Originally – when he had believed it was some sort of snobbish post-colonial joke – this all had made Kershaw dislike the Brits, but now apparently he sort of admired it. His brother Gabe was a literature professor at Brown, and when Kershaw brought this up with him Gabe had nodded and said, yeah, absolutely, but you had to read T. S. Eliot to understand. So Jed Kershaw had bought The Waste Land from Amazon dot com and read it here in Mancreu. The Waste Land was a fucking terrifying document of gasping psychological trauma, and it was plenty relevant to the island, but the important point about it was that Eliot was trying to make use of something called an ‘objective correlative’, which was an external reference point everyone would understand in the same way without fear of misapprehension. Kershaw found this revealing, he said, because it was very British. Only a British poet – and, for Kershaw’s purposes, Eliot was one – would imagine that the gap between people living in the same street was so fucking enormous that you had to read the entire body of English-language poetry from 1500 to the present day in order to have a background which would allow you to communicate something as simple as ‘your dog is pissing on my lawn’ and be reliably understood. Only a Brit could be so appalled by the staggering complexities of meaning which could be found in the word ‘piss’ that he felt it was necessary to read Paradise Lost and The Mayor of Casterbridge in order to be certain he wasn’t getting the wrong end of the stick. And for sure, only a Brit would imagine that adding a huge raft of literary imagery to the sea of human emotion and history which was English would clarify the situation in any fucking way at all. All the same, there was something glorious in that complexity, in the fact that Brit communication took place in the gaps between words and in the various different ways of agreeing which meant ‘no’. But none of that made Mancreu any easier for Jed Kershaw to deal with, and he suspected but could not prove that this was because the island was also French. ‘And the French are worse, Lester, because they do all this same crap and they fucking improvise, too.’
The Sergeant took his time responding to Jed Kershaw’s question. What the fuck, indeed. ‘Well, apparently, five guys from the hills, Jed. And for no reason at all that I can get them to acknowledge.’
‘Assholes!’
‘Yes. And amateurs, too.’
‘So what are we talking about? Money? Girls? Boys? What?’
‘They won’t say. Or maybe there isn’t anything. Maybe this is next.’
‘What “next”? What do you mean, “this is next”?’
‘Maybe this is what happens after a certain point, Jed. With an island that doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. Maybe people just start getting together and killing one another.’
Kershaw stared at him. ‘Fuck, Lester.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fuck, Lester, that is a nihilistic fucking notion.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re saying maybe they just, what, they got together in the backwoods somewhere and decided to do a murder? Get in the car, go somewhere, spray the place with bullets, because, hey, what the hell, it’s the end of the world?’
‘It’s just a possibility.’
‘So, what, we’ve gone from leaving parties to… what? Everybody goes nuts and starts killing everybody like it’s the fucking nutbar apocalypse?’
‘I don’t say it’s likely, sir.’
‘You’re saying “sir” a great deal, Lester. I recognise professional sir-ing when I hear it. Do you have some British psychological-trauma profile which says this is going to happen?’
‘No, sir, not that I’m aware of.’
‘Then Jesus, Lester! Do not scare me like that. Jesus.’ He looked up. ‘The next words out of your mouth better not include “sir”, Lester.’
‘All right, Mr Kershaw, I shall bear that in mind.’
‘Jed.’
‘Jed. Yes, sir.’
Kershaw glowered, then grinned. ‘You are fucking with me just now, Lester, in a manner you no doubt believe is comradely joshing.’
‘If you say so, Jed.’
‘I do, Lester.’
And after that they talked, but nothing more was actually said. The Sergeant excused himself before Jed Kershaw had to find an excuse to get away, and Kershaw looked gratefully after him as he went downstairs. In the street, the Sergeant glanced around for the boy but could not see him. He felt a little sad, but stiffened his spine and reminded himself that they were doing something hunnerten pro cent ZOMG later, and that this was apparently good. In any case, the boy had other aspects to his life that were his own.
He looked around once more and got into his car.
The town of Beauville was surprisingly beautiful as he drove back to Brighton House, like a strong-jawed choir mistress allowing the day to see her softer side. The hard, industrial region of Mancreu was away on the south coast, the ferroconcrete slab housing of the 70s chemical men who had come to refine and combine and produce plastics.
But here in the north, Beauville looked alive and even bustling. Along the harbour front, a few of the very oldest buildings still remained, low-ceilinged and achingly pretty, smelling of three hundred years of tobacco and drink, and traced with cracks from earthquakes and battering gales. In a ring around them loomed gawky colonial townhouses and stores; wooden crossbeams taken from ships bore witness to the ongoing settlement by mariners and merchants. The outer circle was a kind of loose net of tracks, farms, warehouses and fisher huts, slowly giving way to the back country. Mancreu was a fisher island first, a tenuous farmland second, and everything revolved around the town where produce could be bought and sold. A small number of people lived out on the mountainsides, herders and weavers for the most part, and a very few bandits who were mostly bandits by inheritance rather than vocation. The Sergeant peered out that way now, thinking of the men who had killed Shola, wondering if they were from some such raggedy clan. He had thought those men had been among the first to Leave, taking their twentieth-century bolt-action rifles and their few belongings and heading off for some other place where they could quietly waste away. But then, this crew had carried proper weapons. Militia guns, not shepherd’s companions.
A real policeman, he thought, would follow those guns somehow, track them backwards. Or he might draw inferences from their make and model, from their presence at all. How unlikely was it that that gear was in private hands on the island? Not very. North Africa and Yemen both overflowed with Kalashnikovs. So did large parts of South-East Asia. Mancreu was surrounded by a ring of cheap, durable guns. Surrounded, but at a distance, and something of the British ethos regarding firearms had prevailed here for a long while. He had been right a moment ago: Mancreu bandits carried guns which would not have been out of place at Gallipoli or Ypres, and used them largely for shooting glass bottles and sheep belonging to other people, and only very occasionally for a stick-up. Certainly, they did not spree.
Things did not fit. He was keeping count of them in his mind, but they were all so hazy, so very tenuous. He might be being foolish. After all, Shola had been his friend. He very much wanted the death to mean something. And the boy needed it to mean something, needed this bleak introduction to messy, ketchup mortality to be more than just the consequence of a jostling in the marketplace. It dawned on him that he needed to do something else for a few hours. He could knock his head against what had happened until he bled, and he would still not understand it. He would miss the truth if it was offered to him because he was starting to have ideas about what it should look like and he would ignore anything which looked different. He had to step back.