'No need for guns,' Tetelman murmured. The statement hung on the air like an unfulfilled promise.
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'Get rid of them without guns?' said Locke. 'If you mean waiting for them to die out naturally, I'm not that patient.'
'No,' said Tetelman, 'we can be swifter than that.' 'How?'
Tetelman gave the man a lazy look. 'They're my livelihood,' he said, 'or part of it. You're asking me to help you make myself bankrupt.'
He not only looks like an old whore, Locke thought, he thinks like one. 'What's it worth? Your wisdom?' he asked.
'A cut of whatever you find on your land,' Tetelman replied.
Locke nodded. 'What have we got to lose? Cherrick? You agree to cut him in?' Cherrick's consent was a shrug. 'All right,' Locke said, 'talk.'
'They need medicines,' Tetelman explained, 'because they're so susceptible to our diseases. A decent plague can wipe them out practically overnight.'
Locke thought about this, not looking at Tetelman. 'One fell swoop,' Tetelman continued. 'They've got practically no defences against certain bacteria. Never had to build up any resistance. The clap. Smallpox. Even measles.'
'How?' said Locke.
Another silence. Down the steps of the verandah, where civilization finished, the jungle was swelling to meet the sun. In the liquid heat plants blossomed and rotted and blossomed again.
'I asked how,' Locke said.
'Blankets,' Tetelman replied, 'dead men's blankets.'
A little before the dawn of the night after Stumpf s recovery, Cherrick woke suddenly, startled from his rest by bad dreams. Outside it was pitch-dark; neither
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moon nor stars relieved the depth of the night. But his body-clock, which his life as a mercenary had trained to impressive accuracy, told him that first light was not far off, and he had no wish to lay his head down again and sleep. Not with the old man waiting to be dreamt. It wasn't just the raised palms, the blood glistening, that so distressed Cherrick. It was the words he'd dreamt coming from the old man's toothless mouth which had brought on the cold sweat that now encased his body. What were the words? He couldn't recall them now, but wanted to; wanted the sentiments dragged into wakefulness, where they could be dissected and dismissed as
ridiculous. They wouldn't come though. He lay on his wretched cot, the dark wrapping him up too tightly for him to move, and suddenly the bloody hands were there, in front of him, suspended in the pitch. There was no face, no sky, no tribe. Just the hands.
'Dreaming,' Cherrick told himself, but he knew better.
And now, the voice. He was getting his wish; here were the words he had dreamt spoken. Few of them made sense. Cherrick lay like a newborn baby, listening to its parents talk but unable to make any significance of their exchanges. He was ignorant, wasn't he? He tasted the sourness of his stupidity for the first time since childhood. The voice made him fearful of ambiguities he had ridden roughshod over, of whispers his shouting life had rendered inaudible. He fumbled for comprehension, and was not entirely frustrated. The man was speaking of the world, and of exile from the world; of being broken always by what one seeks to possess. Cherrick struggled, wishing he could stop the voice and ask for explanation. But it was already fading, ushered away by the wild address of parrots in the trees,
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raucous and gaudy voices erupting suddenly on every side. Through the mesh of Cherrick's mosquito net he could see the sky flaring through the branches. He sat up. Hands and voice had gone; and with them all but an irritating murmur of what he had almost understood. He had thrown off in sleep his single sheet; now he looked down at his body with distaste. His back and buttocks, and the underside of his thighs, felt sore. Too much sweating on coarse sheets, he thought. Not for the first time in recent days he remembered a small house in Bristol which he had once known as home. The noise of birds was filling his head. He hauled himself to the edge of the bed and pulled back the mosquito net. The crude weave of the net seemed to scour the palm of his hand as he gripped it. He disengaged his hold, and cursed to himself. There was again today an itch of tenderness in his skin that he'd suffered since coming to the post. Even the soles of his feet, pressed on to the floor by the weight of his body, seemed to suffer each knot and splinter. He wanted to be away from this place, and badly.
\ warm trickle across his wrist caught his attention, and he was startled to see a rivulet of blood moving down his arm from his hand. There was a cut in the cushion of his thumb, where the mosquito net had apparently nicked his flesh. It was bleeding, though not copiously. He sucked at the cut, feeling again that peculiar sensitivity to touch that only drink, and that in abundance, dulled. Spitting out blood, he began to dress.
The clothes he put on were a scourge to his back. His sweat-stiffened shirt rubbed against his shoulders and neck; he seemed to feel every thread chafing his
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nerve-endings. The shirt might have been sackcloth, the way it abraded him.
Next door, he heard Locke moving around. Gingerly finishing his dressing, Cherrick went through to join him. Locke was sitting at the table by the window. He was poring over a map of Tetelman's, and drinking a cup of the bitter coffee Dancy was so fond of brewing, which he drank with a dollop of condensed milk. The two men had little to say to each other. Since the incident in the village all pretence to respect or friendship had disappeared. Locke now showed undisguised contempt for his sometime companion. The only fact that kept them together was the contract they and Stumpf had signed. Rather than breakfast on whisky, which he knew Locke would take as a further sign of his decay, Cherrick poured himself a slug of Dancy's emetic and went out to look at the morning.
He felt strange. There was something about this dawning day which made him profoundly uneasy. He knew the dangers of courting unfounded fears, and he tried to forbid them, but they were incontestable. Was it simply exhaustion that made him so painfully conscious of his many discomforts this morning? Why else did he feel the pressure of his stinking clothes so acutely? The rasp of his boot collar against the jutting bone of his ankle, the rhythmical chafing of his trousers against his inside leg as he walked, even the grazing air that eddied around his exposed face and arms. The world was pressing on him - at least that was the sensation - pressing as though it wanted him out.
A large dragonfly, whining towards him on iridescent wings, collided with his arm. The pain of the collision caused him to drop his mug. It didn't break, but rolled off the verandah and was lost in the undergrowth. Angered, Cherrick slapped the insect off, leaving a
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smear of blood on his tattooed forearm to mark the dragonfly's demise. He wiped it off. It welled up again on the same spot, full and dark.
It wasn't the blood of the insect, he realised, but his own. The dragonfly had cut him somehow, though he had felt nothing. Irritated, he peered more closely at his punctured skin. The wound was not significant, but it was painful.
From inside he could hear Locke talking. He was loudly describing the inadequacy of his fellow adventures to Tetelman.
'Stumpf s not fit for this kind of work,' he was saying. 'And Cherrick -'
'What about me?'
Cherrick stepped into the shabby interior, wiping a new flow of blood from his arm.
Locke didn't even bother to look up at him. 'You're paranoid,' he said plainly. 'Paranoid and unreliable.'
Cherrick was in no mood for taking Locke's foul- mouthing. 'Just because I killed some Indian brat,' he said. The more he brushed blood from his bitten arm, the more the place stung. 'You just didn't have the balls to do it yourself.'
Locke still didn't bother to look up from his perusal of the map. Cherrick moved across to the table.
'Are you listening to me?' he demanded, and added force to his question by slamming his fist down on to the table. On impact his hand simply burst open. Blood spurted out in every direction, spattering the map.
Cherrick howled, and reeled backwards from the table with blood pouring from a yawning split in the side of his hand. The bone showed. Through
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the din of pain in his head he could hear a quiet voice. The words were inaudible, but he knew whose they were.
'I won't hear!' he said, shaking his head like a dog with a flea in its ear. He staggered back against the wall, but the briefest of contacts was another agony. 7 won't hear, damn you!'
'What the hell's he talking about?' Dancy had appeared in the doorway, woken by the cries, still clutching the Complete Works of Shelley Tetelman had said he could not sleep without.
Locke re-addressed the question to Cherrick, who was standing, wild-eyed, in the corner of the room, blood spitting from between his fingers as he attempted to staunch his wounded hand. 'What are you saying?' 'He spoke to me,' Cherrick replied. 'The old man.' 'What old man?' Tetelman asked.
'He means at the village,' Locke said. Then, to Cherrick, 'Is that what you mean?'
'He wants us out. Exiles. Like them. Like them!' Cherrick's panic was rapidly rising out of anyone's control, least of all his own.
'The man's got heat-stroke,' Dancy said, ever the diagnostician. Locke knew better.
'Your hand needs bandaging . . .' he said, slowly approaching Cherrick.
'I heard him . . .' Cherrick muttered.
'I believe you. Just slow down. We can sort it out.'
'No,' the other man replied. 'It's pushing us out. Everything we touch. Everything we touch.'
He looked as though he was about to topple over, and Locke reached for him. As his hands made contact with Cherrick's shoulders the flesh beneath the shirt split, and Locke's hands were instantly soaked in scarlet. He
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withdrew them, appalled. Cherrick fell to his knees, which in their turn became new wounds. He stared down as his shirt and trousers darkened. 'What's happening to me?' he wept.
Dancy moved towards him. 'Let me help.'
'No! Don't touch me!' Cherrick pleaded, but Dancy wasn't to be denied his nursing.
'It's all right,' he said in his best bedside manner. It wasn't. Dancy's grip, intended only to lift the man from his bleeding knees, opened new cuts wherever he took hold. Dancy felt the blood sprout beneath his hand, felt the flesh slip away from the bone. The sensation bested even his taste for agony. Like Locke, he forsook the lost man.
'He's rotting,' he murmured.
Cherrick's body had split now in a dozen or more places. He tried to stand, half staggering to his feet only to collapse again, his flesh breaking open whenever he touched wall or chair or floor. There was no help for him. All the others could do was stand around like spectators at an execution, awaiting the final throes. Even Stumpf had roused himself from his bed and come through to see what all the shouting was about. He stood leaning against the door-lintel, his disease-thinned face all disbelief.
Another minute, and blood-loss defeated Cherrick. He keeled over and sprawled, face down, across the floor. Dancy crossed back to him and crouched on his haunches beside his head.
'Is he dead?' Locke asked.
'Almost,' Dancy replied.
'Rotted,' said Tetelman, as though the word explained the atrocity they had just witnessed. He had a crucifix in his hand, large and crudely carved. It looked like Indian handiwork, Locke thought. The Messiah impaled on the
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tree was sloe-eyed and indecently naked. He smiled, despite nail and thorn.
Dancy touched Cherrick's body, letting the blood come with his touch, and turned the man over, then leaned in towards Cherrick's jittering face. The dying man's lips were moving, oh so slightly.
'What are you saying?' Dancy asked; he leaned closer still to catch the man's words. Cherrick's mouth trailed bloody spittle, but no sound came.
Locke stepped in, pushing Dancy aside. Flies were already flitting around Cherrick's face. Locke thrust his bull-necked head into Cherrick's view. 'You hear me?' he said.
The body grunted.
'You know me?'
Again, a grunt.
'You want to give me your share of the land?' The grunt was lighter this time; almost a sigh.
There's witnesses here,' Locke said. 'Just say yes. They'll hear you. Just say yes.'
The body was trying its best. It opened its mourh a little wider.
'Dancy -' said Locke. 'You hear what he said?' Dancy could not disguise his horror at Locke's insistence, but he nodded.
