They glared at one another, and then for a wonder she nodded, and stalked out.
‘Be there at two forty-five,’ the man said. ‘So we can do your hair. Don’t extemporise.’
The Sergeant realised he was a hero.
He shook hands with the Prime Minister. The man had no calluses, and his eyes were perfectly empty.
The Sergeant went back to his father’s house and sat in the ghastly chair. He read comic books and laughed when they were funny. Every so often he turned around, looking for someone at his side who would enjoy the joke. Then he would remember and, in a fury, screw up the comic and rip it apart, only to find himself again a few moments later on his knees, tears all over the floor and tape in his hands as he pieced it back together. He had a stack of them like that. He refused to throw any of them away.
He tried to get work. It turned out to be very hard. The jobs which would otherwise have been offered to a retired soldier-diplomat were closed to him. A proven track record of insane idealism was evidently not a positive for employment by large financial institutions. He wondered whether Africa had put the word out, but he didn’t think she’d have had to. The Brevet-Consul would have been a safe pair of hands, a man experienced in not rocking the boat. There were a lot of positions in the world for someone who kept his mouth shut and filled a comfy chair. Far fewer for someone who actually did what the job suggested he should.
A local school briefly took him on as an assistant teacher, but after the first day the press arrived in vast numbers. DANGEROUS! Tigerman Sergeant Entrusted With Vulnerable Teens! The headmistress asked him to come to her study and he expected her to let him go. Instead she told him stoutly that she had spoken to the parents and the board and they wished to convey their absolute support. The school would keep him if this was what he wanted – the press would get bored after a few weeks. She was bristling with rage and ready for the fight, and he understood that here, finally, he’d found a decent officer. But he’d already realised he couldn’t stay. Every admiring face in the throng of students became in the action of blinking the face of the boy; the whole playground was a mute accusation he could not answer. So he shook her hand and told her the truth, and she embraced him. He left with a promise that he could return whenever he wanted to.
He was too shy for television.
In the end he settled to a sort of ugly mirror of his first days in Mancreu. He rose early, ran, and worked in the garden. He grew tomatoes, but they were weak and sallow and they died. The sun wasn’t bright enough for the exotic plants he wanted to try. His morning route took him through grey streets he vaguely remembered, and they seemed more modern but not more hopeful than they had thirty years ago. The same estates were sinks. The same factories were closed, the same shops had smashed windows. He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the faces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil. When he allowed himself to see it with his sergeant’s eyes, the city seemed bent in upon itself like an addict. He looked for the enemy in the sky, in the wind, and saw just endless weight.
He realised that he could live like this until he died, outside the world. He had not reached the end of himself, he just didn’t know what else to do. So he ran, and read comics, and wept, and that was all.
On the first day of December, the postman arrived with a letter addressed in a very correct script. He opened it immediately, as he always did: he had acquired a hatred of delay. It contained a short card and an airline ticket, representing a significant expenditure, in the name of Lester Ferris.
Lester –
It’s time.
– Kaiko
He sat for a while, cradling the paper in his hand. Finally, the inner sergeant took him upstairs, and ordered him to pack.
Acknowledgments
Driving in an implausibly enormous Toyota Hilux out of Chiang Mai, my nephews Chris and Dan and I were talking nonsense to one another. I have no idea what we were saying, but between one breath and the next this book was born. Thanks, guys.
Clare is always my first reader and my first editor. She denies having a particular talent in this direction. She is wrong about that, though about remarkably little else.
Clemency and Tom are just magic.
Patrick is wise, and into his orbit at Conville & Walsh are drawn other wise people, which is how the world ought to work.
Jason Arthur and Edward Kastenmeier continue to rein in my worser impulses – like using “worser” in a modern novel – and are calm and accepting when I stick to my idiosyncracies. Like Patrick, they have superb people around them.
A small team of test readers got early sight of this book, and they performed wonderfully: they said they liked it, and then very gently they pointed out where it was broken. You know who you are. Thank you.
And to everyone who patiently waited while I ran around looking for a pen or dictated a note to my iPhone during a meeting or stared abstractedly into space and then shouted “tomatoes”. . . This is what it was all about.
Cheers,
Nick Harkaway
London, January 2014
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185559
Version 1.0
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Published by William Heinemann 2014
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Copyright © Nick Harkaway 2014
Nick Harkaway has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434022878
Nick Harkaway, Tigerman
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