The Penal Colony (9 page)

Several times since retrieving it, he had
taken the knife out of its sheath and examined the details of its
construction. The banded pattern, fawn and brown and black, of the
hilt; the brass guard, the long, strong steel of the blade, were
the products of a technology which, compared with anything
available to him now, was fantastically advanced. On the mainland
he would scarcely have looked at the thing twice. Now he admired it
as a collector might admire his most coveted possession. The knife
belonged to him: it was his. He valued it, in a way he had not
known since his childhood. And the knife was already his
accomplice, his trusted friend. It knew his secret. On his service
its point had entered and breached a human heart.

He stood up. He would definitely take his
chances and go back to the coast.

“You won’t be needing that,” the white man
said.

He was the tallest of the three, the heaviest
and the most frightening in appearance, with ginger hair tied in a
pony-tail, a huge red beard, and a goatskin jacket which in style
owed more to the Visigoths than to contemporary Britain. Only his
incongruous Birmingham accent gave him away.

His two companions were younger, both black,
dressed in ragged jeans and sweatshirts. The first, who also wore a
skimpy and much stained leather waistcoat, was wiry and small,
carrying a spear, a length of reinforcing steel rod sharpened to a
point, below which hung a bunch of seagull quills. Round his neck
Routledge was amazed to see a pair of rubber-armoured roof prism
binoculars costing, at current prices, some seven hundred pounds.
The second black, of average build, with a sheepskin headband and
wristlets, had a felling axe at the ready, held across his chest.
His expression indicated that he would not mind using it.

It was impossible that the three of them
could have crept up behind him in total silence; yet that was
exactly what had happened.

This time there would be no escape. The white
man was armed with an S-shaped crowbar.

“Chuck your blade down here,” he said, and
Routledge complied.

“Standard issue, that,” said Spear, giving it
to the white man.

“Now the club,” the white man said.

Felling Axe retrieved it. “Here, this is
Tortuga’s kerry.” He looked up at Routledge. “Where d’you get
this?”

“I found it on the cli—. I found it.”

“On the cliffs. Was that what you was going
to say?”

“Yes. No. I just found it.”

Keeping the club. That too had been
monumentally stupid. Now they would kill him for sure, in revenge,
if nothing else.

“Look on his knees, Obie. It’s blood. He’s
croted Tortuga.”

“Gazzer and all,” said Obie, the one with the
spear.

The white man uttered a quiet, inward laugh.
“What’s your name?”

Routledge decided to lie. “Roger,” he said,
borrowing the identity of a former colleague. “Jenkins.”

“Well, Roger, you done a naughty thing there,
croting our two stonky mates.” He laughed again. “He don’t look the
part, do he, Obie?”

“Looks like a bit of a sperm artist, if you
ask me. Talks like one, too.”

“What about their stuff?” said Felling
Axe.

“The meat’s mine,” the white man said. “That
makes their stuff mine and all.”

“He’s right, Jez,” said the one called
Obie.

Routledge did not fully understand what was
going on, but it seemed that he was the “meat”. It also seemed that
they were not after all unduly exercised by the revelation that he
had “croted” the first two. What concerned them more was the
ultimate destination of the dead men’s “stuff”.

“Did they slake their jakes?” said the one
called Jez. When it became apparent that Routledge hadn’t
understood, he rephrased the question. “Did they prong you?”

Routledge feigned incomprehension.

“You ever been plugged?”

“Shut up, Jez,” the white man said. “Where’s
your stuff, Roger?”

“I’m sorry …”

“Where’d you put the rest of your issue? What
they give you in the Village. The clobber and that.”

“This is all I took.”

“Just the knife and the jacket?”

“Yes.”

“Want to get in there, do we? That Franks.”
He sneered. “How long d’they give you outside?”

“Nine days.”

“He’s lying,” Jez said. “Where’d you hide
your stuff, bastard?”

“No,” the white man said. “He in’t lying. You
wouldn’t tell us no fibs, would you, Roger? Thought not. You’re
coming with us now, Roger. This is Obie, this Jez. Me I’m
Martinson. Ain’t got no first name, have I, Obie?” He smirked
again. “Let’s go.”

With the spear at his back, Routledge was
made to walk. Martinson led the way.

As they passed through the undergrowth,
Routledge remembered the newsreels he had seen of prisoners forced
to appear before the cameras and recant, not knowing whether in the
next moment they would be shot or beaten or merely dragged away
once more and thrown into their cells. While watching he had been
more or less indifferent; but now he found the faces of those men
returning to haunt him. Was that how he looked now, at this moment,
not in the forests of Vietnam or Central America, but on an island
a mere forty kilometres from mainland Cornwall?

“Don’t try and run, Roger,” Martinson said
over his shoulder. “We won’t like it if you do.”

“Where are we going?” Routledge made himself
say.

“Mystery tour.”

It came fully home to him then just how
barbarous was the policy his peers had adopted to rid themselves of
murderers, rapists, terrorists. No man slept on Sert who was not a
fully paid-up member of Category Z. Only the helicopter’s tenuous
touch remained to link him with the past. His sentence was final,
inexorable. His future was this, indivisible from the present. It
was as though he was already dead. With this one difference: part
of him, the part determined to survive, refused to acknowledge
it.

That tiny corner of his mind had not
forgotten the resolution he had made on the ridge. It enabled him
to take in details of the journey, and remained sufficiently
functional to file away information for later use. The white man,
Martinson, appeared to be in charge. Obie he treated with respect;
the other one, possibly a homosexual, he didn’t. Routledge he
virtually ignored, except, from time to time, for telling him to
keep up: even had Routledge not been weak from hunger and lack of
proper sleep he would have found the pace gruelling.

Martinson, in particular, seemed to pass over
rough ground almost as easily as one might walk through a shopping
mall. He rapidly led them to the edge of the wood and out across
the thorn scrub.

The land sloped generally downhill. After a
few minutes they came to an area of more open heath, with more
bracken, where Routledge noticed another buzzard in the sky. The
bracken gave way to vegetation more open yet: a wide expanse of low
heather, dusty purplish and just coming into bloom.

If Martinson ignored the captive, Obie did
the opposite. As they walked, with Jez bringing up the rear, he
badgered Routledge with questions about the mainland. His interest
centred on the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, about
which Routledge was able to provide no information whatever. He
then asked, with similar success, how preparations for next year’s
World Cup were coming along.

“Ain’t you interested in football, then?”

“No. I’m afraid not.”

“Franks’s got radios. Got a telly too.”

“I expect he does the pools and all,” Jez
said.

“Who is Franks?” Routledge brought himself to
say.

“Don’t you know? In the Village. The
‘Father’, he calls himself. That’s so his boys have to use his shit
for toothpaste. Ain’t that right, Jim?”

“That’s right.” Martinson glanced over his
shoulder. “Leave the meat alone now, Obie. You can see he’s puffed
out.”

For that Routledge found himself
grateful.

The heather came at last to an end, replaced
by rough turf with scattered outcrops of rock and scree. The ground
began to rise once more, the grass dotted with minute yellow
flowers. By now Martinson had joined a distinct path worn in the
soil. It threaded its way over a ridge and into a large,
bowl-shaped depression, a kind of natural amphitheatre where a
flock of scrawny and ill-kempt goats was feeding. The flock was
being guarded by four armed men, three whites and a mulatto,
wearing much the same rags and skins as the other outsiders
Routledge had seen.

The goatherds were lounging on the ground,
one with a hat over his face. The mulatto sat up as Martinson’s
party appeared.

“Who got it?” he said, referring no doubt to
Routledge.

“Martinson,” Obie said. “Why four of you,
Beanpole?”

“Alex doubled the guard. What happened at the
light?”

“Tell you later.”

“Yeah. OK.”

The smell of the goats was so abominable that
in the midst of the flock Routledge felt his gorge rise.

“Nearly home now,” Obie said. “Nearly time
for you to tell us what you done with Gazzer and Tortuga.”

“Who? … I’m sorry …”

“I bet you’re sorry.”

Martinson gave another quiet laugh.
Routledge’s flimsy belief that they were going to overlook his
possession of the club had suddenly evaporated.

“No need to look so glum, Roger,” Martinson
said, as they reached the edge of the bowl and came into full sight
of the sea and, below, the primitive assortment of sheds and tents
which was their apparent destination. “Be like our mate Gazzer.
Always try to look on the bright side.”

* * *

Close to, the outsiders’ settlement was even
more appalling than the descent of the hillside had led Routledge
to expect. The main street, or what passed for a street, was
littered with bones and shells and malodorous garbage including
fish waste, the rotting corpses of seabirds, piles of human faeces.
Most of the dwellings were sited among the ruined walls and
foundations of former buildings. This was surely the “Old Town” he
had been obliquely warned about last night.

Some of the inhabitants were already on view.
Others emerged to inspect him. Shocked as he had been by the first
sight of the two on the cliffs, Routledge now saw that, compared
with some of these creatures, Gazzer had been little short of a
Regency fop. At least three of the men who appeared at the
doorways, or rather the mouths, of their shacks had the
unmistakable beginnings of the facial chancres that marked active
cases of HVC; Routledge noticed that they, unlike not a few of the
others, hung well back and neither congratulated Martinson nor
tried to touch and examine the captive. Even here, in hell, they
were shunned, like lepers. What happened to them when the disease
became contagious? Were they allowed to reach that stage? Routledge
thought again of the black man’s saliva in his hair, of the dried
blood which still clung to his trousers.

Beyond the ruined plots and houses, to the
right, beyond the shallow slope of debris-littered beach, spread a
sac-shaped bay with a scattering of islands at its mouth, bounded
at east and west by low headlands. Compared with those on the other
side of the island, the cliffs here were nothing. The bay made an
almost perfect natural harbour; the waves were no more than
knee-high, fumbling their approach and collapsing early into shoals
of weed-polluted, sluggish foam.

At the end of the street stood the ruins of a
comparatively large building, which Obie said was the “hotel”.
Canopies and lean-tos of driftwood and plastic covered about half
the floor area, compensating for the lack of an upper storey; the
rest was open to the sky.

In front of the main entrance, overlooking an
old stone and concrete jetty, was a stone terrace with the evidence
of an elegant balustrade and steps leading down to the beach. Here,
hemmed in by Jez and a number of others who had joined the
procession along the road, Routledge was made to wait while Obie
and Martinson went inside.

As soon as they had gone, the attentions of
the group became more insistent and impertinent. Routledge found
himself being questioned on several sides at once, unable to settle
one demand before another was made. The questions at first
concerned news and happenings on the mainland; they soon became
more and more menacing and priapic. Was he married? What was her
name? What was she like in bed? When had they last done it? In
detail, what were her favourite perversions? And his? During this
he became aware of the leers of two men in particular, one
middle-aged, the other younger, both with the same unconcealed
interest in his person. The older one was the first to translate
intent into action, reaching out a hand to stroke his neck.

Routledge reacted instantaneously, pulling
himself away.

“Leave it, Curtis,” Jez warned the man,
giving his words greater emphasis with the axe.

“I didn’t mean no harm.”

“All you stonks. Piss off out of it.”

“You can’t stop us, Brookes.”

“D’you want to take it up with
Martinson?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said the younger of the
two men, at which there was laughter. “He’ll have to give in some
day.”

“Say that to his face.”

At that moment Martinson appeared in what had
been the porch of the hotel. He descended the low flight of steps
to the terrace.

“All right, boys,” he said. “You’ve had your
eyeful. I’ve got a special surprise. Something new. Be here
tomorrow morning. Bring anything you got worth having. I’ve decided
to auction the meat.”

“What d’you mean, ‘auction’?”

“Just what I say. You’ve got till morning to
raise the ante. Then he goes to the highest bidder.”

Martinson disappeared for the rest of the
afternoon. In the early evening he returned to take custody of the
captive. He was with Obie and Jez, who both elected to remain
behind with Peto in order to report the outcome of whatever errand
they had been engaged upon.