Nick Harkaway: Tigerman

He had begun going along to all of them that he could, a sort of inverted ghost at the feast: the man from a cold, wet island which wasn’t going to burn. He stood outside the circle of the bonfire light and watched as first-edition books and prized saucepans joined photo albums and cradles on the pyre, put a stop to fights before they became feuds or murders. After the first few Leavings, the tone had shifted to something bacchanalian, and then fatigue had set in and replaced that with a sort of silent goodbye which was almost wholesome. Recently the mood was becoming one of breathless transgression: who could destroy the most valuable thing? Who could show their self-despite most graphically as they betrayed the only home they had ever known?

But his presence seemed to act as a sort of dampener, as if the uniform called everyone to remember that most British of virtues: the stiff upper lip. Or perhaps it was like being a Health & Safety inspector, and no one could really get crazy knowing he was around. He nodded sadly to grandmothers burning their feather mattresses and fishermen burning their coracles, to crab hunters immolating their traps and postmen burning their bicycles. He shook hands with the Leavers and sometimes that meant everyone else could suddenly stand to look at them and even talk to them after all. He was an undertaker, a cypher.

An army chaplain had once told him that she had spent years trying to find the right form of words for the bereaved, only to realise that the clichés were the best. Widows and orphans didn’t want to be comforted. They wanted to be recognised.

‘You say “it was very quick, he didn’t suffer,”’ the chaplain had told him. ‘You say “I’m sorry for your loss.” If you’re in a hospital and there’s one of those silences which needs breaking you say “I understand, at the end, he felt no pain” and then you fuck off and let them get on with it. If you want to get punched in the eye you say “he’s in a better place.”’

So the bonfires proceeded in something approximating an orderly fashion, which was almost worse than if they hadn’t, and the Sergeant had become a sort of necessary thing: you couldn’t have a real Leaving without him. The Last Consul had to be there to set the official seal on it, though it was clear to no one whether the seal meant excommunication or absolution.

Staying had not been dignified with a capital letter. No one was Staying. Staying meant dying when the island died, and then there’d be nothing left to die for.

In this exchange regarding the buying and the drinking of tea, though, Shola and the boy had just agreed that they would not Leave for another month. In general, neither showed any inclination to Leave at all; Shola at least acknowledged that one day he must, though that day was forever retreating towards the horizon, but the boy did not. He lived in a perpetual now, and his vigorous objection to the island’s future cleansing was twinned with a stalwart denial that it would ever come to pass. The Sergeant suspected that would have to be dealt with soon. He had an image of the boy, when the day came, chaining himself to the pilings of the Beauville jetty, and NatProMan soldiers cutting him free with saws. Better to find a soft exit strategy.

Shola seemed to be thinking along similar lines. He glanced at the Sergeant and for a moment the fatigue in him was palpable. This time, the Sergeant understood, he had had to think seriously about going. He couldn’t be making money. Couldn’t really be breaking even. The more people left, the more farms and fishing boats weren’t making food, the more expensive everything was and the fewer customers he had. And when Shola went, something would happen. Beauville would shift in some indefinable way from being a place which could recover to a place which was dying — not because of him alone, but because dozens of other Sholas, good-hearted men and women who had done their best and made it bearable for everyone else, would also go. Because it was finally time.

‘What’s it called?’ the Sergeant asked, pointing at the pot.

‘The label says “Heaven’s Limitless Canon”,’ Shola replied. ‘I think they mean “cannon”, like a gun, but who knows? You reckon it’s worth drinking?’

‘It is.’

They had another round and the conversation shifted gratefully to the merits of taking various biscuits with this tea of teas. Beneseffe the Portmaster was called to adjudicate between the ginger nut and the plain digestive, a matter which required the gravest of scrutiny, although Beneseffe, more usually a traditionalist in such matters, unexpectedly held out for the chocolate Hobnob.

It was heartening for the Sergeant to find other people talking like this with the boy, as if he were seeing their friendship in a warm, homely mirror. He felt a species of pride, too, on hearing his young friend give as good as he got in the fierce biscuit debate, concocting ever more outrageous arguments in favour of his case. Then he wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn’t. But they had silence, and not many people had that.

The taking of tea concluded and the boy having departed on night-time business of his own, the Sergeant returned to Brighton House alone.

Three years ago the residence had been a blinding lighthouse white, trimmed with yellow at the corners and along the gutters. Then the first of the Discharge Clouds had washed over Brighton House, and everything died except the tomatoes. On the mountainsides, the red rain had just burned the leaves and run rapidly away towards the sea. The slow-growing hardwoods had survived, albeit bent and scarred, and the underbrush had returned twice as thick. But here, on the flat croquet lawns and manicured terraces, in the planters and window boxes, the concentrated goop sat in great swirling lakes and wrought havoc. The dry season’s dust had stuck to the paint and left the building veined and tinted like a giant cheese. The gardeners had packed up and gone with the diplomats, taking their ladders and their shears and their green aprons from Keen & Ryle of Chichester. The veinous Gorgonzola manse was fossilised, standing alone behind the bare earth that had been the rose gardens. The grounds were left to what might come. The sturdy Tumblers and Black Princes and Purple Russians, the Nebraska Weddings, the Soldakis and the Cherokees, the Brandywines and Radiator Charlies — a whole General Assembly of edible nightshades — saw their evolutionary moment and took over. By the time the Sergeant was handed the keys and told he should make himself entirely at home, because there was no prospect of anyone ever returning to Brighton House, the seaward side of the building was swaddled in vast, overripe tomatoes vying for sunlight and moisture. They rustled when the wind blew, and squeaked as taut, glistening skin rubbed against hirsute stems and flopping, musty leaves. When it rained, it sounded like men on the march, and when the sun came out you could hear them growing, whimpering and shuddering upwards, expanding, bursting, and starting again.

He parked the Land Rover at the back as he always did, and went in by the staff entrance. The rear hall was dark, and rather than turning on the lights he chose to walk along it in the gloom. After a moment, his right hand trailed along the wall and caught the door of the little bedroom he had assigned to himself. It was just behind the staff kitchen, so he didn’t have to bother with the central heating. He just kept the old Rayburn stove alight and used it for water, cooking and warmth. It gave him a pleasant sense of familiarity, a translucent memory of hundreds of evenings spent here and thousands more in his mother’s kitchen long ago — when, like the boy, he had been a reader of comic books. Although back then comics were printed in two or three colours on grainy paper, and superheroes fought bank robbers rather than aliens.