Tigerman (9 page)

‘We are made from awesome!’ the boy said, hands on hips, hero style. Then memory took hold. In belated panic: ‘Shola?’

The Sergeant, about to indicate the corpse, remembered what it must look like and shook his head. He caught the boy’s arm as he went to see and held him back. The boy’s eyes widened and for a moment he grew stubborn, then limp.

‘Shola?’ he asked again.
You have made a mistake. Someone else is dead. It is not our friend
.

‘No,’ the Sergeant told him. He had had this conversation before, knew it very well. He looked around. How many corpses? Five? Six? Was anyone still alive? Any of them might be, except Shola. Shola was dead. But the others . . . He should find out, try to stop the bleeding. He had no idea how to do that. In films, everyone knew those things, but he didn’t and he might make it worse. In the real world, platoons had medics, and ‘don’t fucking touch unless I say’. He looked at the gun and wondered why he wasn’t tempted to pull the trigger, finish the men on the ground. He wanted to want to. A few moments ago, if he’d had this gun, he would have used it without hesitating. Now it was out of the question. Pointless. And it was important to take prisoners. He wished it wasn’t.

‘We beat them,’ the boy protested. ‘We beat them!’

Yes. That much was true. In comics, and in the games the boy played, that meant that the key actors did not die. In the particoloured fantasy world of Superman, winning meant saving your friends. Ergo, Shola could not be dead. Except he was, and that too was bloody obvious and according to convention: when a white soldier goes adventuring, it’s somehow his black friend who gets shot.

‘We did what we could,’ the Sergeant said, hating the words in his mouth. ‘Everything we could. There’s nothing to feel ashamed about.’ This last with great fierceness and certainty because he knew what shame would do later, if not capped now. He reached for something which would make sense. ‘We needed Superman, didn’t we? Only he’s busy. It’s just us.’

The boy nodded in reluctant understanding. ‘We are good. We are not
leet
. Saving Shola would have been
leet
.’

Leet
, the Sergeant thought, from ‘elite’, often written
l33t
or even
1337
. Meaning: the very best. The most able.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We are not
leet
.’

‘Perhaps we should practise,’ the boy murmured sadly.

‘Yes,’ the Sergeant agreed. He was rehearsing his choices in his mind, looking for better ones.
Evade, counter-attack.
There just weren’t any. Not once it started.

He heard a breath, looked down and saw the boy’s mouth open in a perfect O. He jerked back and around, looking for a sixth assassin, but there was nothing. The men on the ground cowered, begged. No threat. No threat. He looked back, abruptly afraid that the boy had been shot and was just now realising, grabbed him and checked him with his hands, moving aside folds of bloody clothing and patting the boy’s arms and legs. ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ His voice was uneven. Unprofessional. He was angry, the way his father had been angry with him when he burned himself on the kettle. ‘Tell me!’ He stopped shyly, worried that he had crossed a line.

‘I am fine,’ the boy said. ‘I am fine! I promise! Sorry. I did not mean to do that. It is okay. I was just seeing.’

‘Seeing what?’

‘Everything,’ the boy said. The Sergeant waited for him to crumple, but he didn’t. Instead he stared back at the room wide-eyed, as if he were visiting a cathedral. Shock looked like that sometimes. Survival became a miracle, the wretched world a heaven.
Well. True enough
.

Outside, someone was arriving. The cavalry. NatProMan, the Sergeant assumed, because explosions and gunfire would definitely attract Kershaw’s attention. Or perhaps he had called them. He didn’t remember. He looked down and saw the boy looking up, and realised that neither of them would cry unless the other one did first. He wondered what earthly good that was to anybody. Very manly. As much use as pulling the trigger, he supposed, which was to say none at all.

‘We should fight crime,’ the boy said. ‘That is what we should do.’

‘JESUS, LESTER,’ JED
Kershaw said, ‘Jesus! Are you okay? Shit! What the fuck is going on? Shall I send in the marines? Were they after you? Was this an anti-Brit thing? Did they think you were one of my guys? Was it anti-American? Was it
jihad
?’

Kershaw was glossy in the heat; his skin had a fried-egg slickness. He was short but seemed to have been fitted with an oversize motor so that he talked too fast and moved like a dragonfly, zigging and zagging and pouncing on things. It was exactly how not to feel comfortable in the heat. His family was Norwegian back down the line, and he looked like a stumpy brown-haired Viking who’d taken a job as a golf pro. You could not have found someone less suited to Mancreu’s climate if you’d searched the whole world. Kershaw didn’t even like Florida. But he had come down to Shola’s and personally taken charge because he was basically decent, and he’d sat at the man’s table and eaten with him.

‘Fuck,’ Kershaw said again, seemingly to nobody. He looked at the Sergeant’s uniform, with its splatter of Shola’s blood along one sleeve and the dust all over his side from his dive to the floor. ‘Lester, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Stop being a sergeant for a few seconds and just . . . Holy shit, Lester, are you okay?’

The Sergeant allowed that a sit down might be just what he needed. He was aware abruptly that he had scalded his face, probably walking through the cloud of burned custard. The Witch would laugh at him. Her cleavage appeared in his mind’s eye, rising and falling, leaning over him: post-combat lust. He struggled to focus on the matter at hand as she straddled him, guiding his hands, his mouth.
God, yes. I want this.

And then, more truthfully:
I need a hug.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, in answer to all Kershaw’s questions. ‘I think it was about Shola, but I don’t know. There’s no reason anyone would come after me.’

‘You’re a policeman,’ Kershaw said.

For a moment, the Sergeant thought this rather unkind. He interpreted it as a rebuke: you’re a policeman! Why don’t you know already? But then he realised that as far as Kershaw was concerned it was an explanation in itself. You’re a policeman: some people don’t like them. It had not really occurred to him that in many places this would be reason enough to shoot someone dead while they were having soup. His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn’t attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you’d have to answer to his mum.

The Witch reappeared, came through the door with her medicine bag. He tried not to see her, then realised when she peered into his face with benign professional concern that this time she was real. He had already opened his mouth to receive her kiss. He shut it. She nodded, began to move carefully around him, tut at the mess on his clothes, probe his bruises.

Kershaw was talking about stability, viable stability under abnormal crisis-induced deindividuational stress, from which according to some NatProMan policy document everyone on Mancreu was presently suffering. He punctuated his speech by yelling at his men to ‘cover that body, find someone to do some fucking clean-up, where’s the fucking undertaker, is there still a fucking undertaker or has the fucker already fucking fucked off?’ The words were irrelevant. His presence was the message. He cared enough to be here, to come in person into what must feel like a very dangerous place, and now he was here he was as confused as everyone else.

‘You didn’t do anything to make this happen, Lester? I’m not going to find out that you and Shola were running coke to kids in Beauville?’

‘That is rude,’ the Witch said without looking up. ‘And ridiculous.’

‘Fuck you, lady! Who asked you anything? What the fuck are you even doing here?’

‘You called for doctors. I am a doctor. Deal with it.’

‘I meant real doctors! My guys!’

‘And they are putting blood back into the women who were shot. Who will live, by the way – I’m so glad you asked.’

‘Fucking MSF fuckers,’ Kershaw muttered. He was embarrassed, the Sergeant could see, by the callousness of his own questions. But it was his role to be callous, to ask the bad questions while others did the repair work, in case there were bad answers.

The Witch sneered and muttered something about inhibited men from Ivy League schools.

‘No,’ the Sergeant said to Kershaw, before this could escalate, ‘nothing like that.’

Kershaw took that at face value and turned to the Witch, asking, by way of amelioration, ‘Is he okay?’

‘He will be,’ the Witch said. ‘Which is a miracle. Lester, turn your head.’

He did.

Kershaw, assured that the Sergeant was not seriously hurt and not a drug dealer, seemed to calm somewhat. Then, too, he had probably needed to know this wasn’t some sort of insurrection. There were those on the island who objected to NatProMan’s presence. Occasionally leaflets surfaced, printed neatly and distributed invisibly, nailed to walls and left on café tables. They denounced Kershaw by name, railed against the destruction of the island, in English, French, and Moitié. It was not what you would call an insurgency. It felt pro forma, or possibly sophomoric: angry young men with a smattering of political history and a sense of betrayal. The Sergeant couldn’t blame them, but in his judgement they – whoever they were – had nothing like the steel for something like this. This was horrible, but it was not revolution. It felt too specific for that. But hardly surgical.

The Sergeant looked for the boy, but he was gone, most likely to whatever place he called home. The Sergeant hoped that whoever waited there would look after him. He felt bad that he had not provided some sort of care while he spoke to Kershaw, but the boy had been quite firm, and he was sovereign. ‘Speak to the American. It is necessary.’ If there was anyone waiting. If he had anyone. The Sergeant hoped that he did, somewhere, and then hoped that he didn’t because that would mean he shared his friend with someone he did not know, that the boy was ultimately not his boy, just a boy he knew. It would make his furtive, half-acknowledged Plan B that much more difficult.

The Witch drove him to her surgery without speaking. She gave him leaves and unguents for his scorched face, more for his bruises, and dressed a gash in his shoulder which must have been from a near miss with the shotgun as he fled into the kitchen. Finally she sighed.

‘I knew Shola,’ she said. ‘Marie will be devastated.’

The Sergeant nodded. Marie, Shola’s girlfriend. Wife, really, though not on paper. Widow. Christ, someone would have to tell her. Except that by now she already knew. There was nothing he could do about that. He’d have to go and see her, of course.

‘Everyone will be,’ he said. And the boy: had he witnessed death like this before? Not impossible. Not here. ‘If you see,’ as ever he baulked at saying ‘Robin’, ‘my friend, tell him to come and find me.’

The Witch shrugged. Exhausted, he accepted that as a yes. He breathed in, hoping to catch her scent to carry it away with him, but the room smelled of the sea, and of disinfectant.

That night the Sergeant dreamed of a woman, in terms he knew were utterly pornographic. They did things he had only read about: desperate things which arched them both and made them cry out until they spasmed and clutched and clawed their way to satisfaction, and then on relentlessly to more and more transgressive journeys in search of some sort of restitution from the world. He called her Breanne, but when finally his lover laid her head upon his chest and slept, her body was slim and pale, and her fingers were tipped in an absurd sherbet pink.

When he woke, the memory was fading and he was aching and grazed and filled with regret – for Shola, for the others who had died so arbitrarily. If he went armed, habitually, as a soldier in a foreign land should, he might have . . . what? Stood off five men with one pistol? Got into a firefight and died? Or should he have marched around Beauville with an SA 80, carrying the weight of it across his chest, the lethal message wherever he went. And what message, exactly, does an armed soldier give out when he is a thousand miles from reinforcements? Fear, perhaps. Foolishness. Thuggishness. It was idiotic. And yet he felt a powerful conviction that he should somehow have prevented what had happened. Should have been prepared for it.

He covered his chest and shoulders with the Witch’s medicaments and felt immediate physical relief. He wasn’t sure he approved, until he tested and found that beneath the cool there was still a burn, an awareness which promised later discomfort in the abused meat of his back: earned pain, solid and reassuring. In the meantime, his mind was clear, albeit a little tinny, as if he was hearing his own thoughts on a cheap recording. He sent a message to London, tersely worded and laconic, indicating a fatal shooting incident at a local café and the apprehension of those responsible by an armed force. He did not specify the nature of the armed force. That sort of thing would require further discussion.

Shola would be buried today. Mancreu custom was in this regard more Muslim than Christian. The Sergeant dressed accordingly, formal and uncomfortable, squeezing himself into a uniform he had not expected to put on again until he went home and was formally retired from combat duty. He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days. He stared at his chest: bright-coloured ribbons, discs and stars.

He couldn’t go for a walk like this, not outside. The heat would flatten him. It would be bad enough at the service. So he walked along the cool, dark corridors of Brighton House, going from one end to the other and hearing the sound of his heels and toes tapping on black and white tiles.
Click clack. Click clack
. The house seemed to approve, whatever ghosts it might have peering down from the rafters and out of the shrouded rooms, and nodding to see a British soldier in full rig once again marching here in the aftermath of bloodshed and victory. Or possibly it was mice, or bats. There had been a bat last year, lost and confused. He had shepherded it out into the darkness and it had crapped on him.