Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Listen now.

Once there was a man who lived in a house with a buff-coloured front door. He did not much like the colour buff. He thought it characterless and insipid. But every door in every street in the town was buff-coloured and to change the colour would have brought him to the attention of those people who liked buff-coloured doors. Every morning he would lock his buffcoloured front door behind him and walk to work, where he would drive a steel-pouring crane until the evening whistle, when he would walk home again and open his buff-coloured door and every evening he would feel depressed by the dreariness of the buff. Every day he opened and closed the buff-coloured door and he grew more and more miserable, for the buffcoloured door came to symbolize everything that was dreary and monotonous and characterless about his life.

One Sunday morning he went to the Company commissary and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint. He did not really know why he went and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint, but he had woken up that morning with an insistent vision of green in his head. Green green green. Green was a restful, meditative colour, easy on eye and soul, serene; green was the colour of green and growing things, green was God’s favourite colour: after all, He had made an awful lot of it. So he put on his old old clothes and set to work. Soon people were gathering to watch. Some wanted a go at it, so the man who liked green gave them a brush and let them paint a bit of his door. With all the help it was not very long before the door was finished and all the people who watched agreed that green was a very good colour for a front door. Then the man thanked his helpers, hung a sign reading “Wet Paint,” and went indoors to have his lunch. All afternoon Sunday, walkers came past his house to look at the green front door and pay their compliments because in street after street of buff-coloured front doors there was only one that was green.

The next day being Monday, the man who liked green put on his vest and his pants and his hard hat and walked out of his green front door to join the stream of workers all pouring into the factory. He poured steel all morning, ate his lunch, drank some beer with his friends, went to the toilet, then poured steel again until seventeen o’clock, when the siren blew and he went home again.

And he could not find his house.

Every house in the street had a buff-coloured door.

Wrong turn perhaps: he checked the street name. Adam Smith Gardens. He lived in Adam Smith Gardens. Where was his house with the green door? He counted along the rows of buff-coloured doors until he reached number seventeen. Number 17 was his house, the house with the green front door. Except the door was buff once again.

When he had left that morning, it had been green. When he came home, it was buff. Then he saw, where someone had put a clumsy handprint, a little glow of living green shining through the buff.

“You bastards!” shouted the man who liked green. The buff front door opened and a buck-toothed little man in a Company paper suit stepped out to deliver a short homily on the necessity of eliminating undesirable traits of individualism between labour units in the interest of greater economic harmony in accordance with the Project Manifesto and Development Plan which made no provision in the labour unit social engineering system for dysfunctional and individualistic colours: such as green, in opposition to and set against uniform, official, functional and socially harmonic colours, such as buff with reference to labour unit housing modules: sub-section entrance and exit portals.

The man who liked green listened patiently to this. Then he took a deep breath and punched the little man in the Company paper suit as hard as ever he could right in his buck-toothed gob.

The name of the man who liked green was Rael Mandella Jr. He was a simple man, uncomplicated, destinyless and ignorant of the mystery spreading its cursed roots around his spine. On the occasion of his tenth birthday he said as much to his mother.

“I’m a simple person really, I like simple things like sunshine, rain and trees. I don’t much want to be one of the great people of history, I’ve seen what that’s done to Pa and Aunt Taasmin. I don’t much want to be a man of substance and consequence, like Kaan with his food franchises, I just want to be happy, and if that means never amounting to very much, that’s fine.” Next morning Rael Mandella Jr. took the short walk from the Mandella mansion down to the gates of Steeltown and passing through them became cranedriving steel-pouring Shareholder 954327186 and happily remained so, a simple man never amounting to very much until the Sunday morning the mystic urge drove him to paint his door green.

Shareholder 954327186 was suspended from his job pending a full inquiry by an Industrial Tribunal. He bowed to the summonings officer, respectful, not in the least bitter or resentful, justice being justice, and went home to his buff-coloured front door to find a half a dozen demonstrators marching around in a circle outside.

“Reinstate Rael Mandella!” they chanted. “Reinstate reinstate reinstate!”

“What are you doing outside my house?” demanded Rael Mandella Jr.

“Protesting against your unjust suspension,” said a zealous-looking young man carrying a placard reading “Buff is boring, green is glorious.”

“We’re the voice of those that have no voice,” added a pinched woman.

“Excuse me, but I don’t want your protests, thank you. I’ve never even seen any of you before, please go away.”

“Oh, no,” said the zealous young man. “You’re a symbol, you see, a symbol of liberty to the oppressed slaves of the Company. You are the spirit of freedom crushed beneath the booted heel of corporate industry.”

“All I did was paint my door green. I’m no symbol of anything. Now, go away before you get into trouble with company security.”

They paraded around outside his house until night fell. Rael Mandella Jr. turned his radio up very loud and closed his blinds.

The industrial tribunal found him guilty of antisocial behavior and assault on the person of a Company executive in the execution of his duties. The chairman, in his short summing-up, used the phrase “industrial feudalism” thirty-nine times and concluded that even though junior Labour Relations Liaison Manager E. P. Veerasawmy was a fearful little shit whose punch in the gob was richly deserved and long overdue, Shareholder 954327186 was not the one to execute such judgment and was therefore fined two months wages spread over the next twelve months and barred from promotion in his section for the next two years. His job as a crane driver was reinstated. Rael Mandella shrugged. He had heard of worse sentences.

The protestors were outside waiting for him, banners and slogans at the ready.

“Draconian oppression of Shareholders!” shouted the pinched woman.

“Stop the show trials!” shouted the zealous man.

“We have a right to green doors!” cried a third protestor.

“Rael Mandella is innocent!” a fourth bawled, and a fifth added, “Quash the sentence! Quash the sentence!”

“Actually, I thought I got off rather lightly,” said Rael Mandella Jr.

They followed him home. They marched around outside his house. They would have followed him into the social centre that evening had they not been involved in a boycott of Company recreational facilities, so they marched around outside waving their banners, chanting their slogans, and singing their protest songs. Agreeably mellow, Rael Mandella Jr. left by a back way so that the protestors would not follow him. He heard shouting and peeked around the side of the Company commissary to see if they had somehow learned of his evasion. What he saw sobered him instantly.