Free Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

produce, all the syrups and ketchups and brines, that he could stand. He wanted nothing so much as fresh food. He loved the dubious Mancreu cheeses and the dry sesame biscuits which went with them. He loved the oily sardines and goat-knuckle stews, the mashed roots and flatbreads which were the island’s staples. He ate whatever was in season and whatever was for sale and thought himself in paradise. Anything so long as he never had to swallow another mouthful from a tin.
    They had therefore evolved a practice suited to their likes. The boy would arrive with fruit, cheese, and bread, and the Sergeant would supply baked beans. They would begin by toasting the bread over a pocket gas burner and warming some beans for the boy. Each would make some disparaging face in the direction of his friend’s meal, and then they would sit in loud, masticatory silence for a while, and then speak of whatever might be on their minds.
    The Sergeant extended the plate of warmed beans, and the boy took them. He ate one mouthful, and then the next. He seemed to be worried that the heating had been uneven, because he was touching each heaped spoon with the tip of his tongue, like a lizard. The Sergeant took a big bite of cheese and bread.
    After a while – it was quite in keeping with the moment, he hoped, not an imposition but a natural thing to do – the Sergeant spoke.
    ‘Do you have . . . family?’
    The boy shook his head gravely. ‘I am too young.’
    A lack of precision could take you to some strange places with a child living on Mancreu, where anything was possible.
    ‘I mean parents. Brothers and sisters. Uncles, even.’
    ‘Aunts and cousins and bears, oh my!’ He grinned.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Sure. Of course.’ He made an encompassing gesture. Mancreu life: everyone is family. If you live in the same street or on the same farm, you’re cousins or brothers. An older man is an uncle if he functions as an uncle.
    ‘Blood family?’
    ‘Someplace.’
    ‘But here?’
Who takes care of you apart from me? Who’s missing you, right now? Where are you when you’re not with me?
He felt like a jealous husband. Or how he imagined it would be to be one.
    The boy shrugged his private shrug, or perhaps it was merely that his mind had wandered, for the next thing he said was that he had heard the British government had captured a flying saucer in the early part of the 1900s, and did the Sergeant know anything about it? Would the Queen know? Or would it be hidden away from everyone, the way the Roswell saucer was at Area 51? The Sergeant answered these questions with the same serious attention he would have given to anything the boy said, as if they were entirely reasonable and not at all preposterous, and after a while longer watching the waves they went back the way they had come – if not together, then two men going in the same direction at the same time.
    They ended up, inevitably, at Shola’s. The Sergeant recognised by the boy’s heavy knapsack and his contemplative quiet that there was reading to be done. He had in his own pocket the paperback of
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, and was finding it entirely engrossing: ‘Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’ He therefore made his way to his own familiar seat, and the boy, without a backward glance, went to the bodyguard’s table, and spread out a sheaf of the work of the great Bendis, the bard of Cleveland. Shola obliged them both with quiet and what provisions they desired, and the common life of Mancreu came and went around them, until the day became the evening and the Sergeant’s left buttock began to ache in a way he could not any longer ignore. Age, he supposed, and bad furniture.
    Shola peered at the Sergeant, appearing to read something in his face which was both familiar and a little bit sad. ‘Anaesthetic,’ he offered. ‘Special Mancreu style.’ He produced a bottle from beneath the counter and poured himself