The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  On one of my excursions, all attired in green, hair neatly combed, I was offered a well-paid job as a farmhand by a prosperous-looking citizen who spoke English.

  ‘I have a beautiful farm. In Kuwait, the most beautiful,’ said Mister Ali.

  ‘With grass and things?’

  ‘No grass.’

  ‘Cows?’

  ‘A goat. Very beautiful.’

  ‘What job do you want me to do?’

  ‘Feeding goat. Each week, one hundred pound Kuwaiti.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Mister Ali drove a white Pontiac convertible with red leather upholstery. I took a seat beside him and he roared out of Kuwait on Highway 1, into the desert. The Kuwaiti desert looks exactly as a desert should look: flat stretches of sand, dunes, and low, barren hills. It was early evening when we reached his farmhouse, a cottage that had apparently been plucked from the Cotswolds and airlifted east of the Great Nafud. It was surrounded by a green picket fence. It was the only house I’d seen since we left the city.

  Mister Ali blasted the horn loudly on arrival, and jovially invited me to give a honk or two as well. As we stepped out of the car, a stooped little man hobbled out of the house to greet us.

  ‘Servant,’ said Mister Ali with a laugh. ‘Name, Hussain. You say, “Hussain”.’

  ‘Hussain,’ I said.

  ‘No, no! Say again, “Hussain”.’

  ‘Hussain,’ I said once more, this time getting the stress right.

  ‘Good! Soon all we speak Arabic. Ha ha!’

  Mister Ali’s geniality suffered a brief lapse while he addressed Hussain. It appeared that he was giving an order that Hussain didn’t wish to carry out. Mister Ali grew hot under the collar; Hussain made faces and scowled and snorted. But Mister Ali seemed finally to prevail, and Hussain went off with ill-will on bandy legs to do as he was told.

  ‘Very funny man, Hussain, ha ha!’ said Mister Ali, cheerful once more. ‘Jelly Chub Land!’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Mister Ali put a finger under his nose and tottered up and down, bandy-legged.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Charlie Chaplin.’

  We sat at a table on the verandah. Mister Ali screamed to Hussain once more. Hussain appeared, carrying a bottle of Johnny Walker and two glasses on a tray. He put a dish cloth around the bottle before setting it on the table, then grimaced with distaste before toddling off, mumbling discontentedly to himself. I worked out that he had not wished to touch the bottle with his naked hand. What Randall had told me about the disdain of the strict Kuwaiti regime for alcohol was surely true.

  After pouring two large, neat glasses of Scotch, Mister Ali took up a canister of what seemed to be pepper, and created a thick, black cap on each of the drinks. He demonstrated how to drink through the filter of pepper. I took a sip, found the taste vile, but did not betray anything.

  ‘Where’s the goat?’ I asked.

  ‘Goat?’ said Mister Ali. ‘Ah, goat! Yes. Goat coming.’

  But the goat didn’t come. Mister Ali urged me to finish that first glass of Scotch, then poured a second. He treated his own drink more lightly. Hussain shuffled out from time to time to express his disgust, but disappeared when he was screamed at. The desert all around was soundless.

  ‘Are you,’ I asked Mister Ali, for want of conversation, ‘a millionaire?’

  ‘Money?’ said Mister Ali. ‘Hoo! Very much! Very very much! US dollar. Sterling. Swiss Franc. Very much, very!’

  I began to feel ill. My eyes couldn’t focus. Mister Ali was kissing my hand and wrist.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘so thin, so white!’

  I thought, Oh Christ!

  Mister Ali kissed my cheeks, and buried his face in my neck. His bristly moustache dug into my flesh. I couldn’t imagine how women could bear such a thing against their skin.

  ‘Gotta go,’ I said, struggling to my feet.

  ‘No, no, stay here, all the time you only with Hussain and goat, nice for you!’

  ‘Gotta go.’

  Hussain stood on the verandah with thunder on his brow. A screaming match broke out. Mister Ali was plainly furious, and so was Hussain. I felt so sick that I thought I would kill Mister Ali and Hussain, then take the car. I wanted a doctor or an ambulance. Mister Ali, however, seemed to lose the argument, and he and Hussain got me into the Pontiac.

  Mister Ali took off with a shriek of tyres and zoomed down the highway at phenomenal speed. As the headlights of oncoming cars reared before me, I took it for granted that we would crash and that I would be killed without ever having reached the green island. I wished to sob, but was too sick to do so. Mister Ali, one hand on the steering wheel, was feeling me all over and kissing me passionately. ‘So thin, so white!’ sounded in my ear like the lyrics of a pop song. I was conscious of the smell of whisky and of the humid aroma of Mister Ali’s cologne. My priority was to stay alive. When Mister Ali dived his head down to my groin, I was enraged at his disregard of the rules of safe driving and slapped at him wildly. He straightened himself in time to avoid a Detroit massacre, and drove the rest of the way into Kuwait City a bit chastened.

  Too ill to move, I had to be dragged from the car to the hotel. Mister Ali propped me against a wall, jumped back into the Pontiac and hit the accelerator. A small crowd gathered around me. My stomach, as if waiting for an audience, heaved everything through the air. A couple of men from the hotel helped me upstairs, admonishing me all the way. ‘No go with Ali! Bad, bad man!’

  Jo studied me with fascinated contempt, as if I had met with the fate I so richly deserved. Randall did some doctoring, wondering aloud if there were anything I would not do to demonstrate my stupidity. ‘A farm? Do you know how many farms there are in Kuwait, you moron? Zero! Zero farms!’

  The working-class culture in which I was reared consigned all able-bodied young men who did not roll up their sleeves and work for a living to a special circle of hell. ‘Wouldn’t work in an iron lung,’ my father once snorted, speaking of a boy of eighteen in our town who seemed to be taking a very long time to recover from a broken leg. Other sinning boys ‘Wouldn’t think of getting their little pink hands dirty,’ or would ‘Drop dead from a day’s hard yakka.’ And so, the day after the farm debacle, I went hitch-hiking in search of oilfields and work.

  Highway 1 rolled out into the desert, past Mister Ali’s cottage and on and on. As soon as I stuck out my thumb, I was offered a ride by a German chemical engineer in a Mercedes. He guffawed at my plan to find work on the oilfields and advised me to return to Australia as soon as I could. He dropped me at the intersection of Highway 1 and a Bedouin camel track, promising to pick me up and take me back to Kuwait if I were still there in two hours. I dismissed his advice and pressed on for the oilfields. What did he know? He wasn’t Kuwaiti.

  The next car that stopped was driven by an army officer—a general, to judge from his insignia. He face was pitted with pock marks, and looked exactly as spooky as skin does when magnified. He spoke no English, but asked with hand signals where I was going. On the side of the road I acted out the job of a man working in the oilfields—dig, dig, dig with my spade—and phew!, wiped my brow. The general watched me impassively, then gestured for me to get into the car. As soon as I was seated, he made a U-turn and headed back towards Kuwait City. I reconciled myself to making another foray into the desert the next day.

  He took me to a shack on the outskirts of town. Four walls and a bed. I realised immediately what would be offered but—courteous as ever—I knew that I should wait for the offer before refusing it. Some of the best-mannered children ever released to the world were, I think, bred in my little patch of rural Australia. The general sat on the bed with a heavy sigh—he was fat and wheezy and not in very good health, by the look of him. He patted the bed beside him, and I sat where he’d patted. He took a wallet from the inside pocket of his khaki jacket, drew out a numb
er of notes and placed them one at a time on the tartan blanket. He had the deliberate movements of a man who has never been required to show haste in anything. I gazed with remote distaste at his profile, at the pendulous lower lip mottled with unwholesome blue smears, at the dense stubble that ran down into the gullies of his chin and neck.

  ‘You,’ he said when he was ready. It was his only English word.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You,’ he said again, and stared at me in his unfocused way out of lustreless black pupils.

  I suddenly noticed that he was pointing at his crotch. Leaning back on the bed and trying to stare down his chest past his belly, he unbuttoned his fly. An enormously fat penis lifted its head from the folds of khaki. As we both gazed down at it, it began to grow, vegetable-like, as if its arousal were being displayed in time-lapse photography. When it had reached its full state of engorgement, its diseased condition became more obvious. It had the texture and colour of a pineapple skin. The general, in dumb-show, gave me to understand that if I were to take it in my mouth, the money on the bed was mine. I declined with a shake of the head. He looked at me regretfully for some time, then slowly nodded as if, after some thought, he’d come to see my point of view. He packed his dick away, brought his hands down on his thighs with a long exhalation of breath and wheezed himself to his feet. Then he drove me back to the hotel.

  I didn’t tell Randall and Jo about the general. I told them that I’d attempted to hitch to the oilfields, but hadn’t made it and would try again the next day. They themselves had been struggling to find work. Randall had consistently been turned back from the hospital; Jo had failed to place her shining references under the scrutiny of the big shots at the oil company offices. We should, all of us, have been demoralised. Instead, Jo and Randall listened to me quietly, nodding at the wrong places, seeming not much upset about things. I was too puzzled to feel relieved (I’d feared a tongue-lashing from Jo). Then I noticed Jo’s knickers peeping out from under the pillow. The stud of her jeans was not secured. Randall’s belt was unbuckled. They’d dressed hurriedly, hearing me on the steps. I’d been out searching for work and they’d been having sex! I felt betrayed, instantly. Particularly by Randall.

  ‘S’matter?’ asked Randall, seeing my frown.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Aw, c’mon! Something’s wrong.’

  ‘You know as well as I do!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Bobby! Hey, pal?’

  ‘I’m going out!’

  I snatched up one of my unread books and stormed out. I didn’t slam the door behind me, but I did close it pretty firmly.

  It was even more pointless to look for a nice little park in Kuwait than in Tehran. No parks, no grass. I ended up standing on the sidewalk, reading. An old woman wandered up to me and asked me something, over and over. I later came to know that the word she was using meant simply ‘What?’ as in ‘What gives?’ I finally lost patience and told her that in my country, people were well-mannered enough to permit another person to read a book on the sidewalk without being bothered by, by—stickybeaks! But I wasn’t actually reading my book. I was going over and over the script of my grievances with Jo and Randall. I mean, what was the use of me bursting my boiler, if, if—oh, it was just appalling their behaviour, appalling!

  Eventually, I had to go back to the hotel. Jo and Randall looked chastened, as they ought. I made a barbed remark about hoping that my arrival had not inconvenienced them too much. Jo, in unguarded moments, looked sickeningly smug. Also, she began wandering around in her underwear—something she would never have done before. She wasn’t all that bad looking in her underwear, in fact. By the time we gave up on Kuwait and left to try our luck back in Shiraz, I was fantasising about a short, ill-tempered English girl in gingham knickers who had no interest in me other than as a bonded debtor.

  A hotel of astonishing luxury once stood on a street teeming with people buying and selling from market stalls. My father spent two nights in one of its elegant bedrooms during the war. The hotel had been taken over by the Australian army. That stay was my father’s only experience of luxury in his life, although he does not use the word ‘luxury’ in describing the hotel’s splendours. He speaks of it as ‘posh, like a palace’. He normally uses ‘posh’ as a term of mild disdain or contempt, referring to affectation (Nigel Harrison’s letterbox, for instance, which, alone of all letterboxes in Eildon is adorned with big, brass numerals). But when he says that the fabulous hotel was ‘posh’, he is simply trying to do it justice. Its reception desk was carved marble; its staircase was made from a similar stone, only pink, or pinkish. The carpets were a thick, red plush. Framed paintings were everywhere, even in the bedrooms where they could easily have been stolen.

  In my father’s bedroom, which he shared with five comrades, a huge painting of a ruined castle hung above the bed. The painting wasn’t a copy or anything like that; it was an original. You could feel the paint with your fingers. The bathroom was enormous, almost as big as the bedroom, all tiled in designs that included what Dad at first took to be swastikas but which turned out only to be swastika-like symbols of a sort found all over the country. And in the enormous bathroom, what do you think? A bed! The idea was, apparently, that you would take a bath, hop out, dry yourself, then stretch out on the bed while a servant brought you tea and biscuits. You pulled a long sash thing to call the servant, not that there were any servants when my father was there. You open the window and the shutters, and what do you see? A million people, blacks, scurrying about in the street below, and a bay as blue as the sky, incredible. You wouldn’t find anything as posh as that hotel in Australia, not Sydney, not Melbourne, nowhere. Do I know why, my father asks; and when I don’t know, he explains. ‘No coolies in Australia. For a hotel like that, you need coolies, cheap labour. White people won’t do it.’

  But posh. Really posh.

  Hotel

  Down in the bazaar, a few days after we arrived in Shiraz, three tall men in dusty black robes and turbans caught my attention. They looked straight ahead as they marched along the narrow lanes, expecting people to step aside, and the people did step aside. Each of the men was followed by a line of women dressed head to toe in black. The women’s faces were hidden by studded leather masks. Some women didn’t have much of a spring in their step, and so I took them to be older. Some seemed to be very young, perhaps in their teens, although I couldn’t be sure. The women of each group were tied each to the other with cord. I could see their flickering gaze as they passed. I thought I could discern curiosity in their eyes, even liveliness. But in the eyes of the men, there was no curiosity. Their chiselled, fleshless faces were models of haughty derision. If they found their way blocked, perhaps by a man leading a donkey or a merchant with his back to them, they simply stopped and let their gaze wander a little left and right, like gunslingers in a crude western. The women would come to a lazy halt, bending a little as they laughed, as if they could see the humour in all this arrogance. The market-goers and merchants were not dressed in robes, but in jeans and shirts and pullovers. I noticed smiles on their faces—satirical smiles. These tall haughty men and their wives were hicks and, although they were spooky, they were also absurd.

  I learned some time later that they were tribespeople down from the hills for a day. Shiraz, I was told, brought five thousand years of history to life in one day. Western culture was welcomed by the Shah’s régime, up to a point, and the middle-class girls in skirts and blouses who sauntered along the boulevards had embraced the West as firmly as was permitted. The poor held on to what was more familiar. The tribespeople were not so much fundamentalist Muslims as ferocious Muslims. The clerical class of mullahs, liberals and conservatives alike, were pissed off with the leaching away of their authority that came with the encroachment of Western values and fads. The intellectuals loathed both the Shah and the mullahs.

 
My sole question, addressed to the quiet, amused and witty man who was attempting to educate me was, ‘If you convert and become a Muslim, can you still have four wives?’ I wish I had craved to learn more about the tribesmen; I wish I’d owned some real curiosity about the world. But when I arrived in Shiraz, it was still the same old thing: scrounging for love.

  We had no money and nowhere to stay when we stepped off the bus in Shiraz, but Randall struck up a conversation with a stoned Peace Corps couple who were prepared to let the three of us camp in their flat for a week. They were off to the east of the country, where hashish that had been cured according to the arcane rites of a mysterious desert sect was due to be dug up and sold for a song to whoever happened to be standing around. The flat was fine, but its cupboards were bare.

  Jo became hysterical, but was taken under the wing of a fierce old man-hater at the British Council, a woman who thought it a shame that a well-brought-up gal like Jo should be forced to share a flat with two aimless boys who’d sponged her last penny. Randall walked down to what looked from the outside like a Middle Eastern version of St James Infirmary, and had the good fortune to meet a surgeon who’d been trained in his home town of Boston. The surgeon promised Randall a job, but had to renege when it was revealed that Randall had only a tourist visa. Leave the country, Randall was told, get yourself a six-month work visa, come back, scrub up, and into the operating theatre with you. But a six-month visa would cost a lot of money. Randall didn’t have a zack. My own employment prospects were, of course, very poor.