Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

He realised he was wishing for the fire now, for the end, and felt like a traitor. And then he wondered when he had come to think of Mancreu as something he could betray.

He got rid of Tigerman’s boots and put the rest of the gear back in the armoury, stuffed the mask in a burn bag and meant to go out and throw the stele into the sea, but his body duped him and when he slumped into an armchair with a cup of tea he closed his eyes.

The boy woke him, or perhaps he simply woke and the boy was there. Either way, there was tea, and even toast.

‘They are dead,’ the boy said.

‘I know.’ No need to ask who.

The boy considered. ‘I feel better,’ he observed. ‘Is that bad?’

‘No. People tell you that you won’t, but you do. You don’t feel good. It’s just something less to worry about.’

The boy nodded. He looked pensive and unsettled. There was a formality between them, a distance, which made the Sergeant want to embrace him but at the same time warded him off. He told himself that happened, that it was part of their rhythm. There were days when they were just in the same room at the same time, and days when they were together, in sync.

‘They are not the men,’ the boy said eventually. ‘Not the real men.’

No. Somewhere there was a man behind the men, or perhaps a woman. Someone who had decided Shola’s death was necessary, for whatever reason. And that someone was Fleet, almost certainly. Fleet, where his writ did not reach, in a world he did not understand. A world he was not supposed to acknowledge existed. The boy glanced at him opaquely.

‘There are journalists,’ he muttered, as if this was even worse than murderers.

‘Where?’

‘In Beauville. They are everywhere. They try to film you if you stand still long enough or do anything interesting. They have found empty houses and they are living in them.’ He scowled. ‘We are being zerged.’

The Sergeant nodded. To zerg (vb), from the video game Starcraft : to overwhelm with vastly superior numbers. It was 101, the boy had told him shortly after their first meeting. Totally 101.

‘I sorted out the suit,’ he said, and when the boy looked up in alarm he added, ‘I still have the mask and the stele.’ For now. For in case. More crossed lines, more mismatched beginnings and middles and ends. Out of step. It’s as if we don’t know each other. Or is it that we do and this is how that goes? He hesitated. ‘Have you heard the other news?’

‘What other?’

‘Kershaw said… He said that there isn’t long now. That soon we’ll all have to leave. Kaiko was quite angry.’ And then quite something else which had not been clear when the missile hit.

‘Kaiko?’

‘Doctor Inoue. The xenobiologist.’

‘The science hottie.’

‘Pechorin’s having his nose redone, by the way. The other man will live, too.’ The one with the spike in his mouth.

‘That is good.’

‘What will you do?’ You’ll have to leave. Won’t you? I have no time left, but I can’t say it all now, can I? Not with you like this. Or me like this, I suppose. It could be either.

The boy shrugged. ‘ Kswah swah .’

‘That’s not an answer!’ It came out of him before he could stop it, a sergeant’s bark. He regretted it immediately, awaited a furious response. None came. The boy shook his head.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not an answer.’ He seemed to find this as troubling as the Sergeant, his face contemplative.

‘I want to help,’ the Sergeant said, after a moment. ‘I just want to help. Do you mind if I try to work out some ways to do that?’

The boy inclined his head. ‘That would be very kind.’ It sounded wooden, like something from a phrasebook.

‘Don’t do anything… I don’t know. Just don’t. You know what I’m talking about.’ Going after Pechorin to accuse him of stealing fish.

‘I won’t,’ the boy said.

They sat together for a while, each peering at the other as if trying to see beneath the skin, and then went their separate ways.

The Sergeant pored over the files for an hour, looking without success for the two files which might be his friends. The files were all higgledy-piggledy, he discovered, shoved almost any which way into their boxes by someone who had no doubt assumed they’d never be looked at again. He got into a rhythm: right hand holds down the file, left hand traces the outer cover and lifts, right fans the pages, left seeks the photos. Check. Check again. Discard.

It was boring. He had not anticipated how boring it would be looking at one photograph after another of children who were not the child he was looking for. Once, a file caught his eye, but the boy in question would be twenty now. A brother? Not a father, however you sliced it. He shunted the file to one side. Then, abruptly angry for reasons he could not put into words, he went into Beauville.

The main street was filled with reporters for the first time ever. There were camera crews setting up in rows in front of the Portmaster’s office, and Beneseffe was telling a team of Germans firmly that this was unacceptable, that the office was out of bounds, and they were responding that there was no law on Mancreu so surely they could film where they liked. Beneseffe saw the futility of arguing with them, so he went back inside and a few moments later six large lobstermen came around the corner and politely but firmly started picking up battery packs and cases and moving them away down the street. The lobstermen were big and scarred and looked as if they could handle themselves, but today there was something else about them, too, an edgy hair-trigger dismay which made anything possible. The newsmen could smell it, and they didn’t fancy it. They cordially thanked Beneseffe for his advice and let themselves be moved along.

The Sergeant looked around. He was not alone in his bad mood. All of Beauville had it today, that sense of exposure and frustration and the resultant animal desire to bite something. He could hear the people bickering with one another, and over by the sandwich stand a scuffle broke out over mustard, two old blowhards he knew to talk to, shoving one another like children in a playground. Even the island was getting in on the act, making it worse: there was a strange, unending buzz in the ground. You couldn’t call it an earthquake. It was more like having an electric toothbrush switch itself on in your luggage. But it wasn’t stopping. It was just there, and it was distantly worrying and annoying.

He thought about the boy, about his perplexity and his unease, and looked at the faces around him, not the strangers but the locals, and realised what was wrong.

Someone had bombed them.

Yesterday, they had all been living on a volcano, and that was different in no way from every other day of their lives – or, philosophically speaking, anyone’s. You could always be hit by a bus or slip and break your neck, whoever you were and wherever you lived. That was why car bombs and the like were frightening but ultimately ineffective. They were supposed to make a point, but all they did was remind everyone of the irritating, upsetting truth that bad things could happen.

But last night something had happened. A human hand had opened the sky with directed malice, reached down among them and killed people, had done so blandly and casually. It didn’t matter that the victims had been by any measure pretty bad people. Anyone who offended against an unknown law could meet the same fate. Anyone within twenty metres of them. Anyone in a car with them or in their house. Anyone who worked with them or overheard whatever appalling secret they had to tell. Or perhaps it was nothing like that at all. Perhaps it had been target practice, or a mistake, and that was what they were worth to the world. It was like living with a capricious god, except that god was out there in the bay and he was just some fucking idiot trying to fake it as best he could, and fuck him. Fuck him for being so rude, so stupid, so powerful and yet so utterly powerless. He could blow up a building. Big deal. Could he put it back together again? No, and that was exactly how the whole thing worked. The chemical men had broken the island and now the United Nations would burn it. No one in the wider world seemed to do anything constructive, no one built or mended. It was lawyers, guns and tax avoidance out there. Real work, reconstruction, was down to ordinary people, and no one ever spent as much money and time on that as they did on ripping things down in the first place, because it was hard.