Courtland Gamboge

The Big Banana, I discovered, was the name given to Courtland Gamboge, the Yellow prefect’s son. I asked Tommo why Courtland wanted to meet me, and Tommo explained that Gamboge-the-younger liked to meet everyone. He had apparently topped eighty points in his Ishihara two years before and was certain to take over from his mother when she retired.

“Not that she will anytime soon,” Tommo added, “but Courtland has to go some way to fill her shoes with the same level of ruthless unpleasantness.”

“All Yellows are ruthless. It’s what they do.”

“Not like these. Prefect Sally Gamboge has refused the Greyforce a holiday for seventeen years and has had them on sixty-eight-hour weeks for as long as anyone can remember. She treats them like dirt and is always drumming up bogus infractions. Even I think it’s out of order, and I’m grotesquely indifferent to the Greys.”

“Is there a reason she’s so particularly unpleasant?”

“The Gamboges think they should be players on a bigger stage. Lots of Yellow, all the overzealous ruthlessness—but a hopelessly provincial CV37 postcode. Transfer requests are simply ignored.”

It was a familiar story. Despite being officially only used for addresses, the right code meant a lot, and snubbing was common, if illegal. I was glad that I had an RG6.

“But she has to pay them overtime,” I pointed out, still thinking about the Greys. “That’s a compensation, at least.”

“It would be if there was anything they could spend it on.”

“Or even share, pool or bequeath their merits,” I said, pointing out one of the more iniquitous regulations regarding Grey wealth.

“Serves them right for always eating the bacon,” said Tommo, whose outrage at the Greys’ treatment was lamentably short lived, “Apart We Are Together, and all that guff.”

“If the Gamboges are so frightful,” I said, “I’m surprised you have anything to do with them.”

“That’s precisely the reason I do. If there’s a tiger in the room, I want to be the one that combs its whiskers. Besides, Courtland has an Open Return, and he might just sell it to me.”

We had been walking in the direction of the river.

“That’s where the Greys live, over there.”

He was pointing at a huddle of terraced houses set apart from the rest of the town. The twin rows of dwellings faced each other, with a roadway between them. Behind the houses were small gardens, tidy masses of runner-bean canes, fruit bushes and garden sheds, and clean laundry fluttering in the breeze.

The homes must have numbered a hundred or more. I had never entered a Greyzone alone or known anyone who had. Even the Yellows thought twice about a visit. But rather than admit they were nervous, they simply said the place was unhygienic, which was patently untrue. Greys just didn’t like us there, in the same way that they weren’t permitted in the village unless on business. The big difference was, Chromatics were allowed in the Greyzone—but thought it wiser to stay away.

“We have a Grey named Jane as our maid,” I said, attempting to glean some information. “She seems a trifle . . . volatile.”

“We call her Crazy Jane, but never to her face. She’s broken more bones than almost anyone else in the village.”

“Accident-prone?”

“Not hers. Ours. She’ll punch anyone who mentions her nose, and once fractured Jim-Bob’s arm because she thought he was looking at her whatnots.”

“Was he?”

“Not on that particular occasion. But she won’t bother us for much longer. We’re not sure how deep into negative merits she is, but it’s rumored five hundred or so.”

I whistled low. “But she’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“I’ll concede that her nose is definitely the cutest and most retrousse in the village,” said Tommo, “but as for pretty—so is a viper. If you tried to kiss either, you’d get bitten on the face.”

The well-worn path through the lumpy grasslands took us past one of the many ancient streetlamps still standing.

“Repainted every year without fail,” said Tommo proudly, pausing for a moment to admire the cast-iron lampposts. “The janitor had to take the Ford into Vermillion to have the bands relined, so he took Jabez and me. On the outskirts you drive through a town that is long gone, but the streetlamps are still there, running in great rows upon the land, and standing in the middle of open pasture like stunted oaks.”

“Could one get to Vermillion and back in a morning?” I asked, Jane’s apparently impossible trip to Vermillion and back still on my mind.

“You could do it in the Ford.”

“Is that a practical proposition?”

“No. For a start, Carlos—he’s our janitor—treats the Model T better than his own daughter, and every drop of fuel oil has to be logged and accounted for. You might get in by Penny-Farthing, but you’d have to push it across the six miles of rutted track between Rusty Hill and Persimmon. Plus you’d have to find a way across the ferry without any transit papers. Believe me, if there was a way, I’d be the first person to try it. There are a hundred reasons for me to get to Vermillion, all of them highly profitable.”

He stared at me for a moment, then cocked his head to one side.

“Do you have some sort of scam cooking—or are you just thinking of a Plan B if you don’t get your Open Return back?”

“The latter,” I replied, and he nodded knowingly.

The Sorting Pavilion was like a miniature version of the town hall, with four shorter and narrower columns supporting the roof over the main entrance. It looked a good deal older than the buildings I had seen so far. The brickwork was crumbling, and years of hard winter rain had washed the mortar from the walls.

The tympanum above the door held a sculpture of a reclining woman, carved in marble. She must have been earth salvage: From the navel upward the weather had scrubbed away the subtlety of the craftsman’s hand, but below this every muscle and sinew was finely detailed. The woman’s features had vanished almost entirely, but she would once have been beautiful. No one would have expended so much time and effort on such a monument if she wasn’t.

The Pavilion had a curved glass roof that boasted no less than three heliostats, and parked outside was a small handcart for moving the sorted sacks of scrap to the railway station nearby. We sat on the oak bench outside and took off our shoes. I knew the protocol, even though we didn’t have a Pavilion in Jade-under-Lime; all our scrap color was sorted at Viridian, one stop down the line.

“Ever been in a Pavilion before?” asked Tommo.

I shook my head.

“So who’s the hick now?” he said, and pushed open the doors.

The Pavilion’s sorting room was long, high and so well lit it was actually brighter than the outdoors, which was the point. It takes a lot of light to see color well, and I suspect that work stopped when the weather was overcast. Tommo directed my gaze toward a man a few years older than myself who was dressed head to toe in a yellow outfit, and apart from two Grey orderlies who were transporting sacks of unsorted tosh to the washing room suspended beneath a silk canopy full of floaties, he was the only person there.

“That’s Courtland,” murmured Tommo in a respectful whisper. “I know you claim to be leaving in a month, but for all our sakes, don’t annoy him or anything, okay?”

“Tommo, I have no reason to make enemies of the buttercup persuasion. And certainly not one with a mother on the Council.”