“Show me your proof of unfatherliness!”
“I have no children,” Donald ventured.
The immigration man raised an eyebrow to his colleague. “Listen!” he said, as though addressing an idiot. “While you are in Yatakang you must not make a child. It will interfere with the optimisation programme. Show me the paper which certifies”—this time he used easier turns of phrase than the verbal shorthand of the first request—“that you cannot make children.”
They want a certificate of sterilisation. That’s something that bleeder Delahanty missed!
“I’m not sterile,” he said, using a term which included impotence and unmanliness in its referents and trying to sound as though he had been insulted.
The immigration man pressed a stud on the counter and swivelled his chair around. A door in the far wall opened to reveal a man in a medical coverall carrying a medikit, a docustat and a fat reference book. Seeing Donald he stopped dead.
“That one?” he called. On receiving a gesture of confirmation he stepped back and exchanged his medikit for another, similar one. Returning, he gave Donald a searching look.
“You speak English?” he demanded.
“And Yatakangi!” Donald snapped.
“You understand what is necessary?”
“No.”
“It is the law for foreigners to be sterile while they are in our country. We do not wish to have our genetic pool contaminated. You have not sterility certificate?”
“No, I haven’t.”
What are they going to do—send me home?
The man in the coverall nipped through his book and found a table of dosages. Having run his finger down and across it, he clicked open his medikit.
“Chew this,” he said, proffering a white pill.
“What is it?”
“It confers forty-eight hours’ sterility in a man of your race and build. Otherwise you have three alternatives: you must consent to immediate vasectomy, you may accept exposure to sufficient radiation to incapacitate your gonads, or you may get on the next plane leaving. This you understand?”
Slowly Donald reached for the pill, wishing he could break the arrogant yellowbelly’s neck instead.
“Give me the passport,” the man in the coverall continued, switching to Yatakangi. From his docustat he extracted a self-adhesive label, which he placed over the centre front panel of the passport.
“You can read this, yes?” he said, reverting to English and showing the label to Donald.
The label said that if he did not report to a hospital within twenty-four hours for a reversible sterility operation he would be jailed for one year and deported after confiscation of his goods.
The pill tasted of dust and ashes, but he had to swallow it, and along with it his nearly uncontrollable fury at the glee with which these slit-eyed runts were witnessing the discomfiture of a white man.
tracking with closeups (18)
IN MY YOUNG DAYS
Victor Whatmough waited to hear his wife Mary close the door of the bathroom, and still a little longer until he distinguished the noise of splashing which meant she was actually in the tub. Then he went to the phone and punched the number with shaking fingers.
Waiting, he listened to the quiet sough of the breeze in the trees outside the house. His imagination transmuted the tap-tap of one branch against another into a sort of drumming, as though to mark the march of the houses advancing over the far crest of the valley which his home overlooked. They had occupied the summit of the hill like an army taking station for an assault on an untenable position. In another few years, this gracious villa set among rolling fields to which he had unwillingly retired would be surrounded. He had bought as much as he could of the nearby land, but now the developers were actually in sight, none of his neighbours would forego the chance of immense profit and sell their ground for what he could afford to pay. And who would buy this empty ground off him, except those same developers he hated?
His mind clouded briefly with visions of wild youths in gangs, roaming the district at night and breaking windows, of small boys clambering over his fences in search of fruit, trampling down his beautifully kept flowerbeds and making off with the jewel-bright stones from the rockery he had assembled from half a dozen different countries.
He thought of a black child who had come into the compound at home, when he was about eighteen, to steal eggs. That one hadn’t come back—had hardly been able to leave. But take a stick to some dirty urchin in this strange new Britain, and the next caller would be a policeman with an assault charge to be answered in court.
The phone’s screen lit, and there was Karen glowing with all the freshness of her nineteen years. He came back to the present with a start, worrying about how his own image would show on the screen at her end. It shouldn’t be too bad, he assured himself; for all his sixty years he was presentable still, being of a durable wiry build, and the grey at his temples and on the tips of his beard only added distinction to his appearance.
“Oh—hullo, Vic,” Karen said without noticeable enthusiasm.
He had made a rather astonishing discovery a week ago, that had undermined his previous dogmatic distaste for modern Britain. In the person—to be precise, in the body—of Karen, he had discovered that there could be contact across the gulf of the generations. He had met her in a quiet hotel in Cheltenham, where he had dropped in for a drink after some business with his lawyers, got talking with her, and without any fuss whatever had been invited upstairs to her room.
She wasn’t local, of course. She was studying at Bristol University, and to check on some ancient records connected with a historical research programme she had come to spend a couple of days in the neighbourhood.
She had been a revelation to him: on the one hand interested in what he had to tell her about his early life, spent partly at school hereabouts and partly in Nigeria, where his family had hung on and hung on until finally the xenophobia of the eighties had made their position untenable; on the other, delightfully matter-of-fact about sex, so that he had not even felt embarrassed about his own impaired capacity for orgasm. He was a thrice-married man, but none of his wives—least of all Mary—had given him so much unalloyed pleasure.
Maybe there was something to justify the changes in his world, after all.
He cleared his throat and smiled. “Hello there, Karen!” he said in a bluff manner. “Keeping well?”
“Oh yes, thanks. A bit busy—it’s getting towards exam time now and life is hectic—but otherwise I’m fine. You?”
“Better than I’ve been for ages. And I don’t have to tell you who deserves the credit for that, do I?” He tried to make his words arch and conspiratorial.
Something—no: someone moved in the ill-focused background of the room where Karen’s phone was located. A blurred human figure. Victor felt a spasm of alarm. He had thought in terms of being discreet as regards Mary, but not—for some unaccountable reason—as regards Karen.
He said, “Well—ah … Why I called you up: I’m thinking of coming over to Bristol some time in the next few days. I have a bit of business to attend to. I thought I could take the chance of dropping in on you.”
A voice—a male voice—said something which the phone did not pick up clearly, and Karen told the interrupter to fasten it for a moment. Conscientiously, Victor added that to the stock of current phrases he had decided to compile so as not to seem intolerably antique. One said “antique”, not old-fashioned or even square; one said “fasten it” instead of telling someone to shut up; one jocularly insulted a person by calling him a “bleeder”, because terms like bastard and bugger had ceased to be pejorative and become simply descriptive. Victor had had some difficulty reconciling himself to the last-mentioned. A preference for one’s own sex had been something literally unspeakable when he was Karen’s age, and to hear her include it in characterising someone she knew as casually as if she were talking about his having red hair was highly disturbing.