The Penal Colony (37 page)

“Well, Routledge?” Appleton said. “What do
you make of him?”

As a child, Routledge had relied on his own
judgement of the people he had met, forming in a matter of moments
an assessment which had invariably proved right. Later in his life
he had doubted the validity of these snap judgements and had
suffered as a result. Since coming to Sert he had found himself
slowly regaining confidence in this primitive faculty. First
impressions were all that counted. In a place like this you could
not afford to give anybody more than the benefit of a single
chance.

“Mr Prine’s all right,” Routledge said.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on him, but eventually he’ll be
trustworthy.”

Both Appleton and Stamper were of a like
mind. The final word would belong to the Father, who would
interview him tomorrow.

“What probation shall we recommend?” Appleton
said.

“Six weeks,” Stamper said.

“Routledge?”

“I suggest two months.”

“That sounds more like it,” Appleton said.
“I’ll mention two months to the Father. Are we agreed, then,
Stamper? Good.”

* * *

One sunny Monday afternoon nearly a fortnight
later, Routledge and Thaine set out with Daniels’s beachcombers for
the rocks below Azion Point. There were twenty-three in the party,
carrying plastic sacks and lengths of cord. Under his PVC slicker
raincoat Routledge, like Thaine, was also bearing a bag containing
tools, water, and food.

Yesterday and last night there had been
another big gale and, though the wind had now lost half its
strength, it was still blowing hard from the south-south-east.

Skirting the Warrens, the group passed the
thatch-roofed chapel and started along the cliffs, coming at last
full into the wind.

The gale had swept all impurities before it.
Today there seemed no limit to vision; the eyesight went on and on,
effortless, indivisible from the brilliance and clarity of the sky.
Across the huge, discoloured contours of the swell Routledge could
see detail and colour on the heaving superstructure of the
lightship. Red hull, white girders. The crew had been evacuated on
Saturday; it was astonishing that the ship was still there at its
moorings, riding the chains.

Astonishing too that the gulls had survived
the storm. They were always here, always patrolling, evil Sert’s
familiars. Among the thrift and stonecrop of the cliffs they raised
their young and taught them the harsh basics of the law, expressed
in the pinpoint pupil of a small and merciless yellow eye. No meat,
dead or alive, was too vile to be disregarded. In the snowy luxury
of their plumage they seemed angels of perfect grace. Always clean,
always pure, they yet made no secret of the way they lived.
Routledge had come to admire them. Talbot had taught him how to
identify the usual sorts: herring, common, black-headed, great and
lesser black-backed, how to tell these from the gentler kittiwakes
of the colonial cliffs. Glaucous and Iceland gulls were occasional
visitors, and one member of the bird-watching club had last January
seen a rare Sabine’s gull.

Just beyond the path, over empty space, a
sparse, irregular procession of herring gulls and great blackbacks,
adults and immatures, was drifting majestically on the updraught,
spilling air, sliding across the wind. From time to time as a bird
overtook the beachcombing party it might turn its head for an
indifferent glance of inspection, but mostly the men were
ignored.

Daniels led the way. The climb down from
Azion Point was not difficult, and they were soon on the beach
which, now at low tide, lay almost fully exposed. The surf was wild
and violent, intensely white, broken above the rocks into sticky
spray which the wind carried onshore.

The beach had been strewn overnight with dark
masses of weed, their holdfasts dislodged or the stems simply
snapped by the force of the storm. Scammell immediately found a
broken hatch-cover, too big to be carried with the party, which he
and Routledge rested at the base of the cliff for recovery
later.

“Should do well today,” Scammell said,
bending to retrieve a capless shampoo bottle in pink,
much-weathered polythene. The label, although faded almost to
extinction, still bore the image of a seductive auburn-haired
woman. “Wouldn’t say no to a bit of that,” he said, showing it to
Routledge.

“No. Nor me.”

The image rather resembled Louise. No: it
resembled her photographs. Routledge realized with a shock that he
had forgotten what the real Louise looked like. He could describe
her to himself, list her attributes, but when he tried to picture
her face he failed. She had been, she was, the love of his life,
and he could no longer even recall what she looked like.

Scammell unceremoniously flung the bottle
into the open mouth of his sack.

Christopher he could remember. Christopher in
nappies, Christopher at the school gate, Christopher in his
pyjamas, tucked up in bed after his bath and his story. “Good
night, Daddy.” That was the last time Routledge had seen his son,
on the eve of the half-term holiday, on the Thursday before the
arrest.

Whatever else happened, if Routledge did ever
manage to get away from this place, he would make sure he saw
Christopher once more. When the boy was eighteen or nineteen he
would somehow get in touch and send him an airline ticket. Brazil.
That’s where Routledge had decided to go. Among the chaos and
suffering of the Amazon frontier there would be complete anonymity,
especially for a fugitive who no one in officialdom even knew was
missing: the escapers, one by one, would be reported dead by those
left behind.

In the Brazilian lumber camps, on the new
highways, there would be work and money for a man who knew one end
of a site from another. After a year or two of that, when Routledge
had amassed some savings, who knew where he might go and what he
might do?

Together with virtually everyone else in the
Village, Routledge had not let his slim chances of a place on the
ketch deter him from dreaming of escape. The lottery was to be held
on Good Friday, 10 April, which was now just over a month away. On
1 May, if all went to plan, the ketch would be ready to leave. The
state of the tide and the phase of the moon would be propitious
then. But if the sky was clear, or the seas were too heavy, launch
could be delayed until the 3rd. And that was the latest date. The
next window for possible departure would be at the next new moon,
and by then a new radar system at Cork Harbour would make a secret
landing at Courtmacsherry out of the question.

10 April. Thirty-three days to go. A maximum
of fifty-six to the launch. He knew the numbers so well he had
almost begun counting the hours.

His reverie was interrupted by the sight
ahead of a short length of sea-faded orange line, which he picked
up and slipped in his sack.

The beachcombing party gradually followed the
shore north-eastwards. Some of the driftwood was oiled and good
only for fuel, but Reynolds found an excellent pallet, barely
stained, and Bryant uncovered a beam of what appeared to be
mahogany. This, like the pallet and the hatch-cover Scammell had
found, was placed under the cliffs to be collected later by
donkey-cart.

When the party finally reached Star Cove the
sun had long since sunk past the end of Azion Point, leaving the
beach in cold shadow.

Without changing their pace, the men
continued searching the shore. Ahead, less than two hundred metres
away, jutted a small outcrop. Behind this the beach was relatively
smoother and more sloping; behind this lay the dark, overhung
entrance of the cave.

The vault of the sky, its blue yielding to
the violet grey that preceded dusk, was so clear that, with a
telescope, one might almost have expected to glimpse the sun
reflected on the body of the satellite.

The outcrop slowly approached. To get round
it the group split into single file, Thaine and Routledge near the
middle, clambering over the boulders, occasionally dislodging
smaller rocks with a dry, hollow clatter; on the other side their
boots crunched on the shells and cobbles of the beach.

The cave mouth had come at last into view.
About three and a half metres high at the middle point and five
metres wide, it owed its existence to the same geological folding
which had formed the cave where Routledge had taken shelter during
his period outside, and which had been responsible for the vast
plates and fissures he had seen on his first-ever view of the
cliffs.

At the highest tides the sea almost entered
the cave. Below the mouth the beach sloped fairly sharply, devoid
now of any but trivial obstructions: for, one by one, under cover
of fog, the larger rocks had been levered up and rolled aside to
leave a narrow slipway nine metres long.

The beachcombers spread out. “See you
tomorrow, weather permitting,” Thaine said to Daniels, as he and
Routledge ducked under the overhang.

Betteridge and Chapman were waiting inside
the cave.

“How did it go?” Thaine asked Chapman, giving
him his beachcombing sack.

“Like a dream.”

Routledge handed his sack to Betteridge and
inspected the beginnings of the ketch. Chapman and Betteridge had
come down here last night, during the storm, and started the first
stage in the assembly process, fitting the heavy members of the
hull into the cradle of the building moulds which, when fitted with
wheels, would also serve as the launching trolley. The wheels had
come from a Ferguson tractor found abandoned after the evacuation
at the lighthouse. Until last autumn they had been on a horse-drawn
cart used for hauling crops. Perished now, the tyres were stuffed
with turf; Thaine had made the axles and bearings in his
workshop.

He and Routledge gave their coats to Chapman
and Betteridge and exchanged woollen hats. The two carpenters then
joined the others outside. Using a beachcombing party for the
changeover had been Routledge’s idea; normally all visits were
restricted to conditions of bad light, low cloud, or fog.

Thaine and Routledge set down their bags and
emptied their pockets of the nails, clench-rings and drift bolts
required for the next stage of construction. The light was
beginning to fail: Routledge hung a tarpaulin across the entrance
and Thaine lit the Tilley lamps. He also lit the paraffin stove to
heat water for coffee.

The back of the cave had been fitted with two
bunks, a bench, and a rack for the collection of tools which, like
the timbers and the pre-finished parts leaning against the cave
wall, had already been brought down from the Village.

Thaine cast a more detailed and critical eye
over the work.

“Everything all right?” Routledge said.

Thaine nodded, running his finger over the
finish of one of the scarf joints the carpenters had made.

He looked up and grinned. “Do you want to
know a secret, Routledge? I’m really beginning to believe this
harebrained scheme might even work.”

Routledge watched as Franks reached into the
cardboard box and drew out another slip, which he handed to
Appleton. In total silence the assembly waited for Appleton to
unfold the paper and speak the fifth name.

Routledge’s hands, fingers tightly crossed,
had been thrust deep in his jacket pockets.

It was nearly noon on the first day of
Easter, the ancient festival of rebirth. Like almost everyone in
the lottery, Routledge had hardly slept last night. At dawn he had
conducted Prine to the site of wall-repairs at one of the
south-west pastures, where Phelps and Rothstein and a couple of
others who had not entered the lottery were today supervising the
probationers. The weather then had been clear, with a chilly
north-east wind. At mid-morning the sky had clouded over. There had
been squalls of hail, rattling the corrugated plastic on the roof
of the carpentry shop, where the final prefabricated sections of
the ketch were being checked.

After the hail the sun had come out again.
Banks of cloud were now drifting south-westwards, out to sea. When
they uncovered the sun its rays felt warm. Spring had returned. In
three weeks it would be the first of May. Soon after that,
Routledge might be in Ireland, heading for the airport. Heading for
Brazil.

Appleton spoke the fifth name. “Mr
Blackshaw.”

From his place on the veranda, Routledge saw
Blackshaw standing near the back of the crowd, among members of his
congregation, which had half an hour earlier emerged from the Good
Friday service. Mouth wide, Blackshaw clapped a hand to his brow,
was patted and helped towards the veranda with envious but
congratulatory gestures.

Three to go. Three chances left. Three out of
a hundred and thirty-seven. The final figure for the draw had been
a hundred and forty-two. Some had dropped out; others had changed
their minds and decided to enter after all. The slips had been
prepared yesterday. The tombola drum was an ordinary clothes-issue
box with a hole cut in the top. The Father was being as fair as he
could, stirring the slips when he put his hand inside, taking his
time.

“Mr Peagrim.”

Overwhelmed, the barber came forward to the
rail of the veranda and joined the rest of the chosen ones:
Redfern, Carr, Thursby, Reynolds, Blackshaw.

Two chances left. Freedom, sweet freedom, two
whole chances away. Probability: 0.015. It was going to take a
miracle now. “O God,” Routledge thought. “You gave a place to
Blackshaw. Give one to me. Give one to me. Give one to me and I’ll
believe in you again.”

The upsurge of hope in the precinct became
almost tangible.

“Mr Gunter.”

It was then that Routledge knew that God
wasn’t listening. Knew that he didn’t exist. Routledge wasn’t
going. One place left. He would never get it. Once chance in a
hundred and thirty-five. He had never won anything in his life,
never would. The judge had been right. He would remain on Sert for
the rest of his days. The same feelings of doubt had already begun
to afflict some of those remaining in the body of the crowd, more
and more as Franks stirred the slips for the last time. He pulled
one out, gave it to Appleton.