‘Please don’t do this,’ he says, visibly distressed. ‘Please … Look. Look, you have a few days grace to think about it. I’ll … I’ll do my best for you, Ms Doherty, that’s a promise.’
‘But, sir,’ her voice cracks, ‘it’s the truth, sir!’
‘But it’s not!’ he cries. ‘If only you could be honest. Don’t you want to live?’
She stumbles forward, stretching out to him, because he cares, she can see that, the distress clear in every line of his ageing face.
‘Get back!’ he says. ‘Guards! I’ve heard enough lying for one day. Guards!’
The two men arrive to drag her out the door.
Infestation
Anto doesn’t know what he’s doing in the country-side. Only a few hours before, he was waiting at the bus station for his girlfriend. But the guards who drove him out of the city have just pushed him through the door of a long low building. It’s warm inside and damp with the exhalations of two dozen … soldiers. That’s what they are. Men and women hurriedly checking weapons and stuffing kitbags.
Once, before the age of ten, the whole scene would have excited him. But he’s past that. All that matters now is that Nessa isn’t here. His arms, made to fight for her, to hold her, hang uselessly.
The draught of his entrance hits the soldiers. As one, they look up. The noise of their preparations, the hum of their chatter, comes to a sudden stop. His cheeks grow hot under their scrutiny.
Anto has seen soldiers before. They’re not supposed to wear their hair long like this lot, or to stuff their belts with so many wicked-looking knives. In his experience, they’re pudgy old men going to seed guarding warehouses; trudging alongside convoys of food making their way into the fading cities. But while many in the room have long seen the back of their thirtieth birthday – sporting scars, missing fingers or even ears – they look as trim as any teenager. They seem both frightening and frightened. How strange. The Call did its worst to them long ago. What could possibly worry them now?
They wear tattered uniforms of mottled green, and every one of them has a Stag’s Head on the shoulder. At least it resembles a stag, although Anto has never heard of deer with blazing red eyes and long, sharp teeth.
A woman at the nearest table looks up and sighs dramatically. ‘Oh, my poor sweetheart, were you looking for the playground?’
She stalks over to him. Her middle-aged frame has more than its share of muscle, and her dark-skinned face is hard too, totally at odds with the way she speaks, for her voice, her accent, belong surely to a white woman in petticoats, playing cards and sipping tea while her husband administers an empire.
She makes as if to shoo him towards the door, but then her eyes reach his left arm and widen.
‘Well, well,’ she whispers. ‘You are an odd little gentleman. Corless!’ The last word is a bark that makes Anto jump. It summons a hulking, scary-looking man with a charcoal cross drawn or maybe carved on to his forehead.
‘Sergeant?’ he rumbles.
‘Do let the good captain know that we have received a … a boy. By mistake.’
He lumbers off, utterly obedient to her ridiculously genteel demand. When she turns back to Anto, he spots three words tattooed in a column under her left eye. He’s heard of this custom, but never seen it. They’ll be the names of her children. The ones who didn’t come home. He forces himself to look away; he doesn’t want to read what’s written there.
Her dark eyes bore into him. ‘You dear little thing,’ she mutters. ‘You can’t be more than fifteen.’
‘Sixteen,’ he lies, and has no idea why he did that. Maybe because she’s so beautiful and scary at the same time. Like the Sídhe are, but the opposite of them too, for she is clearly ageing.
‘You’ve been trained to run, little boy,’ she continues, ‘and how delightful for you! Yet here …’ she has been speaking English up to this point, but switches now to Sídhe, ‘here we hunt a different type of boar. Here we—’
‘Leave him alone, Karim!’
A new man, tall enough for his head to scrape the low roof, has arrived. Old enough that sagging eyebrows threaten to blind him. Everybody moves out of his way though. Everybody except Sergeant Karim. He doesn’t seem to notice and steps around her as he would a particularly jagged piece of furniture.
‘The new recruit,’ he says.
‘A recruit, Captain? Surely not. He claims he’s sixteen. The infestation squad is no place for tiny children, however delightful they may be.’
‘What’s that to you, Sergeant?’ She grates on him, Anto can see that. ‘What’s that to any of us? Orders say he’s coming along tonight.’
‘But he’s staying in the truck, Captain.’
‘Of course. The boy can be the new mascot for all I care.’
The captain points Anto to an empty bench. ‘You sit there, son, until we’re ready to leave.’
‘I … I was told I had a mission.’
‘Were you, by God? A mission? Fair play to you, son. Stay the feck out of the way and do exactly what you’re told. That can be your mission. Understand?’
No. Anto doesn’t understand, but he does obey. He can’t make head nor tail of anything here. Not the gleaming weapons or the nerves. Not his presence either, because what Karim said is true. He doesn’t belong here, not for many years yet. His youth is an incredibly valuable resource in a dying country that can’t afford to waste anything.
He should be learning mechanics or farming. He should be getting married and having as many children as possible – or so the State would like. That’s what it normally demands, and the pressure it brings to bear to ensure such behaviour can be considerable. Not that anybody would have to pressure Anto! Now that he has found Nessa, he wants to do all those things.
The only purpose he could serve in a place like this is to get in the way. Sergeant Karim has made that very clear.
‘All right!’ the captain calls now.
And everybody except Anto knows what he means. Faces grim, they troop out the doors and into three trucks, each decorated with the disturbingly red-eyed stag. Engines sputter into life and the fried-food smell of bio-diesel clogs the air.
‘Come along, boy,’ says Sergeant Karim.
Anto is pushed into the last truck and shoved along like baggage until he’s right up behind the driver’s cab. He can hear the captain’s voice coming in over the radio. ‘Move out!’
And then, it’s off into the night. The soldiers whisper to each other in a bizarre mix of English and Sídhe and made-up words of their own. One of them, a skinny man with the twitching manner of a rat, pokes Anto in his massive left shoulder. ‘Did it hurt?’
Anto nods. It felt like his arm was being ripped off, not just once, but for the entire time the Sídhe woman was touching him. Her smile grew as she tortured him, and she whispered, ‘How marvellous! A giant! How I have longed for a giant of my own!’ Those are the words he hears in his dreams, and more than once he has woken in the stink of his own urine.
He doesn’t want to say any of that to the skinny man, but he doesn’t have to.