Jani and the Greater Game (The Multiplicity Series Book 1) (4 page)

Alfie drowns his sorrows –

Fracas in Allahabad – Tomlinson the irredeemably stupid –

“They’re all pink where it matters...”

I
N
D
ELHI,
L
IEUTENANT
Alfie Littlebody slumped at the bar of the Officers’ Club and stared into his G&T.

A fan turned lazily on the ceiling, the blades not so much cooling the air as stirring the humidity. White-liveried servants moved among the officers and their wives and dance band music played on the wireless. Alfie’s glass was beaded with condensation, matching the perspiration that stippled his round, overweight face. For perhaps the fiftieth time that evening he mopped his brow and cursed the heat.

The damned thing was that he loved the country – it was just the climate he couldn’t stick. He liked the vibrant colours of the place, the amazing diversity, the odd amalgam in the Indian race of pragmatism and spirituality. He liked the incredible variety of the food and the geographical beauty of the subcontinent, especially the hill stations and highlands north of Delhi. He had dreamed as a young man of joining the army and coming to India, and it was all he’d ever hoped it would be: exotic, beautiful and mysterious. His father had expected Alfie to follow him into the Church, but he’d told his father that he wanted to be part of the Raj, to bring a little British fair play to the subcontinent. His father had smiled, in his wisdom, and given his only son his head. Alfie often recalled that tolerant smile, and the look in the old man’s eyes that knew the truth – a truth that had taken Alfie two years to work out for himself.

Those two years had seen a gradual erosion of his dreams. The British were not here to ensure fair play but to subjugate the country and its people. It had dawned slowly on Alfie that his fellow officers despised the average Indian. They ruled with a fist of steel in a velvet glove of ostensible decency. He had done his best to ignore the comments, the jibes made by his fellow officers at the expense of the educated Indians allowed into the Club on sufferance. He had turned away when his compatriots had sworn at and sometimes struck servants for perceived misdemeanours. He had never condoned their behaviour, but had done nothing to challenge it either.

And then the incident at Allahabad on Friday...

He drained his G&T, slammed it down on the bar and ordered a fourth.

“There you are, Littlebody!” Tomlinson cried, slapping him on the back. “Still moping?”

Alfie almost collapsed under the blow. “Christ, can’t you pack it in for once?”

“I say, I’m sorry, old man. Touched a raw nerve?” Tomlinson hitched himself onto a stool and called out, “Scotch on the rocks, Ali, and make it a bloody big one.”

Alfie winced. The old bar-tender’s name was Rajiv; he was Hindu.

“Look, moping about it isn’t the way, Alfie. Put it behind you. Chalk it up to experience and move on. We’ve all tasted the funk from time to time. Don’t let the fact that you ran away get you down.”

Alfie stared at the fatuous oaf. Tomlinson was an Old Etonian, which proved that while money could buy an education it could do nothing to instil intelligence.

“I was not,” Alfie said, “moping about the fact that I ran away.”

Tomlinson pursed his lips and nodded sagely. “Ah, say no more. I get the picture.”

Alfie blinked. “You do?”

“Of course!” Tomlinson took a swig of whisky and smacked his lips. “You’ve got the jitters because Sergeant Travers
saw
you skedaddle, what? Brigadier Cartwright’ll have your balls for breakfast!”

Alfie gripped his drink and knocked back most of it. He felt very drunk and very angry. “Listen, Tomlinson, you were there. You saw what happened. Good God, you were right beside me.”

“And I’m man enough to admit that when I saw that the natives were armed, I said a quick bloody prayer!” Tomlinson laughed. “But, you see, I had
confidence
.”

“Confidence?”

“Confidence, Alfie,” Tomlinson said, leaning forward and prodding Alfie in the chest with his forefinger, “in the efficacy of a little lead.”

“No, no...” Alfie began. “You don’t get my point. That’s not what I meant at all. I mean, look... I didn’t run away because I was
frightened
– though I admit that I was...”

It was Tomlinson’s turn to blink in confusion. “What? I’m afraid you’ve lost me, old boy. You were frightened, so you turned tail and ran.”

“Yes. No. I mean, I was scared, yes, but I ran because I... because I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

“Exactly. You thought the mob was about to get bolshy and attack and you thought, ‘every man for himself,’ and high-tailed it, what?”

Alfie closed his eyes. He wondered if it was his own drunken explanation that was not allowing Tomlinson to get the point, or if his fellow officer was irredeemably stupid.

“No, Tomlinson. Listen here, I ran only after
we
began firing, don’t you see? There we were, a platoon of heavily armed infantry up against, what? Fifty Nationalists armed with a few old Enfields, the odd revolver and a few scythes? It was a slaughter. We should never have opened fire. Christ, we should never had confronted the protest in the first place. It was sheer provocation.”

“I say, old boy, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it?” Tomlinson was visibly non-plussed, like a child being told that Father Christmas does not, in fact, exist. “I mean, they were a bunch of bloody armed natives. Nationalists, moreover. They got what was bloody well coming to them.”

Alfie murmured, “We killed thirty-five of them, Tomlinson.”

The officer slapped Alfie’s back again. “Well, in my opinion that’s thirty-five less of the troublemakers to worry about in future, hm?”

Alfie sipped his drink. “Did you see the look in their eyes?”

“Of course I did. They hate us, Alfie. Hate what we’re doing for them. They’d rather we left so they could take this damned hellhole back to the dark ages.”

Alfie focused on Tomlinson’s smiling face. “I mean – did you see them
after
we opened fire? The fear on their faces as they were slipping and sliding around in all the blood and trying to get away... My God, it’s something I’ll never forget.”

Tomlinson laid a solicitous hand on Alfie’s shoulder. “Look here, Alfie. A word of advice. When Cartwright drags you over the coals, not a dickey bird about all this ‘shouldn’t have opened fire’ business, hm? Better he thinks you’re a coward than a wog-lover, what?”

Alfie shook his head and downed his drink. “I don’t know...” At nine in the morning he was due to report to Brigadier Cartwright, and he despaired at the thought.

Tomlinson caught sight of Second Lieutenant Kemp across the mess and called out, “I say, Kemp. Over here, if you please. A word in your old shell-like.”

Kemp, a jolly roly-poly artillery officer from Devon, approached the bar and draped his arms around Tomlinson and Alfie’s shoulders. He was very drunk and used the pair to lodge himself upright.

“Whassat?”

“Young Littlebody here’s in a bit of a funk. Thinks the little fracas in Allahabad was bad form. Thinks we shouldn’t have shown the natives the old lead.”

Kemp looked incredulous. “What? The bastards were asking for it,
begging
for it, f’you ask me! Wanted... wanted to be made martyrs of, and all that.”

“You see?” Tomlinson said, nodding to Alfie as if Kemp’s dictum was the last word on the subject.

“But,” Kemp went on, massaging the supporting shoulders, “thass not why I’m here. Y’see, I’m planning a little trip down Thompson Street tomorrow. Men’s night out, get my meaning? And I thought... thought you jolly good chaps might like to come along. How about it?”

Alfie drained his glass and tried to slip out from under Kemp’s pressing arm. “Not for me thanks, Kemp.”

“What? Don’t tell me you don’t like the whores, Alfie? Granted, they might be darkies, but... but they’re all pink where it matters, y’know?”

“I really must be going. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night Tomlinson, Kemp.”

“Hey!” Tomlinson said, “Don’t run away like that!” He found the line incredibly funny and repeated it as Alfie hurried from the mess. “
Don’t run away...!
”

He left the club, the hubbub of conversation and dance music diminishing behind him as he stepped down from the verandah and wended his way homewards.

A full moon was out and the night was hot. A breeze, freighted with the heady scent of some tropical bloom, wafted down the quiet street. A rickshaw-wallah pulled up alongside him.

“You like ride, sahib? I make very good price, yes?”

“Thanks awfully, but it’s a very... a very short walk home.”

He considered, as he rounded the corner and approached the bungalow he shared with three other officers, the first and last time he’d accompanied Kemp and the others whoring on Thompson Street. He had found himself in a flimsy cubicle with a beautiful girl barely out of school... if she’d ever been to school in the first place. He’d given her ten rupees and tried to explain, when she attempted to unzip his flies and take him in her mouth, that he really didn’t want her to do that.

He reddened now, a year later, when he recalled his discomfort and subsequent embarrassed flight.

He saw the girl’s face now, demure and ineffably beautiful in the rose light of the bedside lamp.

He stopped in his tracks when he came upon a military police jeep parked outside the bungalow. A young officer was coming down the steps, tapping his thigh with his swagger stick.

“I say, Lieutenant Littlebody?”

Alfie’s stomach turned and he almost discharged the evening’s G&Ts at the feet of the policeman. “Yes?”

“Good show. Thought I’d missed you. Word from the Brigadier. He had to dash off on some emergency up north and he’ll be gone for a day. He said he’d see you at nine A.M. sharp, the day after tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Alfie said. A stay of execution, he thought – though he’d rather, on reflection, have got it out of the way in the morning.

Groaning, Alfie let himself into the bungalow and hurried to bed and the welcome oblivion of sleep.

CHAPTER

THREE

Search for survivors –

The strange creature – The arrival of the Russians –

“We’ll kill the old lady...”

T
HE FIRST THING
Jani noticed was the sunlight.

She was still seated in the armchair she had occupied last night, though now imprisoned beneath a settee that had closed over her like a lid. To her right, through the gap between the two clasped pieces of furniture, a piercing arrow of sunlight warmed her skin.

She heard birdsong, a sweet high trill, and thought she had never heard a sound so beautiful.

She was alive. The idea passed through her consciousness in an incredulous litany:
I am alive, I am alive...

She felt a dull throbbing pain in her right ankle, and another in the small of her back. She wondered if she had passed out with the impact and spent the night unconscious, or if she had somehow slept.