HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, now that The Green Issue print magazine has been released! (For more information or to purchase your copy, visit our shop.)
Clive Collins
Walter Quigley and the Not Quite
Forty Shades of Green
In the beginning was he not the Lilly White Boy dressed up all in green, ho, ho? Off the bus in the town centre and beginning the walk to the grammar school he’d to pass kids not going where he was but only waiting at their stops for buses to the secondary moderns, built on the edges of the town in fields nowhere near as green as the cap and coat Walter had on.
“Green’un!”
“Bogey!”
“Snot rag!”
The big lads hawked up green phlegm to gob at him. The bigger girls chorused “The Green Door”, lifting pale legs for a Frankie Vaughan kick in Walter’s direction. Shoes flew sometimes. Ankle socks were never very clean.
But before all of that there was the garden at the side of the house in Green Lane Road. His mother’s, that was; her with the green thumb as his daddy said. Walter had the photographs taken with the box Brownie camera that was old when he was young. In the garden with his sisters, the green grass growing all around, all around. Except that in the photographs it was grey. Turning brown now, like the sepia flakes of the apple blossom falling, a fuzzy snow across the lens.
But the green, now that was the place they would gather on summer evenings, listening to Radio Luxemburg on a portable radio all but the size of a holiday suitcase. Swallows dipped across the sky; bats did what bats do. Nobody had heard of a transistor then.
And the green was where they stood in November around the bonfire. Bonefire was the way Mammy and Daddy said the word, disapproving really of the fireworks and the rest: the guy, the bonefire. Walter liked the sudden sulphurous flare of the coloured matches when his sisters struck them on the side of the box. Red they were sometimes, but green also. Bengal matches. For Walter then, Bengal was a word mysterious as transistor.
“Is it the uniform, my ducky?” his mother said, when she saw the disappointment on Walter’s face after the letter came saying he would go to Wakefield Boys. It had been his last choice.
It was. It was the uniform. Everybody knew the Wakefield boys when they walked through the town because of their green coats.
But there was still a summer of parks and picnics and the fortnight away; the hushed green of the grass where old men in white trousers and straw hats played out their mysteries; the tennis courts his sisters took turns on with their pals because they’d just the one racquet between them; the strange beside-the-seaside green of cliff paths thick with gorse and ornamental gardens. How then could September ever come?
They could have bought everything the school said was wanting, in the way of uniform and sports kit, second-hand but his mother shook her head to that.
“Your daddy wants you kitted out new. So do I. So shall you be.”
They went to the big Co-op in the town, just around the corner from the school, because Walter’s mother was thinking of her ‘divi’ as well as the newness of the clothes. She bought the lot, all in the approved colours, the school colours. And they bought the green blazer, the cap.
That teatime, when Walter went to show off his new things to his daddy, he was a Greencoat boy from top to toe. “And there’s plenty room in everything for his growing,” his mother said. “Though he’ll hardly get the wear from the trousers as he’s to get long ones for his third year at the school.”
His daddy was dead before then, and the trousers, when he got them, were second-hand.
With the years and Walter’s growing, the clothes shrank accordingly; the colour of the coat began to fade. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; his mother let down the turn-ups on the trousers, the sleeves of the coat; patched the elbows; bound the cuffs.
Green Lane Road, once a place of wonder, became what it always had been: a street, a dead-end. The low brick wall where the women had sat sometimes to natter, that stopped the roadway tumbling into the brook at the end of it, came down. The green planks of the fence put up instead weathered quickly into a dull brown. Sepia, as the photos of the garden would, though not so soon.
At the school, they called Walter “Rum Weather”, the same as the down-and-out who haunted the marketplace, though there were times when, if the old fellow had sat through a service at the Citadel, he’d be dressed better than Walter.
Walter raised different songs when he went past the morning bus queues then: “Green Green”, “The Green Green Grass of Home”. He took to wearing his father’s old mac: rum weather, all weathers.
He had his dinner at home then. If not for that he’d have missed the girl who stood in front of him saying, “Joy, remember? Holy Cross Juniors? Joy Green? Kevin Green’s sister?”
Walter remembered, but he looked like the town tramp, while she, in the years since last they’d met, had become a Mod princess. Shining hair bobbed so that when she shook her head, it moved like rain in the wind; skin flawless; teeth white, straight, perfect. As she was herself. And the clothes. Bandbox, his mother would have said. Bandbox.
Joy was a dream, but lingered, like a smile.
“You were kind to me, Walter.”
He disagreed, trying all the while with his father’s mac to wrap the green rags into invisibility.
She continued anyway, “Always ready with a sweet word when I was shamed in the classroom. Fighting for me in the playground. I’d have given up without you.”
He thought he’d only made things worse.
“What, that ‘Walter, Walter, lead me to the altar’ business? Ah, Walter, I dreamed you would lead me there one day. We used to talk about going to live in Hollywood next door to Doris Day, if you remember. And she’d borrow milk or a cup of sugar from us. Over th’ fence, you know?
“What hurt was them calling me ‘gypsy’, because I was dark and we weren’t long off the boat.”
He said she should forget the past; that if ever she’d seemed gypsylike, she did no longer. He stumbled on the word princess. She lowered her eyes; made a brief but very pretty curtsy.
Then she’d to go on her way, but slipped her white fingers beneath the green coat’s frayed lapel before she did. “I’d like us to be friends again, Walter. You know where I live.”
She was a princess, and he thought for a moment she might kiss him; make him a prince. He waited, wanting her to, fearful she would. Joy waved him goodbye. Walter, frog-like, hopped onto his bus.
Ireland.
University.
Looking down from the aeroplane the first time and the fields really did seem to show a forty shades of green. The sight even stopped the American girl in the seat behind him in her nonsense about never having flown in a “Vizcount” before.
And after that? And after that to Africa. The blackest skins he’d ever seen, the greenest forests. The college buildings up high above the dusty, rusty roofs of the city turning green in the ever-humid air. Green lizards, green snakes, the green banners of Islam.
And green himself, Walter sweat, worried about his somehow not-right marriage, but wrote away anyway in the hot nights, toilet paper wrapped around his wrists: lectures, letters, reports, stories.
He was reading The Heart of the Matter, when a man from the British High Commission called – you couldn’t make it up – Scobie came to see him. See how he was getting on. In the guest book at the university rest house was, perhaps still is, the signature of Graham Greene. Pronounced false by Professor Sherry, though, when he made his appearance, as he did. “Nothing like it. Nothing like it at all.”
Professor Sherry appeared as Walter’s wife disappeared. Back to Ireland.
Back to Ireland, Walter as well, in time. No more the sudden rush of the green fields, only low cloud and already tired jokes about setting your watch back four hundred years. Philippa waited at Aldergrove in a bright green Renault 4. “A steal,” she tells him, before carrying him off to their new home near Greenisland.
Philippa was back to studying then. Art at the University of Ulster in Belfast. Walter studied at home: the situations vacant. Occasionally, he went to England for an interview; stayed with his mother in Green Lane Road. Opening the closet in his old bedroom the first time, he found the green coat hanging there, more shreds than threads, but there.
More often he was in the Botanic Gardens, on a bench, weather permitting; inside the museum otherwise. Mostly, it was otherwise. A paperback in his pocket; Tarry Flynn, The Green Fool.
There, the long walk round the paintings, pausing more often than not in front of “Mr & Mrs Stanley Joscelyne: The Second Marriage”. Anthony Green.
The second marriage? Walter’s first is in trouble. There had been a bus stop once and a girl he’d known. Joy.
Thursday nights, Philippa stayed out for the university disco. Walter went to yoga. His counsellor’s suggestion. Three years’ unemployment. Three years stopping before this or that painting in the Ulster Museum. Mainly that one, the second marriage. Joy.
The teacher’s name was Iris Payne. The rhyme and scansion were not displeasing. Iris, lithe upon her mat, was not displeasing also. Her leotard was green; her tights white. She reminded him of green hills and green lawns and apple blossom.
Coffee. Confessions. Kisses given and received. One evening when the others had gone, Walter closed his eyes as he helped Iris shed the green leotard, slough off her tights. On the floor, her mat their bed, they coupled like snakes.
Afterwards, Iris thought things might be awkward now if Walter stayed in the class.
His own affair begun, and so soon ended, Philippa confessed her own. Jealousy. Rage. Regret. Compensatory copulation. The standard mixture.
Pulling out onto the Shore Road after a visit to her mother’s, Philippa in her bright little Renault was broadsided by the Mercedes she simply did not see. She was unhurt, but the car showed itself up for what it was: a rust-heap held together by the coats of green paint.
A parting of the ways. A retreat. A retrenchment. Green Lane Road again. A week, a month, three. The telephone Walter paid to be installed in the room where his father died rang. The job in Tokyo? Was he still interested? Could he be ready to leave in a fortnight? Erat. Poterat. Fecit. The doubtful benefits of a grammar school education. Packing, he moved the green rags from the cupboard to the dustbin. His mother wept.
The world he came to was pink confetti, as if a giant wedding had been celebrated in the city and there was no brush big enough to sweep up after it.
His first day at the college, Walter walked past students and a broad-hatted gardener in gaiters and split-toed shoes. The man had stooped to worry something from the soil. A stubborn root, perhaps? No. When he stood up his gloved hands held a snake, bright green among the wind-shaken pinkness still falling from the trees. Walter shivered; moved along.
A noticeboard in the entrance hall of the building where he was to teach held a poster advertising an art exhibition: “Anthony Green” it read. “A Green Part of the World.” Walter did not know where the exhibition was. But he would find it.
Born in Leicester, England, Clive Collins is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994. More recently his work has appeared in print and online journals such as Penny, Cecile’s Writers, and terrain.org. He was a short-listed finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Carried Away and Other Stories is available now from Red Bird Chap Books.