The Penal Colony (4 page)

Most impressive of all was the suddenness
with which the cliffs fell away. In places they appeared almost
vertical. The rock was stratified, consisting of thick,
perpendicular layers, each one aligned in the same direction and
pointing slantwise out to sea, so that, in the middle of the cove,
it presented a torn and uneven face, but at either side the open
layers made an overlapping series of smooth, artificial-looking
expanses of stone.

Especially in the middle of the cove, slabs
of rock had calved off and crashed, littering the shore with
colossal rubble. Against and among these slabs, and on short
stretches of stony dark beach, the sea broke with a dutiful sort of
monotony, swilling through the channels and crevices and
occasionally throwing up a listless shower of spray. A dozen metres
out and directly below the place where Routledge was standing, a
ridge of rock lay athwart the tide. With each incoming wave the sea
poured over the ridge, making a seething waterfall; and as each
wave returned it poured back, making now a waterfall on the other
side. Elsewhere were ridges that as yet were too high for the tide,
or others that had already been submerged, only their peaks jutting
above the surface of the foam.

A single white canister, perhaps an old
plastic bleach-bottle, lay washed up on the beach. Except for this
there was no trace of human life, no evidence whatever of
civilization or mankind. Bleach-bottle apart, the view from this
spot could not have changed materially in the past three thousand
years.

After gazing for a moment longer, Routledge
remembered himself and turned back into the scrub. He was searching
for a suitable place to hide, somewhere he could safely sleep.

He was no more than two kilometres from the
Village here, on part of the coast facing west. As far as he could
tell, the Village was sited on a peninsula at the south-western
corner of the island, isolated from the rest of Sert by a fortified
border made from two young thorn-hedges with an intervening no
man’s land of stakes, concrete rubble, rusty barbed wire, and other
materials retrieved from the ruined lighthouse, perhaps, or from
wartime defences on the beaches, or both. The gate through which he
had been expelled last night was sited at the western end of the
border, and was itself fortified even more heavily than the rest.
Three men had been on guard, armed with clubs and machetes; one had
been carrying an axe.

Routledge had spent the night, cold, hungry,
and desperately thirsty, lying in the bracken a few hundred metres
from the gate. It had been too dark to go further without risk of
injury. As it was, he had fallen over several times, and had nearly
sprained his ankle in a rabbit hole.

In the first greyness of morning he had begun
to move away, in line with the coast, first climbing some rising
ground to see what he could of the Village and of the island where
he was destined to spend, as the judge had told him, the remaining
term of his natural life.

The light had been too poor to see much. The
vegetation was composed of rough grassland and scrub, with bracken,
gorse, and, especially near the cliffs, expanses of dwarfed,
scrubby woodland. The soil seemed poor and overgrazed; Routledge
recalled that Sert had once been used for sheep farming. A hazily
remembered television documentary about Sert – there had been a
national outcry when this, and the other islands, had been taken
over by the Home Office – had traced its occupancy from the Middle
Ages, when it had been the site of a monastery, through to the
final decline of the farming population in 1930 or so, concluding
with the subsequent importance of Sert as a nature reserve. Sitting
in front of his TV set – how long ago had that been? – in his
comfortable, complacent living room, Louise beside him on the sofa,
the pale blue display of the video blinking discreetly in the soft,
lamplit gloom under the screen, what would have been his thoughts
had he known what he was really watching?

He wished he had taken more of it in. Now all
he remembered was that the vegetation of the island, this vista of
impoverished scrub, was a legacy of too many sheep and too much
grazing. And rabbits, introduced no doubt by the monks.

His survey had not lasted long: he had been
too frightened of being seen. He had made out the border fence
disappearing across the hill, the gateway, the roof of the
bungalow, and the form of a number of other buildings in the
Village. Most looked pretty crude, like King’s shack. The Village
was larger than he had thought, and was probably larger still, with
much of it hidden by the contours of the land.

Unless he had been mistaken, he had glimpsed
the movement of two or three men patrolling inside the border,
approaching his vantage point. He had not waited to see more.

During the night he had feared that he would
be unable to find water, but, almost immediately after his brief
survey, he had come across a tiny rill springing from the rock and
making its way down to the cliffs. The rill was scarcely more than
a trickle, and at first he had not known how to get enough to
drink. He had tried lying full length with his mouth open and his
cheek pressed hard against the stone, but that had not worked.
Then, despite the cold, he had started to take off his shirt, in
order to soak the water up and squeeze it into a depression made in
the back of his PVC jacket; when a better idea had occurred to him.
Using the cuff of the jacket as a scoop, and with the sleeve
twisted higher up, he had simply collected as much as he had
wanted. Contaminated as it had been by the flavour of plastic, the
first full gulp of water had seemed to Routledge the most wonderful
he had ever tasted.

The most pressing of his problems, water, had
thus been solved. Food was not so important. If necessary, he could
survive for the whole six-day period without eating anything at
all, although he felt that this would not do his cause much good
when he returned to the Village. In order to score maximum points,
in order to win the greatest possible respect and thereby the best
chance of advancing himself in the Community, he had guessed that
he had not merely to survive the ordeal, but to survive it with
ease and style.

Going over what he had discovered during his
time in the Village, he saw that he had actually, despite
Appleton’s efforts, learned quite a lot. The mere fact that
Appleton, doubtless following the rules laid down by the “Father”,
had tried to send Routledge out in total ignorance of the
conditions awaiting him, this fact alone was extremely revealing
about the mentality of the people he was, in the long term, up
against.

From King’s demeanour in front of the
triumvirate, as well as from differences in clothing and a number
of other clues, Routledge had surmised that, in the Community,
status was all. The high status – measured by his clothing and by
his failure to call Stamper “Mr” – of the guard at the bungalow
door seemed to show that status was achieved principally, if not
solely, by closeness or usefulness to the Father. Repellent as the
idea was, Routledge saw that his only chance of future comfort was
indeed to gain admittance to the Community and once there to do
everything in his power to achieve high status.

If the inmates of the Village really lived by
their own code, then he could assume that none of them had told him
a lie. It followed that the figures Mitchell had given of the
island’s population could be believed. He had said that one hundred
and eighty-three men lived in the Village out of a population of
about five hundred in all. That meant there were something like
three hundred and twenty convicts living outside the Community, a
fact which Routledge had seized upon the instant the words had
escaped Mitchell’s lips.

These three hundred and twenty were the
essence of Routledge’s short-term problems. The clubs, machetes,
and iron bars; the general air of security surrounding the Village;
and the sheer labour and discipline required to plant, construct,
maintain and patrol the boundary fence: all this spoke eloquently
of the behaviour of the outsiders. Or rather, “Outsiders”, for that
was almost the way Stamper had said the word. Presumably they were
the hard-core crazies whom not even a society like the Community
could digest. Presumably, too, they were disorganized, or spent
their time fighting among themselves; otherwise, combined, they
would surely have already mounted an irresistible assault on the
Village, if only to gain their rightful access to the helicopter
drops.

Appleton had criticized King for having
revealed the origins of the bungalow and the existence of the
lighthouse and the houses at Old Town. Why? What significance did
such information have? Was Old Town where the outsiders lived? Or
the lighthouse? Or both? It seemed possible. Why then had King, who
by all appearances was no stranger to the combined task of
nursemaid and watchman to new arrivals, why had he said what he
had? Perhaps he had felt a genuine sympathy for Routledge, a
sympathy which in different circumstances might have been a
precursor of friendship. Perhaps he had wanted to warn him. Or
perhaps it was more subtle than that. But no. “That was a mistake,”
Appleton had said. Routledge had already had to assume that
Appleton and the others lived by their own moral code, which meant
that Appleton had not lied to King.

The need to avoid all contact with the
outsiders was paramount. King had as good as warned him to keep
away from Old Town and the lighthouse. In order to do that,
Routledge had to find out where on the island those places were. By
its name, Old Town must have been an early settlement on Sert and
thus must have had some sort of harbour. So Old Town was probably
on the shore or close by it. The western and northern coasts would
take the full brunt of the weather. Hence the harbour, if there was
one, was probably on the east or south coast. But the Village was
at the south-west corner of the island, which made the east coast
more likely. As for the lighthouse, that might be almost anywhere
along the cliffs.

This was all the most tenuous guesswork, but
it looked as if Routledge would be safer keeping to the western
part of the island – indeed, as close to the Village as he
reasonably could. He did not suppose that all three hundred and
twenty of the outsiders lived at Old Town and the lighthouse, or
that they were incapable of roaming the rest of Sert, but he had
nothing else to go on.

He did not even know how big the island was.
From what he had seen already, it seemed to be at least five
kilometres in diameter, and maybe more.

Besides keeping clear of the outsiders, his
predicament resolved itself into three distinct components: finding
water, food, and shelter. Water he had already found. For food he
would try catching rabbits, or birds, or even fish, though he had
no idea how to go about such a task. This immediate area near the
Village might provide him with enough to eat; otherwise, he would
have to wander further and increase his chances of an encounter
with the outsiders.

The more urgent necessity, however, was
shelter, a base. He had entered the scrub with the hope of finding
somewhere, and now, turning away from the cliffs, he resumed his
search.

The various conclusions he had drawn had been
the product of a lucid, detached rationality which bore little
relation to the way he was feeling. During the hours of darkness,
lying awake in the bracken, he had more than once caught himself
being surprised by his ability to think clearly in such
circumstances. For that, he supposed, he had to thank his
education, and the head for detail needed in his work. For the
rest, his former life had left him completely unprepared. He was
not even particularly fit. Except as an impersonal exercise in
logic, the uncertainty about the next few days – never mind the
time after that – was too much for him to contemplate. As soon as
the awareness that it all applied to him threatened to intrude, he
tried to push it aside before terror overwhelmed him. For he was
terrified, truly terrified. He thought he had been frightened last
night, in King’s shack, in the bungalow afterwards; he thought he
had been terrified in custody, and standing in the dock, and at
Exeter; but all that had been nothing. Now he knew what terror
meant. As he forced his way through the branches, a phrase flashed
unbidden through his mind, making worse the sensation, in his
thorax, that he would soon be entirely unable to breathe.
This
is real
.

It was dawn in July. At this corresponding
instant last year he had almost certainly been asleep in bed, four
hundred kilometres away at his house in Rickmansworth. At this
instant now, all over the country, men such as he had been were
also asleep in bed. Yet he, Anthony Routledge, was here on this
island forty kilometres off the north Cornish coast, and, dirty,
unshaven, hungry, wanted for the moment nothing more than to find a
lair among the clifftop scrub.

The wind coming off the Atlantic was the
authentic ocean wind, unbreathed as yet by anyone but himself. Its
smell was the authentic ocean smell; the muffled roar of the surge
was the authentic ocean sound. These obstructive branches were
authentic too, wild, uncultivated, growing without human
interference or restraint. And in just the same way his plight was
authentic. All his life there had been, at bottom, the possibility
of help from someone else in an emergency. No longer.

Thirty metres from the cliff edge he came
across an especially dense thorn bush with its branches forming a
partial dome. The ground under the bush had apparently subsided,
leaving a smoothly contoured hollow thinly covered with grasses. He
stopped and looked around. The slope of the land was such that this
spot would be visible only from the sea or from the more
inaccessible parts of the surrounding cliffs. Beyond the thorn bush
the scrub extended for another thirty or forty metres before giving
way to more open ground.