The Butt (24 page)

‘Bullshit,’ Tom said succinctly. ‘It’s to do with the astande stuff; your skin has righted its own goddamn wrongs.’

‘Don’t bicker, you two,’ their big sister intervened.

Tom fell back. The jump seat was savagely uncomfortable. If he sat sideways, he got cramp in his legs; if he faced to the front, his back ached. The boxes stacked in the tiny trunk kept sliding forward and jabbing Tom in the neck. Then there was Gloria’s package, which she insisted on having in the back so whoever was sitting there could ‘Keep an eye on it, right?’

The package was on Tom’s lap and he was chatting to it. ‘Sorry I had to take you out like that, old chap,’ he said, undoing the string and pulling away the newspaper to reveal Prentice’s ancient foetal features. ‘Nothing I could do to prevent it. You shouldn’t have fucked with the kiddies, man; no one likes that.’

Gloria swivelled in the passenger seat and showed Tom her face – which was Martha’s. He took this in his stride, resumed his soliloquy. ‘They all wanted to be rid of you – I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uh-oh!’ He lifted the head to his lips and reverently kissed it. ‘Uh-oh, poor Yorick, I fucking hated you, man . . .’

‘Tom! Tom! Wake up, right?’ It was Gloria, shaking him. He came to, fumbling to check that his tontine was still where he had put it, then immediately examined her face to see whether he’d been talking in his sleep. But if he had, she made no sign.

They were at another checkpoint. Prentice was already out of the SUV and strutting up and down the road, puffing away. Struggling out, Tom saw that he had been asleep long enough for the desert’s character to have changed. Previously, the sand dunes had been rolling downs; now they had closed up and grown in height. To either side of Route 1 they marched away: vast, pyramidical hills, 500, 600 feet high, with steep slopes, soaring arêtes and summits from which the wind unwound long ribbons of sand.

It was an awesome sight. Gloria stretched and took a deep breath, then exhaled: ‘Aaaah! The erg!’ As any proud suburbanite might hymn the praises of her garden.

Again Tom was summoned by a leathery-skinned, leather-aproned makkata. Again he went along meekly, this time behind the spur of a dune. Again the meaty breath, and the brown engwegge flecks on his pale thigh, as the makkata’s fingers sought out the scar. He dragged himself back to where Gloria was squatting and remarked: ‘I guess it’s gonna be like this the whole way – I mean, these guys having to, uh, examine us.’

‘Well, they aren’t exactly examining you, yeah?’ Gloria had acquired the pedantic tone Tom associated with Adams. ‘They know what grade of astande you are – the guys at the last checkpoint will have told them.’

‘But how?’

She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say. The point is, the desert is a crowded place, yeah? Here, everyone knows everyone’s business, and if a man does something noteworthy, right? It’s at least with the hope that his deed will be sung of, yeah? In the camps of the Entreati and the settlements of the Tayswengo. In the cliff-cut houses of the Aval, and among the vagabond miners of Eyre’s Pit – from the Feltham coast to the Great Divide.

‘The desert people are tremendously proud, Tom, you must understand this. Proud and fierce and just and terrible, yeah? They would rather see a man dead, yeah? Than humiliated.’ She stopped perorating and gave Tom a significant look. It struck him that it was his own future deed – the homicide that was hardening in his heart – that she meant.

These bare-buttocked makkatas – they knew. They knew that Prentice had no grade of astande at all, that he had never had the cut. They realized exactly who and what he was. Now they were simply confirming it: ushering him towards the death seat.

‘So, why the exam?’ Tom asked Gloria, as Prentice returned, buckling his belt.

‘That’s easy, old chap,’ he butted in. ‘As Ms Swai-Phillips was saying, no one wants to be left out. I expect these chaps will still want to jaw for a while, have a good old powwow before they decide whether we have the right rabia to go on.’

‘And if we don’t, smarty-pants?’

But that was the limit of Prentice’s desert lore, and he only shrugged.

The Entreati did want to jaw – at length. They chewed it over with their makkata; they talked with Gloria. They went back to the makkata, then they talked among themselves. Tom drowsed in the lea of a dune. It was unbearably hot: a fierce, dry heat. Frazzling hair – frying skin. Tom couldn’t believe the flies were still able to get aloft – but they were.

Eventually, the deliberations were concluded. Gloria came to report: ‘They want us to spend the night at their settlement. It’s only seventy clicks from here, down at the shore of Lake Mulgrene, right? Frankly, it’s a good idea. I’d been hoping to stop with a different mob, but that’s at least another 200, and it’s too late now.’

As he inserted himself into the hot-box-on-wheels, Tom was appalled by his own lack of foresight. He had never given a thought to where they were going to stay on this leg of the journey. He hadn’t asked if there were road stops, he hadn’t considered the availability of fuel. He hadn’t even checked if there was enough water in the ten-gallon hessian bag that hung on the back rack beside the rifles.

Yet it transpired that Prentice had done all of this – and more; because when they were under way, following the Entreati’s fish tailing, sand-spewing pick-up, he produced an aerosol and, passing it back to Tom, said, ‘Spray some of that thingamajig on your face and hands, old chap, it’ll cool you down.’

It did, deliciously so, and Tom was applying it liberally when Gloria barked, ‘Watch out for the bloody package!’ Cowed, Tom went back to his tortured introspection.

This alternation between childlike yearning and murderous repulsion was familiar; so too was the lust that now flushed through him with a desperate intensity. This was not to do with mere coupling with another human body; it was an urge to universally propagate in defiance of both space and time: tumescence that might raise up from the dead the innumerable creatures lost in the great extinctions . . . Then he collapsed back into a torpor that was equally global: the world was balled up in his palsied hand, yet he hadn’t the strength to chuck it in the trash can.

It was, he decided, nicotine withdrawal – but grown gargantuan; nicotine withdrawal experienced as a full-blown mental illness. Nicotine craving that no quantity of actual nicotine could ever assuage, even if he were to smoke all day long, then pace all night, chaining furiously.

The rough track they were following began to dip towards the west, where the white-hot iron sun was puddling into molten fire. The parcel head nuzzled against Tom’s thigh, and he pushed it away. From some memory cranny crawled the following words: ‘Deep in the desert wastes of the Western Province, Lake Mulgnene stretches for a thousand kilometres across the land, a crystalline expanse of health, purity and hydrolytic balance. Here the Entreati people make their winter encampments . . . And employing technology perfected throughout millennia, they refine and distil the precious fluid–’

‘That’s all gammon, that is!’ Gloria expostulated.

‘Gammon?’

‘Gammon – bloody bullshit; the lake’s crystalline all right, but only ’cause of the salt and all the run-off from the mines.’

‘So, no swimming, then?’

Gloria almost spat. ‘No, no bloody swimming at all, yeah?’

She was growing coarser, Tom felt, as they journeyed into the interior. The floral-patterned charity worker who had hesitantly addressed the reception in the Tontines had been returned to a closet full of hanging personae; then this tough, capable identity had been slipped on.

‘You don’t know how these people live at all, do you, yeah?’ she said.

‘Well, I’ve read the Von Sassers,’ he blustered, but then conceded: ‘I did find it tough going.’

Tom remembered the nights at the Entreati Experience in Vance and then on the road: the enormous anthropology book pinning him to the bed, crouching malevolently on his chest, almost as if it were aware of the blood money he had hidden in its papery belly.

‘The important thing to grasp, yeah?’ Gloria hectored Tom as Prentice pulled up behind the pick-up. ‘Is that these people have never been subjugated, right? They live now as they always have, beautifully and harmoniously. Respect their harmony – and they’ll respect you.’

If the copywriter’s screed on the bottle of Lake Mulgrene mineral water had been hyperbole, then so was the term ‘settlement’ when applied to the Entreati camp. It was a dump. Fifty or sixty men, women and children grovelled in the dirt, dragging themselves from beneath corrugated-iron sheets that had been laid over pits to sit chewing engwegge around smoky fires.

Then there were the dogs: slinking, squirming, yapping curs. There were chunks missing out of their mangy fur, their tails were twisted, their legs seized up. It struck Tom how few dogs he had seen – either over here or back on the coast. The dogs smelled, and they came dallying in – canine flies – to thrust their proboscises against his bare legs.

At the first moist contact, Tom’s own nose unblocked and a crowd of stenches – human and animal waste, rotting meat, wood smoke, singed hair, gasoline fumes – jostled for admission. Smell, the most ancient and canny of the senses. Apart from the very strongest, the most rank of odours, he had for a long time now been smell-blind, the white lines of his cigarettes blocking them out indiscriminately. Tom’s nose backtracked along Route 1, sniffing sweat, perfume, eucalyptus tang and foody bouquet. Back and back to Vance, where Tom had snuffled in the hollow of one of his twin’s neck, unaware that it – and he – were both redolent of ashtray.

In the midden the Entreati tenanted, shit, trash and broken glass were scattered everywhere. The pot-bellied children’s eyes were filled with pus from untreated trachoma, while fully a third of the adults were completely blind. All of them, except for the active young men, had streptococcal infections. Tom also saw the spavined legs of rickets sufferers, and heard the popping wheeze of tuberculosis.

Shortly before they had arrived a dead auraca had been thrown on a fire. It lay there, its coat smouldering, with a startled expression on its lama-like features. ‘It’s a great honour,’ Gloria explained. ‘They’re welcoming us to their cosmos, right?’

She seemed not to notice the disease, the malnutrition, the trash or the dogs. She strode from one humpy to the next in her black robes, a ministering nun handing out cartons of cigarettes and packets of bubble gum.

Soon, everyone over the age of seven was holding a fat packet of Reds and puffing away – some, preposterously, on more than one cigarette at a time. Meanwhile, the little kids blew blue bubbles that burst on their pinched black faces. Soon the dump became yet more littered, with butts and the slick films of the cellophane wrappers.

One thing that wasn’t hyperbole was Gloria’s estimation of their welcome. The Entreati were warm towards them, effusively so. Tom sat by the fire, torn between shame and disgust, as toothless old men and leprous children embraced him with their diseases. At last he managed to drag himself away and set off towards the unearthly limelight that played about the lake shore.

‘Don’t even touch the water,’ Gloria called after him.

Night was encroaching. Away to the east, back in the direction of Route 1, enormous crescent-shaped dunes marched along the horizon, each like the cast of a giant worm that was boring beneath the sands. The wind was soughing in off the lake, laden with mephitic fumes. There could be no question of even attempting to dabble in its celebrated waters, for the shoreline consisted of hundreds of yards of crusted salt and cracked mud. Oily fluid oozed between these platelets, streaking them cobalt, viridian and carmine – colours that belonged in a nail parlour, not the natural world.

As the last rays of the setting sun fingered the limpid surface of the immense depression, they caught on strange-looking rafts of some bubbly excrescence – like enormous frogspawn – that were floating perhaps a mile offshore.

Tom stood, swaying slightly, staring out over this desolate scene. After a while he realized he was not alone. One of the young Entreati men from the checkpoint had followed him down, and stood a way off, smoking, and apparently lost in his own thoughts.

Tom approached him: ‘Do you – can you speak–?’

‘English, mate? Yairs, ’course I bloody can. Did elementary in Trangaden – we all have, right.’

The Entreati was younger than Tom had supposed – little more than a boy, despite his height. Although he had directly contradicted Gloria’s insistence on the cultural isolation of the tribe, it wasn’t this that Tom wished to pursue.