The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  Her jaw worked. A yellow gob of spittle exploded from her lips and landed on the gold carpet at his feet. As she turned away he found he was screaming at her vast back in Hindustani. He was only able to stop when Kate’s gold head came floating into view as she ran lightly up the stairs.

  “Is everything all right?” she said in a bewildered voice. Moirag almost barged her down the stairs, but she clung to the banisters. Humayan pulled himself back into his present culture.

  “It is nothing serious,” he said stiffly. “We had a misunderstanding over the cleaning of my room.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Kate vaguely. “I expect Moirag will do it in the end.”

  With a smile of relief she went into her own room, looking divinely pink and blissful. Humayan was intrigued to notice that she locked the door. He did the same, and put the key on his table before opening the window. He hoped that this might equalise the draught through the spy-hole. The gym-instructor was roaring at a class to get their knees up, and that too was an advantage, as it might muffle any inadvertent noises Humayan happened to make in the cupboard—sighings, groanings, or the like.

  He had a long wait, and the longer it lasted the more puzzled he became. His initial puzzle was how Moirag had managed to fit her bulk into this cramped cuboid, but on reflection he decided that it was possible. She evidently had a powerful will. His second puzzle was how she had expected to spin out her supposed cleaning of the room for so long; his wait stretched on and on. He looked at times through the spy-hole, for the draught was distinctly less now; Kate was restless, but not in a fashion that suggested that her lover was late. She lay for some time on her stomach on the bed, reading a magazine, so that he could admire the swelling of her neatly trousered buttocks. Out of his line of vision her wireless gibbered pop; at last, when a voice was singing croakily that its heart was in the highlands, dad, the man came. He knew this because the sound was switched off while she still lay on the bed, though she had turned and was smiling towards the window. She got off her bed, and in that instant the man must have shut the window, for the draught became agonising. She walked out of his line of vision.

  “Bend!” roared the gym-instructor. “Further! Further! Hold it!”

  He dared not retreat and shut his own window (a) for fear of making a noise, (b) because it might suddenly muffle the sound of the gym-instructor’s bellowings, (c) because the man might have seen it open as he came along the ledge. They were a long time out of sight. Humayan was beginning to wonder what he was missing when the man suddenly strolled into the arc commanded by the spy-hole; he stood and lit a cigarette, then turned back towards the window so that Humayan could study his profile. He was wearing yellow pyjamas. He was tall, with a longish red face ending in an untidy brown beard; premature baldness heightened his brow; he was certainly not handsome, but in its coarse, big-featured fashion his look was one of energy and drive. While he stood there Kate, still (Humayan was glad to see) fully dressed, came and nestled against him, sliding her hands to and fro over his back. Knowing her height, Humayan was able to gauge his. He was a big man, indeed. He patted her haunches with his free hand and gazed out over her head at the window, though there was nothing to see there but the yellow brick wall from beyond which the gym-instructor bellowed his monotonous numbers. The draught through the spy-hole became so painful that Humayan had to close his eye and withdraw it. He willed himself not to look again until he had counted sixty.

  Kate was lying on the bed now, unbuttoning her blouse with slow care. The man, still smoking, sat on the bed beside her with his back to the spy-hole. He did not seem very interested in Kate, fondling her thigh without much attention, much as Mrs. Glister had fondled the ears of one of her dogs while she had told Humayan how badly the young behaved these days. His large red hand ran in slow arcs across the rounded limb. There was something wrong with the fingers, but through the mists of the martyring draught Humayan couldn’t see quite what. The man stubbed his cigarette out and as if that had been a signal Kate cast herself upwards with a sudden convulsion, like a fish leaping from the water, and pulled him down. Humayan could hear his laugh as he came. Then the eye demanded another thirty seconds of relief.

  “Ready now?” bellowed the gym-instructor. Humayan sprang back to attention at the spy-hole.

  It was perfectly maddening. The man was not ready. Really he had the most enviable self-restraint. Kate had let him go and had sat up to slip out of her trousers, but the man’s bulk still screened her as he yawningly removed his yellow pyjamas. The steady welling of tears made the scene slip in and out of focus as the drops concentrated and dispersed. The man’s back was white but muscular, and heavily scarred in two places. Down by the waistline was a single silvery slash, and up on the left shoulder-blade a curious, puckered, branching knot of spoilt tissue. Again Kate tried to pull him down, but this time, effortlessly, he lifted her to him and held her dose. For a moment Humayan thought that they intended to perform the act in a sitting position—he had not read that the English were as imaginative as that—but no, it was just more fondlings. Humayan began to be aware that soon he himself would no longer be able to maintain the objective detachment which is the hallmark of the scientific observer. Ah, when would they begin? He closed his agonising eye.

  At that moment chill fingers gripped his wrist. He shrivelled, then slowly turned his head.

  Glenda, grinning, was beckoning him into his room. He summoned a little dignity and obeyed. Silent as a tree-snake she took his place, but only stayed a few seconds before emerging, still grinning, but like a death’s-head now. She closed the door with care.

  “I want to talk to you,” she whispered.

  “I have work to do.”

  “And laundry. We can talk at the launderette.”

  The gym-instructor began to bellow the steady rhythm of his numbers. “One-ah! Two-ah! Three-ah! Fooouuurrr! One-ah …”

  Humayan picked his bundle of laundry off the bed, telling himself that he had intended to take it up the road before long, and so was in no way diminishing his own freedom of action by acceding to Glenda’s request. They let themselves out of his room like thieves. As he locked the door he saw Glenda putting the spare key of his room away in her purse-belt. She was not in school uniform today, but wearing a black-and-red-striped rugby zephyr and red bell-bottomed trousers. Her feet were bare.

  The green attendants stayed in the furthest corner of the launderette, a sluttish, chain-smoking trio. One pale student, reading a biography of Cromwell, sat waiting for his wash; several other machines churned for absentee launderers. Glenda said nothing till his own shirts and under-clothes were revolving steadily and the white tide of suds had risen to its proper level.

  “Now you can tell me your real name,” she said.

  “Certainly not. There is no reason why I should.”

  “Well, I could tell Kate you’d made a peephole into her room. She’d tell Frank, because she tells him everything. Frank likes hurting people. He really does.”

  Humayan remembered the tough, scarred back, the half-brutal boredom of the man’s love-making.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “All right. I expect I’ll see you.”

  She rose, smiling.

  “My name is Pravandragasharatipili Humayan,” he whispered.

  “You’ll have to write it down. I’ll borrow a biro from one of those Greens.”

  As she bossed the trio of attendants into putting themselves out for her he considered the advantages of spelling his name wrong. No. She would find out. She would know. She knew everything. When she came back he wrote it down for her in careful capitals and coached her in the proper pronunciation.

  “Great,” she said. “Pravandragasharatipili. But I’ll still call you Pete, except … Look, I’ve got a present for you. I want you to wear this.”

  She fidgeted under the sleeve of her zephyr
and slid a bracelet down over her wrist. No, not a bracelet, he had seen exactly that strap of studded red leather before, round the necks of Want and Ought.

  “I am not your dog!” he said angrily.

  “Frank,” she said, smiling and patting the purse-belt where the folded paper with his name lay hidden. “You can wear it under your sleeve and no one will know. It’s a spare—Mum bought a puppy last year from Cousin Ranulph, but the other two ate it.”

  He turned the collar over in his hands. There was a little brass nameplate next to the buckle. It said ‘Must’.

  “This is all very childish,” he muttered.

  “In that case why are you making such a fuss about it?”

  At its widest hole the collar fitted comfortably round his left forearm, where it was hidden by his shirt-cuff. It felt at once as though he had always worn it.

  “I suppose you’ll have to take it off in the bath,” said Glenda. “Do you think he really loves her?”

  “How can I tell?”

  “You’re a man. But I suppose … She loves him. She likes what he does to her. I couldn’t … anyway, I don’t think he loves her. She’s just a nice handy screw, who he doesn’t even have to dress up for.”

  “The nature of men …” began Humayan.

  “He doesn’t love her. That’s settled. Now, what do you make of this?”

  She took the biro from him and on another scrap of paper drew a vertical line with a number of smaller lines crossing it at different angles. He studied it and shrugged.

  “I may have got it wrong,” she said. “It’s the mark on Frank’s shoulder. I think it’s a brand, like cowboys do on cattle.”

  His eye began to weep again at the memory, but he made the necessary effort of recall and drew the scar as he thought he had seen it.

  “My visual memory is not like my memory for numbers,” he said apologetically; at once he was cross with himself for falling so quickly into the mistress-servant relationship she demanded.

  “Yes, that’s more like it,” said Glenda. “I’ve seen that sort of mark …”

  “Were you finished with me pen, then?” said a sharp voice.

  “Thank you,” said Glenda, holding up the biro without looking up. A green fist snatched the paper from her other hand.

  “Boyo!” said the woman. “Not in here you don’t! Out!

  “Do you know what it means?” said Glenda placidly. “It’s quite like those sort of marks you see …”

  The woman interrupted her, without saying anything more, simply by a movement. She slammed the scrap of paper down on the nearest washing machine and ground the stub of her cigarette into it. The acrid prickle of scorched paper pierced the fluffy detergent odours of the place. Her look was of sharp contempt, mixed with the older hatred of one race for its enemy race.

  “The brown boyo can git, now,” she said. “Or I’ll call the boss and he’ll call the cops. You can stay for the washing, lady—and then not be coming back.”

  “OK,” said Glenda. “Sorry about that, Pete. Wait for me outside.”

  This was the broad, sloping avenue down which he had lugged his suitcase on Tuesday. Though it was now Saturday, the weekend, when even the most menial white was presumably slouched at home in front of the telly with the day’s first beer-cans, the same street-sweeper was still on duty, shuffling up the gutter pushing the same pile of litter. Humayan saw now how tall he was, and young, and intellectual-looking, though all three factors were disguised by his melancholy stoop over his brush, or over his cart when he slouched back down the pavement to fetch it. Humayan’s few direct dealings with Greens—Moirag, and now this angry woman in the launderette—had shown him that for a race of servants their manner was far from servile. He felt that he was destined to go back to India having learnt very little about them—little from his statistical research at the RRB, still less from the community in Horseman’s Yard. His knowledge of the racially mixed society of Bombay University had shown him that there are no Europeans so ignorant of India as those who believe that they know it through their servants.

  He was still staring at the man when Glenda joined him. They both started to speak together, he in vague terms about the unknowability of Greens, she about something else. They paused for each other, and in that pause they felt and heard the judder of air that came from a distant explosion. Faces all down the pavement gazed east-south-east. Only the green sweeper seemed not to have noticed the disturbance.

  “If that’s Harrods again,” said Glenda, “Mum will blow her top.”

  Humayan shrugged. It was no business of his.

  “They’re getting nearer,” she said. “First it was Scotland and Wales, and then places like Liverpool. Now it’s London. I wonder how long it’ll be before they reach Horseman’s Yard.”

  He took the paper bag from her and fussed through his clean linen.

  “Is it all there?” he said. “How can you be sure?”

  She laughed, and forgot about bombs.

  “Of course it is,” she said. “I’m going to look after you now. That’s part of the deal. For instance I’ll see Dad asks you to tomorrow’s Committee … oh, you’ll enjoy it … Sundays, provided it’s fine, all the Yard gets together and has drinks before lunch. The idea is they can settle any problems that have come up, but really it’s an excuse for a booze-up. You’d like to meet Frank with his clothes on, wouldn’t you? I wonder what the hell she made such a fuss about in there over his scar—you used to see that sort of mark chalked up in all sorts of places. Not so much now, though.”

  Humayan shrugged and walked with her down the avenue. It was another of those problems which was his only in so far as it was hers.

  He lunched alone in his room, then worked. At first the intricate abstractions of mathematical thought were merely a refuge from this savage culture where bombs exploded in the distance and servants spat at his feet and a young witch rode his shoulders; but after two hours, when he eased his buttocks, rubbery with stillness, to a new position, he found that the fingers of his right hand had for who knows how long past been steadily numbering off the nine brass studs on the collar round his left wrist, as a priest numbers the rotations of his prayer-wheel. The process seemed to help his thought, and now he pursued it consciously. In the next two hours he untangled one statistical knot that had been puzzling him for weeks, and was able to pull that little thread of reasoning out clear. It was not an important thread, but he could not have proceeded far with the knot still there. Perhaps, he thought, Glenda was not a bad witch; she had meant it when she said she would look after him,

  At length the blank stupor that follows such work overcame him. At home he would either have visited a brothel or taken his mother to the cinema, but the morning’s drama had for the moment taken all relish out of either activity, so he decided to clean his room. He had bought dusters and a cheap brush and pan, and Moirag had left him a legacy of dirt that made its removal a satisfying achievement. He shifted the meagre furniture about to get at areas which had been unswept for years; the disturbed dust hung in the air like smoke. When he was in the furthest corner of the room, which was normally covered by the bed, his brushing was impeded by a slight rectangular rise in the carpet. The tacks had been removed, too, and never hammered back, so he was able to turn the flap of carpet over and find a yellow Kodak envelope with a dozen photographic prints in it. He sat on the bed to look at them.

  The first two were indecipherable misty greys; the third showed a shape he recognised, partly because the blurring was much the same as the blurring in his vision when he had peered through the spy-hole—it was part of Kate’s bed and her bedside table. The fourth, now he knew what to look for, was two naked bodies on the bed; the fifth Mr. Leary’s profile; the sixth his back, with the brand or scar on it quite plain; the rest were all pictures of Kate and her lover, snapped through the spy-hole, neither erotic nor informativ
e. Because Glenda was interested Humayan made a careful sketch of the brand, then put the prints back in their envelope and that into a larger one on which he wrote the one word ‘Moirag’. He left this in the kitchen when he went out for his evening stroll.

  This time he walked south, through a well-appointed district, tall houses on either side of broad streets, their white paint shining in the slant sunlight; the parked cars were large and new; well-dressed children were being shepherded home from some playground by spruce nannies whose nunnish uniforms set off their young figures and gave a prim but kindly look to the withdrawn green faces. Most of these children were European, but some were yellow and brown—scions, presumably, of the diplomatic bag. Behind certain of the nannies strolled pairs of men, sober-suited, square-shouldered and alert, usually with one hand in a jacket pocket.

  London smelt of summer dust and money, but hardly at all of people and their dirt. It was not like any city Humayan had ever known. He wandered at random until his way was blocked by a six-lane highway with a barrier-rail running all its length, but not far to his right he saw what seemed to be a pedestrian subway, so he set off towards it. As he reached the top of the ramp he heard a shout of alarm from below; feet scampered and two green youths, thirteen-year-olds, came racing up towards him. Their ragged plimsolls flapped on the ramp as they raced past him without a glance; he watched them scramble over the barrier and jink through the hurtling traffic; from the far carriageways came the squeal of braked tyres and the wincing dash of metal and glass. Humayan walked hurriedly down the ramp, having no desire to waste his time by appearing as a witness in a traffic accident.

  The subway was well-lit, but not clean, and pervaded by the smell of urine. Half-way along a couple of white policemen, armed, were studying the wall. There was a pot of paint by their feet. They looked up at the sound of Humayan’s steps and waited for him to approach. He swallowed as he came.

  “Card,” said one of them gruffly.