Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

The crushing weight of fatigue landed on his shoulders all at once. He pushed it away again, found grit somewhere deep down and clawed his way back into his own head.

Bad Jack. Arno. Kershaw. Pechorin. All and any of them might be added into the plan, for good or ill. Lies are his hill country . Quite. Not Arno.

Pechorin, then? But he was with Arno now, and Kershaw would trust only so far.

Which left Jack. Jack was in this. Back to Jack. He stared at the nest around the Elaine , the madman’s curve of string, and wondered if Jack would yield to the same analysis. Except that he didn’t have schematics for Jack. Jack wasn’t owned by London. Jack, who had been Shola’s boss. Who had been the target of the original attack. Jack who was everywhere. Jack Jack Jack.

He whispered it as he walked through the house alone, hearing his voice echo on the black and white tiles, the wooden boards, the white walls, hearing it inside his own head like a whistle, seeing brown swirls and circles at the corners of his eyes. Sleep now. But he was moving too fast, still thinking. He poured milk from a bottle and made Ovaltine, still in his mind called Ovomaltine because that had been the name on the giant tub of it his mother had brought back from France when he was little. He stood in the conservatory and looked at the tomatoes, wondered if he was fighting them again, their impossible thicket of fibrous green.

He drank deeply, tasted the dregs, felt the malted powder against his teeth. His father had been sparing with the contents of the tub, afterwards, where his mother had always been generous to a fault. In the end, guessing that this was more to do with an unwillingness to let the physical evidence of his wife disappear than with an actual preference, the young Lester Ferris had taken to buying refills and heaping them in when his father was watching television – but even with the tub mysteriously getting fuller with each month that passed, his father made the bedtime drink weaker and weaker. When Lester had moved out, he’d taken the tub with him. Still had it somewhere, back home.

He put the cup in the kitchen and went to his bed. There was a faint light on in the boy’s room, the glimmer of a laptop screen. He paused, knocked. Should he explain about Shola? About death by IOU? No. Not now. Later it would be a final debt to be settled, but you did not burden your soldiers with side issues before the fight. That was how they died.

‘Yes?’ the boy said.

‘Got a minute?’

The boy ushered him in, pointed him to the chair and sat cross-legged on the bed. His face was curious.

The Sergeant sighed. ‘I need something and I don’t know where to get it. I can’t ask anyone else.’ The boy nodded cautiously.

You’re not going to like this . He looked for a way to say it which wasn’t bad, couldn’t find one. ‘I need to talk to Jack,’ he said.

‘Talk to Jack?’

‘To Bad Jack. Yes.’

The boy considered this for a long while, his eyes shuttered and perhaps a little dismayed. ‘Talk to Jack? Why, talk to Jack?’

There were so many ways to put it, to soft-pedal what he needed. But he wanted to tell the truth. Finally he said: ‘Superhero team-up issue.’

And saw the boy’s eyes open very wide. ‘Tigerman and Jack.’

‘Tigerman. And Jack.’

The boy had gone off to work mojo. It was some pretty serious mojo, he said, and would need time. The Sergeant should go and do Sergeant things. ‘Go Wayne,’ the boy had said.

‘Do what?’

‘Wayne! Bruce Wayne. Be ordinary.’

Ordinary people did not have days like this. The Sergeant slept a little, then woke and went to see Inoue, because he didn’t want to feel that he hadn’t when he put on the mask. It wasn’t good to have outstanding business.

Inoue greeted him with a strained smile. ‘Did Kershaw ask you to come out?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just doing my rounds.’ I came for you.

She smiled bleakly. ‘There have been significant developments in my work.’

‘Significant.’

‘In two ways. The next eruption will come very soon. Three days, perhaps less. Kershaw is aware. They will announce the evacuation later. But here, we are already packing. And I am most particularly to bring my things and not… talk about my views. At all.’

‘You’re in trouble?’

‘Mm. Maybe not yet. But I am to understand that I can be if I want to experiment.’

‘Then don’t,’ he said earnestly. ‘There’s enough trouble coming out of this already.’

She sighed. ‘They will not give me a choice, I think. I am urgently required on a project back home. A very good one, apparently. There will be no time for me to oversee the departure here, I am to board a light aircraft later today. My luggage will follow. It has the form of a promotion, all very flattering.’ Her tone made it clear she was not flattered.

He stood in front of her and felt cheated. He had somehow assumed there would be time. Where that time was going to come from he had, in retrospect, no idea. There was never time. He stared at her helplessly.

‘Come,’ she said abruptly. ‘You must see the forecast data. It will help you understand.’

‘I probably won’t understand it, to be honest.’

She snorted. ‘Don’t be absurd. I will explain.’

She led him into the small, oblong room which was her private space. ‘Ichiro!’ she shouted into the hall. ‘I need the big chart in two minutes.’ The Sergeant heard an answering shout, and she shut the door. ‘Sit.’

He sat.

Inoue unrolled a piece of paper from a cardboard tube and weighted it down in front of him with a stapler and a pot of pens. Then she turned. ‘This is the pressure chart for the upper chamber,’ she said. ‘In the normal run of things I would now explain each spike and trough, and you would nod as if that meant anything outside of this building.’ She drew a breath. ‘But it is not a normal day and there is something I wish to make clear. I decline to go back home without doing so.’

She took a quick step towards him and leaned in, held his head between her hands and pressed her mouth fiercely against his. Her lips were narrow and strong. Her tongue flirted, teased. She opened her mouth in a frankly wanton invitation and growled happily when he accepted it.

And then she stepped back and it was as if the whole thing had been a dream. The door opened and Ichiro the genius came in, passed another tube to his chief and – with a rather approving expression – wandered out again.

‘The eruption is coming,’ Inoue said seriously. ‘A big one.’

I should bloody think it is.

But he nodded. ‘I understand.’

She fixed him with a stern look. ‘“I understand, Kaiko . And I have always wanted to visit Japan. Perhaps, Kaiko , I might come and see you when I travel.”’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That.’

‘Good. You would be very welcome.’

She loaded him with technical information and sent him away. They exchanged a formal handshake in parting, on the same gravel drive where poor Madame Duclos’s dog had landed on his car. All around, there was bustle and packing going on, and he drove back to Beauville feeling by turns elated and bewildered. How would he ever get to Japan? But on the other hand, why not? But what about the boy? And what if he was arrested? He couldn’t use chopsticks, that was a concern. He could learn, of course: it wasn’t like learning to play the violin. Japanese would be harder.

He listened to this strange, unfamiliar yammer in his mind and asked himself how long it had been since he had been truly interested in a woman, in her thinking and her laughter rather than just her body. A long time. Perhaps never. Not that he wasn’t interested in her body. My God, he was interested. He couldn’t believe – he could, actually, readily believe it, but he was appalled at himself – that he had not explored her even a little in that frozen instant. He hadn’t wanted to grab. He suspected now that she would have been quite amenable to some grabbing, might well have grabbed back. Ichiro had been an alarm clock for her, he thought, as much as for him.