Ник Харкуэй: Tigerman

‘How’s your stomach for totally mendacious bilge?’ the Consul had asked him.

‘Limited, sir.’

‘Mine too. File these in the bin, then. Or file them properly, but don’t read them. You’ll get the urge, otherwise, to send back some clever reply and there’ll be no end of shit.’

Greatly daring, the Sergeant had ventured to ask if his teacher had himself ever done such a thing. The Consul sighed and looked away.

‘No,’ he said.

This morning’s incoming included a plaintive request from Sana’a.

ATTN: Brevet-Consul Ferris

x: FCO Yemen (Simon, Area Supply)

re: logistics

Lester – can you please check in the arms locker and see whether there’s a small consignment of coffee in there? We’re doing accounts and it seems we’ve taken delivery and can’t find it anywhere. Hoping it got muddled up with your new-issue gas masks.

The coffee was not, in fact, in Brighton House’s armoury. The Sergeant went in through the hi-tech door which ticked and rustled all night long as if talking to itself and checked. He poked around, marvelling as ever at the dangerous and insane toys he had been left to play with. He could have started a minor war with just the contents of one wall, but of course, the island was an anomalous sort of place and it paid, he supposed, to be prepared. Finally he located the coffee in the empty gardener’s hut, listed as fertiliser. He replied to the memo in the negative, leaving out, after a moment of soul-searching, the actual fate of the parcel. He had not been asked about the gardener’s hut, only about the arms locker. He put the coffee in the larder: the boy drank it sometimes, in the early morning when he had slept on the couch. It made him intolerable for hours, but he was worse without it.

Also in the in-tray, a string of requests forwarded by Beneseffe the Portmaster for the Sergeant’s attention on local police matters.

– A lost dog; he felt that one would probably take care of itself, but the lady to whom the animal belonged was very insistent that he must come, Beneseffe said, and very sad. Well, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt.

– A ghost woman running half-naked through the shanty, swimming in a watertank and frightening children; she was becoming a fixture, but she seemed to be harmless and she even had a few fans. It helped that she was evidently a pretty ghost, and sometimes left unlikely gifts. An ongoing investigation he wasn’t sure he ought to solve.

– A mugging outside the Bonne Viveuse bar and cinema in Beauville. Well, he’d ask around. Not much had been taken, and the statement was sketchy. In all likelihood if he pursued it the man would ultimately have to confess that he’d been conned by a tart. All the same, on the outside chance that it was what it seemed, it might bear looking into.

And, from Beneseffe on his own account:

– Someone stealing fish off the docks. It sounded trivial, but fish was worth a lot, and if the business was between crews it could get nasty.

Well, he had his agenda for the day. Find the fish. Keep an eye out for an unhappy, misplaced dog and a scantily clad phantom. Give the mugging victim time to decide whether he’d been assaulted or just billed for services rendered. And he would do his proper job, walk his beat and be seen, drop in on Jed Kershaw to hear the gossip and be sure nothing serious was happening, nothing he actually needed to know. He would bump into the boy, of course, but before that happened he might drop in on the Witch.

She was not a witch, he reminded himself. She was a doctor. But he had met her as ‘the Witch’, and his mind held on to the word.

During the Sergeant’s first summer at Brighton House, the tomatoes had become unruly. When he realised that enemy forces had taken the conservatory, he had stripped off his shirt and tied cloth around his hands so they wouldn’t blister, and he’d gone in with shears and a sickle. The enemy troops were soft and unprepared: he surged and they folded. Superior weaponry was an excellent force multiplier, and he had a plan and an objective and they really didn’t know a lot about warfare. He cleared the room without difficulty and sat amid the corpses of the fallen. He put his feet on a great pile of tomatoes and photographed them, and sent the picture to his sister in the next post. She sent him a message back by fax saying that he should make jelly with the Brandywines. The fax came out of the machine hugely elongated, each letter over an inch high but only a few millimetres across, so that the whole thing was impossible to read. It looked like something reflected in a fairground mirror.

The conservatory was won, but that only revealed the extent of the problem. Through the cracked glass, though, he could see out into the jungle beyond, beneath the canopy of splitting fruit. He realised had been expecting a miniature Amazon rippled with green, but everything was black. When he shone a torch through the glass, he saw that the whole mass was almost solid, thick trunks wrapped around one another like intestine. The garden was one vast coil of nested tomato plants.

He went to the conservatory door and opened it, brought his sickle down on the nearest plant. The rubbery stuff resisted, and he had to saw at it, nearly cut his own leg with the point of the blade. With some effort, he hollowed out a space to stand, and began to work, and then suddenly he was hacking wildly, screaming at this repulsive snare of organic stuff. He was a whirlwind, a living saw. He struck and struck and struck and he felt it fall around him, and he worked beyond fatigue with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He toiled and swore and grinned and wept, and he fought. He never once stopped moving, throwing aside pieces of roped plant until he felt the anger in him subside and wondered abruptly and somewhat awkwardly where it had come from. He wasn’t one of those men who went off. He’d never been a bar brawler or – something in him cringed back, it was the worst thing he could imagine being – a wife-beater. He didn’t really have much of a temper. Hadn’t, until this moment. But here he was, alone in a garden, declaring a war of extinction on a field of tomatoes. It was so wasteful. That notion made him stop, bewildered, and he wondered at the idea that it was wasteful to chop down plants, but somehow not so much so to do the same with men.

There was a pain in his back and a warning sense of overstretch in his shoulders. He stared down at his hands – raw and bloody and sliced across the knuckles – and then looked up to see how much desolation he had wrought. He hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. Then he had to look around twice more to make sure he hadn’t lost his way in the fog of soldier’s gardening. But it was true.

He was almost five feet from the door. He had worked for nearly a whole day, in a straight line, and come less than his own height into the forest. He stared out at the vast field with a sense of awe. They should send military planners here, he thought, to learn about insurgency.

During the night, his hands had swelled up, red and harsh, and when he tried to wash them the following morning the warm water felt like fire and he screamed. He couldn’t use the radio because his fingers were too swollen, so he walked to Beauville and showed his hands to the boy, whose eyes grew very wide. The boy reached out and took his wrists, gently turned the big red slabs this way and that, and then removed from his knapsack a very old Swiss Army knife, and unfolded the magnifying glass. He peered at the scrapes and cuts, and showed them to the Sergeant through the lens. Ragged, as if he had burned them on tiny ropes. A bead of clear plasma rose from one of the little holes, a puff of red cells within. The boy sighed like an older brother.

‘Tomatoes,’ he said. ‘You cut tomatoes. With your hands?’