This Other Eden Read Free

anybody
bothered turning up at all. As far as the eye could see, the boiling ocean was
black. The cliffs and rocks were black. The dead creatures were black. The
emergency operations personnel were black from head to foot, as they got their
emergency operation underway in the usual totally inadequate manner.
    ‘Tanker
disasters are like the first snows of winter,’ Judy would explain to friends.
‘You remember how we used to have snow? Well, year in, year out the stuff would
fall, and every time it was like the first time, it was like nobody had ever
had to deal with snow before. The roads would get clogged up, the trains would
stop, the pipes would burst. Nothing was ever ready. Well, it’s the same when a
billion litres of crude hits a coastline. People think the authorities know
what to do. They don’t. We all just shrug our shoulders and get down there with
a spade and a bucket like we always do.’
    Judy
was standing on the highest cliff overlooking the disaster with the coastguard
people and a couple of local cops.
    ‘Well,
guess we’d better go get the captain. I hear he’s drunk,’ said the chief
coastguard with the weary sigh of a man who had left a good dinner to come and
bear witness to an event which would follow its tragic course, whether he was
there to watch it or not.
    ‘Are
you going down on to the bridge?’ Judy inquired.
    The
coastguard turned disdainfully to look at Judy.
    ‘I
don’t see any reason to discuss my plans with you, nerd,’ he said.
     
     
     
    A
boy named Judy.
     
    Judy was a man even though
he had a woman’s name. He was called Judy because he had been unfortunate
enough to be born during the time of the great gender realignment. A period
when it was a commonly held belief in the university common-rooms of the world
that all single-sex imagery was oppressive. This was a time when men were
strongly encouraged not to grow beards, which were seen as visual assertions of
gender, whereas it became fashionable for women to be as hairy as possible, in
order to blur the margins. The idea was that if everyone could pretend to be
exactly the same then no one could be held back by being different and hence,
it was argued, the individual would be in a position to prosper.
    That
was how Judy came to be called Judy. One morning before he was born, as his
father waxed his face and his mother applied mascara to her legs and upper lip,
it was decided.
    ‘If
it’s a boy we’ll call it Judy,’ they said, ‘and if it’s a girl we’ll call it Hercules.’
In this manner the margins were not blurred, and Judy got dead-legged every day
at school for Sixteen years.
    When
Judy reached his majority he astonished those who knew him by not changing his
name. He had, of course, always intended to do so the moment he got the chance;
but when that chance finally came around, he had suffered so much at the hands
of bullies that there seemed little point in bothering. Children are much
crueller than adults, Judy reasoned, so he had already weathered the worst of
it. He was, of course, wrong. At college, the coarser element laughed at him
and pushed him around every day, and as an adult he rarely turned his back
without hearing a snigger.
    It was
not just that Judy was a boy with a girl’s name; his problems were further
compounded by the fact that he was the least prepossessing of men. He had one
leg slightly shorter than the other and something of a stoop. His glasses were
thick and his hair always greasy. He was what the Americans call a nerd and since
Judy was an American, nerd became his middle name. He was a textbook nerd. It
was almost as if he had been deliberately designed that way. In terms of
appearance there was quite literally nothing about him that was not nerdy. If
they gave out air-miles for looking ineffectual and inadequate, Judy could have
been the first man on Mars.
    If he
had been a stupid nerd Judy might simply have been ignored, but he wasn’t: he
was a clever nerd, very clever