Tigerman

4. Aftermath

‘JESUS, LESTER,’ JED Kershaw said, ‘Jesus! Are you okay? Shit! What the fuck is going on? Shall I send in the marines? Were they after you? Was this an anti-Brit thing? Did they think you were one of my guys? Was it anti-American? Was it jihad?’

Kershaw was glossy in the heat; his skin had a fried-egg slickness. He was short but seemed to have been fitted with an oversize motor so that he talked too fast and moved like a dragonfly, zigging and zagging and pouncing on things. It was exactly how not to feel comfortable in the heat. His family was Norwegian back down the line, and he looked like a stumpy brown-haired Viking who’d taken a job as a golf pro. You could not have found someone less suited to Mancreu’s climate if you’d searched the whole world. Kershaw didn’t even like Florida. But he had come down to Shola’s and personally taken charge because he was basically decent, and he’d sat at the man’s table and eaten with him.

‘Fuck,’ Kershaw said again, seemingly to nobody. He looked at the Sergeant’s uniform, with its splatter of Shola’s blood along one sleeve and the dust all over his side from his dive to the floor. ‘Lester, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Stop being a sergeant for a few seconds and just… Holy shit, Lester, are you okay?’

The Sergeant allowed that a sit down might be just what he needed. He was aware abruptly that he had scalded his face, probably walking through the cloud of burned custard. The Witch would laugh at him. Her cleavage appeared in his mind’s eye, rising and falling, leaning over him: post-combat lust. He struggled to focus on the matter at hand as she straddled him, guiding his hands, his mouth. God, yes. I want this.

And then, more truthfully: I need a hug.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, in answer to all Kershaw’s questions. ‘I think it was about Shola, but I don’t know. There’s no reason anyone would come after me.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ Kershaw said.

For a moment, the Sergeant thought this rather unkind. He interpreted it as a rebuke: you’re a policeman! Why don’t you know already? But then he realised that as far as Kershaw was concerned it was an explanation in itself. You’re a policeman: some people don’t like them. It had not really occurred to him that in many places this would be reason enough to shoot someone dead while they were having soup. His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn’t attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you’d have to answer to his mum.

The Witch reappeared, came through the door with her medicine bag. He tried not to see her, then realised when she peered into his face with benign professional concern that this time she was real. He had already opened his mouth to receive her kiss. He shut it. She nodded, began to move carefully around him, tut at the mess on his clothes, probe his bruises.

Kershaw was talking about stability, viable stability under abnormal crisis-induced deindividuational stress, from which according to some NatProMan policy document everyone on Mancreu was presently suffering. He punctuated his speech by yelling at his men to ‘cover that body, find someone to do some fucking clean-up, where’s the fucking undertaker, is there still a fucking undertaker or has the fucker already fucking fucked off?’ The words were irrelevant. His presence was the message. He cared enough to be here, to come in person into what must feel like a very dangerous place, and now he was here he was as confused as everyone else.

‘You didn’t do anything to make this happen, Lester? I’m not going to find out that you and Shola were running coke to kids in Beauville?’

‘That is rude,’ the Witch said without looking up. ‘And ridiculous.’

‘Fuck you, lady! Who asked you anything? What the fuck are you even doing here?’

‘You called for doctors. I am a doctor. Deal with it.’

‘I meant real doctors! My guys!’

‘And they are putting blood back into the women who were shot. Who will live, by the way – I’m so glad you asked.’

‘Fucking MSF fuckers,’ Kershaw muttered. He was embarrassed, the Sergeant could see, by the callousness of his own questions. But it was his role to be callous, to ask the bad questions while others did the repair work, in case there were bad answers.

The Witch sneered and muttered something about inhibited men from Ivy League schools.

‘No,’ the Sergeant said to Kershaw, before this could escalate, ‘nothing like that.’

Kershaw took that at face value and turned to the Witch, asking, by way of amelioration, ‘Is he okay?’

‘He will be,’ the Witch said. ‘Which is a miracle. Lester, turn your head.’

He did.

Kershaw, assured that the Sergeant was not seriously hurt and not a drug dealer, seemed to calm somewhat. Then, too, he had probably needed to know this wasn’t some sort of insurrection. There were those on the island who objected to NatProMan’s presence. Occasionally leaflets surfaced, printed neatly and distributed invisibly, nailed to walls and left on café tables. They denounced Kershaw by name, railed against the destruction of the island, in English, French, and Moitié. It was not what you would call an insurgency. It felt pro forma, or possibly sophomoric: angry young men with a smattering of political history and a sense of betrayal. The Sergeant couldn’t blame them, but in his judgement they – whoever they were – had nothing like the steel for something like this. This was horrible, but it was not revolution. It felt too specific for that. But hardly surgical.

The Sergeant looked for the boy, but he was gone, most likely to whatever place he called home. The Sergeant hoped that whoever waited there would look after him. He felt bad that he had not provided some sort of care while he spoke to Kershaw, but the boy had been quite firm, and he was sovereign. ‘Speak to the American. It is necessary.’ If there was anyone waiting. If he had anyone. The Sergeant hoped that he did, somewhere, and then hoped that he didn’t because that would mean he shared his friend with someone he did not know, that the boy was ultimately not his boy, just a boy he knew. It would make his furtive, half-acknowledged Plan B that much more difficult.

The Witch drove him to her surgery without speaking. She gave him leaves and unguents for his scorched face, more for his bruises, and dressed a gash in his shoulder which must have been from a near miss with the shotgun as he fled into the kitchen. Finally she sighed.

‘I knew Shola,’ she said. ‘Marie will be devastated.’

The Sergeant nodded. Marie, Shola’s girlfriend. Wife, really, though not on paper. Widow. Christ, someone would have to tell her. Except that by now she already knew. There was nothing he could do about that. He’d have to go and see her, of course.

‘Everyone will be,’ he said. And the boy: had he witnessed death like this before? Not impossible. Not here. ‘If you see,’ as ever he baulked at saying ‘Robin’, ‘my friend, tell him to come and find me.’

The Witch shrugged. Exhausted, he accepted that as a yes. He breathed in, hoping to catch her scent to carry it away with him, but the room smelled of the sea, and of disinfectant.

That night the Sergeant dreamed of a woman, in terms he knew were utterly pornographic. They did things he had only read about: desperate things which arched them both and made them cry out until they spasmed and clutched and clawed their way to satisfaction, and then on relentlessly to more and more transgressive journeys in search of some sort of restitution from the world. He called her Breanne, but when finally his lover laid her head upon his chest and slept, her body was slim and pale, and her fingers were tipped in an absurd sherbet pink.

When he woke, the memory was fading and he was aching and grazed and filled with regret – for Shola, for the others who had died so arbitrarily. If he went armed, habitually, as a soldier in a foreign land should, he might have… what? Stood off five men with one pistol? Got into a firefight and died? Or should he have marched around Beauville with an SA 80, carrying the weight of it across his chest, the lethal message wherever he went. And what message, exactly, does an armed soldier give out when he is a thousand miles from reinforcements? Fear, perhaps. Foolishness. Thuggishness. It was idiotic. And yet he felt a powerful conviction that he should somehow have prevented what had happened. Should have been prepared for it.

He covered his chest and shoulders with the Witch’s medicaments and felt immediate physical relief. He wasn’t sure he approved, until he tested and found that beneath the cool there was still a burn, an awareness which promised later discomfort in the abused meat of his back: earned pain, solid and reassuring. In the meantime, his mind was clear, albeit a little tinny, as if he was hearing his own thoughts on a cheap recording. He sent a message to London, tersely worded and laconic, indicating a fatal shooting incident at a local café and the apprehension of those responsible by an armed force. He did not specify the nature of the armed force. That sort of thing would require further discussion.

Shola would be buried today. Mancreu custom was in this regard more Muslim than Christian. The Sergeant dressed accordingly, formal and uncomfortable, squeezing himself into a uniform he had not expected to put on again until he went home and was formally retired from combat duty. He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days. He stared at his chest: bright-coloured ribbons, discs and stars.

He couldn’t go for a walk like this, not outside. The heat would flatten him. It would be bad enough at the service. So he walked along the cool, dark corridors of Brighton House, going from one end to the other and hearing the sound of his heels and toes tapping on black and white tiles. Click clack. Click clack. The house seemed to approve, whatever ghosts it might have peering down from the rafters and out of the shrouded rooms, and nodding to see a British soldier in full rig once again marching here in the aftermath of bloodshed and victory. Or possibly it was mice, or bats. There had been a bat last year, lost and confused. He had shepherded it out into the darkness and it had crapped on him.

He sat in the comms room and waited for the phone call, and when it came it was from someone he didn’t know, Marie’s brother. Shola was to be buried at eleven. The Sergeant’s presence would be appreciated, but would he mind coming as a civilian? Shola had not approved of war.

In theory this required permission from a senior protocol officer. There wasn’t one, so the Sergeant petitioned the Brevet-Consul. Sometimes when he did this he actually spoke both parts, making his own voice more gruff and giving the Brevet-Consul a slightly breathy way of speaking which was to his ear suitably posh. This time he just decided that the Brevet-Consul gave his consent. The Sergeant told Marie’s brother he entirely understood, and went to change. He wore a pair of light trousers and a white shirt, with a strip of black cloth around the arm. He had to tear the cloth from a blind in the old pantry, and trim it.

The last time he had been to a funeral it had been his mother’s, in a funeral house a hundred miles north of London. It had been a pretty cottage with wisteria and roses and a circle of sweet, pink flowers he couldn’t name. Someone had taken care with the hedges, too, so that they were neat without being prim. You parked off to one side in a maze of privet which gave everyone a secluded place to arrive and feel sombre. All in all, if somebody had to die and be burned to ash, this was as good a place as any.

The effect was rather spoiled by the industrial metal chimney poking out over the tiled roof, and the column of off-white smoke which rose from it. Mr Willoughby’s was doing a too-good business, and while the good man had not double-booked himself, he had grown careless of the time needed to clear one cremation and bring in the next. Even if he hadn’t, though, the chimney would have ruined it all. It was bold and silvered and wide, like the gun from which the human cannonball is fired, to the delight of small children and scantily clad assistants. Lester couldn’t stop thinking of his mother being expelled straight up and out in her velour dressing gown, her hand still clutched around her wretched, capacious handbag. He wondered where she would land, and hated himself. But it was funny, you couldn’t escape that.

And it got worse. The hall was beautiful, with a double row of stone pots filled with flowers around the walls. No one had mentioned this to the attending pastor, who was allergic to something in the arrangements. His eyes swelled as he gave the eulogy, his nose ran and he could barely form the words. When he did, he sounded less like a speaker for the dead and more like the speaker on a bad railway train announcing something you can’t understand.

‘Fnorbree fnorry to hew hfidawl rebd, ibb de bnabe obb Jebub Hbrised, ouah blord abb fnabior.’

The pastor spoke for twenty minutes, his impenetrable snuffles rising and falling and soaring to the rafters, and while it began as infuriating and grotesque it ended up boring beyond anything anyone had ever experienced. They had come to be moved, or to move themselves, to weep and say some kind of farewell, to whatever extent you can say goodbye to what is already a husk. But it was impossible to feel anything in the funeral house with the bunged-up vicar exhorting you to pray ‘add oub fadeb fnord udd’ and the burnished cannon of a chimney rearing out of the roof.

On Mancreu, things were different. They gathered by a little plot at a cemetery on the very edge of the Beauville shanty, where the inhabited part of the island began to blend with the deep brown mountains and the jungle interior. It was a fitting spot. The town Shola had lived in made a respectful curve around the churchyard, acknowledging that even the dead need their privacy. This was a transitional place, belonging partly to the human world and partly to the great green mass on the other side. And if Shola had believed in cremation and never told, well, in a few months or weeks, Mancreu would burn, and any remnant of Shola would burn too.

The Sergeant stood next to the Witch, the broad shadow of Dirac the Frenchman a little to one side, and Beneseffe the Portmaster beyond him, all of them staring down into the hole someone had dug. Pechorin, the Ukrainian officer, was at the back in full uniform. The Sergeant guessed he had not been allowed to come in civvies.

The boy was not immediately apparent. Sometimes he would watch things he deeply cared about from a high vantage point, through an old, vastly heavy pair of field glasses he had bought on eBay. It was as if he feared being burned by too much passion, as if the emotions of others might wake in him a response he would then be utterly unable to control. The Sergeant hoped desperately that his friend would come in person to this occasion, because he thought the boy would regret it deeply if he did not, now and for ever.

Shola’s coffin was a long basket made of straw, bound with ropes of tomato stem. The only flowers were woven into the coffin itself, wild flowers and sprigs of thorn, and a few wickedly greenish-purple leaves of marijuana from his own crop. The basket was anonymously shaped; it had no head and no foot. The Mancreu men – Shola’s cousins and some sturdy dockmen – lowered it in an old piece of fishing net, and Ma Tatin who owned the chandlery sang something old and deep.

Standing at the head of the grave, Marie thanked them all for coming and said Shola had been a good man and that she had loved him even when he was a pain in the arse. For a moment it seemed that she had more to say, a full eulogy, but she just stood there as if at attention and the Sergeant realised that there were tears on her face and that she would stand there until someone took her away. Shola’s cousin Tom shepherded her gently back to her mother, and then said straightforwardly that he would be taking over the café but that anyone who felt they had a stake in it should come and see him and he’d cut them in. The Sergeant wondered why he wasn’t more cautious. Someone might take advantage. And then he wondered ‘of what?’ What sort of idiot would come and demand a part of a failing enterprise on an island which would not exist by the end of the year?

Beneseffe heaved a sigh, and Marie threw in the first handful of soil. Tom beckoned to the Sergeant.

‘It must be someone else, before me,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Surely.’

Tom shook his head. ‘We agreed. It’s you. You were there. Did right.’ Tom hesitated, long face sad, then asked, ‘Did he say anything?’

The Sergeant thought: His lung was on the far wall. His spine was on the floor. They exploded him.

But instead he said: ‘It was too quick.’

The congregation nodded, and gentle hands pushed him forward towards the grave. This couldn’t be right. What about the rest of Shola’s family? But they were over there in a huddle, mourning and brave. They were waiting for him to go ahead of them, had appointed him to show the way. To sergeant for them, and that, at least, was something he understood. He walked to the graveside and looked around for a decent bit of earth. There was too much dust. He wanted loam. He scratched hopelessly, felt his fingernails bend.

There was a small noise, a scuffing of feet on dry ground. From the back of the crowd the boy emerged, head up, chin jutting. He was labouring under the weight of a terracotta pot, which he carried the way Winnie the Pooh carries honey, with both arms wrapped around it in a hug. The people made way for him slowly, as if, in contrast to their decision about the Sergeant, they somehow blamed him for Shola’s death. Perhaps he was an orphan after all; some Mancreu folk believed orphans were bad luck. Perhaps he was just alive when Shola was dead.

The boy drew up alongside him, and the Sergeant saw that the pot was full of rich, black earth. The boy’s hands were grazed and scratched. He had dug this himself, the Sergeant understood, without tools, and from the look of the soil he had got it from the high mountainsides. He had been up early for his digging, and he had lugged his benediction here all alone for what must be miles and put it in this fine pot, and now he was standing almost at attention, because this was Shola’s coffin with Shola’s body in it, and it was the right thing.

Gratefully, the Sergeant drove both hands into the pot, and flung a huge load over the coffin, and then another and another. The world flickered and shifted, and he found that he had thrown it all, that his knuckles were raw from rubbing against the clay. He realised he must have stood there for five minutes, heaving soil over the straw coffin, while the family waited patiently and everyone watched.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down into the grave, wondering if he should scoop some back out for others to give. Sanity prevailed.

The family lined up and threw in the grey dust of the cemetery on top of his rich earth, and then the gravediggers came and filled in the rest very quickly. Finally, Tom spoke. He said that Shola had been a boxer. When a boxer dies, Tom said, they ring the fight bell nine times, and the dead man departs this world when the last whisper of the bell fades away. And then he did it, banging a drumstick against the mushroom-shaped brass bell from the Beauville club. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The ninth echoed, and the bell sang on and on, the metal holding the vibration an impossibly long time. And then it was done.

Shola was gone.

The Sergeant’s intention, when the funeral was over, had been to take the boy for a quiet walk and discuss with him everything that had happened, as he would have with any young man who had just seen close combat and casualties for the first time. He didn’t have the chance, though, because Dirac the Frenchman and Beneseffe the Portmaster scooped them up, and Tom opened the café in his cousin’s honour, just for the afternoon, so that they could sit and be there. Someone had cleaned the place, planed the wooden floor where Shola had died so that they would not walk on his blood. Tom stood on the third step so that everyone could see him and thanked them for coming, and he stayed there so that any time anyone looked up, expecting out of habit to see Shola, they caught his eye, and shared a moment with him, and the hole in the world was known and acknowledged.

In a corner the Sergeant saw Dr Inoue, and she raised her glass – whisky, of course – in salute and approbation. Inoue’s face was remarkable, he thought. It could convey volumes. I’m sad that he is dead, and I know that so are you. I am pleased that you are alive, and I know how hard you tried. I know what you would have wished. I am here. So are you. It is all there is. And of course, in that briefest and softest of twitches at the corner of her mouth: my whisky is your whisky, if you should need it. He smiled back, inclined his head as if receiving a medal, and waited until she turned away. When she did, he felt a weight settle on him, as if she had briefly shared with him the burden of the room.

As the wake went on, the Sergeant made one attempt to take the boy to one side, only to be blocked by Dirac and to realise, belatedly and with some gratitude, that Dirac was taking the sergeant’s role with respect to them both, and that he, Lester Ferris, was himself a man who had just seen combat when he’d been posted out of the line for fear that he wasn’t ready for it yet, who had lost a trooper and might need a bit of looking after.

Dirac was his direct equivalent only up to a point. He was a commissioned officer, a major, but one who knew his job. He was a bit older than Lester, and considerably boozier. His notional title was ‘envoy’, which meant exactly what it said: he had been sent to Mancreu, and there was a strong sense that he was to stay here until he had atoned for his sins. Dirac was an old Legion hand, trained in Guyana in the jungle and seasoned in Mozambique and Algeria. His skin was a weathered tegument the colour of cigars. He had the distinction of having been given three medals and demoted as a consequence of a single incident.

It had been a perfectly simple diplomatic escort job in North Africa, and with an inevitability which spoke to any modern soldier it had gone wrong from the beginning. The political mission was contradictory and insincere, which is fine until you make it the basis for a military deployment. As soon as you involve a professional soldiery, you have to be honest with yourself about your motives. The logic of armed conflict does not read between the lines. In politics, deaths happen incrementally, as a result of bad healthcare and debt. In war, on the other hand, death starts happening when you show up and continues after you leave. Death is not a side effect, and even if you refuse to count the dead they still pile up, and the people who loved them won’t forget: not their names nor how they came to die.

So here was Dirac in some crisis camp at the end of some valley, and here were the precious VIPs who were his flock, and the overworked and desperate doctors they were pressing the flesh with, and there was the press pack from around the world. All along the dry riverbed were the refugees in their hundreds of thousands, carrying their entire lives in a few bags. They were running pell-mell from a man called Gervaise and his militia, the Dogs of the Pure Christ, a hard bunch who’d seen what was happening in Rwanda and Congo and decided they liked it. The camp had a lot of French, Swiss and US nationals in it, so it was under the wing of the UN and had a token guard. The UN couldn’t get up speed for a full-on peacekeeping force, though, because a land war in Africa against an embedded enemy wasn’t anything the big powers wanted any part of. Dirac’s job was to escort the VIPs in and bring them back unscathed. He’d been armed accordingly: light weaponry, no big guns and definitely no air support. This was a humanitarian mission, which today meant for God’s sake don’t do anything humanitarian. The Dogs of the Pure Christ could read a newspaper and they knew the score too: kill who you like as long as you restrict yourself to your own. The camp was out of bounds – but the refugees trying to get to it were fair game.

The Dogs arrived on the third day of Dirac’s mission; a few hundred of them, with mobile artillery. They were very careful. They didn’t fire on the UN tents. They lined the ridges along the valley and glowered down at the pathetic worm of suffering below. It made great television, really pointed up the issues. And every night, while the VIPs were talking sincerely to the press pack, the Dogs lobbed shells down into the valley floor and cut the refugees to pieces.

Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either. Aux armes, citoyens. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’

The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.

‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.

An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘Je m’en fous’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the ravines on either side of the valley and moved down the line in near-as-dammit silence, capturing gun emplacements. They used the darkness and they used their bayonets and they took prisoners as they went. By the time morning came they were exhausted and they’d run out of restraint tags, but they’d captured two hundred and thirty-seven members of the Dogs of the Pure Christ and eight light artillery pieces, along with fourteen shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a pile of automatic rifles and side arms. Dirac marched Gervaise to the nearest crossroads and stripped him naked, then thrashed him with a local thorn bush across the buttocks and told him to take his men and piss off. By some unhappy chance the press corps got wind of this before it happened, so there was global coverage of the most feared warlord in the region getting spanked until he wept.

It was an utterly inexcusable breach of Dirac’s orders and a woeful piece of modern colonialist behaviour. The French government apologised with mountainous sincerity to everyone involved, and even offered to pay for reconstructive plastic surgery on Gervaise’s buttocks. This resulted in the details of the humiliation Gervaise had suffered being once again dwelled upon at length by the international press. The UN investigated – ‘a little Italian bastard with grey eyes came, you couldn’t hide anything from him. It was like hell. He found my girlfriends, my bar tab, everything. I was completely naked in front of an Italian.’ Dirac was summoned to headquarters and told he was no longer welcome in post, then handed over to the French senior staff. They lectured him without a whiff of irony on the proud traditions of the French military which he had sullied with this shameful act, and they told him he was to be demoted – yes, and he was lucky to keep his commission at all! Then they gave him a medal, which went very nicely next to the Pan-African Award for Peace and the German People’s Medal of Justice. At around the same time the Mancreu posting became available and Dirac was permitted to resume his former rank on the understanding that he see out the island’s destruction however long it might take, that he had been a very naughty boy, and that he was really not to do it again.

‘Holy Mother of Christ, Lester,’ Dirac said, first in French and then in English to emphasise his point. ‘Really with custard?’

The Sergeant nodded. Dirac banged his hands on the table, papapapapow! and grinned. ‘That was some shit. And you got them all?’

‘He got one.’ Indicating the boy. ‘With a comic book.’

Dirac raised his eyebrows briefly, but when the Sergeant nodded that he was entirely serious, raised his glass in Gallic salute. ‘Good work! As good as it could have been, okay? As good as it could have been. Both of you, you need to know that.’

The boy shrugged. ‘We were not leet.’

Dirac fairly obviously did not know what that meant, and equally obviously did not need a translation. ‘No. Don’t fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There’s just not being dead.’ And hard eyes, commander’s eyes fixing them both in turn to be sure they understood. ‘I am not blowing smoke up your asses.’

‘When we fight crime, we must be better,’ the boy said.

The Sergeant had forgotten that, had assumed it was a transient strangeness born of the moment of Shola’s death and their survival. He let it fall away without reaction. Dirac, after a moment, did the same.

With some hesitation, the boy unlimbered his knapsack and drew out the dog-eared and curled issue of The Invisibles he had used as a weapon, and offered it up for Dirac’s inspection. The Frenchman took it gravely and tapped the end. ‘Huh. Pas mal.’ He gave it back, and sighed. ‘As good as it could have been, my friend. If the world were perfect there would be no war and I would be sleeping with Lauren Bacall.’

The boy was immediately interested. ‘1944 Bacall, or Bacall now?’

‘Both!’ Dirac replied, with absolute certainty.

This was for some reason very funny, and because there was no reason why it should be, it was acceptable that it was funny. Heads turned in the café as they laughed, faces briefly startled and then reassured. Oh, yes. It’s true: life continues. We grieve and we say goodbye because we are alive.

They drank beer. Then, at Dirac’s insistence, they drank their way through some involved Legion funeral song which seemed to the Sergeant’s uncertain ear for French to involve a great deal of discussion of veal sausage and the shortcomings of the Belgians. There was to be no sausage for the Belgians, because they were shirkers. At each utterance of this dire sentence, it was necessary to drink. The Sergeant duly did so, knowing that he would regret it, knowing that the regret, too, was part of the wake. After a certain point, he lost track of what he was drinking and became separated from himself. The remaining sober corner was able to think quite clearly and to see through his eyes, but could not direct the action of his limbs. That job was now entirely given over to a mad percussionist who performed ‘The Liverpool Girl’ and ‘How I Met Your Sisters’ and found a willing chorusline in the other guests, and then at some point the babble fell away and people departed, and at last Tom brought food and tea and gently eased the remaining mourners out into the deep middle night. The Sergeant wandered homewards through the chill, serenading the endless sky with a pint-glass-and-spoon rendition of ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. By a strange grace, the percussionist appeared to have a good sense of direction.

Where the road forked, however, he surprised himself. Instead of going right, which would have brought him directly home to his bed, he went left, up towards the jungle and the shanty. The cool air was seeping into his muscles and driving the disparate parts of him back together. As he went along the line of a low wall and beside a stream, then down and over a hedge, he stopped singing and took stock. He felt empty, and that was good. His balance was returning. He was placid yet full of an inexhaustible energy, caught in the place between wakefulness and sleep. The compulsion to go in the wrong direction was still undeniable.

He realised he was walking through someone’s garden. There was laundry hanging out, and he nearly got caught up on an immense pair of bloomers. The frilled legs grasped for him like some hunting sea creature, but he fought them off with doggy digging motions, and passed by. He plunged through a thorny bush and out the other side, down a lane, and finally felt he was nearing his destination. The road gave way to a track, and the blackness of the lower jungle rose ahead of him. His feet touched hard paving, then soil. Dust. Grass. An elegant iron gate. It was familiar, for sure, but he had no idea why he was here. He went through. The moon overhead was vast and silver-white, seeming to fill the sky. He sat down.

When he woke he was cold, and he knew he was in the cemetery where Shola was buried, and that he had come to say another goodbye, to apologise, and that he had lost another friend in this life and hadn’t enough to be giving them away. He made a noise, head in hands: wordless sorrow without the stamp of appropriate grieving moulded onto it. He looked for the fresh grave, entertaining a mad fantasy of digging it up, of waking Shola even at this late date, getting him to a proper hospital where they could treat his injuries. No, not a proper hospital: the Fleet! The Fleet could help him. They must have everything there, all the impossible new medicines, machines to pump his blood, machines machines machines. They could give him a new lung, a new heart, a new spine, grow new bones or steal them from someone else. They could do anything, if they wanted. Anything at all.

A scent washed over him, strange and sharp. It was warm and not unpleasant: leaves and bark, yes, and sweat. An animal smell. A neighbourhood dog, he thought, and awaited the wet nose in his ear. Well, that would be nice. Companionship. Dogs were good companions. They had no solid memory, only a sort of endless now. A happy dog was happy almost all the time, and shared that with you, which he could use about now.

The nose did not arrive. The dog butted him gently, quite high on his back. A large dog, or a smaller one on its hind legs. It sighed, and the noise was amazingly loud in the night. He wondered if his own sigh had been quite so massive, if he had woken anyone. He felt that any dog with that much heart should be rewarded with a hug.

He turned around into a completely alien intelligence, a huge soup-plate face with wide, reflective eyes. They were not yellow or green but a scalding platinum. He smelled meat and musk, tasted it in the air.

The tiger blinked. It was enormous. They were supposed to be smaller. They were supposed to be shy, too. Perhaps this one was lonely. The head was on a level with his own as he sat, and bigger. The whole animal must top three hundred kilos. He’d been part of four-man squads which didn’t weigh that much.

It peered at him, neither skittish nor aggressive but imponderable. It snuffled, and he smelled that same scent again, stronger: warm saliva and fur. It sneezed. Tiger snot spattered his chest. He did not cry out. The tiger looked almost embarrassed, butted him again.

Well, dog or not, it seemed to want to know him. He reached out very slowly with his left hand (in case it was torn off). The tiger twitched back from it, then sniffed the offered limb and found nothing to object to. It suffered him to stroke it. The fur was thick and dark, heavy with oil. He wondered whether to scratch it. Domestic cats liked to be scratched. His mother’s had. The tiger had taken the initiative, though, and was pushing upwards under his palm. He scratched. Its eyes closed, and it made a new noise, like a distant avalanche. Purring, he supposed, though it seemed a ridiculous word to describe this sound which was almost too deep to hear.

Time passed. The Sergeant’s left arm grew tired and he substituted his right. Then his right arm grew tired and he slowed and stopped. The tiger whickered reproach. He shrugged. It considered him and accepted the verdict, then wandered away. He was for a moment forcefully reminded of the boy. Conversation over, see you next time. He watched the animal make a slow circuit of the graveyard. He thought it might make a special pilgrimage to Shola’s plot, a sort of omen, but it didn’t and he was obliquely glad. Then, without meaning to, he shut his eyes for a moment and it was gone. He came upright and opened his mouth to call after it, then stopped: he had no idea what he would say. He realised he had been in some way hoping for its approval.

He took two or three steps forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of it by the trees.