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.
By the time he had finished the bread, the rain was worse, battering on the corrugated-iron roof; rain in the tropical style, by the gallon, with the force of a fist. It was loud, but not unpleasant because Shola had padded the interior of the roof with bags of sheep’s wool. The noise was muffled rather than entirely blocked, but the wool meant sitting in the place during a storm was like listening to a tr
oop of mounted horse on the road rather than being inside a giant metal drum. More customers were coming in, cursing and laughing, water streaming from their faces and sloshing from their shoes.
The Sergeant smiled an occasional greeting when someone made eye contact with him, drank his tea, and listened. Like the boy, he had a mobile telephone, a bulky, simple thing with large buttons and a big battery which went on for days. It was next to his tea. At some point – he wasn’t sure when, the action was automatic – he had inserted the battery and switched the device on. He had to do this because except in emergencies he did not travel in-country with a live phone. It was a residual proscription, pointless here, where anyone who was looking for him could just come to the house, but it went against the grain to reveal his location while he was on the move. He restricted the phone’s sign-ins to those places he was known to go and otherwise kept it inert, so that an enemy seeking him in transit must identify him by sight and in person, and risk a comparable exposure.
He took another sip of tea and idly, with his left hand, traced the outline of a deep gouge in the tabletop. It had probably been made with the sight of a handgun. An idiotic thing to do, a lousy use for a gun and bad practice for a soldier, but of course any number of people who had sat in this place with handguns had probably not been soldiers, and many of them – soldiers or not – had undoubtedly been idiots. You couldn’t look at Mancreu and imagine that the island hadn’t seen more than its fair share.
The rain stopped, and a few minutes later the Sergeant came to the end of his tea and of his introspection, and at the same time the boy apparently concluded that he had read and reread his comic book as much as he wanted to. The Sergeant reached for his phone to remove the battery, and was aware of an immediate sharpening of interest and a searchlight intensity in the air.
He kept his hands very much on the table, and softened his shoulders. He didn’t want anyone to make any mistakes about how relaxed he was, how calm, and how he did not intend to reach for his side arm. He wondered who had come in, and how they had done it without making any noise, without the light from the door falling across him. Perhaps they had come from inside the bar, from the private rooms.
He looked up and found the boy watching him, eyes shadowed, body almost entirely wrapped in the dark of his corner table. The bodyguard’s table, the Sergeant called it in his mind, a table he would not have chosen to sit at because he didn’t want to be known as a man who kept his eye on the door. It was enough that he was a soldier. He didn’t want the people of Beauville to think of him reckoning each drinker, making sure he could kill them if he had to. Though of course some part of him did all those things, in the back of his mind, registered newcomers and regulars, weighed them and categorised them, so that if it ever came to it – whatever ‘it’ was – he would know whether to stand or flee, how many could he take down, what would it cost him, and how bad would it get.
Very bad, was the answer, always. One way or another: very bad.
The Sergeant kept his eyes on the boy – not aggressive, just interested – and the boy looked back at him in exactly the same way, reassessing, cataloguing, considering. Why? Where did this stark, sudden appraisal come from? The boy was part of the landscape, a customer. The Sergeant had a vague notion he had glimpsed him before: getting out of a coracle on the waterfront; running errands and bringing messages; sitting and reading. Why was he allowing himself to be visible, exposing himself by this close, intrusive scrutiny? The Sergeant had pegged him as smart and jittery and possibly traumatised. So. What now?
The boy’s body was very still, a mirror of his own demonstrative calm, and the Sergeant, changing the focus of his attention without changing the position of his eyes, followed the line of one scrawny shoulder down to the hands. Then after a moment he snorted approvingly. He relaxed, and felt as much as saw the boy doing the same. For all their physical differences, in this moment they were identical: backs straight, heads slightly forward as they prepared to push themselves to their feet. And each of them was holding his phone’s battery in preparation for putting it away, in a separate pocket. A twin paranoia. A wise man does not catalogue his road home.
The boy nodded to him. The Sergeant nodded back.
‘You are smart,’ the boy said.
‘You too.’
The boy nodded.
‘You like comics?’ the Sergeant asked, then heard the echo of the question and saw his own child self shaking his head at the stupidest thing ever said by man.
But the boy was gracious, respecting the gambit for what it was. ‘Yes.’
‘Which ones?’
‘All. Some DC, for Batman. Grant Morrison! But mostly Marvel. Warren Ellis. Also Spurrier, and Gail Simone. Bendis is full of win.’
The Sergeant grinned. He had never heard this expression before, but he approved of it. Full of win. It had a digital flavour, merry and modern. More things should be full of win.
‘I like Green Lantern,’ he said.
‘Which one?’ the boy demanded.
Oh, sod it. Now he remembered: there were so many Lanterns to choose from, and always changing, and the wrong one was like the wrong football team, the wrong church . . . ‘Hal Jordan,’ he said, dredging up the name.
‘That is totally Old School,’ the boy approved. ‘Jordan is bad ass.’ He separated the words: bad ass. The Sergeant suspected he had learned them by reading. He wondered which comics allowed that sort of language, and realised: probably all of them, these days.
‘You like Captain America, too?’ the boy asked.
The Sergeant hesitated. ‘Not so much,’ he admitted. Bright colours and battlefields didn’t mix for him. Steve Rogers was an invincible man, an overman who wore what he damn well liked, and survived. It was the men around him who didn’t make it. No. The Sergeant did not like Captain America. Perhaps he had once, when he was younger.
The boy nodded as if this was to be expected. ‘Batman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Batman is best. Bob Kane was a god. Also Bill Finger.’ The Sergeant had only the dimmest idea who these people were.
The boy seemed to realise that the conversation had become too technical, because he proffered the comic he had been reading. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Christian Walker is full of win.’
The Sergeant took it, then hesitated. ‘How will I get it back to you?’
‘I’m around,’ the boy said vaguely. ‘But there is n.p. – I do not collect them.’ The boy stopped, grinned. ‘That is not true! I do collect them. But to read, not like a crazy shut-in dude!’
‘I’ll get it back to you,’ the Sergeant promised.
‘Kswah swah,’ the boy replied with a shrug. What happens, happens. Very Mancreu. On the Arabian mainland they said insh’Allah – if God wills it. If God willed it, you might arrive punctually for your appointments, but generally He willed that you show up more or less on the same day. Time and matter were flexible; only God was real. On Mancreu, even God had somehow faded away. The universe was what it was, mutable and strange, and God had made it in His image, so He too was probably imponderable. The nature of His will varied from soul to soul, and what actually happened often wasn’t what anyone understood by it. Perhaps God, being everywhere and seeing all things from outside time, was incapable of willing anything which men could grasp as a plan.
So insh’Allah seemed to suppose too much. On Mancreu, you just said: what happens, happens. It was practically the national anthem.
When the Sergeant asked what to call him, the boy had glanced away and said ‘Robin.’ The Sergeant accepted the lie politely, but never adopted it, and as their acquaintanceship grew he avoided sentences that required him to use a name at all. In his mind, his friend was a unique identity, a presence which had no need of a borrowed label to encapsulate it.
Today, with the image of the pelican and the pigeon still causing occasional head-shaking, they left the Land Rover across the road from the café and bowed each other mirthfully across the thres
hold. It was not unknown for them to spend twenty minutes doing this, each insisting that the other go first, making more and more outrageous speeches of diplomatic deference. Today, though, they merely tussled, the boy shouting ‘Put up your dukes!’ and jabbing inexpertly at the Sergeant’s stomach until the man acknowledged himself subdued into accepting the honour and entering ahead of his friend. He paused two steps inside to allow his eyes to adjust.
Physically, the café was a single rectangular room, but it had the appearance of an L-shape because one corner was taken up by a rather grand wooden staircase that Shola had salvaged from a defunct hotel. The bar was topped with a sheet of folded copper, very worn and very much polished, and the tables were a hodgepodge of round and square. The rickety chairs were moved from one place to another by customers as they came and went, so that only when the café was absolutely full did anyone have to sit on the perilous yellow typist’s stool which Shola kept folded by the bar. Along the walls of the room were benches made from driftwood, silvered and polished smooth by years of slithering backsides.
In the crook of the staircase, with a patrician view of the door and the bar, there was the shtammteh, the table which was by common understanding Shola’s own. It was never reserved. It was simply not somewhere you sat unless you were invited. Even the boy and the Sergeant, upon arrival, made a show of dithering and finding a suitable place, and then Shola came and chided them and moved them to the shtammteh to take their tea with him.