Tigerman Read Online Free Page A

you?’
    ‘I’m around,’ the boy said vaguely. ‘But there is n.p. – I do not collect them.’ The boy stopped, grinned. ‘That is not true! I do collect them. But to read, not like a crazy shut-in dude!’
    ‘I’ll get it back to you,’ the Sergeant promised.
    ‘
Kswah swah
,’ the boy replied with a shrug.
What happens, happens
. Very Mancreu. On the Arabian mainland they said
insh’Allah
– if God wills it. If God willed it, you might arrive punctually for your appointments, but generally He willed that you show up more or less on the same day. Time and matter were flexible; only God was real. On Mancreu, even God had somehow faded away. The universe was what it was, mutable and strange, and God had made it in His image, so He too was probably imponderable. The nature of His will varied from soul to soul, and what actually happened often wasn’t what anyone understood by it. Perhaps God, being everywhere and seeing all things from outside time, was incapable of willing anything which men could grasp as a plan.
    So
insh’Allah
seemed to suppose too much. On Mancreu, you just said:
what happens, happens
. It was practically the national anthem.
    When the Sergeant asked what to call him, the boy had glanced away and said ‘Robin.’ The Sergeant accepted the lie politely, but never adopted it, and as their acquaintanceship grew he avoided sentences that required him to use a name at all. In his mind, his friend was a unique identity, a presence which had no need of a borrowed label to encapsulate it.
    Today, with the image of the pelican and the pigeon still causing occasional head-shaking, they left the Land Rover across the road from the café and bowed each other mirthfully across the threshold. It was not unknown for them to spend twenty minutes doing this, each insisting that the other go first, making more and more outrageous speeches of diplomatic deference. Today, though, they merely tussled, the boy shouting ‘Put up your dukes!’ and jabbing inexpertly at the Sergeant’s stomach until the man acknowledged himself subdued into accepting the honour and entering ahead of his friend. He paused two steps inside to allow his eyes to adjust.
    Physically, the café was a single rectangular room, but it had the appearance of an L-shape because one corner was taken up by a rather grand wooden staircase that Shola had salvaged from a defunct hotel. The bar was topped with a sheet of folded copper, very worn and very much polished, and the tables were a hodgepodge of round and square. The rickety chairs were moved from one place to another by customers as they came and went, so that only when the café was absolutely full did anyone have to sit on the perilous yellow typist’s stool which Shola kept folded by the bar. Along the walls of the room were benches made from driftwood, silvered and polished smooth by years of slithering backsides.
    In the crook of the staircase, with a patrician view of the door and the bar, there was the
shtammteh
, the table which was by common understanding Shola’s own. It was never reserved. It was simply not somewhere you sat unless you were invited. Even the boy and the Sergeant, upon arrival, made a show of dithering and finding a suitable place, and then Shola came and chided them and moved them to the
shtammteh
to take their tea with him.
    The new delivery must just have arrived, because Shola served them a rich gunpowder tea which they had never had before, demanding to know what they thought of it. The Sergeant held a long swallow in his mouth, the perfect temperature baking his gums but not burning them, warming his throat and making his whole body feel cooler. He tasted pepper and smoke and the smell of snow. This was not tea. It was something else, a kind of elixir. It was what tea aspired to be.
    ‘It’s good,’ he said, and saw Shola’s mouth twitch in a smile.
    The boy rolled his eyes. ‘He means totally awesome. This tea is made from hunnertenpercent