Tigerman

7. Bruises

THERE WAS NO way of knowing how long the boy had been sitting there. It was theoretically possible that he had only just arrived, or that he had been, until he heard the key turn in the lock, reading quite cosily in the corner chair – but there was an air of self-mortification about him, a sense that he had selected this posture in the knowledge that it would be uncomfortable, and his long wait with aching muscles was part of the bill which would now come due.

The Sergeant knocked on the doorframe, then cleared his throat. When this elicited no response, he experienced a strange, appalling hallucination or imagining: that the boy had died and was slowly freezing in place owing to rigor mortis. He saw himself realising and leaping up, pounding on the boy’s chest like a madman and giving him mouth-to-mouth – much too late – then carrying the tiny corpse in his arms all the way to Beauville, weeping and weeping and weeping and none of it doing any good. And what was the point of that? What was the point of being a soldier, of being a human being in a world which could work wonders with medicine, if affection – he had almost called it love, but that was a presumption, wasn’t it, because the boy wasn’t his flesh, his son, and while that was something which could be negotiated it hadn’t been negotiated, not yet – what was the point of affection, then, if it didn’t exert any traction on the universe? If it didn’t heal or protect or do anything at all except hurt? In his nightmare he begged the Witch to help him and she did, she duped him and sedated him and while he was asleep she made the dead boy disappear and when he came to himself he thanked her and then they never spoke again.

But when he risked a glance, ridiculously frightened that he would this time turn out to be right, he could see the boy’s chest moving, so that much was good. Still, he knew he was the focus of this frigid rage.

It was new ground. They had never fought before. The Sergeant had never fought in that sense with anyone – and if he had, no one had ever before occupied the strange, vexed, desperate space in his life which now belonged to the boy.

So he advanced, slowly, as if probing for mines with his voice.

‘Sorry I wasn’t around. I had to go over to the Xeno Centre.’

The boy’s face remained firmly turned away. If anything, the ramrod back seemed to grow more disdainful. Instinct told the Sergeant that this was not a bad thing; that it amounted, contrary to appearances, to permission to continue.

‘Inoue wanted to tell me some things. And when we got there, there was a sort of… well, an attack, I suppose. A gang.’

No answer. No shift. Did that mean rejection, or interest? Was it possible that the boy himself did not know? The silence stretched.

‘And I suppose technically I solved the dog thing. I mean, they killed him. Threw him on my car. It’s a mess – you should see.’

No, that was a mistake. Too much, too soon. A hiss of affront. He hurried on.

‘But I’ve got a new case now: the masked men. On quad bikes, if you please. Bloody expensive for Mancreu. Can’t be too many, so I expect I can find them.’ A case you can be part of. A real gang case, pow pow pow. And: I’m sure we talked about this. I’m sure I was allowed.

The boy shrugged, not his usual lazy lift of the shoulders but a hunching dismissal. ‘So you have solved a dead dog. Very good! Very excellent! When it is dropped on you, you do so very good work!’ The voice was shrill, quavering. ‘And in all this where is your friend? Where is my friend? He is still dead! And there are men in jail and you still know nothing! And when you should be looking, where are you? When I am looking, where are you? You are nowhere, except you are not nowhere you are somewhere, but Shola is really nowhere because he is dead and you don’t do anything about it. Which is fine. It is all fine. It is only Mancreu. We understand. Not important for the Brevet-Consul.’ He turned, face in shadow, eyes glaring. ‘Fine. But I thought maybe for your friends. I was wrong.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘I was. Totally. Funny me, ha ha. Ai can haz stupidz.’

‘I just have other things too. The only way I can do what I do is if people let me. I don’t have anything to back me up. And they let me because I don’t just do what suits me. I try to do what needs doing. And Shola… that does need doing. But it’s not the only thing. I’m sorry. I’ll keep after it, you know I will. He was my friend. And so are you.’

‘Yes! There are so many other things. So I have been helping, while you were so importantly somewhere not here. I have solved your fish case for you. Your thief is Pechorin, from NatProMan.’

The Sergeant sighed. Too late, then, to tell the boy not to go near the Ukrainians. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard that, too. The card-players told me, in the old town.’

‘Good. So now you find out about Shola.’

‘Yes. Of course. I’ll…’ But he still did not know what he would do. ‘I’ll chase the weapons. Get names on the men, see if I can find out who hired them. If someone did. I’ll get there, in time.’ And now’s not the time to explain that we may not have very much. Your island is dying, we may never know who murdered your friend: come and be my son. He pushed on. ‘I can interrogate them again. I won’t stop, I promise. Even if you weren’t asking. If you didn’t talk to me any more. I wouldn’t stop. But I’d be…’ a little part of the full truth, now ‘…less. I’d be less than I am. And I want to be more.’

The boy seemed to find this funny, somehow darkly amusing, and shook his head. They sat together in silence for a while, and the wind blew around the edges of the house and in through an open window in the other room. It grew noticeably cold. The Sergeant found himself speaking again. He hoped he knew what he was doing, and suspected he didn’t.

‘I don’t know how to be what you need. I want to. But that sort of thing I always… well, I asked Shola. He was good with people. He was a good man. Me, I’ve… got no practice. I’m used to having instructions. I’m not like you. I don’t… I don’t have the habit of it yet, the natural way of doing it without orders. But I’ll get there. I’ll learn’ – and here inspiration struck – ‘I’ll learn to be a bit like him. Shola didn’t work for anyone.’

The boy jerked away, and his face reflected absolute horror. It must be a flashback, the Sergeant thought, full Dolby surround sound with all the trimmings, and yes, oh, yes, he knew about those. He moved forward, hands out to receive a faint or fend off an attack. The boy opened his mouth and made a high keening sound like the first flurry of bagpipes when the piper settles them under his arm. He stopped, eyes wide, and then made the noise again and again until it tailed away into a gasping cough, then flung himself on the Sergeant and clung to him, and the older man realised abruptly that this noise was grief, and maybe even shame.

The Sergeant sat for a moment with his elbows at shoulder height and his hands in the air, as if someone notionally friendly had him at gunpoint and it would all be sorted out in a moment. Then, with great caution, he lowered his nearer arm and put it around the boy’s back and wrapped the other across so that he could clasp his own wrist and complete the circle in a hug. He rocked gently, and made wordless noises of encouragement. From the boy came back squalls of sorrow and remorse. Shola’s death, the Sergeant gathered, was somehow all to be laid at the boy’s small feet. Shola had been coming to rescue him. They had killed Shola because Shola had told them to leave the boy. The boy had done nothing to help. He had watched Shola die and done nothing. What sort of hero would let that happen? The Sergeant had been like lightning. He had been a god. He had been a warrior. He had been like Batman, but a thousand times better because Batman was ultra wealthy and the Sergeant was just an ordinary person. The boy had done nothing. The whole affair was his fault. The boy was bad.

This flood of self-despite was at the same time quite alarmingly foreign to the Sergeant and entirely familiar. True, he had no direct experience with the violent woes and self-reproaches of children. On the other hand, he was a sergeant, and the commonality in the roles of NCOs and parents was too obvious to dwell upon. He knew how very destructive that simple, unadorned ‘bad’ could be, how it could embrace a whole person from birth to this very present and condemn every aspect of him entire. Where a more nuanced description could be examined and faulted, something so broad was resilient. It was a tar pit. You couldn’t argue it away, because reasoning gave it an undue status as something reasonable. Each attempt to unpick the nest of accusations would draw you deeper in. Your empathy was misunderstanding, evidence of your pure heart’s inability to comprehend the enormity you confronted. Your effort spent on a creature so vile was a waste of kindness needed elsewhere, and this itself was a fresh crime to be registered against the villain. Your subsequent distress and ultimate frustration were read as justified anger at the perpetrator of such sins.

You did not defuse this kind of madness by treating with it upon its own terms. You answered the embracing fear, not the question. For the moment, he waited, honouring the grief. He waited until the storm had died, until the tide had risen to its highest and ebbed and the boy had noticed that no denials or affirmations had been forthcoming, and some part of him had begun to feel instinctively that his confessor must render judgement or lose his position.

‘You’re getting snot on my shirt,’ the Sergeant said to the top of the boy’s head. Translation: the worst thing you are capable of is covering a dirty shirt in mucus.

Silence.

‘I don’t mind,’ he continued. ‘I’m not saying I mind. I just felt, you know, I should say something in case you end up glued to my armpit.’ Translation: cry as long as you need to. I’m here. But the world is still the world, and you haven’t changed.

Silence.

‘And you didn’t shoot him yourself, did you? And you didn’t hire those men to shoot him. So all this is sort of by proximity. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You may be right. At the moment I just don’t see how, is all.’

He didn’t push. He let the tiny, shuddering thing in his arms subside, and realised from the residual tension that there was something left, that the boy had a final charge against himself, and that it was the most serious, the most vile.

‘I did not tell you,’ the boy said at last, stepping out of the embrace to stand in some invisible dock. ‘I have obstructed the investigation and the course of your inquiries and the execution of your duty.’ He was calmer now. Miserable.

‘How so?’ Very neutral, because there was just a chance.

‘Shola worked for Bad Jack,’ the boy said.

The Sergeant opened his mouth to say ‘Bad Jack?’ and shut it again in the awareness that he would sound like a fool. He moved through a chain of response and counter-response in his head, looking for a place to enter the conversation which would be neither condescending nor credulous: if I say this, he will say that. It was hard. He wondered whether it was hard because it was hard, or because he was getting old and couldn’t remember being a boy.

Shola worked for Bad Jack.

On the face of it, the idea was absurd. The main thing about Bad Jack was that he was a fairy tale. There was no such person, and if there had once been a Jack, a brigand, say, or a murderer, well, he was by now at least three hundred years old: a bit long in the tooth to have been Shola’s employer.

But the boy knew all this – and he knew the difference between story and truth. He read Superman and watched Fox News, read Batman and watched Al Jazeera. He was not the sort to fret about a bogeyman. A child living on an island which is itself under threat of execution for the crime of having been environmentally raped has no need of invented villains. A person trading mountain honey with the Black Fleet for shoes and DVDs, running go-between for who-knows-what deals with the shore, did not conjure crooks out of the air. So when the boy said Bad Jack, he did not – could not – mean the nine-foot-tall pumpkin man or the web-footed devil. He meant the kind of Bad Jack who did business in the world, the kind who could command a measure of actual fear. The kind who might have enemies with Kalashnikovs.

‘Someone goes by the name of Bad Jack?’ the Sergeant asked, having come to the end of this line of reasoning and arrived at a response which was not patronising or ignorant.

The boy nodded.

‘Since when?’

‘Since always.’

Which to anyone under the age of twenty meant a length of time greater than a year, but you couldn’t say that, either.

‘He’s always called himself Bad Jack?’

‘No. This Jack is new. But there is always Jack.’

It was just distantly possible, he supposed: an unbroken line of Jacks come down from when Mancreu was a wild island port halfway between French North Africa and British South-East Asia. A secret king, a pirate, a smuggler, a crook.

He pictured a Lord of Misrule on a throne, a combination of ogre and imp in a mountain hall, surrounded by stolen virgins and treasure. Translate that: a thug with gold teeth and imported slave-women, wearing a gangster’s gold chain and thinking himself a monarch. Or an urbane sort of plausible sod from Boosaaso or Yangon with a business degree, taking a hand in the heroin trade.

‘And Shola… what did Shola do for him?’

‘Store things. Make rum. Make connections. Everyone went to Shola’s. Like an oasis with lions and giraffes.’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

The boy shook his head. ‘He comes, he goes. Everyone looks away. No one sees him. No one ever sees Jack, no one talks about Jack.’

The boy was apologising now. ‘I did not tell you, because no one talks about Jack. Or else.’ He drew a line across his throat, made a slicing noise.

‘Well, if he’s so bad, that makes a short suspect list. Who’d stand up to him?’

‘Other bad men.’

Fleet men, maybe. But that was a world of trouble. If this was Fleet, he had no remedy, and he wanted no part of it. He wondered what he would do if it was, how he would explain the limit of his power. Of his will.

‘Bad men doing what? Why?’ he asked instead.

The boy shrugged. ‘This was maybe a demonstration, maybe like Alderaan?’

Alderaan. The Sergeant was the right age to know what that meant. He had been to see the film the first time around, very young and very amazed as the orange and white starship went over his head, and then even more amazed as its enormous pursuer roared after it, going on and on and on for ever and shaking the seats. Movies had never seemed so big.

As for the boy, in the flatiron days of the hot season he wore a baseball cap he had begged from an Afrikaner ship-captain. It said in yellow letters on a starry background: HAN SHOT FIRST, and it proclaimed another of his global allegiances. Now he ended his suggestion on an upward note to make it a question, and he had that look again, the one which said ‘Is this my fault? Do you hate me?’ and most of all ‘Should I hate myself?’ The Sergeant wondered who had put that idea in his head, and how long ago.

‘You’re a good lad,’ he said, answering the important question first. You are filled with whatever it is which makes worth. You have not expended it or negated it. ‘You did right, telling me. You’re not, you’re not bad. You hear me? You’re a good lad. And this is good. I can use it. Find out what happened. Tomorrow I’ll go and talk to those men again, and I’ll talk to them about Jack. It’s better when you know what to ask. They’ll tell me things and that’ll be because of you. You’ve done a brave thing here today. The right thing. And I’m proud of you.’ He found he was having trouble speaking and, hearing his own voice, realised he was nearly in tears. He saw in his mind the boy standing mute and hopeful in front of an ugly armchair, its back towards him and a silence proceeding from it which could only mean a perpetual, corrosive disappointment. A moment later he realised that it was not the boy at all but himself, in that bloody room at home, and there was the electric fire and the print of a hunt and the ship in a bottle. He shuddered. Christ, he had to hold it together. It was not the time, not the time at all to be worrying over old, dead ghosts.

Sergeanting had an answer to that. When you were utterly fucked and you didn’t know what to do, you got busy making sure everyone else was all right and told them not to worry and by the end of it there was a good chance you’d convinced yourself. And if you hadn’t, well, sooner or later you either died or you didn’t and in either case the problem went away. He hauled himself into the present and ordered a forward march, but that did require a definition of forward, and he wasn’t sure where that was, so he just said ‘You’re a good lad’ again, and stood there.

After a moment in this hiatus, the boy slipped quietly back under his arm and rested against the Sergeant’s ribs. The weight was familiar, as if they had sat in this way many times over many years and the Sergeant was only now remembering.

We are changed, the Sergeant thought. Of course we are. Whatever this is, we’re deeper in it.

He shifted slightly and brought his other arm around to make it a real hug, and heard a gasp. When he looked down, he saw under the wide boat-neck of the smock a series of stark blue-red lines across the boy’s shoulders, and recognised them after a moment as bruises.

Some people knew horses and some people knew guns. There were navy men who swore they could tell you from the taste of the water what ocean they were in. You picked things up as you went along and these things became part of you whether you really wanted them to or not. He suspected that Jed Kershaw could tell from walking into a room if someone was about to get shitcanned or promoted. It was just part of becoming who you were.

And Lester Ferris was an infantryman the way the Witch was a doctor. He’d hiked through snowfields and crawled across hot rocks, marched through opium fields and jungle, been shot at and occasionally shot, and blown up. At various times and in various places he’d fought men with his fists and his feet, with broken bottles and with bits of wood picked up from the floor. Some of them had wanted to kill him, others had just been enjoying a donnybrook. Three days ago he’d broken a man’s arm with a frying pan to save the life of one friend and avenge the death of another, had known as he was doing it exactly how much it hurt and how much force was necessary to make sure of the bones.

If Lester Ferris knew just one thing in the world the way meat knows salt, it was bruises.

So he knew a professional punishment beating when he saw one, and his world caught fire as if he had just been waiting to explode all along and now he was raining down on Mancreu like the volcano which had brought him here.

‘Who,’ he grated out, before he could hem himself in with cautions, ‘did that?’ It might be a parent, of course. That might be why the boy was so elusive yet so fond, so seemingly in need in a way the Sergeant could not quite reach. He had a bad dad and needed a good one he could run to when blood was not thick enough to endure. Well, if so, there would be words. ‘Who?’

The boy did not answer immediately, just looked back in something like amazement at the anger kindled in the Sergeant’s face, as if he hadn’t dared to expect it but now that he saw it he was drinking it in like nectar. Christ. Did I not make it obvious that I cared? Is this the only way you know? But then the thought blew away, a frozen bird tossed in the body of the storm.

‘Show me!’ the Sergeant demanded, then carefully bit back the measure of his fury so that he could say ‘please’ and not add to the boy’s injuries a disregard for his sovereignty, however badly he had already been infringed. (And how badly? If he had been, as the newspapers would have it, ‘abused’, there would be no place on the island for the doer. That person would simply vanish into a woodchipper somewhere, and thank you to the allied powers for their extralegal zone.)

But when the boy removed his kirtle the damage was almost surgical. There were bruises which marked where he had been held and more where the lash had fallen – no, not a lash, it had been stiff: a baton or a truncheon – but nothing below the waist, nothing which suggested that sort of interference, and his motion was easy at the hip. No. No, this was punishment, and it had the feel of what a particularly brutal man would call education. On a hunch, the Sergeant glanced over at the boy’s knapsack where it lay on the floor, and saw that it was uncharacteristically poorly fastened, as if in haste. He glanced at his friend for permission and when at least no denay was forthcoming he stalked over to it and plucked at the buckles with his fingers. His hands were clumsy and he snatched and scrabbled, goring his thumb on a sharp edge, but he barely noticed.

When he got the bag open, pantomime snow fell from its mouth onto the bed, wide white pieces drifting down to settle on the blanket. He stared at them, turned them in his hands. Not snow, paper. And not all white. White and pink. White and red. White and black, blue, green. He saw a face with a mask, and recognised at last the remains of a comic book, and then he emptied the bag out and realised that he was seeing the corpse of the boy’s entire collection for the month, ripped beyond restoration. Carefully ripped. Painstakingly.

He felt the world pulse again, as if the room was stretching out wider, bowing to make space for his reaction. A beating was a beating and it was wrong, but there were persons – it might be a schoolmaster, a priest, or even a nun – who would claim that old adage about sparing the rod. But this was not that. This was vandalism of a calculated sort, a two-pronged assault most deliberate, to torture the body and deprive the mind, and it possessed a persistent cruelty. To rip a comic book in half out of frustration, yes. He could see that. Didn’t like it, but yes. But this had taken time and effort and bespoke a refined sort of sadism.

‘They did this in front of you.’

The boy nodded. Of course they had. They had. And they had done it, he knew without asking, from the back of each book, so that there was no possibility of reading them however hurriedly in the right order. The boy must turn his head away and listen, or face the destruction and suffer spoilers as well as desecration. It possessed a peculiar elegance, like the killing of the dog.

‘Who?’ he said, and this time it was a whisper.

‘The fish,’ the boy said at last, and before the Sergeant could misunderstand: ‘I knew that you could not go. It is NatProMan, the fish. But I thought if I went and could take a picture, you would have something and you could show Kershaw. I thought I would fight crime, and then you would have time.’ And the Sergeant wondered if the missing words he swallowed were ‘for me’ or ‘for Shola’ or some combination of both.

‘I see,’ he said. And then, because he had to say the name, he said it like a curse, as if it could turn good food into rot: ‘Pechorin.’

The boy stared at him, eyes wide, and did not say ‘What will you do?’ but Lester Ferris was already asking himself that question, because one way and another he was going to do something and that something must answer this most exquisitely.

He looked around at the flakes of paper on the floor, the ruined mess of bright colours and ridiculous stories of salvation from the sky, and he knew what he would do, as if he was staring through stone to the very heart of the island to find his answer written there. It was a glorious idea, one that was both foolish enough to pass for a prank and yet still savage enough, specific enough to be perfectly understood. He would lay down a law. Not a law in words, but a soldier’s law. Lester Ferris’s law. And the right people would know, without any ambiguity at all, where that law began and ended, and what came if you crossed it.

He would draw the line first of all for Pavel Ygorovitch Pechorin, personally, in a manner appropriate to the sin.

‘Tigerman,’ he gritted out. ‘Whoomf.’