Shades of Grey

A Grey and Sally Gamboge

I stood up straight, my heart beating faster. I went to the front door, pausing only to polish the toes of my shoes on the back of my trouser legs.

But it wasn’t the head prefect.

“You!” I cried, for standing on the doorstep was the quirky rude girl who had threatened to break my jaw back in Vermillion. I felt a curious mix of elation and trepidation, which came out as looking startled.

And so was she. A second’s worth of doubt crossed her face, then she relaxed and stared at me impassively.

“You’ve met?” came a stern voice. Standing behind her was a woman who I assumed must be Sally Gamboge, the Yellow prefect. She, like Bunty McMustard at the station, was covered from head to foot in a well-tailored bright synthetic-yellow skirt and jacket. She even had yellow earrings, headband and watch strap. The color was so bright, in fact, that my cortex cross-fired, and her clothes became less of a fierce shade and more the sickly-sweet smell of bananas. But it wasn’t actually a smell; it was only the sense of one.

“Yes,” I said without thinking. “She threatened to break my jaw!”

It was a very serious accusation, and I regretted saying it almost immediately. Russetts don’t usually snitch.

“Where was this?” the woman asked.

“Vermillion,” I replied in a quiet voice.

“Jane?” said Gamboge sternly. “Is this true?”

“No, ma’am,” she replied in an even tone, quite unlike the threatening one I had heard that morning. “I’ve never even seen this young man before—or been to Vermillion.”

“What’s going on?” asked my father, who had gotten bored posing with one elbow on the mantelpiece and joined us in the hall.

“Sally Gamboge,” said the prefect, putting out a hand for him to shake, “Yellow prefect.”

“Holden Russett,” returned my father, “holiday relief swatchman. And this is . . . ?”

“Jane G-23,” explained Gamboge. “I’m allocating her as your maid. She hasn’t gotten much positive feedback, I’m afraid, but she’s all I can spare. You can have her for an hour a day. Anything more can be privately negotiated. And I apologize in advance for any impertinence. Jane has . . . issues.”

“An hour only?” replied Dad.

“Yes. I’m sorry if you have to sort your own washing and make the bed,” said Mrs. Gamboge with a shrug. “Overemployment is particularly bad at present—too many Greys in unproductive retirement, if you ask me.”

“You could pay them to do overtime,” said Dad.

The Yellow prefect gave out a derisive laugh, not even considering that Dad might have been making a sensible suggestion. The Rules regarding retirement were universal across the Spectrum: As soon as you had discharged your fifty years’ obligation to the Collective, you were free to do what you wanted, and extra work would have to be paid for. “The best Greys,” our Yellow Prefect had once told me, “are the ones who catch the Mildew the morning of their retirement.”

“Hello, Jane,” said Dad, realizing he would get no sense from Mrs. Gamboge. His eyes flicked to the TRUCULENT and DECEITFUL badges below her Grey Spot. “Would you make a tray of scones?

The other prefects are due shortly.”

She bobbed and made to move away, but Gamboge was not yet done.

“Wait until you’re dismissed, girl,” she said in a curt tone, then added more warmly, “Mr. Russett, your son claims he has met Jane before and that she threatened physical violence. I want to know how that’s possible.”

Dad looked at me, then at Jane, then at Gamboge. When Yellows start making inquiries, you never really know where it will all end up. Not reporting something that had happened was sometimes worse than the infraction itself. But despite the fact that Jane had threatened to break my jaw, I didn’t want to get her into trouble. And it would be serious trouble. Threatening to assault was treated the same as assaulting—to the Rules, intent and implementation were pretty much the same thing.

“Well, Eddie?” said Dad. “Where have you seen her before?”

“In Vermillion,” I mumbled, wondering how I could back out without a demerit for wasting a prefect’s time with a spurious accusation. “This morning—just before we caught the train.”

“Then you are mistaken,” said Gamboge, and I saw a sense of relief cross Jane’s face. “Did you see her on the train?”

“No.”

“Vermillion is over fifty miles away, and what’s more, I saw her doing breakfast Useful Work this morning. There is only one train a day—and it heads north. Could you have been mistaken, Master Russett?”

“Yes,” I said, greatly relieved. “It must have been someone else.”

“Good,” said Gamboge. “You may go, girl.” And Jane headed off to the kitchen without another word.

“The head prefect will be attending you soon,” said Gamboge, addressing my father, “but in the meantime I was wondering if you could look at some Greys who are claiming to be unwell? If you’d countersign a malingering report, I can dock some merits and knock some sense into the work-shy scalybacks. It’ll only take ten minutes.”

“I’ll, um, do what I can,” said my father, mildly perturbed by the Yellow prefect’s obvious dislike of her workforce. Yellows were in charge of Grey employment allocation. Some did it well, others badly.

Gamboge was clearly one of the latter.

The door closed behind them, and I walked slowly down the corridor to the kitchen, where Jane was busying herself in a halfhearted manner. I stood at the door, but she ignored me. For a moment I thought that perhaps I was mistaken—no one could travel over one hundred miles in a single morning without a train. But looking at her, I knew that I wasn’t wrong, because when gazing at her, I felt the same odd tautness in my chest. And that nose. It was quite unique.

“How did you do it?” I asked. “Commute to Vermillion and back in a morning?”

“Commute?”

“I collect obsolete words,” I explained, attempting to impress. “It means to travel a distance to work every day—or something.”

“Have you heard of the term dickhead?”

“No, I haven’t got that one. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but it might describe you. And I didn’t ‘commute’ to Vermillion—you’re mistaking me for someone else. Did you just look at my nose?”

“No,” I said, which was a lie.

“Yes, you did.”

“All right,” I replied, feeling brave, “I did. So what? It’s actually rather—”

“I would be failing in my duty of care if I didn’t warn you.”

“Warn me about what?”

“Of what might happen if you were to use the words nose and cute anywhere near me.”

It might have been an odd leg-pull, so I laughed.

“Come on, Jane—!”

She glared at me and I saw that flash of anger again. It was definitely the same person.

“Did I say you could use my name?”

“No.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Red. You and I have nothing to say, because we’ve never met and have nothing in common. So let’s just leave it at that, and in a month you can go home to Polyp-on-the-Noze or wherever it is you come from, and carry on your pathetically uninteresting life as far from me as possible. Or farther.”

She went back to measuring out the flour as I stood in silence, wondering what to say or do. I’d never quite met anyone so forthright. It was like talking to a Prefect in the body of a twenty-year-old Grey.

“Do you have a preference over the fat I use in the scones?” she asked, holding up two pots. “Pure vegetable is more expensive, but the animal reconstitute might have traces of resident in it. I don’t know how qualmy you hub-dwellers are.”

“We’re not fussed. Who was the wrongspotted Grey in the Paint Shop?”

If I’d known better, I wouldn’t have asked. She paused for a moment, then grabbed the nearest utensil from the counter and hurled it in my direction, where it struck the door frame with a thunk. It was a carving fork. I stared at the quivering handle barely five inches from my face, then back at Jane, who was glaring at me, so livid with rage that I could see the red in her cheeks. Pretty nose or not, she had a serious temper.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’ve never met.”

The doorbell rang. Ordinarily, I would have expected Jane as maid to go and answer it, but she didn’t.

“I’ll, um, get that, shall I?”

She ignored me, so I left the kitchen, then came back, pointed at the fork where it was still stuck in the door frame, and said, “You wouldn’t really kill me, would you?”

“No.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Not here. Too many witnesses.”

I must have looked shocked, for she allowed herself a wry smile at my expense.

“Joke, right?” I said.

“Right.”

But it wasn’t, as it turned out.

I again expected it to be the head prefect at the front door, and again it wasn’t. On the step was a wrinkly old woman with two rosy bumps for cheeks and a cheery grin. She wore a dress that was to my eyes a dark burgundy, but it wasn’t. It was natural purple—I was just seeing the red component in it. She wore a bright synthetic Purple Spot and, below that, several merit badges and an upside-down head prefect badge—she had once run the village. Instinctively, I stood that much straighter in her presence.

She was also carrying a cake: a plain, jamless sponge cake, but with the unusual luxury of a single bright red glaceed cherry atop a sheet of perfect white icing.

“The new swatchman?” she asked in an incredulous tone. “You seem barely out of short pants.”

“That would be my father,” I replied. “He’s with Mrs. Gamboge, sorting out the malingerers. Can I help?”

“I suppose one must get used to the swatchmen getting younger,” she said, sighing, as if I’d not spoken.

“Welcome to East Carmine.”

I thanked her, and she told me that her name was Widow deMauve, that she could see lots of purple and that she was our next-door neighbor. After relating a tedious yet mercifully short story regarding a fatal industrial accident that had left three households struggling to find a cleaner, she finally asked me if I would like the cake.

“That’s very kind,” I replied, taking the cake from her, “and with a cherry of all things. Would you like to come in?”

“Not particularly.”

She paused for a moment, and then leaned closer. “Since you are new here, it would be only fair to warn you of Mrs. Lapis Lazuli.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Despite her honeyed words and faux generosity, she’s a thieving, Rot-dodging congenital liar whose contribution to the village would be much improved if she were soap.”

“You don’t like her?”

“What a suggestion!” replied the Widow deMauve in a shocked tone. “She is one of my closest and dearest friends. She and I log Pooka sightings. Have you seen one recently?”

“Not recently,” I replied, not thinking an ex-head prefect would concern herself with something as childish as specters.

“We also run East Carmine’s reenactment society—would you care to join?”

“What do you reenact?” I asked, which was a reasonable question, since there wasn’t much to reenact except scenes from Munsell’s Life, which was too dreary to even contemplate.

“We reenact the previous Friday every Tuesday, then every Saturday morning is reenacted the following Thursday. It’s a lot of fun when the whole village gets involved. At the end of the year we reenact the highlights. Sometimes we even reenact the reenactments. Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I made no reply, so she pointed at the cherry cake.

“That will be half a merit, please.”

It was a ridiculous price, even from someone who could see a lot of purple.

“However, if you decide not to eat it, I would gladly buy it back at cost—minus the seventy-five percent handling fee.”

“The cake?”

“The cherry.”

“Can I buy the cake without the cherry?” I asked after a moment’s thought.

“Really!” she said in an affronted tone. “What point is cherry cake without the cherry?”

“Having trouble, Mother?”

A man had trotted up the three steps to the front door. He was dressed in long prefectural robes that must have been pure magenta. He was undoubtedly the head prefect. He was also middle-aged, tall, and athletic, and he looked vaguely affable. Behind him were two other brightly colored and wholly authoritarian figures, who I assumed were the rest of the prefects. Widow deMauve piped up, “Mr. Russett is refusing to pay for the cake I made him.”

The head prefect looked me up and down. “You seem a bit young for a swatchman.”

“Please, sir, I’m not Mr. Russett, I’m his son.”

“Then why did you say you were?” asked Widow deMauve suspiciously.

“I didn’t.”

“Oh,” she said in a shocked tone, “so I’m a liar now, am I?”

“But—”

“Are you refusing to pay?” asked the head prefect.

“No, sir.” I paid off the old woman, who chuckled to herself and hurried away.

Head Prefect deMauve—I assumed this was he, even though he had not and would not introduce himself to a junior—stepped into the house and looked me up and down as though I were a haunch of beef.

“Hmm,” he said at last. “You look healthy enough. Are you bright?”

It was an ambiguous question. Bright could mean either “intelligent” or “highly color perceptive.” The former question was allowable; the latter was not. I decided to meet ambiguity with ambiguity.

“I believe so, sir. Can I suggest you make yourselves comfortable in the drawing room?”

Along with deMauve were the Blue and Red prefects, who I would soon learn were named Turquoise and Yewberry. Turquoise appeared a decent chap, but Yewberry looked a fool. I saw them to their seats before hurrying back to the kitchen.

“The prefects are here, Ja—” I checked myself just in time, then continued, “Listen, what do I call you if I can’t use your name?”

“I’d really prefer it if you didn’t speak to me at all. But if you had even an ounce of self-respect, you’d use my name anyway.”

It was a challenge. I looked around to see if there were any sharp objects within easy reach, and could see only an egg whisk.

“Right, then,” I said. “Jane, the prefects are—” I hadn’t realized that egg whisks could hurt so much, but then I’d never had one chucked at me before. It caught me just above the forehead. That infraction alone—never mind the impertinence, disrespect and poor manners—would have netted her at least fifty demerits if I wanted to make something of it, and a 10 percent bounty to me for reporting it.

“You’ll never get any merits or positive feedback at this rate,” I said, rubbing my head. “How do you expect to get on in life?”

She gave me a weary look.

“Oh,” I said, “do you have any merits or positive feedback?”

“No.”

“And you don’t think that’s bad?”

She turned and fixed me with her piercingly intelligent eyes.

“There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Rulebook.”

“That’s just not true,” I replied, shocked by the notion that there might be another, higher arbiter of social conduct. “The Rulebook tells us precisely what is right or wrong—that’s the point. The predictability of the Rules and their unquestioning compliance and application is the bedrock of—”

“The scones are not quite done. You take in the tea, and I’ll follow.”

“Were you listening to a word I said?”

“I kind of switched off when you drew breath.”

I gave her one of my most powerful glares, shook my head sorrowfully, gave an audible “tut” and, after picking up the tea tray, left the room in what I hoped was high dudgeon.