Djinn Rummy (5 page)

 

 

 

 

A
hot-air balloon bobbing uncertainly over a desert landscape.

Inside the balloon, a man and a girl, surveying the view with binoculars. There's nothing to be seen except sand and, in the far distance, huge rocky outcrops. No signs of life whatsoever. That suits the man and the girl perfectly.

The girl stoops down and picks up a metal cylinder, like a steel thermos flask. She opens it and rolls into the palm of her hand a single seed, no bigger than a grape pip. It sits, heavy for its size, in the soft skin of her hand. It looks, if anything that small and inert can manage such a feat, smug.

‘Well?' asks the man. He has to shout because of the roaring of the wind, but his shout is so full of awe that it sounds like an extremely loud whisper; as if he was talking to a very deaf person in a cathedral.

‘Here's as good a place as any,' replies the girl. ‘Let's go for it.'

She leans over the side and reels for a second at the sight of so much nothing between her and the ground; then she deliberately opens her palm and lets the seed fall.

The seed falls . . .

And hits the ground.

WHUMP!

Was it a seed, or was it a bomb? Difficult to tell; there's a mushroom-shaped cloud standing up from the desert floor . . .

But that's not smoke or dust, that's foliage; a huge, thick stem supporting a giant bud -

- which bursts into a hot-flame-yellow flower with a raging red centre. The flower lifts towards the sun - you expect it to roar and shake its head like a lion - and the plant raises its two broad, leathery leaves like wings; and even up in the balloon, a thousand feet overhead, that's a threatening sight.

‘Christ,' shouts the man, ‘look at that thing grow!'

Look indeed; the plant is twenty feet high and still growing. Fissures run along the desert floor, marking the swift passage of the roots underground like lightning forking across a black sky.

‘That,' the girl agreed, ‘is one hell of a primrose.'

‘Sorry?'

‘I said that's one hell of a -'

‘Speak up, I can't quite hear what you're -'

‘I SAID, THAT'S ONE HELL OF A PRIMROSE.'

‘Yes.'

No longer growing; instead, consolidating. The stem swells, to support the weight of the flower. The petals fan out, snatching photons out of the air like a spider's web. Hot chlorophyll pumps through the swelling veins. The roots tear into the dead ground like miners' drills. And stop.

‘Hey up,' says the man, ‘I think it's on its way.'

The primrose is rocking and bouncing up and down, for
all the world as if it's on a trampoline. Now it's swaying backwards and forwards, using all the leverage of its already phenomenal bulk to rip its roots free. In this particular part of the desert, nothing has stirred the ground since the seas evaporated and the wind ground down the rock and stamped it flat as a car park and hard as tarmac; fifty million years or thereabouts of patient landscaping, contouring, making good. A few more millennia, God might be saying, and we'll have a decent tennis court. Unless, of course, some bugger of a psychotic giant primula comes along and starts carving it up . . .

With a crack like bones breaking and much spraying of sand into the air, the roots come free; and for a few seconds they grope frantically in empty air until they touch ground, and -

- like a monster spider with wings and a huge yellow wind-up gramophone on its back, the plant begins to shuffle, on tip-root, sideways across the sand towards the distant shade of the outcrops.

‘Gaw,' mutters the man, as well he might. For the Thing scuttling across the sand below him was his idea, and it was his genius (or his fault) that turned a little yellow wildflower commonly found in the fields and hedgerows of Old England into this:
Primula dinodontica
, the Ninja Primrose; or, to put it another way, one of the three components of the ultimate Green Bomb.

‘Well,' says the girl, ‘looks like that one works OK. Let's try the others.'

‘I'm not absolutely sure about this . . .'

‘Don't be so bloody wet. Here goes.'

From a second flask she takes another seed: flat, bean-like, about the size and shape of a small sycamore pod. Before the man can do anything, she's let it go.

WHUMP!

‘. . . serious misgivings,' the man is saying, ‘about the whole project. I mean, I never actually imagined for one moment -'

The primrose stops in its tracks. The tips of its roots, as sensitive as the nose of a bat, have felt the thump of the second seed landing, the explosion as the incredible potential energy contained in its brittle husk is released, the shivering of the earth as another set of iron-hard roots is driven deep under the surface. Like you, Mother Earth has this thing about needles . . .

‘That,' remarks the man, rolling back the frontiers of statement of the stunningly obvious, ‘is disgusting.'

A savage flashback into the racial memory - the myth of the hydra, the hundred-headed serpentine guardian of Hell's gate - except that instead of heads, this thing has pale blue flowers. Pale blue flowers writhing and twisting on their stems, petals snapping frenziedly at the empty air. The first Devil's Forget-Me-Not has been spawned.

‘Two down,' yells the girl cheerfully, ‘one to go. I'm really pleased, aren't you?'

The man says nothing; instead, he grabs for the third flask and hugs it to him. As the girl reaches for it, he backs away; forgetting that backing space in the basket of a balloon is strictly limited.
Safe
backing space, anyway.

‘AAAaaaaaaah!' he remarks.

As he hits the ground (at which point, his troubles are definitively over) the flask is jolted out of his hand and flies wide, landing on a rock and smashing to pieces. A tiny, tiny seed, no bigger than a grain of salt, falls on to the flat stone -

WHUMP!

- which explodes into gravel as the third and finest
achievement of Operation Urban Renewal springs into instantaneous life. Its roots plough through the compacted sand like a torpedo through water as the single grotesque pod, the like of which hasn't been seen on earth since Hieronymus Bosch's window-box was destroyed by the Inquisition, splits and falls away, revealing a flower -

- You have to call it a flower, because botany is a naïve, trusting science which never for one moment imagined that anything like this could happen. A terrible, hideous flower, with jowls and warts and fangs and a big, purple lolling tongue -

- which tilts backwards towards the sun, and spits.

This is
Viola Aeschrotata
, the Hammerhead Pansy; proof, if any were needed, that the business of Creation is best left to the professionals. With a ghastly sucking noise, it ups roots and lurches at a terrific pace towards the other two flowers -

- who stop dead in their tracks, waggle their stamens and stare. A few seconds before, they had been marching grimly towards each other, with the express intention of pulling each other's leaves off. Now they exchange frightened glances, corolla to corolla. Jesus Christ, they are saying, what the fuck is
that
?

Pull yourself together, for crying out loud, empathises the Primrose. So long as we stick together, the two of us can have it for breakfast. What are you, a flower or a mouse?

But the Forget-Me-Not is backing away, its blossoms peeping out from behind its leaves. The hell with that, it broadcasts, have you seen the hairs on that thing? You want to be a hero, chum, be my guest. I'm -

With a lightning flurry of roots, the Pansy springs; and the Forget-Me-Not discovers, rather too late, just how
incredibly quickly it can cover the ground on its enormous scaffolding of roots. There is a sickening plopping noise as, by sheer bulk, it crushes the Forget-Me-Not into the ground. The flower cranes on its stem and darts forward; the petals close; the carcase of the Forget-Me-Not shudders convulsively, and slumps.

In the balloon, the girl nods her head in unbounded satisfaction; and then, just to be on the safe side, has a good long pull on the hot-air burner.

For the Primrose, the desert is suddenly a very big, very open, very lonely place. The Pansy rises to the tips of its roots, swaying slightly; there is sap all round the bell of its flower.

OK. There is an infinity of magnificently pointless bravado in the vibes thrown out by the Primrose, as it rocks back on its roots and crouches, in a floral version of the classic knife-fighter's stance. Come on, weed, make my day.

No responding vibes from the Pansy; nothing at all. It emanates a vast negative aura, like a lawn-mower or a watering-canful of DDT. Every hair on the Primrose's leaves is standing on end.

Look. We can talk about this. The world's big enough for the two of us.

We're on the same side, you and me. Wildflowers united can never be uprooted.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin
.

But from the Pansy, nothing. And now it has begun to move; slowly, rootlet by rootlet, dragging up vast moraines of sand and dust as it comes . . .

Sod you, then, the Primrose snarls, as its leaves pucker in horror. Go climb a trellis.

Ten or twelve seconds later, when it's all over, the Pansy
swivels its flower and looks around, until it is satisfied that there's nothing else alive within the range of its senses. That, as far as it is concerned, is how things ought to be. It ups roots and begins to crawl.

Five hours later, the girl in the balloon watches its dehydrated form wilt into a heap, thrash a last moribund tendril, and die. This, after all, is the Mojave Desert; even the roots of the Hammerhead Pansy can't dig deep enough here to strike water. Deserts have this aggravating knack of always having the last word.

Sow a few of those little white seeds somewhere where there's water, however - in the middle of New York, say, or Moscow or Paris or London, where water either runs in rivers through the middle or swooshes about a few feet under the surface in easy-to-find ceramic arteries - and it would be a very different story. The term ‘flower power' would take on a whole new nexus of unpleasant meanings.

The girl smiles. The ultimate Green Bomb was now a reality. (And with friends like her, does the earth really need any enemies?) As the balloon drifts on its lazy course back home, she reflects contentedly on the progress of Operation Urban Renewal . . .

(. . .
Our environment is in deadly peril. The relentless spread of urbanisation threatens to poison and smother every last wild flower and blade of grass on the surface of the planet. Every pollutant, every waste product, every man-made toxin in the world originates in the Cities. The Cities, therefore, have got to go.

We believe that we have found a way
. . .)

It was regrettable, the girl mused, that the prototypes of the other two flowers should have been destroyed; not just because it would have been useful to be able to observe their progress but because it's always a tragedy, on general principles, when a living plant perishes. Would it be excessively animist and sentimental, she wondered, if she returned to the spot a little later and held some sort of brief, modest funeral?

No humans, by request.

 

The back bar of Saheed's was heaving. It was Karaoke Night.

Genies are, when the chips are down, simple creatures, as refined as the effluent from the
Torrey Canyon
, but with a strong instinctive sense of rhythm. There is nothing they enjoy more, after six or eight gallons of chilled goat's milk with rennet chasers, than grabbing a microphone in a crowded room and miming to Elvis singing
Heartbreak Hotel
. Since turning himself into a carbon copy of Elvis, correct down to the last detail of the DNA pattern, is child's play to a genie, the effect can be confusing to an uninformed bystander.

If this be offence, Kiss was a hardened recidivist, and on ninety-nine Karaoke Nights out of a hundred you could earn good money betting that he'd be up there, informing the Universe at large that ever since his baby left him he'd found a new place to dwell, if he had to jump queues and break bones to do it. Not, however, tonight.

Instead, Kiss was huddled in a corner with a half-empty plastic jerrycan of Capricorn Old Pasteurised on the surface of which icicles were forming, and a guest.

Of all the bars, he was thinking, in all the world, why did she have to come into mine?

‘That one over there,' Jane was saying, ‘looks exactly like Elvis Presley. Or was he a . . .?'

Kiss shook his head. Although there was no house rule prohibiting mortals, no genie had ever, in the long and illustrious history of the establishment, brought his employer there. The only reason there wasn't a rule against it was that in Saheed's there are no rules whatsoever.

Jane, however, had wanted to come. More than that; she had Wished to come, and accordingly here they were.

The agony had started, as far as Kiss was concerned, when Jane walked up to the bar, grabbed the menu and without looking at it ordered a bacon sandwich.

The barman had stared at her. ‘A what?' he demanded incredulously.