The Penal Colony (27 page)

“We’ll never get it back!”

“Let go! Let go! It could take you over the
cliff!”

Afterwards, Routledge was not sure why he had
refused to obey. Perhaps he had had enough of the way they were
treating him. Perhaps he had felt it was time to assert himself, if
not over Thaine then over the tarpaulin, this entity which in its
unruliness was just as unmanageable as his relations with the
Village as whole. For a moment he did not care whether the wind did
indeed change direction and pull him over the cliff. To fall then,
at the onset of darkness in this early autumn gale, would have been
a resolution of sorts. During the first two or three seconds,
dropping through space before taking the first of the brutal, fatal
blows, he would at least have been free.

These were not thoughts. There was barely
even time for them to take shape as a feeling when, just as
mysteriously, the gust subsided and the tarpaulin abandoned its
attempt at liberty. Routledge gathered in the folds and went back
to Thaine.

“What about your hand, Mr Thaine?”

Thaine shone the flashlight on it. The skin
had been torn and there was blood, but the wound looked worse than
it was. “I’ll live,” he said. “Let’s get this thing fixed.”

As they worked, Routledge decided to forbear
mentioning what he had overheard in the carpentry shop.

Until now he had disliked Thaine, just as he
had disliked all those on the Village Council. Like everyone except
King, Thaine had made no attempt to reciprocate the subtle
overtures of friendship which Routledge believed he had extended
and which, at the first sign of indifference, had been withdrawn.
Thaine in particular, with his self-confident manner and the
technical ability that had placed him so high in the tree, had
evinced not the slightest interest, rebuffing these embryonic
approaches with something like rudeness. Routledge’s pride would
not allow him to make the next move. But he must unconsciously have
craved Thaine’s esteem, for he was surprised, once they had
finished fixing the tarpaulin and were walking back to the Village,
how gratified he was when Thaine said, “That was a brave thing to
do, Mr Routledge. You could have been killed.”

“To be honest, I didn’t really think. I
suppose I just felt angry, if you know what I mean.”

“Anyone else would have let go. I’m sorry I
put you at risk. I should have secured the mill earlier. We heard
the storm warning at the six o’clock news. Only, the Father got an
important letter from home. But you know about that, don’t
you?”

“In outline.”

Thaine did not pursue the subject, and
neither did Routledge, who, in the commonplace remarks they
exchanged on the way to the precinct, was increasingly conscious
that an irreversible change had taken place in the way Thaine
regarded him.

“You ought to see Mr Sibley about that cut,”
Routledge said, as they drew near to the bungalow. “Get some iodine
or something.”

“Yes, I think I will.”

They paused on the shale: Routledge would be
going straight on, to the veranda, to fetch the calculations. “Good
night, then, Mr Thaine.”

“Be seeing you,” Thaine said.

* * *

Routledge did not know how he was going to
endure the house-warming which he himself had so stupidly dreamed
up. The moment when Carter and Ojukwo arrived could easily have
proved a disaster, but Routledge managed to carry it off and was
certain they had detected no change in his attitude. As for them,
they were concealing their fears remarkably well. They surely knew
that someone in the Village had wedged open the workshop door.
Perhaps they already suspected Routledge; perhaps they had
discovered that Talbot had sent him there looking for Thaine. But
that was most improbable. They would not dare make such inquiries.
There was nothing they could do to alleviate the excruciating
suspense of wondering when the hammer would fall. Or perhaps they
thought they had not been identified; perhaps they thought they had
got away with it. Was that why they seemed so nonchalant?

They were the first to arrive. “Mr Phelps
says to say he can’t make it,” Carter announced. “He’s on patrol
duty.”

Routledge, acting the host, hung their
dripping raincoats from the pegs by the door. “I don’t envy him,”
he said.

“Nor me,” Ojukwo said.

“It looks nice in here,” Carter said.

Routledge had been busy. Two extra lamps were
burning near the table, which he had spread with his meagre stock
of provisions: cake, assorted biscuits, apples, a plum, a bar of
whole-nut chocolate already divided into sections.

“Something to drink?”

“What you got?” Carter said.

At that moment, to Routledge’s relief,
Johnson appeared, bearing two bottles of island beer. Johnson had
helped with the foundations. He looked part Asian, with a scanty
beard; his summer crewcut was now growing out. Besides working on
various building projects in the Village, Johnson, with his
excellent eyesight and his abilities in tracking and
self-concealment, acted as an assistant to Foster, the undercover
agent who monitored events and trends among the outsiders. Just
like Foster, Johnson maintained a robust attitude towards the
threat they posed. His was one of the growing number of voices
calling for direct action to reduce the outsiders’ numbers: a
“cull” was how he described it. Routledge wondered how he would
react to the news about Carter and Ojukwo.

As Routledge opened the beer, there was a
knock at the door and King arrived. The gathering was complete.

“There’s been more fighting,” Johnson said,
once they had started on the cake. Routledge did not have enough
chairs, so his guests were standing. “Mr Foster come in about an
hour ago. He reckons Nackett’s in trouble. I can tell you now
’cause it’ll be public tomorrow. Houlihan went for Old Town first
thing this morning, before dawn.”

“How many killed?” King said.

“Ten, easy.”

“Prisoners?”

“Could be.”

“Does it mean anything?” Routledge said.

“We don’t know yet. Might just be the usual.
Revenge. They’re like them hillbillies. They can’t even remember
what the feud’s about no more.” Johnson accepted a bourbon biscuit.
“They’re good, these. We used to have these when I was a kid.”

“What happens if Nackett goes?” King
said.

Johnson shrugged. “One less cockroach to
worry about. Don’t frig around, squash the lot of them, that’s what
I say. Wouldn’t take long. We’ve got blokes’d love to do it. Still,
the Father knows best.”

He said this in all earnestness. The other
three guests silently agreed; the remark seemed to put an end to
further speculation about the outsiders.

The storm had now reached its height. The
house was standing up to its baptism extraordinarily well. Not a
single drop of water had so far penetrated the roof or the walls.
Only at the edges of the windward shutters, and in places round the
door, were there slight signs of damp. Ojukwo’s craftsmanship was
already paying dividends.

Routledge remembered the skill and efficiency
with which Ojukwo had set to work on his behalf. No payment had
been asked for, none expected, yet Ojukwo had worked harder and
better than any mainland carpenter. In fact, on the mainland, in
his daily contact with builders, Routledge had developed a general
contempt for artisans of all sorts, for their laziness and greed,
for the substandard work they put in. He had forgotten just how
much care even an uncomplicated piece of joinery, when properly
done, demanded of the craftsman. Ojukwo was indeed a craftsman. His
work was invested with and guided by the single quality most
lacking on the mainland: pride.

If Routledge had still been in two minds
about what to do, the memory of Ojukwo with his try-square and
scratchstock would have helped recommend him to one rather than
another course of action; but there was more to it than that.
Ojukwo’s bulk, his mildness, the sad expression in his eyes,
reminded Routledge of King. He had never talked about his crime.
Until today he had seemed to live largely within himself. Yet now
it had emerged that he and Carter were lovers. Homosexuals, a
menace to the Community, but lovers all the same.

Routledge pitied them their vice, their need
for physical affection. Unless they were stopped, they would sooner
or later be thrown out. If that happened the others outside would
show them no mercy.

He would try to frighten them. He was no
longer interested in earning points with Franks. If it was their
fate to be reported, he would rather someone else got the credit,
someone like Johnson, perhaps, with a sturdier and less complicated
sensibility. They were lucky that it was he and not Johnson who had
entered the workshop tonight.

Tomorrow, or at the first safe opportunity,
he would slip a note into Ojukwo’s jacket pocket at the recreation
hut. He would write the note with his left hand, in disguised,
thickly pencilled block capitals.

As he served more beer, as the conversation
turned to talk of the storm, Routledge mentally perfected the text.
Its composition gave him a curiously serene feeling. He had arrived
at a new point in his experience, utterly unknown. He had undergone
a change of heart. The incident with Thaine had been not a cause,
but a result, of this change. He was different. He viewed his
fellows in another and less critical light.

“Mr King,” he said, for he did not know how
familiarly King knew Johnson. “Mr King, help yourself to
chocolate.” The final version was ready. He rehearsed it again,
even visualized the way it would look on paper, crumpled paper of
an anonymous sort, not the kind he used at Godwin’s.

I KNOW WHAT YOU & CARTER DONE IN THE
CARPENTREY SHOP, YOU’D BETTER STOP NOW FOR YOU’RE OWN GOOD. NEXT
TIME I TELL THE FATHER. A FREIND.

For a while Houlihan did not answer.
Illuminated by three fulmar lights, he sat in perfect ease and
silence, picking his nose with a deeply exploring forefinger, and
at intervals took time to examine the spoils.

Despite the presence of Pope and Feely,
Martinson watched him with a profound sense of peace. Something
inevitable was coming to fruition here, prefigured perhaps a
million years before, in the stars, in the rocks, in the pounding
waves, in the gale against the lighthouse wall. The old feeling was
coming back; had never left him. He was at one with the universe.
That moment, the first time he had laid hands on that soft white
neck, the look in her eyes, stood out in his memory like a marker
post for this slowly unfurling future. All the psychiatrists they
had produced had been unable to understand this simplest of simple
ideas: the idea of destiny. Not for nothing had he been born at
that particular time and place. Not for nothing had his young mind
been steeped in the magnificent language of the Old Testament. The
prophets had foreshadowed everything that was to come.

The struggle had lasted two thousand years,
would reach its conclusion with the beginning of the third
millennium. Why the third? Because three was the first in the
series of numbers dedicated to darkness. Satan’s strongest forces
came in threes. The three crosses at Golgotha, site of the enemy’s
first bad mistake.
Eli, Eli.
And then, on the third day, the
Resurrection. After that it had been downhill all the way. With his
gleaming shield and morningstar Satan had rained countless
swingeing blows on his adversary, by sheer strength and persistence
wearing him down. Now he was almost on the ground, flat out, a
taloned, scaly foot about to be clamped in triumph on his face.
Soon the end would come. Driven by those massive bundles of muscles
and sinews, the spiked ball would be powered through its highest
and most momentous arc, coming down with a force that nothing could
withstand. At bottom, when it made contact, when the morningstar
smashed its way below the horizon, aptly, inevitably, the lights
would go out for ever.

Few were those on Earth privileged to share
in this final blow. Few were those to whom Armageddon and the next
millennium’s afterworld held out their greatest promise.

Not for nothing had he been born then. Not
for nothing had his old man buggered off just before his birth. Not
for nothing had his mother abandoned responsibility for baby James
and left him for long periods, years at a stretch, with his
grandma. Shut up for weeks in her room, he would hear only stories
from the Bible. As soon as he was old enough to read, she taught
him how to understand Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the Book of
Revelation. She taught him the interpretation of symbols. He came
to understand that, just beneath the surface, everything fitted the
pattern, everything was a symbol within the larger symbolic
whole.

The reason he was here on Sert was to play
out his part in this stately and preordained game. Sert had become
a model of the age-old struggle. The Village was the final bastion,
and he had been chosen to breach it.

Sometimes he had not been sure how to
proceed, and then guidance had always been provided. He saw now
that Peto would never have thrown in his lot with Houlihan. The
grazing treaty had stretched to the limit their powers of
agreement. Peto had been an obstruction right enough, but it had
been a false move last summer to set him and Houlihan against each
other: the seeds of Peto’s downfall had already been evident then.
As punishment, and also to put him in abeyance until the proper
time, Martinson had been cast down from the tower. Now, thanks to
Obie, his leg was getting better: he could walk again, albeit with
a limp.

Tonight he had used the cover of the storm to
come here alone and put his proposition. The Irishman had listened
suspiciously, his pale blue eyes giving nothing away. With his
large, bald, and bony head, with his red face and the tufts of
curly grey hair protruding above each ear, with the deliberation of
his speech and the slowness of his movements, Houlihan seemed every
inch the peatbog peasant. All this was in complete contrast to the
true man, whose ruthless cunning had kept him for so long safe and
sound in charge of the lighthouse.