Tigerman

1. Pelican

ON THE STEPS of the old mission house, the Sergeant sat with the boy who called himself Robin, and watched a pigeon being swallowed by a pelican.

The whole business had come as a surprise to everyone involved, not least of all it seemed to the pelican herself, who had engaged in the attempt almost absently and now appeared to be wishing it was over and done. She was by nature a placid bird, slow to take wing and hard to rile, but the pigeon had been presuming on her good nature for several months now, scooting between her and the pieces of bread that people tossed in her direction as they wandered by, fluttering down to snatch treats of fish almost from her beak.

This morning, the pelican had had enough, and when the pigeon came between her and a bit of tuna, she had just opened to the fullest extent and engulfed the fish fragment and the pigeon both, to squawks of outrage and alarm from her antagonist. To the Sergeant’s eye, her swollen gullet had possessed at that moment the dreamy smugness of a trick well played, but he acknowledged inwardly that the faces of birds were impenetrable, so it could as well have been the foreknowledge of indigestion.

The boy had been very impressed, which is to say that – contrary to established practice – he put down the comic book he was reading on the wall beside him and stared, his attention entirely taken up by the drama unfolding. The Sergeant had never seen him do this before. Even last year, when the volcano had briefly erupted and ash and fire had been falling all around, and the Sergeant had scooped him up under one arm and run like hell for the shelter of a convenient cellar, the boy had retained a desperate grip on Planetary no. 7, and clamped his other hand to the elderly Nokia cellphone which he kept in his left hip pocket.

These items were the only evidence that someone else cared for him. The phone kept working and every so often he had a new comic, worn about the edges but with all its pages, and rarely more than three months out of date. Sometimes he carried a knapsack which contained several at once, when the supply had been irregular and he’d been hoarding two or three while waiting for the previous issue, so as not to have things happen out of order. He was very particular about continuity, he had told the Sergeant in so many words. Events should happen in their proper time.

‘Otherwise the story will not work,’ he said. ‘Totally bogus narrative structure. WTF?’ He actually spoke the letters ‘WTF’, and rolled his eyes.

That was just how it was. The boy’s English was self-taught and uneven, peppered with guest appearances from movies and TV, from online games whose players were in America, Europe and China. When he spoke he could shift in one moment from the manner of a too-serious Harvard freshman to that of a teenaged Shanghai gold-farmer sweating in a vast warehouse of machines.

On the topic of stories and character, he was particularly donnish and sniffy: ‘There must be development-over-time or it is just noise.’ And when it appeared that the Sergeant was not entirely following this line of discussion – it was one of their earlier conversations and the older man’s education in these matters was not yet properly begun – he had changed tack and demanded whether the Sergeant might have any lightweight twine that would work for a kite string. Which he had, and had happily given up.

The pigeon’s head disappeared, and the noises of protest from the pelican’s throat began to fade. The boy picked up the comic again and read with his usual intensity. The Sergeant leaned back against the stone in such a way as to suggest that the affair had been nothing special, though in all honesty he’d never seen anything to compare with it.

They were an unlikely twosome. The man was of medium height and craggy. He was still six months shy of forty, but he looked fatigued and even a little lost. His face was leathered by a life of actual soldiering in inclement places, and he had scars, about which he was self-conscious. Scars were supposed to be narrow white lines which looked raffish, not puckered worms slithering forever across your shoulder and itching abominably. They should be discreet, so that a man could boast about them to girls. He was thickset – and some of that was this recent bout of soft living, he had to concede, even if the rest was working heft – but he seemed to move carefully, as if the world was fragile and he didn’t want to break it.

The boy meanwhile was androgynous in the way of boys, with no fat on his body at all, and scruffy black hair cut short. He seemed to be interested in everything, had a restless intelligence which might even qualify as genius. The Sergeant guessed his age as between ten and fourteen, but could not narrow the range. There was dust on him always, and often grass stains or splashes of oil. His forearms were corded with child’s muscle from whatever work it was that he did – and it seemed he did a bit of everything – when he wasn’t reading comic books and spending time with his friend. He wore a long smock which was rather too big on his shoulders, so that on a bad day he looked like a match-stick man in a lampshade. In the late-afternoon light and under the cracked façade of the mission house, he resembled a monk, and the Sergeant expected him at any moment to lift his head and preach from the Book of Superman. Chapter 9, verse 21: the world shall know thee as a blur and as a sign upon the heavens, as a hope and an earnest of good things.

When the boy had finished reading, he looked up to assure himself that nothing of importance was taking place with the pelican, and then glanced over at the Sergeant. It was the hour of the day when they usually went to Shola’s and took tea. The island of Mancreu had very few customs left, but tea had somehow clung on, and of all the cafés and bars – and as far as these two were concerned the remaining living rooms and campsites and samovars as well – Shola’s made the best tea. Shola had a proper kettle and he didn’t leave the dregs in the pot or the scale in the water. He was a dandy and a gambler, but he knew tea.

The Sergeant had left his car at the fish market, ten minutes away along the seafront. This was also customary. Walking along the front allowed him to say hello to everyone. The afternoon greeting was important for social order. Like tea, a British sergeant taking his ease along the promenade was a solid, familiar thing. It said that there was still sense in the world. In theory, of course, the British presence here had been withdrawn three years ago, claims of sovereignty having been yielded to the NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu, NatProMan. The Sergeant was technically the senior officer (albeit non-commissioned) in the United Kingdom’s Mancreu Command, and as a side job he was senior consular staff member, too. ‘Just don’t issue any bloody passports without checking the rules,’ the actual Consul had told him as he left, ‘and for Christ’s sake don’t let anyone talk you into signing any treaties.’

‘Could I?’ the Sergeant asked.

‘No,’ the Consul said. ‘But you could make a frightful mess, so don’t. Take the keys, enjoy the house, and rest up. I understand that’s why you’re here. Just nod to everyone and don’t annoy Kershaw at NatProMan and this’ll all be done in a few months. They can’t keep the place around much longer. It’ll be nice for you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Saying hello, therefore, was the greater part of the Sergeant’s official function. He was to keep the consulate open and ensure that assistance was forthcoming to any British citizens who needed it, though this essentially meant calling the British Embassy in Yemen, and in any case had never actually been required. In many ways his real job was simply to occupy Brighton House, the sprawling, haunted old manse on a hill overlooking Beauville – the only town of any size on the island – which had in former times been the seat of colonial power. With its back to the mountains and the jungle, and its pocked face to the sea, Brighton House was almost identical to every British holding in the various candle ends of Empire – even if perhaps the coming destruction of the island did make it dolefully unique.

And so these were his days, week in and week out, and had been for more than two years: walk, take tea, and say hello. As the inheritor of what remained of British authority, he could additionally marry anyone who for some unlikely reason wanted him to officiate rather than a local priest, and he could facilitate adoptions and divorces for EU passport holders. Other than that, he could if he chose investigate local crime at the behest of a relevant person (it was unclear who was relevant so he tended to interpret this according to his lights) and he had the right to sit in on NatProMan Strategic Board meetings as representative of the United Kingdom – which had chosen firmly to abrogate such representation and therefore he was under orders not to.

Seen on the map, the island of Mancreu was a double arc, the shape of a seagull sketched by a child. The central segment, the beak, was thirty miles deep, the wingspan perhaps a hundred. Along the concave edges, mountains reared out of the restive water of the Arabian Sea. Mancreu was a first-and-last isle perched on the lip of the great mid-ocean ridge, midway between Socotra and the Chagos Islands. The people were an unbothered ethnic jumble of Arab and African and Asian, with the inevitable admixture of Europeans. France and Britain had held Mancreu alternately for centuries, with the French coming off considerably better, until late in the Victorian period it fell almost by accident under the Union Flag once more, and British it had remained thereafter, far flung and mentioned mostly in the footnotes.

To the north, the water grew pale green and warm. To the south, it turned blue, the bottom falling away into a frigid darkness which was the site of the indigenous population’s hell. The south coast was known to be peopled with demons: fish-finned men and feral women ruled by Jack the Wrecker, Mancreu’s resident fairy king. Bad Jack was capricious. If the milk turned, Jack had molested the cow. If you left honey on the doorstep, Jack might trade it for cash or rum or even a hunting rifle. He was known to rescue lost travellers, but also to rob them, and if a ship went down in bad weather, well, no doubt Jack had stood on the cliff with his lantern and seen it onto the rocks for spite. He was, in other words, the warm-water image of every bogeyman up and down the British coast, and likewise an object of knowing derision until the night drew in, after which people were discreetly more circumspect. Bad Jack, Mauvais Jacques, Jack Storm-eye – and even, by some strange twist, Jack of the Nine, the bitter memory of a colonial governor’s justice.

The name, Mancreu, had been given by mariners grateful for the sandy beaches on the lee side. Those early sailors thought the island was an image of the Grail carved into the face of the Earth. On embroidered pieces of canvas cloth, sometimes crude, sometimes alarmingly intricate and ethereal, they showed Mancreu as the curved palms of the Virgin catching the blood of Christ. In Beauville, this perception was still a matter of known fact. Elsewhere in the world it was less well understood, but from time to time a ship out of North Africa would put in, crewed by tyro seamen from missionary towns baked dry and starving, and somewhere near the bow would be a benediction in French:

Hail, Madonna of the Gull’s Wing. Hail, Madonna. Let your mark be upon us sinners, and your voice upon the deep. Bid the blue water roll softly. Speak to the clouds and hold their thunder. Guard us from men of ill-intent and from plagues and sorrows. Hail, Madonna. Hear us, Madonna. Bring us home.

There was still a scrivener’s office on the harbour front, where a holy sign-painter hung his papal warrant. He was an albino – or something like it – named Raoul. He was subject to strange infirmities, either in consequence of his condition or from overuse of magic inks, but was said in person to be magnetic, like a poet or a prophet. He was also said to have been a mercenary, a leader of men, or perhaps a great pirate before the calling found him and the writing of God’s word on ships became his life. The Sergeant had never ventured into his lair. It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.

The scrivener’s beautiful daughter was famous around Beauville, and famously out of bounds. White Raoul’s girl: what might the father do, should her heart be broken? Or worse: should harm befall her? What might he not do? Take down his sign, for sure, and close his shop – but what else? Might he not write maledictions with the same strength as blessings? Or call upon whatever armies he once commanded to avenge her tears? Might not the papal warrant, conferred in the name of mercy, give equal prominence in God’s eyes to a father’s rage? Beautiful Sandrine must live a lonely life, uncourted and unkissed, because it was not known where Raoul’s disapprovals might begin. The Sergeant had never seen her. He wondered sometimes if she were a myth, a sort of running joke on the big foreigner. More likely he’d walked past her a dozen times and not realised it, and her beauty was more to be found in its own fame than in her face.

‘Tea,’ the boy said firmly.

They walked together in silence to the dented, oil-stinking old Land Rover which served as the Sergeant’s official military conveyance. He unlocked his own door and threw the keys across the roof to the boy – if the car had ever possessed a central locking system it was long defunct – who caught them and let himself in, then ducked into the passenger seat and passed them back without looking. The older man felt the keys land in his palm and inserted the right one into the ignition even as his foot pressed the brake. When the engine spluttered a little unwillingly and the cabin jerked they were neither of them caught off guard, and a mutual puff of air through pursed lips expressed disapproval of this automotive weakness.

The friendship he had with the boy was one of a small number the Sergeant had established on Mancreu. He had not expected to find any, but his tenure had endured far beyond original estimates and an infantryman alone was a profoundly unnatural thing. Infantry was by definition an army, a river of soldiers which washed up and over and could not be stopped. It was your family and your friends and the way you lived and most of all it meant you were never by yourself. Somewhat less so for an NCO, perhaps, whose responsibility it was to get the job done, harry and cajole the lads in the right direction, then haul them home again in one piece, so far as any of these things was possible. Rank made you a little bit a stranger, but also gave you new roles to fill: uncle, nursemaid, gaffer, big brother, pastor, best mate and headmaster – that was a sergeant. One thing you never were was short of conversation.

On Mancreu he had no platoon to look after. Brighton House was vast and empty. There were two ballrooms in the east wing, both dim and sheeted. On his third day he had unwrapped a leather armchair in one of the drawing rooms so that he could sit, and discovered over those early weeks that he rather liked the quiet. In fact, he could spend ages in it. He had found it hard at first to listen without tracking things, without placing them and knowing them for friend or enemy, but gradually that automatic classification had faded away and he was left with rustling leaves and waves and a cowbell somewhere far off, and the idling of a fisherman’s outboard in the choppy water beneath the cliff. He walked the endless corridors on the upper floors alone, wondering what the rooms had seen. There was a local bird with a quite infuriating cry like a sneeze, and he amused himself by saying ‘bless you’ whenever he heard it. Occasionally he thanked himself on behalf of the bird. After a while he found that he could forget the clock and even dismiss memory and awareness almost entirely, fade into the scenery and let his senses be everything that there was of him. It was wonderful.

On other days, though, the lack of amiable chatter drove him mad. The sound of his footsteps bounced around inside his head as if he was Brighton House itself, empty and dry and dismal and waiting for a renewal which would never come. He might, from time to time, visit his French counterpart on the island for a drink. Dirac, representing the absence of Gallic interest in doings on Mancreu, was good company, but quite often he was busy because he had several lovers in Beauville and was always on the lookout for more. The Sergeant supposed that this was in keeping with appropriate French post-colonial behaviour, just as walking the beat and taking tea was for himself. All the same, on those Sargasso days he needed company, and – this being the shape of things and he being who he was – it was inevitable that he should have become involved with the Beauville Boxing Club. A boxing ring was a place where strangers could get to know one another, where awkwardness did not figure. You didn’t have to be polite, or funny, or diplomatic. You didn’t even have to be a decent boxer, although he was. You just had to show some good heart and sooner or later the club would take you in or it wasn’t a proper club. There were always personalities, of course, but they came after the boxing, they happened outside the ring. Those things tended to resolve themselves, especially if you didn’t have much to prove.

And it was just as inevitable, given his official position and his advanced age in the eyes of the local champions, that upon his arrival at the cool half-basement which served the Beauville club as its headquarters he should instantly be accorded the status of referee. He had intended to do a little sparring here and there, even arrange some friendly fights to keep himself fresh, but there was almost no one who would get in the ring with him. It was a no-win situation for the younger boxers. If he was a poor fighter, they might lay out the Brevet-Consul, a middle-aged geezer with a dodgy guard and weak ribs. Sure, there’d be no real consequences, but they had no way of knowing that, and in any case it would be a piss-poor sort of victory to carry around. On the other hand it was not impossible – not impossible at all, given the build of the man and the power in his legs – that they might lose, get flattened by a fellow who could just as well be a senior citizen as far as the streets of Mancreu were concerned. Neither option was appealing to the muscular fishermen and farmers who boxed here.

Which left him with Shola the café-owner and Pechorin of NatProMan.

Shola was tall and lean and an outrageous boaster. To hear him tell it he had loved every pretty woman between Bangkok and Tehran and all of them missed him terribly. He dressed like a pirate, or a drug dealer from an old American movie, and he worried a great deal about his hair, but he could hit fast and straight when you weren’t expecting it. He was an enjoyable opponent, filled with humour and ready enough to step back before a bout got past the point of good fun. His torso – like all of them he boxed without a shirt – was enviably beautiful, hard lines and ripples. He spoke with a faint French-North African lilt, but he was Mancreu born, his family washed up in the early 1900s, and a century later they were still here.

His manner invited confidences and friendship. ‘But when will you go?’ the Sergeant had asked, as they soaked in the club’s whirlpool after thirty minutes of ducking and jabbing. By the upside-down logic of Mancreu it was the first question between new friends, like a schoolboy’s ‘what’s your favourite team?’ and with the same cautious offer of alliance.

Shola rolled his head along his endless shoulders, and sighed. ‘No idea. When it is time, you know? When it is good and time. But for me there is nowhere to go, now. No other island like this in all the blue oceans of the world. Caribbean is all over hotels. Maldives are sinking and half of the people want women to wear veils. No music, because that might lead to dancing. I will go to El Hierro, maybe. It’s in the Atlantic. Very long way. But I think when it’s time I’ll go and see El Hierro. Maybe me and that island could fall in love a little bit. Always room for the right bar on the right island. There’s carnival there. And lizards, man! Big lizards!’ He held his hands apart, and grinned.

‘But when?’

Shola shrugged. ‘Not today. There’s still people here today. And not tomorrow, either. I have bookings for lunch. Maybe next week, if I get around to it.’ Which he obviously wouldn’t.

‘Don’t wait too long.’ The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic. The Sergeant had shed the perception as far as he could, but the traces of it occasionally embarrassed him even now. He cringed.

‘Lester,’ Shola said happily, ‘you are an old woman. You know that? But you box like a rhinoceros. They teach you that at sergeant school? I think I have broken my hand on your head.’ And then the laugh, a huge laugh which said: yes, of course, I will be your friend.

The other man, Pechorin, could not have been more different. He was a squat Ukrainian, and sullen, as if whatever place he went offended him on arrival. He was not so much a boxer as a hitter. After a few tentative engagements he could be guaranteed to lose his temper, and his hallmark combination would come out: double jab, cross, hook hook hook and on and on until the hooks became haymakers, and he could never understand how everyone slipped the last punch and got behind his guard. The Sergeant did not often box with Pechorin, but when it was inevitable he adopted a sort of mirror posture, never letting the man land anything on him, never provoking him, until the referee declared a winner on points. There was no point asking him when he would leave, because he was here on deployment. He would leave when he was ordered to, and he cared nothing one way or the other. In any case, Pechorin was not comfortable in the whirlpool with other men’s bodies on display, so he was never there.

Shola’s café was where the Sergeant had first encountered the boy. It had been the second week after his official investiture as Brevet-Consul, and his second visit to the place after meeting its owner in the ring. His arrival this time was the intentional sort of accident. He had been ambling along the shady streets on what was either a reconnaissance or a stroll, thinking he just might pop in but then again perhaps he wouldn’t, but as he approached to within a few steps of the door and considered walking on by, Mancreu performed one of its seasonal lurches and the rain started: explosive golf balls of water, gentle at first but growing rapidly more weighty and numerous. He glanced up, saw no relief, and dashed inside.

He was greeted by a burst of mirth – a drenched foreigner is always hilarious – and ushered in. Shola himself had been absent that day, but the barman, Pero, had known him for a friend of the boss and bawled for the good kettle. The result had been a pungent caravan tea, bitter and startlingly good. Better, in fact, than any he could remember drinking pretty much anywhere, although some part of him wondered if that might not have more to do with his memory and his recent history than the tea itself.

He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child’s toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He stretched backwards over his chair, and when he looked down again he noticed vaguely a boy, also drinking tea, sitting in the corner with a comic book. Beside the boy was a big, blocky mobile telephone in grey plastic. It was so old it had a visible aerial.

The Sergeant drank his first pot dry very quickly and ordered another, and some bread and butter. These also turned out to be excellent – the butter was a pale vanilla froth which spread onto the sourdough and lifted it to something like the level of the tea.

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.

An army chaplain had once told him that she had spent years trying to find the right form of words for the bereaved, only to realise that the clichés were the best. Widows and orphans didn’t want to be comforted. They wanted to be recognised.

‘You say “it was very quick, he didn’t suffer,”’ the chaplain had told him. ‘You say “I’m sorry for your loss.” If you’re in a hospital and there’s one of those silences which needs breaking you say “I understand, at the end, he felt no pain” and then you fuck off and let them get on with it. If you want to get punched in the eye you say “he’s in a better place.”’

So the bonfires proceeded in something approximating an orderly fashion, which was almost worse than if they hadn’t, and the Sergeant had become a sort of necessary thing: you couldn’t have a real Leaving without him. The Last Consul had to be there to set the official seal on it, though it was clear to no one whether the seal meant excommunication or absolution.

Staying had not been dignified with a capital letter. No one was Staying. Staying meant dying when the island died, and then there’d be nothing left to die for.

In this exchange regarding the buying and the drinking of tea, though, Shola and the boy had just agreed that they would not Leave for another month. In general, neither showed any inclination to Leave at all; Shola at least acknowledged that one day he must, though that day was forever retreating towards the horizon, but the boy did not. He lived in a perpetual now, and his vigorous objection to the island’s future cleansing was twinned with a stalwart denial that it would ever come to pass. The Sergeant suspected that would have to be dealt with soon. He had an image of the boy, when the day came, chaining himself to the pilings of the Beauville jetty, and NatProMan soldiers cutting him free with saws. Better to find a soft exit strategy.

Shola seemed to be thinking along similar lines. He glanced at the Sergeant and for a moment the fatigue in him was palpable. This time, the Sergeant understood, he had had to think seriously about going. He couldn’t be making money. Couldn’t really be breaking even. The more people left, the more farms and fishing boats weren’t making food, the more expensive everything was and the fewer customers he had. And when Shola went, something would happen. Beauville would shift in some indefinable way from being a place which could recover to a place which was dying – not because of him alone, but because dozens of other Sholas, good-hearted men and women who had done their best and made it bearable for everyone else, would also go. Because it was finally time.

‘What’s it called?’ the Sergeant asked, pointing at the pot.

‘The label says “Heaven’s Limitless Canon”,’ Shola replied. ‘I think they mean “cannon”, like a gun, but who knows? You reckon it’s worth drinking?’

‘It is.’

They had another round and the conversation shifted gratefully to the merits of taking various biscuits with this tea of teas. Beneseffe the Portmaster was called to adjudicate between the ginger nut and the plain digestive, a matter which required the gravest of scrutiny, although Beneseffe, more usually a traditionalist in such matters, unexpectedly held out for the chocolate Hobnob.

It was heartening for the Sergeant to find other people talking like this with the boy, as if he were seeing their friendship in a warm, homely mirror. He felt a species of pride, too, on hearing his young friend give as good as he got in the fierce biscuit debate, concocting ever more outrageous arguments in favour of his case. Then he wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn’t. But they had silence, and not many people had that.

The taking of tea concluded and the boy having departed on night-time business of his own, the Sergeant returned to Brighton House alone.

Three years ago the residence had been a blinding lighthouse white, trimmed with yellow at the corners and along the gutters. Then the first of the Discharge Clouds had washed over Brighton House, and everything died except the tomatoes. On the mountainsides, the red rain had just burned the leaves and run rapidly away towards the sea. The slow-growing hardwoods had survived, albeit bent and scarred, and the underbrush had returned twice as thick. But here, on the flat croquet lawns and manicured terraces, in the planters and window boxes, the concentrated goop sat in great swirling lakes and wrought havoc. The dry season’s dust had stuck to the paint and left the building veined and tinted like a giant cheese. The gardeners had packed up and gone with the diplomats, taking their ladders and their shears and their green aprons from Keen & Ryle of Chichester. The veinous Gorgonzola manse was fossilised, standing alone behind the bare earth that had been the rose gardens. The grounds were left to what might come. The sturdy Tumblers and Black Princes and Purple Russians, the Nebraska Weddings, the Soldakis and the Cherokees, the Brandywines and Radiator Charlies – a whole General Assembly of edible nightshades – saw their evolutionary moment and took over. By the time the Sergeant was handed the keys and told he should make himself entirely at home, because there was no prospect of anyone ever returning to Brighton House, the seaward side of the building was swaddled in vast, overripe tomatoes vying for sunlight and moisture. They rustled when the wind blew, and squeaked as taut, glistening skin rubbed against hirsute stems and flopping, musty leaves. When it rained, it sounded like men on the march, and when the sun came out you could hear them growing, whimpering and shuddering upwards, expanding, bursting, and starting again.

He parked the Land Rover at the back as he always did, and went in by the staff entrance. The rear hall was dark, and rather than turning on the lights he chose to walk along it in the gloom. After a moment, his right hand trailed along the wall and caught the door of the little bedroom he had assigned to himself. It was just behind the staff kitchen, so he didn’t have to bother with the central heating. He just kept the old Rayburn stove alight and used it for water, cooking and warmth. It gave him a pleasant sense of familiarity, a translucent memory of hundreds of evenings spent here and thousands more in his mother’s kitchen long ago – when, like the boy, he had been a reader of comic books. Although back then comics were printed in two or three colours on grainy paper, and superheroes fought bank robbers rather than aliens.

Where the boy lived, and with whom, was one of the intimacies to which the Sergeant was not privy, and the boy became politely deaf when quizzed. It was agreed between them that such issues were not necessarily any of the Sergeant’s business, and he did not press. All the same, in the back of his mind there was a need to know. It was something he had absorbed in Afghanistan: on deployment you are always in combat. Even when no one is attacking you, the battle goes on. Things happen behind the horizon and beneath your feet; the whole landscape is your enemy and the people can change their minds about anything minute to minute. In the high valleys they don’t believe in September 11th, not because they don’t credit human wickedness but because they don’t honestly believe in skyscrapers. Half of them think the soldiers they’re fighting now are just Soviets who never left, and a few of those believe the Russians are just a cat’s paw for the Brits – those who aren’t waiting for the Queen to come in fullest glory and give them whatever their grandfathers’ grandfathers were promised by Victoria, and as far as they’re concerned you could walk to Buckingham Palace in a couple of weeks and HRH would happily roast you a goat for dinner. It’s not ignorance and it’s not stupidity, it’s another planet and you live there as much as they live here. Spend a while on that planet, and you get so that you don’t like gaps in your knowledge, even if trying to fill them in is rude.

He sighed, and peered at his face in the mirror: a young face, really, if slightly foxed. And yet, at the same time, the face of a too-old man. He had slipped from one generation to another without feeling the change, and this was abruptly the face of a father, not a son. A childless father, to be sure, but all the same he was exhausted and the fatigue never quite seemed to go away however much he slept. He wondered if this was what it was like at forty, if you just never quite felt yourself again, slowed down and down and down.

He rolled into bed and closed his eyes, hoping that tonight would be a peaceful one, and knowing he would dream of something, because you always did.

Unless, he growled into the pillow an hour later, you didn’t sleep at all. Then you didn’t dream, you just got heavier and more uncomfortable, and finally you got up again. He was too tired to read, too bored to stay awake, and yet here he was. Excessive tea-drinking, most likely, or maybe just Mancreu. There was a wind they said made you wakeful – it had a name he could never remember. Mancreu had dozens of winds, each with a different supposed effect. Wind to turn the milk and wind to drive the fish away, wind to sigh in the trees and wind to provoke infidelity. There were spirits which went with them. He wondered what these old ghosts thought about the state of things now. Probably, they took a dim view.

He got out of bed and put on his dressing gown. It was a light brown fleece, ordered online with a pair of Haflinger slippers. The slippers were more comfortable, coarse yet cosy wool. Haflinger should make dressing gowns. This one was too warm and overly clinging, like too much ketchup on your chips.

He got a torch from his bedside and wandered the hallways, looking for something, not knowing what it was. A place to sit. Almost, he went to the cypher room to read the incoming messages, but caught himself. He’d lose his grip on sleep entirely sitting in front of that glowing screen, watching the British establishment’s own news ticker sharing celebrations and horrors from all across the globe. Instead he wandered into the glass conservatory on the ocean side and peered out at the night. It was cold, but that suited him. He sat down and stared out over the garden to the water and the curve of the waves.

Around about the time White Raoul the scrivener was born, Mancreu entered the modern age. A Franco-Dutch chemical company built a plant in the rough, dry backlands on the unsheltered south side. The people thought it a good deal: useless, grim country exchanged for enough hard cash to build a cinema, dredge the harbour every ten years, and lift the weight of living in an isolated, hopeless Eden. The chemical men found caverns of fresh water deep down, filtered by rock from the ocean, and that was even better: they pumped it out to quench the thirst of the workers, and up to the north Beauville grew and prospered and became a proper waystation for shipping in the Arabian Sea. When the time came to worry about waste, the solution was obvious: into the empty spaces the clear water left behind they pressed the by-products of their industrial toil, until one day in early 2004 the ground shook and the tectonics changed, and magma rose under the caverns.

In retrospect: a hoarding from White Raoul’s spidery hands would have been the very thing. The devil was at play. The brimstone oven deep beneath Mancreu cooked and boiled, and in its fiery heart new, strange compounds were birthed and recombined. Dismal substances unknown and unimagined steamed in the deep, and seeped and stained through cracks towards the surface, ever upward into a huge chasm. There they made a balloon of weirdest muck, the fine membrane of earth stretched tighter and tighter until a farmer, ploughing, penetrated the upper crust and was fired some thousands of feet into the air and fully two miles sideways, falling like a burning angel in the middle of the Beauville shanty. Behind him came a warm mist which itched, but nothing more.

That first Discharge Cloud stripped half the island of its pines and shrubs, and rippled the white stones of Beauville like waxworks too close to a flame.

Seven months later came the second Cloud: harmless to humans, but death to rodents, and the Beauville high valleys were filled with the stench of dead marmots. Seagulls and spiders grew fat on the corpses.

The third Cloud caused fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and licence across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language – Broca’s Area, he said – was missing. A grown woman, caught on the mountainside in the first exhalation of the Cloud, was thought to have lost all function in that region as well, but he could not find her to verify it. It was sad and frightening, he said, if true. All the same, his parent company was greatly interested by the Cloud as a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and filed patents.

The geologists said that the cauldron beneath Mancreu was still boiling, and showed no signs of emptying. The strange murk within was protean, they said. No telling what it would do next. Best to seal it up, if possible – but they had no suggestions as to how this might be achieved. One bold fellow also calculated that the amount of chemical released already exceeded what had been pumped in. He plumbed the depths with an improvised dipstick seven hundred yards long, and said he thought the solution was probably organic, even biological.

And so it proved. A team of Japanese xenobiologists – more used to guessing about the nature of life on other planets and studying strange fissures on the ocean floor – ascertained that the whole process had created a colony of bugs in the deep strata. These protozoa were transforming plain minerals into fuel for the ongoing chemical reaction, and other varieties of microbe then converted waste and water into food for the first. A perfect example of the magnificent adaptability of life, the scientists said. They were extremely impressed, almost to the point of being joyful. A worthy foe. Learned papers were written, but answers – solutions – came there none.

Indeed, the team was still here, a colony of perky boffins who lived apart in a village of seismographs and mobile centrifuges housed in a village of old-style Quonset huts and modern geodesic domes. Of all of them, the Sergeant only really knew the project chief, Kaiko Inoue, who came into Beauville by jeep every other Thursday and bought food and a few small bottles of imported whisky. The Japanese team loved whisky, had fetishised it beyond anything any Scot would ever think of, could name its lineages and recite the ideal chemical make-up of the peat and the perfect conditions for the casking, and had actually developed a special and very grave formal ceremony for its distribution. They had invited the Sergeant once, and he had sat on his heels for three hours and watched, at first with amusement and then impatience and then with a sort of awe as they moved through precise, elegant motions and the scent of the Talisker drifted up and entranced him. By the time he took his first sip it was like heaven and his aching muscles were absolutely forgotten, and that one glass without ice or water was the best he had ever had. Inoue had begun to make whisky here herself. She called it Island End Uisge Beathe, and it would only be drunk when Mancreu was in ashes. She would sit in Osaka with her team in ten years, or twenty, in the home of her father who was also a xenobiologist, and together they would break the seal on one of the casks and they would drink, and only then would she know whether she had wasted her time.

‘You must come, Lester,’ Inoue had said. ‘You must come! We will cry for this place, but also we will dance the Funky Chicken.’ And she had actually demonstrated, to his delight and the absolute bewilderment of her interns. The Sergeant was not always at ease with scientists, but Inoue was different. She was graceful and she made him feel at home in his skin. She was joyful, and from time to time she painted her fingernails in bright bubblegum colours.

Twenty-two weeks after she delivered her initial report, a new Cloud was belched up by the island and a freak of weather carried it over the sea to the east. Two thousand in the Maldives were stricken with a blight which caused temporary blindness and tinted the skin green with chlorophyll. Governments convened. The chasm must be cleansed. Quite obviously, they told the avid press room, it was dangerous. Should the symbiotic bugs spread into the oceans, the world might rapidly become unfit for human life. Or something might emerge from Mancreu’s gullet which ate plastic, or silicon, or devoured crude oil, and the bases of industrial civilisation might perish. If the mountain went quiet for a few months, that just meant it was biding its time.

A new classification for the crisis was formulated. Mancreu was made the first ever UNO-WHO Interventional Sacrifice Zone, a place so wretchedly polluted that it must be sterilised by fire. In acknowledgement of the people of the island and their proud heritage and culture, the execution was deferred pending a final assessment. In the meantime, Mancreu became a kind of Casablanca, possessed of an uncertain legal status by virtue of the sentence of death, expropriated from its notional sovereign by the international will, gladly yielded up to its doom, yet still there and officially claimed by no one.

Then the Black Fleet gathered, and the process of sterilisation remained on hold.

On hold, like the Sergeant himself, who had arrived some time later and should by now have gone home. Well, he was in no hurry. In the night of Brighton House, he listened to the sound of the tomatoes beyond the glass. In amongst them somewhere there was a creature, probably a feral cat. He watched the moon trace its path across the sky and realised that the chill was seeping into him. His feet and lower legs were cold, and so was his nose. He felt a brief, tiny rumble in the ground, as if the island were a dog dreaming of rabbits. The windows rattled, and then it was over. A three-pointer, if that.

Abruptly, he wanted to be back in bed, and when he lay down the mattress was somehow a perfect fit.