He sat in the comms room and waited for the phone call, and when it came it was from someone he didn’t know, Marie’s brother. Shola was to be buried at eleven. The Sergeant’s presence would be appreciated, but would he mind coming as a civilian? Shola had not approved of war.
In theory this required permission from a senior protocol officer. There wasn’t one, so the Sergeant petitioned the Brevet-Consul. Sometimes when he did this he actually spoke both parts, making his own voice more gruff and giving the Brevet-Consul a slightly breathy way of speaking which was to his ear suitably posh. This time he just decided that the Brevet-Consul gave his consent. The Sergeant told Marie’s brother he entirely understood, and went to change. He wore a pair of light trousers and a white shirt, with a strip of black cloth around the arm. He had to tear the cloth from a blind in the old pantry, and trim it.
The last time he had been to a funeral it had been his mother’s, in a funeral house a hundred miles north of London. It had been a pretty cottage with wisteria and roses and a circle of sweet, pink flowers he couldn’t name. Someone had taken care with the hedges, too, so that they were neat without being prim. You parked off to one side in a maze of privet which gave everyone a secluded place to arrive and feel sombre. All in all, if somebody had to die and be burned to ash, this was as good a place as any.
The effect was rather spoiled by the industrial metal chimney poking out over the tiled roof, and the column of off-white smoke which rose from it. Mr Willoughby’s was doing a too-good business, and while the good man had not double-booked himself, he had grown careless of the time needed to clear one cremation and bring in the next. Even if he hadn’t, though, the chimney would have ruined it all. It was bold and silvered and wide, like the gun from which the human cannonball is fired, to the delight of small children and scantily clad assistants. Lester couldn’t stop thinking of his mother being expelled straight up and out in her velour dressing gown, her hand still clutched around her wretched, capacious handbag. He wondered where she would land, and hated himself. But it was funny, you couldn’t escape that.
And it got worse. The hall was beautiful, with a double row of stone pots filled with flowers around the walls. No one had mentioned this to the attending pastor, who was allergic to something in the arrangements. His eyes swelled as he gave the eulogy, his nose ran and he could barely form the words. When he did, he sounded less like a speaker for the dead and more like the speaker on a bad railway train announcing something you can’t understand.
‘Fnorbree fnorry to hew hfidawl rebd, ibb de bnabe obb Jebub Hbrised, ouah blord abb fnabior.’
The pastor spoke for twenty minutes, his impenetrable snuffles rising and falling and soaring to the rafters, and while it began as infuriating and grotesque it ended up boring beyond anything anyone had ever experienced. They had come to be moved, or to move themselves, to weep and say some kind of farewell, to whatever extent you can say goodbye to what is already a husk. But it was impossible to feel anything in the funeral house with the bunged-up vicar exhorting you to pray ‘add oub fadeb fnord udd’ and the burnished cannon of a chimney rearing out of the roof.
On Mancreu, things were different. They gathered by a little plot at a cemetery on the very edge of the Beauville shanty, where the inhabited part of the island began to blend with the deep brown mountains and the jungle interior. It was a fitting spot. The town Shola had lived in made a respectful curve around the churchyard, acknowledging that even the dead need their privacy. This was a transitional place, belonging partly to the human world and partly to the great green mass on the other side. And if Shola had believed in cremation and never told, well, in a few months or weeks, Mancreu would burn, and any remnant of Shola would burn too.
The Sergeant stood next to the Witch, the broad shadow of Dirac the Frenchman a little to one side, and Beneseffe the Portmaster beyond him, all of them staring down into the hole someone had dug. Pechorin, the Ukrainian officer, was at the back in full uniform. The Sergeant guessed he had not been allowed to come in civvies.
The boy was not immediately apparent. Sometimes he would watch things he deeply cared about from a high vantage point, through an old, vastly heavy pair of field glasses he had bought on eBay. It was as if he feared being burned by too much passion, as if the emotions of others might wake in him a response he would then be utterly unable to control. The Sergeant hoped desperately that his friend would come in person to this occasion, because he thought the boy would regret it deeply if he did not, now and for ever.
Shola’s coffin was a long basket made of straw, bound with ropes of tomato stem. The only flowers were woven into the coffin itself, wild flowers and sprigs of thorn, and a few wickedly greenish-purple leaves of marijuana from his own crop. The basket was anonymously shaped; it had no head and no foot. The Mancreu men – Shola’s cousins and some sturdy dockmen – lowered it in an old piece of fishing net, and Ma Tatin who owned the chandlery sang something old and deep.
Standing at the head of the grave, Marie thanked them all for coming and said Shola had been a good man and that she had loved him even when he was a pain in the arse. For a moment it seemed that she had more to say, a full eulogy, but she just stood there as if at attention and the Sergeant realised that there were tears on her face and that she would stand there until someone took her away. Shola’s cousin Tom shepherded her gently back to her mother, and then said straightforwardly that he would be taking over the café but that anyone who felt they had a stake in it should come and see him and he’d cut them in. The Sergeant wondered why he wasn’t more cautious. Someone might take advantage. And then he wondered ‘of what?’ What sort of idiot would come and demand a part of a failing enterprise on an island which would not exist by the end of the year?
Beneseffe heaved a sigh, and Marie threw in the first handful of soil. Tom beckoned to the Sergeant.
‘It must be someone else, before me,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Surely.’
Tom shook his head. ‘We agreed. It’s you. You were there. Did right.’ Tom hesitated, long face sad, then asked, ‘Did he say anything?’
The Sergeant thought: His lung was on the far wall. His spine was on the floor. They exploded him.
But instead he said: ‘It was too quick.’
The congregation nodded, and gentle hands pushed him forward towards the grave. This couldn’t be right. What about the rest of Shola’s family? But they were over there in a huddle, mourning and brave. They were waiting for him to go ahead of them, had appointed him to show the way. To sergeant for them, and that, at least, was something he understood. He walked to the graveside and looked around for a decent bit of earth. There was too much dust. He wanted loam. He scratched hopelessly, felt his fingernails bend.
There was a small noise, a scuffing of feet on dry ground. From the back of the crowd the boy emerged, head up, chin jutting. He was labouring under the weight of a terracotta pot, which he carried the way Winnie the Pooh carries honey, with both arms wrapped around it in a hug. The people made way for him slowly, as if, in contrast to their decision about the Sergeant, they somehow blamed him for Shola’s death. Perhaps he was an orphan after all; some Mancreu folk believed orphans were bad luck. Perhaps he was just alive when Shola was dead.
The boy drew up alongside him, and the Sergeant saw that the pot was full of rich, black earth. The boy’s hands were grazed and scratched. He had dug this himself, the Sergeant understood, without tools, and from the look of the soil he had got it from the high mountainsides. He had been up early for his digging, and he had lugged his benediction here all alone for what must be miles and put it in this fine pot, and now he was standing almost at attention, because this was Shola’s coffin with Shola’s body in it, and it was the right thing.
Gratefully, the Sergeant drove both hands into the pot, and flung a huge load over the coffin, and then another and another. The world flickered and shifted, and he found that he had thrown it all, that his knuckles were raw from rubbing against the clay.
He realised he must have stood there for five minutes, heaving soil over the straw coffin, while the family waited patiently and everyone watched.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down into the grave, wondering if he should scoop some back out for others to give. Sanity prevailed.
The family lined up and threw in the grey dust of the cemetery on top of his rich earth, and then the gravediggers came and filled in the rest very quickly. Finally, Tom spoke. He said that Shola had been a boxer. When a boxer dies, Tom said, they ring the fight bell nine times, and the dead man departs this world when the last whisper of the bell fades away. And then he did it, banging a drumstick against the mushroom-shaped brass bell from the Beauville club. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The ninth echoed, and the bell sang on and on, the metal holding the vibration an impossibly long time. And then it was done.
Shola was gone.
The Sergeant’s intention, when the funeral was over, had been to take the boy for a quiet walk and discuss with him everything that had happened, as he would have with any young man who had just seen close combat and casualties for the first time. He didn’t have the chance, though, because Dirac the Frenchman and Beneseffe the Portmaster scooped them up, and Tom opened the café in his cousin’s honour, just for the afternoon, so that they could sit and be there. Someone had cleaned the place, planed the wooden floor where Shola had died so that they would not walk on his blood. Tom stood on the third step so that everyone could see him and thanked them for coming, and he stayed there so that any time anyone looked up, expecting out of habit to see Shola, they caught his eye, and shared a moment with him, and the hole in the world was known and acknowledged.
In a corner the Sergeant saw Dr Inoue, and she raised her glass – whisky, of course – in salute and approbation. Inoue’s face was remarkable, he thought. It could convey volumes. I’m sad that he is dead, and I know that so are you. I am pleased that you are alive, and I know how hard you tried. I know what you would have wished. I am here. So are you. It is all there is. And of course, in that briefest and softest of twitches at the corner of her mouth: my whisky is your whisky, if you should need it. He smiled back, inclined his head as if receiving a medal, and waited until she turned away. When she did, he felt a weight settle on him, as if she had briefly shared with him the burden of the room.
As the wake went on, the Sergeant made one attempt to take the boy to one side, only to be blocked by Dirac and to realise, belatedly and with some gratitude, that Dirac was taking the sergeant’s role with respect to them both, and that he, Lester Ferris, was himself a man who had just seen combat when he’d been posted out of the line for fear that he wasn’t ready for it yet, who had lost a trooper and might need a bit of looking after.
Dirac was his direct equivalent only up to a point. He was a commissioned officer, a major, but one who knew his job. He was a bit older than Lester, and considerably boozier. His notional title was ‘envoy’, which meant exactly what it said: he had been sent to Mancreu, and there was a strong sense that he was to stay here until he had atoned for his sins. Dirac was an old Legion hand, trained in Guyana in the jungle and seasoned in Mozambique and Algeria. His skin was a weathered tegument the colour of cigars. He had the distinction of having been given three medals and demoted as a consequence of a single incident.
It had been a perfectly simple diplomatic escort job in North Africa, and with an inevitability which spoke to any modern soldier it had gone wrong from the beginning. The political mission was contradictory and insincere, which is fine until you make it the basis for a military deployment. As soon as you involve a professional soldiery, you have to be honest with yourself about your motives. The logic of armed conflict does not read between the lines. In politics, deaths happen incrementally, as a result of bad healthcare and debt. In war, on the other hand, death starts happening when you show up and continues after you leave. Death is not a side effect, and even if you refuse to count the dead they still pile up, and the people who loved them won’t forget: not their names nor how they came to die.
So here was Dirac in some crisis camp at the end of some valley, and here were the precious VIPs who were his flock, and the overworked and desperate doctors they were pressing the flesh with, and there was the press pack from around the world. All along the dry riverbed were the refugees in their hundreds of thousands, carrying their entire lives in a few bags. They were running pell-mell from a man called Gervaise and his militia, the Dogs of the Pure Christ, a hard bunch who’d seen what was happening in Rwanda and Congo and decided they liked it. The camp had a lot of French, Swiss and US nationals in it, so it was under the wing of the UN and had a token guard. The UN couldn’t get up speed for a full-on peacekeeping force, though, because a land war in Africa against an embedded enemy wasn’t anything the big powers wanted any part of. Dirac’s job was to escort the VIPs in and bring them back unscathed. He’d been armed accordingly: light weaponry, no big guns and definitely no air support. This was a humanitarian mission, which today meant for God’s sake don’t do anything humanitarian. The Dogs of the Pure Christ could read a newspaper and they knew the score too: kill who you like as long as you restrict yourself to your own. The camp was out of bounds – but the refugees trying to get to it were fair game.
The Dogs arrived on the third day of Dirac’s mission; a few hundred of them, with mobile artillery. They were very careful. They didn’t fire on the UN tents. They lined the ridges along the valley and glowered down at the pathetic worm of suffering below. It made great television, really pointed up the issues. And every night, while the VIPs were talking sincerely to the press pack, the Dogs lobbed shells down into the valley floor and cut the refugees to pieces.
Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either. Aux armes, citoyens. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’
The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.
‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.
An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘Je m’en fous’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the ravines on either side of the valley and moved down the line in near-as-dammit silence, capturing gun emplacements. They used the darkness and they used their bayonets and they took prisoners as they went. By the time morning came they were exhausted and they’d run out of restraint tags, but they’d captured two hundred and thirty-seven members of the Dogs of the Pure Christ and eight light artillery pieces, along with fourteen shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a pile of automatic rifles and side arms. Dirac marched Gervaise to the nearest crossroads and stripped him naked, then thrashed him with a local thorn bush across the buttocks and told him to take his men and piss off. By some unhappy chance the press corps got wind of this before it happened, so there was global coverage of the most feared warlord in the region getting spanked until he wept.
It was an utterly inexcusable breach of Dirac’s orders and a woeful piece of modern colonialist behaviour. The French government apologised with mountainous sincerity to everyone involved, and even offered to pay for reconstructive plastic surgery on Gervaise’s buttocks. This resulted in the details of the humiliation Gervaise had suffered being once again dwelled upon at length by the international press. The UN investigated – ‘a little Italian bastard with grey eyes came, you couldn’t hide anything from him. It was like hell. He found my girlfriends, my bar ta
b, everything. I was completely naked in front of an Italian.’ Dirac was summoned to headquarters and told he was no longer welcome in post, then handed over to the French senior staff. They lectured him without a whiff of irony on the proud traditions of the French military which he had sullied with this shameful act, and they told him he was to be demoted – yes, and he was lucky to keep his commission at all! Then they gave him a medal, which went very nicely next to the Pan-African Award for Peace and the German People’s Medal of Justice. At around the same time the Mancreu posting became available and Dirac was permitted to resume his former rank on the understanding that he see out the island’s destruction however long it might take, that he had been a very naughty boy, and that he was really not to do it again.
‘Holy Mother of Christ, Lester,’ Dirac said, first in French and then in English to emphasise his point. ‘Really with custard?’
The Sergeant nodded. Dirac banged his hands on the table, papapapapow! and grinned. ‘That was some shit. And you got them all?’
‘He got one.’ Indicating the boy. ‘With a comic book.’
Dirac raised his eyebrows briefly, but when the Sergeant nodded that he was entirely serious, raised his glass in Gallic salute. ‘Good work! As good as it could have been, okay? As good as it could have been. Both of you, you need to know that.’
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