The Green Gene

by Peter Dickinson

  It didn’t say anything about overcoming the witch, but she seemed to be linked with the dangers. The old sages were of course the ancient druids. Using the line of stitching as his central mark, he wrote the charm along the leather, using Ogham characters. Naturally the charm would be more efficacious in that form. He buckled the collar back on and went out.

  “Oho, yes,” said Mr. Palati, grinning like one of Hanuman’s apes. “I am sure there are such places. One moment, one moment only, and I will telephone. No, no, my friend, every man to his tastes and needs. Did not Brahma make all men different? Oh, I know a fellow, an Egyptian I tell you, who can only enjoy himself at the top of a step-ladder. Yes, I tell you, and it was worse than that. He is one of those fellows who wants a different lady each time. I have seen him bicycling round Hammersmith with his ladder—he pretends to be a window-cleaner, you know? The girls all call him Pharaoh, and he is bicycling round all the houses looking for fresh girls who do not have vertigo. I am a joking man, so I tell him he must take out an insurance policy, to insure the girls for industrial accidents, you know. Poor Pharaoh, he did not understand that I am making a joke, and he does what I tell him, but he was not lucky with his broker, who telephones the Home Office, very English, you know, and so poor Pharaoh is deported. Oh, easy, they follow him and catch him with a green girl. But at Ramadan he sent me a postcard of the pyramids, saying now he is married and very happy. No, no, I know what you are thinking. You are a naughty fellow, like me!”

  Selina was unpredictably large, and the shower-room was small. She frowned as she dried, towelling her back like an athlete so that her big breasts lolloped to and fro, tracing and retracing the graph-curve of an erotic equation. Humayan dried in the corner away from the shower, dodging her vigorous arms.

  “I thought you’d know how to do it,” she said. “I mean blokes with funny ideas usually do.”

  “Ladies in India are not so tall.”

  “Still, we managed in the end, didn’t we. It’s a bit of a change, something like that, I always say, and a change is as good as a rest if you see what I mean.”

  “In certain cases I agree,” said Humayan. He was tired.

  “Listen to you! D’you mind if I ask you something a bit personal, Pete?”

  “The reason for my perversion is that a witch has put a spell on me.”

  “Is that true? Really, that’s thrilling! I must tell Marge and I promise it won’t go no further. She’s as secret as the grave—she has to be. She’s in charge of all the cleaning, see, at the Race Relations. She’s my sister, and we’ve always told each other all our secrets, so that’s how I know it won’t go no further. I mean, she’d be in dead trouble if they found out at the Relations what I do for a living—such a puritan lot you never!”

  Humayan made a small sound of protest but she gabbled on unheeding.

  “Anyway it wasn’t that I wanted to ask, Pete. I mean that really is personal—I wouldn’t ask something like that—not first time, anyway. No … well, I mean, you know, well it’s actually the first time I’ve gone with a coloured bloke, and I don’t mind telling you my first idea was at least in a shower I’ll know he’s clean, if you see what I mean. I mean there’s no way of telling, is there? You aren’t offended, are you? And then I thought, well, really it’s not any different from white blokes, except you’re a bit cleverer than some, once we worked out how, and kept it up a bit longer. Honestly, some of these boys, it makes me wonder what they think they’re spending their money on. They might be on piece-work, I tell Marge. No, what I wondered was if you think there’s any difference, apart from everybody being a bit different anyway, if you know what I mean.”

  This is a poser, thought Humayan as he eased himself into a shirt that despite the shower-curtain their activities had somehow dampened. Next time he would bring a large plastic bag. Having so far kept the deception up he did not want to admit that he had never before made love in a shower-bath—which despite initial problems had produced a pleasingly invigorating effect and helped him not to disgrace his country by an inadequate performance. And, besides the novelty of the sluicing water, there was the fact that you could have carved two Indian girls out of Selina and still had meat to spare. He thought back to Penelope, a white woman who worked in a Bombay brothel and despite a certain scrawniness was able to charge extra because of the colour of her skin though another girl had once told Humayan that Penelope was really only a rather pale half-caste. As a statistical sample Penelope was both small and suspect, but she would have to do.

  “There is a little difference in the texture of the skin,” he said judiciously, “but nothing essential varies.”

  “Listen to you!” she crowed. “Nothing essential! Marge will love that—she’s got a lovely sense of humour. But it was all right, wasn’t it?”

  “Very nice,” said Humayan, interested that despite the day-in, day-out nature of her trade she was still animated by a sexual patriotism similar to his own. “Indian ladies are very nice too, of course.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” she said, moving her towel to the steppe-land of her thighs and thus allowing him space to wriggle into his trousers, “it’s a funny thing but sometimes you get a bloke in here who won’t talk about anything except all the Greenies he’s had, and what a wonderful screw they were. But we had a girl in here once, a funny kind of girl, very nice spoken, and I don’t know what happened but suddenly she come all over liberal and went off to work in a house near the docks where you get all kinds of things happening and the cops look the other way. It was against her principles to work in a racialist house, you see. And she come in here six months later and we had a bit of a chat and she said she wasn’t suffering for her principles at all, and she’d met a Chinaman she wanted to marry only he wanted a yellow wife. Anyway, she’s a nun now. But I’m not like that at all, not me. I’ve never told anyone this except Marge, but I get a nightmare, over and over again, and it’s the whole Welsh rugby team come in after Twickenham, all wanting me and all smelling of leeks. And when I wake up I know it’s only a dream, and I know that they don’t come to Twickenham any more, and they wouldn’t be allowed in here not in the last six years, but I’m still ever so frightened.”

  “I did not realise that the miscegenation laws were so recent.”

  “Lordy, yes. All these freedom movements, equality and such, that’s quite a modern thing. My grannie kept a house in Cheltenham—we’ve come down in the world a bit, but she owned the freehold, she did, and she told me—she’s dead now, of course—she told me Royalty used to look in when they was in that part of the world with no bridges to open special, only she was such a snob I doubt if it happened more than once. But she did tell me that in her day, in a nice area like that—it was different in places like ports of course—in a nice area like that you didn’t have to have no laws, because the Greenies knew their place and, well, they all knew what would have happened to a green boy what showed his face in a white house. But then of course the Greenies started getting ideas and there was clergymen and communists taking their side—though seeing some of the clergymen we get in here I can’t think how anyone paid any attention to them—and so of course we had to start having laws, just to keep things decent.”

  “I see,” said Humayan, taking his wallet out of his jacket.

  “You pay Mrs. Cholmondely, down in the foyer,” said Selina. “Unless you’ve got a Diner’s Card, that is.”

  “I understand,” said Humayan, “but I would like to give you a little present too.”

  He put two clean pound notes down on a miraculously dry segment of the bathroom stool, and immediately wondered whether one would have been enough.

  “That’s ever so kind of you,” said Selina earnestly. “Will you be coming back then?”

  “I hope so.”

  “That’s nice. Just give Mrs. Cholmondely a tinkle and I’ll make sure the bathroom’s free.”

 
Next morning he found on his desk a column of paper which had not been there the night before. Automatically he read the line of figures and letters at the top and tried to relate them to his work; then he realised that they were printing instructions and read on:

  “Pete Humayan does not look as though he could change the world. He is slight and large-eyed. He stares at England with a look of polite but withdrawn reserve. He landed in England only one week ago, but already the people who matter are beginning to know that Pete Humayan could change the world. Your world. My world.”

  Really, these layman, thought Humayan, beginning to purr as he read. Mr. Leary—or rather Frank Lear, for that was how the article was signed—had written a very friendly piece, and had even got most of the facts he quoted approximately right. The exaggerations seemed to Humayan most pardonable. It was unfortunate that the main scientific bias of the article concentrated on the possibility of forecasting the birth of green children to white parents—a phenomenon which at the moment was statistically negligible, but around which, it was clear, a considerable body of popular myth had accumulated. The background of their previous night’s stroll was splashed on with thick paint “… while around us the life of a Celtic Zone unwound its skein of misery … at last the clamour of curfew pierced the ugly dusk …” The concluding paragraph contrasted the locked and tidy playground in the White Zone with the uprooted climbing-frame under the through-way loop, and the judder of that bomb: “How soon will this noise become the only language that race speaks to race? Can Pete Humayan do anything to prevent that day coming?”

  The telephone rang as he was reading that sentence second time through and thinking what a lot of fuss they were making about their problems: 2,197 deaths last year, enough for one moderate-sized Madras riot …

  “Humayan,” he said in the brisk voice of a man who could change the world.

  “Hi, Pete. This is Dick Mann. You read that piece of Frank’s.”

  “Yes, yes indeed. I have just finished. I am afraid it’s very sensational.”

  “Come off it! You couldn’t ask for a better ad, and nor could we. But has he got his facts right?”

  “I think so, but the emphasis …”

  “Bugger the emphasis. Nothing you want changed?”

  “No, er, bearing in mind that it is popular journalism …”

  “Popular with you, anyway. He’s come the Wordsworths a bit strong at the end—that type always feel they’ve got to pull out the organ-stops. It’ll be a kindness to tell him to lop a bit out here and there. Tighten it up. It’ll be interesting to see how many of the others bite. So long.”

  At first Humayan was distracted from his work by a tendency to re-read bits of Mr. Leary’s article, but after an hour he folded it and put it in a drawer. He toiled steadily along dull paths for two more hours, but just before lunch, when his mouth and stomach were already forecasting their own pleasure with sweet juices, the beast of insight stirred amid the thickets. He scribbled a ‘Do not disturb’ notice, taped it to his door, turned the key in the lock and settled by the printer. His mind left his body to nose along the intricate tracks. Even the clack and chicker of the print-out and the lines of lit figures jerking into being on the Telex became remote to his numb senses, though it was he who caused them. These things were for the moment extensions of himself, functioning unnoticed, as did his lungs and heart. The big computer in the basement performed its miracles as if it were a limb of his own mind.

  Five hours later all his muscles shuddered as the soul came back to sit behind the pineal nerve. He filled half a page of paper with handwritten symbols, clipped to it the three sheets of print-out that showed the true track, kicked into one corner the mound of doublings and false trails, and began to massage the tensions out of his left fingers which had been hovering all that time above the keys.

  V

  THE MINISTER FOR INTERNAL DEFENCE (Sir Lorimer Proudfoot)—As Hon. Members are aware, these shocking explosions are the work of an irresponsible minority—

  MRS. STRAUSS (Hampstead: Independent Liberal)—These bombs express the frustrations of the whole Celtic Nation. (Shouts of “No. No!”)

  SIR LORIMER—If the Hon. Member for Hampstead is right, then the whole Celtic Nation is an irresponsible minority.

  HON. MEMBERS—Hear, Hear! (Laughter.)

  When Humayan came back to Horseman’s Yard he was confoundedly hungry, but too tired to go out to Mr. Palati’s, or even to open a tin and warm up its contents; so he was delighted to find on the carpet outside his door a square white box containing a clumsily iced cake. The icing was pink, and green letters spelt out the word PEECE.

  Much relieved that the ridiculous feud with Moirag appeared to be over, and salivating at the thought of all that sticky sweetness for himself alone, he unlocked his door and put the cake on the table. While he washed his hands the collar on his left wrist became itchy, and continued to be so as he fetched a knife and plate from the kitchen. He was fidgeting irritably with it when someone knocked softly at the door. He called out. Glenda crept in, grinning.

  “Hello,” she said. “You look dead beat.”

  “I am tired, yes, but I am happy. I did good work this afternoon and now Moirag has forgiven me and made me a cake.”

  “No! Let’s have a look! God, it looks absolutely poisonous!”

  “Do you think so?” said Humayan in a shocked whisper.

  “What? Oh, poisonous? No, of course not. Well, I mean, I shouldn’t think so, but you never know with Greens. I mean, I suppose you did have a row with her, and you’re living in her room—at least she thinks it’s her room still—and … oh, I’m sure it’s all right.”

  Humayan stared at the cake. It looked much less succulent now. The collar on his wrist had stopped itching.

  “Anyway,” said Glenda, “where would she get the poison? We could try it on the dogs, I suppose, but they’d probably be sick anyway. I know what, let’s go out to the park and feed it to the pigeons and see what happens. Only … have you got anything else to eat? Good-oh, here’s a tin of chicken breast. I’ll nick some bread and make a couple of sandwiches—it’s ages till supper. She’s taken the dogs for a walk, so if we go now …”

  In the park, behind low wooden palings, a number of birds strutted and mooched. The larger ones were exotic, peacocks and bantams and gold pheasants, but between these incredible promontories of colour the grass festered with sooty pigeons. Two yellowish tots were crumbling bread between the palings, watched by a green nanny in brown uniform, watched in turn by two square-shouldered men. Humayan had brought only one slice of the cake in a paper bag, at the rustle of which a splinter-group of birds moved in his direction.

  “Not the pigeons,” said Glenda. “They might fly away. Try that peacock.”

  It wasn’t easy. The pigeons were nippy and the peacock stately and bored until a peahen came up, drab and meek and greedy. The peacock lost interest in food, shook himself with an irritable rattle of plumes and, as if involuntarily, began the slow erection of his tail-feathers. Humayan watched this process with a remote but genuine thrill of sympathy for the poor beast’s enormous, unavailing beauty and dignity; for the peahen, as if in deliberate rebuff, pecked about among the pigeons and paid no attention either to the iridescent sail of plumes, or to the soft buff-coloured underpants revealed when the male’s dance brought him backside-on to her, or to the shivering rattle of the quills.

  “You’re missing her,” said Glenda. “For heaven’s sake look what you’re doing.”

  Humayan crumbled and tossed with great attention until the cake was gone.

  “Let’s go and sit down,” she said. “We can see what happens from over there. How long shall we give it?”

  “Ten minutes. This is all very foolish.”

  “I’m enjoying myself. Here’s your sandwich. I wonder whether there’s anything in the by-laws about poisoning pigeons—you�
�d better say it’s part of your religion if anyone makes a fuss. I’m sure it’s part of mine—it’s just the kind of thing old Minus One fancies. Who do you think those men are? They don’t look as if they were here for fun. Oh, I know, those brats must belong to some ambassador—Spanish I should think—and everyone’s got into such a kerfuffle over this other old geezer that they’ve all got bodyguards in case … Crikey!”

  Her exclamation was almost drowned by a weird noise from the enclosure. The peahen had embarked on a staggering parody of the cock’s dance; her beak was raised to the sky and emitted in staccato bursts the agonising wail of the species; this uproar was enough to alarm the pigeons who whirled away with clapping wings, so that when the peahen stopped her performance and keeled over on her side it was possible to see that five or six sooty grey bodies were already lying inert on the grass. For a while the peacock continued his display, too self-absorbed to notice that his inamorata was no more; but the two bodyguards frowned, glanced round among the tree-trunks and slid their hands into their coat pockets.

  “Golly!” said Glenda. “Let’s be off!”

  “That will only make things worse,” said Humayan, putting his hand into his jacket and withdrawing his wallet; he saw the larger bodyguard’s hand begin to snatch something from the pocket, and then relax as the wallet came into view. The man strode towards him, still wary, as Humayan withdrew the orange RRB pass. The hard but unhealthy features did not change, but the man flicked into view a rather similar piece of blue pasteboard, then put it away and took Humayan’s pass. He studied the photograph, stared at Humayan with opaque eyes, withdrew a little notebook from another pocket and wrote down some details from the pass, which he handed back.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  After a shrugging colloquy with his mate they whistled to the nanny and jerked their heads. One of the children had managed to reach the corpse of a pigeon and was trying to pull it through the palings. The nanny snatched both children away. They were crying as she led them down the path. The watchers followed, heavy-footed.