We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (27 page)

My marksmanship didn’t exist before the Captain took it upon himself to create it on his shooting range behind the rosebushes. He had no interest in grooming me for military service—either I’d feel the call to it or I wouldn’t, was what he said—but found it a crucial skill for any young man to possess.

Was it so wrong to be happy?

“Cradle the stock against your shoulder like so,” he told me, “and be sure it’s solidly placed, or when it punches back it will hurt you. Rifles are loud. Don’t let the noise startle you into losing your grip on the gun.”

Even so, it was louder than I expected. I punched holes through two targets and the blast punched holes in my ears, or so I felt for minutes afterwards. The Captain was delighted, though, and clapped his hands.

Later, he introduced me to moving targets: “Aim just in front of the bird. It’s not going to stay in place.” And: “Never rush your shot. It doesn’t matter if a wild boar’s charging you directly or if George’s dragon is—it’ll gore you all the faster if you miss.”

He smiled after the lessons. He was pleased: largely with himself, like he’d just taught me a new trick. “A quick lad,” he said. “We’ll make a hunter of you yet.”

I lived downstairs, one storey below the grand ballroom, though as far as I knew the Captain didn’t dance. There I slept on a feather mattress and dreamed a memory from not so long ago.

I was practising with the rifle after the Captain’s lessons, loading, aiming, and firing at the targets behind the rosebushes. I could see the frustration on my own face when the barrel jammed, the vindictive triumph in my eyes when I shot a squirrel that’d been irritating me with its chatter. I smiled at my own impatience.

I watched myself through the eyes of an observer who circled me lazily from a distance, but not a vast one.

I woke up and went to check the lock on my bedroom door. In the morning I was woken again by a long, twisting, miserable sound that I couldn’t quite place.

Once I saw a Chinese funeral march in Kuala Lumpur, all in white. The family hadn’t been wealthy and couldn’t pay for a large well-ordered procession. So they dragged together all their white and they made up for it with their wretched howls: howls which frightened my mother’s cat, which my cousins took to calling “ghoul noises,” which even my mother deemed an unconscionable nuisance after a certain point. The hounds were making this noise.

The door to the kennel was torn off its hinges. The bitch must have put up the greater fight. Her hide had been torn up in great rents but she hadn’t been devoured. The stud’s abdomen was all but gone, one of his legs too. Another dog was missing his forepaws and sprawled with his head at an odd angle. The others were flecked with red to greater or lesser degree and howling, but alive.

I found myself stepping over their remains, nearly slipping on the blood. I scratched one of the other dogs absently and was disturbed by the tranquil pace of my heart.

The Captain wasn’t faring so well. He’d wrapped himself in what looked like two dressing-gowns over his clothing. The sound had rendered him wan and ill. The Yorkshireman groundskeeper was worse, though: he’d blanched bone white and had already been sick on the kennel floor, by the look of it.

Captain Lyons said, simply, “I’ll put together a hunt.”

The room smelled like the dogs’ blood. I knelt next to the bitch. “Sir,” I called. “Look.”

He looked. So did the groundskeeper, still mottled and silent in the corner.

I motioned to the deep, dark scores in her side, made with an impossibly long sweep.

The Captain recovered his spirits in time for the next day’s hunt. He was shaven tidy again and his copper moustache twitched over his mouth like a curry-brush. I imagined him intrepid with a machete, plumbing King Solomon’s mines.

I didn’t want to go with him. My dream was too much with me, loping around me in a lazy circle, watching me shoot even now. I remembered the scores on the dogs’ bodies. But after breakfast I encountered the Captain on the grounds and he hailed me, distracted: “Ah, there you are, lad. Come along and saddle Cleto, all the men are going to need their guns.”

It was a kindness, I reminded myself. I knew how much I stuck out in the hunting party, like a sallow little thumb. The hounds whined in disharmony, always one too high or too low to ignore. On a normal hunt it would’ve been irritating, but the noise was just about the only thing keeping me from falling off my horse. I hadn’t slept well at all. Every time I’d woken in the night, I found my dreams slinking away from me on soft-padded feet.

I put a hand on the stock of one of the Captain’s rifles. The mist penetrated my shabby jacket and clammied up my skin as we rode onward over the moor, mindful of our footing on the heather.

“Oi, Lyons!” Our neighbour Mr Gaffney pulled up his horse short in front of the Captain impudently, forcing him to do the same. “What’s the matter with your hounds? The cat got in the kennel, didn’t it? Where’s their trail?”

“There isn’t one,” I answered, preoccupied with Cleto. “The tiger lost them in the rain and it hasn’t come back. It should be wounded.”

Gaffney raised his eyebrows at my speaking up. The groundskeeper was more concerned with the content. “Tiger?” he repeated and the Captain settled his butterscotch eyes on me too.

I was aware again of sticking out. A rich gentleman, a working fellow, and an Army Captain were still three Yorkshiremen when it came down to it. Contrast me, the boy here on a kindness.

I swallowed. “There’s no cat so large,” I said: truthfully, too, though that was not how I knew. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything else, sir, however ridiculous it sounds. And I’m sure it does.”

“A tiger,” Gaffney repeated, more amused than bemused. He was a sportsman and to him this was sport. The Captain looked at him through half-lidded eyes, but Gaffney was too blooded himself to mind an Army Captain’s opinion, so went on, “What a bedevilled idea. It’d be a stranger to these parts, to be certain.”

Like me
, I thought.

The cat followed me every night now. His stripes rippled like a hypnotic illusion when I closed my eyes, sometimes to find myself wearing them. I don’t know when I started thinking of it as a “he,” but it might have been when I found myself sitting up in bed and the tiger sitting up in the doorway watching me. Its eyes were dilated black in the near-darkness. Its tail flicked back and forth behind it like an angry snake.

“You killed the dogs,” I said.

He smiled. How can a tiger smile? But he did, and I knew that he was, too.

“You couldn’t have been hungry,” I said, angry. “There are sheep here for miles. But you killed the dogs.”

“I was tired of their noise,” he purred, curling his tail around his great brutish feet. “I don’t lie. Men lie to make themselves feel better about the things they do. Tigers destroy what ails them. And they feast.”

I understood him so well and saw him so clearly outlined in the doorway that I was sure I was not dreaming. But he didn’t kill me; he turned and padded off into the hall and I woke up in the morning with the door as closed and latched as I’d left it.

The next week I was awoken by a furious knocking and the butler’s voice. I knew what he was after before I opened my eyes, because I’d seen it happen.

“The master’s putting together a hunt, boy,” he said. “Go, go—quickly now!”

My tiger was no longer merely wild, but a man-eater. Mr Burroughs had been found dead on the stones of the open gallery in his manor house where he liked to smoke. I knew because I’d been there and seen him surprised, then running briefly because cats like to play, then bleeding. He was fairly wretched to the last of it. I watched him die with disappointment and contempt.

I washed up in the basin. I looked in the mirror and wondered why my eyes weren’t slitted in the light.

Mr Burroughs, pitiful irritating Mr Burroughs with his endless talk of the Orient. Had he really touched a man-eater? He had now. I hated the Orient, hated Malaya, hated myself and everything I brought here; I wished desperately to turn myself in, but for what? They’d put me in a sanitarium and then nothing could help me.

I answered the Captain’s summons instead. I felt like I was walking to the gallows. He, by contrast, was taut and alive; he’d recovered his spirits since the deaths of his dogs, and far from destroyed, he was flushed and lively and glowing with anticipation. He wasn’t fond of Burroughs, I knew, so I supposed he planned to save his condolences for the widow. His anger about the man’s death seemed to be fixed to a very sharp point, aimed directly at the cat. A tiger’s skin was one of those missing from his game room wall.

It occurred to me that he finally believed in the beast. Of course it was immature of me to resent that he hadn’t just taken my word. But I did, so really, neither of us was thinking about poor old Burroughs at all.

I didn’t hate Burroughs. Neither did the Captain. But I had to admit that I didn’t miss him.

It was strange to feel like the murderer of a man you literally could not have murdered. It was even stranger to cease caring about it for the time being. I found myself saddling up all the men, who were all ignoring me, including the Captain—valets became invisible at times like this—and our cocksure neighbour Sebastian Gaffney nearly cuffed me at one point, but I avoided his ire and we were off with the dogs. Riding with them was exhilarating; I wondered what I would do if I encountered the tiger. Would it recognize me? Was I mad?

No one there had tracked a tiger before, but the Captain discussed some common-sense strategy with the other men: “shoot for the head no matter what,” one of them was saying, “it may kill some of the dogs first but let the dogs distract it, and then we’ll drag the damned thing in and see who the Devil we have to blame for its being here—”

But I had walked with the tiger in his vanishing stripes and I was unsure of our prospects. Before we reached the ridge above Burroughs’ house, the dogs were giving the howl they did when they lost a trail and the tracks were gone.

“Damn you, Lyons,” Gaffney snapped, bringing his mount around, “Tomorrow I’m calling the Mayor and he’s going to send for a game hunter.”

Cleto was nervous, I could feel her shifting. I put my hand in her mane and looked to the Captain, but the Captain didn’t have any answers and I realized I was going to have to decide what to do.

That night I didn’t dream, not even passingly. The tiger let me be. The moonlight did not, though; it was particularly bright around the hour of two-o’clock and I still woke. I wondered who the tiger was going to kill next. My door was still latched, of course, but that didn’t mean anything and was small comfort to my nerves: he’d come in and out with impunity, like he was invisible to everyone but me.

I stared at my face in the mirror and I was finally certain of it.

I sat with my head in my hands for quite a time. And then I dressed and belted my rifle to my back and pulled on my boots and set off on foot into the mist and heather.

On the grounds of the Gaffney estate, in the garden where Mr Gaffney would go for his walks and entertain his arrogant perspectives on politics and modern man out loud to his guests, I found what I expected to find. I was less frightened than I imagined I would be, because it was difficult to be frightened at the sight of your constant companion, whom you saw night after night and day after day. He visited me in my bedroom, after all. He knew me better than anyone else here.

Gaffney had been dead for some time, because the Captain had already consumed most of him by the time he looked up at me. I advanced over the stones of the path, but when our eyes met I couldn’t go further. Absurdly, I felt ashamed.

There was blood all down his face and chest. He looked superbly poised. He arched his fine eyebrows at me.

“Are you really a tiger?” I asked with a measure of disbelief.

“It’s something you could call me. Once I was a wolf,” he said with a shrug. “But I went to Malaya and I have been a tiger ever since.”

I said nothing.

“We are beautiful creatures,” he said, baring his teeth to smile. They were flat and human. “Poor Burroughs wasn’t wrong. And we are wild. And men cannot comprehend us. But Burroughs insulted me.” He closed his mouth and annoyance clouded his handsome features, the lines between his butterscotch eyes. “I am English,” he said with coldness and pride.

He had no care for his fine hunting clothes, not his jacket or his jodhpurs, and they were all splattered with Sebastian Gaffney’s blood. Gaffney was beginning to stiffen. I didn’t care to look down at him again, but the smell of his entrails was drying out. Some of the gore was starting to make the Captain’s arms sticky, though. He wrinkled his nose in distaste and licked the back of his hand fastidiously.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

The Captain looked up. His tongue was red again. “I sired you,” he said. “When I came to see you I wondered if you’d be another wretched little Malay, simpering along like the others.” He smiled and his voice softened and came out a purr. “But no, you were a tiger.”

He crouched down over the corpse again and tore out more of Gaffney’s guts. I saw a man; I saw a cat, hunched over its kill, the speech was all the same to me. “Shed that skin, Jonathan,” he said, “and I will teach you how to feast.”

I could feel the crawl of my hairless skin, cold and vulnerable. I could feel the weakness of my muscles: a man’s muscles. I could feel the man’s weapon on my back, which was dead weight on a cat’s impatience. Captain Lyons had taught me how to use that weapon, a crucial skill for any young man to possess. The gun wasn’t important to him, though. He could shoot a gun if he liked, or slide adeptly off the back of a panicking horse and skewer a pig with a lance. What mattered was that I could hunt.

“You’re mistaken, Father,” I said as I slung the rifle off my back.

My father looked up at me.

I cradled the stock against my shoulder. “That isn’t my name,” I said and waited for the pig to charge me.

What Really Happened in Ficandula

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz