Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

On the last day of her sabbatical, the first Discharge Cloud came. It rolled down along the high valleys, and she was caught in it and changed. She was vibrant and beautiful still, compassionate and energetic. But from moment to moment she forgot almost everything and everyone, living in an endless now which seemed to worry her not at all. Of all things, she remembered most of all the island, the endless smugglers’ paths and narrow goat tracks, the rivers and waterfalls where she swam. She was content and even joyful in her new state. But she never spoke, and she did not know her son.

And he, of course, still knew her.

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.