The Penal Colony

by Richard Herley

  As they fixed the first wire a tremendous gust took them unawares and tried to wrest the tarpaulin away. Thaine yelled with pain. The wire had snapped and gashed his hand. He lost his grip.

  The tarpaulin, flapping wildly and suddenly filled with its own huge, mysterious, and autonomous power, was like a broad blue monster unexpectedly come to life. It wanted to head inland, across the scrub and over the potato fields. Routledge was nothing, a trifle, an afterthought. It began pulling him along. He lost his balance, fell, and found himself being dragged through the prickles of the low gorse bushes which bordered the fields here.

  “Let go of it!” Thaine shouted. “Quick!”

  “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overtures of friendship which Routledge believed he had extended and which, at the first sign of indifference, had been withdrawn.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 Ojukwu 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,” Ojukwu 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 Ojukwu.

  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. Ojukwu’s craftsmanship was already paying dividends.

  Routledge remembered the skill and efficiency with which Ojukwu had set to work on his behalf. No payment had been asked for, none expected, yet Ojukwu 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 prop
erly done, demanded of the craftsman. Ojukwu 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 Ojukwu 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. Ojukwu’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 Ojukwu’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.

  11

  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.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally, wiping his finger on his trouser leg. “There’s so much bad blood, I don’t know if my boys’d go for it at all.”

  “It’s our only chance of getting him,” Martinson said.

  “Make no mistake. I hate that Liam Franks as much as you.”

  Impossible. Martinson’s hatred was both personal and impersonal, specific and general. As a representative of the other side, Franks was just about ideal. It was his race of bigheads that had always infested every position of authority and ease, exploited every opportunity, imposed their will on those unable to protect themselves. They ran the world. Franks had gathered about him all those on the island who shared the same trait, like that bighead Jenkins, the one who had stolen the crossbow and wrecked his house, the one whom he would have tracked down and killed had it not been for the fracas about the goats. Jenkins was on the list too, second only to Appleton.

  “What’s it to be?” Martinson said. “D’you want Nackett or not?”

  “I could get him myself. I nearly had him this morning.”

  “Yes, and five of your blokes topped in the process.”

  “Looking long-term, like,” Houlihan said, innocently enquiring, “what happens when you get ideas?”

  “I won’t get no ideas. Franks is all I want.”

  “That’s your word on it tonight. Tonight is tonight. Later is later. It could come down to it.”

  “You got to take a chance.”

  “Honest enough, anyhow.” Houlihan’s finger returned to his nose for a final brief visit. He glanced at Feely. “What d’you say to our friend’s scheme, Harold?”

  Feely shrugged and made a sputtering noise, the beginnings of a raspberry. “He’s got a point about joining forces. But then we’ve always known that. If you draw up a list of pros and cons, the co
ns always outweigh. Pro: we eliminate Franks. Pro: we get our deliveries back. Pro: we get the stuff in the Village. And that’s it. Con: we have to fight them. Not easy. They’ve got crossbows and God knows what else. They’re well organized, better than us. At the moment we get no bother from them at all. If Franks goes that might change. Con: we have to risk sovereignty over the lighthouse. Con: we have to forget our differences, and, as you say, Archie, there’s just too many old scores to settle for that. Then the last and biggest con of all, we have to trust the word of a nutter like Martinson here.”

  Yes, Feely, Martinson thought. Nutter. That’s what the shrinks reckoned. And that’s what you’ll reckon when I’m driving in the nails.

  The meeting was working out much as he had expected. The campaign would have been quicker and neater with Houlihan’s co-operation, but it was by no means essential. He might have counted on Feely to put the boot into his proposals: but Pope was another matter. Pope was less of a brown-nose, more representative of the rest of the brain gang, more realistic and pragmatic. Martinson had been studying him closely. It was early days yet. Probably best not to make a move too soon.

  “And Wayne,” Houlihan said. “Your opinion, please.”

  After a moment, Pope said, “It be nice to say goodbye to Dave Nackett.”

  “This is true,” Houlihan said. “This is very true. It wouldn’t be your personal ambition talking, would it now, Jim?”

  “I told you. I want Franks.”

  “And nothing else? Not even leadership of your illustrious borough? Nor even of mine? No, don’t answer that again.” He scratched his pate. “Let’s say you bod Mr Nackett anyway, just to show willing. Then if your boys make you boss, we’ll talk again.”

  “Do we want that?” Feely said, nervously. “Do we want Martinson in charge? At least we know Nackett’s little ways. He’s no worse than Peto.”

  “Be quiet, Harold.”