The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  I didn’t find anything like it. The women I saw, those who were draped in shawls and those in Western dress, went about the normal business of women—working, or going to work, or shopping, or herding kids along, catching taxis, jumping off buses, shouting, chattering. But what I did find was something that increased my upset.

  I turned into a narrow cobblestoned street where men were unloading crates from the back of a truck. The men were uniformly small, dark and haggard, like urban serfs, eternally ill-nourished and eternally over-worked. That was what made me stop to watch—the ground-down look of the men. Each wore a harness that supported a frame hanging from his shoulders. He would back up to the tray of the truck, bend over, and a crate would be dropped into the frame. In that bent-over posture he would stagger over the cobblestones, unloading the crate on the landing of a warehouse. The crates were very big and obviously very heavy. Fork-lifts did this work in my country.

  The men were skilful, but the work was dangerous. And as I watched, an accident happened. A man slipped and fell. The crate he was carrying landed first on the cobbles, then rolled over on him, pinning him down. His workmates hurried to him, calling shrilly, like a flock of dark birds. They hauled the crate from him, supported his head, pulled his shirt up from his trousers. His face was white and his body twitched. Blood from a tear above his groin ran onto the wet cobbles and grew like a flower. I could see that his wound was terrible. The corner of the crate or the wire strapping had ripped across him. He was dead in perhaps a minute. People came from everywhere; they stood on any raised surface to get a better look. Two or three of his workmates hammered at the cobbles with their fists. The others stared down wordlessly. I could see that some ritual was about to commence, for a holy man, or so he seemed to me, was being ushered through the crowd. There was no sign of a medic or of an ambulance. I moved away a little, then kept moving.

  After an icy draught of shock that set me trembling had died away, I tried to understand whatever it is we are meant to understand when we see a human being cuffed out of life in that way. And perhaps I did think about the poor man and his fate for a bit. But the dominating thought was not really a thought at all, but a great shift in the furniture of my mind. Perfumed boudoirs, soft beds, velvet drapes, the upholstery of Saladin’s harem—all of that disappeared. The stage was now bare and echoing, with few lights.

  Jo became the sole supporter of the expedition to Kuwait. She spoke of Cathy sometimes with sorrow (‘I don’t know what I’m to say to her parents, I’m sure’) and sometimes with disgust (‘The girl is a harlot, pure and simple’). She didn’t need me any longer; Randall was her pretend boyfriend. She would certainly have suggested that I buzz off, but Randall wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Say I get sick, who’ll keep the Arabs away from your arse? Bobby’s our back-up.’ Jo had no confidence in my ability to keep the Arabs away from her arse, nor should she have had, but she needed Randall and had to listen to him.

  Jo’s home life in Sheffield appeared to have been so cosy that it was difficult to work out why she ever felt the need to travel to Kuwait. On the long train journey to Ankara, she worked herself up into a Sheffield frenzy, chattering about the games she had enjoyed with her dad in the evenings. ‘At chess, of course, he was a master,’ she told us. ‘I honestly had to give up trying to beat Daddy at chess. Do you know, sometimes he would give me his queen after the second move, and I still couldn’t beat him? Cribbage was a different matter. A different matter entirely. You’ll think I’m boasting and I can’t help it if you do, but at cribbage, at least with Daddy, I was supreme. Do either of you play cribbage?’ I gave the impression of being interested but Randall couldn’t be bothered. ‘For fuck’s sake, cribbage?’ Jo, with her anorak tied up under her chin, blushed pink, but persisted. ‘I do think we might try a game of five hundred. I have the cards with me. There’s nothing to see out the window, surely.’

  ‘I’m going for a piss,’ said Randall. ‘You coming, Bobby?’

  Once in the corridor, Randall took me by the shoulders. ‘She’s driving me crazy,’ he said. ‘Can you fuck her?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘She needs a fuck. What do you think she’s here for? I can’t do it. I tried to get interested in Istanbul, but I couldn’t. You do it. She’ll be okay after a fuck, for a while.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Take her into the john.’

  ‘The toilet?’

  ‘Yeah. Do it now.’

  ‘But it’s dirty!’

  ‘The john? Who cares! Do you think she cares? Do you care?’

  ‘There’s not enough room to lie down!’

  ‘Aw for fuck’s sake! You don’t lie down, you moron! You stand her up!’

  ‘Stand her up?’

  ‘Okay, forget it. Cribbage. Jesus Christ.’

  Randall was in too bad a mood for me to ask him about the thing that was troubling me so much, which was the problem of unequal distribution of wealth within a society. The dead haulier, crushed by the crate, returned again and again, his face white on the wet black cobbles and the blood trickling as if a small tap below his abdomen had been left running. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to concentrate on the beauty of women, on their breasts and lips, and the way they nonchalantly pushed their hair back from their faces. But if people like the little hauliers had to make a living as they did, how could I concentrate?

  I didn’t know how much of my uneasiness to accept and how much to forget. Randall might say, ‘You can’t do anything about it, it’s the way it is, that’s all.’ Or he might say, ‘So what? The guy had an accident.’ I needed a hand. The problem was strangely shaped. I needed help in making it rest properly on a shelf. People should have more money than the little haulier had. Why did they not have more money? The question seemed exactly that stark. It would never again seem so stark. Books, knowledge and life would offer explanations, but never quite shake my conviction about the bald, bothering, badness of such injustice.

  We found a tiny hotel in Ankara, on the verge of a vast, ashy wasteland more or less in the middle of the city. The desolation dragged Jo down into a slough from which she could not rise. She sobbed to herself and squeaked incessantly. Randall, tired of the squeaking, went out for a walk in the freezing evening air and returned ill. He took to bed and shook. His experience in the naval medical corps allowed him to diagnose pneumonia. ‘Get some money from Jo, find a pharmacy and buy this.’ On a piece of paper he wrote ‘Acramyacin’. Off I headed into the sour city, clutching the paper and the money.

  Ankara looked joyless and dull. Ill-will sat on every face I saw. Blunt, brutish buildings reared above sites of desultory commerce. I found a pharmacy—not so easy, because I was looking for a red cross. The bored pharmacist glanced at the scrawled word and asked me in impeccable English whether I had the authority to administer antibiotics. I said that I had, and he immediately handed me the medicine, charged me an insignificant fee and said wearily, ‘Get the dose right, for your patient’s sake and mine.’

  Back at the hotel, Randall dosed himself and crawled back under the thin blankets. His shaking was so violent that the iron bed danced its way first left, then right. After Jo and I had eaten a wretched meal of soggy beans and lard in the world’s least welcoming restaurant (perched as it was above the ash heap), I attempted to seduce Jo—as a favour to Randall.

  ‘You look lovely tonight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look lovely tonight.’

  ‘Oh do shut up. I feel dreadful.’

  ‘Yes, but I was just saying that you look lovely, even though you feel, you know, dreadful.’

  ‘I despise this country! I despise everything about it! For pity’s sake, just do look at these wretched Turks! I’ve a mind, you know, to pack it all in and go back to Britain.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s their country. They’re allowed to look however they like.’

  ‘Do
n’t start that. Cathy was always going on like that. God, that imbecilic girl! In all fairness, it was a jolly drab thing she did, you’ll agree with that.’

  We tramped back to the hotel. I’d done my best. Jo cleaned her teeth (an assiduous ten-minute scrub, the brush applied in five distinct formats), pulled her blankets over her head (we all shared one room) and began to sob. I put my blankets on the shuddering form of Randall, dressed myself in almost every garment in my suitcase, and slept in bundled comfort.

  Randall was no better in the morning. His face had a dull, silvery look. He allowed me to dose him and to help him to the toilet down the corridor. ‘If I get any worse,’ he croaked, propped above the feculent hole, ‘call the goddam embassy. You got that?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Call the embassy.’

  ‘What’s happening with Jo?’

  ‘She’s feeling dreadful, and crying.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Keep sweet with her, Bobby. She pulls out, we’re fucked. Play cribbage with her.’

  I played not cribbage but five hundred with Jo. I enjoyed it. I used to play with my stepmother, a bitter and intense opponent. Oddly, the game brought out Jo’s generosity. She was a hopeless player and always lost to me, but would gleefully relay the results to Randall. ‘Honestly, you would not believe it, you would not! I was four hundred and fifty, Bobby was nil, and what did he choose? Open misère! Five hundred points in a single game! Not even I have ever done that!’

  The antibiotics cured Randall in a week. He was touched that I’d given him my blankets, and pleased about the impact of the card games on Jo’s mood. He told me, in a way that filled me with pride, that I was only half the idiot he’d always thought I was. It was important to me to have Randall’s endorsement because he knew about books. He’d already read most of what I was reading. I had kept most of the books from the American Library in Athens, compensating it with a number of my own that fallen in my esteem. It was fair. My books were in better shape than the library’s. When I was struggling with Tender Is The Night, Randall told me not to bother, that the book was a dud. I put it aside and started on a collection of Isaac Singer stories, and was given a little approving nod of the head by Randall. I wondered how a medical corpsman in the US Navy had become so well read, but I didn’t dare ask him. Some months later, re-reading The Nigger of the Narcissus, I came to Conrad’s observations about the reading habits of sailors, and showed it to Randall.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘Never knew anybody in the navy who’d read anything.’

  ‘What about you?’ I said.

  ‘I was just passing time in the navy,’ he said. ‘Mostly, I’m a genius.’

  It was marginally cheaper to travel by bus than by train, and Jo insisted that we save every penny we could. The buses were all bone and sinew; no upholstery, no comforts of any sort. We found ourselves in regions of Turkey that seemed entirely populated by hillbillies. The men wore daggers at their waists. Their skin was the colour of sandstone; their hair flamed with henna. The sight of Jo in jeans incensed them.

  In the bare little towns, posses of men would follow us, picking up handfuls of dirt and stone to throw at our backs. Jo, who was given to fits of English melodrama, told Randall that he was to kill her if they attempted to rape her. He assured her that the men were probably far more interested in me than in her, so far as rape was concerned. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘Men don’t rape men!’ Randall went on to explain, in a scholarly way but not without delight, that Muslims were not much into rape. Stiff penalties were prescribed, and in any case the men would be offended by her unshaven twat and, without knowing when her last period had finished, would be reluctant to touch her. ‘They practically have you surgically scrubbed before they’ll go near you. Bobby’s different. Sweet little arse like that. You take a look around next time. It’s Bobby’s arse they stare at.’ Jo, crimson with embarrassment, went into a deep Sheffield sulk and wouldn’t talk to either of us until we reached Tehran.

  Apartment

  As the number of travellers’ cheques in Jo’s wallet grew fewer, her mood worsened. A highly directed anger took the place of sobbing and squeaking. She asked questions she intended to answer herself. ‘What possible job could Bobby do in Kuwait? Well actually, I have the answer to that. He’ll do nothing. For example, he has a typewriter and he can’t even type. But he can wash dishes. Oh, wonderful! He can wash dishes! And what of my other star boarder? He’s also well equipped to wash dishes. Well, let me tell something to both of you. You shall wash dishes! You shall jolly well wash every dish in Kuwait until I have back each last penny I’ve advanced you! Each last penny!’

  After one of these outbursts—this one in Tehran—Randall soothed Jo by encouraging her to speak of her plans for the next few years. She liked to do that. And so she sat on the side of her bed, fixed her eye on a patch of floor and spoke in a maniacal whisper of the large sums of money she would make in Kuwait, of the chaps she might meet, of the romance that might be kindled down there on the Persian Gulf, of marriage, of children. Randall had already told me not to ask questions of Jo whenever he set her off on one of these fantasies. I might have asked her was why she didn’t work hard and make a large sum of money in Sheffield, and get married there. But then, why hadn’t I stayed in Australia and found a nice girl? Why was I sitting in a hotel room in the bustle of a huge Iranian city pondering my chances of meeting a nice Kuwaiti girl on the Persian Gulf?

  Or Randall—what about Randall? He’d confessed to me only the day before that his situation was desperate. We’d been searching for a bar in the middle of Tehran, and hadn’t found one because there weren’t any. The only bars were in expensive international hotels. So we drank pomegranate juice and sat on the sidewalk, and Randall confessed that he was as blue as he could get. ‘Why? Why do you think? I’m thirty-two, I’ll be thirty-three in a couple of months. I’ve got nothing, no wife, no kids, never been married, not a dime to my name, nothing. Now I’m sliding along on the skin of my arse to Kuwait! Fucking Kuwait! I’ve gotta do something. I’m not a fucking kid. For you, it’s okay. You’re ten years old. This’s nothing, this’s just, what?—an adventure for you, whatever. I’m thirty-two, Bobby! I’ve gotta do something!’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be okay,’ I offered. ‘You’re still young looking.’

  ‘Oh, great. Now I’m getting encouragement from a ten year old.’

  ‘You could marry Jo.’

  ‘Are you completely insane? Marry Jo? Just tell me to kill myself, how about? I’ll jump out there under the next truck. I’ll tell you one thing. If she mentions ‘Britain’ once more, I definitely will kill myself. She doesn’t even say ‘England’, she says ‘Britain’—‘Boo hoo, I’m going back to Britain’. Christ, the fucking English are pathetic, just fucking pathetic.’

  The wait for our Kuwaiti visas stretched out. The Kuwaitis were in no hurry to embrace us. Keen to show my worth to the expedition, I headed out one morning with my typewriter to see if I could find a day’s work. My idea was to set myself up on a park bench and offer to type up letters in English for Tehranis with relatives in America or Australia or wherever. I’d seen men working at this craft in Istanbul, hunched over ancient Smith Coronas. The shortcomings of my project were not apparent to me. Why would Tehranis wish to send a letter in English to their relatives? How would my clients convey the substance of the letter to me unless they could speak English themselves? And so on.

  My project was not much of an advance on the money-making schemes I’d employed in my home town. I sold snake-bite kits: a used razor blade, a length of string. You opened the snake bite with the razor blade then made a tourniquet with the string. I packed the blade and the string into a little metal HMV gramophone needle-case. I’d found a hundred empty metal cases up at the tip. My asking price for the kit was ten shillings—pretty steep. I attempted to hawk the kits to fishermen down on
the river bank, and to tourists. I didn’t sell one. Other schemes included hiring myself out as a black-tracker, even though I was white. But I had terrific success with less ambitious projects. I sold mudeyes, worms and yabbies to fishermen; went door to door as an odd-job boy; rooted through the debris at the tip retrieving soft-drink bottles. So for all I knew, my typing plan might have worked.

  Tehran was not a city of parks. I found no park bench, no picnic table at which I could set up. But I did find a tiny strip of grass beside a highway, and there I settled with my typewriter beside me on top of a pile of paper. I wrote a sign, ‘letters typed in english 50 rials per page’, and displayed it to the passing traffic. I was wearing my green suit.

  People stopped to stare, but not to dictate a couple of pages to a distant relative. I was ready to give up after a barren hour or so. Then a smartly dressed officer of some sort (army intelligence, as it turned out) in starched, pale-green twill wandered up to me, smiling, and asked a great number of questions, none of then related to my new craft. Hearing that I was filling in time waiting for a visa to Kuwait, he rolled his eyes and gestured with his hand toward the sky. ‘Kuwait very bad. Bad people,’ he said. He was handsome, in his thirties, with a thick, highly groomed black moustache. I thought he was running some sort of racket, but what the racket would be I couldn’t imagine. When he suggested that I, together with my friends, stay in the apartment of a man he knew instead of wasting money on a hotel, I immediately agreed. He wrote down his name and the address of the apartment, gave me three fifty-rial notes for the taxi fare, and arranged a meeting for the late afternoon.