Nick Harkaway: Tigerman

The boy nodded to him. The Sergeant nodded back.

‘You are smart,’ the boy said.

‘You too.’

The boy nodded.

‘You like comics?’ the Sergeant asked, then heard the echo of the question and saw his own child self shaking his head at the stupidest thing ever said by man.

But the boy was gracious, respecting the gambit for what it was. ‘Yes.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All. Some DC, for Batman. Grant Morrison! But mostly Marvel. Warren Ellis. Also Spurrier, and Gail Simone. Bendis is full of win.’

The Sergeant grinned. He had never heard this expression before, but he approved of it. Full of win. It had a digital flavour, merry and modern. More things should be full of win.

‘I like Green Lantern,’ he said.

‘Which one?’ the boy demanded.

Oh, sod it. Now he remembered: there were so many Lanterns to choose from, and always changing, and the wrong one was like the wrong football team, the wrong church. . ‘Hal Jordan,’ he said, dredging up the name.

‘That is totally Old School,’ the boy approved. ‘Jordan is bad ass.’ He separated the words: bad ass . The Sergeant suspected he had learned them by reading. He wondered which comics allowed that sort of language, and realised: probably all of them, these days.

‘You like Captain America, too?’ the boy asked.

The Sergeant hesitated. ‘Not so much,’ he admitted. Bright colours and battlefields didn’t mix for him. Steve Rogers was an invincible man, an overman who wore what he damn well liked, and survived. It was the men around him who didn’t make it. No. The Sergeant did not like Captain America. Perhaps he had once, when he was younger.

The boy nodded as if this was to be expected. ‘Batman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Batman is best. Bob Kane was a god. Also Bill Finger.’ The Sergeant had only the dimmest idea who these people were.

The boy seemed to realise that the conversation had become too technical, because he proffered the comic he had been reading. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Christian Walker is full of win.’

The Sergeant took it, then hesitated. ‘How will I get it back to you?’

‘I’m around,’ the boy said vaguely. ‘But there is n.p. — I do not collect them.’ The boy stopped, grinned. ‘That is not true! I do collect them. But to read, not like a crazy shut-in dude!’

‘I’ll get it back to you,’ the Sergeant promised.

‘ Kswah swah ,’ the boy replied with a shrug. What happens, happens . Very Mancreu. On the Arabian mainland they said insh’Allah — if God wills it. If God willed it, you might arrive punctually for your appointments, but generally He willed that you show up more or less on the same day. Time and matter were flexible; only God was real. On Mancreu, even God had somehow faded away. The universe was what it was, mutable and strange, and God had made it in His image, so He too was probably imponderable. The nature of His will varied from soul to soul, and what actually happened often wasn’t what anyone understood by it. Perhaps God, being everywhere and seeing all things from outside time, was incapable of willing anything which men could grasp as a plan.

So insh’Allah seemed to suppose too much. On Mancreu, you just said: what happens, happens . It was practically the national anthem.

When the Sergeant asked what to call him, the boy had glanced away and said ‘Robin.’ The Sergeant accepted the lie politely, but never adopted it, and as their acquaintanceship grew he avoided sentences that required him to use a name at all. In his mind, his friend was a unique identity, a presence which had no need of a borrowed label to encapsulate it.

Today, with the image of the pelican and the pigeon still causing occasional head-shaking, they left the Land Rover across the road from the café and bowed each other mirthfully across the threshold. It was not unknown for them to spend twenty minutes doing this, each insisting that the other go first, making more and more outrageous speeches of diplomatic deference. Today, though, they merely tussled, the boy shouting ‘Put up your dukes!’ and jabbing inexpertly at the Sergeant’s stomach until the man acknowledged himself subdued into accepting the honour and entering ahead of his friend. He paused two steps inside to allow his eyes to adjust.

Physically, the café was a single rectangular room, but it had the appearance of an L-shape because one corner was taken up by a rather grand wooden staircase that Shola had salvaged from a defunct hotel. The bar was topped with a sheet of folded copper, very worn and very much polished, and the tables were a hodgepodge of round and square. The rickety chairs were moved from one place to another by customers as they came and went, so that only when the café was absolutely full did anyone have to sit on the perilous yellow typist’s stool which Shola kept folded by the bar. Along the walls of the room were benches made from driftwood, silvered and polished smooth by years of slithering backsides.

In the crook of the staircase, with a patrician view of the door and the bar, there was the shtammteh , the table which was by common understanding Shola’s own. It was never reserved. It was simply not somewhere you sat unless you were invited. Even the boy and the Sergeant, upon arrival, made a show of dithering and finding a suitable place, and then Shola came and chided them and moved them to the shtammteh to take their tea with him.

The new delivery must just have arrived, because Shola served them a rich gunpowder tea which they had never had before, demanding to know what they thought of it. The Sergeant held a long swallow in his mouth, the perfect temperature baking his gums but not burning them, warming his throat and making his whole body feel cooler. He tasted pepper and smoke and the smell of snow. This was not tea. It was something else, a kind of elixir. It was what tea aspired to be.

‘It’s good,’ he said, and saw Shola’s mouth twitch in a smile.

The boy rolled his eyes. ‘He means totally awesome. This tea is made from hunnertenpercent secret inside-the-door-teaching tea fu ! It is the daddy of tea. This tea is the tea of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine. Every morning: this tea, then lightsaber practice. Strong in the Force!’ He made a lightsaber noise. Vvmwomm, Vvmwomm, TCHA FWSH!

Shola obligingly refilled his cup. ‘I should order more?’

Such an order was a statement of commitment to remain for another month. The boy nodded gravely. ‘I will come and drink it.’

Leaving — Leaving with a capital ‘L’ as opposed to merely going out of a shop or a house — had become a ritual. You couldn’t call it a tradition, because it wasn’t, would never be, old enough. It was a sort of shared insanity, like cutting your own flesh to see if it hurt. If you were Leaving, going away from Mancreu and not coming back — and tacitly everyone was Leaving, of course, no one had suggested the population should stay and die when the hammer fell, but still, Leaving before your neighbours was a form of defeat or desertion — then you threw a party. Above all, you had a bonfire, and you burned what you couldn’t take with you and couldn’t give away. Not just what no one wanted, but the things you couldn’t let go of, things you’d rather destroy with your own hand than see shattered by the impossible, cleansing heat that would burn Mancreu down to the rock, to the waterline and the granite on which the island stood, and past even that, down and down into the mantle of the Earth to scour the place of a generation of stupid human abuse.

In the beginning, Leavers had printed posters, spent money on them, tried to sell themselves on a festive atmosphere somewhere between a wake and a christening. This chapter is over, this world is over, but there is a new one! But the falseness of it, of forced departure claimed as opportunity, showed through like a broken bone. Now they wrote in white chalk on the black telegraph poles which connected Mancreu’s trembling phone network to the exchange: a wide, shamed L and then a time and a place, always after dark, always outside town. The Leavers came first, and the next to arrive were always other Leavers or those who knew they would be, very soon, and then the celebrants, the ones who had outlasted another crop of the weak. People wept and marriages shattered, truths were uttered which should have been kept deep inside. Family heirlooms, beautiful pieces of wooden furniture, jewellery, even pets and livestock burned. This wasn’t a clean break. It was sati by proxy, and that only because no one had yet been desperate enough, wild enough, sick enough in the heart to step into the flames. But the Sergeant had privately told Jed Kershaw that it was only a matter of time.