Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

Inoue apparently decided that enough had been said which was serious or alarming, because she dropped back into her Kershaw voice. ‘Good! The doctor says she’ll send a car at eight and you’re to call her Kaiko or you’re walking home!’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Jumping Jehosaphat, Lester!’

‘Sorry.’

‘This is Jed Kershaw, Lester. You don’t call me “ma’am”.’

‘In point of fact, Jed, I’ve been calling you “ma’am” since day one.’

‘Never mind that now!’ It was actually rather a good impression of Kershaw’s bluster. ‘And when you talk to her, you say “Kaiko”. In fact, say it now so that you don’t forget.’ She made a basso chuffing which he was fairly sure was a giggle. Was it possible she was talking through a cardboard tube?

Gamely, he said: ‘“Kaiko.”’

‘Again!’

‘“Kaiko.”’

‘Practise, Lester. Dr Inoue was quite specific, and it’s a long walk.’

‘All right,’ he said, and she chuffed again and rang off.

He looked at his watch, bemused. He had just enough time to open one box and look randomly through a few files, but not enough to find the one containing the records he wanted specifically, and somehow it would be admitting defeat to begin as if he had already been let down.

He put the knife on the sideboard, ready for the morning.

Not wishing to treat his half-arrangement with the boy with disrespect, the Sergeant went down to the café to leave a note, and, finding his friend already there, hastily ordered tea and made his excuses. The boy listened, then grinned hugely.

‘You have a date!’ he said. ‘With the xeno lady! That is hot.’

The Sergeant shook his head. ‘It’s not like that.’

‘It so is.’

‘It’s not! She wants a friendly face, is all. She’s worried about something.’

‘She has many friends at the xeno station,’ the boy said, ‘but she calls you. This is totally hot adult dating (meet area girls now!)’

When the Sergeant continued to protest, the boy enlisted the help of Tom from behind the bar. Tom listened carefully to the sequence of events, and grinned. ‘I don’t know, Lester,’ he said lightly, ‘I think maybe the kid has a point.’

‘Not on my best day,’ the Sergeant said, smiling back.

‘Oh! So you would tap that?’ the boy demanded.

The Sergeant, who had never really thought about it, was about to say ‘no’ but found he couldn’t. It had always seemed such an impossibility that he might be attractive to Kaiko Inoue that he had never actively asked himself whether she was attractive to him. Now that he came to consider it, however – now that he came to wonder about what might happen between them if such a thing ever came to pass – he had to acknowledge that she was more than a little captivating.

‘The situation does not arise,’ he muttered, and realised he was blushing.

‘Ooooo-ooooh!’ cried the boy happily. ‘ Barracuda! ’ And then, in deference to the possibility that the Sergeant was too old for this reference, ‘Na na na na na na na na na NA NAAAAH! Oooo-oooh! Barracuda! Like in Charlie’s Angels .’

The Sergeant stayed for a little longer, threatening everyone with terrible violence, and then took his wounded dignity back to Brighton House, trying to think about everything except Kaiko Inoue in his bed.

THE CAR ARRIVED on the dot of eight, and the Sergeant stepped into it with a feeling of being on the outside looking in. Until now, insofar as he had been in this situation at all, he had been the driver, not the passenger, waiting patiently with a book while someone very influential tried to find his other shoe. He found he was imagining what he must look like to the polite young man behind the wheel, and worried initially that he must look very posh and snotty, then abruptly, in a veering inversion, that by trying to look less so he was denigrating the importance of the event which was consuming the driver’s evening. Was it perhaps more disrespectful to assert that they were on the same social level than it was to accept that they weren’t? The Brevet-Consul was a mucketymuck, but the Sergeant was a working man, and this was a temporary assignment. Except that, he supposed, it would never entirely go away.

It occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that it would almost certainly help in getting a job after the army.

He didn’t say anything at all while he thought about this, and when he came to himself the car was slowing outside the NatProMan admin block, the red-brick misery which had once been Mancreu’s house of detention. It was lit from below by two floodlights which somehow served only to make it darker and more Gothic.

Wonderful.

He walked to the door and it opened as if God or some sort of technological whizzbang was involved, but this was Mancreu so it was neither, just a respectful NatProMan soldier in flunkie mode.

‘Thank you,’ the Sergeant said, and saw the kid’s eyes flicker in surprised acknowledgement. He went on in.

The old prison had been largely modernised for the use of prisoners, so the majority of the cells were drab little cubicles which had readily become storage rooms and offices. The main hall, however, had been preserved – for historical authenticity or more likely because the triple-height open-plan room with its cages along the side walls was too expensive to remodel. Kershaw greeted him at the double doors and ushered him inside, and the Sergeant stopped for a moment on the threshold in utter amazement.

The hall had been transformed. It was still wrapped in shadows, still echoing and bleak. But along the middle was a banqueting table laid for forty, and the cooking was being done on gas burners in the cells. At one end, another, larger cell held a military jazz band, the drummer a striking marine corporal with her head shaved and the island of Mancreu tattooed onto her scalp. The music was slow and edgy and made him think of Shola’s wake, the combination of sorrow and celebration, and the building vanished into its own darkness, so that the ceiling was invisible and the walls seemed to go up and up for ever.

‘I hear you’re making an announcement, Jed,’ the Sergeant said.

‘Yeah,’ Kershaw replied. ‘You were on the list, anyway. Inoue just called you first. You get that, right?’

‘It’s nice to be a plus one. I can pretend I’m an ordinary bloke.’

‘I thought you were an ordinary bloke.’

‘Oh, I am. But they’ve given me all these hats, haven’t they?’

Kershaw nodded like a man who understood hats. ‘This is going to be an epic party, Lester. I’m glad you’re here.’ He smiled and – to the Sergeant’s amazement – actually leaned forward and hugged him, then dashed away to greet someone else. The Sergeant stared after him in bemusement.

He felt a hand on his arm.

‘Did he just hug you, Lester?’

‘Yes, Kaiko, he did.’

‘Was it weird?’

‘It was, a little bit.’

‘You need practice.’ She hugged him too, fiercely, and slipped away again before he could register that it was happening. His memory reported: Slender. Strong. Soft in interesting places. Smells good. More, please.

‘Come on,’ Kaiko Inoue said, ‘we’re over here. By the way, this is when you tell me how well dressed I am.’

He smiled and stepped back to give her proper consideration, and then found he was genuinely staring. Inoue was wearing a black dress, long and flowing and with a collar which fastened at the neck. She wore earrings made of tumbling gold and red links which rippled as she turned her head. Her arms were bare and narrow and surprisingly muscular.

‘You look great,’ he said honestly. She grinned.