Tigerman (7 page)

The Sergeant turned the wheel and felt the beginnings of a skid; the road surface was covered in scree and shale. He allowed the car to drift a little, enjoying the play of the tyres and the tarmac, then straightened up and let his route take him in amongst the narrower streets.

Kershaw – his first stop, out of politeness – was not available, which meant the American was probably receiving information or instructions. The Sergeant left a message at the desk with a promise to come back later. He went over to the harbour and Beneseffe showed him the scene of the great fish theft, which was predictably stinky but otherwise not terribly helpful. A fully staffed crimes unit could have taken fingerprints and statements, worked out who had used the winches and the hauler. It would still have been almost impossible to learn much from the physical evidence because everyone likely to have committed the crime was allowed to use the equipment. It was remotely possible that someone not from the port had sneaked in, known how to work everything, gone off with the fish. But that person would then have to dispose of the fish, and how precisely would a shepherd explain his sudden good fortune? Had they fallen as rain? (And on Mancreu in particular: if they had, would anyone buy them?)

It seemed unlikely that this crime would remain mysterious for very long. There was a limited number of things you could do with four tons of fresh fish.

Pursuant to his other investigation – the one which related to his long-term solution for the boy’s evacuation – the Sergeant asked Beneseffe casually if he knew who his friend’s parents were.

‘Which boy?’ the Portmaster responded.

‘The one who’s always around. Comic books and a big old cellphone. Slim, dark hair. Smart.’

For a moment he thought Beneseffe might actually be able to tell him. There was a flicker of recognition in his face. Perhaps it was common knowledge.
That boy who was orphaned in the storm of ’02, whose parents died of a fever, who survived the car crash back in ’09
. Perhaps this would be simple. But Beneseffe shook his head. There were a lot of boys on Mancreu, even now. ‘Ask at the schoolhouse,’ he suggested.

‘He doesn’t go to school.’

‘If he doesn’t and he should then they’ll know who he is, won’t they?’ Beneseffe pointed out, his tone implying that if this was detective work he considered it easier than people believed.

And they might know, at that, the Sergeant thought. Absence might be conspicuous. He would ask – but not today. Tomorrow. If he asked too many questions all at once, people would notice. The boy might find out about it indirectly, and that was not part of the plan.

Standing outside in the sunlight, he considered his idea of dropping in on the Witch as if by accident, but felt now that this would amount to an imposition of his presence. She must recognise it for what it was: a loneliness, and an approach. It would be better instead to make overt what was in his mind. Send her flowers. Ask her out. She was quite capable of refusing him with grace and making the matter relatively painless, he knew that. He wondered if she liked to read, as well as to play music. He had books he could lend her. Perhaps they would swap books. Perhaps reading would become an evening together, and between pages of a novel she would undress, and kiss him.

He sighed. He should have made his proposition months ago. It might have been possible. Now there was a fatigue about his desire, as if they had been lovers for too long and the flame was guttering, leaving them with a comfortable friendship and nothing more. His mind offered him visions of her, and his body was keen enough to accept the notion, but more and more they came with the hollow familiarity of repetition, and faded away without heat.

Seagulls landed all around him in a cloud, shrieking. One of the open boats was coming in, the bait high and vile in the air. The Witch was banished. Well, now he could not go and see her. Her skin was muddled in his mind with the smell of drying mackerel. Hardly good kindling.

At a loose end, he went out onto the seafront and sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the dock like a child. The dog? The mugging?

Mancreu shuddered, and he rolled himself hastily away from the water’s edge. He had no desire to take a dip in the diesel-filmed harbour, swallowing seagull shit and oil. He stretched out a hand to steady himself on the cobbles.

The tremor faded.

He settled, resuming his seat, and listened to the sounds behind him in the town. Someone was brushing a broken bottle into a pan, and over on the other side of the Portmaster’s office a lobsterman was chasing a stray lobster along the ground. The Sergeant laughed, but then the man turned and he was wearing a cheap surfing T-shirt, and it was – absurdly – one he had seen before, dozens of times, in Afghanistan. Someone must have donated a crate of them, because the kids all wore them when they went to school.

He sighed. Afghanistan had been a mess. The Americans called it a Total Goatfuck, and they laughed and swore and kept their spirits up by firing huge bombs into the cave systems. Several of the local section commanders had taken to wearing stetsons and sheriff’s badges when they went out in public, and one actually made a temporary drive-in and screened a bunch of cowboy movies dubbed into Pashtun and Farsi. ‘I want them to know where we’re coming from,’ he said. ‘I want them to understand that this is how we do.’ The Afghans watched the movies, some from the makeshift benches in the drive-in and some through field glasses from up in the hills, and there was a great deal of debate over coffee and raisins about whether Rooster Cogburn really did have true grit. Then one morning the projectionist was found with the second reel of
High Noon
pushed into his open chest.

‘What the fuck did he expect?’ the Sergeant overheard a senior officer say to a visiting member of the general staff. ‘He sent his message, and they sent one back. Their message isn’t a lot more insane than his, it’s just in capital fucking letters!’ And then, to everyone’s surprise and embarrassment, the man wept.

The Brits didn’t talk about Afghanistan being a Total Goatfuck. That didn’t come close to expressing how they felt. They had a sense of having been here before, a sense they got from their regimental histories and from the Afghans themselves, who still recognised the flags they flew and the badges on their shoulders from the wars of a hundred years ago. There were soldiers here whose great-grandfathers had fought the Pashtuns in 1918, and the fathers of those men had fought them before that in 1879, and their fathers in 1840. The Brits shared with the locals a tacit understanding that nothing done here would make any difference, that this was just another layer of bloody patina on the cold, hard soil.

Command gave the Sergeant a new second lieutenant to take care of, a boy called Westcott. He was posh as Royal Doulton and thick as a carthorse. He said the war was going to be ‘an improvement for everyone in the long run’. He let it be known that he liked his men to read, because he felt it improved their chances of ‘getting a good position’ when they got home.

The Sergeant, like many men whose jobs involve a great deal of waiting, enjoyed reading. He carried one paperback wherever he went. He had a small library in his locker and selected something different each time he packed his gear. He had
Three Men in a Boat
and
The Passion
and
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, a few old Eric Frank Russell editions, and a copy of
Bleak House
for the winter. Westcott said he should invest in an electronic book tablet. They could store thousands of books, Westcott said, and they lasted for weeks between charges. A couple of the soldiers already had them, Westcott said, and really liked them. Progress was what it was all about. When he was out of the army, he was going into business and then later when he knew a thing or two he might stand for Parliament – that was giving back, which a person in Westcott’s position really ought to do.

Two weeks on, Westcott was reading from his gizmo in a ravine when the sky opened white and purple and bullets poured down. The machine had brought the Taliban right to him; it had a cellular connection Westcott had forgotten to switch off, or maybe he couldn’t wait for the latest Grisham and had tried to bloody download it. The Sergeant dragged two men through the howling night and hid them in the stripped carcass of a bus, then went back and found that Westcott had been cut in half. The enemy was a gaggle of boys and an older man, and one of the kids had a box with wires poking out which was their uplink detector. They were dancing and celebrating.

Blue Peter
, the Sergeant thought.
My Science Project. I’m fighting sticky-backed plastic and cornflakes packets
. He was only dimly aware of being injured.

A day later, the whole valley was made of glass. The daisy-cutters weren’t classed as weapons of mass destruction because they weren’t nukes, but they worked just as well by being very big. They were so big they had to be pushed out of the back of carrier planes one by one, down the ramp usually used for tanks and trucks. Each of them was a natural disaster in a box. The air for miles in any direction smelled of oil, hot stone, and charred sheep. The Sergeant sat in the back of a truck with his legs hanging down over the road and watched. Someone had thought it might be a good notion for him to know that the men who had killed Westcott weren’t getting away with it. Privately, he thought that whoever that person was must be new here. Still, it wouldn’t do to be ungrateful. He recited the whole of a poem he knew about a cat. For a while, it seemed to be all he could say. When he found other words, they were jagged and inappropriate, full of a sense of waste.

They sent him to Mancreu.
Take a break, Lester. Not long on active for you now, is it? Nearly forty. Well, serve it out. We’ll find something for you
.

He watched the waves in the harbour and thought about Beneseffe’s stolen fish. He would be quite content to stay here. Mancreu life – strange and undemanding and disjointed – suited him. He wondered if there were some other abandoned island somewhere without the death warrant hanging over it, a place which needed a sergeant. El Hierro, Shola had said. Maybe El Hierro. Then he felt like a traitor for having the thought, as if he were married to a sick woman and coveted her sister. Well, he would stay as long as he was permitted. But there was nothing wicked in wondering where he would go, after. That was just life. You had to be practical.

There was a presence at his side and the noise of a pocket radio and he recognised, in a brief lull in the breeze, the scent of the boy. His friend smelled of earth today, rather than salt, so the Sergeant guessed he had not been out on his boat. The radio dangled by a lanyard from the boy’s hand, and a breathless northern English voice was detailing Real Madrid’s latest triumph on the football pitch. A famous victory, the voice said, which seemed rather premature. Time would decide whether it was famous or not, and most likely it would be just another game.

The boy politely switched off the radio and the Sergeant got to his feet. They walked along beside the water until they came to a broad stretch of sea wall that was flat and warm, in a part of Beauville which was now mostly deserted. Both sat. The boy said nothing. The sea washed and swooshed. After a moment, the boy reached into his bag and produced something wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil.

They had an arrangement regarding food which was acceptable to both. The Sergeant had a considerable inventory of baked beans and spaghetti hoops at Brighton House which amounted to more than a single person could consume over the space of some years. The boy had made it clear that he regarded baked beans as the highest form of culinary genius, but had a correspondingly low opinion of the spaghetti hoop. As with the continuity of stories and the football of Real Madrid, the matter was akin to a religious one, and no heresies were tolerated. The barbecued bean, for example, was taboo. Alphabet shapes could not move him to a gentler opinion of pasta in sauce.

The Sergeant, meanwhile, had long ago eaten all the tinned produce, all the syrups and ketchups and brines, that he could stand. He wanted nothing so much as fresh food. He loved the dubious Mancreu cheeses and the dry sesame biscuits which went with them. He loved the oily sardines and goat-knuckle stews, the mashed roots and flatbreads which were the island’s staples. He ate whatever was in season and whatever was for sale and thought himself in paradise. Anything so long as he never had to swallow another mouthful from a tin.

They had therefore evolved a practice suited to their likes. The boy would arrive with fruit, cheese, and bread, and the Sergeant would supply baked beans. They would begin by toasting the bread over a pocket gas burner and warming some beans for the boy. Each would make some disparaging face in the direction of his friend’s meal, and then they would sit in loud, masticatory silence for a while, and then speak of whatever might be on their minds.

The Sergeant extended the plate of warmed beans, and the boy took them. He ate one mouthful, and then the next. He seemed to be worried that the heating had been uneven, because he was touching each heaped spoon with the tip of his tongue, like a lizard. The Sergeant took a big bite of cheese and bread.

After a while – it was quite in keeping with the moment, he hoped, not an imposition but a natural thing to do – the Sergeant spoke.

‘Do you have . . . family?’

The boy shook his head gravely. ‘I am too young.’

A lack of precision could take you to some strange places with a child living on Mancreu, where anything was possible.

‘I mean parents. Brothers and sisters. Uncles, even.’

‘Aunts and cousins and bears, oh my!’ He grinned.

‘Really?’

‘Sure. Of course.’ He made an encompassing gesture. Mancreu life: everyone is family. If you live in the same street or on the same farm, you’re cousins or brothers. An older man is an uncle if he functions as an uncle.

‘Blood family?’

‘Someplace.’

‘But here?’
Who takes care of you apart from me? Who’s missing you, right now? Where are you when you’re not with me?
He felt like a jealous husband. Or how he imagined it would be to be one.