The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  ‘The CIA?’

  ‘Yeah, kid. Whaddya getting?’

  The half-dozen others were watching me through narrowed eyes.

  ‘I don’t get anything from the CIA.’

  ‘Yes you do, kid. You get plenty. I seen you in a big, fancy restaurant down on Constitution Square. Seen you having lunch with George from the embassy.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone called George.’

  ‘Yes you do, kid. You know plenty. George’s job, you know what it is? George’s job is to keep tabs on us guys. Seen you down there in Constitution Square with George, reading out of a notebook.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that! I wouldn’t give anybody any names!’

  ‘Hoo! Now, I didn’t say nothing about giving names, did I? That just popped out, didn’t it? Think we got a stool pigeon here, my friends. Doctor Lubisch, if you’d just pass me the castrating knife? Sorry as hell about this, kid.’

  ‘C’mon, back off, Donny,’ he was told. And he did.

  ‘Had you going there for a minute, right? Give us a smile. What’s your name?’

  ‘Bobby.’

  ‘Bobby! Bobby’s good. Every Bobby I ever knew was a sweet, sweet guy. I think I’m already in love with you, Bobby. But what the fuck are you doing here? I mean, what the fuck are you doing here? You’re, like, twelve, maybe?’

  I tagged along when the dodgers and their girlfriends went up to the nightclub district to eat and drink. It was considered important culturally to have sex on the Acropolis while the sun came up. A Jewish girl from Brooklyn, Deborah, wildly drunk, gave me a binding commitment to sex—but after she’d passed through the hands of Dean and Jerry and Wayne on the crumbling steps of the Temple of Athena, she’d lost her zest.

  It was probably just as well. My observations of Deborah’s demeanour in the throes of passion alarmed me. The women of the green island behaved in a well-mannered way, with gentle sighs, murmured expressions of thanks. Deborah was more forward. She thrashed about like an enraged eel and screamed obscenities at Wayne, at Donny, at Jerry. She drew the line nowhere at all. ‘Fuck me, you cunt!’ she screamed at Jerry. She slapped them, she spat in their faces, she pulled their hair. The dodgers took all this rough handling cheerfully and had no complaints to make when it was over and they were sitting with their arms around Deborah, passing a bottle of ouzo back and forward. Deborah herself became the plain, plump, good-natured young woman in horn-rimmed spectacles she’d been before sex. It was baffling to me.

  As on the ship, I took what solace I could from books. Before I discovered the American Library at the back of Omonia Square, I read what was left about in the hostel—Last Exit to Brooklyn, Mountolive, Franny and Zooey. But it was finding the American Library that made my life vivid once more. Randall, a colleague of the dodgers but not one himself—he was in his early thirties and had served in the navy—took me down to the library and used his passport to check out the stack of books I’d chosen. Arms full, I wandered out into the sunshine and stood gazing about at the city with a smile on my face. My happiness bulked within me; it had a weight and density. I carried the pile back to the hostel and curled up on my bed.

  Down at the Australian Consulate, papers had been drawn up and were awaiting my signature.

  ‘Qantas. Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne. You pay back the Commonwealth government at a rate not exceeding 22 per cent of whatever salary you are paid when next employed.’

  The consulate official, a kindly, gruff man with the seamed face of a die-hard boozer, offered me the papers to sign. When I said that I had decided to stay in Greece, he sat back in his chair, puffed out his cheeks and let out his breath in a way that made his lips flubber. Then he shrugged.

  ‘Right-oh,’ he said. ‘You’re the boss. Expect to see you back here in a bit, but. Need any moolah?’ He took five hundred-drachma notes from his wallet and passed them to me.

  ‘Pay me back when your dog has pups,’ he said.

  A crisis began to build a few days later. It drew its vigour from the sleet and wind of a sudden, surly day. Everyone stayed indoors and smoked the dope of a deft little Mancunian dealer who called himself Dicky the Rascal. Interior lighting was banned during the day, and the hostel by the middle of the afternoon was as dark as a cupboard. In every room on every floor, in the attic, in every secret place, little parties had started up—some by candlelight, some in shadow. In spite of the chill and gloom, the hostel pulsed with life. Dicky the Rascal and his girlfriend sashayed from room to room passing out tiny packages of foil-wrap twisted at each end and calling out in a trippy sing-song, ‘Moving it, comrades, moving it!’

  Given the job that night of collecting money for mess-hall IOUs, I went from room to room with a leather pouch around my waist and a pen and pad in my hand. I was the only person in the hostel with a job to do at that time of night. I was unwelcome, but tolerated. The hostel had become Rio—music, fumes, laughter, bongoes. People walked about naked with smiley faces painted on their behinds; couples made love and conversation in a cheerfully preoccupied way, barely allowing sex to interrupt a conversation, never allowing a conversation to sidetrack sex. Requesting payment for servings of spaghetti and meatballs from young women sitting astride their boyfriends, I developed a slight stutter. ‘No, no, that’s okay, I’ll c-come back later.’

  I completed my chore and turned in the very little money I’d collected to the warden, a weary man with mottled lips, always on the verge of being overwhelmed by two things happening at one time, let alone a hundred. I went to bed and lay there in a mounting fever of longing, sick in every organ and muscle, the skin of my body like a burning shroud.

  Listening to the jingle-jangle of laughter and music, I had to ask myself what it was that prevented me joining in. I was younger than everyone else, certainly, and seemed even younger than I was, but this was a festival and nobody cared about my age. I could have been a ten-year-old dwarf with a monkey’s tail and donkey’s ears and I would have been happily embraced and fondled, if I’d given myself up to it. Nobody cared. But I couldn’t give myself up to it. Amongst a hundred people, I felt I was the only one floundering. What Eden could I have more ecstatically conjured than this one? Libidinous, naked young women of a dozen nationalities flaunting their breasts and behinds as they crawled across the debris of pizza crusts and peanut shells to fetch the last of a bottle of Smirnoff: how much more inviting did an orgy have to be before I gave a whoop and hurrah and joined in? If I didn’t want hedonism, what in the name of God did I want?

  I didn’t know, and so I read. One novel was not enough to overcome the pain and yearning and self-disgust. I read ten pages of one novel, ten of another, another, another, another, another. At first, the frenzied reading was no more than white noise dulling the sound of laughter, but gradually the stories took hold and I was drawn into a minor festival of my own. I went from the railway platform where Lane Coutell stood reading a letter from Franny Glass, to March staring into the eyes of the fox on the Midlands farm she shared with Banford; to the crewman complaining aboard the Narcissus; to Dangerfield, the ginger man, gazing down the Balscaddoon Road and out to the Irish Sea; to Atticus’s office in the court-house, containing ‘little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checker-board and an unsullied Code of Alabama’; to the first description of Hester Prynne, ‘a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from a regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the …’

  Literature cannot replace love-making, nor should it, except when it has to. I read for hours. Rio died away. I woke in the morning with a couple of books pressed against my ribcage and four more on the floor beside me. I was instantly happy to see how much more of the six books still awaited my reading, but within a minute I was blue to my boots to think of what I had missed that night. I wept, sighed, went to work sweep
ing up the mess of carnival all over the hostel. I saw many of the people, now clothed, that I’d seen unclothed some hours earlier. None looked the worse for wear. They’d awoken in Eden as eager, refreshed and cheerful as if from a week’s slumber on swansdown pillows.

  Winter blew in a crowd of rowdy Dutch kids fleeing subzero Amsterdam for the slightly warmer south. Most of them were Provos—politically pissed-off renegades. The hostel staff didn’t like them. They were forever sermonising, particularly about the Vietnam War, and the dodgers took exception to holier-than-thou dyke-pluggers running down the USA. Also, it emerged that the Provos biggest political coup was getting the town fathers of Amsterdam to distribute white bicycles about the city. It was an environmental thing. But it wasn’t all that sexy. It wasn’t the Black Panthers. The dodgers thought it stupid and boring. The Dutch proselytised a fair bit about the wholesomeness of condoms, which was aggravating to the dodgers. Not so much the endorsement of condoms, so far as I could tell, but the intrusion of pious protestant do-goodism into areas best left pagan.

  All in all, the dodgers and the hostel staff felt it a good time to move on. Philly and Cassie packed their bags and headed off to Istanbul. Donny and the dodgers followed a few days later. I had no idea what my next move should be. But I would not return to Australia.

  Randall, an ex-medical corpsman from the US navy, had developed a pitying interest in my case. ‘Jesus, Bobby, what the fuck are you going to do? You can’t work here forever, kid.’

  ‘Get another job?’ I suggested.

  ‘Who the fuck would employ you? You’re not a goddamned brain surgeon. Don’t you think a million Greek kids can wash dishes the same as you? Do you think the Greeks are importing dish washers?’

  ‘I got a job here,’ I said.

  ‘You got a job here because the guy who runs this dump likes to get in with the embassies. Embassy guys ask him a favour, he asks them a favour. He’s probably got relatives in Australia, probably planning to send his grandma down there, wants some slack with visas. Something. He’s got an angle.’

  This was demoralising news. I’d thought that my diligence at the kitchen sink commended me. I decided to take up smoking to make myself appear older and more employable. I had a pack of Winstons I’d found in one of the dorms. Halfway through the first cigarette, I swooned and fell down. But I persevered, and by the evening I had it down pat. I put on my green suit and wandered down to a café to show off my technique in public. Randall was sitting at a table with a couple of English girls from the hostel.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Gimme the cigarettes.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Gimme the cigarettes!’

  I handed them over. He took most of the remaining cigarettes then returned the pack.

  ‘Wasted on you. You’re not even breathing in.’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘No you’re not. This is Jo, this is Cathy. Jo, Cathy, this is Bobby. Robert. We’re going to Kuwait with Jo and Cathy.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Cathy, offering her hand. Jo seemed a little sceptical.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Cathy, a cheerful girl with black hair, a dead-straight fringe and bright cheeks, ‘we can’t really travel in Turkey and Iran without male company. Not really, from what we’re told. You get pestered, sort of thing. We can pay your way, and you pay us back when we get to Kuwait. There are very very good jobs in Kuwait. You’d have to agree to pay us back, you know, properly agree.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said

  ‘How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ said Jo, less and less comfortable the more she studied my face.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘He’s twenty, nearly,’ Randall put in quickly. ‘Anything you want us to sign, that’s fine with us.’

  ‘Oh, we wouldn’t dream of it!’ said Cathy.

  ‘I’ll type something up,’ said Jo.

  ‘Jo’s a secretary,’ said Randall. ‘Worked for some big shot. Seventy words a minute, is that right, Jo?’

  ‘Seventy-five,’ said Jo. ‘Royal Dutch Shell.’

  My father’s loyalties are always directed to men. Women are adversaries. One friend’s wife is a drunkard, and my father shakes his head in disgust when he hears what the friend has to put up with. He offers to talk to the wife, see if he can put her right. Another friend’s wife is a notorious nag. Dad commiserates. Whenever he talks to me of holidays, of just getting away from everything, it’s understood that he means getting away from Gwen and from women altogether. He speaks of camping trips up on Big River; maybe even going further, taking a look at the outback. You’d never want to take a woman with you on a long trip, he says. Women complain. They can’t help it.

  Thinking of what Dad has said, I realise that he must have in mind the big trip to Eden he made with five mates back in the days when my mum was still around. I remember him coming back from the coast with a couple of hessian bags full of fish and ice. He dumped all the fish out on the kitchen table—fish galore, slithery and gleaming. Lumps of ice clattered off the table and whizzed across the kitchen floor. Dad was as high as a kite. He and his mates, filthy and unshaven and smelling of fish guts, shook their heads and grinned, delighted with their catch. My mother didn’t seem delighted at all. She didn’t actually complain, but she looked put out. So I get an idea of what he means when he says you wouldn’t want to take a woman with you on a long trip. They don’t get happy in the same way as a man.

  East

  Cathy remained chirrupy the whole way to Istanbul. As the train battered its way through a snowstorm, I watched with delight as she sat with her nose against the window, rattling off a commentary. ‘Ooh, there’s this tiny, tiny village and a man with a donkey, I daresay he’s a Turk, oh, and it’s piled ever so high, this little cart thingy the donkey’s pulling, he’s utterly the loveliest thing, the little donkey—oh no!—I don’t like that, I really don’t like that, he’s striking the poor beast, oh that is cruel, that truly is cruel!’ Jo, pale and uncomfortable and complaining of the stench of her fellow passengers, seemed the least likely person to enjoy travel of any sort. ‘Oh do shut up, Cathy! I don’t want to hear about donkeys!’

  The Turks in the compartment gazed at Jo only briefly, rejecting her with their eyes, but they followed Cathy’s every motion closely. When she chattered away at the window, kneeling on her seat, they stared at her bum swinging this way and that as if it were a vision of indescribable mystery and enchantment. She spent a great part of the journey reading to me aloud from Emma and telling me exactly what she would be doing now if she were not in a train on the way to Istanbul but back in Sheffield. ‘Firstly, washing Daddy’s car, it’s a Sunbeam, which might sound a little teeny for a family car but there’s only the three of us. I do the mats, too, take them right out, scrub them, and then hang them on the line to dry.’

  The people we’d known in Athens had re-established themselves in unaltered idleness in Istanbul. We found them all on the evening of our arrival, crowded into a cheap eatery in the oldest part of the city. Philly had sent back home for more money; she intended to study belly-dancing at an amazing academy in the shadow of Saint Sophia. Cassie was considering a career as a high-class whore. Wealthy Turks would pay any price on earth for a girl with cornsilk hair and pink cupid’s bow lips. Seeing Philly again threw me into turmoil. Her beauty was overwhelming. Also, we communicated so well on an intellectual level. She read books, for instance, and so did I.

  Cathy went missing for a week shortly after our arrival in Istanbul, and when we found her again, the soft red roses in her cheeks had been replaced by hectic flushes. The tender expression in her blue eyes was now smoky, lickerish. She had met Donny, who was finding Philly not quite to his taste. Cathy was in love, stoned, and her lips were swollen. She had taken on the job of hat-slut—she passed around the hat for D
onny while he played guitar in various eateries. She had lost all interest in continuing the journey to Kuwait to work as a nurse, the profession for which she had been trained. Jo was furious. She set her lips in a thin, white line and glared out at the world like an irritated dormouse.

  Meanwhile, Philly and Cassie had been visited by the father and mother of a boy who’d paid them a large sum of money for sex. The father and mother suggested that the money should be returned, because that would mean that their son had merely had sex with Philly and Cassie (not such a bad thing) but hadn’t paid for it (a bad thing, to have paid for it). The girls gave back the money on the understanding that the same sum would then be offered to them as a gift, but this didn’t happen. The incident ruined their vision of living in perfumed luxury on the Bosphorus, and inclined them to return to Santa Fe.

  Listening to all this troubled me. It was not that my ideas about sex were gentlemanly; they were quite as salacious as the next boy’s. It was just that the idea of lust in women, or a mercantile leaning, exposed the egocentricity of my sex plans. Despite all I’d read about sex and love and the hurly-burly of boy–girl relationships, I’d paid no real attention. I’d seen people in love; I’d seen people broken-hearted; I’d seen my mother weeping, before her departure; I’d seen my stepmother and my father transformed into homicidal maniacs by the disappointments of love. Why should I have believed that an island existed where warm-hearted women waited to devote themselves to my service? Weren’t they human, these women?

  Still confused, I left Randall and Jo at the hotel one cold morning and wandered around the city by myself, hoping to lose my distress in the creation of new, maybe more realistic, fantasies. I hoped to stumble across a harem, this being Istanbul. Some years earlier, I’d read a book about a girl called Angelique who, at the time of the Crusades, had wound up in the harem of Saladin. Angelique was blond, tender and sweet. She had endless sex with Saladin and was crazy about him, in spite of he being a Muslim and she a Christian. I was looking for a place where women like Angelique sashayed about in their underwear and tenderly ministered to boys who came in from the street.