Tigerman by Nick Harkaway Page A

boy’s hands were grazed and scratched. He had dug this himself, the Sergeant understood, without tools, and from the look of the soil he had got it from the high mountainsides. He had been up early for his digging, and he had lugged his benediction here all alone for what must be miles and put it in this fine pot, and now he was standing almost at attention, because this was Shola’s coffin with Shola’s body in it, and it was the right thing.
    Gratefully, the Sergeant drove both hands into the pot, and flung a huge load over the coffin, and then another and another. The world flickered and shifted, and he found that he had thrown it all, that his knuckles were raw from rubbing against the clay. He realised he must have stood there for five minutes, heaving soil over the straw coffin, while the family waited patiently and everyone watched.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down into the grave, wondering if he should scoop some back out for others to give. Sanity prevailed.
    The family lined up and threw in the grey dust of the cemetery on top of his rich earth, and then the gravediggers came and filled in the rest very quickly. Finally, Tom spoke. He said that Shola had been a boxer. When a boxer dies, Tom said, they ring the fight bell nine times, and the dead man departs this world when the last whisper of the bell fades away. And then he did it, banging a drumstick against the mushroom-shaped brass bell from the Beauville club. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The ninth echoed, and the bell sang on and on, the metal holding the vibration an impossibly long time. And then it was done.
    Shola was gone.
    The Sergeant’s intention, when the funeral was over, had been to take the boy for a quiet walk and discuss with him everything that had happened, as he would have with any young man who had just seen close combat and casualties for the first time. He didn’t have the chance, though, because Dirac the Frenchman and Beneseffe the Portmaster scooped them up, and Tom opened the café in his cousin’s honour, just for the afternoon, so that they could sit and be there. Someone had cleaned the place, planed the wooden floor where Shola had died so that they would not walk on his blood. Tom stood on the third step so that everyone could see him and thanked them for coming, and he stayed there so that any time anyone looked up, expecting out of habit to see Shola, they caught his eye, and shared a moment with him, and the hole in the world was known and acknowledged.
    In a corner the Sergeant saw Dr Inoue, and she raised her glass – whisky, of course – in salute and approbation. Inoue’s face was remarkable, he thought. It could convey volumes.
I’m sad that he is dead, and I know that so are you. I am pleased that you are alive, and I know how hard you tried. I know what you would have wished. I am here. So are you. It is all there is
. And of course, in that briefest and softest of twitches at the corner of her mouth:
my whisky is your whisky, if you should need it
. He smiled back, inclined his head as if receiving a medal, and waited until she turned away. When she did, he felt a weight settle on him, as if she had briefly shared with him the burden of the room.
    As the wake went on, the Sergeant made one attempt to take the boy to one side, only to be blocked by Dirac and to realise, belatedly and with some gratitude, that Dirac was taking the sergeant’s role with respect to them both, and that he, Lester Ferris, was himself a man who had just seen combat when he’d been posted out of the line for fear that he wasn’t ready for it yet, who had lost a trooper and might need a bit of looking after.
    Dirac was his direct equivalent only up to a point. He was a commissioned officer, a major, but one who knew his job. He was a bit older than Lester, and considerably boozier. His notional title was ‘envoy’, which meant exactly what it said: he had been sent to Mancreu,