The Butt (15 page)

Me too, Tom thought. Me too. And as the rain had started again, he put on the wipers.

They drove in silence for the next three hours. Route 1, after undulating over the outliers of the Great Dividing Range, settled down on to the lowlands plains. On each side of the road there were dense fields of spear-leafed sugarcane, the rows of which strobed by in a greenish blur. The rain petered out after an hour or so, leaving wraiths of mist clinging to the cane fields. The occasional clapboard shack, raised on stilts, that loomed up had the deathly aspect of a sudden apparition.

Narrow-gauge railtracks crossed the road at intervals, along which clattered locomotives pulling wagonloads of cut cane: so much sweetness, Tom though, in such a sour place. He had to stop for these trains, but when he saw a road-train, either ahead or in the rear-view, he had to pull right off the blacktop, so as to avoid being crushed as flat as roadkill when the three – or even four – semi-trailers came roaring past.

It was at once tedious and nerve-racking driving for Tom; while, as navigator, Prentice had nothing whatsoever to do. There was only one interprovince highway: this was it, they were on it; and would remain on it through a thousand kilometres of cane country, a thousand of hill country, and a further two thousand of desert before they reached the Tontine Townships. Here Tom would leave Prentice and make a left.

The SUV rollicked down into the broad creek bottoms, and rattled acrosss the bridges of railway ties with a reassuring hum of its tyres. Tom, despite the need for intermittent tricky manouevres, lapsed into that waking dream that is the virtuality of long-distance driving.

Besides, he had driven Route 1 before, with his family, up to the lodge in the cloud forest and then back to Vance. He tried to convince himself that this was merely another jaunt, and that Prentice was only another idiot child. A child Tom was taking white-water rafting or parascending – for the garish signs advertising these attractions reared up along the roadside, their metal tenderized by the shooting practice of passing drivers.

They drove on through rain-washed country towns where the only signs of life were the semicircles of smoking men standing along the sixteen-metre lines outside the bars, and the brightly lit plate-glass windows of agricultural equipment dealerships. Darkness fell on the land, sudden as a cloth dropped on a birdcage. The SUV’s headlights carried a runway of bashed bitumen before them, and so they took off into the void, over and over again.

The car had moai bars, but, even so, Tom knew that once they were into the hills, and then the desert, they would have to avoid night driving. He had been warned that the giant flightless birds zeroed in on the lights of moving vehicles; they were damned by their own unevolved psychology to bomb the human occupants with their feathery bulk, and in the process commit suicide.

It was ten thirty when Tom pulled into the forecourt of a lonely motel. The illuminated lozenge of its sign crawled with bugs, and, as he stepped from the car, Tom was perfused with the soupy night-time atmosphere.

By the time Tom got back, Prentice had retired to his cabin. But, as Tom was unclipping the two Galil rifles from the rack, he re-emerged to ask: ‘I say, Brodzinski, would you mind terribly . . .’ The request was completed by the tube of ointment he held in his hand, and a tilt of his weak chin that exposed the gooey corruption.

‘You want me to put that stuff on your goddamn neck?’ Tom took an incredulous swig from the fifth of whisky.

‘It’s, um, it’s . . . well, back in Vance Lady Mulgrene was doing the honours . . .’

Prentice wasn’t ashamed; only hesitant, like the moths batting at their heads in the yellowy downlights.

‘Is this to do with our respective grades of astande?’ Tom said. The whisky was planing away his emotions with bold strokes.

‘Oh.’ Prentice smiled. ‘I hardly think so, old chap. It’s just awfully awkward to spread on an even coat. D’you mind?’

‘I hardly think that’s possible.’ Prentice’s clipped tone suggested Tom had committed a dreadful solecism. ‘You see, Brodzinski, it’s psoriasis – it only flares up like this when I’m bally stressed!’

Tom carefully set the bottle down on the concrete and took the tube. Prentice grunted softly as Tom smoothed on the ointment. His breath was sour. The flesh beneath Tom’s fingers felt deeply cracked – fissured, even. When he had finished he said: ‘I gotta wash my hands now.’

‘Of course, old chap, of course,’ Prentice said, yet made no move to thank him or even open the door to Tom’s cabin.

Sitting sideways on the bed, Tom sipped his whisky and flipped through the tourist brochures that had been left on the pillow. Should they be so inclined – this being cane country – he and Prentice could visit the Giant Sugar Sachet at Wilmington the following morning, then go on to a hobby ranch at Villeneuve where tame auraca could be ridden.

When he had created a big-enough compartment, he put Atalaya Intwennyfortee’s blood money in it and closed the book. With the artful application of a few strands of Sellotape, it was possible for anyone to pick up the heavy volume, and even read the front sections of it, without being aware of the small fortune it contained.

As the level in the bottle of whisky fell, so Tom’s head sank down on to the book: a moneyed pillow. Gazing woozily at the bedside table, he contemplated his cellphone and digital camera. Unsteadily, Tom aligned the two devices, hoping, blearily, that they might somehow work it out between them during the night.

In that night, Tom found himself with Sergeant Elldollopollollou. The massive Tugganarong cop wore a soiled diaper – he reached his brawny, reddy-brown arms out to Tom. ‘Cuddle me!’ he cried. ‘Cuddle me!’

Tom took it as an order.

Through the viewfinder, Tom saw Prentice’s head, and behind it clouds of white vapour gushing from the refinery’s cooling pipes. Prentice also wanted to do the tour, but Tom drew the line at this. The air smelled sweet and burned. Tom, who had a hangover, gagged on it, saying, ‘If we’re gonna make the Tree Top Lodge before nightfall, we gotta get a move on.’

As the day progressed, the country began to change. The steady beat of the cane rows faltered, became staccato. Smaller fields with arable crops began to appear. The clapboard shacks lost their stilts and grew corrugated-iron hides. Route I twisted, turned, shrugged its bitumen shoulders and began to mount the Great Dividing Range in a series of switchback bends. The rainforest, furry with ferns, woven with lianas, tumbled down to meet their puny SUV as it laboured up the inclines.

There were no more road-trains. They came upon trucks, with a single semi-trailer, inching through the hairpins, and forming temporary moving bridges across the churning streams in the upland gullies. The only other traffic consisted of open-topped five-ton police trucks. In the backs of these sat squads of impassive Tugganarong, their hands clenched on their rifles, their eyes vacant.

They stopped for a counter lunch at a bar in Hayden, the hill town where Tom had tried to buy the Gandaro spirit wagon for Tommy Junior. The native craftsmen and trinket sellers were gone from beneath the baobab tree. There were hardly any auraca wagons or rickshaws in the churned-up mud of the streets. Walking past the ATM where he had withdrawn money all those weeks before, Tom half expected to encounter the old wino, but he wasn’t around either. Indeed, there were few hill people in Hayden, and, of those that were splashing between the concrete boxes of the stores, a mere smattering were Anglos of any description.

Sitting at the bar, struggling with a burger engorged by eggs, tomatoes, pineapple chunks, cheese slices and bacon rashers, Tom observed: ‘I hadn’t exactly taken in how few Anglos there are actually living up here. The local people must depend an awful lot on the tourists – what do they do when they’re gone?’

‘Ah, now, Brodzinski.’ Prentice twisted his independent fringe with his nicotine fingers. ‘Your bing-bong never does any work, as such. Sits in his longhouse, chews his engwegge, chucks a few seeds out the door. Soil up here’s so bloody fertile he doesn’t need to even till it. When the taro comes up, he sends out the womenfolk to pull it and pound it.’

Tom yearned for the native barman to come over and slap Prentice, but he was glued to the TV above the bar, which displayed the spark and puff of automatic weapons, and a tanker turned on its side in the desert sand, like a whale stranded on a beach.

The sound was turned down, but in the coloured strip that ran along the bottom of the screen marched the thread: ‘Roadside ambush east of the Tontine Townships renders 22 lives non-viable. Insurgents blamed . . .’

‘You know what they say, Brodzinski,’ Prentice continued. ‘The Tugganarong are the ethnics the Anglos wish they’d discovered when they got here, while this lot’ – he pointed flagrantly at the barman – ‘are the ones they actually did.’

‘I don’t give a shit about that,’ Tom said. Then, calling to the barman, he pleaded, ‘Hey, fella, you wouldn’t mind switching on that heater of yours, wouldya? I’m freezing here.’

They reached the top of the escarpment an hour or so after lunch. Tom regretted the shot he had taken to warm himself up. No matter how carefully he adjusted the car heater, he was either too warm and sleepy or too shivery to negotiate the potholes that now began to crater the blacktop.

Prentice didn’t notice any of this; he was rustling the capacious pages of one of his own national newspapers. Tom couldn’t conceive of how he had managed to buy it in Hayden. Prentice insisted on giving him terse, verbal updates on a sports game that was of consuming interest to him: ‘Addenley’s been bowled out, there’s no way we can avoid the follow on now.’ Even though back in Vance, Tom had told him that he knew nothing of the game and cared still less for it.

While Tom struggled with the steering wheel, peering through the misted-up windshield, his indolent companion reclined, feet up on the dash, as if he were on a motorized Barcalounger. And if Prentice valued his neck enough not to light up in the car, he never the less asked every few miles, when Tom thought they might stop. Then, in anticipation of his ‘fag break’, he withdrew a filter-tip from its box and toyed with the miniature white penis, until his chauffeur – gnawed at by attraction and repulsion – pulled over.

At least the landscape was worth stopping for. As Prentice turkey-cocked, gobbling smoke, Tom surveyed the cloud forest. The canopy fell away from the road, dipping into dells, then swirling up in frills and ruffs of greenery, from which surged the petrified waterspouts of volcanic plugs. Cloud snagged on these rocky nodules; while in the deep valleys, where the Handrey’s terracing created the contours of an actual-sized topographical map, the mists slowly roiled.

The overall impression was at once homely and fantastical, an effect heightened, once they resumed the drive, by the pasturage of Anglo farmsteads, with its drystone walls and too-green grass, upon which grazed Friesian cattle. Their chocolate and white jigsaw markings were utterly incongruous: kids’ stickers, crazily affixed to this alien environment.

Handrey longhouses were set high up on the vertiginous slopes. Some of these were, Tom guessed, enormous, their curved walls of smoothly adzed logs making them appear organic, not man-made.

Wild auraca huddled near the treeline, nuzzling their long necks together: the furry boughs of subsidiary copses. Once, a family group broke across the road in front of the SUV: bull, cow, three or four calves, leaping wall and ditch, their hooves slithering, their necks waggling. Tom braked hard, and Prentice, roused from his paper, said, ‘Magnificent beasts.’

Tom cursed, put the car back in shift, drove on.

Shortly before dusk they reached the Tree Top Lodge, where the Brodzinskis had spent the three happiest days of their vacation. Tom had hung on to the prospect of a relaxing break here all the way from Vance. He recalled giggling gaggles of naked brown kids leaping into the pool, and mingling easily with the tourists’ paler, pinker children.

Their parents had lain around on the teak decking of the teardrop-shaped pool, while the brown kids’ parents brought them chilled drinks and meaty tid-bits on bamboo skewers.

Up in the cloud forest, Tom, Martha and the kids had been at ease. There seemed none of the ethnic tension that otherwise marred this idyllic land. Tommy Junior had emerged from his virtual world, and, wearing skin-tight swiming trunks, he bombed the multiracial pool with his own murky-brown body. The kids had squealed with joy; the adults flinched indulgently.

That night, in their beautiful cabin – a small-scale replica of a Handrey longhouse – Tom and Martha had tenderly embraced. This was enough.

The Handrey mob had gone. Tom dredged up some names and put them to the wet-season manager, a mean-featured old Anglo man who sat behind the reception desk in the darkened lobby.

‘Hildegard,’ he inquired, ‘and is it Harry? I thought they ran the place . . . on behalf of the Tribal Council.’

‘Tribal Council!’ The old man guffawed. ‘Don’t make me shit meself. The owner puts them bing-bongs in during high season for local colour.’ He was chewing engwegge, and Tom found it difficult to take his eyes off the long bristly hairs that crawled on the old man’s Adam’s apple.

He missed a spittoon with a stream of juice.

‘That mob,’ he said, smacking his stained lips. ‘They couldn’t run a piss-up in a bloody brewery.’

The old Anglo’s hands shook as Tom handed over his and Prentice’s documents. He glanced cursorily at the laissez-passers, then turned the register so Tom could sign it.

‘You can sign for him too,’ the old man rasped, and Tom wondered if he had been over here so long that he could tell their respective grades of astande simply by looking.

Prentice stood a way off, behind a rattan divan on which lay the other partner in this dubious enterprise: an obese Tugganarong, who, utterly drunk, was drooling in front of a TV screen that made the lobby surreally cosy, with its close-up picture of the crackling flames from another ambushed convoy of fuel trucks.

Besides this, the only light in the entire compound was shed by the storm lanterns that hung from nails in the walls and the tree trunks lancing up through the boardwalks that connected the cabins. As he limped ahead of them along one of these, the manager chuckled self-indulgently: ‘Generator’s on the fritz. Only got enough juice in the solar batteries for the telly. Gotta have the telly, yeah?’

He showed them to adjoining cabins; then, before leaving Tom, asked, ‘Have you got any firearms in the car?’

When Tom conceded that they had, the manager became obliging. ‘I’ll get Stephen to bring ’em in and lock ’em up in the gun cabinet. Pissed as he is,’ he chuckled, ‘he’s the same as any other Tuggy when it comes to handling a rifle, yeah.’

Left alone, Tom went straight to the bathroom for a shower. He couldn’t find soap or shampoo; instead of the basket packed with toiletries he remembered, it was empty except for a crumpled piece of paper, which, when he smoothed it out, proved to be an IOU for ‘sundry bathing requisites’, signed in a shaky hand by ‘W. F. Turpin, Manager’.

It was the same story with the minibar, only this time there were several IOUs, dated over a period of weeks and reading, ‘IOU one miniature gin, London Particular brand’, all of them signed with the same Dickensian signature.

Tom didn’t have long to think on this, because Prentice tapped on his door to complain: ‘How am I supposed to shower after a bally-hard day’s driving in a trickle of cold water?’

Taunting him with its own superfluity, the sky chose that moment to gush, and rain hissed into thatch above their heads. Tom pointed out that it was he who had done all the driving, but Prentice wheedled on: ‘I say, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t happen to have a pair of fresh underpants I could have the loan of?’

Dinner was a morose affair. They sat on the long veranda, looking down at the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. In the feeble light from the storm lanterns, the manager limped from the swing doors leading to the kitchens. Behind these, Stephen, the fat Tugganarong, was, he explained, ‘cooking up a storm’. A remark confirmed by the loud curses, crashes and bangs that did battle with the thunder rolling overhead.

The appetizer was a grub as pale as Prentice’s face slathered in pink, creamy dressing. Tom couldn’t even begin to contemplate this; his companion, however, slurped his own down and then, with a curt ‘D’you mind, old boy?’, took on Tom’s as well.

Then, a long wait.

A road-train with two semi-trailers sloshed into the muddy parking lot. In the gloom, the two identical grinning Mediterranean women painted on their sides were sinister: votive icons of ancient goddesses. Beneath their leering faces was inscribed the slogan MAMAS WITH FORESIGHT ALWAYS SERVE SIBYLLINE PIZZA.

The rig’s four powerful headlights were lidded with a mascara of bugs, and a still-twitching auraca calf was caught in the mandibles of its steel bars.

With a sharp hiss, the driver applied his air brakes. He cut the engine and leaped down from the cab; a bulky, hairy fellow in a soiled string undershirt. Tom, noting regular features and slanting eyes, as the man clambered stiffly up to the veranda, guessed that he had a dash of Tugganarong blood.

The driver haled the manager with ‘Oi! William! Beer!’, then sat down at a table as far removed from his fellow guests as possible. He drank his beer and ate his grub cocktail in silence. The auraca calf became still on the grille.

Tom shivered – he was hungry as well as cold. He fixated on the blood-spotted sphincter of an ancient Bandaid that lay on the decking. Beside the pool there was a mouldy pair of cut-off jeans, a perished rubber sandal, a cracked snorkelling mask.

‘Tough drive, Mr McGowan?’ he said ingratiatingly.

The driver only grunted: ‘More beer, William.’ He burped, withdrew a handgun from the waist of his pants and placed it on the table.

The moa collation consisted of thin white slices of the giant flightless bird’s flesh laid over two hunks of buttered bread. On the margins of the platter, diced pineapple and star fruit glistened. The unappetizing spectacle was finished off by a slurry of the same pinkish sauce that had coated the appetizer.

Tom groaned and took a long pull on his own beer. William had sententiously informed him that there was no whisky available, and this despite the fact that Stephen had been flagrantly drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Prentice came back from the lobby. ‘They’ve followed on,’ he told Tom, then tucked into his moa.