The Penal Colony

by Richard Herley

  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 h
ad 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.

  Routledge got down on his haunches and examined the hollow more closely. It did not look very inviting; he had known better hostelries than this. But it was safe, and it was relatively dry.

  Rubbing a hand across his stubble, he hesitated before going further, still unable to rid himself of an irrational, self-conscious feeling that he was being watched.

  He looked up, directly overhead. The thought had just occurred to him that he was indeed being watched. They might well have a satellite in orbit for precisely this purpose.

  He considered sticking out his tongue, or thumbing his nose, or making some rather more emphatic gesture. But that was not his way, and it would merely give them something else to smile about. If they were watching. And if they weren’t, the gesture would not only be futile, but also, somehow, the act of a man in the earliest stages of madness. Like talking to himself. He had been doing it consistently now, under his breath as if he were afraid of being overheard; and it was time to stop.

  However sophisticated their cameras, they would be unable to see through the overarching foliage of the bush. He crawled into the hollow and after a few experiments found the most comfortable way to lie down, with his head given as much shelter as possible. Yes. This would do.

  He told himself he ought to make a start on finding food. He would go back to the rabbit warren and try there, see if he could find a young one out on its own, or else rig up some sort of trap.

  But he did not move. He was very tired. The drugged sleep he had awoken from in King’s shack had left him feeling utterly drained. His subsequent terrors and exertions had drained him still more, and now, before facing the next part of the onslaught, all he wanted was a little time to recuperate.

  He shut his eyes.

  Enclosed by the branches, enclosed within himself, the difficulties he had just been facing, out there in the daylight, seemed immediately to recede. They belonged again to some other person, not to himself.

  Routledge heard the wind in the leaves. He heard the distant waves, and, a little while later, the deep, throaty prronk of a raven’s cry. It came only once, and was instantly swept away on the wind. He listened for it again, drifting in and out of his thoughts, thinking of all that had happened and all that would be.

  Forgetting to listen, he abandoned himself completely, let himself go, and fell at last into a heavy, unhappy, and dreamless sleep.

  4

  “Gazzer. Over here.”

  “What you found?”

  “He must have came this way.”

  Routledge was instantly awake, his heart pounding so hard that he had difficulty in hearing. Two men, at least two, were close to his lair. The first who had spoken sounded like a black man, the other, Gazzer, a white.

  They were searching for someone. For him.

  What an imbecile he was! They would have seen the helicopter; they would know that a new prisoner would probably have been landed; they would know the procedure. Where more logical to look for the new man, and his clothes, and anything else he might have, than in the vicinity of the gate? From the gate he would have left a clear trail through the bracken and across the wet grassland. They would have seen the places where he had stumbled, the flattened bracken where he had spent the night. They would have seen where he had drunk from the rill, and then … then the trail into the scrub.

  So. This was how he was going to die.

  The sun had come out. From the look of the light, it seemed that it was now mid morning. He must have been asleep for several hours. The wind had softened and become warmer.

  “No sign of him.”

  “I tell you he been past here. Four, five hours since.”

  The voices were even closer now, coming from somewhere over his left shoulder. Two metres away. No more. He was paralysed: if he moved he knew he would make a sound and that would be the end.

  There came a long silence. Finally the white man said, “Let’s go on.”

  More vegetation was parted and crushed. They were leaving.

  And then it happened.

  In a conversational tone the white man said, “What’s this?”

  Routledge looked round. A human male, a thing, a creature of about twenty-five, hands on knees, was half bending, head cocked, and peering into the space under the bush.

  “Jackpot.”

  Routledge sat up.

  “Been asleep?”

  The man’s hair could not have been cut or washed for several months at least; his beard not for many more. In his right hand he was holding half a metre of rusty angle-iron. He was dressed in tattered jeans, almost rags, and a sleeveless jacket, an outlandish jerkin of what Routledge guessed was goatskin, black and brown and white. “Like Robinson Crusoe,” Routledge thought. “No: Ben Gunn.” Dangling from his neck was a string of assorted shells. His arms and face were, under the filth, deeply tanned. As the man began a slow smile, Routledge saw that his few remaining teeth were rotten, but his eyes, in contrast with his skin, shone with a clear, intense, maniacal healthiness.

  “I said, ‘Been asleep?’”

  “Yes,” Routledge said. “Yes, I’ve been asleep.”

  “We thought you was. Didn’t we, Winston?”

  The black man appeared. “I’m warnin’ you, Gazzer. Don’t call me that.”

  “Just a joke.”

  “You been to the Village?” the black said to Routledge. He did not seem quite as tall as the white; his clothes were no better. His chief garment was a stained and grimy cotton blouson, originally pale cream. Under this he was we
aring a blue T-shirt with the faded remnants of a circular yellow logo, now illegible. His dungarees, green corduroy, were too short, revealing bare ankles in a pair of grubby trainers. He looked about forty. Instead of angle-iron, he was armed with a heavy wooden club, much carved and polished.

  “Course he’s been to the Village,” the white man said. “What’s your name?”

  “Anthony. Tony.”

  “Get here yesterday, Tony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a nice ride on the ’copter? Yeah? What d’you reckon to our little island, then? Nice, innit?”

  There could be no escape. They were being careful to block the only way out, and even if he did get past them they would catch him in the scrub, bring him down, and kill him. From the impudent way they were standing he could tell they knew he was soft and weak, fresh from the mainland, while they, veteran survivors, were as fit and hard and ruthless as any man could be. In their faces he could see their thoughts about his life, his job, his background, his money.

  “I said it’s nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was you? Dartmoor?”

  “Exeter.”

  “What you here for?”

  “I … I …”

  “He’s here for wanking his cat,” the black man said. “Who gives a shit? We’re wasting time. We want fun, right?”

  “You goin’ to come out of there?” Gazzer said.

  Routledge began to make his mind work. He started to crawl into the open.

  “Don’t forget your jacket, Tony.”

  Once, on a Harrow street corner, he had been mugged by three blacks. He had made the mistake then of trying to appease them, of answering their insolent questions, of telling them the time when asked, of revealing his wristwatch and the way he spoke. And now he had begun to do exactly the same thing again. Also a mistake.

  “You want to ream him first?” the black man said, as Routledge emerged.

  The white man did not answer. His hand had gone to his fly. He grinned at Routledge, looked at the black man, looked back at Routledge. “Get down on your knees and pucker up.”