Nonsense.
He growled, in irritation or lust, he wasn’t sure, and ran on. He was following a narrow path, probably a badger run, and yes: he was holding the compass, finding his way. He grinned, then laughed. He wanted to sing and drink and eat. He wanted to sleep for a year, to lie naked in a jacuzzi looking out over the Sahara while someone rubbed his feet, to headline at a rock concert, to tear down walls with his hands. He had won. He was a god.
Adrenalin. Let it go.
But he couldn’t, and anyway it should be over by now, the high should be exhausted and burned out, should have left him hollow. He wondered if inhaling burning heroin could do this. Cocaine, perhaps. Maybe there had been cocaine, too. Or perhaps there was something here, in this jungle. Maybe the red flowers were a stimulant.
Tigerman make famous victory! Hah!
There wasn’t really, in this world, a way in which burning a shitload of heroin and beating up some dealers was a crime.
He ran on to Beauville, and his way home.
His reckoning was good. He came out of the jungle at the old millhouse, checked the sky and saw clouds and no helicopter, trotted over the road into a plantation and jogged on. He felt he still had more in the tank – impossibly – but he wanted to save it in case there was more craziness to deal with before he slept. The rendezvous was another twenty minutes away. Two streets later he stopped, halted by a thought: the Witch. Her house was here, or near here. It must – he had never thought of Beauville like this before, had always stuck religiously to the road system, but in fact it was all closer together than he had realised – it must be just beyond that stand of palms.
He found that he was heading towards it. For what, exactly? Surely not to bang on the door and ask her to harbour a fugitive. To have sex with a fugitive. No. Whatever magic was working on him to vanish his aches and strengthen his legs, he remained himself, and he knew after nearly forty years on Earth that when you showed up at a woman’s door in the middle of the night smelling of blood and diesel and river mud, she did not immediately lose track of her underwear, or even her common sense.
Not to admit all, either. If she was what she appeared to be, she didn’t need the trouble – and if she wasn’t then nor did he.
Not to serenade her, not to seek medical attention, not to steal her car. But since he was passing, and this being the day he was having, he wanted to see her front door and put his hand on the gate, and know that not everything on Mancreu was a mess.
He climbed the fence around the plantation and ran across the spongy sea-grass towards her house. The door was very solid, an old, traditional Mancreu colonial door made of salvaged wood. It looked inviting, and safe. Perhaps he would just call on her, say he had heard a noise, was wondering if she was all right. Perhaps she would ask him in, after all. Perhaps she was so worldly that his attire would hardly seem odd to her.
Don’t be an idiot.
There was a light burning in the window, and to his amazement she was awake, sitting in a high-backed chair. Her hands were stretched out in exhortation or applause. Come on, come on! Did she have a child, then? Was she for some reason teaching her toddler to walk at two a.m.? The Sergeant realised he had no idea. Perhaps that was something some children did, perhaps they sat up in bed and screamed until you put them on the floor and then they took their first steps and you gave them a lollipop. He had not seen a child’s first steps, not ever. Or perhaps he had and hadn’t known. He had seen plenty of small children, shaky waddlers flopping into their mothers’ arms. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. Perhaps, if he had understood what was happening around him, he would have realised on some of those occasions that he was witnessing a mundane sort of miracle. Perhaps if he had realised it, he might actually have won a single, genuine heart or mind, made a connection which meant more than occupation and cigarettes.
‘Your son is walking! Is that the first time?’
‘Yes! It is! Well done, Iskender! Well done!’
‘Here, we’ve got some coffee in the jeep, have a cup with me.’ Because, in some parts of the Caucasus and even elsewhere, to drink a toast in beer was an eternal curse. Coffee, however much he loathed it, was universal.
And thus I make the world safe for democracy! But perhaps children’s steps were private things, not to be shared with a lumbering British sergeant.
Just as this scene beyond the window was private. He turned to go, and as he did so he saw White Raoul the scrivener, one leg twisted without his cane, claw his way forward. Therapy, surely, of the most human sort. Teach the muscles, lift the spirit. The Sergeant could hear the patient’s joints protest, hear them click and grind. Each step was pain. And yet White Raoul weathered it, welcomed it even, because she was at the far end. Her arms were out to him and her face was a cry of approbation. Brave soldier! Raoul grunted, and the Sergeant could see her weight shift as she prepared to bridge the gap between them, but she held back, held back, and he recovered his balance and his composure. More pain. A mangled hip, the Sergeant thought, and likely a prosthetic kneecap on the other leg: an old, cheap one. A Swiss surgeon had famously used a calf’s kneecap years ago, but he had been a genius and this was not his work. This was patch and repair and don’t worry about it too much because to be honest this man will probably die. Car crash. Gunfire. Falling log. Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.
Raoul passed the little table and the chairs, and his grin was victory. His doctor – no, more: his reward – lunged at him, and for a moment the Sergeant thought she would knock him down, but together they made a single, upright pillar in the little house. She pressed her mouth on his urgently, and then her dress was gone and beneath it she was quite nude. She stripped away his smock and the shapeless trousers, and then his strange, rainbow arms were around her back, corded muscle locked against tanned skin. The scrivener’s body was a tapestry, tattoos weaving in and out of bands of mottled skin, over old, hard muscles and elegant ribs, and what could only be shrapnel scarring in a spray along one flank. Life must be a constant barrage of greater and lesser pain. But here, now, it all made sense, as if he was a machine made of broken parts which functioned perfectly only in this one action, only for her. They made love standing up, and White Raoul grew less unsteady and more fluid with each moment, and her breath gasped out into the night.
Abruptly, the Sergeant realised that he was spying.
He turned, and picked his way through the shadowed streets into a breeze which was unusually cold.
The car was exactly where it should be, and the boy was gone.
The Sergeant arrived at Brighton House ten minutes later, and closed the door on Mancreu with some finality. In the morning he would love the place again, he knew, but for tonight he had had enough. Enough tomatoes, enough stolen fish, enough local characters and their little ways. Enough tigers, enough trying to do the right thing. He was tired and he was not dead and that was good.
He stripped off the suit and bundled it into a bag. When he awoke he would destroy it, return as many pieces as he could to the armoury, and move on. He reckoned he had a better than even chance of having escaped identification and tracking tonight. If he had, all he needed to do was sit tight and stay clean and let the inevitable blurring of events and the imminent destruction of Mancreu wash the problem away. Dig in and let the shitstorm fly by. He laughed, feeling the euphoria of survival.
Fuck you, he told the world. Not dead, again.
He showered, peering down at himself and seeing the body he recognised, old scars and new bruises. He had some light scalding, some scratches, and in the mirror he could see a bold blue square where the armour had taken bullets. Green mosaic tiling gave his body a slightly fishy sheen.
He walked naked into the galley and drank water straight from the tap, then when his thirst faded he poured a couple of fingers of Scotch and sipped at it slowly, letting himself feel the burn. He did not dilute it. He wanted the fire in it, the bite.
Sensing
movement, he peered at his groin, half-amused, half-frustrated. Signs of post-combat arousal: all dressed up and no place to go. He patted his penis in a friendly way. It bounced. After three decades of sharing his life with its weird, unpredictable reactions, he tended to view it as a benign alien presence and treated it accordingly. He had never given it a name, because he privately thought only idiots did that, but it was idle to pretend that he and the organ were always of one mind. He, for example, found nothing erotic in being shot at, but it inevitably produced this reaction. Seeing the Witch naked and having sex would seem much more so, but had elicited none at all. That was imponderable, but curiously appropriate. He wished her well with Raoul, truly. He felt his desire relinquish her, felt his mind remove her to that separate, respected place reserved for things he cherished and wanted to protect, but did not touch.
Not dead, again.
11. Complications
THE SERGEANT SHOWERED and went into the comms office, found that Kershaw had indeed called, several times. He thought for a while, then lifted the phone and called back.
‘What’s the news, Jed?’ he asked, when the operator connected him. ‘I’ve been hearing helicopters all night.’
‘Your typical batshit insane Mancreu,’ Kershaw snapped. ‘While you were fucking three Bolivian pole-dancers in a hayloft, some jackass hillman went postal on a patrol. Roughed them up pretty good. You okay?’
‘Aside from being roused from my beauty sleep. Big chap, was he, this jackass?’
‘Oh, ha ha.’
‘I was only going to observe, between Bolivians as it were, that we in the British Army give our fellows guns and train them in this thing called combat, and we tend to think of one bloke attacking a full patrol of – what, eight? – as a bit of an error on his part. We tend to expect the patrol to cut such a fucking idiot into thin strips and bring him home to us for close inspection of the parts.’
‘They were a man short.’
‘Oh, well, if it was only seven to one, that explains it.’
‘Yeah, I guess it was a lot like the War of Independence, huh?’
‘Yes, I’ll tell the Queen, she loves your little japes. Here, hang on.’ He yawned loudly. ‘Did you say he roughed them up? As in, with his hands?’
‘Hands and feet. One of them has a heelmark on his ribs.’
I’ll be sure and burn the boots first. The Sergeant let a little more disdain creep into his voice. ‘He was unarmed? Against professional soldiers?’
‘I know, I know.’
‘No, you don’t, Jed. This is one of those moments where you sort of need to be a soldier. It can’t be done.’
‘You did it,’ Kershaw objected.
The Sergeant’s heart nearly fell out of his mouth. He means Shola! Shola’s café. Not tonight! Talk!
‘That was entirely different. Five amateurs, and I got bloody lucky with the custard. Even so, I ought to be dead. It was a bloody stupid thing I did, Jed, and I honestly don’t know why except there was a child present and I thought he was next. This isn’t that. You’re talking about a fully armed, trained patrol. They’re pulling your pisser. One bloke? Nine foot tall with green skin, was he? Warned them not to make him angry?’
Kershaw paused. ‘Yeah, something like that.’
Too close to the truth. Careful. The Sergeant filled the silence with a more plausible slander. ‘Probably got into a fight with one another and it turned nasty.’
‘Lester . . . I’m a little bit freaking out here. I have a guy in the hospital they’re telling me was force-fed a railroad spike.’
‘Fuck.’ Because it was the only thing to say.
‘Yeah.’ Kershaw sighed. ‘This island . . . What the hell do you want, anyway?’
‘You called me. I assume you needed my superior military knowledge.’
‘I’m up to my neck in superior military knowledge over here, asshat. Pardon me if I was a little bit worried about the old British washout who lives on his own. Why the fuck didn’t you answer your phone?’
‘Went out to buy dinner. Had a glass of beer. Just woke up.’
‘You were asleep? Asleep but hearing helicopters?’
‘It was a very large glass.’
He let Kershaw bitch at him a little more, fostering the notion of chummy, earthy Lester Ferris, a bit vague and a bit hapless, serving out his time. After a few more exchanges Kershaw transparently wanted to get rid of him, reassured and aggravated in just the right measure, and the Sergeant hung on just long enough to appear a bit needy. Then he went to his bedroom and lay down. His bones hurt. His muscles ached. He realised his ears were ringing. On the other hand: full of win. From SNAFU to Mission Accomplished by dint of having balls of steel. Very nice.
So score one for the world, he told himself. Score one for kitchens and cats and woolly hats and village green cricket and score bugger all and piss off for men in offices and men in caves making war on one another by selling smack to kids in Liverpool or New York, for the sake of things none of the rest of us give a shit about.
At some point, he slept, and was grateful.
The Sergeant woke late and realised he was stuck to the Consul’s linen. His left forearm was bleeding all along to the elbow, sluggish, grazed, and painful. The sheet was solidly glued to his shoulders where he had been burned above the armour, and he had bruises everywhere. His throat was sore as hell.
‘You are an idiot,’ the Witch said unsympathetically.
She stood at the foot of his bed, a leather bag hanging on a strap across her chest. It pressed her shirt against the centreline of her body, emphasising her curves. He realised that the last time he had seen her she had been naked and gasping, and belatedly averted his eyes.
She leaned away from the bag, hauled it onto the foot of the bed, and rummaged. ‘Don’t move. You’re a mess.’
‘As well as an idiot.’
She shrugged. ‘I said, don’t move. If you pull that off it will hurt more. For longer. Tcha!’ This last in disgust, because he had turned to examine his shoulders and the movement had wrenched a wad of fabric away from his flesh. He grunted.
She stomped up the side of the bed and put her hand flat on his chest below his chin. When he did not lean back she pushed him, not with her arm but with her body’s weight, so that if he wanted to remain half-upright he must effectively carry her. His stomach muscles gave up the fight immediately, strain spiking from his pelvis to his ribs.
She nodded approval. ‘No hernia.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘You’re not screaming.’
She removed a pair of scissors from the bag. The Consul’s linen would suffer, but there was an entire room devoted to it upstairs and none of it would last much longer anyway. She began to cut.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Your little friend came and got me. Said you’d come on a grassfire and tried to put it out. Did it not occur to you to call for assistance? I see you also fell on . . .’ she peered at his back, ‘. . . a dressed-stone wall. From a height of not less than five feet. Congratulations on not being paralysed. No, please do not tell me why it was important that you take on the inferno by yourself. If you tell me I am reasonably certain I will find that “idiot” does not do you justice. Do not answer me unless I say so. It is unwise to annoy or surprise the person who is cutting around the place where your skin is glued to your sheet.’
The scissor blades snipped. He kept silent, listening to the boy’s lies in his mind, turning them over. They were good.
‘Can you feel that?’ the Witch demanded. ‘You can answer.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it painful?’
‘Itchy.’
‘And here?’
He hissed discomfort.
‘You’re very lucky.’ She daubed. A welcome cold spread along his scapula and down his spine.
After an hour of more or less painful ministrations she pronounced him shipshape, at least to the extent that was possible f
or an idiot. He thanked her and asked how the clarinet was going and she said it was going well. He went upstairs and brought her the sheet music, a little shyly. She took it with thanks, but regarded him with an uncertain expression. She was sensing a shift in his perception of her, could not entirely place it but knew it was a respectful one and did not inquire as to the reason. Perhaps she assumed someone had informed him of her relations with White Raoul.
‘Light exercise is fine,’ she said. ‘More than that and you’ll split something and bleed. The burns are extremely minor but they will be annoying. Don’t pick at them. Don’t get them dirty. Don’t sunbathe. I’ve left you a salve for the bruising, which you should apply morning and evening. You’re nodding! Don’t nod: listen! I cannot count, even on both hands, the number of injuries you have which could’ve been much worse, so don’t do whatever you did last night ever again or you’ll probably die. That’s a medical recommendation, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re an idiot. Tell me there was at least a puppy in a tree.’
‘Just grass. My fault. Having my annual fag. Cigarette. Dropped it in the wrong place.’
He offered her tea, but she had business elsewhere, so he sat on the low red-brick wall and watched her depart. She had a workmanlike stride which spoke of important things to do. He still found her admirable, but his lust had evaporated. He liked her, and he respected the scrivener – insofar as he knew him at all – and he would not for worlds interfere with what they had, which was something he had heard about but never tasted and which he felt the world ought to respect more than it did. The world respected nothing, and in most cases that was fine because not much was worth respect the way some people believed. But love of the sort that uplifted he regarded with something close to religious fervour. The love of family. The love which builds.