Tigerman

16. Houseguests

IT HAD BEEN quiet enough during the day, the Beauville mob sleeping off its rage on stolen mattresses dragged out onto the street or in the bedrooms of departed neighbours, but as dusk fell fresh fires were already being kindled in the shanty and the weird gabble of the riot began whispering on the wind. The rage was building again, the furious rejection of an intolerable circumstance. The Sergeant could feel it in his teeth, in the line of his jaw: the cold wash of coming violence. It whispered between men and women camped in town squares, in ditches and ruined houses. It sparked and glittered. In another place it would have meant revolution and civil war, but here there was nowhere to put it, nothing to be done with it which was even as constructive as tearing down statues, so it zinged back and forth and grew, and as it grew it grew uglier.

He stood on the flat roof at the edge of the wing and peered over the lip of the house down towards Beauville. From up here – the highest point of the building – one could see the whole of the town. When the wind came up he could smell the sea, and the stink of burning.

Beauville would burn again tonight unless someone stepped in, and there was no one to do it. Kershaw would not, and perhaps he was right that he could not. NatProMan might become the occupying enemy as opposed to the tolerated presence of the outer world. The Fleet was even more disbarred, had its denizens had any desire to intervene. Beneseffe’s little army was simply too small, there were no NGOs to mediate, and the global press pack was getting great TV out of the collapse. How often did anyone get to cover an actual apocalypse, however local and small? Crisis was commonplace; endings were not.

The thought did not make him happy, and even less so because he was in some senses not affected. Up here on the hill, Brighton House was a long walk from the centre. You could herd a mob – if you had, say, quad bikes and a willingness to deploy violence – but you couldn’t push them to walk an hour in the dark. That was a little too cold and considered. Brighton House was a symbol of the good old days as much as the bad ones, which was why Lester Ferris had been made Mancreu’s bobby on the beat by acclamation.

So he was safe enough so long as he kept his head down, and when it was all done – in a fortnight, he guessed, not much more – he would go home and he would have some photographs and probably quite soon a new job, and that would be that.

But down there it would be bad, and really the end of the island would bring no release. Mancreu’s last ten thousand would be evacuated and resettled and they’d be a people dispossessed and perhaps unwelcome, in places they did not know. He was a tourist, a spectator, as surely as Kathy Hasp and her pals. He might help the boy – though how, he did not know, and he had no notion of what Sandrine meant to that plan: would he have to adopt them both? Fake a marriage with her? – but that would be the extent of it, and a pisspoor extent it was. And he was a man under authority, specifically instructed to stay out of the way. In films that might not mean anything, but for all his adult life he had taken orders and it counted with him. It was a piece of who he was, a thing made not of duty or queen and country, but self.

He realised guiltily that he was picking and choosing. For the boy, he had done things far outside what he was permitted. He just didn’t care about the people below him enough to break the rules. They were far away and he didn’t know their names.

He went inside and looked in on the Witch, and she shrugged. Her patient was stable. White Raoul was sleeping in a chair. Nothing to report.

He found the old man from the street of the card-players reading one of the Consul’s books in the kitchen, a Russian novel he hadn’t heard of.

He knew he was avoiding the boy, and the conversation they must have. He went to look for him.

The boy was watching television in the spare room, inevitably the news coverage of the island. Kathy Hasp frowned out of the screen, her fluid, Antipodean English lending her authority and a species of gravitas while the strangely emphatic cadence of network news tried to take it away: ‘…a grim night here on Mancreu and most likely another one to come, with more arson already going on around me – although it’s hard to know if you can really call it that on an island without law, and without a future. These are the actions of a people on the edge…’ Her eyes flicked away to the horizon, but the cameraman had his back to the Fleet. It was just an editorial decision, a question of what was news. Rioting, yes. Shipping, no.

The Sergeant lowered himself to the floor, his shoulders resting against the side of the bed. He looked straight ahead, towards the television but not at it, and the boy thumbed the remote. Hasp was replaced by a cadaverous Brit the Sergeant had met once or twice, who stooped like a stork and seemed on the screen to take joy in nothing. In person he was a voracious eater and drinker with a high, startling laugh which seemed to erupt from the narrow face. He must have been up on the roof of the old prison house last night: the footage was excellent, like something from Tahrir or Beirut, all darkness and flame. Again, the Fleet was no part of the picture: ‘…pall of smoke hanging over the town, and the very real possibility of more violence to come…’

The television went mute, and the Sergeant realised the boy was looking at him, and waiting. There was no time in this moment for his hesitations and his fears, so he went ahead.

‘Your mum. Your mother. I know who she is now,’ the Sergeant said. ‘I mean, I know the story, or something very close. Arno found it all out, I never managed it. You must have known I was trying.’ And that was true, he realised. The boy could not have missed the inquiries, would have been informed by the same network of gossips from which he got all his local knowledge. And he had neither helped nor hindered. But is that yes, or no? Don’t try to decode. Just talk. It would all be so much easier if everyone talked more.

He realised he had stalled. ‘I don’t know where she is. Is she safe? Do you want,’ he swallowed, ploughed on, ‘do you want to bring her here?’ It was very hard to say. Please bring the person who owns your loyalty into my house. The person whose claim on you I cannot hope to match. But he was not in the business of claiming the boy, had promised himself this was not about possessing him. It was about uplifting, about supporting. He would give what he could, take what was offered, and that was all.

The boy looked at him for a long moment, and his face was inscrutable. Was this measurement or verdict? Was this silence a judicial sentence, or the time taken to uncover his own response?

He went back to looking at the silent television, the endlessly looping images of his burning home. The Sergeant sat with him and let his fear and his hope drain away into the floor, until they were both just there, in the room. In a moment, something would happen, but not yet. For now, the offer was there, and all its capacity for hurt.

‘She is there,’ the boy said, tonelessly. He pointed at the shanty. ‘In the south side, at the edge. Sometimes she is there. Sometimes in the mountains. She comes and goes.’ He named a street.

The Sergeant nodded. ‘Is she there at the moment?’

‘She wasn’t,’ the boy said. ‘But now she may be.’

‘Won’t she stay away?’ The Sergeant pointed at the screen.

‘No,’ the boy said. ‘The fires are pretty.’

‘Will she… will she be all right?’ Amidst the burning town.

‘No. Yes.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Unknown unknown, right? But she will not be kept safe. She does what she does. They will come to her house or they will not. Burn it or not. She will be there, she will flee, she will stay. Kswah swah.’

No, the Sergeant realised. Of course. He cannot compel her, in this or in anything. Anyone else he can bargain with, cajole and haggle. He can trade or finesse. But for her he has only himself, and he is a currency she does not recognise.

‘Like hell.’ The words slipped out of him, and he smiled to take the sting. ‘I’ve dealt with refugees before, who didn’t want to come. Done medical evacuation, too. Done it all. You can’t pick her up and pop her over your shoulder because that would be disrespectful and I understand that. But I bloody can, if that’s what it takes.’

He saw the boy’s eyes widen, as if this was an answer he had never considered, and perhaps it was. Then the Sergeant’s shoulder was once more being hugged, fiercely and breathlessly, and his sleeve was wet with tears. You do a lot of crying, don’t you? he thought, wonderingly. But then, I suppose I did, too, when I was little. And wondered why he no longer did. It wasn’t as if the world was notably improved. Although here, now, with the boy looking to him for support in something so important, and accepting his help, perhaps the situation was all right, after all.

The doorbell rang, long and loud, and then again and again, with anger or urgency. Not rioters, he thought. They do not ring the bloody bell. Someone who respected his house. Inoue, or Kershaw, or even Pechorin.

But it was none of them, and when he opened the door the world was once again upside down.

‘It’s the only place, Lester,’ Dirac said.

The Frenchman stood on the stoop, and beyond him was a small woman with two children, both of them wearing makeshift bandages. The woman was coughing: smoke inhalation, but not terrible. Behind her was a man with a gash down one cheek, and behind him there was a family, and behind them more and more in a straggling line which wound away into the dusk.

The wounded of Beauville were looking for help. And for shelter from the gang, the Sergeant realised. It was medieval. When all else is lost, you go to the keep. He had set himself up for this: he had played the role of British Imperial person, and they had seen him do it and had not needed him. But now they did, and so here they were, and he must open the door and let them in or turn them away into a night filled with likely horrors. He felt the colour drain out of his face.

Dirac shrugged. ‘You’ve got room.’

Which he had, and orders to keep a low profile – but now that they were here, sending them off again would be a story. A better, louder one than just taking them in. No doubt Dirac must be seeing double, leading a snake of fleeing families to the dubious safety of a house which might not want them. And just as surely, he must know that the Sergeant could see the image too, and could not in face of it default, even if he had wished to. But this is trouble, real trouble. I can feel it coming.

The Sergeant stepped aside, and waved them in. ‘All the way through to the west wing,’ he said. ‘Get them settled in and I’ll turn on the power. The water won’t be hot for a few hours. Do they have food?’

‘Some.’

‘Bloody hell. How many?’

‘I did not count.’

The Sergeant threw his hands in the air. Dirac laughed. ‘That was almost French.’

‘I’ll give you French. Good evening, ma’am,’ he added automatically to the corpulent matron passing his threshold. ‘All the way down to your right and perhaps you’ll take charge of the bathroom facilities and make sure decency is observed?’

She nodded stoutly, and carried on.

The boy gazed with wide eyes at the incomers, as if they were something he had never imagined and could not now entirely account for.

‘If they fill up the west wing, shove them in the east one, we’ll have to board up the windows but it’s sound,’ the Sergeant said. ‘We’re keeping this floor for a hospital and the upper rooms here for storage and so on. No one goes in my room or yours, at all, and no one in the comms room or the bloody armoury unless I say so,’ and please let me not have to go that road, ‘and keep a space for the lady we were discussing close to you.’

The boy nodded. ‘And the hot Barracuda,’ he added firmly.

Dirac choked a little. The Sergeant stifled the desire to argue or to shout at both of them, and ran to the comms room.

‘This is Ferris for Africa.’

‘Hold, please. Put your thumb on the plate.’

The Sergeant did so.

‘Once more, please.’

‘Sonny, I will put my thumb somewhere so appalling your grandchildren will walk like Gloucester Old Spots. Get Africa and tell her I said it’s a codeword BOHICA.’

There was a suffused silence, and then Africa came on. ‘It’s me. He’s Googling that now, I can tell from the absolutely scandalised expression on his face. Why BOHICA?’

‘I have civilian refugees, locals.’

‘How many?’

‘Lots. A couple of hundred, maybe. Maybe more.’

There was a pause. ‘Fuck,’ Africa said meditatively.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And you’re letting them in because you have with your usual intelligence spotted the fact that keeping them out would be a front page we can all live without.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good boy.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘How did they come to this solution to their problems, Sergeant? Have you been thumbing the scales over there? Flying the flag?’

‘A member of an allied force took it into his head to bring them here. He feels it’s the safest place within reach of the town.’

‘An allied force? Not NatProMan, surely?’

‘France, ma’am.’

She snorted. ‘I should have known. All right, then. Continue to use your initiative, very discreetly. Take necessary steps. And yes, I will fall on you from a great height if you bollocks it up, so don’t. Familiar?’

‘Story of my life, ma’am.’

‘You and me both.’

Kathy Hasp arrived a few moments later on a Triumph motorcycle which must have been more than sixty years old. She rolled the bike directly into the shack which served Brighton House as a garage, tacitly claiming its security in the face of the desperate line of men and women queued up outside the door. There was a rifle carrier by the front tyre and Hasp had adapted this to hold a small digital video camera, which she slapped onto her shoulder as she walked over to the door. Her face was devoid of the overly demonstrative expression she wore for the network. She looked tired and grey.

‘Hey, Lester,’ she said, by way of greeting.

‘Ms Hasp,’ he replied.

‘Seems you got yourself a relief effort here.’

‘Seems so.’

‘I thought Her Majesty was sitting this one out.’

‘Her Majesty is. But I’ve got space and a roof and no orders to the contrary, so I can put up a few friends in their time of need, can’t I?’

‘Old-fashioned hospitality, then.’

The red light on the camera was alight. He’d known it would be, then forgotten. Now he glanced at it for an instant, then away. ‘If you like.’

‘I do like, Lester. I like very much. It’s bad down there.’

He thought of Sandrine, felt the boy somewhere behind him, the acuteness of his focus. ‘How bad?’

For answer, she unlimbered the camera and reversed it. In the grainy screen of the eyepiece and without sound, he saw the mission house in flames and a man lying bleeding on the lip of the fountain. Another man, walking by, paused for a moment and rolled him into the water. The bleeding man held himself up for a moment, and then looked straight at Hasp’s camera.

He lay down on his back in the water, and breathed out.

The other man watched for a while, and then walked away, vanishing into an angry crowd.

The Sergeant leaned away from the eyepiece. Kathy Hasp looked at him.

‘They’ll see what’s happening here, Lester.’

‘I know.’

‘They’ll see and they won’t like it and they’ll come up here like a fucking Frankenstein movie with torches and pitchforks and they’ll burn this place down with everyone inside. You’re making an opposition, someone they can get to.’

‘We’re not hurting anyone.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘You do know that never makes any difference, right?’

‘What will you do?’ he returned a little sharply.

She patted the camera without pride. ‘It’s all I can do.’

He nodded. ‘Same here.’ She winced in acknowledgement. Well, good. ‘Do you want to come inside? Get some shots of the before?’

‘Sure. We’ve got time.’

‘How much time?’

She thought about it. ‘Maybe an hour and a half before they set off. But they won’t walk it, not all of them. There’ll be trucks. You know there will.’

He hesitated. ‘We have some guns, you know. Some other stuff.’

‘You gonna use ’em?’

‘I’m a soldier.’ She knew he’d dodged the question, but she didn’t follow up. He suspected she wanted to run away, but that she wouldn’t because that would be worse. He wondered how often she felt that, if she just lived from one bloody awful obligation to another. A lot of the correspondents drank, or drugged, or fucked up a hurricane, and a lot of them did all of the above, but what they were addicted to was horror, and that was the thing they’d never kick.

She walked past him into the house.

He set the boy to showing Kathy Hasp around, made sure everyone knew Dirac was in charge if he himself could not be found, then slipped quietly away. He took a moment to wonder whether this was still the right thing to do, whether Sandrine was better off where she was. Yes, and no. Brighton House was defensible, if it came to it. Her own, these nights, was so much kindling.

The armoury corridor was long and very quiet. The Sergeant could hear all the noises from the rest of the house – people shuffling and settling, the sound of the Witch complaining about a lack of something or other, a child wailing, even quiet laughter – but they were far away. The corridor belonged to him and his footsteps.

He had locked the partition behind him and the closed space felt thick, as if he were going down the aisle of a great cathedral and at the far end his bride or his confession would be waiting for him.

The metal door resisted. He leaned on it and there was a brief moment of stasis before it swung open. He went inside and opened the burn bag. The mask was just as he had left it, a whisper of silica spray around the cheeks. It looked like a cast-off undergarment from a very particular sort of brothel. The front armour plate was perfect, the back one ruined.

He discarded the useless plate, selected another from store and slipped it home, then found a combat firefighting suit and put the bottom half on, added the armour and then the long coat over the top. He pulled on the utility belt, stuffing random items into the empty places: flare, truncheon, taser, hand-strobe, smoke canisters and anything else which would fit. On reflection, he reloaded the sharkpunch and tucked it away, then looked in the mirror. Without the mask and with the coat zipped up, he was just a rescue worker, just good old Lester come to help.

He slipped out of the side door into the garage shack, and saw Kathy Hasp’s motorcycle. On instinct, he walked over to it. The key was in the well under the saddle.

Two hundred metres beyond Brighton House along the coast road there was a track leading down to the sea. It was overgrown now – the tiny hamlet it had served having faded not in this most recent upheaval but long before, when the chemical men first set foot on the island with promises of wealth and modernity – but the baked earth remained solid underfoot. The Sergeant rolled the bike silently onto the path, and then stood for a moment in the dusk, scenting tomatoes on the wind.

This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.

He held the mask in his hands like a communion cup, and ducked his face to meet it. The moist interior surface sealed against his skin. The tomato smell faded, replaced by the antiseptic base note of the mask and a whisper of his own sweat.

He climbed aboard the motorcycle and started it up, then charged it out onto the road in one convulsive movement, waiting until he was pointed at the town of Beauville before turning on the lights. The nearest refugees flinched away from the sudden clap of sound, then ran from the road. No. Not the Quads. Me. He was seeing one face in ten, a brief impression as his eyes skipped from one to the next, but Jesus, there were a lot of them, on makeshift crutches and leaning on one another, bleeding and beaten and burned.

He must seem to come from nowhere, the clap of sound and then the light: a ghost rider – or so he hoped – like the ones in the song. He roared past them, down to the town and the flames.

The endless line of refugees flew by, occasional single faces sticking briefly in his vision, their desperation or fatigue or plain boredom filling his mind for an instant before being swallowed by the sound of the road and the certainty which he felt now.

This was rash. There was no cloud cover, no concealment. If NatProMan was watching, they would see him, they would be able to trace him back to the house – although the house was full now, he realised, rather than empty, and his address would yield nothing more than confusion. The refugees sheltered him even as he sheltered them.

He had learned from watching Shola’s body fall: a single man could not adequately defend himself except by attacking. If he had known that Shola’s killers – now ash on the wind, and falling probably on the ship which had ordered both their original mission and their subsequent destruction – if he had known that they were coming, he could have met them, stood them down, or beaten them before their attack could find its place. After they had begun was already too late, the shotgun blast tearing through the foppish silk shirt.

But tonight, in the same position almost exactly, he did know. There were killers preparing now, and they would come into his house to do murder.

He would go to Sandrine, and then he would see about the Quads.

He took the north road towards the shanty and left the refugees behind, the seemingly endless line of them and their need.