Keep The Giraffe Burning (11 page)

But the cap. The green cap is just right for this boy’s head, said the other, and fell down next to him.

At three o’c1ock the other police found them all: the woman Clara, the dog Felix, and the two police men. They must have been right about that boy in the green cap, said one. Another said, this is what they do to those who know too much. We had best put out a call right now for the little girl.

I did it, I did it, said Bill. Clara and the children yes and the dog too. Why did I do it?

Money? asked the big, round man.

Felix looked out the window of the bus at the danger. Why will men in green cars do that? he said. There is room for him and for the bus, but that man wants all the street for his own.

Ann did not look out, and said nothing. She read a book.

You have had too much to drink, said the big man. I cannot give you any more. Do I have to draw you a picture? Go home.

I wish I could, said Bill. I only wish I could. Give me another, will you?

No. Not if you was my brother. Go to bed.

But I have no car, no children, nothing, said Bill, going red.

If I were a dog, said Felix, I would go after that car and get it I would.

Ann read: We are all fish. She closed the book.

I was down by the train station today, she said. With a blue cap on my head. I went up in a tree to look at the big train.

I am a dog, said Felix. As the bus came to a stop, he jumped down and ran after the green car. Night was upon them.

Night fell.

We have the green car, so it must be that blue cap we are now after, said one of the police men. If we can only get to the train station in time, we can stop that girl, before she gets another man or woman.

You talk like a man who eats fish cake, said another. It is the
green
cap we want, and it is at the
bus
station. The cap is upon a
boy
, one who got it at the fire station. Here, you can not run this car well. Let me have a go at it.

Let go! Look out! That dog! That bus!

There is my car, said Bill. He ran into the street. Look out for the bus! said the big, round man.

Two queens sat just back of Ann on the bus. Did we run over a rabbit dear? asked the one called Dot.

That is his bag, said the other, who had the name Clara. Tell me, sweets, can I keep this green cap?

That old thing? Blue is it not? Yes, do keep it. I found it today under a tree. By the station. It is just right for your head, you know?

OR

C
AREER
O
PPORTUNITIES AT THE
P
ASCAL
B
USINESS
S
CHOOL

Through the barred window, a blue Magritte sky. I’ve told them, I’m as innocent as any angel that ever danced on the head of any pin. They can’t keep me.

‘Getting out of here?’ Professor Rice grins. ‘Nothing easier. I can leave anytime I like.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all how you look at it. Professor, if you’ve said that once, you must have said it a thousand ti–’

The meter in the wall clicks, and a printed card slips out. It reads:
Surely you mean that, if he has said it a thousand times, he must have said it once. Otherwise explain.

They, the Acamarians, are pretty hot on explanations. I throw the card on the heap in the corner. Some lucky prisoner has the makings of a card house. Not me, I’m ready for execution. When I tell them I have nothing to lose, they ask me to explain.

‘If I close my eyes, the world goes. (All but the smell of my unwashed cellmate.) You can’t kill me, or I’ll take the world with me. You can destroy my soul, but my body will go marching on.’ That usually impresses them, especially when I march around the cell with my eyes shut.

When that fails, I can always tell them that past and future are all the same to me.

The cell door clangs open theatrically. A new man is thrown in. I am wary, for two reasons: (a) His ugliness. The yellow teeth, blackheads in ears, greased-down black hair with white dandruff, fat neck with boils – could he be an agent, trying for sympathy? (b) Anyway, he smells. Could be a way of breaking me down. They don’t know the secret resources of Yuri Trumbull, though.

‘Hello. They got you, too?’

I nod. Nods are safe, they give them information only one bit at a time. An old trick I learned from an Apache programmer. Trumbull is wily. My companion offers his hand. Scabs.

‘Don’t you know me?’ he says. ‘I know I’m not at my best, but –’

‘Professor Rice!’ I haven’t seen him for, what, fifteen years. Professor Rice, of the good old Pascal Business School. ‘What a coincidence!’ More
of their work, I’m thinking. But I know all about coincidences. I’m an actuary. Professor Rice is an antiquary. The Acamarians caught him in the Antarctic, digging up – why am I telling all these silly lies?

‘So they got you, too,’ he says again. ‘My star pupil.’ He sits on his bunk, marking territory with a noisy fart. ‘Where was it?’

I begin inventing the past, as it really was. ‘At work. I had just calculated the life expectancies for a Mormon waiter whose mother owns her own rhubarb, and a bricklayer who races his catamaran. The Mormon lives longer.’

‘Fascinating. How much longer?’

Yuri Trumbull isn’t saying. Wouldn’t they just like to get their tentacles (or claws or whatever they have) on that vital piece of inside information!

‘I finished, and my pocket calculator read 808327338. Bob Deal, at the next desk, started rambling on about probabilities. “I’ve got six reports here,” he said, “from different places. Six people who took out life insurance, effective midnight, June the sixth. One minute later, each of them was killed by lightning. Incredible.”

‘“I believe it,” I said.

‘Bob has a short temper, it has something to do with his wooden neck. “Listen, it’s about as likely as all the air in this room rushing over to one side and leaving a vacuum. Not impossible, but not bloody likely, either. There’s devilry in it.”

‘I looked at my pocket calculator upside down. It read BEELZEBOB. “Hey Bob, here’s a funny coincidence for you!”

‘He didn’t answer. All the air had rushed away from his part of the room, leaving a vacuum. Well, I took the hint. Ever since, I’ve been a devout –’

‘Mormon?’

‘No, bricklayer. It’s the sincerest form of prayer, according to my wife.’

Professor Rice blew his nose and looked at his handkerchief thoughtfully, like a customer at the hors d’oeuvres table. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’

‘My prayers have not been answered, no. But who knows? A few more bricks … As he suffocated, Bob wrote down the combination to the wall safe on his blotter. I opened the wall safe and looked through it to a blue Magritte sky. Blue, I tell you!’

He offered me a sandwich. Staring at his black fingernails, I declined.

‘Taking a light carbine from the office wall, I crawled into the safe and on through. Magritte country, all right. A lot of men in bowler hats standing around, striking poses. I could fairly smell the green apples. This could only be London. The wind was from the south-southeast at a steady –’

‘Get to the telegram part,’ he said, spitting crumbs.

How did he know about that? Was he inventing my past?

‘It was handed to me from a train window. It said,
A CRUST OF-BREAD IS BETTER THAN NOTHING.
N
OTHING IS BETTER THAN HEAVEN.
So it was you who
sent it?’

‘I couldn’t leave the train,’ he protested. ‘I was investigating a murder – or its opposite, really.’

I’ll work that into my past somehow. I’m in the driver’s seat again.

I first knew Professor Rice as a brisk, white-toothed young teacher, leading the Statistical Anomaly seminar. Very advanced stuff, for kids who only wanted to sell insurance.

‘Trumbull, let’s have that paper on the Prisoner’s Dilemma.’

Game theory. Two men are captured by the enemy, and questioned separately. If, say, A confesses, and B doesn’t, A will be freed, given a huge reward and treated as a hero. B will be shot. If both men confess, they’ll serve life sentences at hard labour. If both keep their mouths shut, they’ll be released. What should B do?

We have been questioned separately, the Professor and I. What did he tell them? That I was his star pupil? Or that he found the conclusions of my paper invalid?

‘Professor Rice, have you actually seen them face-to-face?’

‘Of course not, my boy.’ The patronizing tone. ‘No one has actually seen the Acamarians. That’s partly how they keep their power. Talk about culture shock! Frankly, this invasion is getting on my nerves. No, we have to take their existence on faith. Oh, did I tell you I’m writing a novel about God?’

Years after our seminar, I met him on a tube train. He crosses London every day, to an office in the financial district. There he works on his long-awaited novel. Even then, I could see the signs of deterioration: The nap coming off his bowler, glasses taped together at the temple. He held a clipboard, and seemed to be counting the passengers. I invent the conversation:

‘Hello, Professor. What’s this?’

‘Working over a theory, Trumbull. Counting the number of people who get on and off. At every station, more people get off the train than on. Curious, eh?’

‘Every station? That’s impossible.’

He made a face. ‘Please. Never use that word. There are two perfectly plausible explanations. (a) People are being generated right inside this carriage, somehow. (b) The word “more” doesn’t mean what it used to mean.’

I counted the passengers at the next station.

‘Your theory’s wrong. I just saw three people get into this carriage, and only one got out.’

‘You didn’t see the others, then? That
is
fascinating.’

Fascinating, his favourite word. He hisses it, sticking out the yellow lower teeth. He is fascinated by paradoxes, and by found bits of his own excessive body dirt.

A sad decline: Shiny bowler and hallucinations.

He yawns, exposing food, exhaling the smell of death. What could be more unlikely, in any universe, than being locked into a cell with this living corpse? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so bad: smooth grey stone walls, wooden bunks, not bad. The food could improve, especially the
pollo soppresso.
Rice prefers his packed lunches (where does he get them?), thin tomato-margarine sandwiches, he bites the dry crusts better than heaven, he throws the scraps on the floor.

‘Do they let you smoke here?’ He rolls a dirty little rag of a cigarette. ‘Go on. You saw men in bowlers …’

‘They rushed me, brandishing their umbrellas. How was I to know they were making for a train? I opened fire.’

‘But it didn’t work?’

‘I see you know this country well, Professor. In order to reach the heart of a businessman dressed as Kafka, the bullet must first get halfway to him. Then it must go half the remaining distance, and so on, an infinite number of smaller and smaller steps. It’s all too much for the bullet, so it gives up. Motion is impossible.’

‘All things are possible with God,’ he counters.

The next card asks him to elaborate.

‘God can do anything. He could even cure poor old Zeno’s dreams of impotence. I refer to Zeno the Greek philosopher, and not to Zeno the highly literate English prisoner.’

He received a THANK YOU card, the first I’ve seen.

‘The bullet fell from the end of the gun and rolled around on the platform. One of the commuters tripped and fell down on it, and it lodged in his heart. So I’m here for a murder I didn’t commit.’

‘A likely story,’ says Rice. He means it; his very boils are bursting with approbation. ‘My own case is similar. I’m an antiquary, as you know. While digging in the Antarctic, I happened to find two rare old bronze coins. A Greek piece marked “51
B.C.
”, and a British coin marked “George I”. These have proved fraudulent, and they say I planted them myself.

‘They produced three witnesses who swear they saw me do it. I offered to produce thirty who would swear they didn’t see me do it, but there: The guilty are always caught, you know.’

A card asks for explanation.

‘If a man is guilty, he is always caught for his crimes. Another way of saying the same thing is, if a man is not caught, he’s not guilty. We have only to look around and find a man who’s never been caught. Is he innocent? Of course he is. There are millions of uncaught innocent men. Samuel Butler, to name but three.

‘So I was caught.’ He drops the ragged cigarette and digs a finger in his ear. ‘The interrogation was odd. They asked me all about an old problem from the seminar.’

I’m not listening. Bread is better than heaven, is it? The lazy loaves drift quietly across our sky. Really they’re Acamarian spacecraft, I suppose, powered by sheer nerve. Our nerve is gone, we’re the suppressed chickens. I want out. I want the clean smell of fresh deodorant again. Is
it true that, merely by using spray deodorants, humanity destroyed the Earth’s ozone layer? And did that open the way to our invaders? I must look it all up in the prison library. Before dawn, and the firing squad.