Tigerman (11 page)

Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either.
Aux armes, citoyens
. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’

The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.

‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.

An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘
Je m’en fous
’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the ravines on either side of the valley and moved down the line in near-as-dammit silence, capturing gun emplacements. They used the darkness and they used their bayonets and they took prisoners as they went. By the time morning came they were exhausted and they’d run out of restraint tags, but they’d captured two hundred and thirty-seven members of the Dogs of the Pure Christ and eight light artillery pieces, along with fourteen shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a pile of automatic rifles and side arms. Dirac marched Gervaise to the nearest crossroads and stripped him naked, then thrashed him with a local thorn bush across the buttocks and told him to take his men and piss off. By some unhappy chance the press corps got wind of this before it happened, so there was global coverage of the most feared warlord in the region getting spanked until he wept.

It was an utterly inexcusable breach of Dirac’s orders and a woeful piece of modern colonialist behaviour. The French government apologised with mountainous sincerity to everyone involved, and even offered to pay for reconstructive plastic surgery on Gervaise’s buttocks. This resulted in the details of the humiliation Gervaise had suffered being once again dwelled upon at length by the international press. The UN investigated – ‘a little Italian bastard with grey eyes came, you couldn’t hide anything from him. It was like hell. He found my girlfriends, my bar tab, everything. I was completely naked in front of an Italian.’ Dirac was summoned to headquarters and told he was no longer welcome in post, then handed over to the French senior staff. They lectured him without a whiff of irony on the proud traditions of the French military which he had sullied with this shameful act, and they told him he was to be demoted – yes, and he was lucky to keep his commission at all! Then they gave him a medal, which went very nicely next to the Pan-African Award for Peace and the German People’s Medal of Justice. At around the same time the Mancreu posting became available and Dirac was permitted to resume his former rank on the understanding that he see out the island’s destruction however long it might take, that he had been a very naughty boy, and that he was really not to do it again.

‘Holy Mother of Christ, Lester,’ Dirac said, first in French and then in English to emphasise his point. ‘Really with custard?’

The Sergeant nodded. Dirac banged his hands on the table,
papapapapow!
and grinned. ‘That was some shit. And you got them all?’

‘He got one.’ Indicating the boy. ‘With a comic book.’

Dirac raised his eyebrows briefly, but when the Sergeant nodded that he was entirely serious, raised his glass in Gallic salute. ‘Good work! As good as it could have been, okay? As good as it could have been. Both of you, you need to know that.’

The boy shrugged. ‘We were not
leet
.’

Dirac fairly obviously did not know what that meant, and equally obviously did not need a translation. ‘No. Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.’ And hard eyes, commander’s eyes fixing them both in turn to be sure they understood. ‘I am not blowing smoke up your asses.’

‘When we fight crime, we must be better,’ the boy said.

The Sergeant had forgotten that, had assumed it was a transient strangeness born of the moment of Shola’s death and their survival. He let it fall away without reaction. Dirac, after a moment, did the same.

With some hesitation, the boy unlimbered his knapsack and drew out the dog-eared and curled issue of
The Invisibles
he had used as a weapon, and offered it up for Dirac’s inspection. The Frenchman took it gravely and tapped the end. ‘Huh.
Pas mal
.’ He gave it back, and sighed. ‘As good as it could have been, my friend. If the world were perfect there would be no war and I would be sleeping with Lauren Bacall.’

The boy was immediately interested. ‘1944 Bacall, or Bacall now?’

‘Both!’ Dirac replied, with absolute certainty.

This was for some reason very funny, and because there was no reason why it should be, it was acceptable that it was funny. Heads turned in the café as they laughed, faces briefly startled and then reassured.
Oh, yes. It’s true: life continues. We grieve and we say goodbye because we are alive.

They drank beer. Then, at Dirac’s insistence, they drank their way through some involved Legion funeral song which seemed to the Sergeant’s uncertain ear for French to involve a great deal of discussion of veal sausage and the shortcomings of the Belgians. There was to be no sausage for the Belgians, because they were shirkers. At each utterance of this dire sentence, it was necessary to drink. The Sergeant duly did so, knowing that he would regret it, knowing that the regret, too, was part of the wake. After a certain point, he lost track of what he was drinking and became separated from himself. The remaining sober corner was able to think quite clearly and to see through his eyes, but could not direct the action of his limbs. That job was now entirely given over to a mad percussionist who performed ‘The Liverpool Girl’ and ‘How I Met Your Sisters’ and found a willing chorusline in the other guests, and then at some point the babble fell away and people departed, and at last Tom brought food and tea and gently eased the remaining mourners out into the deep middle night. The Sergeant wandered homewards through the chill, serenading the endless sky with a pint-glass-and-spoon rendition of ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. By a strange grace, the percussionist appeared to have a good sense of direction.

Where the road forked, however, he surprised himself. Instead of going right, which would have brought him directly home to his bed, he went left, up towards the jungle and the shanty. The cool air was seeping into his muscles and driving the disparate parts of him back together. As he went along the line of a low wall and beside a stream, then down and over a hedge, he stopped singing and took stock. He felt empty, and that was good. His balance was returning. He was placid yet full of an inexhaustible energy, caught in the place between wakefulness and sleep. The compulsion to go in the wrong direction was still undeniable.

He realised he was walking through someone’s garden. There was laundry hanging out, and he nearly got caught up on an immense pair of bloomers. The frilled legs grasped for him like some hunting sea creature, but he fought them off with doggy digging motions, and passed by. He plunged through a thorny bush and out the other side, down a lane, and finally felt he was nearing his destination. The road gave way to a track, and the blackness of the lower jungle rose ahead of him. His feet touched hard paving, then soil. Dust. Grass. An elegant iron gate. It was familiar, for sure, but he had no idea why he was here. He went through. The moon overhead was vast and silver-white, seeming to fill the sky. He sat down.

When he woke he was cold, and he knew he was in the cemetery where Shola was buried, and that he had come to say another goodbye, to apologise, and that he had lost another friend in this life and hadn’t enough to be giving them away. He made a noise, head in hands: wordless sorrow without the stamp of appropriate grieving moulded onto it. He looked for the fresh grave, entertaining a mad fantasy of digging it up, of waking Shola even at this late date, getting him to a proper hospital where they could treat his injuries. No, not a proper hospital: the Fleet! The Fleet could help him. They must have everything there, all the impossible new medicines, machines to pump his blood, machines machines machines. They could give him a new lung, a new heart, a new spine, grow new bones or steal them from someone else. They could do anything, if they wanted. Anything at all.

A scent washed over him, strange and sharp. It was warm and not unpleasant: leaves and bark, yes, and sweat. An animal smell. A neighbourhood dog, he thought, and awaited the wet nose in his ear. Well, that would be nice. Companionship. Dogs were good companions. They had no solid memory, only a sort of endless now. A happy dog was happy almost all the time, and shared that with you, which he could use about now.

The nose did not arrive. The dog butted him gently, quite high on his back. A large dog, or a smaller one on its hind legs. It sighed, and the noise was amazingly loud in the night. He wondered if his own sigh had been quite so massive, if he had woken anyone. He felt that any dog with that much heart should be rewarded with a hug.

He turned around into a completely alien intelligence, a huge soup-plate face with wide, reflective eyes. They were not yellow or green but a scalding platinum. He smelled meat and musk, tasted it in the air.

The tiger blinked. It was enormous. They were supposed to be smaller. They were supposed to be shy, too. Perhaps this one was lonely. The head was on a level with his own as he sat, and bigger. The whole animal must top three hundred kilos. He’d been part of four-man squads which didn’t weigh that much.

It peered at him, neither skittish nor aggressive but imponderable. It snuffled, and he smelled that same scent again, stronger: warm saliva and fur. It sneezed. Tiger snot spattered his chest. He did not cry out. The tiger looked almost embarrassed, butted him again.

Well, dog or not, it seemed to want to know him. He reached out very slowly with his left hand (in case it was torn off). The tiger twitched back from it, then sniffed the offered limb and found nothing to object to. It suffered him to stroke it. The fur was thick and dark, heavy with oil. He wondered whether to scratch it. Domestic cats liked to be scratched. His mother’s had. The tiger had taken the initiative, though, and was pushing upwards under his palm. He scratched. Its eyes closed, and it made a new noise, like a distant avalanche. Purring, he supposed, though it seemed a ridiculous word to describe this sound which was almost too deep to hear.

Time passed. The Sergeant’s left arm grew tired and he substituted his right. Then his right arm grew tired and he slowed and stopped. The tiger whickered reproach. He shrugged. It considered him and accepted the verdict, then wandered away. He was for a moment forcefully reminded of the boy.
Conversation over, see you next time
. He watched the animal make a slow circuit of the graveyard. He thought it might make a special pilgrimage to Shola’s plot, a sort of omen, but it didn’t and he was obliquely glad. Then, without meaning to, he shut his eyes for a moment and it was gone. He came upright and opened his mouth to call after it, then stopped: he had no idea what he would say. He realised he had been in some way hoping for its approval.

He took two or three steps forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of it by the trees.

HE STRUGGLED THROUGH
the next morning because there were things to do, things which couldn’t wait a day however awful he felt. He got up. It wasn’t pleasant. He ate some soup, wished he hadn’t. It swilled around in his stomach as if he was a hollow plastic sack. He knew better than to add bread. It would swell and make him feel bloated and leaden.

The weather was stubbornly ordinary. The natural world was remorseless about human death and just rolled on. Some people took solace in that, in the continuance of a greater cycle, but the Sergeant had found that he did not. Death was bad, and that was all. It was not a mercy, not a release, not a victory, and there was no more joy in a man becoming food for worms than in a chicken becoming food for a man.

He waited for the soup to recede, then took himself out for a run. He pushed himself through the blinding headache and on until he felt the jelly in his legs fade and the poisons in his blood bubble out through his skin. He stank. Tainted sweat fell from his body onto the track, and he wondered if it would make any difference to the cocktail of slurry and strangeness under the island. Booze metabolites and skin, salt and water, filtering down through endless layers of sand and rock to a weird melting pot somewhere down below. He showered, and midway through, as the water spiralled away down the plughole, he abruptly found the notion enormously alarming. He was giving up tiny parts of his physical self to be assimilated by what was under the island, would become part of an alien thing so dangerous that only total war could be contemplated, an annihilation so fierce it would take the stone and the sea with it. He retched, but nothing emerged from him. He allowed himself two ibuprofen tablets from supplies, logged them, and chased them with more water and a sachet of electrolyte salts intended for treating severe diarrhoea. Finally he added a multivitamin and a single bit of crispbread from the larder to settle his stomach. The mixture was sickly, but he knew it would work.

Dressed and dry, he took himself out to the car. He had prisoners to talk to: Kershaw was keeping them for him.

Beauville did have a prison – an old red Victorian box with narrow, barred windows and a high wall – but it had been commandeered by NatProMan to house its overspill, and was now full of administrators, soldiers and a considerable stock of weapons. Serious criminals – of which there had not been many – had been transferred to prisons in the Scandinavian countries where the crime rate was actually dropping so fast that the prison infrastructure industry was having trouble staying afloat. Denmark had been a net importer of criminals since 2011.