PRIMATE BOTANY

The petals, once glorious in scent and hue, were now blackened and shrivelled, but such was the rhythm of life in those days in the copses that punctuated the woodlands of the Southern regions of P___shire; in one such clearing by a gurgling, translucent brook, stood our cottage. I recall well how the spring tamarins gave way to a carpet of luscious sifakas while, here and there, a marmoset, resplendent in aquamarine, erupted into bloom and tilted its head towards the lemon sun of early June. Langurs with their distinctive bespeckled leaves and star-shaped flowers duelled for light with slender lorises and crimson geladas. Fragile tarsiers in orange and gold were interspersed with rapidly-growing indris while the heads of russet bonobos collapsed onto the ground under their own weight.

My idyllic boyhood was brought to an abrupt end when war came to our land and the sound of frogs and dragonflies were drowned out by that of enemy bombers passing overhead towards the industrial heartland intent on destruction. At the age of 18, I followed my father in taking the King’s shilling and swapped the green of the woodland for the blue of the Navy. Within a month, my father was dead, skewered by a bayonet in Bessarabia. Six months later, my mother too was dead, killed by a tumour that was detected too late. I sprinkled their ashes into the brook and returned to the Atlantic fleet.

When hostilities ceased, both the winners and losers retired to lick their wounds and began to set about carving a new world from the remnants of the old. Having no discernible skills, but having a strong arm, I took up a pick and spent twenty-two years hacking rubidium from underground seams in every far-flung corner of the world where that metal is desired above all others; Mesopotamia, the Yucatan peninsula, Tierra del Fuego. Caring not for life or wellbeing, I became a rich man, but at a price; my lungs are worn away to nothing by the hot, poisonous dust of the earth’s core and now I have but one desire – to smell, once again, the heady aroma of wild orang-utans in summer in the glades of my youth, before my remains too are cast into the clear water.