The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  “The knitwear department,” said a new voice, rough with sorrow.

  Mrs. Glister was sitting on the longest, lowest sofa. She was skinny and blonde, and was mopping from a cold blue eye the last spillage of her emotion.

  “It’ll all be in the papers tomorrow,” she said.

  “I think not, Mother,” said Doctor Glister. “This is Mr. Humayan.”

  The words were a call from the tents of grief to the ramparts of duty. She rose from the sofa and inspected Humayan with her head tilted slightly to one side, as though at that angle her sharply defined nose obstructed her vision less.

  “Well,” she said, as she settled back after letting him feel the chill touch of three bony fingers, “I hear that you are coming to stay with us for a few weeks.”

  “Months, Mother,” said Doctor Glister. The whisper made his remark sound wholly emotionless.

  “No doubt it will all sort itself out,” said Mrs. Glister. Had it not been for Kate, now decelticising herself upstairs—perhaps at this very moment deliciously naked—Humayan would have offered to leave. As it was he tried to imitate Doctor Glister and speak without anger.

  “I would be honoured to reside here,” he said. “I do not wish to be a nuisance or embarrassment to anybody. I am clean and quiet and tidy, I think.”

  He thought he detected a slight softening of Mrs. Glister’s face, and at the same time a hardening of her glance, as though she appreciated his sentiments but did not quite believe them. She reminded him uncomfortably of his grandmother. As she started to speak again the door opened behind him and the two dogs came yelping in, scampered on to the sofa and wrestled for places on Mrs. Glister’s exiguous lap, where they turned to stare bulbous-eyed at the intruder.

  “I’ve fed the little rats,” said the girl who came behind them. “Who’s this?”

  She was dark and spectacled and rather plain, but not with the plainness of a girl who has grown to a woman’s size without yet feeling ready for a woman’s role; the bones of her face were strong, and she had her mother’s nose; but for her maroon school uniform her age would have been unguessable. Perhaps she knew that she would never look succulent, and so was training to become an aunt. She stared at Humayan with knowing aggressiveness.

  “Hello,” she said, “I’m Glenda.”

  “Anne,” protested Mrs. Glister.

  “Mum’s slid a bit to the right since she christened us,” said the girl.

  “My name is Humayan. Er, Pete Humayan.”

  “I bet it’s not.”

  “Anne!”

  “You are right, miss. My real name is very long and difficult.”

  “And anyone who knows it has power over you.”

  Humayan shook his head, startled. His horoscope had told that he would travel far and be troubled with a witch, but had not linked the two prophecies. Was it possible that here, in this brusque and unmagical room, he had met her? She had a witch’s eyes behind those spectacles.

  “I am not superstitious,” he said bravely.

  Doctor Glister had been listening with an amused look while he applied successive matches to his pipe. “Let’s call him Pete,” he said.

  “I think the children should call him Mr. Humayan,” said Mrs. Glister. “I certainly shall. I was not expecting a crowd for luncheon, Mr. Humayan, so I’ve got no food in the house. But if you’d like to come to supper this first evening, so that we can get to know each other …”

  “I should be most honoured.”

  “Will you show him Moirag’s old room, Anne?”

  • • •

  “You’ve got your own kitchen and bath, see? That’s the old zoning laws, before this new lot. Greens in domestic service had to be separately accommodated, which meant having their own plumbing and cooking, in London anyway. I bet Moirag never had a shower, and she nicked all her food out of our kitchen …”

  Humayan sat on the edge of the bed and watched Glenda with growing alarm as she banged drawers open and shut and flung the cupboard door wide. She actually disappeared right into the cupboard, then came out grinning and threw herself down by the bed and peered under it.

  “Checking for empty bottles,” she said. “Moirag’s half-drunk in the mornings and fully drunk in the evenings—they all are. Luckily she’s got a head like iron, but she does hide her empties in funny places. They aren’t allowed to drink anything stronger than beer, har har. I expect you don’t drink at all, being a whatever you are.”

  “I have no religion, but I do not drink.”

  “Dad’s a humanist. Very wet.”

  “His humanism permits him to drink to excess?”

  “What? Oh, wet. No, I meant creepy, boring, yuck. That’s what humanism is, religionwise. I’m a latter-day Satanist, though I still have to attend school prayers. I sing the hymns backwards. They only make us go to prayers to be counted. That’s what education is, being counted once a day at prayers and once a year at exams.”

  “Counting people is very important. I do it for a living.”

  “Is it? Well, let me tell you we latter-day Satanists worship the great Minus One, because when everybody’s been killed there’s going to be one more death than there was life, which will make the great Minus One plus, and he’ll rule the universe.”

  “That is very philosophical.”

  “Is it?”

  She knelt up, sounding pleased for the first time.

  “I think so. And did you know that minus one possesses two imaginary cube roots, other than minus one itself, and each is the square of the other to all eternity?”

  “No! That’s great! I’ll tell Helen and we’ll work it into our prayer-book. She’s the other latter-day Satanist, and she has to go to church in the holidays. She’s got a really yuck family, even worse than mine. Show me how this cube-root thing works.”

  She sat beside him on the bed while he did the equation on the back of an envelope. She got it at once.

  “I suppose it would work just as well for plus one.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a pity … still … Why have you come here?”

  “I have been hired to try and explain and forecast the growth in the number of green children born to parents with white skins but mixed racial origins.”

  “I didn’t know the number was growing.”

  “But in your history books …”

  “They won’t teach us any British History. It’s all foul Japanese.”

  “Oh, well. The facts are simple, but the explanation is extremely complicated. Your so-called Celts are in fact a people of very mixed racial origins, as are your so-called Saxons. Until the fourteenth century the occurrence of the green gene as a dominant was rare enough to escape mention, but then in Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was a sudden surge in the number of green births, enough to make up five per cent of the population—though that is guessing, of course. The records are very bad. The numbers stayed like that for several generations, and then there was another surge, and another in the last century, though that was disguised by the enormous growth in population of all colours. Nobody knew what caused these surges, but I happened to be doing some work on something else and stumbled across the beginnings of an explanation, so here I am.”

  “But why us?”

  He explained briefly about the advertisement in Prism, and Kate’s interpretation.

  Still kneeling Glenda took off her spectacles and stared at him. Without the screening glass he could see that she had a strong cast in her left eye. Her gaze made him feel very uncomfortable, as though she already knew all there was to be known about him, and there was as little point in trying to hide from her search as there is from the snuffling monster in a nightmare. She shook her head when he’d finished.

  “Kate’s got a very simple view of Dad. He must have some reason for mucking Mum about. Dad is always �
��”

  She stopped, cocked her head to listen and put her glasses back on. Humayan heard a faint scrabbling at the door. One of the dogs, he thought.

  “Come in,” shouted Glenda.

  Doctor Glister’s bearded head poked round the door as though there was no neck or body behind it.

  “Ah, there you are, Glenny,” he said, and came creeping into the room. “I’ll drop you at school on my way back to the office. All well, Pete? I trust you don’t think I’ve misled you in our correspondence.”

  “On the contrary. You have been exceedingly veracious.”

  Doctor Glister blinked and smiled.

  “Veracity is one of my weak points,” he said. “I ought to take lessons in lying from Glenny. Well, I’ll see you this evening then.”

  He crept away.

  “You’re in luck,” said Glenda. “It’s Moirag’s evening off, so Mum will be cooking. She’s good. See you.” As soon as she was gone Humayan locked the door and removed the key.

  The architect who had designed Horseman’s Yard had needed a ruthless ingenuity to comply with the old zoning laws without wasting on greens any space a white might fancy. The separate cell for a domestic servant was fitted into the interstices of other, better-proportioned rooms. No one much larger than Humayan would have been able to use the shower at all. No one had, anyway. A buttress-like projection in the lavatory wall forced the occupant to rest most of his weight on his left buttock; rumours in the buttress told Humayan it was a water-tank. The bedroom too was niched and nooked wherever the amenities of a neighbouring room had been given priority. There was an exiguous hanging cupboard, and the furniture was the bed, one upright chair, and a chest all of whose drawers stuck in different fashions and needed different knacks to open or shut them.

  Humayan unpacked slowly, choosing the best possible location for every item and making a fastidious bundle of the dirty laundry of his voyage. He discovered in the process that the room was far from clean, with dust and scraps in any corner that could not immediately be reached by a perfunctory sweeper; none of these fragments told him anything about the previous occupant, except that she used bright brass hairpins, but after a while the knowledge of her became oppressive in the tiny space, a life lived under these conditions, squeezed into the crannies left between the Glisters’ lives, full of hard angles and restrictions, and now swept away by a force as impersonal to her and blind as famine or a tidal wave. He began to think he could smell the slightly sour sweat of a middle-aged unwashing woman, mixed with the taint of brandy dregs. He opened the window.

  The bright noon was full of a single voice, as monotonous as a heartbeat, as harsh as the cry of a peacock.

  “One-ah! Two-ah! Three-ah! Foooouuuurr! One-ah! Two-ah! Three-ah! Foooouuuurr!”

  It came from beyond the yellow wall which provided the whole view from his window. He leaned out and saw that the same featureless blank ran the whole length of this side of Horseman’s Yard; at its foot each house in the Yard had its own area of dustbins and other unsightlinesses, segregated here so that the central courtyard should remain spruce and jolly. He also saw that the architect had chosen to enliven this façade with a single unifying detail, a ledge that ran all along the Yard about two feet below the windows, a highway for burglars. It was a bally nuisance, he thought. He would have to lock his window whenever he went out. Being a cautious man, he would have locked his window in any case, but still it was a nuisance to have to. A bally nuisance.

  When he had unpacked he took his dirty clothes to a laundromat, and while they were washing found an unvandalised phone-booth and rang the Race Relations Board, to make sure that he would be expected when he arrived for his new job next morning. He ate a flavourless omelette at a restaurant, then strolled round the zone, admiring the tree-lined streets and the flower-packed gardens and the commanding voices of pink children calling to their green nursemaids. When he was tired of that he went back to Horseman’s Yard and lay on his bed, considering possible next steps on the road to becoming Kate’s lover. He decided to buy a book on sitar-music, and pretend to know something of that art. All music is mathematics, after all.

  Mrs. Glister could indeed cook. Somehow the consciousness of a beautiful meal made the period after supper quite bearable, when it should have been an agony. The five of them sat round in the living room and constructed conversations, awkward little edifices of ill-mortared remarks, not combining into any coherent street or village. Mrs. Glister seemed able to converse only about people she knew; ideas and generalisations were intolerably foreign to her, nor would she permit anything that bore in any way on the racial situation. Even so, she did most of the Glisters’ talking, for the Doctor himself seemed to relish most the intervals in the conversation, filling them with bubbling sucks at his extinct pipe. Kate lay on the floor on her stomach in a pose that stretched her trousers tight round the hummock of her buttocks, leafing through magazines that she had evidently read before. Glenda played patience but glanced up from time to time to demolish any conversation that seemed likely to grow into a meaningful shape; Humayan came to the conclusion that she was not only dangerous but unappealing, a jolly awkward customer, in fact. He welcomed the television news as a merciful relaxation, but when it was over Mrs. Glister said with a sigh that was almost a sob, “Nothing about Harrods.”

  Doctor Glister grunted with a faint note of warning—perhaps it was that that made Glenda join in. “What about Harrods?” she said.

  “They blew it up. The knitwear department. That nice Mavis is dead and Mrs. Grant has lost an arm. Only we’re not supposed to know. Animals!”

  “Have you studied our dogs, Pete?” said Doctor Glister. “Yes, indeed, sir. I have not seen dogs of this type before. Are they, er …”

  Mrs. Glister smiled and turned one of the animals over to tickle its flabby, pinkish belly; but it responded with an erection of its minuscule instrument, so she cuffed it to the floor and turned her attention to the other one.

  “Yes, they’re very rare,” she said. “They’re called Boogers. It’s quite an interesting story. Show Mr. Humayan the picture, Anne.”

  With an indecipherable mutter Glenda got off the floor and fetched a photographic album, which she flipped through and plonked open on Humayan’s lap. The picture was a reproduction of a painting, showing an interior in which a number of red-faced rustics were playing a card-game. A dog exactly like the one in Mrs. Glister’s lap was pissing against the table-leg. At the bottom were the words ‘Adrian van Bugger. Dutch School’.

  “That’s a very famous painting,” said Mrs. Glister, “and Booger was an artist who always drew every detail accurately. Look at those pans above the stove. But the dog was quite different from any known breed until my cousin retired from the army and decided to try and breed a dog exactly like the one in the picture. You see, that way he’d get a much purer strain of dog than almost all the known breeds, which are only Victorian developments, or even later. But we know from the picture that Boogers existed three hundred years ago. Only we’re having a dreadful fight with the Kennel Club to get the breed recognised.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Humayan. His Director at the University had told him what useful words these were in England.

  “Yes,” sighed Mrs. Glister, “the Kennel Club’s so stuffy, you see, and they won’t recognise a breed until it’s bred true for several generations. The trouble is that when you get Boogers looking right, like the one in the picture, they don’t breed any more. They’re quite nice little dogs, but they just aren’t interested in breeding. My cousin uses artificial insemination, and then the bitches make terrible mothers and he has to hand-rear the pups. It’s such a pity. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of money in them if we can only sort out their emotional problems. When the girls are grown up I’m …”

  “The truth is,” said Glenda, “that van Bugger was the hell of a painter of doorways and three-legged stools and de
ad rabbits, but he couldn’t paint anything alive. Not for nuts. Look at those men—you’ve never seen men like that, have you? The same with the dog. He painted it all wrong. There never was a dog that shape, so naturally when you breed one that shape the others don’t recognise it’s a dog at all, and don’t see any point in having sex with it. They’ll go yelping after any bitch that really looks like a dog. Mrs. Smith-Higgins’s collie …”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Kate, stretching with luxuriant boredom. “He dropped a dog-shaped blob of paint on the canvas and was too lazy to dean it off, so he just added a leg or two and a widdle. Cousin Ranulph’s spent his retirement trying to breed a blob.”

  “It is an interesting genetic experiment,” said Humayan. “What are their names?”

  “They are called Want and Ought,” said Doctor Glister.

  “Oh, that is very philosophical,” said Humayan. “Which is which?”

  “I have not made up my mind.”

  “They are a new acquisition?”

  “Far from it. We’ve had them for three years, haven’t we, my dear. The enigma of desire and duty …”

  “And that’s not philosophical, that’s plain bloody laziness,” said Kate, with the same lovely rage that the police state had evoked in her that morning. Doctor Glister looked pleased and Mrs. Glister sat stiff on the sofa and smiled the dead smile of a mother who has heard all her children’s favourite jokes many, many times.

  Eventually that day, Tuesday, ended.

  Planetary favour was still beaming down on Humayan when he returned from his first day’s work. Even the jostles and stares of the commuter-packed Saxons-only compartment of the tube had done nothing to weigh down his buoyancy. His office was for himself alone, newly equipped, and containing a computer input console more sophisticated than any he had ever used. The Director had invited him to take coffee in his office—that had been particularly gratifying, for the Director was a most impressive figure—at least a most impressive figurehead, gaunt and tall with curling great eyebrows over deep-set eyes. He had made a perfectly delightful speech of welcome, about the honour Humayan was doing the RRB by coming so far to help them with their difficult and vital task, and then he had talked with fervour and knowledge about varieties of Indian cooking, until Humayan’s mouth watered with memories. The interview had lasted so long that when Humayan left he found two impatient-looking gentlemen waiting in the office of the Director’s secretary.