The Penal Colony (5 page)

Routledge got down on his haunches and
examined the hollow more closely. It did not look very inviting; he
had known better hostelries than this. But it was safe, and it was
relatively dry.

Rubbing a hand across his stubble, he
hesitated before going further, still unable to rid himself of an
irrational, self-conscious feeling that he was being watched.

He looked up, directly overhead. The thought
had just occurred to him that he was indeed being watched. They
might well have a satellite in orbit for precisely this
purpose.

He considered sticking out his tongue, or
thumbing his nose, or making some rather more emphatic gesture. But
that was not his way, and it would merely give them something else
to smile about. If they were watching. And if they weren’t, the
gesture would not only be futile, but also, somehow, the act of a
man in the earliest stages of madness. Like talking to himself. He
had been doing it consistently now, under his breath as if he were
afraid of being overheard; and it was time to stop.

However sophisticated their cameras, they
would be unable to see through the overarching foliage of the bush.
He crawled into the hollow and after a few experiments found the
most comfortable way to lie down, with his head given as much
shelter as possible. Yes. This would do.

He told himself he ought to make a start on
finding food. He would go back to the rabbit warren and try there,
see if he could find a young one out on its own, or else rig up
some sort of trap.

But he did not move. He was very tired. The
drugged sleep he had awoken from in King’s shack had left him
feeling utterly drained. His subsequent terrors and exertions had
drained him still more, and now, before facing the next part of the
onslaught, all he wanted was a little time to recuperate.

He shut his eyes.

Enclosed by the branches, enclosed within
himself, the difficulties he had just been facing, out there in the
daylight, seemed immediately to recede. They belonged again to some
other person, not to himself.

Routledge heard the wind in the leaves. He
heard the distant waves, and, a little while later, the deep,
throaty
prronk
of a raven’s cry. It came only once, and was
instantly swept away on the wind. He listened for it again,
drifting in and out of his thoughts, thinking of all that had
happened and all that would be.

Forgetting to listen, he abandoned himself
completely, let himself go, and fell at last into a heavy, unhappy,
and dreamless sleep.

“Gazzer. Over here.”

“What you found?”

“He must have came this way.”

Routledge was instantly awake, his heart
pounding so hard that he had difficulty in hearing. Two men, at
least two, were close to his lair. The first who had spoken sounded
like a black man, the other, Gazzer, a white.

They were searching for someone. For him.

What an imbecile he was! They would have seen
the helicopter; they would know that a new prisoner would probably
have been landed; they would know the procedure. Where more logical
to look for the new man, and his clothes, and anything else he
might have, than in the vicinity of the gate? From the gate he
would have left a clear trail through the bracken and across the
wet grassland. They would have seen the places where he had
stumbled, the flattened bracken where he had spent the night. They
would have seen where he had drunk from the rill, and then … then
the trail into the scrub.

So. This was how he was going to die.

The sun had come out. From the look of the
light, it seemed that it was now mid morning. He must have been
asleep for several hours. The wind had softened and become
warmer.

“No sign of him.”

“I tell you he been past here. Four, five
hours since.”

The voices were even closer now, coming from
somewhere over his left shoulder. Two metres away. No more. He was
paralysed: if he moved he knew he would make a sound and that would
be the end.

There came a long silence. Finally the white
man said, “Let’s go on.”

More vegetation was parted and crushed. They
were leaving.

And then it happened.

In a conversational tone the white man said,
“What’s this?”

Routledge looked round. A human male, a
thing, a creature of about twenty-five, hands on knees, was half
bending, head cocked, and peering into the space under the
bush.

“Jackpot.”

Routledge sat up.

“Been asleep?”

The man’s hair could not have been cut or
washed for several months at least; his beard not for many more. In
his right hand he was holding half a metre of rusty angle-iron. He
was dressed in tattered jeans, almost rags, and a sleeveless
jacket, an outlandish jerkin of what Routledge guessed was
goatskin, black and brown and white. “Like Robinson Crusoe,”
Routledge thought. “No: Ben Gunn.” Dangling from his neck was a
string of assorted shells. His arms and face were, under the filth,
deeply tanned. As the man began a slow smile, Routledge saw that
his few remaining teeth were rotten, but his eyes, in contrast with
his skin, shone with a clear, intense, maniacal healthiness.

“I said, ‘Been asleep?’”

“Yes,” Routledge said. “Yes, I’ve been
asleep.”

“We thought you was. Didn’t we, Winston?”

The black man appeared. “I’m warnin’ you,
Gazzer. Don’t call me that.”

“Just a joke.”

“You been to the Village?” the black said to
Routledge. He did not seem quite as tall as the white; his clothes
were no better. His chief garment was a stained and grimy cotton
blouson, originally pale cream. Under this he was wearing a blue
T-shirt with the faded remnants of a circular yellow logo, now
illegible. His dungarees, green corduroy, were too short, revealing
bare ankles in a pair of grubby trainers. He looked about forty.
Instead of angle-iron, he was armed with a heavy wooden club, much
carved and polished.

“Course he’s been to the Village,” the white
man said. “What’s your name?”

“Anthony. Tony.”

“Get here yesterday, Tony?”

“Yes.”

“Have a nice ride on the ’copter? Yeah? What
d’you reckon to our little island, then? Nice, innit?”

There could be no escape. They were being
careful to block the only way out, and even if he did get past them
they would catch him in the scrub, bring him down, and kill him.
From the impudent way they were standing he could tell they knew he
was soft and weak, fresh from the mainland, while they, veteran
survivors, were as fit and hard and ruthless as any man could be.
In their faces he could see their thoughts about his life, his job,
his background, his money.

“I said it’s nice.”

“Yes.”

“Where was you? Dartmoor?”

“Exeter.”

“What you here for?”

“I … I …”

“He’s here for wanking his cat,” the black
man said. “Who gives a shit? We’re wasting time. We want fun,
right?”

“You goin’ to come out of there?” Gazzer
said.

Routledge began to make his mind work. He
started to crawl into the open.

“Don’t forget your jacket, Tony.”

Once, on a Harrow street corner, he had been
mugged by three blacks. He had made the mistake then of trying to
appease them, of answering their insolent questions, of telling
them the time when asked, of revealing his wristwatch and the way
he spoke. And now he had begun to do exactly the same thing again.
Also a mistake.

“You want to ream him first?” the black man
said, as Routledge emerged.

The white man did not answer. His hand had
gone to his fly. He grinned at Routledge, looked at the black man,
looked back at Routledge. “Get down on your knees and pucker
up.”

“That’s it, Gazzer,” the black man said.
“That’s it. Give it to him like th—”

He interrupted himself with a scream.

Routledge had no idea what he was doing. In
the next instant, having already, somehow, lunging forward, managed
to slash his sheath-knife across the exposed, obscenely semi-erect
length of the white man’s penis, he turned and with all his
strength thrust the blade into the black man’s chest. He was
momentarily too astonished to resist; the point entered somewhere
near the middle of his left breast pocket. After a fleeting
resistance, as if the steel had been delayed by intervening bone or
cartilage, the knife slid in as far as it would go. Routledge felt
the moulded brass of the guard hurting the upper joint of his
thumb; he pushed even harder, clutching with his left hand at his
victim’s collar.

In the corner of his eye Routledge saw the
white man standing immobile, his angle-iron club dropped and
forgotten, hands held apart and slightly spread, staring downwards,
his wild, mad, tangle-bearded face a pantomime mask of incredulity.
His penis had been all but severed. Almost no time had elapsed: yet
the wound, in the richly vascular substance of his erectile tissue,
was already spouting blood.

The fetid smell of the black man’s clothing
filled Routledge’s mouth and nostrils, his face pressed hard into
the shoulder of the blouson. Close by his right ear came a gurgling
sound, and he felt the sudden wetness of blood or mucus or saliva
penetrating his hair.

The black man let his club drop. Already
dead, the whole weight of his body toppled forward on the knife.
His arms closed Routledge in a heavy embrace. Routledge began to
fear he would be unable to get the knife out: the sheer weight of
the corpse was threatening to overwhelm him, but he gave a vigorous
tug, and another, and the blade came free. Routledge twisted aside,
allowing the body to fall forwards, and turned back to face the
white man.

His jeans were soaked and splashed with red,
yet still he had not moved; still he had not uttered a sound. He
looked down at what had been done to him and looked up again.

In his eyes Routledge saw an expression of
stupefied resignation, from almost the same source as that which
appears in the eyes of a rabbit about to be killed; but this was
essentially human, and, addressed at a far deeper level than mere
language, directly to another man’s heart, made a primal and
uncomprehending plea for mercy.

The man took a step backwards. Holding
Routledge’s gaze for as long as possible, he turned and, half
bending, holding out one hand in protection, began to crash his way
through the scrub.

Routledge’s first instinct was to let him go.
The man would surely bleed to death anyway. But then again, he
might not. And he might be found by other outsiders, who, for all
Routledge knew, were also out searching for the new arrival.

He bent down, retrieved the angle-iron club,
and, with the knife in his left hand, set off in pursuit.

* * *

An hour later it was finished. With much
physical difficulty, wearing the PVC jacket to help protect the
rest of his clothes, he had managed to drag both bodies to the edge
of the cliffs. The black’s had tumbled loosely, hitting an outcrop
a glancing blow and then falling almost unhindered to the beach.
The other had struck a ledge halfway down and was now lying,
spreadeagled, in full view. That could not be helped.

The wounded man had put up a fight. Routledge
had hit him many times with the angle-iron club, in the face, on
the head.

Now it was over.

Routledge felt cold. His hands were
trembling. Images of what had just happened kept repeating
themselves in his brain.

As he crouched by the rill, trying to wash
the blood from the jacket, he wondered how much longer he could
tolerate the knowledge of what he had done.

In the space of a single hour his whole view
of himself had been defiled. He had become what everyone else
believed him to be. And this time he had murdered not just one, but
two of his fellow human beings.

The sun had grown even warmer. Routledge felt
its heat: on the back of his hands, being absorbed by the dark
fibres of his sweater. The water was pure, crystal-clear. The
instant it came into contact with the blood it flowed slightly back
and then onward in swirling patterns of alternately lighter and
darker, translucent, maroon.

As he handled the jacket he realized that,
for several minutes past, he had become increasingly conscious of
texture and colour, shadow and contrast, of the sheer volume of
detail being returned to him by his eyesight. His hearing had
become more acute and detailed, too; his sense of touch,
everything. It was as though he had never used his body before,
except somehow at second hand.

With a twig he tried to clean the blood from
the stitching on one of the big black buttons. This. Essentially
this. This jacket. They were going to kill him for this.

He supposed he should now be feeling sick,
but it was far more complicated than that. His main sensation was
disgust, with himself, and with them for having forced him into it.
He felt dirty as well as nauseous, ashamed, guilty; but he also
felt glad, and relieved, and lucky. And at bottom he felt
surprised, and proud, of his own strength and daring, and of the
decisive way he had behaved once it had become obvious where his
only course of action lay.

He was still alive, physically unhurt. He was
up here; they were down there. He was still in possession of the
jacket. In short, he had won, and they, they who had brought
violence upon themselves, had lost.

“You want to ream him first?”

That’s what the black man had said. There had
been no doubt about it. “We want fun.” Afterwards they would have
killed him. With the angle-iron, or with the wooden club, or with
both together. They would have taken his jacket, his sweater,
shirt, trousers, underpants, his boots and socks. Gazzer would have
put the trousers on at once and thrown his old jeans down next to
the body. Winston – whatever his true name had been; Routledge
might never know – would have raised an argument. One sock
each.