Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “A snake’s head, I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

  She became rigid. Her arm began to rise stiffly towards her spectacles, as though she were about to unveil her own counter-armaments.

  “Didn’t I tell you all science is one, Mother?” said the Prime Minister, laying his hand on the rising arm and stilling it. “Doctor Foxe, you never told me the end of your story.”

  “Which story, sir?”

  “The drug which made your rats virtuous. What became of it?”

  “SG 19? I don’t know, sir. I don’t even know what it was supposed to do, but I expect it was a dead end. We get a lot of them, I’m afraid.”

  2

  Foxe’s bike was a lady’s model, ancient, black and absurdly heavy. It looked as though it had been engineered to carry the gaunt governesses of the children of English colonial administrators, forty years back. Its bearings were far from frictionless, and even with seat and handles raised to their limits it was a couple of sizes too small for Foxe. But it had a single invaluable asset, which was that it wasn’t worth stealing. The machine he’d bought on arrival in Hog’s Cay had vanished in twenty-four hours, and so had its smartish replacement, but this old beast remained faithful. Besides, as Foxe told Galdi (who drove the mile and a half to work each day in a 140 mph Alfa), if anybody did nick it he’d have a fair chance of tracking them by sound; its characteristic squeaks and rattles were audible a block away. He didn’t tell Galdi that he cycled because Lisa-Anna had persuaded him to take at least that amount of exercise in Vienna.

  Foxe coasted, clanking, down the twisty tree-shadowed road from the promontory where the lab buildings stood and out into the blazing flats below. The shortest way home lay along the handsome new beach road, past the absurd hotels, but at noon there always seemed to be a steady wind from the south, just strong enough to whip bitter little sprays of white sand into his face as he pedalled; so over the weeks he’d explored and perfected his own route through the sordid maze of Back Town. Now he branched off the main road, crossed the screening dunes and dipped in among the tangle of shanties.

  Poverty without picturesqueness, colourful with the hues of rust and tar and scum, rich-smelling with much-used cooking oil and rotting fruit and open drains. Foxe had seen tourists being politely turned away from this end of Back Town by two of the Island police, and pointed in the direction of the gaudier and more presentable sections near the harbour, but till to-day nobody had tried to stop him. He was about half way home, already savouring the beer and fish-salad which he’d left in his refrigerator, when it happened. The alley he was in twisted round the back of one of the few large buildings among the shanties—a sort of dance-hall tavern—and reached a larger road. At this point Foxe’s path was blocked by a crowd, mostly with their backs to him.

  “Scuse me,” he said, “scuse me,” and began to nose his way through with his front wheel. A few of them looked at him, but mostly they gave way without interrupting their chatter. He reached the front of the crowd and saw that the road itself was empty but a similar mass of people lined the far side, all evidently waiting for someone to pass. As he eased his bike into the space a policeman—khaki shirt and trousers, black cap, white whistle-cord round neck, gun at hip—stalked in front of him and held up a hand.

  “Can’t cross here, mister. Prime Minister coming.”

  “Oh. How soon?”

  The policeman’s black brow furrowed as he peered up the road.

  “Can’t hear no cheering. Bit of time, yet.”

  “In that case …”

  The policeman stared at Foxe, both startled and angry.

  “Prime Minister coming, I tell you, man,” he said.

  “Got the Ol’ Woman with him,” said someone in the crowd.

  An area of chatter stilled into quiet sighs. Foxe hesitated.

  “Better go back, man,” said someone. “You don’ want to cross where the Ol’ Woman coming.”

  “OK,” said Foxe. “Thanks.”

  They made way to let him back his bike into the alley and then paid no more attention to him. He noticed another policeman close-by, a smaller, scruffier figure than the one in the main road. This man was standing by the foot of a ladder which leaned against the tavern wall. Foxe approached him.

  “How long will he be?” he asked.

  “Get it done by time the Prime Minister come long,” said the policeman.

  Foxe blinked and looked up. A man on the ladder was frantically white-washing a section of wall, trying to obliterate a large symbol which Foxe had noticed in several places in Back Town, a circle with a vertical bar projecting at the top. Hitherto it had meant nothing to him, but now he suddenly caught the policeman’s warning gaze and guessed that this was something which the Prime Minister would prefer not to see—the symbol of some underground opposition movement, perhaps. Indeed, it looked vaguely like the old cartoonist’s convention for an anarchist’s bomb, so it might be just that. More important at the moment, the painter was going to take at least another twenty minutes to obliterate it, and that meant that Foxe wasn’t going to be able to get back to his flat for lunch.

  “Thanks,” he said, then turned and cycled back along the alley, only now noticing how much quieter and less populous the shanties were than normal. What now? The Prime Minister’s visit had already spoilt half a morning’s figures, making timings less precise and the rats’ behaviour—because of the shift in routine—less comparable with other days. Foxe was determined to get the afternoon back on keel, starting precisely at 2.15. That meant eating somewhere close-by. With a shrug of distaste he turned towards the beach.

  He came out behind a hotel whose architecture had often caught his eye. It had clearly been designed by an admirer of the Sydney Opera House and had the same look of being unlikely to stand on its own feet, but then somebody had become bored with all that scalloped whiteness and ordered the outer shell to be painted in great swoops of pink and orange and green. Inside this gaudy carapace, like a hermit crab in an exotic shell, lurked the mean-proportioned slab of the hotel proper. Foxe pedalled round to the front and found a wide terrace where tables were laid for a formal meal and white-jacketed waiters moved beneath a trellis of scarlet-trumpeted creeper. Foxe didn’t feel like that at all, and by now knew that it was inconceivable that a waiter on Hog’s Cay would bring him a meal in thirty-five minutes flat. He was just about to cycle on when his eye was caught by a neon sign saying “Igloo Bar”.

  The phrase had a weird appeal. It seemed to incorporate the coolness he longed for after the frustration and heat of his ride, and the stillness and isolation he preferred for his meals. He locked his bike to the trellis and followed the pointing arrow.

  The bar was a small, white-domed room with settees upholstered in polar-bear skins. It was empty except for a handsome black barmaid wearing an Eskimo parka.

  “Morning,” said Foxe. “Got anything to eat in here?”

  “Nuts,” she said.

  Foxe sighed. The air-conditioning was actually working. There are more forms of food than the merely solid.

  “Can you do me a Bloody Mary?” he said.

  “Bring it to you, sir,” she said.

  Foxe sat on one of the bear-skin settees. The table in front of him was a plastic rock, flat-topped. The ash-tray was a trepanned seal-head. When the girl brought his drink it came in a walrus tusk. Her parka stopped at hip level and below that her uniform was fish-net tights and immensely high platform shoes.

  “You don’ mention snow-shoes to me, sir, please,” she said, gritting the teeth behind her smile. As she moved away the door swung open and a tall thin man came in. He was black, and wore a pale blue suit, white hat, pink tie and shirt of the most intense iridescent violet Foxe had ever seen. Though his clothes were new and smart and clean, he was still somehow a little dishevelled and moved with the stooping, fretted look of the native Islander.
>
  “Rub noses, honey?” he said.

  The girl didn’t look up but poured some green goo into a tall glass, added soda and then something which instantly sprang into a ball of fluffy foam on top of the concoction, which she pushed towards the newcomer. He craned towards her, wrinkling his nose invitingly. She whispered swearwords through her compulsory smile. He took his hat off and put it over her face, then picked up his drink and carried it across to join Foxe.

  “Like it, sir?” he said.

  “It’s a change,” said Foxe, guessing he might be talking about the bar.

  “American?”

  “English.”

  “You poor old imperialist wash-out. Didn’t think you’d have the dough for a place like Hog’s Cay.”

  Foxe realised that the man was fairly drunk.

  “I’m not a tourist,” he answered. “I work here.”

  “Uh? You the new feller at the Dorchester? Feller they’ve hired to teach that accent to the waiters?”

  The Dorchester was a gabled, half-timbered, diamond-paned-windowed, twisty-chimneyed fantasy a mile along the beach.

  “No,” said Foxe. “I work up in those buildings on the headland.”

  “That right?” said the man, not at all interested.

  “Yes. What do you do?”

  “I keep this hut. I’m the boss round here. My name’s Trotter.”

  “Uh?”

  “No need to be surprised, man. How else you think I come to run a joint like this? What do I know ’bout hotels? All my life I tell them I going to be a herbalist, and they push me into this job. Honey, you can take that fur coat off if you want—the boss ain’t looking, and ’bout every-one else gone watching my cousin ride through the streets.”

  Foxe was a fairly reticent person with strangers, but there was something oddly appealing about this drunk young man that made him want to keep the conversation going.

  “I was talking to your cousin this morning, then,” he said. “He brought his mother to look at my rats.”

  Mr Trotter’s eyes widened.

  “You hear this, honey?” he called softly. “This gentleman been talking with the Old Woman this morning.”

  The girl stopped smiling, put a finger to her tongue and drew a little cross on her forehead.

  “She struck me as a pretty formidable figure,” said Foxe.

  “Formidable! You got the word for her. Formidable! Sure. She try anything. She try anything. She don’ know nothing, but she got the power, and she try anything!”

  His voice was losing its clipped, neutral accent and becoming closer to that of the poorer Islanders, deep and a little slurred, with a rhythm that brought some sentences to the verge of song.

  “She tried to tell my boss a spell about planting melonpips on a virgin’s grave,” said Foxe.

  Mr Trotter gave a sour laugh.

  “This one everybody know,” he said. “Sure, sure, all the little girls. I take you up the cemetery, show you graves with twenty, thirty melon-plants growing there!”

  “Does it work?” asked Foxe.

  Mr Trotter reverted to more learned tones.

  “Course not,” he said. “Wrong kind of melon, wrong grave, wrong phase of Venus, wrong words to say on the grave … Oh, it work with the Old Woman if she try it. It work for her with a plastic tulip from a Datsun show room. She got the power!”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “A little bit. Just a little bit. I ain’t so interested in that. I’m after the knowledge. Listen here. There’s a little tree grows on Main Island—Ferdinandusa hirsuta—glittery long leaf, hairy stem, red flower like a bunch of little ball-point pens—we call it the sorry-bush. Reason why, it’s a little poisonous, not enough to kill you, but you try smelling one of those flowers and you cry all morning. Sorry you smelt it. Sorry-bush, see?”

  Foxe nodded. He realised now why he felt at home with Mr Trotter—he was a creature of the same kind as himself, who knew his subject well and liked to talk about it.

  “OK,” said Mr Trotter. “All the little girls know that. Hide a piece of sorry-bush in a bunch of flowers and send it to the girl who steals your boy, make her sorry, see? That ain’t knowledge. But listen. Every sorry-bush got one little leaf on it—’nother drink for the gentleman, honey—just one leaf. Now, suppose there’s a feller wants to kill you. You find a sorry-bush, find this leaf, take it to the priest, give him a dash of money, tell him ‘Here’s this enemy wants to kill me.’ OK, the priest takes your leaf and gives it a blessing. Saturday night he wraps it round one holy wafer. Sunday morning your enemy comes to Mass, and priest takes care to give him that one wafer. After Mass he gives you back the leaf. OK? Now, long as you keep that leaf, your enemy stops wishing to kill you. Still your enemy, sure, but not your murderer.”

  “I see. And what you mean by knowledge is not knowing the story, but knowing which leaf to pick.”

  “Right. And that I ain’t got yet. Too busy bossing this bloody hotel.”

  The barmaid came swaying over with another Bloody Mary for Foxe and a green horror for Mr Trotter.

  “Think I ought to change the decor?” asked Mr Trotter.

  “It’s a bit rough on the girl,” said Foxe, “and I don’t suppose any visiting eskimos would care for it much. But it’s nice and cool.”

  “While the air conditioner keeps working. What you doing to-night, honey?”

  “Staying far as I can get away from you,” said the girl over her shoulder.

  “That’s a compensation,” said Mr Trotter to Foxe. “For herbalising I got to stay chaste—no good less I do. But it don’ apply for hotel-keeping.”

  “Are the Trotters a chaste lot?” asked Foxe. “I mean, there’s so many of you about …”

  “Don’ you know the story?”

  “No.”

  “Uh. Hundred and fifty years ago there was this little runt of a man called Trotter. Now he must have had the power. First, he persuaded all the men in three villages that just over there, beyond the horizon, there’s this island where you only got to put a leaf in the soil and a cane jump up, you only got to dig a hole for water and you find pirate gold. Only no women allowed on this Island. So all the men get in their boats, and Trotter leads them away. Month later, all the women down on the shore, looking for their men to come home with the boat full of rubies, when they see Trotter coming back all alone. I tell you he must have had the power, cause of he tells them their men ain’t coming back no more and now they’re all going to be Mrs Trotter. And the women agree.”

  “What had happened to the other men?”

  “He poisoned them. Bought a barrel of rat-poison from England, my Granmammy told me. That shows he never got the knowledge, cause of there’s bushes and bushes all growing on the Islands he might have used. Root, leaf, flower, seed.”

  “So that’s how the Trotters came to be the ruling dynasty?”

  “Sure. I tell you, man, the top Khandhar, he’s my cousin.”

  “What’s a Khandhar?”

  Mr Trotter paused and took a swig from his drink. The froth gave him a snowy moustache which he licked pensively away, watching the barmaid while he did so.

  “You don’ hear any of this, honey,” he said.

  “You be the stupid one, I be the deaf one,” she answered.

  “Surprising you never hear about the Khandhars,” he muttered. “Nobody won’t talk about them on the Islands, less they’re drunk, like me. But when I was in New York, learning about hotels, people keep asking me are they really Marxists? Are they going to go Castro?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Foxe. “The revolutionaries. They told me about them in Vienna—at least they told me not to talk about them. Are they Marxists as a matter of fact?”

  “They better be. Long as Doctor O’s fighting Marxists, the State Department’s going to stay happy with Doctor
O. Only he’s done a pretty stupid thing—he’s wiped them out. Shot most of them, put the rest in the Pit. So least until next time there’s a cane failure, and Doctor O needs somebody to blame it on …”

  Foxe’s eye caught the barmaid’s and she instantly glanced away. She looked far from deaf. Two Bloody Marys weren’t enough to make him incautious, as far as Company briefings were concerned.

  “I’ve got to go pretty soon,” he said. “Perhaps you could explain something else to me—something quite different.”

  “Sure,” said Mr Trotter, obviously relieved at the change of subject. He listened attentively while Foxe described the episode involving the gardener, the snake, the rake, Captain Angiah’s revolver and Mrs Trotter. At the end he shook his head, smiling sadly.

  “Stupid ignorant peasant,” he said. “I got a little knowledge, I got a little power, but sure I’m not going to try a trick like that till I got a lot more of both of them. Listen. Asimbulu, Lord of Thunder, when he takes a body he becomes a snake, wide across as a rum barrel. He’s a joker, too. You want to find treasure, perhaps Asimbulu will help you, providing you bind him right. First, you got to bite the head off of a living snake, that olive kind we call the brassa. After that you got a lot more to do—prayers, plants, dances, blood, water—I don’ know it all. When you finish you tell Asimbulu you won’ loose him from your binding less he leads you to a treasure, OK? But you get one little bit wrong and you don’ bind Asimbulu. He binds you. He’s a joker, I tell you; so your rake breaks in your hand; your hat flies off with a bullet when there ain’t nobody there to shoot. All that. OK?”

  “I see. Yes. Mrs Trotter seemed to think I had something to do with it—it was my fault—she’d irritated me, and I didn’t tell her how I knew about the rake and the snake’s head …”

  “Ho! Man, you begun something there. Ho! Listen to this. You come here but you don’ belong here, like these bloody tourists don’ belong. We’re two worlds. You got your own knowledge and your own power and we got ours. Your science, our science. A piece of our science, in your world it’s a ghost—you walk right through it, you don’ even see it’s there. You walk even through Asimbulu. Maybe he changes you, but you don’ know you been changed. OK, two worlds. I can go a bit in both of them. I know the science name of the sorry-bush—your world—and I know the power in it—our world. You, man, you live all in your world. What I tell you about the sorry-bush, that makes you laugh inside. You tell yourself, How can the leaf of a plant stop a man from doing a murder? How can it make him a good man? Show me. Find me two hundred murderers and let me test them with my shining instruments. That’s what you say, right?”