The Penal Colony

by Richard Herley

  “That’s it, Gazzer,” the black man said. “That’s it. Give it to him like th—”

  He interrupted himself with a scream.

  Routledge had no idea what he was doing. In the next instant, having already, somehow, lunging forward, managed to slash his sheath-knife across the exposed, obscenely semi-erect length of the white man’s penis, he turned and with all his strength thrust the blade into the black man’s chest. He was momentarily too astonished to resist; the point entered somewhere near the middle of his left breast pocket. After a fleeting resistance, as if the steel had been delayed by intervening bone or cartilage, the knife slid in as far as it would go. Routledge felt the moulded brass of the guard hurting the upper joint of his thumb; he pushed even harder, clutching with his left hand at his victim’s collar.

  In the corner of his eye Routledge saw the white man standing immobile, his angle-iron club dropped and forgotten, hands held apart and slightly spread, staring downwards, his wild, mad, tangle-bearded face a pantomime mask of incredulity. His penis had been all but severed. Almost no time had elapsed: yet the wound, in the richly vascular substance of his erectile tissue, was already spouting blood.

  The fetid smell of the black man’s clothing filled Routledge’s mouth and nostrils, his face pressed hard into the shoulder of the blouson. Close by his right ear came a gurgling sound, and he felt the sudden wetness of blood or mucus or saliva penetrating his hair.

  The black man let his club drop. Already dead, the whole weight of his body toppled forward on the knife. His arms closed Routledge in a heavy embrace. Routledge began to fear he would be unable to get the knife out: the sheer weight of the corpse was threatening to overwhelm him, but he gave a vigorous tug, and another, and the blade came free. Routledge twisted aside, allowing the body to fall forwards, and turned back to face the white man.

  His jeans were soaked and splashed with red, yet still he had not moved; still he had not uttered a sound. He looked down at what had been done to him and looked up again.

  In his eyes Routledge saw an expression of stupefied resignation, from almost the same source as that which appears in the eyes of a rabbit about to be killed; but this was essentially human, and, addressed at a far deeper level than mere language, directly to another man’s heart, made a primal and uncomprehending plea for mercy.

  The man took a step backwards. Holding Routledge’s gaze for as long as possible, he turned and, half bending, holding out one hand in protection, began to crash his way through the scrub.

  Routledge’s first instinct was to let him go. The man would surely bleed to death anyway. But then again, he might not. And he might be found by other outsiders, who, for all Routledge knew, were also out searching for the new arrival.

  He bent down, retrieved the angle-iron club, and, with the knife in his left hand, set off in pursuit.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  An hour later it was finished. With much physical difficulty, wearing the PVC jacket to help protect the rest of his clothes, he had managed to drag both bodies to the edge of the cliffs. The black’s had tumbled loosely, hitting an outcrop a glancing blow and then falling almost unhindered to the beach. The other had struck a ledge halfway down and was now lying, spreadeagled, in full view. That could not be helped.

  The wounded man had put up a fight. Routledge had hit him many times with the angle-iron club, in the face, on the head.

  Now it was over.

  Routledge felt cold. His hands were trembling. Images of what had just happened kept repeating themselves in his brain.

  As he crouched by the rill, trying to wash the blood from the jacket, he wondered how much longer he could tolerate the knowledge of what he had done.

  In the space of a single hour his whole view of himself had been defiled. He had become what everyone else believed him to be. And this time he had murdered not just one, but two of his fellow human beings.

  The sun had grown even warmer. Routledge felt its heat: on the back of his hands, being absorbed by the dark fibres of his sweater. The water was pure, crystal-clear. The instant it came into contact with the blood it flowed slightly back and then onward in swirling patterns of alternately lighter and darker, translucent, maroon.

  As he handled the jacket he realized that, for several minutes past, he had become increasingly conscious of texture and colour, shadow and contrast, of the sheer volume of detail being returned to him by his eyesight. His hearing had become more acute and detailed, too; his sense of touch, everything. It was as though he had never used his body before, except somehow at second hand.

  With a twig he tried to clean the blood from the stitching on one of the big black buttons. This. Essentially this. This jacket. They were going to kill him for this.

  He supposed he should now be feeling sick, but it was far more complicated than that. His main sensation was disgust, with himself, and with them for having forced him into it. He felt dirty as well as nauseous, ashamed, guilty; but he also felt glad, and relieved, and lucky. And at bottom he felt surprised, and proud, of his own strength and daring, and of the decisive way he had behaved once it had become obvious where his only course of action lay.

  He was still alive, physically unhurt. He was up here; they were down there. He was still in possession of the jacket. In short, he had won, and they, they who had brought violence upon themselves, had lost.

  “You want to ream him first?”

  That’s what the black man had said. There had been no doubt about it. “We want fun.” Afterwards they would have killed him. With the angle-iron, or with the wooden club, or with both together. They would have taken his jacket, his sweater, shirt, trousers, underpants, his boots and socks. Gazzer would have put the trousers on at once and thrown his old jeans down next to the body. Winston – whatever his true name had been; Routledge might never know – would have raised an argument. One sock each.

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

  The reality was far worse than anything Routledge had foreseen. He could not survive much more of this. Perhaps he had been right before. Suicide was the only rational answer to a place like Sert. For, even if he got into the Village, he knew it would not end there.

  He discovered that he had been scrubbing mechanically at the same place on the jacket. He stopped.

  The flow in the rill was barely adequate, but he lay down and tried to wash his hair, especially on the side where he had felt the black’s slobber. He had been scrupulously careful so far not to touch it or to put his fingers to his lips or eyes. The same with the blood. Especially the blood.

  When he had finished he stood up. Using its pop-stud, he fastened the sheath of his knife to one of the belt loops on his trouserband – the Father had not given him a belt. The sheath itself he tucked inside his trousers, leaving the handle protruding at a ready angle. Once, twice, he made an experimental grab at the knife. It came out quickly and cleanly.

  The wooden club seemed a handier weapon than the angle-iron, which he now hid in the bracken just above the rill. He had no plans to come back here, but plainly the angle-iron was too valuable to be hurled away at random. The rill he had contaminated: he could not drink from it again. This spot was anyway too near the Village; and, of more importance, the area bore too many signs of activity. He had already delayed dangerously long. Besides, sooner or later he would have to solve the problem of food.

  Behind the outcrop where the rill emerged, the ground rose in a fern-clad slope to a broken ridge where more of the native rock lay exposed. Up there, more of the island would be visible, and he could make a better decision about where to go next.

  Except for the breeze, and the rill, and the sound of the sea, the air was utterly silent. For the first time, he noticed an absence of the vast generalized roar – of traffic, aeroplanes, factories, washing machines, refrigerators, the background noise of hundreds and thousands of people going about their daily lives – which had been his constant
companion on the mainland. Even in his cell at Exeter, even during the worst and deepest part of the night, the sound had come at him from the direction of the city. Now it had ceased. For ever.

  He skirted the outcrop and started pushing a way uphill through the forest of chest-high bracken.

  There was something almost menacing about its luxuriance. This hillside belonged to the bracken’s kingdom, and it brooked no intrusion, especially from a foreigner, a soft white mainlander like himself. The green fronds made a sea; in the half-light at ground level the stems were tough and snagged mercilessly at his ankles. The soil consisted of a dry, tobacco-like mulch, the legacy of countless generations of fern. Mingled with the summer’s heat, it had taken into itself, absorbed, and corrupted the pungent smell of the fresh foliage, and now, like a giant radiator, was slowly giving it back.

  There was no path of any kind, no record of the passage of human or animal feet. Routledge was having to make his own path, one that could be clearly seen and followed; but that could not very well be avoided.

  The ground climbed steeply. Metre after unrelenting metre, the gradient drained the strength from his legs and from the whole of his body. With each step he became more conscious of the solid, the lifeless tons of soil and rock of which the hill was made. He was not used to physical exertion. His heart seemed to be beating dangerously fast, and with every intake of breath his throat burned. Despite the fact that he had already removed his jersey and rolled up his shirtsleeves, he was sweating profusely. The sweat attracted still more the swarms of flies he was disturbing as he went. The flies on the cliffs had been horrible black things, like huge, shiny mosquitoes; these were more like house-flies, but smaller and drabber and more persistent. He decided to break off a fern frond to use as a whisk.

  “Get here yesterday, Tony?”

  The voice had sounded so real that he abruptly stopped and looked round. He was three hundred metres from the cliff edge here; the place where it had happened was already indistinguishable from the rest of the clifftop scrub. The cliffs themselves, their beach, their newly acquired jetsam, were of course invisible. From the imagined position of the bodies, foreshortened somewhat by his present elevation, the blue, mist-hazed surface of the sea extended smoothly to the horizon. There were no other islands to be seen, no ships. Discounting surveillance by satellite, which he now thought unlikely, the only eyes exposed to the evidence of his crime were those of an indolent gull, floating past on the updraught.

  No – it didn’t happen. None of this is happening.

  Sometimes, at home, in the real world to which he knew he would at any moment return, he had been awoken in the early hours by a crash, as if made by burglars downstairs. After lying in the dark for five or ten minutes, his heart thudding, he would get up and venture to the top of the stairs. Standing in his pyjamas, getting progressively colder, he would listen and listen. He was standing like that now, waiting for the equivalent of the innocent creak, the noise of contracting wood or metal, that would let him accept the crash purely as a product of his own imagination and return to bed. He was waiting for some proof that this was all an illusion.

  A fly alighted on his lips and in an instant he spat it away, brushing a hand across his face. He felt the stubble there. This was no illusion.

  “He’s here for wanking his cat.”

  “Shut up!” he said, out loud. “I will not go mad. I refuse to go mad. I will die the way I want to die. I will die as myself.” But wasn’t this already the beginning of madness, to be talking like this?

  “I haven’t got a cat. Can’t stand the bloody things.” Couldn’t stand their superior attitude, their cruelty, their selfishness.

  Why had the black man said it? Because, because, in a poetical sense, he had been absolutely right. That’s exactly why Routledge had ended up taking a ride on the ’copter. Wanking his cat: the sum total of his life before the arrest.

  “That’s not true!”

  Yes it is.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Get a grip, you silly bastard! O Sweet Jesus, they’d done it to him this time all right! First the police, the courts, the jailers, and now last night. They could have taken him into the Village straight away. They must have seen what sort of bloke he was. But no, they’d sent him out, the bastards, the evil rotten bastards. Like an overgrown Boy Scout, that Appleton bastard had loved every minute, they all had. And now they’d done it. It was their fault, what had happened. No: it hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have happened.

  Routledge could bear it no more.

  Flailing the black man’s club, slashing blindly at the bracken and the flies, he began to run uphill, stumbling through the ferns, making for the ridge.

  5

  The only natural harbour of any size on Sert lay at the north-eastern corner of the island. A small, deep bay, protected from the open ocean by a scattering of rocky islands at its mouth, the harbour was edged on its inner side by a strip of fine, white sand called Town Beach: for, almost adjoining the beach, stood the remains of what had once been Sert’s principal settlement.

  In the five years since the island had first been used as a penal colony, Old Town had been wrecked almost beyond recognition. Never prosperous, even in its nineteenth-century heyday, the settlement had at least been characterized by a certain neat neighbourliness springing from the simple, God-fearing existence led by its inhabitants. The fifty or sixty dwellings, made of stone and roofed with slate, and each with its own stone-walled garden to front and rear, had mostly been built facing the beach, along the cart-track joining the minister’s house with the stone and concrete quay.

  Some of the houses had been burned down, others demolished in the search for slates or useful blocks of stone. None was now much more than a blackened shell.

  The largest of those still standing had been the steward’s house, used for many years after the war as a small hotel for the naturalists and holidaymakers who had visited Sert. To the front was a stone terrace overlooking the quay; to the rear, the gardens and arboretum on which the hotelier had expended so much time and labour. The greenhouse had long since collapsed, every pane of glass removed or smashed. The kitchen garden, the hedges and lawns, were now a jungle. The exotic palms had been uprooted, every tree cut down.

  After the evacuation, Home Office gangs had cleared the hotel, as well as the rest of Sert, of anything likely to aid an escape attempt. Officially this meant any object that might be used in the construction of a boat. In practice it gave the gangs licence to destroy whatever they felt like destroying. Of all the buildings on the island, only the warden’s bungalow had escaped the spree, and then only because he had remained there until the last possible moment.

  The hotel had served the Home Office men as a billet, so it had not fared as badly as, for example, the lighthouse. Nonetheless, before leaving, they had removed entirely the upper floor and, as a parting gesture, had set fire to the remainder.

  Since then the hotel had been assailed by the inmates themselves. That so much had survived this long was due in large measure to the old-fashioned values of the craftsmen who had built it, and in the rest to the fact that it had quite early been taken over by Alexander Peto for his residence.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Peto sat down on his bench overlooking the quay. Once he was seated, Obie, Desborough and Brookes sat down too, at their accustomed places, on the boulders set there for the purpose.

  This was where Peto held his council, in imitation, Obie supposed, of the Father, the hated Franks. Not that anyone in Old Town cared what Peto or his council said. All that could be claimed for Peto’s town was that its inhabitants had reached the unspoken agreement that, while there, they tried to refrain from attacking one another. The same agreement obtained in Houlihan’s rival camp at the lighthouse.

  The population of each camp varied between a hundred and a hundred and fifty. Men went from one to the other just as they pleased; or joined the utter outcasts who, alone or in pairs, lived wild.

&nbs
p; Obadiah Walker had managed to survive in Peto’s shadow. For a while he had been his reluctant bed-mate; but now Desborough had come along and that had changed.

  Peto squinted down at the harbour, at the pale line of beach curving away to the right. From here virtually the whole town could be seen. What could not be seen, behind the hotel and the hillside rising above it, two and a half kilometres away round the coast, was the stained white tower of the lighthouse; but Obie could guess well enough what Peto was thinking.

  Without moving his head, Peto said, “Houlihan’s gone too far.”

  Obie silently agreed. He was surprised how well Peto was managing to contain his rage.

  “We’s going to have to do something.”

  “He wants us to, of course.”

  “And after all that shite last spring,” Desborough said, meaning the protracted negotiations about territory and grazing.

  “I say get him back,” Brookes said. “Go direct. Just take him.”

  Peto treated him to a moment’s disdain. “The question is, if we don’t do nothing, what’ll he do next?”

  Obie had made the discovery earlier that morning. Peto’s prize billy had been stolen from behind the hotel, its tether cleanly cut. Peto doted on the animal, and had even bestowed on it a name – “Billy”. This, while none too imaginative, in Obie’s view, was a measure of Peto’s fondness, for none of the other goats had been so honoured. Peto liked to watch Billy in action and drew vicarious pleasure from his performances. Billy’s offspring always received preferential treatment, and indeed he had contributed in no small measure to the steady improvement in the Old Town flock. And now he was gone.

  There were four possible explanations. The first was that one or more of the wild men had taken him. But the wild men did not breed goats. They hunted the goats which, like themselves, roamed wild. It would be an act of senseless bravado for a wild man to enter Peto’s private ground to steal something he could come by at no risk.