Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

He found that he was heading towards it. For what, exactly? Surely not to bang on the door and ask her to harbour a fugitive. To have sex with a fugitive. No. Whatever magic was working on him to vanish his aches and strengthen his legs, he remained himself, and he knew after nearly forty years on Earth that when you showed up at a woman’s door in the middle of the night smelling of blood and diesel and river mud, she did not immediately lose track of her underwear, or even her common sense.

Not to admit all, either. If she was what she appeared to be, she didn’t need the trouble — and if she wasn’t then nor did he.

Not to serenade her, not to seek medical attention, not to steal her car. But since he was passing, and this being the day he was having, he wanted to see her front door and put his hand on the gate, and know that not everything on Mancreu was a mess.

He climbed the fence around the plantation and ran across the spongy sea-grass towards her house. The door was very solid, an old, traditional Mancreu colonial door made of salvaged wood. It looked inviting, and safe. Perhaps he would just call on her, say he had heard a noise, was wondering if she was all right. Perhaps she would ask him in, after all. Perhaps she was so worldly that his attire would hardly seem odd to her.

Don’t be an idiot.

There was a light burning in the window, and to his amazement she was awake, sitting in a high-backed chair. Her hands were stretched out in exhortation or applause. Come on, come on! Did she have a child, then? Was she for some reason teaching her toddler to walk at two a.m.? The Sergeant realised he had no idea. Perhaps that was something some children did, perhaps they sat up in bed and screamed until you put them on the floor and then they took their first steps and you gave them a lollipop. He had not seen a child’s first steps, not ever. Or perhaps he had and hadn’t known. He had seen plenty of small children, shaky waddlers flopping into their mothers’ arms. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. Perhaps, if he had understood what was happening around him, he would have realised on some of those occasions that he was witnessing a mundane sort of miracle. Perhaps if he had realised it, he might actually have won a single, genuine heart or mind, made a connection which meant more than occupation and cigarettes.

‘Your son is walking! Is that the first time?’

‘Yes! It is! Well done, Iskender! Well done!’

‘Here, we’ve got some coffee in the jeep, have a cup with me.’ Because, in some parts of the Caucasus and even elsewhere, to drink a toast in beer was an eternal curse. Coffee, however much he loathed it, was universal.

And thus I make the world safe for democracy! But perhaps children’s steps were private things, not to be shared with a lumbering British sergeant.

Just as this scene beyond the window was private. He turned to go, and as he did so he saw White Raoul the scrivener, one leg twisted without his cane, claw his way forward. Therapy, surely, of the most human sort. Teach the muscles, lift the spirit. The Sergeant could hear the patient’s joints protest, hear them click and grind. Each step was pain. And yet White Raoul weathered it, welcomed it even, because she was at the far end. Her arms were out to him and her face was a cry of approbation. Brave soldier! Raoul grunted, and the Sergeant could see her weight shift as she prepared to bridge the gap between them, but she held back, held back, and he recovered his balance and his composure. More pain. A mangled hip, the Sergeant thought, and likely a prosthetic kneecap on the other leg: an old, cheap one. A Swiss surgeon had famously used a calf’s kneecap years ago, but he had been a genius and this was not his work. This was patch and repair and don’t worry about it too much because to be honest this man will probably die. Car crash. Gunfire. Falling log. Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.

Raoul passed the little table and the chairs, and his grin was victory. His doctor — no, more: his reward — lunged at him, and for a moment the Sergeant thought she would knock him down, but together they made a single, upright pillar in the little house. She pressed her mouth on his urgently, and then her dress was gone and beneath it she was quite nude. She stripped away his smock and the shapeless trousers, and then his strange, rainbow arms were around her back, corded muscle locked against tanned skin. The scrivener’s body was a tapestry, tattoos weaving in and out of bands of mottled skin, over old, hard muscles and elegant ribs, and what could only be shrapnel scarring in a spray along one flank. Life must be a constant barrage of greater and lesser pain. But here, now, it all made sense, as if he was a machine made of broken parts which functioned perfectly only in this one action, only for her. They made love standing up, and White Raoul grew less unsteady and more fluid with each moment, and her breath gasped out into the night.

Abruptly, the Sergeant realised that he was spying.

He turned, and picked his way through the shadowed streets into a breeze which was unusually cold.

The car was exactly where it should be, and the boy was gone.

The Sergeant arrived at Brighton House ten minutes later, and closed the door on Mancreu with some finality. In the morning he would love the place again, he knew, but for tonight he had had enough. Enough tomatoes, enough stolen fish, enough local characters and their little ways. Enough tigers, enough trying to do the right thing. He was tired and he was not dead and that was good.

He stripped off the suit and bundled it into a bag. When he awoke he would destroy it, return as many pieces as he could to the armoury, and move on. He reckoned he had a better than even chance of having escaped identification and tracking tonight. If he had, all he needed to do was sit tight and stay clean and let the inevitable blurring of events and the imminent destruction of Mancreu wash the problem away. Dig in and let the shitstorm fly by. He laughed, feeling the euphoria of survival.

Fuck you, he told the world. Not dead, again.

He showered, peering down at himself and seeing the body he recognised, old scars and new bruises. He had some light scalding, some scratches, and in the mirror he could see a bold blue square where the armour had taken bullets. Green mosaic tiling gave his body a slightly fishy sheen.

He walked naked into the galley and drank water straight from the tap, then when his thirst faded he poured a couple of fingers of Scotch and sipped at it slowly, letting himself feel the burn. He did not dilute it. He wanted the fire in it, the bite.

Sensing movement, he peered at his groin, half-amused, half-frustrated. Signs of post-combat arousal: all dressed up and no place to go. He patted his penis in a friendly way. It bounced. After three decades of sharing his life with its weird, unpredictable reactions, he tended to view it as a benign alien presence and treated it accordingly. He had never given it a name, because he privately thought only idiots did that, but it was idle to pretend that he and the organ were always of one mind. He, for example, found nothing erotic in being shot at, but it inevitably produced this reaction. Seeing the Witch naked and having sex would seem much more so, but had elicited none at all. That was imponderable, but curiously appropriate. He wished her well with Raoul, truly. He felt his desire relinquish her, felt his mind remove her to that separate, respected place reserved for things he cherished and wanted to protect, but did not touch.

Not dead, again.

THE SERGEANT SHOWERED and went into the comms office, found that Kershaw had indeed called, several times. He thought for a while, then lifted the phone and called back.