Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

Shola had believed in cremation and never told, well, in a few months or weeks, Mancreu would burn, and any remnant of Shola would burn too.
    The Sergeant stood next to the Witch, the broad shadow of Dirac the Frenchman a little to one side, and Beneseffe the Portmaster beyond him, all of them staring down into the hole someone had dug. Pechorin, the Ukrainian officer, was at the back in full uniform. The Sergeant guessed he had not been allowed to come in civvies.
    The boy was not immediately apparent. Sometimes he would watch things he deeply cared about from a high vantage point, through an old, vastly heavy pair of field glasses he had bought on eBay. It was as if he feared being burned by too much passion, as if the emotions of others might wake in him a response he would then be utterly unable to control. The Sergeant hoped desperately that his friend would come in person to this occasion, because he thought the boy would regret it deeply if he did not, now and for ever.
    Shola’s coffin was a long basket made of straw, bound with ropes of tomato stem. The only flowers were woven into the coffin itself, wild flowers and sprigs of thorn, and a few wickedly greenish-purple leaves of marijuana from his own crop. The basket was anonymously shaped; it had no head and no foot. The Mancreu men – Shola’s cousins and some sturdy dockmen – lowered it in an old piece of fishing net, and Ma Tatin who owned the chandlery sang something old and deep.
    Standing at the head of the grave, Marie thanked them all for coming and said Shola had been a good man and that she had loved him even when he was a pain in the arse. For a moment it seemed that she had more to say, a full eulogy, but she just stood there as if at attention and the Sergeant realised that there were tears on her face and that she would stand there until someone took her away. Shola’s cousin Tom shepherded her gently back to her mother, and then said straightforwardly that he would be taking over the café but that anyone who felt they had a stake in it should come and see him and he’d cut them in. The Sergeant wondered why he wasn’t more cautious. Someone might take advantage. And then he wondered ‘of what?’ What sort of idiot would come and demand a part of a failing enterprise on an island which would not exist by the end of the year?
    Beneseffe heaved a sigh, and Marie threw in the first handful of soil. Tom beckoned to the Sergeant.
    ‘It must be someone else, before me,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Surely.’
    Tom shook his head. ‘We agreed. It’s you. You were there. Did right.’ Tom hesitated, long face sad, then asked, ‘Did he say anything?’
    The Sergeant thought:
His lung was on the far wall. His spine was on the floor. They exploded him.
    But instead he said: ‘It was too quick.’
    The congregation nodded, and gentle hands pushed him forward towards the grave. This couldn’t be right. What about the rest of Shola’s family? But they were over there in a huddle, mourning and brave. They were waiting for him to go ahead of them, had appointed him to show the way. To sergeant for them, and that, at least, was something he understood. He walked to the graveside and looked around for a decent bit of earth. There was too much dust. He wanted loam. He scratched hopelessly, felt his fingernails bend.
    There was a small noise, a scuffing of feet on dry ground. From the back of the crowd the boy emerged, head up, chin jutting. He was labouring under the weight of a terracotta pot, which he carried the way Winnie the Pooh carries honey, with both arms wrapped around it in a hug. The people made way for him slowly, as if, in contrast to their decision about the Sergeant, they somehow blamed him for Shola’s death. Perhaps he was an orphan after all; some Mancreu folk believed orphans were bad luck. Perhaps he was just alive when Shola was dead.
    The boy drew up alongside him, and the Sergeant saw that the pot was full of rich, black earth. The