Tigerman (3 page)

By the time he had finished the bread, the rain was worse, battering on the corrugated-iron roof; rain in the tropical style, by the gallon, with the force of a fist. It was loud, but not unpleasant because Shola had padded the interior of the roof with bags of sheep’s wool. The noise was muffled rather than entirely blocked, but the wool meant sitting in the place during a storm was like listening to a troop of mounted horse on the road rather than being inside a giant metal drum. More customers were coming in, cursing and laughing, water streaming from their faces and sloshing from their shoes.

The Sergeant smiled an occasional greeting when someone made eye contact with him, drank his tea, and listened. Like the boy, he had a mobile telephone, a bulky, simple thing with large buttons and a big battery which went on for days. It was next to his tea. At some point – he wasn’t sure when, the action was automatic – he had inserted the battery and switched the device on. He had to do this because except in emergencies he did not travel in-country with a live phone. It was a residual proscription, pointless here, where anyone who was looking for him could just come to the house, but it went against the grain to reveal his location while he was on the move. He restricted the phone’s sign-ins to those places he was known to go and otherwise kept it inert, so that an enemy seeking him in transit must identify him by sight and in person, and risk a comparable exposure.

He took another sip of tea and idly, with his left hand, traced the outline of a deep gouge in the tabletop. It had probably been made with the sight of a handgun. An idiotic thing to do, a lousy use for a gun and bad practice for a soldier, but of course any number of people who had sat in this place with handguns had probably not been soldiers, and many of them – soldiers or not – had undoubtedly been idiots. You couldn’t look at Mancreu and imagine that the island hadn’t seen more than its fair share.

The rain stopped, and a few minutes later the Sergeant came to the end of his tea and of his introspection, and at the same time the boy apparently concluded that he had read and reread his comic book as much as he wanted to. The Sergeant reached for his phone to remove the battery, and was aware of an immediate sharpening of interest and a searchlight intensity in the air.

He kept his hands very much on the table, and softened his shoulders. He didn’t want anyone to make any mistakes about how relaxed he was, how calm, and how he did not intend to reach for his side arm. He wondered who had come in, and how they had done it without making any noise, without the light from the door falling across him. Perhaps they had come from inside the bar, from the private rooms.

He looked up and found the boy watching him, eyes shadowed, body almost entirely wrapped in the dark of his corner table. The bodyguard’s table, the Sergeant called it in his mind, a table he would not have chosen to sit at because he didn’t want to be known as a man who kept his eye on the door. It was enough that he was a soldier. He didn’t want the people of Beauville to think of him reckoning each drinker, making sure he could kill them if he had to. Though of course some part of him did all those things, in the back of his mind, registered newcomers and regulars, weighed them and categorised them, so that if it ever came to it – whatever ‘it’ was – he would know whether to stand or flee, how many could he take down, what would it cost him, and how bad would it get.

Very bad, was the answer, always. One way or another: very bad.

The Sergeant kept his eyes on the boy – not aggressive, just interested – and the boy looked back at him in exactly the same way, reassessing, cataloguing, considering. Why? Where did this stark, sudden appraisal come from? The boy was part of the landscape, a customer. The Sergeant had a vague notion he had glimpsed him before: getting out of a coracle on the waterfront; running errands and bringing messages; sitting and reading. Why was he allowing himself to be visible, exposing himself by this close, intrusive scrutiny? The Sergeant had pegged him as smart and jittery and possibly traumatised. So. What now?

The boy’s body was very still, a mirror of his own demonstrative calm, and the Sergeant, changing the focus of his attention without changing the position of his eyes, followed the line of one scrawny shoulder down to the hands. Then after a moment he snorted approvingly. He relaxed, and felt as much as saw the boy doing the same. For all their physical differences, in this moment they were identical: backs straight, heads slightly forward as they prepared to push themselves to their feet. And each of them was holding his phone’s battery in preparation for putting it away, in a separate pocket. A twin paranoia. A wise man does not catalogue his road home.

The boy nodded to him. The Sergeant nodded back.

‘You are smart,’ the boy said.

‘You too.’

The boy nodded.

‘You like comics?’ the Sergeant asked, then heard the echo of the question and saw his own child self shaking his head at the stupidest thing ever said by man.

But the boy was gracious, respecting the gambit for what it was. ‘Yes.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All. Some DC, for Batman. Grant Morrison! But mostly Marvel. Warren Ellis. Also Spurrier, and Gail Simone. Bendis is full of win.’

The Sergeant grinned. He had never heard this expression before, but he approved of it.
Full of win.
It had a digital flavour, merry and modern. More things should be full of win.

‘I like Green Lantern,’ he said.

‘Which one?’ the boy demanded.

Oh, sod it. Now he remembered: there were so many Lanterns to choose from, and always changing, and the wrong one was like the wrong football team, the wrong church . . . ‘Hal Jordan,’ he said, dredging up the name.

‘That is totally Old School,’ the boy approved. ‘Jordan is bad ass.’ He separated the words:
bad ass
. The Sergeant suspected he had learned them by reading. He wondered which comics allowed that sort of language, and realised: probably all of them, these days.

‘You like Captain America, too?’ the boy asked.

The Sergeant hesitated. ‘Not so much,’ he admitted. Bright colours and battlefields didn’t mix for him. Steve Rogers was an invincible man, an overman who wore what he damn well liked, and survived. It was the men around him who didn’t make it. No. The Sergeant did not like Captain America. Perhaps he had once, when he was younger.

The boy nodded as if this was to be expected. ‘Batman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Batman is best. Bob Kane was a god. Also Bill Finger.’ The Sergeant had only the dimmest idea who these people were.

The boy seemed to realise that the conversation had become too technical, because he proffered the comic he had been reading. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Christian Walker is full of win.’

The Sergeant took it, then hesitated. ‘How will I get it back to you?’

‘I’m around,’ the boy said vaguely. ‘But there is n.p. – I do not collect them.’ The boy stopped, grinned. ‘That is not true! I do collect them. But to read, not like a crazy shut-in dude!’

‘I’ll get it back to you,’ the Sergeant promised.

‘
Kswah swah
,’ the boy replied with a shrug.
What happens, happens
. Very Mancreu. On the Arabian mainland they said
insh’Allah
– if God wills it. If God willed it, you might arrive punctually for your appointments, but generally He willed that you show up more or less on the same day. Time and matter were flexible; only God was real. On Mancreu, even God had somehow faded away. The universe was what it was, mutable and strange, and God had made it in His image, so He too was probably imponderable. The nature of His will varied from soul to soul, and what actually happened often wasn’t what anyone understood by it. Perhaps God, being everywhere and seeing all things from outside time, was incapable of willing anything which men could grasp as a plan.

So
insh’Allah
seemed to suppose too much. On Mancreu, you just said:
what happens, happens
. It was practically the national anthem.

When the Sergeant asked what to call him, the boy had glanced away and said ‘Robin.’ The Sergeant accepted the lie politely, but never adopted it, and as their acquaintanceship grew he avoided sentences that required him to use a name at all. In his mind, his friend was a unique identity, a presence which had no need of a borrowed label to encapsulate it.

Today, with the image of the pelican and the pigeon still causing occasional head-shaking, they left the Land Rover across the road from the café and bowed each other mirthfully across the threshold. It was not unknown for them to spend twenty minutes doing this, each insisting that the other go first, making more and more outrageous speeches of diplomatic deference. Today, though, they merely tussled, the boy shouting ‘Put up your dukes!’ and jabbing inexpertly at the Sergeant’s stomach until the man acknowledged himself subdued into accepting the honour and entering ahead of his friend. He paused two steps inside to allow his eyes to adjust.

Physically, the café was a single rectangular room, but it had the appearance of an L-shape because one corner was taken up by a rather grand wooden staircase that Shola had salvaged from a defunct hotel. The bar was topped with a sheet of folded copper, very worn and very much polished, and the tables were a hodgepodge of round and square. The rickety chairs were moved from one place to another by customers as they came and went, so that only when the café was absolutely full did anyone have to sit on the perilous yellow typist’s stool which Shola kept folded by the bar. Along the walls of the room were benches made from driftwood, silvered and polished smooth by years of slithering backsides.

In the crook of the staircase, with a patrician view of the door and the bar, there was the
shtammteh
, the table which was by common understanding Shola’s own. It was never reserved. It was simply not somewhere you sat unless you were invited. Even the boy and the Sergeant, upon arrival, made a show of dithering and finding a suitable place, and then Shola came and chided them and moved them to the
shtammteh
to take their tea with him.

The new delivery must just have arrived, because Shola served them a rich gunpowder tea which they had never had before, demanding to know what they thought of it. The Sergeant held a long swallow in his mouth, the perfect temperature baking his gums but not burning them, warming his throat and making his whole body feel cooler. He tasted pepper and smoke and the smell of snow. This was not tea. It was something else, a kind of elixir. It was what tea aspired to be.

‘It’s good,’ he said, and saw Shola’s mouth twitch in a smile.

The boy rolled his eyes. ‘He means totally awesome. This tea is made from hunnertenpercent secret inside-the-door-teaching
tea fu
! It is the daddy of tea. This tea is the tea of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine. Every morning: this tea, then lightsaber practice. Strong in the Force!’ He made a lightsaber noise.
Vvmwomm, Vvmwomm, TCHA FWSH!

Shola obligingly refilled his cup. ‘I should order more?’

Such an order was a statement of commitment to remain for another month. The boy nodded gravely. ‘I will come and drink it.’

Leaving – Leaving with a capital ‘L’ as opposed to merely going out of a shop or a house – had become a ritual. You couldn’t call it a tradition, because it wasn’t, would never be, old enough. It was a sort of shared insanity, like cutting your own flesh to see if it hurt. If you were Leaving, going away from Mancreu and not coming back – and tacitly everyone was Leaving, of course, no one had suggested the population should stay and die when the hammer fell, but still, Leaving before your neighbours was a form of defeat or desertion – then you threw a party. Above all, you had a bonfire, and you burned what you couldn’t take with you and couldn’t give away. Not just what no one wanted, but the things you couldn’t let go of, things you’d rather destroy with your own hand than see shattered by the impossible, cleansing heat that would burn Mancreu down to the rock, to the waterline and the granite on which the island stood, and past even that, down and down into the mantle of the Earth to scour the place of a generation of stupid human abuse.

In the beginning, Leavers had printed posters, spent money on them, tried to sell themselves on a festive atmosphere somewhere between a wake and a christening.
This chapter is over, this world is over, but there is a new one!
But the falseness of it, of forced departure claimed as opportunity, showed through like a broken bone. Now they wrote in white chalk on the black telegraph poles which connected Mancreu’s trembling phone network to the exchange: a wide, shamed L and then a time and a place, always after dark, always outside town. The Leavers came first, and the next to arrive were always other Leavers or those who knew they would be, very soon, and then the celebrants, the ones who had outlasted another crop of the weak. People wept and marriages shattered, truths were uttered which should have been kept deep inside. Family heirlooms, beautiful pieces of wooden furniture, jewellery, even pets and livestock burned. This wasn’t a clean break. It was
sati
by proxy, and that only because no one had yet been desperate enough, wild enough, sick enough in the heart to step into the flames. But the Sergeant had privately told Jed Kershaw that it was only a matter of time.

He had begun going along to all of them that he could, a sort of inverted ghost at the feast: the man from a cold, wet island which wasn’t going to burn. He stood outside the circle of the bonfire light and watched as first-edition books and prized saucepans joined photo albums and cradles on the pyre, put a stop to fights before they became feuds or murders. After the first few Leavings, the tone had shifted to something bacchanalian, and then fatigue had set in and replaced that with a sort of silent goodbye which was almost wholesome. Recently the mood was becoming one of breathless transgression: who could destroy the most valuable thing? Who could show their self-despite most graphically as they betrayed the only home they had ever known?

But his presence seemed to act as a sort of dampener, as if the uniform called everyone to remember that most British of virtues: the stiff upper lip. Or perhaps it was like being a Health & Safety inspector, and no one could really get crazy knowing he was around. He nodded sadly to grandmothers burning their feather mattresses and fishermen burning their coracles, to crab hunters immolating their traps and postmen burning their bicycles. He shook hands with the Leavers and sometimes that meant everyone else could suddenly stand to look at them and even talk to them after all. He was an undertaker, a cypher.