This Other Eden (2 page)

The
visitors, on the other hand, affect an exaggerated Britishness as a defence
against the obvious fact that they are on the make. They ask for tea and are
gently amused when it arrives with the tea-bag still in the cup. They order
obscure malt whiskies, secretly hoping that the bar won’t stock them. They tell
their hosts that the thing they like most about LA is the paper toilet-seat
covers. When they get home to Britain they speak wittily of toothy but empty
smiles and glib, automised admonishments to ‘enjoy’. They claim firmly that it
is a fine place to visit but they could never live there, which translates, of
course, as nobody has asked them to.

Nathan
made no such pretence at indulgent distaste. He thought California was lovely.
He enjoyed the toothy smiles. He thought it was nice to be greeted cheerfully.

‘But
for God’s sake, they don’t
mean
it,’ a disaffected independent producer
from Fulham had said over an Isle of Locharno McClaymore the Bonny single malt
in the hotel bar. ‘They don’t care if you live or die.’

‘Since
when have good manners been a matter of sincerity?’ Nathan replied. ‘You wish
me “all the best” every time I see you, but you wouldn’t lift a finger to make
it happen.’

‘Look,
I was taught good manners, not vacuous hypocrisy,’ snapped the producer, who
had that day failed even to be loved very much, let alone green-lighted.

‘Exactly,’
said Nathan. ‘You were
taught
to say please and thank you, not because
anyone wished to indoctrinate you with a false sense of goodwill, but simply
because it is important to show consideration. Is the Californian “have a nice
day, enjoy your life, die happy and come back as something wonderful” any
different?’

The
producer from Fulham moodily ordered another drink. He thought that Nathan
would sing a different tune when Plastic Tolstoy’s people knocked back his
Claustrosphere ad and put him straight on a sub-orbital back to dirty old
England. Then he’d be badmouthing the Yanks along with all the other unloved
Brits.

But
Nathan had no intention of getting knocked back; he was going to be
green-lighted. Because he was prepared to bet that, with the addition of the
scared little girl, his scenario about the end of the world would be the
warmest scenario about the end of the world that Plastic Tolstoy’s people would
have seen all week.

An
idea that’s time has come.

Everybody was talking
about the end of the world these days. It was a very big subject, not perhaps
quite as big as sport, or the love-lives of the British royal family, but none
the less very big. Some people, like Plastic Tolstoy, were trying to market it.
Others, like Jurgen Thor, the Great Green Warrior, were trying to prevent it.
Some people were, of course, causing it. Whether by accident or design, every day
countless incidents, both large and small, were hastening the Earth’s untimely
demise. One such event, a rather large one as it happened, was shortly to occur
off the coast of Alaska. There, whilst Nathan awaited the studio’s reaction to
his heart-warming vision of catastrophe, would be found images of Earth death
every bit as chilling as those he had invented. Not
quite
as chilling,
perhaps, for in real life the plot rarely curves and people are often less
inclined to care.

Chapter
Two

A loose-fitting coffin

in a watery grave

A
view from a cliff.

The mess was
indescribable. Yet it would have to be described, as always, described in yet
another of the pointless reports that had to be written. No report could ever
adequately convey what a mess it really was, though. As Judy, the investigating
officer on the scene, often said, you had to be there.

‘You
know how with babies,’ Judy would say, ‘you can never quite believe what a
state they can get things into, until you find out for yourself? Well, it’s the
same with supertankers.’

Everything
was as it always was on these occasions. Judy sometimes wondered why anybody
bothered turning up at all. As far as the eye could see, the boiling ocean was
black. The cliffs and rocks were black. The dead creatures were black. The
emergency operations personnel were black from head to foot, as they got their
emergency operation underway in the usual totally inadequate manner.

‘Tanker
disasters are like the first snows of winter,’ Judy would explain to friends.
‘You remember how we used to have snow? Well, year in, year out the stuff would
fall, and every time it was like the first time, it was like nobody had ever
had to deal with snow before. The roads would get clogged up, the trains would
stop, the pipes would burst. Nothing was ever ready. Well, it’s the same when a
billion litres of crude hits a coastline. People think the authorities know
what to do. They don’t. We all just shrug our shoulders and get down there with
a spade and a bucket like we always do.’

Judy
was standing on the highest cliff overlooking the disaster with the coastguard
people and a couple of local cops.

‘Well,
guess we’d better go get the captain. I hear he’s drunk,’ said the chief
coastguard with the weary sigh of a man who had left a good dinner to come and
bear witness to an event which would follow its tragic course, whether he was
there to watch it or not.

‘Are
you going down on to the bridge?’ Judy inquired.

The
coastguard turned disdainfully to look at Judy.

‘I
don’t see any reason to discuss my plans with you, nerd,’ he said.

A
boy named Judy.

Judy was a man even though
he had a woman’s name. He was called Judy because he had been unfortunate
enough to be born during the time of the great gender realignment. A period
when it was a commonly held belief in the university common-rooms of the world
that all single-sex imagery was oppressive. This was a time when men were
strongly encouraged not to grow beards, which were seen as visual assertions of
gender, whereas it became fashionable for women to be as hairy as possible, in
order to blur the margins. The idea was that if everyone could pretend to be
exactly the same then no one could be held back by being different and hence,
it was argued, the individual would be in a position to prosper.

That
was how Judy came to be called Judy. One morning before he was born, as his
father waxed his face and his mother applied mascara to her legs and upper lip,
it was decided.

‘If
it’s a boy we’ll call it Judy,’ they said, ‘and if it’s a girl we’ll call it Hercules.’
In this manner the margins were not blurred, and Judy got dead-legged every day
at school for Sixteen years.

When
Judy reached his majority he astonished those who knew him by not changing his
name. He had, of course, always intended to do so the moment he got the chance;
but when that chance finally came around, he had suffered so much at the hands
of bullies that there seemed little point in bothering. Children are much
crueller than adults, Judy reasoned, so he had already weathered the worst of
it. He was, of course, wrong. At college, the coarser element laughed at him
and pushed him around every day, and as an adult he rarely turned his back
without hearing a snigger.

It was
not just that Judy was a boy with a girl’s name; his problems were further
compounded by the fact that he was the least prepossessing of men. He had one
leg slightly shorter than the other and something of a stoop. His glasses were
thick and his hair always greasy. He was what the Americans call a nerd and since
Judy was an American, nerd became his middle name. He was a textbook nerd. It
was almost as if he had been deliberately designed that way. In terms of
appearance there was quite literally nothing about him that was not nerdy. If
they gave out air-miles for looking ineffectual and inadequate, Judy could have
been the first man on Mars.

If he
had been a stupid nerd Judy might simply have been ignored, but he wasn’t: he
was a clever nerd, very clever indeed, which was of course something of a red
rag to the bullies. It was bad enough, the bullies reasoned, putting up with
someone who was such a dork, without that dork having the gall to be cleverer
than they were.

Occasionally,
in his younger days, Judy had considered having a physical rebuild, or at the
very least getting his face done. But as he grew up he came to rather resent
the idea of paying a surgeon to attack his body simply because people did not
find it attractive. Besides which, he could not have afforded a really decent
operation. The cosmetic surgery industry had become fearful of creating a world
filled with semi-identical, plasticized, doll-like figures. They had therefore
introduced a system which they called ‘financial discrimination’, which meant
that only very rich people could turn themselves into semi-identical, plasticized,
doll-like figures.

Therefore
Judy remained as nerdy as the day he was born and suffered the consequences. It
was probably because of this discrimination that a clear sense of what was
right grew strong in Judy’s heart, and he determined that he would spend his
life fighting intolerance and injustice. To this end, he employed his
considerable intellect to win himself a place with the FBI, reasoning that he
would certainly find plenty of intolerance and injustice in the FBI.

He was
right. Nothing changed. Judy irritated the nastier element amongst his new
colleagues no less than he had irritated the bullies at school and college. He
continued to look stupid and talk smart, a combination almost guaranteed to
bring out the bully in anyone who was even remotely so disposed. During his
training the oafs and toughs continued to beat him up as they had always done.
He was shouldered aside on the firing range and wet-towelled in the showers.
Many of his colleagues were, of course, nice to him, but a kind smile does
little to mitigate the pain of being held down and given a Chinese burn, or of
having a Magnum .44 suspended by a piece of string from your scrotum.

The
passage of years had not tempered Judy’s sense of injustice and the resentment
he felt at being constantly dismissed remained undiminished. Therefore, when
the coastguard on the polluted cliff top called him a nerd, he drew himself up
to his full height, which was either five-five, or five-five and a half,
depending on which leg he put his weight on, and prepared to confront yet
another nerdist.

‘My
name is Judy Schwartz,’ he said. ‘I am an FBI agent and I demand that you take
me with you on to the bridge of this stricken tanker. Otherwise I shall devote
the rest of my life to finding out who your mistress is and then revealing her
identity to your wife.’

Dead
hand at the tiller.

The little coastguard
helicopter stood with its engine idling on the roof of the ship’s bridge, while
Judy, two coastguards and the local chief of police went inside and surveyed
the scene.

‘Well,
he sure saved us a lot of trouble,’ said the police chief.

‘Did
the decent thing, I reckon,’ a coastguard added.

They
were referring to the captain of the stricken tanker who was dead, killed,
apparently, by his own hand. There he sat, slumped across his bloodied charts,
a bottle in one hand, a revolver in the other and his brains in the wastepaper
basket on the other side of the room.

It was
déjà vu for Judy. He had seen this scene before, on another bridge in another
storm. In the midst of a different disaster he had seen a ship’s master dead
over his charts. Dead before he could explain why he had allowed his ship to
get so close to shore in such inclement circumstances.

Outside
on the enormous deck, which was listing at an angle that made standing up
extremely difficult, the crew were being winched to safety. Apart, that is,
from the captain, who was dead, and the second in command, a competent looking
woman named Jackson. She was standing near the bridge, awaiting any further
instructions from the coastguard before following the crew off the ship. Judy
wandered outside into the gale and spoke to her, shouting, to be heard above
the wind and the rain.

‘Did
you order the abandon ship, Ms…?‘ he asked.

‘Jackson.
Barbara Jackson. No, I did not, sir. The captain ordered abandon ship and most
of the crew got away in the boats before the situation deteriorated to
necessitate coastguard helicopters.’

‘So the
captain discharged his duties and then killed himself?’

‘That
is the case.’

‘Was
that like him?’ Judy asked.

‘Was
what? Discharging his duties or killing himself?’

‘Killing
himself.’

‘Well,
he didn’t make a habit of it,’ Jackson responded angrily. ‘But then he didn’t
make a habit of losing ships. Certainly not like this. We went down like a
stone, holed both sides. The captain would have known what the consequences of
that would be. This coast’s finished for three hundred miles, the fishing, the
wildlife, everything. Would you want that on your conscience? He was a decent
man. I reckon he’d have been dead inside before he pulled the trigger.’