Tigerman Read online

  ‘You must come, Lester,’ Inoue had said. ‘You must come! We will cry for this place, but also we will dance the Funky Chicken.’ And she had actually demonstrated, to his delight and the absolute bewilderment of her interns. The Sergeant was not always at ease with scientists, but Inoue was different. She was graceful and she made him feel at home in his skin. She was joyful, and from time to time she painted her fingernails in bright bubblegum colours.

  Twenty-two weeks after she delivered her initial report, a new Cloud was belched up by the island and a freak of weather carried it over the sea to the east. Two thousand in the Maldives were stricken with a blight which caused temporary blindness and tinted the skin green with chlorophyll. Governments convened. The chasm must be cleansed. Quite obviously, they told the avid press room, it was dangerous. Should the symbiotic bugs spread into the oceans, the world might rapidly become unfit for human life. Or something might emerge from Mancreu’s gullet which ate plastic, or silicon, or devoured crude oil, and the bases of industrial civilisation might perish. If the mountain went quiet for a few months, that just meant it was biding its time.

  A new classification for the crisis was formulated. Mancreu was made the first ever UNO-WHO Interventional Sacrifice Zone, a place so wretchedly polluted that it must be sterilised by fire. In acknowledgement of the people of the island and their proud heritage and culture, the execution was deferred pending a final assessment. In the meantime, Mancreu became a kind of Casablanca, possessed of an uncertain legal status by virtue of the sentence of death, expropriated from its notional sovereign by the international will, gladly yielded up to its doom, yet still there and officially claimed by no one.

  Then the Black Fleet gathered, and the process of sterilisation remained on hold.

  On hold, like the Sergeant himself, who had arrived some time later and should by now have gone home. Well, he was in no hurry. In the night of Brighton House, he listened to the sound of the tomatoes beyond the glass. In amongst them somewhere there was a creature, probably a feral cat. He watched the moon trace its path across the sky and realised that the chill was seeping into him. His feet and lower legs were cold, and so was his nose. He felt a brief, tiny rumble in the ground, as if the island were a dog dreaming of rabbits. The windows rattled, and then it was over. A three-pointer, if that.

  Abruptly, he wanted to be back in bed, and when he lay down the mattress was somehow a perfect fit.

  2. Dreams

  THERE WAS WHITE chalk on the telegraph poles the next morning, times and places scrawled one under another. The Sergeant winced as he peered through his window. He wondered who it would be. Beauville families, for sure. A few farmers giving up the ghost. People he knew to nod at. People he had helped, or got drunk with. Children he had lifted up from scuffed knees. Probably a few adults he had arrested and would be glad to see go, but mostly the inevitable winnowing was taking the honest middle, leaving the listless and the feckless, the very good and the very bad. He wondered if he would need to be more and more of a policeman as time went by, if his time on Mancreu would grow more busy and more unpleasant as things gathered pace. Although when would that happen? He had already been here longer than anyone had thought possible. If Mancreu was a potential extinction event – and that was what they had called it in the Security Council – then humanity was being very relaxed about fighting it.

  Well. There were things he could do. From the beach to the mountains, at least, he could be the small, necessary face of the law. He was even somewhat equipped for his investigative duties by a six-day course in public order and detection from the Metropolitan Police Service, attended in preparation for his stint in Basra. The course had been intense and rather depressing because the instructors knew and the students knew that the entire job was moribund from the outset, a token gesture towards a civil society the occupying powers could not and would not impose. But on Mancreu, it was enough. Most cases he had come across were simple enough that – if they could not be solved purely by turning up – a little thought and some legwork yielded results. He had discovered a small affinity for asking the right questions. He leaned heavily on the parting advice of his instructor, Detective Inspector Burroughs:

  ‘You grind the facts as best you can, but after that it’s about putting yourself in the way of people,’ Burroughs had told him, in a brief, quiet moment. ‘If you just get out in the river and stand there long enough, you end up with fish in your trousers and everyone thinks you’re a genius.’

  Since arriving on the island he had dealt with some thefts and some basic assaults, one killing – in self-defence, though that had been far from clear at the outset – and a host of odd, minor disputes which technically were more the province of a magistrate than a policeman. The only really intractable puzzle had been a break-in at the Xenobiology Centre in which nothing was stolen except some of Dr Inoue’s notes and a selection of inexpensive desktop toys from Japan. He had initially assumed a journalistic motive, but since there had been no great splash of scientific scandal he had come to the conclusion that it had been the work of a vagrant looking for food. The notes were a draft which had been sitting on Inoue’s desk, she said, and eminently replaceable. The Sergeant pictured pages of graphs stuffed into a tattered coat to keep out the south wind. The toys . . . he couldn’t find a use for. A crime of opportunity, then, which was copper-speak for no bloody idea. Burroughs would have shaken his head: ‘Lester, when you find yourself blaming a tramp because the crime makes no sense and tramps are known to be mad, you’re nowhere.’

  The Sergeant’s neck twinged. He had woken with a stiffness in his shoulders and his head was full of the night’s dreams, which had been bitter. Someone had told him once that the act of moving is what erases our memory of dreams: if you wish to remember, you must make a conscious effort to consider each image with the waking mind before so much as sitting up.

  He, evidently, was wired differently, or perhaps he had brooded an instant too long before swinging his legs down onto the mat at his bedside, because the recollection was easy and even insistent.

  He had dreamed that he held his wife in his arms. The sweetness of it was painful. She was tallish and strong and she smelled of London in the summer rain, of cream teas in Cornwall and of oil paint in his uncle’s studio. Her hair was in front of her face and somehow whatever he did he never quite spoke her name, although he knew it, he was sure.

  They danced. He had never been comfortable with modern dancing, had told her so early in their marriage, and she had agreed to learn ballroom. They had discovered they liked it and now they were very good, floating across the pale wood of a mirrored salon over a French restaurant in King’s Cross. Waltzing, the way a soldier and his missus should.

  It went wrong before the song ended. It was abruptly his sad duty to inform her of his own death. He was a ghost, his body cooling far away, his spirit embodied just for this, either a blessing or a vile cruelty.

  ‘I’ve crossed over,’ he said, ‘that’s what I’m here to tell you. You’ll be all right. You will. Take care of the kids and promise me you won’t hang about when you’re ready, not on my account. You do what you do and I’ll be smiling, and remember I’m waiting for you.’ He couldn’t believe he was saying these things. Euphemisms and platitudes he had always despised. Crossed over. Gone on. Passed away. All crap. The word was ‘dead’ and it didn’t mean any kind of good, not ever, not for anyone.

  Her face bunched and crumpled and she wept horribly, great racking sobs of utter despair he could not make right, because even the sovereign remedy of the embrace, the kiss on the top of her head, the gentle rocking which had always served before, even these made the whole thing worse because it was the last time ever, and he was dead, and in a moment he would fade away and she would be alone. He had never felt any great sorrow at the prospect of his own death before. Dread, certainly. But her horror awoke his own, and he reproached himself for making her cry and was powerless to mend his fault.

  ‘Y
ou can’t,’ she kept saying. ‘Please don’t,’ and then she was gone, or he was, and all he had was the memory of her crying.

  When he woke, he remembered he had never married. His relief was immense, but on its heels came a ghastly aloneness which made the world black around him.

  He let the curtain drop back and dressed automatically, looking at his bed and wondering how they had both fitted into it.

  He walked around the house. In the communications room there were faxes on the machine. The first few were not addressed to him, but he was copied in. He picked them up and put them in the file without reading so much as a word of the main text. Almost all these memos were about things he didn’t need to know, and the ones which occasionally featured relevant information were about the ships in the bay of the Cupped Hands. In theory he did need to know about these, but in practice he had been given to understand that he would be better off not. They were legalistic and indirect, but they dealt with the arguments and instruments by which various interests, including NatProMan and its allies, were making use of the lawless nature of the Mancreu waters for things they might not otherwise be able to do, and the maintenance of that convenient situation against dangerous judicial drifts towards answerability and competence.

  ‘How’s your stomach for totally mendacious bilge?’ the Consul had asked him.

  ‘Limited, sir.’

  ‘Mine too. File these in the bin, then. Or file them properly, but don’t read them. You’ll get the urge, otherwise, to send back some clever reply and there’ll be no end of shit.’

  Greatly daring, the Sergeant had ventured to ask if his teacher had himself ever done such a thing. The Consul sighed and looked away.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  This morning’s incoming included a plaintive request from Sana’a.

  ATTN: Brevet-Consul Ferris

  x: FCO Yemen (Simon, Area Supply)

  re: logistics

  Lester – can you please check in the arms locker and see whether there’s a small consignment of coffee in there? We’re doing accounts and it seems we’ve taken delivery and can’t find it anywhere. Hoping it got muddled up with your new-issue gas masks.

  The coffee was not, in fact, in Brighton House’s armoury. The Sergeant went in through the hi-tech door which ticked and rustled all night long as if talking to itself and checked. He poked around, marvelling as ever at the dangerous and insane toys he had been left to play with. He could have started a minor war with just the contents of one wall, but of course, the island was an anomalous sort of place and it paid, he supposed, to be prepared. Finally he located the coffee in the empty gardener’s hut, listed as fertiliser. He replied to the memo in the negative, leaving out, after a moment of soul-searching, the actual fate of the parcel. He had not been asked about the gardener’s hut, only about the arms locker. He put the coffee in the larder: the boy drank it sometimes, in the early morning when he had slept on the couch. It made him intolerable for hours, but he was worse without it.

  Also in the in-tray, a string of requests forwarded by Beneseffe the Portmaster for the Sergeant’s attention on local police matters.

  – A lost dog; he felt that one would probably take care of itself, but the lady to whom the animal belonged was very insistent that he must come, Beneseffe said, and very sad. Well, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt.

  – A ghost woman running half-naked through the shanty, swimming in a watertank and frightening children; she was becoming a fixture, but she seemed to be harmless and she even had a few fans. It helped that she was evidently a pretty ghost, and sometimes left unlikely gifts. An ongoing investigation he wasn’t sure he ought to solve.

  – A mugging outside the Bonne Viveuse bar and cinema in Beauville. Well, he’d ask around. Not much had been taken, and the statement was sketchy. In all likelihood if he pursued it the man would ultimately have to confess that he’d been conned by a tart. All the same, on the outside chance that it was what it seemed, it might bear looking into.

  And, from Beneseffe on his own account:

  – Someone stealing fish off the docks. It sounded trivial, but fish was worth a lot, and if the business was between crews it could get nasty.

  Well, he had his agenda for the day. Find the fish. Keep an eye out for an unhappy, misplaced dog and a scantily clad phantom. Give the mugging victim time to decide whether he’d been assaulted or just billed for services rendered. And he would do his proper job, walk his beat and be seen, drop in on Jed Kershaw to hear the gossip and be sure nothing serious was happening, nothing he actually needed to know. He would bump into the boy, of course, but before that happened he might drop in on the Witch.

  She was not a witch, he reminded himself. She was a doctor. But he had met her as ‘the Witch’, and his mind held on to the word.

  During the Sergeant’s first summer at Brighton House, the tomatoes had become unruly. When he realised that enemy forces had taken the conservatory, he had stripped off his shirt and tied cloth around his hands so they wouldn’t blister, and he’d gone in with shears and a sickle. The enemy troops were soft and unprepared: he surged and they folded. Superior weaponry was an excellent force multiplier, and he had a plan and an objective and they really didn’t know a lot about warfare. He cleared the room without difficulty and sat amid the corpses of the fallen. He put his feet on a great pile of tomatoes and photographed them, and sent the picture to his sister in the next post. She sent him a message back by fax saying that he should make jelly with the Brandywines. The fax came out of the machine hugely elongated, each letter over an inch high but only a few millimetres across, so that the whole thing was impossible to read. It looked like something reflected in a fairground mirror.

  The conservatory was won, but that only revealed the extent of the problem. Through the cracked glass, though, he could see out into the jungle beyond, beneath the canopy of splitting fruit. He realised had been expecting a miniature Amazon rippled with green, but everything was black. When he shone a torch through the glass, he saw that the whole mass was almost solid, thick trunks wrapped around one another like intestine. The garden was one vast coil of nested tomato plants.

  He went to the conservatory door and opened it, brought his sickle down on the nearest plant. The rubbery stuff resisted, and he had to saw at it, nearly cut his own leg with the point of the blade. With some effort, he hollowed out a space to stand, and began to work, and then suddenly he was hacking wildly, screaming at this repulsive snare of organic stuff. He was a whirlwind, a living saw. He struck and struck and struck and he felt it fall around him, and he worked beyond fatigue with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He toiled and swore and grinned and wept, and he fought. He never once stopped moving, throwing aside pieces of roped plant until he felt the anger in him subside and wondered abruptly and somewhat awkwardly where it had come from. He wasn’t one of those men who went off. He’d never been a bar brawler or – something in him cringed back, it was the worst thing he could imagine being – a wife-beater. He didn’t really have much of a temper. Hadn’t, until this moment. But here he was, alone in a garden, declaring a war of extinction on a field of tomatoes. It was so wasteful. That notion made him stop, bewildered, and he wondered at the idea that it was wasteful to chop down plants, but somehow not so much so to do the same with men.

  There was a pain in his back and a warning sense of overstretch in his shoulders. He stared down at his hands – raw and bloody and sliced across the knuckles – and then looked up to see how much desolation he had wrought. He hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. Then he had to look around twice more to make sure he hadn’t lost his way in the fog of soldier’s gardening. But it was true.

  He was almost five feet from the door. He had worked for nearly a whole day, in a straight line, and come less than his own height into the forest. He stared out at the vast field with a sense of awe. They should send military planners here, he thought, to learn about insurgency.

  During the night, his hands had swelled up, red a
nd harsh, and when he tried to wash them the following morning the warm water felt like fire and he screamed. He couldn’t use the radio because his fingers were too swollen, so he walked to Beauville and showed his hands to the boy, whose eyes grew very wide. The boy reached out and took his wrists, gently turned the big red slabs this way and that, and then removed from his knapsack a very old Swiss Army knife, and unfolded the magnifying glass. He peered at the scrapes and cuts, and showed them to the Sergeant through the lens. Ragged, as if he had burned them on tiny ropes. A bead of clear plasma rose from one of the little holes, a puff of red cells within. The boy sighed like an older brother.