The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  Kovacs seemed immune to everything but a self-lacerating fury for having precipitated the block, complaining that all he had wanted to know was the source of the stuff. ‘And you know! You’re on Quarter staff, so you know!’

  Sykes laughed through his mask of blood. ‘I would have told you. Now I can’t.’

  Kovacs said very sharply, ‘I think you can.’

  An adroit, clever, oblique questioner can sometimes penetrate a block by eliciting replies on only vaguely related subjects until an outline of the suppressed information shows through the mass of disparate answers, but neither of us had the psychiatrist’s expertise for that sinuous process.

  Kovacs meant something else, something quite different, and Sykes knew what it was; he held Kovacs’ eyes in understanding and fear. I would have known, too, if it had not been a thing so at odds with every instinct that it did not at once enter my mind. I was struck by the fear on their faces; Sykes no doubt had cause for apprehension but I could not guess what afflicted Kovacs and did not understand his feeling until after it was all over. I had come early to the conclusion that he feared and felt nothing.

  He took up a lamp and pushed his face close to Sykes’s, with the light in the soldier’s eyes. ‘How long since they put the hook in you?’

  I said, ‘He can’t answer that. It’s military.’

  Kovacs took no notice of me. Perhaps he saw some reaction the voice was inhibited from expressing, for he looked fleetingly as though something had been understood, ‘Sometime back, eh? On border patrol?’

  He lowered the lamp and said to me, ‘It weakens with time. It gets so a man can break his own conditioning – if he’s hurt enough or terrified enough.’

  Understanding the unthinkable, I protested, ‘That’s barbaric.’

  He erupted in instant, violent rage. He screamed at me, ‘Run back to your mother if you can’t face it!’

  Sykes seized the moment to burst between us like a thunderbolt but bungled it badly in the half-light and narrow space. His weight tossed me out of his way and on my back in the water; it was his sheer ill luck that my flailing feet tangled in his ankles and he went momentarily to his knees. Even so he contrived to hit me on the cheekbone, harder than I had ever been hit in my life before, as he scrambled up.

  Kovacs came at him from behind and did something so coldblooded that it still spikes my dreams. He grabbed Sykes’ right arm as the man rose to one knee, pulled it straight out and slightly back, then slammed his foot down hard on the shoulder joint.

  Sykes shrieked – there is no other word for it – with the agony of dislocation and remained kneeling, head down, breath rasping in sobs of pain and shock, Kovacs stood over him, yelling like a madman, utterly out of his mind, “You’ll tell me! Tell me! Everything you know you’ll tell me!’ He thumped the outraged shoulder and Sykes whined, and it was the face of insanity that sometimes bawled and sometimes pleaded like a child, ‘You’ll tell me, soldier. Oh, you’ll tell me, tell me, tell me.’

  I shouted, ‘Kovacs, stop it!’ and sounded in my own ears only horrified and futile.

  He shot me a glance of blind hatred. ‘If you’re not man enough, go and hide!’ Then, watching me with rage in his eyes in case I should try to interfere, he wrenched Sykes’ other arm from its socket and the man’s howling echoed around the walls.

  I heard voices as the outer door flew open and half a dozen men crashed into the narrow passage, calling, ‘Wha’s on? Wha’ doon?’

  What was on, what was doing, was nothing they had not seen before, Billy Kovacs getting some answers. They would have stayed to watch, like the kids, if he had not gestured them out, his face demoniac. They went without question, curiosity satisfied, not quite joking over the sight but not disturbed by it, either. They came in, looked and went out and I had seen at last the blunting of the soul that comes to those whose lives are without change or hope of change. They came and went like an irrelevance, the inconsistent piece that memory puzzles over and forgets.

  So we were as we were, Sykes on his knees in the polluted water, whining like a sick dog, his useless arms hanging from his shoulders while the thin, demented figure of Kovacs kneeled with him, mouth at the man’s ear, articulating threats in a failing, strained voice like a cracking twig. And I – I watched as if I were the one hypnotized and unable to break a block.

  I could have stopped it, could have torn Kovacs away and knocked him out. And what would I have done then with the tortured man whose agony I could observe but not relieve? That was an emotional dilemma. There were others. There was the conviction that if the knowledge could be obtained, we must have it and that the eyes of conscience must be blind to the manner of getting it. I plead for myself that I was eighteen, a boy at large in the world’s viciousness, still the creature of what training had drummed into me, that it was necessary that some suffer for the general good. I was still in training, still under pressure, not yet stuffed so full of horrors as to question what was rammed into my eager head, so I watched with revulsion, loathing what Kovacs did, loathing him for what he was and telling myself that it must continue because the end was the safety of all the people. Looking back, the excuses leave me feeling no better about it.

  Grotesque and wrenching was the fact that Sykes was trying to answer, now that he knew the truth behind the game of tablets for sex. He wanted to answer and could not. Part of the hoarse, strangled breathing was his attempt to speak against the conditioned stricture of his throat. He wanted to answer not because his courage had run out but because he knew that for right or wrong he should answer; his kneeling was not surrender but the torment of stomach spasms contingent on the effort to tell. Kovacs was in fact holding him from falling to drown on the floor.

  Eerily, Kovacs’ voice changed to a new mode of whispering persuasion. I could just hear his murmuring. ‘Don’t try so hard, soldier, just let it come. You try to tell it and your body knots up. Just let it come . . . when it’s ready . . . when it falls out because there’s nothing left to stop it.’

  Sykes lifted his head to search his tormentor’s eyes and made raw noise in his throat like struggling speech. He nodded slightly and uttered somewhere near the low threshold of my hearing, ‘Yes . . .’

  I felt then that I knew nothing at all about people or what the human mind could do, when madman and victim agreed on brutality and the manner of it, Sykes saying, ‘Hurts . . .’ as his breath ran out on a sigh, and Kovacs murmuring a kind of loving encouragement, ‘A little pain . . . and then it’s over . . . good soldier, good man . . . a little pain . . .’

  His face changed again as he spoke, into the mindless absorption of a moron at play, dreaming of the next anguish.

  He must be, I thought, at bottom insane.

  What he did was startling in its implication of his capacities, something I would not have known how to do. He took each of Sykes’ arms in turn, pulled the limb out straight as the man moaned, steadied the shoulder joint with spider fingers and jerked it back into the socket. All the time his splintering voice crackled and whispered.

  A man cannot break modern conditioning by his own will; it must be relieved by the implanting operator or drain away gradually with time – or be rejected by a body fighting for its life and sanity. The tormented body-mind, driven to self-preservation can, in unbearable extremity, achieve what the will cannot. The two of them were devoted to the simple proposition, in one murderous and in the other unimaginably courageous, that the man had not yet been badly enough hurt. Resetting the shoulders had relieved no pain – the arms would be useless for days, hanging from a mass of torn ligaments and black, bruised flesh. As yet they were only a continuing agony for reinforcement.

  Expert torture requires implements, refinements centered on specific nerves; there are limits to what can be done with bare hands. Kovacs knew what could be done. Without warning he let go of Sykes and stood up.

  The sergeant fell face down into the shallow water and stayed there, drowning, legs scrambling for a nonexist
ent hold, body writhing, arms twitching uselessly because he could not force them to work, to raise him. He was barely able to squirm his mouth above water, to gulp a breath before Kovacs pushed him down again. He was being killed slowly and he knew it, killed with the maximum infliction of despair; the time came when he no longer struggled to raise his head.

  Perhaps by then he wanted to die and might have done if his great courage had not wanted to live and talk; there was a terrifying sense of co-operation between them. Kovacs seized him by the hair, dragged him upright and set him against the wall, holding him steady with one hand leaning at arm’s length on his chest, inhibiting further the labored breathing.

  Still with that moronic emptiness in his eyes he prised Sykes’ legs apart with his knee and said, ‘I’m going to crush your balls.’

  That threat penetrates where other pains can be withstood; it hits psychic depths. Sykes, near-drowned, was almost incapable of reaction but he shook his head weakly and tried to move his helpless arms across his body. Kovacs nodded violently, endorsing his promise and with all his strength drove his knuckles into the exposed crotch.

  Sykes was too strong, too fit, too outright brave to faint and he was beyond screaming. He slipped gently down the wall to sit like a collapsed puppet, whimpering. Kovacs dragged him upright, savaging the agonized arms, never ceasing his compulsive questioning, and again prised the legs apart.

  As he drew back his fist Sykes cried out what might have been, ‘Please, no!’ in absolute terror. Kovacs hesitated, craning close to the sergeant’s face where, unbelievably, something like the flicker of a smile crossed the blood and strain. The damaged mouth began jerkily to speak.

  It was over.

  Kovacs held him like a baby, loving his handiwork, hugging triumph to his heart and asking, asking, asking the questions.

  My relief was so great that at first the words were only dribbled sounds in the lamplight, until he dropped a name and even Kovacs’ absorption livened in a spasm of shock.

  I listened then in a web of shock of my own, discovering that if the sergeant’s purgatory was over, a door to another purgatory of a different kind was opening for me.

  My first thought was that I must protect my brother, whatever miserable thing he had done or had become; second thought showed me why I must protect him – so that Mum should never know what Francis had become involved in.

  There was a long silence when Sykes had done. Kovacs sat back on his haunches, knowing what my thought must be. He looked old in that unkind light, a mask of sharp bones and deep creases, the demon in him gone away, leaving the aging poseur who faked and conned and tortured in the name of his empire, Twenty-three. Perhaps he was remembering his entry into our lives as we struggled with our belongings on the footpath. In Francis the team of Kovacs and Conway had produced its end product.

  He half rose, leaning toward me, reaching to lay a hand on my shoulder. Comforting me, by Christ! He said softly, ‘Teddy.’

  I struck his hand away so hard that his knuckles cracked against the wall like a stick breaking and he fell forward into the water. I cursed at him, ‘Animal! Barbarian animal!’

  He put his hands up in a gesture like fear, not physical fear but a pleading against rejection. It was so unexpected that it cut across my instinct to kick and maim. There seemed no end to his store of pleas and persuasions.

  ‘I had to, Teddy.’

  Horribly, there was truth in this. There may have been other methods, had we known of them, but in his terms he had had to do what he could. Uneasily, in my terms also.

  He said, ‘You couldn’t do it, boy, but I had to.’

  No, I could not have done it. I can fight better than most in a competitive way and I could fight savagely for my life if need be but I could never have done what he had done. He had called up the killer and harnessed it to his will but I had no killer in me. I was Sweet reared, civilized, aware of the beating heart of humanity; I had no defense against the Swill kind of reality. I was, in the gutter world of necessity, incompetent.

  The knowledge improved nothing; that my companion dog, Kovacs, needed patting made him no less feral or untrustworthy.

  My reactions were so chaotic that I said what must be the stupidest thing you could say to an unbalanced man, ‘You aren’t human. You’re insane.’

  I might have triggered more blind rage, but he shook his head like an animal scattering water and said strongly, ‘It isn’t mad to see clear what you have to do.’

  He had Nick’s ability to throw up statements that challenged my certainties, opening up areas of the mind that loomed and threatened because I could not see into them. Some remnant of stubbornness prompted the thought, But you have to be insane to do it, but the sense of uneasy ignorance stopped me saying it. Instead, I nodded at Sykes, lying with his head against the sandbags, incredibly asleep and violently snoring.

  ‘What about him? There’s no meds in the towers now.’

  ‘He’ll be right.’

  ‘How will he? You can’t just leave him to recover on his own.’

  ‘Why can’t I?’ That savagery was meant only to jerk me into mental gear. He said with harsh weariness, ‘Start your brains working instead of your feelings,’ and went splashing outside into the lobby.

  He came back with four of the ruffians who had appeared earlier in search of spectator sport. They carried a rough stretcher of poles and bags. They lifted Sykes, with the care of those who had handled broken men before, on to the sandbag parapet. He woke and cried out and one of them said, ‘Sorry, mate, we got no dope.’ They eased his trousers down, padded his crotch with rags and fixed the pad with strips of clothing that had been sewn into bandages.

  For his outraged shoulders they could do nothing and no expertise could prevent pain as they folded his hands over his stomach. He wept and two of them made the soothing noises of helplessness as they lifted the stretcher above the water and the others maneuvred him on to it.

  He breathed like an exhausted runner as Kovacs bent over him. ‘If we stood you up could you walk a bit?’

  Sykes asked hoarsely, ‘Far?’

  ‘Maybe fifty meters.’

  The sergeant made a slight movement of his chin, the sketch of a nod. ‘Try . . . try.’

  Kovacs laid his fingers on the man’s cheek. ‘Good soldier! Terrific soldier!’ In Sykes’ contorted smile I recognized some manner of basic communication, wordless understanding. Now that they both knew the same things, the personal slate was clean. In Kovacs’ place I would have been pleading for forgiveness, but they knew it was not necessary, did not matter.

  Kovacs said to the stretcher party, ‘Drop him as close to the barracks gate as you can get. Set him on his feet and let him walk in. Help him if you have to but don’t get caught. If he falls, shout for the sentry and run. You have to get there while it’s still dark, so make it fast.’

  They took Sykes away and I never saw him again, which was as well because I could not have looked in his eyes.

  I felt I could stand no more of Kovacs. I said to him as a farewell, ridding myself of him, ‘I’m going to Mum’s place.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Your part is over,’ I told him. ‘Mine begins now.’

  ‘Not with your mother. Not till we’ve worked something out. A story.’

  ‘We don’t tell her anything, that’s all.’

  ‘You aren’t thinking, Teddy. Francis has to be got out of there. He’s got to disappear.’

  Kovacs in his emotional welter had grasped the point my bright Extra mind had not, that not only was Francis his beloved woman’s son but that the trail leading to him would also lead to the power behind him once Nick took action.

  ‘They’ll kill him,’ Kovacs said. ‘Whoever it is will kill him. We can hide him, we can hide anyone in the towers. Come upstairs, we’ve got to talk it over.’

  He was right. We needed a plan of some sort before I talked to Nick, which must be very soon.

  It was still dark outside. The sava
gery in the garbage well had occupied less than half an hour but I needed urgently to get out of the unbearable tower. At the top of the first flight I said, ‘There’s nobody around, we can talk here.’

  There was a weak globe on the landing; they tried to keep the stairs lit at night. In its little radiance I dare say I seemed as drawn and ill as Kovacs. He seemed ready to collapse. I thought vaguely of emotional reaction as he, a step above me, looked down and I saw that he was crying. He said in a shocking gabble, ‘Don’t desert me, Teddy.’

  He did not mean now, this minute. He meant ever, and I was enraged by the vanity of the demand. I knew what would come next. I did my best, I tried to be a father to you, and my insulted stomach would turn completely sour.

  As so often in this terrible new world, I was wrong. He clutched the stair rail and slid down the wall like a man fainting until he sat on the top step with his head against a poisonously obscene graffito. He said, ‘I’m too old, I can’t take it any more.’ The tears did not run but squeezed out one by one, reluctantly, while I wondered what the devil to do with him. I could not just walk away. I said, ‘You still do a bloody good imitation.’

  He dropped his head and shoulders and became the most wretchedly forlorn thing in my experience. I felt that I had hit a helpless child who had nothing in common with the demon in the garbage well. I tried to help him up. ‘Come on, now. I’ll see you home.’

  He would not move. He said, ‘I have to do it, Teddy. I can’t ask anyone else to do what I won’t do myself.’

  This was something I had heard spoken of but had never known, the immense, empty loneliness at the top. It meant more than the solitude of a leader daring neither intimate nor favourite; it meant being the one who must do whatever needs doing, able to give orders only to those who cannot match him. It was the sort of comprehension against which personal vanity falters.