to be with my
family. It was not a good time to be a Muslim here, not when the
Saudis stopped exporting their oil. Everybody blamed us! We were the
evil Muslims keeping all the oil.”
“Aye, you and the Scots alike,”
interjected Jake.
“I should have stayed on my own
farm,” continued Hafiz. “Life was simpler, even when the Taliban
were trying to tell us what we can and can't grow. But when my wife
died, Yusuf's father said I should come here to live with them. Then
there was the so-called Saudi Spring, he went off on Hajj all excited
about the new republic and never came back. All I have now is this
godless grandson who never comes to see me.”
At first the world had cheered on the
Saudi Spring, the al Saud regime was toppled but the 'democratic
revolution' turned to bitter, sectarian civil war and thousands of
pilgrims were trapped. Outside forces were rumoured to be at play, as
they always are. Which faction, or nation, deployed the weapon that
caused the ultimate atrocity can never be known for sure, but the
destruction of Mecca and the Last Hajj plunged the Islamic world into
crisis. The faith of millions was shattered and the world reeled.
Yusuf and his grandfather had found themselves on opposite sides of a
great divide. Yusuf's faith was blasted and his god destroyed;
Hafiz's faith tested beyond bearing, but unbroken.
“I can't put everything right,
grandfather, but there's a place on our farm for you, if only you'll
come,” tried Yusuf once more. “And I promise, I'll see you every
day so you can pass on your knowledge.”
Hafiz blinked away what seemed to be a
tear and asked, “What's so different about this farm that it has a
place for a man like me?”
I continued with my short history of
the farm. “After the fuel crisis, transport became difficult and
getting bulky crops to market was a struggle and barely worth it. So
we decided to grow food only for ourselves and I returned to my
roots, as it were. Before, I had been a pharmacist, so I knew what a
world oil shortage could do to the pharmaceutical industry. We
converted as much land as we could to medicinal crops and collected
all the herbs we could find to build up a seed bank. Maintaining the
genetic stock is vital, but the collection is far from complete.”
Suddenly, Hafiz's expression changed.
He beamed a wide smile at Yusuf. “Now, I understand. All right,
Yusuf, I'll teach you everything I know. I thought the tradition
would die with me. Your father never approved, you know.”
Jake and I were both surprised at the
suddenness of the reconciliation, but Hafiz turned to me and said
“Come, come. You must see my garden, then you'll understand the
gift Yusuf has given me.”
As I stepped out into the narrow back
yard, realisation dawned on me, too. To one side of the path a host
of shimmering poppies, on the other an unmistakeable mass of
serrated, fingered leaves, fragrant in the heat of the day.
“Swat Valley's finest!” Hafiz
exclaimed, with pride in his voice.
Christina had known all along I would
accept the new candidate. Hafiz's knowledge, and his seed stock,
would be invaluable to the farm.
“This farm of yours,” Hafiz asked,
“What is it called?”
Yusuf spoke before I could open my
mouth. “New Alchemy Farm, grandfather.”
“Ah, yes. Al-kimiya. That's a
good Islamic word.”
