The Penal Colony (6 page)

“Have a nice ride on the ’copter? Yeah? What
d’you reckon to our little island, then?”

The reality was far worse than anything
Routledge had foreseen. He could not survive much more of this.
Perhaps he had been right before. Suicide was the only rational
answer to a place like Sert. For, even if he got into the Village,
he knew it would not end there.

He discovered that he had been scrubbing
mechanically at the same place on the jacket. He stopped.

The flow in the rill was barely adequate, but
he lay down and tried to wash his hair, especially on the side
where he had felt the black’s slobber. He had been scrupulously
careful so far not to touch it or to put his fingers to his lips or
eyes. The same with the blood. Especially the blood.

When he had finished he stood up. Using its
pop-stud, he fastened the sheath of his knife to one of the belt
loops on his trouserband – the Father had not given him a belt. The
sheath itself he tucked inside his trousers, leaving the handle
protruding at a ready angle. Once, twice, he made an experimental
grab at the knife. It came out quickly and cleanly.

The wooden club seemed a handier weapon than
the angle-iron, which he now hid in the bracken just above the
rill. He had no plans to come back here, but plainly the angle-iron
was too valuable to be hurled away at random. The rill he had
contaminated: he could not drink from it again. This spot was
anyway too near the Village; and, of more importance, the area bore
too many signs of activity. He had already delayed dangerously
long. Besides, sooner or later he would have to solve the problem
of food.

Behind the outcrop where the rill emerged,
the ground rose in a fern-clad slope to a broken ridge where more
of the native rock lay exposed. Up there, more of the island would
be visible, and he could make a better decision about where to go
next.

Except for the breeze, and the rill, and the
sound of the sea, the air was utterly silent. For the first time,
he noticed an absence of the vast generalized roar – of traffic,
aeroplanes, factories, washing machines, refrigerators, the
background noise of hundreds and thousands of people going about
their daily lives – which had been his constant companion on the
mainland. Even in his cell at Exeter, even during the worst and
deepest part of the night, the sound had come at him from the
direction of the city. Now it had ceased. For ever.

He skirted the outcrop and started pushing a
way uphill through the forest of chest-high bracken.

There was something almost menacing about its
luxuriance. This hillside belonged to the bracken’s kingdom, and it
brooked no intrusion, especially from a foreigner, a soft white
mainlander like himself. The green fronds made a sea; in the
half-light at ground level the stems were tough and snagged
mercilessly at his ankles. The soil consisted of a dry,
tobacco-like mulch, the legacy of countless generations of fern.
Mingled with the summer’s heat, it had taken into itself, absorbed,
and corrupted the pungent smell of the fresh foliage, and now, like
a giant radiator, was slowly giving it back.

There was no path of any kind, no record of
the passage of human or animal feet. Routledge was having to make
his own path, one that could be clearly seen and followed; but for
the moment that could not very well be avoided.

The ground climbed steeply. Metre after
unrelenting metre, the gradient drained the strength from his legs
and from the whole of his body. With each step he became more
conscious of the solid, the lifeless tons of soil and rock of which
the hill was made. He was not used to physical exertion. His heart
seemed to be beating dangerously fast, and with every intake of
breath his throat burned. Despite the fact that he had already
removed his jersey and rolled up his shirtsleeves, he was sweating
profusely. The sweat attracted still more the swarms of flies he
was disturbing as he went. The flies on the cliffs had been
horrible black things, like huge, shiny mosquitoes; these were more
like house-flies, but smaller and drabber and more persistent. He
decided to break off a fern frond to use as a whisk.

“Get here yesterday, Tony?”

The voice had sounded so real that he
abruptly stopped and looked round. He was three hundred metres from
the cliff edge here; the place where it had happened was already
indistinguishable from the rest of the clifftop scrub. The cliffs
themselves, their beach, their newly acquired jetsam, were of
course invisible. From the imagined position of the bodies,
foreshortened somewhat by his present elevation, the blue,
mist-hazed surface of the sea extended smoothly to the horizon.
There were no other islands to be seen, no ships. Discounting
surveillance by satellite, which he now thought unlikely, the only
eyes exposed to the evidence of his crime were those of an indolent
gull, floating past on the updraught.

No – it didn’t happen. None of this is
happening.

Sometimes, at home, in the real world to
which he knew he would at any moment return, he had been awoken in
the early hours by a crash, as if made by burglars downstairs.
After lying in the dark for five or ten minutes, his heart
thudding, he would get up and venture to the top of the stairs.
Standing in his pyjamas, getting progressively colder, he would
listen and listen. He was standing like that now, waiting for the
equivalent of the innocent creak, the noise of contracting wood or
metal, that would let him accept the crash purely as a product of
his own imagination and return to bed. He was waiting for some
proof that this was all an illusion.

A fly alighted on his lips and in an instant
he spat it away, brushing a hand across his face. He felt the
stubble there. This was no illusion.

“
He’s here for wanking his cat.”

“Shut up!” he said, out loud. “I will not go
mad. I refuse to go mad. I will die the way I want to die. I will
die as myself.” But wasn’t this already the beginning of madness,
to be talking like this?

“I haven’t got a cat. Can’t stand the bloody
things.” Couldn’t stand their superior attitude, their cruelty,
their selfishness.

Why had the black man said it? Because,
because, in a poetical sense, he had been absolutely right. That’s
exactly why Routledge had ended up taking a ride on the ’copter.
Wanking his cat: the sum total of his life before the arrest.

“That’s not true!”

Yes it is.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Get a grip, you silly
bastard! O Sweet Jesus, they’d done it to him this time all right!
First the police, the courts, the jailers, and now last night. They
could have taken him into the Village straight away. They must have
seen what sort of bloke he was. But no, they’d sent him out, the
bastards, the evil rotten bastards. Like an overgrown Boy Scout,
that Appleton bastard had loved every minute, they all had. And now
they’d done it. It was their fault, what had happened.
No: it
hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have happened.

Routledge could bear it no more.

Flailing the black man’s club, slashing
blindly at the bracken and the flies, he began to run uphill,
stumbling through the ferns, making for the ridge.

The only natural harbour of any size on Sert
lay at the north-eastern corner of the island. A small, deep bay,
protected from the open ocean by a scattering of rocky islands at
its mouth, the harbour was edged on its inner side by a strip of
fine, white sand called Town Beach: for, almost adjoining the
beach, stood the remains of what had once been Sert’s principal
settlement.

In the five years since the island had first
been used as a penal colony, Old Town had been wrecked almost
beyond recognition. Never prosperous, even in its
nineteenth-century heyday, the settlement had at least been
characterized by a certain neat neighbourliness springing from the
simple, God-fearing existence led by its inhabitants. The fifty or
sixty dwellings, made of stone and roofed with slate, and each with
its own stone-walled garden to front and rear, had mostly been
built facing the beach, along the cart-track joining the minister’s
house with the stone and concrete quay.

Some of the houses had been burned down,
others demolished in the search for slates or useful blocks of
stone. None was now much more than a blackened shell.

The largest of those still standing had been
the steward’s house, used for many years after the war as a small
hotel for the naturalists and holidaymakers who had visited Sert.
To the front was a stone terrace overlooking the quay; to the rear,
the gardens and arboretum on which the hotelier had expended so
much time and labour. The greenhouse had long since collapsed,
every pane of glass removed or smashed. The kitchen garden, the
hedges and lawns, were now a jungle. The exotic palms had been
uprooted, every tree cut down.

After the evacuation, Home Office gangs had
cleared the hotel, as well as the rest of Sert, of anything likely
to aid an escape attempt. Officially this meant any object that
might be used in the construction of a boat. In practice it gave
the gangs licence to destroy whatever they felt like destroying. Of
all the buildings on the island, only the warden’s bungalow had
escaped the spree, and then only because he had remained there
until the last possible moment.

The hotel had served the Home Office men as a
billet, so it had not fared as badly as, for example, the
lighthouse. Nonetheless, before leaving, they had removed entirely
the upper floor and, as a parting gesture, had set fire to the
remainder.

Since then the hotel had been assailed by the
inmates themselves. That so much had survived this long was due in
large measure to the old-fashioned values of the craftsmen who had
built it, and in the rest to the fact that it had quite early been
taken over by Alexander Peto for his residence.

* * *

Peto sat down on his bench overlooking the
quay. Once he was seated, Obie, Desborough and Brookes sat down
too, at their accustomed places, on the boulders set there for the
purpose.

This was where Peto held his council, in
imitation, Obie supposed, of the Father, the hated Franks. Not that
anyone in Old Town cared what Peto or his council said. All that
could be claimed for Peto’s town was that its inhabitants had
reached the unspoken agreement that, while there, they tried to
refrain from attacking one another. The same agreement obtained in
Houlihan’s rival camp at the lighthouse.

The population of each camp varied between a
hundred and a hundred and fifty. Men went from one to the other
just as they pleased; or joined the utter outcasts who, alone or in
pairs, lived wild.

Obadiah Walker had managed to survive in
Peto’s shadow. For a while he had been his reluctant bed-mate; but
now Desborough had come along and that had changed.

Peto squinted down at the harbour, at the
pale line of beach curving away to the right. From here virtually
the whole town could be seen. What could not be seen, behind the
hotel and the hillside rising above it, two and a half kilometres
away round the coast, was the stained white tower of the
lighthouse; but Obie could guess well enough what Peto was
thinking.

Without moving his head, Peto said,
“Houlihan’s gone too far.”

Obie silently agreed. He was surprised how
well Peto was managing to contain his rage.

“We’s going to have to do something.”

“He wants us to, of course.”

“And after all that shite last spring,”
Desborough said, meaning the protracted negotiations about
territory and grazing.

“I say get him back,” Brookes said. “Go
direct. Just take him.”

Peto treated him to a moment’s disdain. “The
question is, if we don’t do nothing, what’ll he do next?”

Obie had made the discovery earlier that
morning. Peto’s prize billy had been stolen from behind the hotel,
its tether cleanly cut. Peto doted on the animal, and had even
bestowed on it a name – “Billy”. This, while none too imaginative,
in Obie’s view, was a measure of Peto’s fondness, for none of the
other goats had been so honoured. Peto liked to watch Billy in
action and drew vicarious pleasure from his performances. Billy’s
offspring always received preferential treatment, and indeed he had
contributed in no small measure to the steady improvement in the
Old Town flock. And now he was gone.

There were four possible explanations. The
first was that one or more of the wild men had taken him. But the
wild men did not breed goats. They hunted the goats which, like
themselves, roamed wild. It would be an act of senseless bravado
for a wild man to enter Peto’s private ground to steal something he
could come by at no risk.

Alternatively, Billy might have been stolen
by a raiding party from the Village. Even Peto admitted, though,
that the Village stock was in every way superior to his own, Billy
included. Although Franks was capable of anything, and the
possibility could not be dismissed out of hand, there was no
obvious reason for the villagers to have taken Billy.

The third explanation was that someone in Old
Town itself was responsible. That presupposed there was a way of
keeping Billy or his remains concealed from Peto’s view, which
there wasn’t. Besides, no one else in Old Town bred goats or took
an interest in stock. Outside the Village, the only other man on
the island who did that was Houlihan.

There could be little doubt that it had been
an act of deliberate provocation. Obie could even see an amusing
side to it: dark, bizarre, grotesque, typical of Houlihan. But more
than this, the development was ominous. It was tantamount to
another declaration of war. The truce seemed to be coming to an
end.

“Get Martinson and Gazzer,” Peto told Obie.
“Go over the light and see what you can see.”