by Alan Baxter
Rosenbaum nodded, lips pursed. “Hmm. Why don’t you tell me why you always so quickly resort to violence?”
“This again?” Rickard’s eyes slid back to the plant, his derision melting away to slack-jawed contemplation. Rosenbaum said nothing, observing. Silence hung in the room, present like a third person. Rickard’s head tilted slowly to one side, his gaze roaming up and down the tall, dark green plant. His lips shivered, almost whispering something.
“Jack?”
Rickard jumped like he’d been stung. “Because bitches never fucking listen!”
*
Jasper Hancock sat down opposite Rosenbaum in the canteen, his tray loaded with sandwich, apple and juice box. “Hello, John.”
Rosenbaum smiled, one cheek distended with his own sandwich. “Hi. How’s things?”
Hancock shrugged. “Life in the madhouse, et cetera. You?”
“Session with Rickard this morning.”
“Nuff said. Did you suggest to Henry that I might like some hideous jungle vine?”
Rosenbaum laughed. “Yeah. Hideous?”
“It’s horrible! All dark leaves and black stems.”
“I thought it was quite exotic. More to the point, it seems quite happy in my office, so anything to get Henry off my back. Hospital policy, got to have greenery.”
Jasper’s eyebrows rose. “Well, maybe you have a point. It’s an ugly thing, but not so ugly as Henry.”
*
As the week progressed the temperature continued to rise, but Rosenbaum found himself becoming acclimatised. He could grow to like the place after all, he decided, the dry heat easier than the coastal summer, and the isolation was comfortable.
Under the pleasant breeze of the air-conditioner, he waited patiently while Scott Fleming fumed. He knew the man needed space to vent his feelings, release the valve of anger.
“It’s just so hard!’ Fleming spat at last. “Why bother?” His Scottish accent seemed to add fury to his words.
“Of course it’s hard,” Rosenbaum said, keeping his voice in a low, soft register. “It’s hard for everyone. But why do you think it’s so hard for you?”
“Because it always goes wrong.”
“What does?”
“Everything! From a new start in Australia years ago, it’s consistently gone bad. My marriage failed, my jobs suck. Even moving all the way out here, I managed to lose a job no one else wanted. I’ve been retrenched seven times. Seven times! How is it not me? How is that normal? I’m cursed.” Fleming’s eye twitched as he ground his teeth. Sucking a breath in through his nose he tipped his head to rest on the chair back. His brow creased. “That’s new, is it not?”
“What?” Rosenbaum followed the Scotsman’s gaze to a tendril of plant creeping across the ceiling. Miniature sucking feet marched over the white tiles, tiny green leaves in a military row beneath. In less than a week the plant had grown rapidly, but this morning it had been a foot short of the ceiling. Now it was six inches across it.
“Yes, it’s new,” Rosenbaum said quietly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s a bit . . . dark.”
Rosenbaum nodded. If the “greenery in the offices” policy was supposed to help put the patients at ease, he wasn’t seeing it. Except for Rickard, and that wasn’t encouraging. “Let’s get back to you, Scott.”
*
When Fleming left the office Rosenbaum stood before the plant. The black trunk thrusting up from the terracotta pot was thicker, more gnarled than before. The vine-like branches spread left and right, climbing the wall like a fan, the whole thing pressed up and out into the room. If it kept going the way it was it would be across the ceiling and over the door within another week. Maybe it was too comfortable inside and not such a good idea after all. He went in search of Henry.
*
The old gardener’s hand-rolled cigarette smoke hung fragrant in the musty confines of the shed. A part of Rosenbaum envied the simplicity of the man’s life. Rebecca would be appalled by him.
“It’s too healthy?” Henry asked.
“I’m afraid so.” Rosenbaum was embarrassed to admit it. “I don’t think it’s an indoor species. It’s growing too fast.”
Henry puffed, blue smoke spiralling around his head, catching in the wispy hair of his ears. “So you want me to take it away again?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“But everything else I give you bloody dies.”
“Why don’t plants like it in there?” Rosenbaum asked.
Henry settled back on his stool, affected the air of a teacher. “A lot of things can upset a plant. They react to all kinds of influences; light, water, chemicals, music, feelings.”
“Feelings?” Rosenbaum interrupted.
“You can stop smirking. You’ve heard about people talking to their plants, ain’t ya? A plant likes nice soothing voices and music. It responds well to happiness and laughter.” He gestured with a tilt of the head. “Not much happiness in that place, eh?”
“Except this new plant seems to do really well.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why. It’s obviously suited to something there. Or you forget to water it just right.”
Rosenbaum couldn’t help smiling. He figured that was probably the closest thing to a joke old Henry would ever make. “Where’s it from?”
“Dunno. Probably a native. I should look it up, maybe. It popped up here in the grounds a while back.”
“Popped up?”
Henry pointed with his cigarette, out through a smeared window to the edge of the gardens near the struggling river. “Runs all along that side by the water. Doesn’t grow very fast down there, the climate’s harsh this far inland. Cropped up one year after days of massive storms and a flood. The river burst its banks. First time I’ve ever seen that in all my life here. There was hail the size of golf balls, all gritty and dirty looking. Smashed a lot of windows, messed up a bunch of cars. The grounds got thoroughly washed out, stripped all the beds and that. Took me weeks to clean up. That’s about when this new thing started growing. But that was a few years ago now. I’ve ignored it until I started running out of things for you lot in your rooms.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit strange?”
Henry frowned, shrugged. “You care what I think? Most of you lot don’t talk to me much.”
Rosenbaum felt a tinge of embarrassment. “Well, I think people are just busy.”
Henry sniffed, standing up. “Well. Seeing as I like you, I’ll get that plant out of your office later on and replace it with something else.”
“Thanks, Henry. I promise I’ll do my best to keep the next thing alive.”
Rosenbaum left the old man there, staring contemplatively at his cigarette, and strolled through the heat towards his car. Don’t forget the supermarket, he reminded himself as he went, trying to think what he might buy. Deciding on dinners was a new skill he was having trouble developing.
*
Rosenbaum opened his office awkwardly, briefcase in one hand, coffee in the other. As the door swung in, the coffee hit the rough, brown carpet tiles with a splash of liquid and steam, splattering the doctor’s shoes and trousers. He stared in disbelief at the plant, covering the corner of the room in luxuriant growth. Tendrils of dark green droplets snaked across the ceiling, reaching almost to the light fitting in the centre. The plant had virtually doubled in size overnight.
Ignoring the mess on the floor he went in, felt the weight of the thing above him as he passed underneath to see the pot. Its trunk was as thick as his upper arm, twisted and powerful. The terracotta had cracked, overwhelmed by roots pressing up through the soil like fingers reaching from the grave.
The lower limbs were curled, writhing out across the walls. A grey smear caught his eye, the paint peeled off the wall where one branch had been levered away, the tiny suckers ripping out a chunk of the plasterboard. Marks scored the trunk, gashes that had healed and grown over, puckered like old scars. He didn’t remember seeing them before.
A few threads of cotton hung among the branches and a small, curved handsaw lay on the floor.
Rosenbaum had a strangely compelling urge to lean forward and embrace the thing. With a gasp, he hurried from the room, heading for the gardens.
*
Henry’s shed stood empty. No aromatic scent of tobacco, no worksheets from the office on the desk. Rosenbaum stepped back outside, saw Jasper Hancock strolling across the grass towards him.
“He there?”
“No.”
Hancock stopped. “If you see him will you ask him to take that plant away from my office? Bloody thing is growing like a weed, I don’t like it.”
Rosenbaum nodded, mouth too dry to actually respond. Hancock raised an eyebrow, then smiled and walked back inside.
Rosenbaum scanned the gardens. Henry always arrived long before anyone else, up with the dawn, still in his shed after dark. Rosenbaum remembered the first conversation they’d had, standing under that big gum tree in the car park. The doctor had made small talk, trying to be friendly. Heading home, Henry? Your wife got a hot meal for you?
Nah. Breast cancer took her a few months ago, but I’m surviving.
Rosenbaum had felt like a fool, such a stupid social faux pas. And he knew his comment stemmed from his own bitterness.
He headed for the administration building.
“Is Henry in today?” he asked the middle-aged woman at the desk. Edith or Edna or something. He could never remember.
She looked up, slid her glasses onto her neatly coiffed hair. “No idea, Doctor. He comes and goes like clockwork, so I imagine he’s here.”
“He doesn’t check in or out?”
“No-one keeps an eye on him. Very reliable, he is. If he’s not in his shed he’ll be somewhere in the gardens, I expect.”
“He drives that battered red Toyota to work, right?”
“Yes. Lives in town and he’s driven that thing every day I’ve known him, and I’ve been here nearly twenty years.”
“He’s been here longer?”
“Oh, my word, yes. Much longer. And his car’s nearly as old as he is, I’d wager.” She smiled, clearly holding the gardener in some affection.
Rosenbaum thanked her and twenty minutes later he’d confirmed the aged Toyota was parked not far from his own car, but Henry was nowhere to be found on the hospital grounds.
*
The river twisted along one side of the gardens, a glittering snake in the morning sun at the bottom of a deep, dry channel. It would take a phenomenal storm for that to rise high enough to break its banks, Rosenbaum thought. Trees and shrubs lined the near side, edging Henry’s manicured lawns. Across the divide, the unforgiving landscape was all orange earth, low scrub and straggling bush in every direction, the town a twenty minute drive to the west. If you could call the small place a town, just a crossroads, two pubs, a few shops. Rosenbaum’s new home was another ten minutes past the locality, tiny under the massive vault of sky. But his appreciation of the isolation was growing steadily. It’s what he had sought after the divorce, after all. And he was doing good work out here, he reminded himself.
A twenty metre or more section of nearby bank was obscured by the dark green, twisting vine that had claimed Rosenbaum’s office. He stared, awe and trepidation swirling in his chest. Further along the river bank more clumps gathered, locked in a frozen dance of growth. They weren’t especially tall, but were dense and healthy-looking, their leaves a solid, glossy green, reflecting the hot day. And they stood out, because they all leaned the wrong way.
Other trees and bushes along the riverbank grew upwards, spread softly where Henry hadn’t pruned them back. Rosenbaum scanned the sky, traced the line of the sun. His eyes fell back to the vines, all leaning away from the nourishing light. Towards the hospital building, stretching forward like leashed dogs craning their necks to suck in a powerful scent.
*
Jasper Hancock waved him over from the entrance to the wards. Clinical white rooms with harsh blue-white lights, echoing somehow with the depression, schizophrenia, psychosis of the patients too damaged to care for themselves, too hurt to be trusted with others. The remote far west of the state was infamous for breaking people.
Rosenbaum waved back as he approached. “What’s up?”
Hancock was pale. “You seen the day room?”
“Not recently. Why?”
“Come and look.” Hancock turned and led the way along a linoleum corridor awash with antiseptic odours.
People in white gowns wandered the day room, or sat at plastic tables playing board games, doing jigsaw puzzles, scratching at their skin. In the corner a huge vine burst forth from a terracotta pot, the sides of the vessel cracked, leaking soil. The plant fanned across the walls, ten feet to either side, flooded up over the ceiling in a wave. Drops of jade green shimmered over the room. Some of the patients shied away, trying to be as far from the plant as possible. Others stood beneath it, looking up like a prisoner finally released from solitary, feeling the sun on their face for the first time in years.
Rosenbaum gaped. “How long has that been there?”
“You never come in here?” Hancock asked.
“I do my rounds of the rooms but I never have cause to come in. I don’t do groups these days.”
Hancock nodded, still staring at the plant. “I do. I had a group in here four days ago. That wasn’t there.”
Rosenbaum stared, lost for words. It seemed to coax him forward, some strange allure.
“How is that possible, John?” Hancock’s voice was strained. “What grows like that? And the one in my office is twice the size it was yesterday, stuck to the walls like it’s glued there. And have you seen the message from admin?”
“No,” Rosenbaum said. “What message?”
“Two patients are missing. Your pal Rickard and old Testa. Unaccounted for, presumed escaped.”
“Rickard may have escaped,” Rosenbaum mused quietly. “But Testa couldn’t walk a hundred metres without needing a long rest!”
“I know. So they’re missing, but maybe not escaped.”
“Missing like Henry,” Rosenbaum muttered.
“And two orderlies haven’t reported for work this morning, apparently.” As Hancock swallowed, his throat made an audible click.
“Really?”
“Is it . . . Is it the plants?” Hancock asked weakly.
“We have to get rid of these things,” Rosenbaum said. The vine had a presence, like a predator in the undergrowth, poised, waiting to pounce. “They’re not right, they have to be removed.” The words tugged against his pragmatic professionalism, but were dense with an innate truth.
“I was going to throw mine out,” Hancock said. “But I can’t move it. When I tried to pull it away from the wall I felt like it . . . ”
Rosenbaum looked away from the plant for the first time as Hancock’s voice petered out, saw the man’s pinched expression. “Like it what?”
“Like it pulled back.”
*
Rosenbaum and Hancock stood in the inky shadow of the old gum, hidden in the night.
“Are we sure about this?” Hancock asked.
“I don’t see any other option. We’re trained to recognise delusion and paranoia, aren’t we?” Rosenbaum’s eyes were wide in the dark, the whites bright. “We’d recognise it in each other if not in ourselves, yes?”
“There’s no other way?”
“There’s no time! Think about the rate of growth. And Rickard, Testa, Henry.” He had told Hancock more about the gardener, the cotton shreds and the saw. They both agreed on his fate, though their conclusion was unspoken as it threatened their rational minds.
“Is this madness?” Hancock asked quietly.
Rosenbaum shook his head. “I think it’s survival.”
Hancock was silent for several moments. Eventually he nodded once. “Okay. But we have to time it right, like we agreed. Get everyone out.”
“Yes. My office, your office, Sally’s
office, the day room, the front reception and the courtyard? That’s all the places they are?”
“Yep. You take the three offices, I’ll do the others, then hit the alarm. Once everyone’s out, we finish the job before anyone can stop us. We’ll have to try to explain later.”
“Good god.” Rosenbaum stared into the darkness, towards the river. “Okay. We can help everyone out, and between us we’ll send people in the right direction.”
“Right.” Hancock’s voice suddenly held conviction. A decision made, a corner turned. He strode off into the dark, a large jerry can bouncing against his thigh.
Rosenbaum drew a deep breath, headed for the offices, trying not to think of anything but the plan. It was the only way. No one would believe them, not in the little time they had before those things took over.
He walked through dim, empty corridors, the weight of the can in his hand like a tonne of conscience. He pushed open his own office first, gritted his teeth as he tried to ignore the thin curtain of green leaves overhanging the door, covering the ceiling entirely. He strode in, pushed open the window and doused the plant and pot with petrol.
A wave of desolation swept over him, so total, so complete, he whimpered as if in pain. He just wanted to lay down. He wanted to crawl up against the base of the plant and let it wrap him up in its blackened arms and take him away. With a cry he staggered from the room, gasping for air like a man near drowning.
He braced himself, kicked open Sally Kendall’s door and walked straight to the window. Her plant was less than half the size of his but its presence no less powerful. He doused the thing, repeating over and over in his head, My mind is my own. My mind is my own.
In a cold sweat, trembling with the sour adrenaline of fear, he took long strides to Jasper Hancock’s room and repeated the actions. He cried out aloud, “My mind is my own!”
The urge to lay among the twisting black tendrils with their shining dark gems was almost overwhelming. He remembered his patients, Marie’s disturbed horror, Rickard’s lascivious joy. He was right. They were right. They were doing the right thing.
