He could see how it had happened quite clearly, even as he drove the pan down hard on the arms and hands of the first armed man and felt them break. The tin had flown in, and the man nearest had opened fire. A bullet, red-hot and trailing burning residues, had penetrated the tin, igniting the powder. The explosion – there was nothing else to call it – blasted the tin to pieces, firing the greater part into the wall and a cone of small fragments of hot metal directly at the hapless marksman. The bang had been deafening, which was why the Sergeant could not hear anything. The men in the fire zone would not die, though the closest probably would lose the sight in his right eye.
The second standing man was bringing up his gun. The Sergeant suspected the killer was mostly seeing fuzzy shapes, but he knew he was under attack and he knew what to do about it. A soldier or a militiaman who had seen some sort of combat. The initial attack is blunted, but that doesn’t mean you stop. You keep fighting, because the moment you stop you hand the enemy the initiative. That was right and proper.
The Sergeant’s technical approval did not stop him from batting the gun to one side and shattering the man’s face with the base of the copper pan. The man pulled the trigger as he went down, and one of his friends on the ground shrieked as he lost a toe. Well, such is combat (you murdering prick).
The Sergeant saw movement and turned to find the boy poking another of the men on the floor in the eye with his comic book. Rolled tight, the comic was a stout wooden stick with a series of cookie-cutter edges at each end. The man screamed as his nerves reported the assault, and the boy kicked his gun away. The Sergeant hit the last man in the head, collected a gun and held it on them, counted: yes, five accounted for. His mouth tasted of bile and burning. He glanced out into the street: they had no backup.
Done.
And that was it. Five armed bandits versus a tween and a man having a quiet afternoon, and they’d won.
The boy looked around in wonder.
‘We’re alive!’ he said, and then again, Frankenstein style: ‘I am a-liiiive!’ The Sergeant wondered if this was shock, and thought it was, filtered through the boy’s weird, frenetic brain. ‘We pwn!’ the boy shouted. ‘We are alive and they are teh suxor!’
The Sergeant had only the vaguest idea what this meant. ‘Pwn’ was familiar, although he didn’t think you were supposed to say it out loud. Someone had explained it to him. He realised with a sickly feeling it had been Lieutenant Westcott, browsing his latest ebook in a Panther CLV, somewhere between Farah and Rudbar. Abruptly he was there as well as here. He knew he was remembering but couldn’t find the pause button. The playback just rolled on over the top of the men on the floor, the boy’s jubilant awareness of survival.
‘It’s a typo,’ Westcott had said. ‘They made it into a joke. You start with the simple statement “we won”. If you’re typing in a hurry, it might become “own”. Yes? And if you’re really going for it you might hit the wrong button altogether and get “pwn”. The lexicon is always growing. A lot of these games have chat channels as well as control keys, so that you can trashtalk the opposition. Like sledging’ – because cricket is always the clearest comparison. ‘So the kids type in a hurry because they’re under fire. Mostly war games, of course. The Americans use them to train the marines in teamwork, actually. Very forward-looking.’
The Sergeant had had a brief image of every sitting room in every town in the world becoming a training ground for marines. A wealth of potential recruits. Even more enemies. But there were always more enemies than allies, in video games. It had been that way since Space Invaders, which some people had actually wanted to ban on the grounds that it was wrong to suggest there were some fights you couldn’t win. You can always win, these people insisted, if you just go for it. Nike soldiering. Pep-talk strategy, and never mind the logistics, which will land you high and dry without food or body armour or even bullets. Real soldiers – soldiers like the ones in Hollywood films – could improvise a machine gun with a drainpipe and a bunch of clothespegs.
Like a man improvising a bomb with a tin of custard. He swayed, trying to remember what the real world looked like. The café. The café and Shola’s blood and bone everywhere and the smell of it. That was what it looked like now.
‘We are made from awesome!’ the boy said, hands on hips, hero style. Then memory took hold. In belated panic: ‘Shola?’
The Sergeant, about to indicate the corpse, remembered what it must look like and shook his head. He caught the boy’s arm as he went to see and held him back. The boy’s eyes widened and for a moment he grew stubborn, then limp.
‘Shola?’ he asked again. You have made a mistake. Someone else is dead. It is not our friend.
‘No,’ the Sergeant told him. He had had this conversation before, knew it very well. He looked around. How many corpses? Five? Six? Was anyone still alive? Any of them might be, except Shola. Shola was dead. But the others . . . He should find out, try to stop the bleeding. He had no idea how to do that. In films, everyone knew those things, but he didn’t and he might make it worse. In the real world, platoons had medics, and ‘don’t fucking touch unless I say’. He looked at the gun and wondered why he wasn’t tempted to pull the trigger, finish the men on the ground. He wanted to want to. A few moments ago, if he’d had this gun, he would have used it without hesitating. Now it was out of the question. Pointless. And it was important to take prisoners. He wished it wasn’t.
‘We beat them,’ the boy protested. ‘We beat them!’
Yes. That much was true. In comics, and in the games the boy played, that meant that the key actors did not die. In the particoloured fantasy world of Superman, winning meant saving your friends. Ergo, Shola could not be dead. Except he was, and that too was bloody obvious and according to convention: when a white soldier goes adventuring, it’s somehow his black friend who gets shot.
‘We did what we could,’ the Sergeant said, hating the words in his mouth. ‘Everything we could. There’s nothing to feel ashamed about.’ This last with great fierceness and certainty because he knew what shame would do later, if not capped now. He reached for something which would make sense. ‘We needed Superman, didn’t we? Only he’s busy. It’s just us.’
The boy nodded in reluctant understanding. ‘We are good. We are not leet. Saving Shola would have been leet.’
Leet, the Sergeant thought, from ‘elite’, often written l33t or even 1337. Meaning: the very best. The most able.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We are not leet.’
‘Perhaps we should practise,’ the boy murmured sadly.
‘Yes,’ the Sergeant agreed. He was rehearsing his choices in his mind, looking for better ones. Evade, counter-attack. There just weren’t any. Not once it started.
He heard a breath, looked down and saw the boy’s mouth open in a perfect O. He jerked back and around, looking for a sixth assassin, but there was nothing. The men on the ground cowered, begged. No threat. No threat. He looked back, abruptly afraid that the boy had been shot and was just now realising, grabbed him and checked him with his hands, moving aside folds of bloody clothing and patting the boy’s arms and legs. ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ His voice was uneven. Unprofessional. He was angry, the way his father had been angry with him when he burned himself on the kettle. ‘Tell me!’ He stopped shyly, worried that he had crossed a line.
‘I am fine,’ the boy said. ‘I am fine! I promise! Sorry. I did not mean to do that. It is okay. I was just seeing.’
‘Seeing what?’
‘Everything,’ the boy said. The Sergeant waited for him to crumple, but he didn’t. Instead he stared back at the room wide-eyed, as if he were visiting a cathedral. Shock looked like that sometimes. Survival became a miracle, the wretched world a heaven. Well. True enough.
Outside, someone was arriving. The cavalry. NatProMan, the Sergeant assumed, because explosions and gunfire would definitely attract Kershaw’s attention. Or perhaps he had called them. He didn’t remember. He looked down and
saw the boy looking up, and realised that neither of them would cry unless the other one did first. He wondered what earthly good that was to anybody. Very manly. As much use as pulling the trigger, he supposed, which was to say none at all.
‘We should fight crime,’ the boy said. ‘That is what we should do.’
4. Aftermath
‘JESUS, LESTER,’ JED Kershaw said, ‘Jesus! Are you okay? Shit! What the fuck is going on? Shall I send in the marines? Were they after you? Was this an anti-Brit thing? Did they think you were one of my guys? Was it anti-American? Was it jihad?’
Kershaw was glossy in the heat; his skin had a fried-egg slickness. He was short but seemed to have been fitted with an oversize motor so that he talked too fast and moved like a dragonfly, zigging and zagging and pouncing on things. It was exactly how not to feel comfortable in the heat. His family was Norwegian back down the line, and he looked like a stumpy brown-haired Viking who’d taken a job as a golf pro. You could not have found someone less suited to Mancreu’s climate if you’d searched the whole world. Kershaw didn’t even like Florida. But he had come down to Shola’s and personally taken charge because he was basically decent, and he’d sat at the man’s table and eaten with him.
‘Fuck,’ Kershaw said again, seemingly to nobody. He looked at the Sergeant’s uniform, with its splatter of Shola’s blood along one sleeve and the dust all over his side from his dive to the floor. ‘Lester, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Stop being a sergeant for a few seconds and just . . . Holy shit, Lester, are you okay?’
The Sergeant allowed that a sit down might be just what he needed. He was aware abruptly that he had scalded his face, probably walking through the cloud of burned custard. The Witch would laugh at him. Her cleavage appeared in his mind’s eye, rising and falling, leaning over him: post-combat lust. He struggled to focus on the matter at hand as she straddled him, guiding his hands, his mouth. God, yes. I want this.
And then, more truthfully: I need a hug.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, in answer to all Kershaw’s questions. ‘I think it was about Shola, but I don’t know. There’s no reason anyone would come after me.’
‘You’re a policeman,’ Kershaw said.
For a moment, the Sergeant thought this rather unkind. He interpreted it as a rebuke: you’re a policeman! Why don’t you know already? But then he realised that as far as Kershaw was concerned it was an explanation in itself. You’re a policeman: some people don’t like them. It had not really occurred to him that in many places this would be reason enough to shoot someone dead while they were having soup. His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn’t attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you’d have to answer to his mum.
The Witch reappeared, came through the door with her medicine bag. He tried not to see her, then realised when she peered into his face with benign professional concern that this time she was real. He had already opened his mouth to receive her kiss. He shut it. She nodded, began to move carefully around him, tut at the mess on his clothes, probe his bruises.
Kershaw was talking about stability, viable stability under abnormal crisis-induced deindividuational stress, from which according to some NatProMan policy document everyone on Mancreu was presently suffering. He punctuated his speech by yelling at his men to ‘cover that body, find someone to do some fucking clean-up, where’s the fucking undertaker, is there still a fucking undertaker or has the fucker already fucking fucked off?’ The words were irrelevant. His presence was the message. He cared enough to be here, to come in person into what must feel like a very dangerous place, and now he was here he was as confused as everyone else.
‘You didn’t do anything to make this happen, Lester? I’m not going to find out that you and Shola were running coke to kids in Beauville?’
‘That is rude,’ the Witch said without looking up. ‘And ridiculous.’
‘Fuck you, lady! Who asked you anything? What the fuck are you even doing here?’
‘You called for doctors. I am a doctor. Deal with it.’
‘I meant real doctors! My guys!’
‘And they are putting blood back into the women who were shot. Who will live, by the way – I’m so glad you asked.’
‘Fucking MSF fuckers,’ Kershaw muttered. He was embarrassed, the Sergeant could see, by the callousness of his own questions. But it was his role to be callous, to ask the bad questions while others did the repair work, in case there were bad answers.
The Witch sneered and muttered something about inhibited men from Ivy League schools.
‘No,’ the Sergeant said to Kershaw, before this could escalate, ‘nothing like that.’
Kershaw took that at face value and turned to the Witch, asking, by way of amelioration, ‘Is he okay?’
‘He will be,’ the Witch said. ‘Which is a miracle. Lester, turn your head.’
He did.
Kershaw, assured that the Sergeant was not seriously hurt and not a drug dealer, seemed to calm somewhat. Then, too, he had probably needed to know this wasn’t some sort of insurrection. There were those on the island who objected to NatProMan’s presence. Occasionally leaflets surfaced, printed neatly and distributed invisibly, nailed to walls and left on café tables. They denounced Kershaw by name, railed against the destruction of the island, in English, French, and Moitié. It was not what you would call an insurgency. It felt pro forma, or possibly sophomoric: angry young men with a smattering of political history and a sense of betrayal. The Sergeant couldn’t blame them, but in his judgement they – whoever they were – had nothing like the steel for something like this. This was horrible, but it was not revolution. It felt too specific for that. But hardly surgical.
The Sergeant looked for the boy, but he was gone, most likely to whatever place he called home. The Sergeant hoped that whoever waited there would look after him. He felt bad that he had not provided some sort of care while he spoke to Kershaw, but the boy had been quite firm, and he was sovereign. ‘Speak to the American. It is necessary.’ If there was anyone waiting. If he had anyone. The Sergeant hoped that he did, somewhere, and then hoped that he didn’t because that would mean he shared his friend with someone he did not know, that the boy was ultimately not his boy, just a boy he knew. It would make his furtive, half-acknowledged Plan B that much more difficult.
The Witch drove him to her surgery without speaking. She gave him leaves and unguents for his scorched face, more for his bruises, and dressed a gash in his shoulder which must have been from a near miss with the shotgun as he fled into the kitchen. Finally she sighed.
‘I knew Shola,’ she said. ‘Marie will be devastated.’
The Sergeant nodded. Marie, Shola’s girlfriend. Wife, really, though not on paper. Widow. Christ, someone would have to tell her. Except that by now she already knew. There was nothing he could do about that. He’d have to go and see her, of course.
‘Everyone will be,’ he said. And the boy: had he witnessed death like this before? Not impossible. Not here. ‘If you see,’ as ever he baulked at saying ‘Robin’, ‘my friend, tell him to come and find me.’
The Witch shrugged. Exhausted, he accepted that as a yes. He breathed in, hoping to catch her scent to carry it away with him, but the room smelled of the sea, and of disinfectant.
That night the Sergeant dreamed of a woman, in terms he knew were utterly pornographic. They did things he had only read about: desperate things which arched them both and made them cry out until they spasmed and clutched and clawed their way to satisfaction, and then on relentlessly to more and more transgressive journeys in search of some sort of restitution from the world. He called her Breanne, but when finally his lover laid her head upon his chest and slept, her body was slim and pale, and her fingers were tipped in an absurd sherbet pink.
When he woke, the memory was
fading and he was aching and grazed and filled with regret – for Shola, for the others who had died so arbitrarily. If he went armed, habitually, as a soldier in a foreign land should, he might have . . . what? Stood off five men with one pistol? Got into a firefight and died? Or should he have marched around Beauville with an SA 80, carrying the weight of it across his chest, the lethal message wherever he went. And what message, exactly, does an armed soldier give out when he is a thousand miles from reinforcements? Fear, perhaps. Foolishness. Thuggishness. It was idiotic. And yet he felt a powerful conviction that he should somehow have prevented what had happened. Should have been prepared for it.
He covered his chest and shoulders with the Witch’s medicaments and felt immediate physical relief. He wasn’t sure he approved, until he tested and found that beneath the cool there was still a burn, an awareness which promised later discomfort in the abused meat of his back: earned pain, solid and reassuring. In the meantime, his mind was clear, albeit a little tinny, as if he was hearing his own thoughts on a cheap recording. He sent a message to London, tersely worded and laconic, indicating a fatal shooting incident at a local café and the apprehension of those responsible by an armed force. He did not specify the nature of the armed force. That sort of thing would require further discussion.
Shola would be buried today. Mancreu custom was in this regard more Muslim than Christian. The Sergeant dressed accordingly, formal and uncomfortable, squeezing himself into a uniform he had not expected to put on again until he went home and was formally retired from combat duty. He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days. He stared at his chest: bright-coloured ribbons, discs and stars.
He couldn’t go for a walk like this, not outside. The heat would flatten him. It would be bad enough at the service. So he walked along the cool, dark corridors of Brighton House, going from one end to the other and hearing the sound of his heels and toes tapping on black and white tiles. Click clack. Click clack. The house seemed to approve, whatever ghosts it might have peering down from the rafters and out of the shrouded rooms, and nodding to see a British soldier in full rig once again marching here in the aftermath of bloodshed and victory. Or possibly it was mice, or bats. There had been a bat last year, lost and confused. He had shepherded it out into the darkness and it had crapped on him.
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