Authors: Nick Harkaway
To the north, the water grew pale green and warm. To the south, it turned blue, the bottom falling away into a frigid darkness which was the site of the indigenous population’s hell. The south coast was known to be peopled with demons: fish-finned men and feral women ruled by Jack the Wrecker, Mancreu’s resident fairy king. Bad Jack was capricious. If the milk turned, Jack had molested the cow. If you left honey on the doorstep, Jack might trade it for cash or rum or even a hunting rifle. He was known to rescue lost travellers, but also to rob them, and if a ship went down in bad weather, well, no doubt Jack had stood on the cliff with his lantern and seen it onto the rocks for spite. He was, in other words, the warm-water image of every bogeyman up and down the British coast, and likewise an object of knowing derision until the night drew in, after which people were discreetly more circumspect. Bad Jack,
Mauvais Jacques
, Jack Storm-eye – and even, by some strange twist, Jack of the Nine, the bitter memory of a colonial governor’s justice.
The name, Mancreu, had been given by mariners grateful for the sandy beaches on the lee side. Those early sailors thought the island was an image of the Grail carved into the face of the Earth. On embroidered pieces of canvas cloth, sometimes crude, sometimes alarmingly intricate and ethereal, they showed Mancreu as the curved palms of the Virgin catching the blood of Christ. In Beauville, this perception was still a matter of known fact. Elsewhere in the world it was less well understood, but from time to time a ship out of North Africa would put in, crewed by tyro seamen from missionary towns baked dry and starving, and somewhere near the bow would be a benediction in French:
Hail, Madonna of the Gull’s Wing. Hail, Madonna. Let your mark be upon us sinners, and your voice upon the deep. Bid the blue water roll softly. Speak to the clouds and hold their thunder. Guard us from men of ill-intent and from plagues and sorrows. Hail, Madonna. Hear us, Madonna. Bring us home.
There was still a scrivener’s office on the harbour front, where a holy sign-painter hung his papal warrant. He was an albino – or something like it – named Raoul. He was subject to strange infirmities, either in consequence of his condition or from overuse of magic inks, but was said in person to be magnetic, like a poet or a prophet. He was also said to have been a mercenary, a leader of men, or perhaps a great pirate before the calling found him and the writing of God’s word on ships became his life. The Sergeant had never ventured into his lair. It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.
The scrivener’s beautiful daughter was famous around Beauville, and famously out of bounds. White Raoul’s girl: what might the father do, should her heart be broken? Or worse: should harm befall her? What might he not do? Take down his sign, for sure, and close his shop – but what else? Might he not write maledictions with the same strength as blessings? Or call upon whatever armies he once commanded to avenge her tears? Might not the papal warrant, conferred in the name of mercy, give equal prominence in God’s eyes to a father’s rage? Beautiful Sandrine must live a lonely life, uncourted and unkissed, because it was not known where Raoul’s disapprovals might begin. The Sergeant had never seen her. He wondered sometimes if she were a myth, a sort of running joke on the big foreigner. More likely he’d walked past her a dozen times and not realised it, and her beauty was more to be found in its own fame than in her face.
‘Tea,’ the boy said firmly.
They walked together in silence to the dented, oil-stinking old Land Rover which served as the Sergeant’s official military conveyance. He unlocked his own door and threw the keys across the roof to the boy – if the car had ever possessed a central locking system it was long defunct – who caught them and let himself in, then ducked into the passenger seat and passed them back without looking. The older man felt the keys land in his palm and inserted the right one into the ignition even as his foot pressed the brake. When the engine spluttered a little unwillingly and the cabin jerked they were neither of them caught off guard, and a mutual puff of air through pursed lips expressed disapproval of this automotive weakness.
The friendship he had with the boy was one of a small number the Sergeant had established on Mancreu. He had not expected to find any, but his tenure had endured far beyond original estimates and an infantryman alone was a profoundly unnatural thing. Infantry was by definition an army, a river of soldiers which washed up and over and could not be stopped. It was your family and your friends and the way you lived and most of all it meant you were never by yourself. Somewhat less so for an NCO, perhaps, whose responsibility it was to get the job done, harry and cajole the lads in the right direction, then haul them home again in one piece, so far as any of these things was possible. Rank made you a little bit a stranger, but also gave you new roles to fill: uncle, nursemaid, gaffer, big brother, pastor, best mate and headmaster – that was a sergeant. One thing you never were was short of conversation.
On Mancreu he had no platoon to look after. Brighton House was vast and empty. There were two ballrooms in the east wing, both dim and sheeted. On his third day he had unwrapped a leather armchair in one of the drawing rooms so that he could sit, and discovered over those early weeks that he rather liked the quiet. In fact, he could spend ages in it. He had found it hard at first to listen without tracking things, without placing them and knowing them for friend or enemy, but gradually that automatic classification had faded away and he was left with rustling leaves and waves and a cowbell somewhere far off, and the idling of a fisherman’s outboard in the choppy water beneath the cliff. He walked the endless corridors on the upper floors alone, wondering what the rooms had seen. There was a local bird with a quite infuriating cry like a sneeze, and he amused himself by saying ‘bless you’ whenever he heard it. Occasionally he thanked himself on behalf of the bird. After a while he found that he could forget the clock and even dismiss memory and awareness almost entirely, fade into the scenery and let his senses be everything that there was of him. It was wonderful.
On other days, though, the lack of amiable chatter drove him mad. The sound of his footsteps bounced around inside his head as if he was Brighton House itself, empty and dry and dismal and waiting for a renewal which would never come. He might, from time to time, visit his French counterpart on the island for a drink. Dirac, representing the absence of Gallic interest in doings on Mancreu, was good company, but quite often he was busy because he had several lovers in Beauville and was always on the lookout for more. The Sergeant supposed that this was in keeping with appropriate French post-colonial behaviour, just as walking the beat and taking tea was for himself. All the same, on those Sargasso days he needed company, and – this being the shape of things and he being who he was – it was inevitable that he should have become involved with the Beauville Boxing Club. A boxing ring was a place where strangers could get to know one another, where awkwardness did not figure. You didn’t have to be polite, or funny, or diplomatic. You didn’t even have to be a decent boxer, although he was. You just had to show some good heart and sooner or later the club would take you in or it wasn’t a proper club. There were always personalities, of course, but they came after the boxing, they happened outside the ring. Those things tended to resolve themselves, especially if you didn’t have much to prove.
And it was just as inevitable, given his official position and his advanced age in the eyes of the local champions, that upon his arrival at the cool half-basement which served the Beauville club as its headquarters he should instantly be accorded the status of referee. He had intended to do a little sparring here and there, even arrange some friendly fights to keep himself fresh, but there was almost no one who would get in the ring with him. It was a no-win situation for the younger boxers. If he was a poor fighter, they might lay out the Brevet-Consul, a middle-aged geezer with a dodgy guard and weak ribs. Sure, there’d be no real consequences, but they had no way of knowing that, and in any case it would be a piss-poor sort of victory to carry around. On the other hand it was not impossible – not impossible at all, given the build of the man and the power in his legs – that they might lose, get flattened by a fellow who could just as well be a senior citizen as far as the streets of Mancreu were concerned. Neither option was appealing to the muscular fishermen and farmers who boxed here.
Which left him with Shola the café-owner and Pechorin of NatProMan.
Shola was tall and lean and an outrageous boaster. To hear him tell it he had loved every pretty woman between Bangkok and Tehran and all of them missed him terribly. He dressed like a pirate, or a drug dealer from an old American movie, and he worried a great deal about his hair, but he could hit fast and straight when you weren’t expecting it. He was an enjoyable opponent, filled with humour and ready enough to step back before a bout got past the point of good fun. His torso – like all of them he boxed without a shirt – was enviably beautiful, hard lines and ripples. He spoke with a faint French-North African lilt, but he was Mancreu born, his family washed up in the early 1900s, and a century later they were still here.
His manner invited confidences and friendship. ‘But when will you go?’ the Sergeant had asked, as they soaked in the club’s whirlpool after thirty minutes of ducking and jabbing. By the upside-down logic of Mancreu it was the first question between new friends, like a schoolboy’s ‘what’s your favourite team?’ and with the same cautious offer of alliance.
Shola rolled his head along his endless shoulders, and sighed. ‘No idea. When it is time, you know? When it is good and time. But for me there is nowhere
to
go, now. No other island like this in all the blue oceans of the world. Caribbean is all over hotels. Maldives are sinking and half of the people want women to wear veils. No music, because that might lead to dancing. I will go to El Hierro, maybe. It’s in the Atlantic. Very long way. But I think when it’s time I’ll go and see El Hierro. Maybe me and that island could fall in love a little bit. Always room for the right bar on the right island. There’s carnival there. And lizards, man! Big lizards!’ He held his hands apart, and grinned.
‘But when?’
Shola shrugged. ‘Not today. There’s still people here today. And not tomorrow, either. I have bookings for lunch. Maybe next week, if I get around to it.’ Which he obviously wouldn’t.
‘Don’t wait too long.’ The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic. The Sergeant had shed the perception as far as he could, but the traces of it occasionally embarrassed him even now. He cringed.
‘Lester,’ Shola said happily, ‘you are an old woman. You know that? But you box like a rhinoceros. They teach you that at sergeant school? I think I have broken my hand on your head.’ And then the laugh, a huge laugh which said:
yes, of course, I will be your friend
.
The other man, Pechorin, could not have been more different. He was a squat Ukrainian, and sullen, as if whatever place he went offended him on arrival. He was not so much a boxer as a hitter. After a few tentative engagements he could be guaranteed to lose his temper, and his hallmark combination would come out: double jab, cross, hook hook hook and on and on until the hooks became haymakers, and he could never understand how everyone slipped the last punch and got behind his guard. The Sergeant did not often box with Pechorin, but when it was inevitable he adopted a sort of mirror posture, never letting the man land anything on him, never provoking him, until the referee declared a winner on points. There was no point asking him when he would leave, because he was here on deployment. He would leave when he was ordered to, and he cared nothing one way or the other. In any case, Pechorin was not comfortable in the whirlpool with other men’s bodies on display, so he was never there.
Shola’s café was where the Sergeant had first encountered the boy. It had been the second week after his official investiture as Brevet-Consul, and his second visit to the place after meeting its owner in the ring. His arrival this time was the intentional sort of accident. He had been ambling along the shady streets on what was either a reconnaissance or a stroll, thinking he just might pop in but then again perhaps he wouldn’t, but as he approached to within a few steps of the door and considered walking on by, Mancreu performed one of its seasonal lurches and the rain started: explosive golf balls of water, gentle at first but growing rapidly more weighty and numerous. He glanced up, saw no relief, and dashed inside.
He was greeted by a burst of mirth – a drenched foreigner is always hilarious – and ushered in. Shola himself had been absent that day, but the barman, Pero, had known him for a friend of the boss and bawled for the good kettle. The result had been a pungent caravan tea, bitter and startlingly good. Better, in fact, than any he could remember drinking pretty much anywhere, although some part of him wondered if that might not have more to do with his memory and his recent history than the tea itself.
He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child’s toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He stretched backwards over his chair, and when he looked down again he noticed vaguely a boy, also drinking tea, sitting in the corner with a comic book. Beside the boy was a big, blocky mobile telephone in grey plastic. It was so old it had a visible aerial.
The Sergeant drank his first pot dry very quickly and ordered another, and some bread and butter. These also turned out to be excellent – the butter was a pale vanilla froth which spread onto the sourdough and lifted it to something like the level of the tea.