Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

This flood of self-despite was at the same time quite alarmingly foreign to the Sergeant and entirely familiar. True, he had no direct experience with the violent woes and self-reproaches of children. On the other hand, he was a sergeant, and the commonality in the roles of NCOs and parents was too obvious to dwell upon. He knew how very destructive that simple, unadorned ‘bad’ could be, how it could embrace a whole person from birth to this very present and condemn every aspect of him entire. Where a more nuanced description could be examined and faulted, something so broad was resilient. It was a tar pit. You couldn’t argue it away, because reasoning gave it an undue status as something reasonable. Each attempt to unpick the nest of accusations would draw you deeper in. Your empathy was misunderstanding, evidence of your pure heart’s inability to comprehend the enormity you confronted. Your effort spent on a creature so vile was a waste of kindness needed elsewhere, and this itself was a fresh crime to be registered against the villain. Your subsequent distress and ultimate frustration were read as justified anger at the perpetrator of such sins.

You did not defuse this kind of madness by treating with it upon its own terms. You answered the embracing fear, not the question. For the moment, he waited, honouring the grief. He waited until the storm had died, until the tide had risen to its highest and ebbed and the boy had noticed that no denials or affirmations had been forthcoming, and some part of him had begun to feel instinctively that his confessor must render judgement or lose his position.

‘You’re getting snot on my shirt,’ the Sergeant said to the top of the boy’s head. Translation: the worst thing you are capable of is covering a dirty shirt in mucus .

Silence.

‘I don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘I’m not saying I mind. I just felt, you know, I should say something in case you end up glued to my armpit.’ Translation : cry as long as you need to. I’m here. But the world is still the world, and you haven’t changed .

Silence.

‘And you didn’t shoot him yourself, did you? And you didn’t hire those men to shoot him. So all this is sort of by proximity. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may be right. At the moment I just don’t see how, is all.’

He didn’t push. He let the tiny, shuddering thing in his arms subside, and realised from the residual tension that there was something left, that the boy had a final charge against himself, and that it was the most serious, the most vile.

‘I did not tell you,’ the boy said at last, stepping out of the embrace to stand in some invisible dock. ‘I have obstructed the investigation and the course of your inquiries and the execution of your duty.’ He was calmer now. Miserable.

‘How so?’ Very neutral, because there was just a chance.

‘Shola worked for Bad Jack,’ the boy said.

The Sergeant opened his mouth to say ‘Bad Jack?’ and shut it again in the awareness that he would sound like a fool. He moved through a chain of response and counter-response in his head, looking for a place to enter the conversation which would be neither condescending nor credulous: if I say this, he will say that . It was hard. He wondered whether it was hard because it was hard, or because he was getting old and couldn’t remember being a boy.

Shola worked for Bad Jack.

On the face of it, the idea was absurd. The main thing about Bad Jack was that he was a fairy tale. There was no such person, and if there had once been a Jack, a brigand, say, or a murderer, well, he was by now at least three hundred years old: a bit long in the tooth to have been Shola’s employer.

But the boy knew all this — and he knew the difference between story and truth. He read Superman and watched Fox News, read Batman and watched Al Jazeera. He was not the sort to fret about a bogeyman. A child living on an island which is itself under threat of execution for the crime of having been environmentally raped has no need of invented villains. A person trading mountain honey with the Black Fleet for shoes and DVDs, running go-between for who-knows-what deals with the shore, did not conjure crooks out of the air. So when the boy said Bad Jack, he did not — could not — mean the nine-foot-tall pumpkin man or the web-footed devil. He meant the kind of Bad Jack who did business in the world, the kind who could command a measure of actual fear. The kind who might have enemies with Kalashnikovs.

‘Someone goes by the name of Bad Jack?’ the Sergeant asked, having come to the end of this line of reasoning and arrived at a response which was not patronising or ignorant.

The boy nodded.

‘Since when?’

‘Since always.’

Which to anyone under the age of twenty meant a length of time greater than a year, but you couldn’t say that, either.

‘He’s always called himself Bad Jack?’

‘No. This Jack is new. But there is always Jack.’

It was just distantly possible, he supposed: an unbroken line of Jacks come down from when Mancreu was a wild island port halfway between French North Africa and British South-East Asia. A secret king, a pirate, a smuggler, a crook.

He pictured a Lord of Misrule on a throne, a combination of ogre and imp in a mountain hall, surrounded by stolen virgins and treasure. Translate that: a thug with gold teeth and imported slave-women, wearing a gangster’s gold chain and thinking himself a monarch. Or an urbane sort of plausible sod from Boosaaso or Yangon with a business degree, taking a hand in the heroin trade.

‘And Shola. . what did Shola do for him?’

‘Store things. Make rum. Make connections. Everyone went to Shola’s. Like an oasis with lions and giraffes.’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

The boy shook his head. ‘He comes, he goes. Everyone looks away. No one sees him. No one ever sees Jack, no one talks about Jack.’

The boy was apologising now. ‘I did not tell you, because no one talks about Jack. Or else.’ He drew a line across his throat, made a slicing noise.

‘Well, if he’s so bad, that makes a short suspect list. Who’d stand up to him?’

‘Other bad men.’

Fleet men, maybe. But that was a world of trouble. If this was Fleet, he had no remedy, and he wanted no part of it. He wondered what he would do if it was, how he would explain the limit of his power. Of his will.

‘Bad men doing what? Why?’ he asked instead.

The boy shrugged. ‘This was maybe a demonstration, maybe like Alderaan?’

Alderaan. The Sergeant was the right age to know what that meant. He had been to see the film the first time around, very young and very amazed as the orange and white starship went over his head, and then even more amazed as its enormous pursuer roared after it, going on and on and on for ever and shaking the seats. Movies had never seemed so big.

As for the boy, in the flatiron days of the hot season he wore a baseball cap he had begged from an Afrikaner ship-captain. It said in yellow letters on a starry background: HAN SHOT FIRST, and it proclaimed another of his global allegiances. Now he ended his suggestion on an upward note to make it a question, and he had that look again, the one which said ‘Is this my fault? Do you hate me?’ and most of all ‘Should I hate myself?’ The Sergeant wondered who had put that idea in his head, and how long ago.

‘You’re a good lad,’ he said, answering the important question first. You are filled with whatever it is which makes worth. You have not expended it or negated it. ‘You did right, telling me. You’re not, you’re not bad. You hear me? You’re a good lad. And this is good. I can use it. Find out what happened. Tomorrow I’ll go and talk to those men again, and I’ll talk to them about Jack. It’s better when you know what to ask. They’ll tell me things and that’ll be because of you. You’ve done a brave thing here today. The right thing. And I’m proud of you.’ He found he was having trouble speaking and, hearing his own voice, realised he was nearly in tears. He saw in his mind the boy standing mute and hopeful in front of an ugly armchair, its back towards him and a silence proceeding from it which could only mean a perpetual, corrosive disappointment. A moment later he realised that it was not the boy at all but himself, in that bloody room at home, and there was the electric fire and the print of a hunt and the ship in a bottle. He shuddered. Christ, he had to hold it together. It was not the time, not the time at all to be worrying over old, dead ghosts.