The new delivery must just have arrived, because Shola served them a rich gunpowder tea which they had never had before, demanding to know what they thought of it. The Sergeant held a long swallow in his mouth, the perfect temperature baking his gums but not burning them, warming his throat and making his whole body feel cooler. He tasted pepper and smoke and the smell of snow. This was not tea. It was something else, a kind of elixir. It was what tea aspired to be.
‘It’s good,’ he said, and saw Shola’s mouth twitch in a smile.
The boy rolled his eyes. ‘He means totally awesome. This tea is made from hunnertenpercent secret inside-the-door-teaching tea fu! It is the daddy of tea. This tea is the tea of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine. Every morning: this tea, then lightsaber practice. Strong in the Force!’ He made a lightsaber noise. Vvmwomm, Vvmwomm, TCHA FWSH!
Shola obligingly refilled his cup. ‘I should order more?’
Such an order was a statement of commitment to remain for another month. The boy nodded gravely. ‘I will come and drink it.’
Leaving – Leaving with a capital ‘L’ as opposed to merely going out of a shop or a house – had become a ritual. You couldn’t call it a tradition, because it wasn’t, would never be, old enough. It was a sort of shared insanity, like cutting your own flesh to see if it hurt. If you were Leaving, going away from Mancreu and not coming back – and tacitly everyone was Leaving, of course, no one had suggested the population should stay and die when the hammer fell, but still, Leaving before your neighbours was a form of defeat or desertion – then you threw a party. Above all, you had a bonfire, and you burned what you couldn’t take with you and couldn’t give away. Not just what no one wanted, but the things you couldn’t let go of, things you’d rather destroy with your own hand than see shattered by the impossible, cleansing heat that would burn Mancreu down to the rock, to the waterline and the granite on which the island stood, and past even that, down and down into the mantle of the Earth to scour the place of a generation of stupid human abuse.
In the beginning, Leavers had printed posters, spent money on them, tried to sell themselves on a festive atmosphere somewhere between a wake and a christening. This chapter is over, this world is over, but there is a new one! But the falseness of it, of forced departure claimed as opportunity, showed through like a broken bone. Now they wrote in white chalk on the black telegraph poles which connected Mancreu’s trembling phone network to the exchange: a wide, shamed L and then a time and a place, always after dark, always outside town. The Leavers came first, and the next to arrive were always other Leavers or those who knew they would be, very soon, and then the celebrants, the ones who had outlasted another crop of the weak. People wept and marriages shattered, truths were uttered which should have been kept deep inside. Family heirlooms, beautiful pieces of wooden furniture, jewellery, even pets and livestock burned. This wasn’t a clean break. It was sati by proxy, and that only because no one had yet been desperate enough, wild enough, sick enough in the heart to step into the flames. But the Sergeant had privately told Jed Kershaw that it was only a matter of time.
He had begun going along to all of them that he could, a sort of inverted ghost at the feast: the man from a cold, wet island which wasn’t going to burn. He stood outside the circle of the bonfire light and watched as first-edition books and prized saucepans joined photo albums and cradles on the pyre, put a stop to fights before they became feuds or murders. After the first few Leavings, the tone had shifted to something bacchanalian, and then fatigue had set in and replaced that with a sort of silent goodbye which was almost wholesome. Recently the mood was becoming one of breathless transgression: who could destroy the most valuable thing? Who could show their self-despite most graphically as they betrayed the only home they had ever known?
But his presence seemed to act as a sort of dampener, as if the uniform called everyone to remember that most British of virtues: the stiff upper lip. Or perhaps it was like being a Health & Safety inspector, and no one could really get crazy knowing he was around. He nodded sadly to grandmothers burning their feather mattresses and fishermen burning their coracles, to crab hunters immolating their traps and postmen burning their bicycles. He shook hands with the Leavers and sometimes that meant everyone else could suddenly stand to look at them and even talk to them after all. He was an undertaker, a cypher.
An army chaplain had once told him that she had spent years trying to find the right form of words for the bereaved, only to realise that the clichés were the best. Widows and orphans didn’t want to be comforted. They wanted to be recognised.
‘You say “it was very quick, he didn’t suffer,”’ the chaplain had told him. ‘You say “I’m sorry for your loss.” If you’re in a hospital and there’s one of those silences which needs breaking you say “I understand, at the end, he felt no pain” and then you fuck off and let them get on with it. If you want to get punched in the eye you say “he’s in a better place.”’
So the bonfires proceeded in something approximating an orderly fashion, which was almost worse than if they hadn’t, and the Sergeant had become a sort of necessary thing: you couldn’t have a real Leaving without him. The Last Consul had to be there to set the official seal on it, though it was clear to no one whether the seal meant excommunication or absolution.
Staying had not been dignified with a capital letter. No one was Staying. Staying meant dying when the island died, and then there’d be nothing left to die for.
In this exchange regarding the buying and the drinking of tea, though, Shola and the boy had just agreed that they would not Leave for another month. In general, neither showed any inclination to Leave at all; Shola at least acknowledged that one day he must, though that day was forever retreating towards the horizon, but the boy did not. He lived in a perpetual now, and his vigorous objection to the island’s future cleansing was twinned with a stalwart denial that it would ever come to pass. The Sergeant suspected that would have to be dealt with soon. He had an image of the boy, when the day came, chaining himself to the pilings of the Beauville jetty, and NatProMan soldiers cutting him free with saws. Better to find a soft exit strategy.
Shola seemed to be thinking along similar lines. He glanced at the Sergeant and for a moment the fatigue in him was palpable. This time, the Sergeant understood, he had had to think seriously about going. He couldn’t be making money. Couldn’t really be breaking even. The more people left, the more farms and fishing boats weren’t making food, the more expensive everything was and the fewer customers he had. And when Shola went, something would happen. Beauville would shift in some indefinable way from being a place which could recover to a place which was dying – not because of him alone, but because dozens of other Sholas, good-hearted men and women who had done their best and made it bearable for everyone else, would also go. Because it was finally time.
‘What’s it called?’ the Sergeant asked, pointing at the pot.
‘The label says “Heaven’s Limitless Canon”,’ Shola replied. ‘I think they mean “cannon”, like a gun, but who knows? You reckon it’s worth drinking?’
‘It is.’
They had another round and the conversation shifted gratefully to the merits of taking various biscuits with this tea of teas. Beneseffe the Portmaster was called to adjudicate between the ginger nut and the plain digestive, a matter which required the gravest of scrutiny, although Beneseffe, more usually a traditionalist in such matters, unexpectedly held out for the chocolate Hobnob.
It was heartening for the Sergeant to find other people talking like this with the boy, as if he were seeing their friendship in a warm, homely mirror. He felt a species of pride, too, on hearing his young friend give as good as he got in the fierce biscuit debate, concocting ever more outrageous arguments in favour of his case. Then he wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn’t. But they had silence, and not many people had that.
The taking of tea concluded and the boy havi
ng departed on night-time business of his own, the Sergeant returned to Brighton House alone.
Three years ago the residence had been a blinding lighthouse white, trimmed with yellow at the corners and along the gutters. Then the first of the Discharge Clouds had washed over Brighton House, and everything died except the tomatoes. On the mountainsides, the red rain had just burned the leaves and run rapidly away towards the sea. The slow-growing hardwoods had survived, albeit bent and scarred, and the underbrush had returned twice as thick. But here, on the flat croquet lawns and manicured terraces, in the planters and window boxes, the concentrated goop sat in great swirling lakes and wrought havoc. The dry season’s dust had stuck to the paint and left the building veined and tinted like a giant cheese. The gardeners had packed up and gone with the diplomats, taking their ladders and their shears and their green aprons from Keen & Ryle of Chichester. The veinous Gorgonzola manse was fossilised, standing alone behind the bare earth that had been the rose gardens. The grounds were left to what might come. The sturdy Tumblers and Black Princes and Purple Russians, the Nebraska Weddings, the Soldakis and the Cherokees, the Brandywines and Radiator Charlies – a whole General Assembly of edible nightshades – saw their evolutionary moment and took over. By the time the Sergeant was handed the keys and told he should make himself entirely at home, because there was no prospect of anyone ever returning to Brighton House, the seaward side of the building was swaddled in vast, overripe tomatoes vying for sunlight and moisture. They rustled when the wind blew, and squeaked as taut, glistening skin rubbed against hirsute stems and flopping, musty leaves. When it rained, it sounded like men on the march, and when the sun came out you could hear them growing, whimpering and shuddering upwards, expanding, bursting, and starting again.
He parked the Land Rover at the back as he always did, and went in by the staff entrance. The rear hall was dark, and rather than turning on the lights he chose to walk along it in the gloom. After a moment, his right hand trailed along the wall and caught the door of the little bedroom he had assigned to himself. It was just behind the staff kitchen, so he didn’t have to bother with the central heating. He just kept the old Rayburn stove alight and used it for water, cooking and warmth. It gave him a pleasant sense of familiarity, a translucent memory of hundreds of evenings spent here and thousands more in his mother’s kitchen long ago – when, like the boy, he had been a reader of comic books. Although back then comics were printed in two or three colours on grainy paper, and superheroes fought bank robbers rather than aliens.
Where the boy lived, and with whom, was one of the intimacies to which the Sergeant was not privy, and the boy became politely deaf when quizzed. It was agreed between them that such issues were not necessarily any of the Sergeant’s business, and he did not press. All the same, in the back of his mind there was a need to know. It was something he had absorbed in Afghanistan: on deployment you are always in combat. Even when no one is attacking you, the battle goes on. Things happen behind the horizon and beneath your feet; the whole landscape is your enemy and the people can change their minds about anything minute to minute. In the high valleys they don’t believe in September 11th, not because they don’t credit human wickedness but because they don’t honestly believe in skyscrapers. Half of them think the soldiers they’re fighting now are just Soviets who never left, and a few of those believe the Russians are just a cat’s paw for the Brits – those who aren’t waiting for the Queen to come in fullest glory and give them whatever their grandfathers’ grandfathers were promised by Victoria, and as far as they’re concerned you could walk to Buckingham Palace in a couple of weeks and HRH would happily roast you a goat for dinner. It’s not ignorance and it’s not stupidity, it’s another planet and you live there as much as they live here. Spend a while on that planet, and you get so that you don’t like gaps in your knowledge, even if trying to fill them in is rude.
He sighed, and peered at his face in the mirror: a young face, really, if slightly foxed. And yet, at the same time, the face of a too-old man. He had slipped from one generation to another without feeling the change, and this was abruptly the face of a father, not a son. A childless father, to be sure, but all the same he was exhausted and the fatigue never quite seemed to go away however much he slept. He wondered if this was what it was like at forty, if you just never quite felt yourself again, slowed down and down and down.
He rolled into bed and closed his eyes, hoping that tonight would be a peaceful one, and knowing he would dream of something, because you always did.
Unless, he growled into the pillow an hour later, you didn’t sleep at all. Then you didn’t dream, you just got heavier and more uncomfortable, and finally you got up again. He was too tired to read, too bored to stay awake, and yet here he was. Excessive tea-drinking, most likely, or maybe just Mancreu. There was a wind they said made you wakeful – it had a name he could never remember. Mancreu had dozens of winds, each with a different supposed effect. Wind to turn the milk and wind to drive the fish away, wind to sigh in the trees and wind to provoke infidelity. There were spirits which went with them. He wondered what these old ghosts thought about the state of things now. Probably, they took a dim view.
He got out of bed and put on his dressing gown. It was a light brown fleece, ordered online with a pair of Haflinger slippers. The slippers were more comfortable, coarse yet cosy wool. Haflinger should make dressing gowns. This one was too warm and overly clinging, like too much ketchup on your chips.
He got a torch from his bedside and wandered the hallways, looking for something, not knowing what it was. A place to sit. Almost, he went to the cypher room to read the incoming messages, but caught himself. He’d lose his grip on sleep entirely sitting in front of that glowing screen, watching the British establishment’s own news ticker sharing celebrations and horrors from all across the globe. Instead he wandered into the glass conservatory on the ocean side and peered out at the night. It was cold, but that suited him. He sat down and stared out over the garden to the water and the curve of the waves.
Around about the time White Raoul the scrivener was born, Mancreu entered the modern age. A Franco-Dutch chemical company built a plant in the rough, dry backlands on the unsheltered south side. The people thought it a good deal: useless, grim country exchanged for enough hard cash to build a cinema, dredge the harbour every ten years, and lift the weight of living in an isolated, hopeless Eden. The chemical men found caverns of fresh water deep down, filtered by rock from the ocean, and that was even better: they pumped it out to quench the thirst of the workers, and up to the north Beauville grew and prospered and became a proper waystation for shipping in the Arabian Sea. When the time came to worry about waste, the solution was obvious: into the empty spaces the clear water left behind they pressed the by-products of their industrial toil, until one day in early 2004 the ground shook and the tectonics changed, and magma rose under the caverns.
In retrospect: a hoarding from White Raoul’s spidery hands would have been the very thing. The devil was at play. The brimstone oven deep beneath Mancreu cooked and boiled, and in its fiery heart new, strange compounds were birthed and recombined. Dismal substances unknown and unimagined steamed in the deep, and seeped and stained through cracks towards the surface, ever upward into a huge chasm. There they made a balloon of weirdest muck, the fine membrane of earth stretched tighter and tighter until a farmer, ploughing, penetrated the upper crust and was fired some thousands of feet into the air and fully two miles sideways, falling like a burning angel in the middle of the Beauville shanty. Behind him came a warm mist which itched, but nothing more.
That first Discharge Cloud stripped half the island of its pines and shrubs, and rippled the white stones of Beauville like waxworks too close to a flame.
Seven months later came the second Cloud: harmless to humans, but death to rodents, and the Beauville high valleys were filled with the stench of dead marmots. Seagulls and spiders grew fat on the corpses.
The third Cloud caus
ed fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and licence across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language – Broca’s Area, he said – was missing. A grown woman, caught on the mountainside in the first exhalation of the Cloud, was thought to have lost all function in that region as well, but he could not find her to verify it. It was sad and frightening, he said, if true. All the same, his parent company was greatly interested by the Cloud as a treatment for sexual dysfunction, and filed patents.
The geologists said that the cauldron beneath Mancreu was still boiling, and showed no signs of emptying. The strange murk within was protean, they said. No telling what it would do next. Best to seal it up, if possible – but they had no suggestions as to how this might be achieved. One bold fellow also calculated that the amount of chemical released already exceeded what had been pumped in. He plumbed the depths with an improvised dipstick seven hundred yards long, and said he thought the solution was probably organic, even biological.
And so it proved. A team of Japanese xenobiologists – more used to guessing about the nature of life on other planets and studying strange fissures on the ocean floor – ascertained that the whole process had created a colony of bugs in the deep strata. These protozoa were transforming plain minerals into fuel for the ongoing chemical reaction, and other varieties of microbe then converted waste and water into food for the first. A perfect example of the magnificent adaptability of life, the scientists said. They were extremely impressed, almost to the point of being joyful. A worthy foe. Learned papers were written, but answers – solutions – came there none.
Indeed, the team was still here, a colony of perky boffins who lived apart in a village of seismographs and mobile centrifuges housed in a village of old-style Quonset huts and modern geodesic domes. Of all of them, the Sergeant only really knew the project chief, Kaiko Inoue, who came into Beauville by jeep every other Thursday and bought food and a few small bottles of imported whisky. The Japanese team loved whisky, had fetishised it beyond anything any Scot would ever think of, could name its lineages and recite the ideal chemical make-up of the peat and the perfect conditions for the casking, and had actually developed a special and very grave formal ceremony for its distribution. They had invited the Sergeant once, and he had sat on his heels for three hours and watched, at first with amusement and then impatience and then with a sort of awe as they moved through precise, elegant motions and the scent of the Talisker drifted up and entranced him. By the time he took his first sip it was like heaven and his aching muscles were absolutely forgotten, and that one glass without ice or water was the best he had ever had. Inoue had begun to make whisky here herself. She called it Island End Uisge Beathe, and it would only be drunk when Mancreu was in ashes. She would sit in Osaka with her team in ten years, or twenty, in the home of her father who was also a xenobiologist, and together they would break the seal on one of the casks and they would drink, and only then would she know whether she had wasted her time.