Shades of Grey Page 12

  The consulting room was pretty much the same as at Jade-under-Lime, only larger. There was a couch under a glazed ceiling, and to one side an X-ray machine, the swatch safe and several glass-fronted cupboards packed with bandages and a few instruments. I noticed that there was even an arc light, on a wheeled stand, that was plugged into the wall.

  “What a relief!” he said as I entered. “It’s only you.”

  He got up and walked across to the filing cabinet, placed a file back into its slot and then closed the drawer.

  “I can give you five minutes,” he said, rummaging through a mountain of treatment-request forms that all needed his backdated signature. “Ochre has left the practice in an appalling state. I’ve got five women to time correctly for Chromovulation by the end of the month, the sniffles is definitely getting worse and get this: Ochre’s been stealing and selling the village’s swatches!”

  “The village is buzzing with it,” I replied, giving the impression of a lad with his finger on the pulse. “How many have gone?”

  He sat back in his swivel chair and shook his head sadly.

  “I haven’t inventoried them all, but certainly five hundred or so, stolen over a period of several years—in clear contravention of about twenty-seven different Rules and the Chromaticologist’s oath!”

  “Wow,” I exclaimed, overwhelmed by Ochre’s audacity. Adherence to the strict rule of Rule was maintained not just by the severity of the punishment, but by the certainty of being caught.

  “We’ve still got a few hundred,” said Dad, walking across to the swatch safe and flicking through the six-inch-square envelopes that protected the hues, “but mostly the ones he couldn’t sell on the Beigemarket. The sort that deal with athlete’s foot, male-pattern baldness and excessive wrinkling of the scrotum.”

  “It wasn’t a fatal self-misdiagnosis, was it?”

  “I think not. DeMauve believes he’d been indulging in the palette rather heavily. Beyond lime—perhaps even beyond Lincoln.”

  “You think he was Chasing the Frog?”

  Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. If he was, then it’s little wonder the Council returned an accidental- death verdict at the inquest. They were doing Ochre’s family and the rest of the village a favor.”

  It explained the “misdiagnosis.” “Chasing the Frog” was what hardened greeners did when their cortex was too burned for even Lincoln to have an effect. They would go into the Green Room and partake of the color painted within—the shade of green that you saw only once in your life, when it was time to go. The color painted within the Green Room was known as “sweetdream” and would render you unconscious in twelve minutes and dead in sixteen, but during those twelve minutes every synapse in your brain would fire in a sparkling fountain of pleasure. The cries from the Green Room were never of pain or fear. They were of ecstasy. Chasing the Frog was a dangerous game. Time it right and you were sitting on a cloud. Time it wrong and you’d be good only for the renderers.

  “Falsifying a cause of death?” I muttered. “That’s got to be five thousand demerits there and then.”

  Dad shrugged and I thought for a moment. “The Rules are pretty malleable out here, aren’t they?”

  “In most places, Eddie, if you look—which I don’t recommend.”

  “You’re right,” I said, thinking of Jane, and how I should really just drop the whole wrongspot issue.

  “Ochre’s wife and daughter can’t be having a great time of it,” he added. “The Council exonerated them of all wrongdoing as regards the swatch theft, but even so—guilt by association and whatnot. Next!”

  The door opened, and a Grey man walked in. He was a senior, and bent double by either toil in the fields or toil in the factory—toil, anyway. He had a runny nose and watery eyes. It didn’t take a six-year Chromaticologist’s training to see what the problem was.

  “It’s the sniffles, Mr. G-67,” said Dad kindly. “There’s a lot of it about. Unfortunately, we have problems with the Long Swatch, so I don’t have anything I can show you for it—it’ll be a week’s bed rest.”

  The Grey seemed very pleased with the outcome, and handed my father his merit book.

  “Ah,” said Dad as he flicked through the pages of the man’s employment record and feedback score. “Tell me, Mr. G-67, have you been suffering from heavy legs recently?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I would strongly suggest that you have.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the Grey obediently. “Awful they’ve been these past few years. So heavy I sometimes can’t get out of bed.”

  “Exactly as I thought,” replied my father. “I am giving you three weeks and four days’ additional bed rest. We’ll also remove this.”

  Dad took the MALINGERER badge off the Grey’s lapel, doubtless placed there by Sally Gamboge.

  The man’s worn features cracked into a smile. He thanked Dad profusely and tottered out of the room.

  “Heavy legs?” I asked.

  “He’s got less than half a percent of his Civil Obligation to complete before retirement,” murmured Dad, filling in a treatment form, “and he looks like he deserves to finish early.”

  “That’s not really allowed, is it?”

  Dad shrugged. “Not really. But the Greys have been worked half to death by the Gamboges, and if it’s in my power to afford them a break, I’ll do so.”

  “Are you giving everyone with the sniffles time off work?”

  “No. I’m going to get hold of some 196-34-44 tomorrow—it’ll have the outbreak cured in a twinkling.”

  Dad explained that Robin Ochre had been the swatchman for two villages and kept a satellite Colorium equipped with a short swatch of about two hundred color-cards. It was in Rusty Hill.

  “Next!”

  A young Blue girl walked in, holding a bloodied towel to her hand. In the colorless village, the blood looked inordinately bright.

  “Hello!” she said brightly. “I seem to have cut my finger off.”

  “Actually, you’ve cut two off,” said Dad, examining the wound. “You should be more careful.”

  But I wasn’t interested in the Blue’s propensity for clumsiness. I was thinking about Robin Ochre’s second practice. Rusty Hill was firmly etched in my mind, because it was where the Grey wrongspot had lived.

  “You’re going to Rusty Hill?” I asked, intrigued by the sudden possibility that had just opened up.

  “Yes,” he said, selecting some very fine thread and a needle.

  “Wouldn’t Ochre have swiped the swatches from there, too?”

  “DeMauve thinks not,” said Dad, placing the offset glasses on the Blue’s nose and showing her some 100-83-71 out of his traveling swatch case to slow the bleeding. “Ochre said Rusty Hill spooked him. In any event, Carlos Fandango is taking me over there early tomorrow morning. I’m going to have to sew these back on,” he remarked to the Blue, who was staring absently out the window.

  “I don’t use the pinky,” she said, “and there are a lot of people waiting to see you.”

  “They can wait.”

  “Dad,” I said, “I’d like to go to Rusty Hill, too.”

  “Out of the question,” he replied immediately. “The Council were reluctant to sign a travel order to even allow me over there. But they reasoned that if the workforce is laid up with the sniffles, the village will grind to a halt. Fandango is driving me, but he’s under strict instructions not to enter the village.”

  “It’s only been four years since the Mildew swept through the village,” added the Blue girl, who had been listening to the conversation with interest. “By rights, no one should go there for at least another sixteen.”

  “Another excellent reason,” remarked Dad. “Would you call the nurse? I’m going to need a second pair of hands if I want to see even a handful more patients before supper.”

  I pressed the NURSE CALL button. She came in, nodded me a greeting, looked at the Blue’s hand with a reproachful “Tut” and expertly threaded a needle.


  “I’ll do the arteries,” Dad said to the nurse, “if you tackle the tendons. Oh, Eddie, jot down 37-78-81 on my blotter—nerves always rejoin better when encouraged by a dull orange. Close the door on the way out, will you?”

  I walked back into the waiting room, where a sense of daring suddenly gripped me. Not everyone would be seen by my father today, so rather than have everyone queue for hours tomorrow morning to be first in, I thought I’d help out.

  I found some paper, made up thirtyplaying-card-sized squares, wrote a number on each and then went around the waiting room, handing them out to everyone and explaining how the system worked: A number would be displayed as soon as my father was seeing patients again, and when your number came up, you would be seen. “But be warned,” I added. “Miss your turn and you’ll have to take a new number.”

  I had to run over the details several times as the concept was somewhat novel, but after a good deal of mumbling and consternation over this, the principle was at last imparted to the villagers. Pretty soon half the room filed off to do other things, or simply go home. I made a sign asking new patients to take a number from a small stainless-steel kidney bowl, and as an afterthought I set aside a box for the tickets that had been used.

  Happy that the first practical test of my Russett Mk II Numbered Queuing System was under way, I walked out of the Colorium with a bounce in my step. I stopped at the suggestion box to apply for retrospective permission to use the system under the Standard Variable procedure that Travis had told me about. I was in no doubt that the council would reject it, but at least it covered my hoo-ha against infraction.

  One Eyebrow

  2.8.02.03.031: Bicycles shall not be used beyond the Outer Markers lest the steel frames attract lightning.

  I took a deep breath, and sat on a nearby bench to gather my thoughts. I needed to get to Zane G-49’s old address in Rusty Hill if I was to have a chance of figuring out what he was doing in the Paint Shop, but Dad was right: I would have to have a very good reason to go with him. Rusty Hill was just close enough to walk in a day, and if I took the ten-merit fine for lunch nonattendance, it could be a possibility. I just didn’t fancy walking twenty-eight miles, especially in this heat. I was just wondering if there was a Penny-Farthing in the village that I could borrow, when I heard a voice.

  “Do you have any hobbies?”

  I looked up. The Widow deMauve was sitting at the other end of the bench, and she was staring at me. It was a rhetorical question, as a minimum of one hobby was mandatory, even for the many Greys who didn’t have the time. The theory was that a hobby “drove idle thoughts from the mind,” but the Rules weren’t specific over what that hobby might be. Trainspotting and collecting coins, stamps, bottles, buttons or pebbles were pretty much the default options, but needlework, painting, guinea-pig breeding and violin making had their adherents. Some collected artifacts from before the Something That Happened, such as super-rare bar codes, teeth, money cards or keyboard letters, all of which came in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. There were also those who made up silly hobbies to annoy the prefects, such as belly-button casting, hopping and extreme counting. For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.

  “I’m currently devising improved methods for queuing,” I said in a grand manner, but she wasn’t the slightest bit interested.

  “I like to put holes in things,” she announced, showing me a piece of paper with a hole in it.

  “That must take a considerable amount of skill.”

  “It does. I put holes in wood, cardboard, leaves—even string.”

  “How do you put a hole in string?”

  “I tie it in a loop,” she said, with dazzling simplicity, “and there you go: hole. I thought I was the only one. But look what I found in the co-op this morning.”

  She showed me a ring doughnut. “Well!” she exclaimed, much aggrieved. “It’s as though no one can think of an original hobby these days without some copycat jumping on the bandwagon.”

  “It’s probably Mrs. Lapis Lazuli,” I whispered mischievously, and Widow deMauve’s eyes opened wide.

  “I knew it!”

  “Would you excuse me?” I said. “I’ve just seen someone I must talk to.”

  I got up and trotted after a Green who had just walked past, carrying a trombone. It wasn’t an excuse to get away; I’d noticed that he had only one eyebrow.

  “Pardon me?”

  He stopped and stared at me for a moment, then a look of recognition came over his face. “You’re the new swatchman’s son, aren’t you?” he asked. “The one who’s seen the Last Rabbit?”

  “Y-es.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Furry . . . mostly.” I introduced myself before he could quiz me too carefully over the rabbit, but it felt uncomfortable and a bit odd talking to him—I hadn’t really held a friendly conversation with a Green before. Back in Jade-under-Lime we kept ourselves verymuch to ourselves. Jabez was not far short of his quarter-century and, by his dress code, looked as though he were a farmer.

  “Your eyebrow,” I said, pointing to where it wasn’t. “Tommo told me Jane pulled it off. Is that true?”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied with a grin as he touched the scarred area with a fingertip, “but she did it quickly so it wouldn’t hurt too much. If she’d hated me, she could really have drawn it out.”

  “She seems generous in that respect,” I said slowly.

  “I was thinking of having a donor eyebrow sewn on,” said Jabez, “but if they attached it badly I’d look quizzical for the rest of my life. Are you thinking of asking her out on a date?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “I don’t know why I did,” said Jabez with a frown, “probably that nose of hers. It’s quite something, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “it certainly is.”

  “Just don’t tell her. She . . . doesn’t like it.”

  “Hullo!” said Tommo, who had just reappeared. “Eddie, this is Jabez Lemon-Skye. He’s first-generation Green, so hardly objectionable at all. What’s going on?”

  “Eddie and I were just discussing how to get a date with the Nose.”

  Tommo raised his eyebrows. “So you are interested in Jane?”

  “Just making conversation.”

  “Sure you are. I’d leave her well alone, if you want my advice.” He gave out a conspiratorial chuckle. “And if we’re talking about guilty secrets, Jabez is a love child. His parents married because—get this—they couldn’t bear not to! Weird, huh?”

  “I’ll not be made ashamed of it,” remarked Jabez with great dignity, “but muse on this: When you meet an Orange or a Green, you’re not looking at wasted primal hue, but the product of a couple motivated by something more noble than the headlong rush for Chromatic supremacy.”

  Up until that point, I hadn’t really thought about it that way. The Russetts had been trying to make up our lost hue for over a century. Marrying into the Oxbloods would finally take us back to where we were before my great-grandfather married the Grey. Red was my destiny, if you like—the hue I was born to.

  “If we’re being so open with one another,” declared Jabez with a smile, “perhaps you can tell Eddie how you like to stare at naked bathers.”

  “That’s a scurrilous untruth!” declared Tommo. “I wasn’t staring—I was simply asleep with my eyes open, and they happened to walk past.”

  There was a pause. I didn’t really know what to say to make conversation with a Green, so said the first thing that came into my head. “What’s it like seeing green?”

  Jabez lowered his voice. “It’s quite simply . . . the best. The grass, the leaves, the shoots, the trees—all ours. And do you know, the subtle variations in shades are almost without number—in leaves, from the brightest, freshest hue when unfurling, to the dark green in late summer before they turn and we lose them. Thousands of shades, if not millions. Sometimes I just sit in the forest and star
e.”

  “He does, you know,” Tommo put in. “I’ve seen him. But I’d not swap my reds for his greens if you paid me a thousand merits—Tommo’s not going to be taken by the Rot fully conscious, no, sir.”

  It was one of the downsides of being the Color of Nature: When the Mildew came for you, the Green Room had no effect—even with offset spectacles. If Green, you had to go the hard way. Fully conscious, and slowly asphyxiated as the spores inexorably clogged up your airways. Some Greens took the matter into their own hands to effect a quick way out, and others joined a self-help syndicate, much against the Rules.

  “That’s the difference between you and me,” replied Jabez, staring at Tommo with a smile. “A lifetime of nature’s rich and bounteous color in exchange for five hours of suffering? The forest wins hands down every time.”

  “Not for me,” Tommo replied cheerfully. “As soon as the spores start sprouting, I’m diving headfirst into the endorphin soup without so much as a ‘Thanks, guys, it’s been a heap of number twos.’ ”

  Jabez considered it time to go before Tommo became too insulting.

  “Welcome to the village, Eddie—and listen to one word in eight from walking Reboot here. Friend?”

  I paused for a millisecond. I’d never accepted a friendship from a Green before. In fact, aside from twelve Oranges, six Blues, Bertie Magenta and just recently Travis, all of my 436 friends were Red.

  “Friend.”

  He gave Tommo a friendly shove, and departed.

  We walked along a cobbled street lined with shops of varying description and usefulness. I noticed a tailor, a hardware store, a mender, Dorian’s photographic studio, a combination wool shop and haberdasher’s and a Head Office-approved forksmith. Tommo pointed out people of interest, and introduced me if he thought it appropriate.

  “That’s Bunty McMustard. The most poisonous woman in the village.”

  “We’ve met already.”

  “Then you’ll know. When she succeeds in prizing Courtland out of Melanie, the offspring will be so devious they’ll spontaneously combust—but you didn’t hear me say that.”

  “Of course not.” But I was thinking about Rusty Hill. “You said you could fix things, Tommo.”