There was a shot and Solly came back holding the remains of a python in one hand and a dead chicken in the other.
“Too late,” he grinned, “snake got him first.”
He sat down, leaving the dead bird on the floor, and the snake draped across the railing.
“Now you’re on the council,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something to get your hands in shape.”
“Ah, they’re all right. The blisters have all gone.” Vincent wondered what blisters had to do with the council.
“I wasn’t talking about blisters, Mr Economics. I was discussing the matter of your hands.” Solly chuckled. His white teeth flashed in the light from the kitchen window. “You’re going to have to take some medicine.”
Vincent was used to being teased. He had faced poisonous grasshoppers, threatened cyclones and dozens of other tricks they liked to play on him. He didn’t know what this was about, but he’d find out soon enough.
“What medicine is that, Sol?”
“Why,” laughed Solly, “little pills, of course. You need a few little pills now you’re on the council. We can’t have you sitting on the council with the wrong-coloured hands.”
Vincent couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d never discussed the blue hands. His mind had been full of it. Not a day had gone by when the blue hands hadn’t caused him pain. But he had avoided mentioning them for fear of touching so nasty a wound.
“Eupholon?” He said it. The word.
“For a smart boy, you’re very slow. Sure, that’s what they call it.”
Vincent’s scalp prickled. He had said the name. How did he know the name? They knew about him. It was a trap. Now it would be the time for justice to be done. They would force him to take the poison he’d given them.
There was a silence.
“Solly, you know where I worked before?”
“Sure, you was the great Economics man.”
“I mean what company.”
“Sure, you worked for Mr Farrow.” Solly’s voice was calm, but Vincent’s ears were ringing in the silence between the words.
“How you know that, Solly?”
“Oh, you got a lady friend who reckons you’re a bad fella. She wrote us a letter. Three pages. Boy, what you do to her, eh?” He laughed again. “She’s a very angry lady, that one.”
“Anita.”
“I forget her name,” he waved an arm, dismissing it. “Some name like that.”
In the corner of his eye, Vincent saw the headless python twitch.
“That why you want me to take the pills?”
“Christ no.” Solly roared with laughter, a great whooping laugh that slid from a wheezing treble to deepest bass. “Christ no, you crazy bastard.” He stood up and came and sat by Vincent on the step, hugging him. “You crazy Economics bastard, no.” He wiped his eyes with a large blue hand. “Oh shit. You are what they call a one-off model. You know what that means?”
“What?” Vincent was numb, almost beyond speech.
“It means you are fucking unique. I love you.”
Vincent was very confused. He slapped at a few mosquitoes and tried to puzzle it out. Every shred of fact that his life was based on seemed as insubstantial as fairy floss. “You don’t care I sent the pills here?”
“Care!” the laughter came again. “To put it properly to you, we are fucking delighted you sent the pills here. Everything is fine. Why should we be mad with you?”
“The blue hands …”
“You are not only crazy,” said Solly affectionately. “You are also nine-tenths blind. Don’t you notice anything about the blue hands?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re bloody blind. All the best men got blue hands. All the bravest men. We’re bloody proud of these hands. You got blue hands on Upward, Vincent, you got respect. How come you can live here so long and not notice that? We had to beat that damn guard to get these hands, Vincent. When the time came to kick out Farrow, everyone knows who’s got the guts to do it, because we’re the only ones that’s got the hands.”
“So I’ve got to have blue hands, to be on the council?”
“You got it. You got perfect understanding.”
“OK,” Vincent grinned. He felt as light as air. He poured himself another beer. He wanted to get drunk and sing songs. He didn’t dwell on the idea of the blue hands. That was nothing. All he said was, “Where do I get the pills?”
Solly scratched his head. “Well, I suppose there must be some up at the warehouse. You better go up and take a look.”
Vincent started laughing then, laughing with pure joy and relief. The more he thought about it, the funnier it was and the more he laughed. And Solly, sitting beside him, laughed too.
I imagine the pair of them hooting and cackling into the dark tropical night, a dead chicken at their feet, a headless python twitching on the railing. Not surprisingly, they were laughing about different things.
Late the next morning Vincent set off to walk to the warehouse. He felt marvellous. In the kitchen he cut himself some sandwiches and on the dusty road he found a long stick. He walked the three-mile track with a light heart, delighting in the long seas of golden grass, finding beauty in the muddy mangrove shoreline and its heat-hazed horizon.
Vincent in white shorts with his cut lunch and walking stick like a tourist off to visit Greek ruins.
The warehouse shone silver in the harsh midday sun. There was something written on the side. As he came up the last steep slope he finally made it out: someone had painted a blue hand on the longest side of the building and added, for good measure: WARNING — DEATH. He wondered vaguely if this had been the manager’s work. How gloriously ineffective it had been. What total misunderstanding had been displayed.
He was still a hundred yards from the warehouse when he saw a man, dressed in white shorts like himself, standing at the front of the building.
The man called.
Vincent waved casually and continued on, wondering who it was. The man was white. He had seen no white people until now.
As he walked up the hill, being careful not to slip on the shale which made up the embankment, the man disappeared for a second and then came back with what looked like a rifle. Vincent’s first thought was: a snake, he’s seen a snake. He grasped his stick firmly and walked ahead, his eyes on the ground in front.
So he didn’t see the man lift the rifle to his shoulder and fire.
The bullet hit the ground a yard ahead of him and ricocheted dangerously off the rocks.
Vincent stopped and yelled. The man was a lunatic. The bloody thing had nearly got him. Even as he shouted he saw him raise the rifle again.
This time he felt the wind of the bullet next to his cheek.
He didn’t stay to argue any longer, he turned to run, fell, dropped the sandwiches and stick and slithered belly down over shale for a good twenty feet. When he stood up it was to run.
From the next hill he saw the man with the gun walk down the hill, pick up the sandwiches and slowly saunter back to the warehouse.
Imagine Vincent, cut, bruised, covered in sweat, his eyes wide with outrage and anger as he strode into the Royal Hotel and found Solly at the bar.
“Solly, there’s some crazy bastard at the warehouse. He shot at me. With a fucking rifle.”
“No,” said Solly, his eyes wide.
“Yes,” said Vincent. “The bugger could have killed me.”
They bought drinks for Vincent that night and he finally learned that the guards he had once employed for Farrow were now employed by the council to continue their valuable work. Those with blue hands did not want them devalued.
And Vincent, nursing his bruises at the bar, tried to smile at the joke. It was not going to be as easy to get his blue hands as he’d thought.
Faced with the terrifying prospect of death or wounding, he began to consider the possibility of blue hands more carefully. Whilst they would give him some prestige on Upward Island, they would make him grotesque anywhere else, of interest only to doctors and laughing schoolchildren on buses. He saw himself in big cities on summer days, wearing white gloves like Mickey Mouse. He saw the embarrassed eyes of people he knew and, he says, my own triumphant face as I revelled in the irony of it: Dr Strangelove with radiation poisoning.