Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘What the fuck did he expect?’ the Sergeant overheard a senior officer say to a visiting member of the general staff. ‘He sent his message, and they sent one back. Their message isn’t a lot more insane than his, it’s just in capital fucking letters!’ And then, to everyone’s surprise and embarrassment, the man wept.

  The Brits didn’t talk about Afghanistan being a Total Goatfuck. That didn’t come close to expressing how they felt. They had a sense of having been here before, a sense they got from their regimental histories and from the Afghans themselves, who still recognised the flags they flew and the badges on their shoulders from the wars of a hundred years ago. There were soldiers here whose great-grandfathers had fought the Pashtuns in 1918, and the fathers of those men had fought them before that in 1879, and their fathers in 1840. The Brits shared with the locals a tacit understanding that nothing done here would make any difference, that this was just another layer of bloody patina on the cold, hard soil.

  Command gave the Sergeant a new second lieutenant to take care of, a boy called Westcott. He was posh as Royal Doulton and thick as a carthorse. He said the war was going to be ‘an improvement for everyone in the long run’. He let it be known that he liked his men to read, because he felt it improved their chances of ‘getting a good position’ when they got home.

  The Sergeant, like many men whose jobs involve a great deal of waiting, enjoyed reading. He carried one paperback wherever he went. He had a small library in his locker and selected something different each time he packed his gear. He had Three Men in a Boat and The Passion and The Hound of the Baskervilles, a few old Eric Frank Russell editions, and a copy of Bleak House for the winter. Westcott said he should invest in an electronic book tablet. They could store thousands of books, Westcott said, and they lasted for weeks between charges. A couple of the soldiers already had them, Westcott said, and really liked them. Progress was what it was all about. When he was out of the army, he was going into business and then later when he knew a thing or two he might stand for Parliament – that was giving back, which a person in Westcott’s position really ought to do.

  Two weeks on, Westcott was reading from his gizmo in a ravine when the sky opened white and purple and bullets poured down. The machine had brought the Taliban right to him; it had a cellular connection Westcott had forgotten to switch off, or maybe he couldn’t wait for the latest Grisham and had tried to bloody download it. The Sergeant dragged two men through the howling night and hid them in the stripped carcass of a bus, then went back and found that Westcott had been cut in half. The enemy was a gaggle of boys and an older man, and one of the kids had a box with wires poking out which was their uplink detector. They were dancing and celebrating.

  Blue Peter, the Sergeant thought. My Science Project. I’m fighting sticky-backed plastic and cornflakes packets. He was only dimly aware of being injured.

  A day later, the whole valley was made of glass. The daisy-cutters weren’t classed as weapons of mass destruction because they weren’t nukes, but they worked just as well by being very big. They were so big they had to be pushed out of the back of carrier planes one by one, down the ramp usually used for tanks and trucks. Each of them was a natural disaster in a box. The air for miles in any direction smelled of oil, hot stone, and charred sheep. The Sergeant sat in the back of a truck with his legs hanging down over the road and watched. Someone had thought it might be a good notion for him to know that the men who had killed Westcott weren’t getting away with it. Privately, he thought that whoever that person was must be new here. Still, it wouldn’t do to be ungrateful. He recited the whole of a poem he knew about a cat. For a while, it seemed to be all he could say. When he found other words, they were jagged and inappropriate, full of a sense of waste.

  They sent him to Mancreu. Take a break, Lester. Not long on active for you now, is it? Nearly forty. Well, serve it out. We’ll find something for you.

  He watched the waves in the harbour and thought about Beneseffe’s stolen fish. He would be quite content to stay here. Mancreu life – strange and undemanding and disjointed – suited him. He wondered if there were some other abandoned island somewhere without the death warrant hanging over it, a place which needed a sergeant. El Hierro, Shola had said. Maybe El Hierro. Then he felt like a traitor for having the thought, as if he were married to a sick woman and coveted her sister. Well, he would stay as long as he was permitted. But there was nothing wicked in wondering where he would go, after. That was just life. You had to be practical.

  There was a presence at his side and the noise of a pocket radio and he recognised, in a brief lull in the breeze, the scent of the boy. His friend smelled of earth today, rather than salt, so the Sergeant guessed he had not been out on his boat. The radio dangled by a lanyard from the boy’s hand, and a breathless northern English voice was detailing Real Madrid’s latest triumph on the football pitch. A famous victory, the voice said, which seemed rather premature. Time would decide whether it was famous or not, and most likely it would be just another game.

  The boy politely switched off the radio and the Sergeant got to his feet. They walked along beside the water until they came to a broad stretch of sea wall that was flat and warm, in a part of Beauville which was now mostly deserted. Both sat. The boy said nothing. The sea washed and swooshed. After a moment, the boy reached into his bag and produced something wrapped in greaseproof paper and foil.

  They had an arrangement regarding food which was acceptable to both. The Sergeant had a considerable inventory of baked beans and spaghetti hoops at Brighton House which amounted to more than a single person could consume over the space of some years. The boy had made it clear that he regarded baked beans as the highest form of culinary genius, but had a correspondingly low opinion of the spaghetti hoop. As with the continuity of stories and the football of Real Madrid, the matter was akin to a religious one, and no heresies were tolerated. The barbecued bean, for example, was taboo. Alphabet shapes could not move him to a gentler opinion of pasta in sauce.

  The Sergeant, meanwhile, had long ago eaten all the tinned produce, all the syrups and ketchups and brines, that he could stand. He wanted nothing so much as fresh food. He loved the dubious Mancreu cheeses and the dry sesame biscuits which went with them. He loved the oily sardines and goat-knuckle stews, the mashed roots and flatbreads which were the island’s staples. He ate whatever was in season and whatever was for sale and thought himself in paradise. Anything so long as he never had to swallow another mouthful from a tin.

  They had therefore evolved a practice suited to their likes. The boy would arrive with fruit, cheese, and bread, and the Sergeant would supply baked beans. They would begin by toasting the bread over a pocket gas burner and warming some beans for the boy. Each would make some disparaging face in the direction of his friend’s meal, and then they would sit in loud, masticatory silence for a while, and then speak of whatever might be on their minds.

  The Sergeant extended the plate of warmed beans, and the boy took them. He ate one mouthful, and then the next. He seemed to be worried that the heating had been uneven, because he was touching each heaped spoon with the tip of his tongue, like a lizard. The Sergeant took a big bite of cheese and bread.

  After a while – it was quite in keeping with the moment, he hoped, not an imposition but a natural thing to do – the Sergeant spoke.

  ‘Do you have . . . family?’

  The boy shook his head gravely. ‘I am too young.’

  A lack of precision could take you to some strange places with a child living on Mancreu, where anything was possible.

  ‘I mean parents. Brothers and sisters. Uncles, even.’

  ‘Aunts and cousins and bears, oh my!’ He grinned.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. Of course.’ He made an encompassing gesture. Mancreu life: everyone is family. If you live in the same street or on the same farm, you’re cousins or brothers. An older man is an uncle if he functions as an uncle.

  ‘Blood family?
’

  ‘Someplace.’

  ‘But here?’ Who takes care of you apart from me? Who’s missing you, right now? Where are you when you’re not with me? He felt like a jealous husband. Or how he imagined it would be to be one.

  The boy shrugged his private shrug, or perhaps it was merely that his mind had wandered, for the next thing he said was that he had heard the British government had captured a flying saucer in the early part of the 1900s, and did the Sergeant know anything about it? Would the Queen know? Or would it be hidden away from everyone, the way the Roswell saucer was at Area 51? The Sergeant answered these questions with the same serious attention he would have given to anything the boy said, as if they were entirely reasonable and not at all preposterous, and after a while longer watching the waves they went back the way they had come – if not together, then two men going in the same direction at the same time.

  They ended up, inevitably, at Shola’s. The Sergeant recognised by the boy’s heavy knapsack and his contemplative quiet that there was reading to be done. He had in his own pocket the paperback of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and was finding it entirely engrossing: ‘Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’ He therefore made his way to his own familiar seat, and the boy, without a backward glance, went to the bodyguard’s table, and spread out a sheaf of the work of the great Bendis, the bard of Cleveland. Shola obliged them both with quiet and what provisions they desired, and the common life of Mancreu came and went around them, until the day became the evening and the Sergeant’s left buttock began to ache in a way he could not any longer ignore. Age, he supposed, and bad furniture.

  Shola peered at the Sergeant, appearing to read something in his face which was both familiar and a little bit sad. ‘Anaesthetic,’ he offered. ‘Special Mancreu style.’ He produced a bottle from beneath the counter and poured himself a single measure in a little red glass.

  The rum was brown and thick, and there were veins like treacle in it. Every September, Shola harvested his small marijuana crop – the plant grew well on the island, at least on the sheltered side – and selected some of the best leaves. He dipped them briefly in boiling water to kill anything living, and pushed a handful into each of twelve bottles of sweet white alcohol. Then he buried the bottles in the mud at the back of his house, and the sun baked the mud and the mud coddled the rum, so that when he dug it up again in July the leaves were beaded with resiny sap. He shook the bottles one by one until the rum was the colour of crude oil, then poured it through a fresh linen cloth, and finally stoppered the finished product again and laid the bottles by for special occasions and dire emergencies. It was quite respectable. Mancreu men had brewed fortified rums for as long as anyone could remember. There were pictures of missionaries drinking them and losing their inhibitions, and stories of Knights Templar finding out about them and mistaking them for Christ’s Blood. The original indigenes had made theirs with a local hallucinogenic root, but no one used that any more because it was addictive and had the unfortunate property of sending you blind and mad. Marijuana was better, and you could sell it to the Black Fleet for Swiss francs. Shola no longer trusted dollars. The Chinese owned the dollar, Shola said. It was only a matter of time.

  The Sergeant declined the drink with thanks, though part of him very much wanted to accept. A strange, Victorian spectre dangled over him: the image of a fat, hirsute colonial administrator taking to the local drugs and losing his mind, running naked through the streets. Children laughed and pointed, women smirked. Men sucked air through their teeth as something terrible and a little bit funny happened to his exposed member. People – undefinable people, but including Kershaw, Beneseffe, the Witch, Pechorin, and of course, Kaiko Inoue and even the boy – would think less of him.

  Shola shrugged and poured half the glass carefully back into the bottle, then drank the rest. The Sergeant, feeling embarrassed at this evidence of his own prudishness, accepted a bowl of soup instead, and returned his attention to Eddie Coyle.

  The men came in as Shola was shifting the café from one mood to another. He had turned on the neon lights and taken the tea kettle off the hob, but he had not closed the shutters. He had gone up to the private rooms to change his workmanish daytime shirt for the extraordinarily ugly red silk one he wore at night. Every day he looked exactly the same. Perhaps he had several sets of each uniform. The Sergeant imagined a daytime closet upstairs filled with vests and aprons and grubby trousers, and opposite it an old wardrobe filled with a row of Casanova blouses, vintage 1974 from Yeah, Baby! of Brick Lane, bought from eBay and shipped by sea to Qatar and then on to Mancreu, vacuum-sealed by Shola’s explicit instruction, lest the damp creep in and they arrive covered in mould.

  There were five men, and they arrived as the Sergeant finished his soup. They were local but not familiar, and from his vantage the Sergeant had time to be uncomfortable with their intent faces and their focus. He shifted his weight from the bones of his arse to his feet, and felt the muscles in his stomach tighten as he leaned forward over his empty bowl.

  The shooting started.

  They weren’t systematic but they made up for it with sheer aggression. They had a shotgun and four Chinese AKs. Two fishermen having dinner before going out for the evening went down first, then the dogmeat seller who always smelled of chum. Two good-time girls at the bar – Isobel and Fleur, or so they had claimed – tried to dive behind it and were hit on the way over. Then Shola.

  The Sergeant saw Shola very clearly, because they were on opposing trajectories. The Sergeant was heading out, knees protesting as he hurled himself forward, but protesting in a willing way: fuck, yes, but don’t make a habit of it. He imagined he must look almost horizontal, head forward, muscles straining to keep up with his lunge for the kitchen and the back door. He had a sudden image of the boy’s comic books. Men in those stories ran like this all the time. Heroes did. Towards the action, it must be said, but they were often indestructible and in one way or another well armed. They ran like this to answer a ringing phone, sometimes.

  Shola was coming down the main stairs with his barman’s rag over his shoulder, buttoning the awful shirt, the wide smile of welcome vanishing as he saw the guns, replaced by a look of horror as his early customers – his friends, mostly – started to scream. He shouted ‘Stop!’ the way people do when something utterly awful is happening and will continue to happen whatever they say. There was no expectation that it would change anything, but it must be said. The human throat could not keep it inside. People said it to bombs and hurricanes and tsunamis and wildfires. The Sergeant had seen video footage, in 2001, of a woman standing on the street bellowing it at the Twin Towers.

  It never made any difference, and no one expected it to. It was the soul’s voice, in hell.

  Shola’s soul was inaudible, but between stutters and bangs the men saw him. Perhaps because he was coming forward, all of them reacted. First the AKs punctured him and he jiggled like a hula dancer, arms wide as if snapping his fingers and inviting you to join in. Then the shotgun tore a fistful from his chest and he stopped being Shola and became a dead thing, flying backwards and landing on his own floor.

  The Sergeant realised he was kneeling in the kitchen, concealed by the angle of the bar, and staring back into the room. The boy was still sitting where he had been when it all started. His face was spattered with something which must have come from Shola, a strange granular mixture the Sergeant had never seen before. Brain and bile, perhaps. Or Shola’s lunch. The comic book in front of the boy was ruined, piled high with dripping anatomy. The boy was staring straight ahead, quite still. The Sergeant could not decide if he had frozen or if he understood instinctively that movement would kill him.

  The killers for their part looked rather surprised to have succeeded so well. They had apparently been expecting some manner of resistance. They kept their weapons trained on the boy. The only question among them appeared to be who would kill him. The Sergeant heard o
ne of them say temoin, witness. For God’s sake, he thought. Leave him alone. Shola’s dead. It’s over.

  He peeped in again and saw the point man’s eyes go from alert to cold. The boy would die in a second or two. The decision was made.

  He looked down at his hands and found he was holding a metal biscuit tin. He opened it and saw a smattering of yellow grains, smelled Bird’s Custard. What was he doing with it? Ludicrously, this was quite a dangerous object: shake a teaspoon of custard powder in a box and add a flame and the whole thing goes off like a bomb. It has to do with burn rates and surface area. ‘Explosive yield,’ the Sergeant’s demolitions tutor had told him, ‘is bloody complicated, so don’t piss about with it. If you’ve got to improvise, assume you need to be a long way away.’

  And then he hadn’t got the tin any more. What had he done with it? He was kneeling in a pile of discarded yellow powder. He heard a gunshot, and almost immediately afterwards he was deaf.

  Part of him – the trained-soldier part, a parcel of endlessly drilled responses which required no thought, which often took over in times of crisis – had been expecting a sort of woofing noise. The best he could have hoped for was a loud pop and plenty of light to blind them. He must have got the proportions exactly right, and Shola’s tin must have had a tighter lid than advertised. Expecting? How had he been expecting anything?

  He stepped through the kitchen door brandishing a long-handled copper frying pan.

  Three men were on the ground, and the biscuit tin was sticking out of the far wall, blown open like a razor-edged sunflower. The two remaining killers were staring blindly, but neither of them had yet started shooting. The boy was under the heavy wooden tabletop. Adolf Hitler, the Sergeant remembered irrelevantly, had once been preserved from death by a tabletop.