The Green Gene Read online

  “Ah, heavens,” she said, “I could be doing with a good screw. You will think me a very forward woman, Pete.”

  In the Welsh manner she made both statements sound like questions. Humayan yawned, looked at the lake and then at the papers on the table, and considered. If his gaolers had a hidden camera somewhere in the room they would be able to take a photograph of him copulating with a Celt, and then would have a powerful hold over him. On the other hand …

  “Quite soon we will come to a good place to stop,” he said.

  “Lovely,” she said. “It is like doing revision for my finals, when I would bribe myself through each chapter with a bar of chocolate at the end. I never sat the exams, but I put on twelve pounds.”

  She was a lovely woman, plump and strong. She laughed—not a giggle but a deep laugh like a man’s—with the pleasure of love. She had suckled children and her breasts were large and soft, but there was a straightforwardness about her caresses and demands that suggested that she had not had many lovers.

  “Ah, that is good, that is good,” she whispered, rocking him gently to and fro on her in the dusk-filled room.

  “It enlarges the soul,” he answered.

  “I didn’t know that,” she sighed.

  “Yes, it enlarges the soul.”

  This was an affirmation of truth against the nightmare brutalities of the cellar and the lake, so he spoke the words louder than he need have.

  “I believe you,” she said.

  “Oh, I do not know that it enlarges women’s souls.”

  She laughed her pleased laugh and pinched his left buttock.

  They became like lovers in an idyll, who have been miraculously given leave to break step from the iron march of Time and to follow their own by-ways at their own pace. This was not the dead abstraction of the hours that he had endured in the cellar, but a calendar of their own choosing. It enabled them to do huge stints of solid work, exploring the intricate and infolded valleys of mathematical probability. Then they would make love, then sleep, whatever time the sun declared outside.

  Humayan woke once, in the dark, and started to run through the chain of his reasoning, looking for weak links. She must have been awake too, and perhaps heard the alteration of his breathing.

  “Relax, Pete, relax,” she whispered.

  “Oh, I am very relaxed. But I have been thinking about the work we did today. I want to make it as safe as possible for you—I did not care before, you know, but now I want to protect you as much as I can.”

  She slid her arm under his ribs and clutched him to her like a child with a doll. For the first time he realised how frightened she was of the job she had been singled out for; their work might keep her mind busy, but her lustfulness was a way of appeasing the terrors of her body and her deeper being.

  “You need not do it at all,” he said. “They can find someone else and I will teach her.”

  Her hug slackened.

  “I have a husband and two sons,” she said. “I had not been thinking of telling you of them. My man is a checker at Cardiff Docks, but he is a genius with it—a bard, a song-maker, as good as any of them in a hundred years. Only there’s no printing of his songs, by law. They go from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth, without even his name to them. I have heard another man singing in a pub for drinks, singing one of my man’s best songs, one that he made for me, and this other man telling all the customers that he wrote it himself, and them knowing no better. He is a bit of a drinker too, my man, but no worse than some. Our two boys are good boys, with good brains, and we teach them all we can, for the schools, you know, are only permitted to teach them enough to make them checkers in docks. Shameful it is. So for them and their kind I must strike a blow—that’s one thing. The other is that if I say no, my man will come back from work with his head broken, or there’ll be a fire-bomb thrown into the room where my boys sleep—yes, it has happened. It is the innocent who are punished in a war like ours.”

  Her hand began to slide along his thigh but he caught it and held it still.

  “What kind of a people are you?” he said. “How can you do these things to each other and still believe it is a good cause you are fighting in?”

  “I have read that at the partition of India refugee trains came into the stations with every passenger dead and blood running from the carriages so that the wheels could not grip the rails.”

  “It was those Moslem swine,” he said angrily.

  Her laugh, for once, was a jeer. Then she sighed.

  “We are a brutalised people,” she said. “We always have been. Perhaps it is something in our blood. The Irish, you know, are more cruel than the Scots, but the Scots are more deliberate in their cruelty. However it is, we are all brutalised. Listen, Pete, the sort of treatment we have had—for centuries we have had it, but always growing worse—that sort of treatment makes it impossible to follow virtue. The straight and narrow path has been blown up, and we are left with a choice of roads to destruction. All choices are evil, but I am sure of one thing; to do nothing, not to fight, to sit in degradation for ever, that is to perpetuate the evil. All possible action is also evil, but good might come of it. I do not say good will come, good might come. I choose that possibility, however faint, against the certainty of perpetual degradation.

  “Would you throw a bomb into a room where children of your own race slept?”

  “No, I cannot conceive of myself doing that. But, Pete, I can understand the mind that does it, and thinks it right to do it. And listen, Pete. Until you have made the effort to understand how it feels to act like that, what it means to be so brutalised, you have no right to judge us. Nobody has any right to judge us.”

  “As a child I was taught that all action is evil, however well-intended, as binding the soul closer to the wheel of the world.”

  “That’s an easy way out. I do not wonder that the English rulers discouraged the missionaries who tried to wean their subjects from that line of thinking. Oh, Pete, Pete, don’t judge us, don’t you judge me. That’s all.”

  There was only one other little eddy in the smooth flow of their idyll. One morning Alan came to their room and explained that the brother-in-law of the German Chancellor was coming to see the house, which was kept in exquisite historic nick as proof that the zoning laws did not deprive Greens of cultural equality, though in fact it was only opened for the occasional foreign white VIP. The difficulty was that the previous major domo, who had been a casualty of the shoot-out, had been a very slight gentleman, and none of the new group could get into his magnificent uniform. So if Humayan would condescend to green up for the occasion …

  Anna was reluctant, but Alan produced a press cutting from an American newspaper showing Mr. Zass, with his leg in plaster, shaking hands with the American ambassador in Dublin. So Humayan saw that he would have to show, even at some risk to himself, a similar gesture of goodwill. Anna coached his Indian accent into Welsh, and he spent a morning weighed down with gold braid and unearned medals, which tinkled every time he bowed, as he did at the entrance to each of the magnificent rooms their camera-clicking visitors inspected. The German tipped him five pounds when they left, but Anna would not let him touch her until he had removed the last faint smear of green grease from his skin.

  After that the days of lust and cerebration flowed with a glassy impetus towards the cliff of parting.

  Part III

  Noside

  IX

  Thus is it written. Before the Incarnation of the Siddhartha (blessed be he) there lived in a northern province the wisest man in the world. For thirty and three years had he grown, and for thirty and three years had he acquired wisdom, and for thirty and three years had he taught and kings came to him for counsel. And in his hundredth year he spoke to his disciples, saying, Now will I meditate. Let none come near me. So for thirty and three years did he sit in silence beneath a lemon tree and
his disciples tended his body. And in his hundred and thirty-third year he stirred and looked about him. Then his disciples spoke to him, saying, Master, may our ears be blessed with the fruits of thy meditation. And he answered saying, For three and thirty years I have meditated on this one question, namely whether among the sands of the desert there be two grains of sand that are in every way identical. And his disciples said to him, Master, is this not a small question for thee, who art the wisest man in the world? And he answered them saying, Per adventure it is a small question, but it was too large for me, and I found no answer.

  “OK,” said Mr. Mann in a voice of finality, “if they aren’t going to make a song and dance about it, we won’t either. We’ll get a doctor’s report out, saying that you’ve had a period of amnesia. Shock of seeing Horseman’s Yard go up. That OK by you?”

  “Are they all dead?” said Humayan.

  “Who?”

  “The Glisters.”

  “Yeah. Tough, wasn’t it? That Katie was a pretty piece. Wait a minute, there was the other girl who got out, but the blast knocked her cold—yes, hold it, there was something I wanted to clear with you about that. Hang on.”

  He picked a folder off his desk instead of getting the report from the big machine. So he had been expecting to ask this question, and the last-minute interest was false. He glanced through the papers with a perfunctoriness that confirmed this, then laid them down and tapped a paragraph.

  “Here it is,” he said. “The girl was holding a dog-collar which she said she’d given you as a joke. It had some writing on the inside. Know anything about that?”

  “I hope that did not cause trouble,” muttered Humayan, no longer having to act obsequiousness. “The joke was that she is a witch, and she made me wear the collar as a symbol of her power over me. I wrote a mantra on the inside, a protection against witches. It was all very silly.”

  “Ogham?”

  “Oh, that is a secret language of this country, so I thought the mantra might have greater power here written like that, you know?”

  Mr. Mann stared. For the moment his emotions were naked, as astonishment shaded into contempt. “Christ!” he said, closing the file.

  “I hope I have caused no trouble,” gabbled Humayan, who had steeled himself to other areas of lying and was unprepared for this. “I was intrigued by Ogham, you know. The linear element and the counting element have the feeling of a very primitive computer coding, you see …”

  “Christ,” sighed Mr. Mann, returning to his carapace of bureaucratic efficiency. He picked up a metallic ink pen, altered the coding on the outer slip and fed the documents back into the machine.

  “You’d better get back to work,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone where you’ve been. We’ll book you in to an hotel.”

  “I have a friend I can stay with.”

  “OK. So long, Pete. Watch your step.”

  The outer office had changed. Bound volumes of Prism stocked the brand-new bookshelves and galley-proofs littered the floor. Several extremely tough-looking filing cabinets stood against a wall. But Tarquin, just as before, was reading the details of the day’s accumulator from his Telex screen into the phone. That was a bonus, Humayan thought.

  The work he had been hired to do no longer held his mind, but he forced himself through massive calculations because in the course of them he was able to test many of his assumptions about the total programming of the big machine in the basement. He discovered one danger-point only, and a few minor simplifications besides the big simplification that Tarquin was still in the same office and still betting. He had deliberately bought a morning paper, and that evening he stuffed it into the litter bin ten yards down from Mr. Palati’s restaurant; the green street-sweeper scuffling along the gutter towards him did not hurry his pace; but Humayan, talking to Mr. Palati, saw the man take the paper, pretend to glance at the headlines, and then fold it into his jacket pocket before emptying the rest of the bin into his cart.

  A few days later Humayan worked till after supper-time and left the building by way of the A corridor. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in A3 so he slipped inside; a green woman was sweeping the floor with careful strokes while Anna dusted the Telex keyboard, frowning. She looked up at him, smiled minutely and nodded. He put the key on the desk beside her, and her fingers touched his as she picked it up. He pointed to the black-and-white abstract that hung where the Oxfam child had been, put his finger to his lips, kissed his hand to her and left. She was stripped and searched whenever she came to the building, so that she would have to find a hiding-place in the office and leave it there. She would choose something clever and sensible, he thought. She was like that. He was very depressed as he made his way home, thinking he would never see her again.

  This depression deepened over the days. One evening, almost without knowing what he was doing, he took the tube that he had habitually used when he had been living with the Glisters and got out at the same old station. The Avenue seemed unaltered except for being dustier as the urban season swung towards autumn. The leaves on the plane trees were larger, too, and less sappy. But the same gaunt sweeper came up the gutter towards him, nudging his pile of effluvium. The sunk, blood-shot eyes fell for an instant on Humayan, stared for a startled nano-second and swung away. Humayan strolled towards the man.

  “Got a light, mister?” he said.

  The man muttered and did not look up.

  “It is all right,” said Humayan. “I told the RRB that I was stunned by the explosion and woke up a prisoner. But in fact my captors did not know why I had been captured, nor on whose orders … Listen, sir, if you do not tell me I will inform the RRB of the true fact. If you do, I will keep silence. I give you my word.”

  The man stopped sweeping, straightened up and scratched his head under his cap. His height and melancholy and bafflement gave him the look of a great ape in a zoo, a creature so far out of its natural element that it can do nothing but stare at the passing crowds with an air of tragic bewilderment.

  “It wasna canny,” he muttered. “Five green shentlemen I hadna kent before cam tae tak up my paving, and ain of them spak wi me and askit after ye, and when wad yoursel be passing. And ye didna come and ye didna come, and syne they gan filling in their hole agin, but they didna fill it a’; and yon mon wha had askit me callit me over and gave me a wee claith to pit ower your face, and said that I was tae pick ye up if I could, and tak ye to a hoose he told me of. Sae I pickit ye up, but I didna mind the address o yon hoose, sae I carried ye awa tae the gang I kent, and they took ye awa. But they kent naething aboot ye, and nae mair of the ither gang. Mon, but they were sair fashed that a kidnapping could be plannit in their ain territory, and themselves nae kenning ocht aboot it.”

  He laughed suddenly at the anger of his friends, a sour and melancholy sound. Humayan gave him a florin, and left him still shaking his head at the strangeness of things.

  The pub was not yet open. The alley that led to Horseman’s Yard was half blocked by the scaffolding from which the builders were repairing the bomb-damage to the pub, but the workmen had gone home so Humayan ducked through.

  The iron gates were gone, and so was everything else. Where the Sunday morning sherry-glasses had twinkled was a scree of rubble. The Glisters’ house, Mr. Leary’s and the other house that side were completely collapsed; those on the other sides of the yard had not a window between them; a vast green tarpaulin covered a hole in the gymnasium roof. Among the jumbled bricks and odd fragments of belongings poked out—shards of bright pottery that had once been lampstands, gilded slivers of wood that had framed garish abstracts or paintings of African elephants. Elsewhere, perhaps as part of the process of getting the bodies out, a vague attempt at tidying up had been begun and then abandoned, so that piles of brick had been roughly stacked together into ugly pyramids and splintered floorboards tossed into a heap. Humayan picked his way over to another such pile, which was simply a m
iscellany of bric-à-brac, and looked up at the gymnasium wall. Hovering invisible up there was the ghost of a bed on which happy, pretty Kate Glister had had her pleasure; and a few yards to its left the ghost of a spy-hole through which no draught would any longer whistle. His eye began to water and his other eye wept with it. He looked down at the junk at his feet and through the mists of grief discerned a small brass object, twinkling.

  He stooped and plucked it out of the mess, and the leather strap came with it. The word on the tag was ‘Ought’. When he had cleaned the collar with his handkerchief and buckled it round his left wrist he found it meant nothing at all. He turned away uncomforted.

  She was waiting for him at the pillar-box on the corner of the main road. He thought it was a tramp or beggar-woman, especially when she came hobbling towards him with one beseeching hand outstretched, as if for money. Indians learn in early childhood how to ignore beggars, but now he was taken unawares.

  “Pete,” she said. “Pete. Don’t go away, please!”

  He swallowed with shock. Before he could recognise her for sure she staggered against him and buried her head on his shoulder. She stank.

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  “In prison. They let me out a week ago … I hadn’t anywhere to go. I hadn’t got any money. I didn’t know what had happened to the Yard. Helen’s parents wouldn’t let her talk to me. The school … I’ve been living out of dustbins like … like a Green.”

  He had not believed, when he had known her before, that he would ever hear her cry. She did not do so easily. Her sobs were wrenched through the torn shell of her confidence, each one an agony. There seemed to be nothing that would help her stop.

  Up the avenue, under the planes, floated a yellow light. Humayan pushed himself free and ran to the kerb, waving. She clung to his sleeve saying, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” The taxi stopped but the green driver looked with distrust at his prospective fares, a small brown man and a battered female who might be any colour. He slid the gear-lever forward.