The Butt (27 page)

Prentice plodded away towards an ersatz massif of slag heaps.

It was too hot to wait in the car, so Tom and Gloria hid from the sun in the shadow of a smoking shelter, where ectoplasm was sucked from dirty-faced miners by powerful ducts. Sitting on the rubble, Tom asked again: ‘Who’s Erich, and what’s that freakin’ parcel got to do with him?’

Gloria arranged herself beside him and coyly covered her ankles with the hem of her robe. ‘You’ve known him almost as long as you’ve known me, yeah?’ she said. ‘He’s one of the authors of that magnificent book you’ve been struggling with for weeks now.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,’ she replied. ‘It’s common knowledge that the Von Sassers – first father, then son – have been living with the Tayswengo for many, many years now. If you’d made the effort to get through their book, then you’d know how closely involved Erich is with the Intwennyfortee mob.

‘Jesus, Tom, I’ve kids in my bloody orphanages who’ve seen their parents shot dead over tontines right in front of their eyes. They weren’t too traumatized to ask the right questions, but you, you carry on sitting there, yeah? Day after day, letting yourself be dragged along by other people, not even bothering to find out where the hell they’re taking you, yeah?’

Another bloody Martha on my back, thought Tom. At least the flies are being kept off by the miners’ smoke. He was thirsty; although less, he thought, than he should be, given that he was sweating heavily. Moreover, Tom felt a surge of energy between his shoulders, electrifying his spine. He stretched expansively.

‘Did you even hear what I said?’ Tom’s substitute wife nagged him.

The phone rang in the guards’ booth. One of them answered it, spoke for a while, then came over to the shelter.

He addressed Tom: ‘It’s your man, yeah. Says he’s crook, wants you to go down there and give ’im a hand, right.’ He went away again.

Tom stood. ‘Dragged along by other people, am I?’ he said to Gloria. ‘We’ll see about that.’

He strode off along the road leading to the mine, past DANGER and NO SMOKING signs, then under a banner that advertised: EYRE’S PIT EXTRACTION FACILITY, A DIVISION OF MAES-PEETERS INDUSTRIES. OPERATIONAL DAYS THIS YEAR: 360. ORE EXTRACTED: 75,655 TONNES. INJURIES: 1,309. FATALITIES: 274. The figures, Tom thought, were nothing to brag about.

The background roar gained definition: there was the massed clanking of heavy machinery and the hammering of the engines that powered them, while soaring above it was the bellowing of thousands of voices. Skirting the slag heaps, he made decisively for a stack of Portakabins that he assumed were the mine’s offices and stores.

Eyre’s Pit yawned open beside him – a massive chomp out of the world, with nibbled edges defended only by a single strand of barbed wire. Tom reeled back and sat down abruptly on the pebbly ground. Then, summoning himself, he crawled forward on hands and knees until he could gaze down into it.

The pit was at least 6,000 feet deep and a mile across: so immense an absence where there ought to be presence that it created its own distortions in natural law. Tom felt as if he were staring into an earthy empyrean – while also experiencing nauseating vertigo. He grabbed handfuls of the ground, lest he be torn down into the subterranean sky.

There were entire weather systems inside the pit: steamy wraiths wrestled with the black clouds spewed by burn-off pipes; turbo-charged thermals carried flocks of grey and black ash high over Tom’s head, ashes that seconds before had been floating far below him.

At the very bottom, mechanical diggers tore at the sides of the pit, scouring out ochreous grooves. There were hundreds of these galleries, and thousands of miners stood in them. Some hacked away with pickaxes, while others formed chains to deposit bucket after bucket of ore on to the ever-clanking conveyor belts. Tom was reminded of the leaf-cutter ants on the shrubbery at the Mimosa.

The chthonic pit also created its own warped acoustics, so that while the machinery was muted, the groans of the tormented souls carried up to Tom’s ears: the ‘hhns’ and ‘gaars’ of the ants hammering at the rock; the ‘oofs’ and ‘aarghs’ of their comrades hefting the buckets. Then, very distinctly, a small voice wheedled, ‘Gissa ciggie, mate, I’m on smoke-o in ten.’

This wasn’t an industrial enterprise at all – it was manmade hell.

Tom found Prentice slumped by the Portakabins, partly resting on the sloppy gonad of a hessian water bag. Tom picked this up by its handle, then helped Prentice to his feet. Together, they limped back to the checkpoint, Prentice leaning heavily on Tom’s shoulder.

‘Did you see . . .’ Prentice croaked, the psoriasis splitting the inflamed skin along his jaw. ‘Did you see inside that bally pit, it’s . . . it – it shouldn’t be permitted.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ Tom teased him. ‘Get a hold of yourself, man. You wouldn’t want a world without aluminium, now would you? There’d be no forks, no planes, no tinfoil to wrap your fags – somebody has to make the sacrifice.’

Tom was still pumped up when he attached the water bag to the back of the SUV. He got in and drove them all away with manly dispatch. But his rejuvenation didn’t last for long; by the time they were ten klicks away from the mine, Tom was finding it difficult to keep the car on the track. When they had travelled twenty, he had to pull over and let Prentice take the wheel.

Tom had blundered into a psychic quagmire, and for the next day and a half he floundered there. He was incapable of unzipping his pants without the assistance of his good buddy Brian Prentice. Between feeding sessions – when Prentice coaxed Tom to swallow gritty mouthfuls of oatmeal – and criticism ones – when Gloria hectored him with his ignorance – Tom lay awkwardly along the back seat. The boxes of ribavirin and cartons of cigarettes jabbed his neck, while the desert mutated beyond the filmy windows of the car.

Towards sunset on the second day the track descended, and the badlands vomited them out. A flock of moai, startled by their approach, rose up from the shade of some gum trees and goosestepped away, their useless pigeon wings flapping. Hypersensitized, all three of them smelled water. Gloria said, ‘Nearly there, yeah?’

Then, without warning, they were, jolting between wonky fence posts, past the welcoming sign: YOU ARE ENTERING TAYSWENGO TRIBAL LAND. SMOKING PERMITTED. RESPECT THE ANCESTORS; then a second: RALLADAYO, TWINNED WITH DIMBELENGE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO.

Gloria felt moved to hector Tom some more: ‘Erich von Sasser has given everything to these people, yeah? They revere him as a – well, perhaps they revere him – and we all do – a little more than we should. But that’s no reason for you not to be respectful: he’s brought all sorts of benefits to the Intwennyfortee mob, yeah? Fresh water, education, healthcare. Jobs too – and that’s had a knock-on effect for the rest of the tribe, who range from here to the Great Dividing Range.

‘Most of all, Erich’s provided them with a real belief system and a workable social structure, yeah?’

‘Given them a real belief system,’ Tom rasped, ‘what the hell d’you mean?’

But before Gloria could reply, the SUV thrummed over the ties of a wooden bridge and humped into a turning circuit. Prentice hit the brakes – and the flies were upon them, streaming in through the open windows.

In a plantation of widely spaced gum trees stood a long, low building that reminded Tom of the twins’ elementary school in Milford. It had the same steel-framed windows and modular construction: one classroom bolted on to the next. A short way off there was a structure in complete contrast, a Tyrolean chalet with elaborately fret-worked doors and shutters, and a wide shallow-pitched roof. The incongruity of this dinky wooden confection was completed by the trio of mismatched men who stood upon its raised veranda, a veranda that was sprinkled with snow-white dust.

Tom shaded his aching eyes. The skeletal figure of Hippolyte von Sasser’s brother was unmistakable – they might have been twins. If anything, Erich was even more predatory-looking than the Chief Prosecutor. His skinny legs were emphasized by tight lederhosen; the bib of these and a voluminous cotton shirt provided him with an avian breast. An alpine hat balancing on the sharp summit of his bald head completed the costume. This Von Sasser was a pipe-smoker as well, yet the tiny cumuli that rose from its tall porcelain bowl did little to discourage the flies that preyed on his raptor features.

Standing beside Von Sasser, his naked chest decorated with the medallions of several cameras, camcorders and voice recorders, was Jethro Swai-Phillips; while on the other side of the imposing anthropologist, his bleached teeth showing in a diplomatic rictus, stood the Honorary Consul.

For a long time the two groups stared at one another. Gloria sighed deeply. Prentice detached his hands from the steering wheel with an audible ‘tchupp’. Tom hugged Gloria’s ovoid parcel. If the three men on the veranda shifted at all, it only confirmed them in their stasis.

Then Swai-Phillips broke the spell. He lunged down the wooden stairs and came towards the SUV. From the way he moved, alone – his head tucked well forward, his arms pumping, his sandalled feet dancing in the dust – Tom saw a complete personality change in the once imposing lawyer. Swai-Phillips was doggy – there was no other word for it. He doggily opened the car door and snuffled Prentice out, then he bounded round and did the same to Gloria. He thrust his moustachioed muzzle into the car, while yapping: ‘He’s the man, see, Doc von S, yeah, he’s the man – c’mon Tommy, man. C’mon and meet him – he’s been waiting for you . . . He wants to meet with you . . . tell you stuff, right.’

Swai-Phillips was without his wrap-around shades. His bad eye was gooey, his good one roved crazily. Flies grazed on his furry top lip. ‘C’mon, Tommy, yeah. C’mon . . .’ He grabbed Tom’s hand and bodily hauled him from the back seat. The parcel came too, in the crook of Tom’s arm. ‘It’s here – it’s now, it’s all times, man,’ he blethered, ‘ ’cause he’s the man, the big bloke . . .’ His Afro agitated like a wind-blown bush.

Von Sasser stirred. Puffing his pipe, he squeaked down on high leather boots and came over to where Tom stood, his head reeling. The flies moiled in the deep sockets of Von Sasser’s eyes.

‘I believe you have something for me, yeah.’ Raucous vowels misbehaved on Teutonic bedrock. ‘Is that it’ – the anthropologist pointed with his pipe stem – ‘under your arm?’

Mute, Tom passed him the parcel, and as soon as Von Sasser took it he experienced a fresh surge of vigour; his vision pinged into acuity. Then, over Von Sasser’s high shoulder, Tom saw the corrugated-iron humpies of the Intwennyfortee mob. There were at least forty of them, each with its own fenced yard and aircon’ unit. They were strung out along an airstrip, at one end of which stood a light aircraft. A wind sock kicked at the sky. A diesel generator hammered in the near-distance. Of the natives themselves there was no sign. Tom stared into the ice-blue eyes. He felt no fear, for once again he was Astande, the Swift One, the Righter of Wrongs.

Von Sasser threw back his head and laughed – ‘Aha-ha-ha’ – then stopped abruptly. He tore away the remaining shreds of newspaper to reveal a translucent pod fastened with two clips. Inside this hermetic egg were five wicked-looking scalpels, formed like embryonic harpoons. ‘It’s difficult to get hold of such beauties,’ he ruminated. ‘These are made by Furtwangler Gesellschaft of Leipzig, right. In answer to your very reasonable question, Mr Brodzinski, because of ritual considerations, they had to be brought here together with the individual they’re going to be used to operate on.’

Von Sasser darted Prentice a meaningful look. Then, with a ‘Hup!’, he passed the instrument case sideways to Swai-Phillips, who caught it on the fly and sprinted away towards the school building, still yapping: ‘The man, hoo-ee, yeah! He’s the man!’

It was an unsettling sight, but Tom focused on what the anthropologist had said. ‘Whose ritual considerations?’ he queried.

‘Why’ – Von Sasser smiled – a worrying expression – ‘mine, of course.’

Adams had hung back during this exchange. Now he approached them, saying, ‘I think all necessary, ah . . . explanations will be forthcoming in good time, Tom. You must be tired after your long journey. I believe you are to be accommodated in the Technical College. Allow me to escort you there. Herr Doktor has invited you – me’ – he made an inclusive gesture – ‘all of us, to dinner at his house in an hour. I’m sure then he will do us the honour of expounding further.’