Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Once upon a time, he thought, only it’s not like that because it’s not fucking funny. And where had he heard that? ‘Throw the stele in the sea and tell him you want to take him away from here and see what he says. Maybe there’s a family for you after all. Leave your victory on this island where it belongs.’

The story went on, relentless.

Once upon a time, White Raoul knew a lover from the mountains, a weaver woman of the old stock. They made no marriage and no contract. She would not have him, because he was a foreigner. He amused her and adored her and perhaps his feelings were reciprocated. But when she conceived a child she told him that Beauville was too modern and too cold a place to raise a daughter and she went home, and would not see him any more. Sandrine was born on the floor of a herder’s cottage, midwifed by a cowman. She visited her father as she grew. He kept a place for her always in his house, and she was famed for her looks. Her father’s fierce protectiveness was misconstrued. He was not guarding her virtue, just his small allotment of time with the child as she grew and changed from month to month and he missed each waystation of her life: her first tooth, her first word, her first love.

Until she too bore a child, to a longline fisherman, and when he died she mourned and healed and in time the boy attended school in Beauville, for the dead father had persuaded her the world beyond the island was worth knowing. She obtained by some haggling an old computer and a solar mat to charge it, and they learned together of the history of Mancreu, and Europe and Africa and more, and together they were angry and impressed and afraid. She studied correspondence courses and prepared for the day she must travel with him to the mainland and enrol them both in some manner of university. It was possible. There were bursaries, charities, husbands and even sugar daddies, and if these failed there was always crime. Her family knew crime.

She was methodical, composing options and plans, laying groundwork. She networked, by phone and by email and later by the new avenues of social media. With the assistance of a passing photographer and a local flautist she created a YouTube slot which picked up thirty thousand views. And she got her wish: scholarships for them both one autumn, with all the trimmings, at an institution in Qatar.

That summer she walked the high passes every day. She took pictures of them, inhaled them, sketched them and sang to them. She slept under the stars, sometimes alone and sometimes in company, drank and danced and visited her mother and her uncles and aunts. She and the boy together toiled over their English and their Arabic both, watching movies and listening to CDs and reading books, so that the way they spoke was a muddle of Scotland and Baltimore, Tikrit and Tunis.

On the last day of her sabbatical, the first Discharge Cloud came. It rolled down along the high valleys, and she was caught in it and changed. She was vibrant and beautiful still, compassionate and energetic. But from moment to moment she forgot almost everything and everyone, living in an endless now which seemed to worry her not at all. Of all things, she remembered most of all the island, the endless smugglers’ paths and narrow goat tracks, the rivers and waterfalls where she swam. She was content and even joyful in her new state. But she never spoke, and she did not know her son.

And he, of course, still knew her.

IT HAD BEEN quiet enough during the day, the Beauville mob sleeping off its rage on stolen mattresses dragged out onto the street or in the bedrooms of departed neighbours, but as dusk fell fresh fires were already being kindled in the shanty and the weird gabble of the riot began whispering on the wind. The rage was building again, the furious rejection of an intolerable circumstance. The Sergeant could feel it in his teeth, in the line of his jaw: the cold wash of coming violence. It whispered between men and women camped in town squares, in ditches and ruined houses. It sparked and glittered. In another place it would have meant revolution and civil war, but here there was nowhere to put it, nothing to be done with it which was even as constructive as tearing down statues, so it zinged back and forth and grew, and as it grew it grew uglier.

He stood on the flat roof at the edge of the wing and peered over the lip of the house down towards Beauville. From up here — the highest point of the building — one could see the whole of the town. When the wind came up he could smell the sea, and the stink of burning.

Beauville would burn again tonight unless someone stepped in, and there was no one to do it. Kershaw would not, and perhaps he was right that he could not. NatProMan might become the occupying enemy as opposed to the tolerated presence of the outer world. The Fleet was even more disbarred, had its denizens had any desire to intervene. Beneseffe’s little army was simply too small, there were no NGOs to mediate, and the global press pack was getting great TV out of the collapse. How often did anyone get to cover an actual apocalypse, however local and small? Crisis was commonplace; endings were not.

The thought did not make him happy, and even less so because he was in some senses not affected. Up here on the hill, Brighton House was a long walk from the centre. You could herd a mob — if you had, say, quad bikes and a willingness to deploy violence — but you couldn’t push them to walk an hour in the dark. That was a little too cold and considered. Brighton House was a symbol of the good old days as much as the bad ones, which was why Lester Ferris had been made Mancreu’s bobby on the beat by acclamation.

So he was safe enough so long as he kept his head down, and when it was all done — in a fortnight, he guessed, not much more — he would go home and he would have some photographs and probably quite soon a new job, and that would be that.

But down there it would be bad, and really the end of the island would bring no release. Mancreu’s last ten thousand would be evacuated and resettled and they’d be a people dispossessed and perhaps unwelcome, in places they did not know. He was a tourist, a spectator, as surely as Kathy Hasp and her pals. He might help the boy — though how, he did not know, and he had no notion of what Sandrine meant to that plan: would he have to adopt them both? Fake a marriage with her? — but that would be the extent of it, and a pisspoor extent it was. And he was a man under authority, specifically instructed to stay out of the way. In films that might not mean anything, but for all his adult life he had taken orders and it counted with him. It was a piece of who he was, a thing made not of duty or queen and country, but self.

He realised guiltily that he was picking and choosing. For the boy, he had done things far outside what he was permitted. He just didn’t care about the people below him enough to break the rules. They were far away and he didn’t know their names.

He went inside and looked in on the Witch, and she shrugged. Her patient was stable. White Raoul was sleeping in a chair. Nothing to report.

He found the old man from the street of the card-players reading one of the Consul’s books in the kitchen, a Russian novel he hadn’t heard of.

He knew he was avoiding the boy, and the conversation they must have. He went to look for him.

The boy was watching television in the spare room, inevitably the news coverage of the island. Kathy Hasp frowned out of the screen, her fluid, Antipodean English lending her authority and a species of gravitas while the strangely emphatic cadence of network news tried to take it away: ‘. . a grim night here on Mancreu and most likely another one to come, with more arson already going on around me — although it’s hard to know if you can really call it that on an island without law , and without a future . These are the actions of a people on the edge . .’ Her eyes flicked away to the horizon, but the cameraman had his back to the Fleet. It was just an editorial decision, a question of what was news. Rioting, yes. Shipping, no.