The Penal Colony

by Richard Herley

Then Thaine said, “Bravo, Routledge.”

  “Yes,” Appleton said. “That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

  “Very well,” Franks said, after a moment. “If that’s the sentiment, who am I to demur? The project continues.”

  The meeting broke up. Routledge put his chair back on its stack and was about to leave the laboratory when Franks called out to him. “A word with you, please, Routledge.”

  Once the Council members had dispersed, Franks led Routledge into the adjoining office. Routledge felt as if he should pinch himself: he could not believe that the events of the morning were really happening to him. It seemed not to be an hour or two, but several days, since he had been out on Beacon Head with Appleton and the others, since he had plotted the positions of the lightships.

  The map and its perspex sheet had been hurriedly dumped inside the door. “Shall I put it back on the wall?” Routledge said, almost overwhelmed by a sense of the privilege of being invited alone into the Father’s office.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Franks said. In his desk drawer he found a small screwdriver.

  Had it been this morning, in the laboratory, when Franks, perhaps impressed by Routledge’s single-minded devotion to the project, had decided to mark him out for elevation? Or had he been watching him for longer than that, for the entire time he had been in the Community?

  They laid the map on the sheet and raised it into place. While Routledge held the perspex steady, Franks got on a chair and fixed the three uppermost screws. Without warning, as he stood down, he said, “I want you to serve on the Council. You will be subordinate to Mitchell. Is that all right by you?”

  Routledge scarcely knew how to answer. “I’m honoured,” he managed to say. Such a phrase had never passed his lips in earnest before.

  “You shouldn’t be. Make no mistake, Routledge, if what Walker says is true, we’re up the creek. We’re going to need all the brain-power we can get. Mr Godwin first drew you to my attention. He thinks pretty highly of you.”

  “Really?”

  “And I see Thaine has finally taken a bit of a shine to you.”

  “He has?”

  “Didn’t you notice the way you were addressed?”

  “I … yes.” He remembered now.

  Franks gestured at the smaller and shabbier of the two armchairs in the room. Routledge nervously sat down, wishing that the moulded soles of his workboots were not quite so encrusted with the red clifftop mud.

  “Drink? It’s nearly lunchtime.”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Beer? Whisky?”

  “Whatever you’ve got, Father.”

  “Whisky, then.”

  As Franks went to a steel cabinet and poured the drinks, Routledge looked out of the French windows at the garden, where Godwin, balding and round-shouldered, wearing his waxed cotton jacket, was even now heading back towards his workshop. So he had recommended Routledge to the Father. As with King, as with so many others in the Village, Routledge now felt ashamed of his first impression of the man.

  “Just a general chat about the way the Council works,” Franks said, once he had given Routledge a glass and sat down himself. “Normally the meetings are a bit more lively than the one you saw this morning. But, as I say, these are difficult times.”

  Routledge’s anxiety got the better of him and he interrupted with the single most important question he wanted to ask. “Father, when you said we were going to concentrate on the defence of the Community, what exactly did you mean?”

  “You’re wondering how we can defend ourselves against the potential force of both the towns.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re thinking the crossbows are all we have, those and better discipline?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s true we’re in trouble if the outsiders get together. Deadly serious trouble.” Franks sampled his whisky. “But all is not lost if they do. Thanks to Randal Thaine, we’ve got another ace up our sleeve besides that weedkiller.”

  6

  Routledge was sitting with his feet up against the edge of the fireplace, head back, half dozing, listening to the sleet on the roof and on the shutters of his house. The suggestion of a smile crossed his lips as he replayed in his mind what he could remember of the closing moves: he had finally drawn a game of chess with King. Only just. But he had drawn it all the same.

  For once he had lit the fire. While playing, he and King had eaten a hot supper and drunk tea. At nine o’clock King had retired to his own house. After that Routledge had re-read today’s letter from Louise and examined the photos of Christopher she had sent. She had written the previous week as well, and the one before that. It seemed after all that she was going to keep her promise and continue writing. Her wedding had been three weeks ago, at the beginning of February.

  In the firelight Routledge examined his watch. Ten-forty.

  He looked round once more and saw that now at last he was being observed. The man in the sleeping-bag, his new ward, had regained consciousness. Twenty-six years of age, pale and gaunt, he had been convicted of murder during the execution of an armed robbery.

  Routledge stood up.

  The new man was regarding him with dread, but made no attempt to struggle. What was going on behind those eyes? What did he make of his host? What impression had he gained of the room, the fire, the smell of stale fulmar oil which Routledge himself no longer even noticed? As Routledge approached he was struck by the comparison between the way he himself was now and the way he must have been last July when he had awoken at King’s. Had he been like this man? Yes, looking back, he realized he had. Except that he had been, if anything, even worse, even more frightened.

  “It’s all right,” Routledge said. “Don’t worry. You’re safe.”

  The man did not reply.

  Routledge said, “What’s your name?”

  “Where am I?”

  “I ask the questions. Your name.”

  “Vic.”

  “Vic what?”

  “Vic Prine.”

  “From where?”

  “Lewisham.”

  “From which prison?”

  “Dartmoor. Dartmoor. I was at Dartmoor.”

  “Well, Mr Prine, I’m afraid to tell you you’ve landed up on Sert.”

  Prine tried not to show any reaction. “Yeah, well,” he said.

  He allowed himself to be removed from the sleeping-bag. A large, dark, and malodorous stain had spread from the centre of the quilting. He had urinated in his sleep.

  “I couldn’t help myself,” he said.

  For a moment Routledge thought he was going to offer resistance, but then his knees buckled and he half collapsed on the floor. Routledge lifted him easily and sat him on the edge of the spare bed. “Do you want to throw up?”

  Prine shook his head.

  Routledge introduced himself and brought Prine a comb, the washbowl, and a pair of his own trousers, some grey corduroys long past their best.

  Like patrol duty, the work of acting as guardian to new arrivals was shared equally throughout the Community. Villagers who had once acted as guardian to a successful entrant were, if they wished, thereafter exempted.

  Because the new man had awoken before midnight, Appleton agreed to conduct the initial interview straight away. Routledge sat in the place Mitchell had occupied during his own first interview and delivered Mitchell’s lines.

  Now that he served on the Council, Routledge’s eyes had been opened to the way the Village was administered. As he had suspected, outgoing mail was indeed vetted. This he regarded as a sensible and necessary precaution in the endless struggle to keep the Prison Service and hence also the outsiders at bay.

  The interview procedure was part of this struggle. Having selected suitable applicants, it recruited only the cleverest, fittest, and luckiest arrivals and discarded the rest. Properly fed and clothed, armed, and with a high morale, a community of such men was more than a match for a larger and less disciplined force. Unfort
unately the combined size of the two outsider camps had now outweighed even this advantage.

  So far there had been only one report from Obie, according to which Martinson was lying low before attempting to assassinate both Nackett and Houlihan in the spring. Another possibility was that he was lying low because the plot had been invented by Obie purely to save his own neck. Nothing Foster had observed had given any credence to Obie’s claims.

  Nevertheless, for the past two months the Village had been preparing for invasion. Franks had revealed to the Council his thoughts on defence and detailed plans had been drawn up. Every second man had been issued with a prong-barbed spear, the shafts fashioned from willow or holly and the blades forged in the metalwork shop using scrap steel. Some of these weapons, Routledge learned, had been made as long as two years ago, and had been lying in store in the bungalow roof-space. Spare hoes, axes, hatchets, machetes, had been honed to extra sharpness. Thaine had designed battle-hammers made of lumps of rock some fifteen centimetres in diameter, held in barbed wire netting attached to a couple of metres of nylon rope. Twenty of these had so far been completed.

  However many weapons the Village possessed, Routledge knew, as did everyone else, that nothing could compensate for lack of numbers. This was a problem Franks had foreseen right from the start, but short of murdering failed applicants or risking Service intervention by launching an unprovoked attack on Old Town or the lighthouse, there had been no solution to it.

  In recent weeks, though, another change in the intake procedure had been made. The period outside, at first reduced, had been reluctantly abandoned. Prine, though he did not know it, no longer faced the experience that Routledge and most of the villagers had endured. Instead, if he were otherwise qualified and if he wished, he would serve a probationary period inside the Village, working on the land, living in virtual isolation from everybody but his guardian and fellow probationers and one or two others selected by Appleton. At the end of this period the full Council would meet and decide whether the newcomer should be admitted to the Community, or expelled.

  At a prearranged point near the end of the interview, Routledge conducted Prine from the room and left him in Talbot’s care. When Routledge returned to the laboratory, Appleton and Stamper were already deeply in discussion.

  “Well, Routledge?” Appleton said. “What do you make of him?”

  As a child, Routledge had relied on his own judgement of the people he had met, forming in a matter of moments an assessment which had invariably proved right. Later in his life he had doubted the validity of these snap judgements and had suffered as a result. Since coming to Sert he had found himself slowly regaining confidence in this primitive faculty. First impressions were all that counted. In a place like this you could not afford to give anybody more than the benefit of a single chance.

  “Mr Prine’s all right,” Routledge said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on him, but eventually he’ll be trustworthy.”

  Both Appleton and Stamper were of a like mind. The final word would belong to the Father, who would interview him tomorrow.

  “What probation shall we recommend?” Appleton said.

  “Six weeks,” Stamper said.

  “Routledge?”

  “I suggest two months.”

  “That sounds more like it,” Appleton said. “I’ll mention two months to the Father. Are we agreed, then, Stamper? Good.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One sunny Monday afternoon nearly a fortnight later, Routledge and Thaine set out with Daniels’s beachcombers for the rocks below Azion Point. There were twenty-three in the party, carrying plastic sacks and lengths of cord. Under his PVC slicker raincoat Routledge, like Thaine, was also bearing a bag containing tools, water, and food.

  Yesterday and last night there had been another big gale and, though the wind had now lost half its strength, it was still blowing hard from the south-south-east.

  Skirting the Warrens, the group passed the thatch-roofed chapel and started along the cliffs, coming at last full into the wind.

  The gale had swept all impurities before it. Today there seemed no limit to vision; the eyesight went on and on, effortless, indivisible from the brilliance and clarity of the sky. Across the huge, discoloured contours of the swell Routledge could see detail and colour on the heaving superstructure of the lightship. Red hull, white girders. The crew had been evacuated on Saturday; it was astonishing that the ship was still there at its moorings, riding the chains.

  Astonishing too that the gulls had survived the storm. They were always here, always patrolling, evil Sert’s familiars. Among the thrift and stonecrop of the cliffs they raised their young and taught them the harsh basics of the law, expressed in the pinpoint pupil of a small and merciless yellow eye. No meat, dead or alive, was too vile to be disregarded. In the snowy luxury of their plumage they seemed angels of perfect grace. Always clean, always pure, they yet made no secret of the way they lived. Routledge had come to admire them. Talbot had taught him how to identify the usual sorts: herring, common, black-headed, great and lesser black-backed, how to tell these from the gentler kittiwakes of the colonial cliffs. Glaucous and Iceland gulls were occasional visitors, and one member of the bird-watching club had last January seen a rare Sabine’s gull.

  Just beyond the path, over empty space, a sparse, irregular procession of herring gulls and great blackbacks, adults and immatures, was drifting majestically on the updraught, spilling air, sliding across the wind. From time to time as a bird overtook the beachcombing party it might turn its head for an indifferent glance of inspection, but mostly the men were ignored.

  Daniels led the way. The climb down from Azion Point was not difficult, and they were soon on the beach which, now at low tide, lay almost fully exposed. The surf was wild and violent, intensely white, broken above the rocks into sticky spray which the wind carried onshore.

  The beach had been strewn overnight with dark masses of weed, their holdfasts dislodged or the stems simply snapped by the force of the storm. Scammell immediately found a broken hatch-cover, too big to be carried with the party, which he and Routledge rested at the base of the cliff for recovery later.

  “Should do well today,” Scammell said, bending to retrieve a capless shampoo bottle in pink, much-weathered polythene. The label, although faded almost to extinction, still bore the image of a seductive auburn-haired woman. “Wouldn’t say no to a bit of that,” he said, showing it to Routledge.

  “No. Nor me.”

  The image rather resembled Louise. No: it resembled her photographs. Routledge realized with a shock that he had forgotten what the real Louise looked like. He could describe her to himself, list her attributes, but when he tried to picture her face he failed. She had been, she was, the love of his life, and he could no longer even recall what she looked like.

  Scammell unceremoniously flung the bottle into the open mouth of his sack.

  Christopher he could remember. Christopher in nappies, Christopher at the school gate, Christopher in his pyjamas, tucked up in bed after his bath and his story. “Good night, Daddy.” That was the last time Routledge had seen his son, on the eve of the half-term holiday, on the Thursday before the arrest.

  Whatever else happened, if Routledge did ever manage to get away from this place, he would make sure he saw Christopher once more. When the boy was eighteen or nineteen he would somehow get in touch and send him an airline ticket. Brazil. That’s where Routledge had decided to go. Among the chaos and suffering of the Amazon frontier there would be complete anonymity, especially for a fugitive who no one in officialdom even knew was missing: the escapers, one by one, would be reported dead by those left behind.

  In the Brazilian lumber camps, on the new highways, there would be work and money for a man who knew one end of a site from another. After a year or two of that, when Routledge had amassed some savings, who knew where he might go and what he might do?

  Together with virtually everyone else in the Village, Routledge had not let his
slim chances of a place on the ketch deter him from dreaming of escape. The lottery was to be held on Good Friday, 10 April, which was now just over a month away. On 1 May, if all went to plan, the ketch would be ready to leave. The state of the tide and the phase of the moon would be propitious then. But if the sky was clear, or the seas were too heavy, launch could be delayed until the 3rd. And that was the latest date. The next window for possible departure would be at the next new moon, and by then a new radar system at Cork Harbour would make a secret landing at Courtmacsherry out of the question.

  10 April. Thirty-three days to go. A maximum of fifty-six to the launch. He knew the numbers so well he had almost begun counting the hours.

  His reverie was interrupted by the sight ahead of a short length of sea-faded orange line, which he picked up and slipped in his sack.

  The beachcombing party gradually followed the shore north-eastwards. Some of the driftwood was oiled and good only for fuel, but Reynolds found an excellent pallet, barely stained, and Bryant uncovered a beam of what appeared to be mahogany. This, like the pallet and the hatch-cover Scammell had found, was placed under the cliffs to be collected later by donkey-cart.

  When the party finally reached Star Cove the sun had long since sunk past the end of Azion Point, leaving the beach in cold shadow.

  Without changing their pace, the men continued searching the shore. Ahead, less than two hundred metres away, jutted a small outcrop. Behind this the beach was relatively smoother and more sloping; behind this lay the dark, overhung entrance of the cave.

  The vault of the sky, its blue yielding to the violet grey that preceded dusk, was so clear that, with a telescope, one might almost have expected to glimpse the sun reflected on the body of the satellite.

  The outcrop slowly approached. To get round it the group split into single file, Thaine and Routledge near the middle, clambering over the boulders, occasionally dislodging smaller rocks with a dry, hollow clatter; on the other side their boots crunched on the shells and cobbles of the beach.

  The cave mouth had come at last into view. About three and a half metres high at the middle point and five metres wide, it owed its existence to the same geological folding which had formed the cave where Routledge had taken shelter during his period outside, and which had been responsible for the vast plates and fissures he had seen on his first-ever view of the cliffs.