The Butt (30 page)

‘No.’ Adams gave a fastidious shudder. ‘I’ve a long-established involvement with the work that Erich does here. I first visited Ralladayo on my drive north after my retirement. His ideas, his, ah . . . vision, his personality too – they all had a profound, ah . . . effect on me.’

Adams was looking old this morning; he was even unshaven: a silvery blaze on his horsy cheeks. Tom speculated on the hiatuses: was Adams rummaging in the lumber room of his own consciousness, trying to find a useful phrase? Or might there be an Entreati sorceress in there with him, composing these near-instant communiqués? If it was the latter, then the Honorary Consul had received all the instruction he currently needed, because he snapped back to his usual full attention: ‘Erich is unavoidably detained with important work in the dispensary until lunchtime. However, he asked me if I’d be prepared to show you and Mr Prentice over the place – if you’d like me to, that is?’

‘Sure,’ Tom said.

Adams seemed relieved. ‘That’s good. I’ve been coming back here every year since that first visit. Dry season vacations I spend with my, ah, friends in the hill country – but Christmases are always devoted to Ralladayo. It may be something of an exaggeration, but Erich – and the Intwennyfortee mob, of course – have given me a little, ah, job – communications, PR, that kind of thing. It’s undemanding work, but my diplomatic experience can be put to, ah, use.’

Tom was going to point out that it had been highly unpro- fessional of the Consul to withold this information from him when they were back in Vance, but Adams was already on his feet, slurping down the last of his own unsweetened, undiluted coffee.

Prentice had also got up. He stood, looking nauseous and rubbing the raw patch of red skin on his neck. Adams leaned over and whispered something into the wiry cloud surrounding Jethro Swai-Phillips’s left ear. Gloria and Vishtar barely glanced up, only muttering ‘Bye’ as the three men quit the veranda. When Tom looked back, he saw that the lawyer had risen, and was awkwardly dragging his stricken leg back inside.

There were noisy galah birds mucking about in the eucalyptus trees. Their pink plumage and grating cries were faintly uncanny: were they tiny airborne Anglos or had the white interlopers on this island-continent mutated to resemble these plumed natives, whose every song burst ended with a query: ‘Kraa-kra-kraa?’

First, Adams took them to see the domestic interior of a Tayswengo humpy. Obediently, Tom chatted to its proud inhabitant, a grave matron in a black toga, whose cheek bulged with engwegge. She pointed out cooking pots similar to the ones Tom had bought in Vance, and mimed the preparation of auraca meat.

Next, they walked to the far end of the airstrip. Hidden behind a low hill was a galvanized-iron barn two storeys high. The noise of machinery – incongruous in this desert fastness – echoed beneath its roof. When they stepped inside, Tom was surprised to find the menfolk who were so conspicuously absent from the rest of Ralladayo. He had assumed they were away hunting; instead, they were hunched over industrial sewing machines and automated cutting equipment. It was a sweat shop – and the garments the Tayswengo were piecing together were the black togas.

‘Initially, they were a bit of a novelty,’ Adams explained as they strolled from stage to stage of the manufacturing process. ‘Certain, ah, bohemian types down south adopted the togas as, ah, fashion statements. But increasingly the Anglo market is coming to appreciate that these are beautifully designed for outdoor pursuits.’

Tom almost laughed at Adams’s attempts to play the marketeer – they were so at odds with his studied circumspection. But then, as they left the baking-hot barn, the Consul threw back at his charges: ‘Erich’s idea, naturally.’

They doubled back to the airstrip. Here, in a small shack, was the grandly titled ‘Communications Center’. Adams pointed out every part of his little fiefdom – the PC, the photocopier machine, even the water cooler – with unaffected enthusiasm. Tom was reminded of a kid with its playhouse. In a small inner room, Adams introduced the men to a new-looking two-way radio. ‘Feel free’, he said to Tom, ‘to call home. We can patch in to the phone network via a, ah, sympathetic operator in Trangaden.’

After that, they proceeded in the direction of a double-sized humpy that stood near by, at the end of the main drag. ‘This’, Adams said, ‘is the orphanage I mentioned to you. It’s really only a, ah, marginal undertaking for the community, but Erich is particularly devoted to it . . .’ He broke off and eyed his tour party sceptically.

Tom had subsided into tedium as the tour progressed: Amish village, historic town centre, Ralladayo – where was the difference? As for Prentice, he had lagged behind the whole way, fiddling with his cigarettes, and now he was baulking at the orphanage.

‘I say, Mr Adams,’ he wheedled, ‘I expect you’ll be heading over to the dispensary after this, yes? If it’s no bother, I’ll pop back to the College and pick up the ribavirin, then I’ll meet you there.’

If Prentice had been requesting permission, he didn’t wait to have it granted. He walked away as fast as he could, with his stiff-legged silent-movie gait. Tom waited until he was a way off, then said snidely: ‘Surely the ribavirin is needed here, at the orphanage?’

‘Don’t be, ah, silly,’ said the Consul dismissively. ‘You can’t have barely trained care assistants administering powerful medication like that, can you?’

‘Look.’ Involuntarily Tom felt the blistered nap of Adam’s seersucker sleeve. ‘I – I tried my darndest back there, before Eyre’s Pit–’

Adams shrugged him off. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, Tom, it’s not relevant any more. Besides, you’re forgetting who I am.’

The Consul put an end to the exchange by opening the gate in the wire fence. Tom sighed, then followed Adams’s long back into the big humpy.

Inside, there were utilitarian steel cots clustered under the whale-belly curve of the corrugated iron. A few lurid plastic toys were piled on the old piece of carpet that had been laid directly on the earthen floor. Three toddlers were sitting in silence by these injection-moulded bubble cars and sectional toadstools. In the dim light their pupils were dilated, and they emanated bemusement. A young Tayswengo woman sat watching them on a stool; at least, so Tom assumed, for it was completely hidden by the skirts of her toga. She curled forward from this invisible plinth to wave the flies off the little kids with a switch of leaves.

‘Is Miss Swai-Phillips here, Olympia?’ Adams asked her.

‘No.’ The girl was as listless as her charges. ‘She stopped by, yeah, now she’s . . . Oh . . . I dunno.’

A rustling noise coming from one of the cots at the back of the humpy attracted Tom’s attention. Not wanting to – although the resistance also seemed to be in the treacly air – he strolled over to it. A baby lay awkwardly curled in a damp skein of sheet. Distractedly – for the mite was a pitiful sight – Tom fixated on the mattress, which had the same covering of frangipani blossoms as the ones at the Mimosa. The child was the size of a one-year-old, but, on examining it more closely, Tom realized it was much older: maybe two or even three – not a baby at all. Its face was wizened, its skin lumpy and scaly – in places, cracked and weeping. The child was of mixed race.

Adams joined Tom.

‘Is it . . . AIDS?’ Tom asked.

‘No’ – the Consul was blithe – ‘although we do see cases here. The young women go off to the road stops. They get themselves into, ah, difficulties. No, this little guy has psoriasis – Vishtar tells me it’s, ah, hereditary.’

As the Polaroids revealed the Consul’s eyes, so Tom sought them. ‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘what you wanted me to see?’

Prentice was sitting waiting for them outside the dispensary. He eyed Tom through the smoky veil he always wore, presumably trying to gauge Tom’s reaction to the orphanage visit. Rather than respond to this, Tom extended his hand and helped the pathetic fellow up.

‘The dispensary’ was a misnomer for this cinder-block building, which was nearly as big as the derelict school. It had an extensive waiting area that was thronged with Tayswengo women holding babies who were sick enough to be there, yet strong enough to bawl about it. There were also a few native men in evidence – and they too exhibited a reassuring lack of stoicism. They had sustained a variety of cuts, bruises and, in one particularly vocal case, a minor gunshot wound. Whenever one of the harassed nurses appeared, the Tayswengo all pounced on him or her, proffering the afflicted portion – or baby – while pleading to be seen by the doctor.

They all got the same answer: ‘Dr Loman is busy assisting the surgeon today – you all know that, yeah.’

Prentice handed over his boxes of ribavirin to one of these nurses, who whisked them off without comment. The making of his reparations had been as anticlimactic as Tom’s. ‘Wampum,’ Adams muttered, then he led them down the corridor that ran the length of the building, pointing out the treatment rooms to one side and the wards to the other.

The dispensary, Tom thought, had been built and equipped perhaps two decades before as a small state-of-the-art hospital. Some time during the intervening years, it had begun to be severely neglected. Now the floors were unwashed – stained with blood, and worse. Perished rubber hoses dangled from oxygen cylinders, while used hypodermic syringes lay in the drifts of dead leaves that had blown in through the warped un-shuttable windows. In one ward there was a waist-high heap of soiled gauze pads; in a second, a broken pipe leaked bilious water on to the cracked tiles. The aircon’ wasn’t working, and the flies – unlike the medical staff – were in constant attendance.

They reached the end of the corridor and stood there, looking through the dirty window which faced the airstrip. On the far side of this some young Tayswengo men were breaking in an auraca bull. They circled the enraged animal, chucking dust and pebbles in its supercilious face. When, inevitably, it lunged at one them with its tiny head, the youth leaped up and neatly pincered its long neck with his legs. They both crashed to the ground and writhed there, their spasmodic movements compellingly pornographic. Tom looked away.

‘The scalpels I brought,’ he said to Adams. ‘They were for these operations, then?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And the surgeon is–’

‘He has to do lots of these operations?’ Tom persisted, while out of the corner of his eye he noticed Prentice, up against the wall, arms and legs crossed defensively.

‘As many as he possibly can,’ Adams answered. ‘These are relatively straightforward procedures, Tom, not too invasive. The patients can, in most cases, leave the dispensary the same day. At a modern hospital – say in Trangaden – they would be entirely routine; the costs are, ah, minimal. Out here, with the particular problems a community like this faces, they’re absolutely essential. That’s why Erich has devoted himself to them so, ah, single-mindedly.’

Lunch was on the veranda. Tom was hungry. He was finally getting accustomed to the local Anglos’ proclivity for stuffing themselves with wads of hot food in the very baking oven of midday. At Von Sasser’s the culinary accent remained resolutely Germanic: ham hocks stood in the top of a double-boiler, paddling in apple sauce. A fresh hayrick of sauerkraut had been pitch-forked, steaming, on to an aluminium platter. The potato was mashed today – and piping hot.

Gloria joined the three men at the table and poured herself a beaker of lemonade. At breakfast she had been in her black toga; now she was wearing the same cotton dress she’d had on when Tom first encountered her at the Swai-Phillips compound. It did flattering things to her bust – which Tom admired while eating. There was no sign of her crazy cousin.

Loman and Von Sasser came ambling through the eucalyptus grove from the direction of the dispensary. They climbed on to the veranda and helped themselves to large plates of pig, cabbage and carb’. Neither man had troubled to take off his scrubs, but only undone the tapes at the back, so that the green garments gaped open. Both were wearing short pants, and when they came to the table, the blotches of blood on their chests gave them the creepy – yet comic – appearance of patients who had escaped the knife in order to enjoy a hearty meal.

Tearing his eyes from the grisly spectacle, Tom saw the little SUV standing where Prentice had parked it the evening before. Some Tayswengo kids were sitting inside. The one in the driver’s seat was wrestling the wheel; the others were aiming pretend cameras, miming Anglos on vacation. They captured the occupants of the veranda in their invisible boxes, then turned them on the tame auraca grazing the sparse grass in the paddock.

With the air of men who had for a long time been working as a team, Von Sasser and Loman finished their plates at the same time, then pushed them aside. Von Sasser called for coffee, and the Tayswengo waitress swished away in her humiliating dirndl. Von Sasser produced his long-stemmed pipe. He filled it with tobacco from a leather pouch, then lit it. The assembled company were all riveted by this matinée, but Tom was now convinced that Von Sasser’s spoken lines were intended for him – and Prentice – alone.

‘How does it all end?’ was how the anthropologist began today’s homily. ‘Isn’t that the question that torments the Anglo – bothers him like a fly in his eye? The Third Act problem, the thrilling climax . . . then the drowsy resolution. Yes, yes, the Anglos’ lust for this is blatantly bloody sexual – they’re not like the true natives of this great land. Those poor bastards have had it hammered into them for so long that they’re shit, that they just sit on their arses while the flies eat them! Especially the children – the poor bloody kids. It’s almost as if,’ – he shifted to confront Prentice – ‘they’re born with this fatalism.’

Von Sasser stopped. Prentice no longer had the energy to even quail beneath his raptor’s stare: his psoriasis was back with a vengeance; the badlands of cracked and humped skin had spread right up on to his face. ‘You!’ Von Sasser spat. ‘You can do whatever you like to the poor bloody kids . . . except’ – the shotgun eyes came back to Tom – ‘tell them stories with clap-happy bloody endings!’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess I was kinda intrigued,’ Tom said lamely.

‘My father, Otto, is buried at Gethsemane Springs, forty clicks east of here, yeah, on the track to the coast. The Technical College was his own brainchild, right. He laboured for it – strived to make it a reality. He even went south, put on dress kit and gave after-dinner bloody speeches to raise money for it from Anglo fat cats, who – once his back was turned – went back to cursing the bloody bing-bongs.’

With forensic fingers, Von Sasser picked up his tiny espresso cup and took a sip. He smacked his lips with an ‘ah’, then went on. ‘Be that as it bloody may, when my dad was dying he made me promise that I’d sack the Anglo teachers and let the College decay back into the bloody dust.

‘ “Erich,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether our people study the sciences, the arts, maths or languages – the result is the same: it makes them lust for an end; that, Erich, is the true leitmotif of Western civilization, and it’s the very one we’ve come here to rid them of. Don’t let our people fall victim to the narrative fallacy of the Anglos!”

‘ ’Course, I’m not claiming that those were his actual last words – that’d be a bit bloody rich! But he was dead in days, and I respected his final wish – why wouldn’t I? By then I’d already begun the work he’d had me trained for; it’s true, the first results were not exactly, er . . . conclusive’ – Tom noted the hesitation – ‘but in spite of that we were both confident we’d found a way forward, so that these people’ – he threw an arm wide to encompass all of Ralladayo – ‘would never, ever waste their lives waiting for the bloody end. Sitting in the dark and smelly multiplex of their minds, gagging to know how their lives would turn out, while completely neglecting to bloody live them!’

There was silence for a few seconds, then Tom heard an electronic whirr. Its source was Swai-Phillips: the lawyer was hovering at the corner of the chalet, a camcorder held to his good eye. He switched it off and let it fall by its lanyard on to his bare chest. He approached the table, walking normally and banging his big, square hands together with slow, resounding claps. He stopped, bowed low, then gravely intoned: ‘Here endeth the second lesson.’

Von Sasser ignored him, instead rattling off a series of commands: ‘Winnie, take Brodzinski here over to the comms shack; he’ll be needing to call his people. Brodzinski, you take your man Prentice along with – you wanna keep a close eye on that one. Vishtar and I’ve got more bloody carving to get on with s’arvo.’ He rose. ‘Till sundown, then!’ And, with Dr Loman in his train, swept off the veranda and back through the gum trees towards the dispensary.

Adams came to life. ‘ ‘C’mon,’ he said to Tom. ‘Erich’s right; the early afternoon’s the best time to patch across.’

Tom, with an access of hypocritical pity, helped him to his feet and said, ‘D’you want me to get some ointment for you? I don’t mind putting it on . . .’

‘Don’t bother, old chap,’ Prentice muttered. ‘Let’s go make your call.’ Then he gave the lopsided smile of a beaten cur, and added: ‘Not long now.’

In the comms shack Adams adopted the persona of a radio ham. He put on headphones – or ‘cans’, as he pretentiously referred to them – and played with the switches and dials on the transmitter. Prentice dumped his bundle of a body form down on an upturned crate, while Tom took a swivel chair beside Adam’s. The ether whistled and warbled, then, once the appliance was humming nicely to itself, Adams took his headphones off.

‘There’s some news you, ah . . . might like to tell the folks back home,’ he said. ‘It’s, ah . . . concerning Mr Lincoln.’

Tom marvelled at how such a heavy lunch could rise up his gorge so easily: here it came, another hateful display of amateur dramatics by the Queen Ham. ‘What?’ Tom yelped. ‘Has the old man died?’

‘On the contrary.’ Adams chose his words as fastidiously as a spinster selecting Scrabble tiles. ‘Dr Loman spoke with one of his colleagues in Vance this morning. It would appear that Mr Lincoln has, regained, ah . . . consciousness. It’s an astonishing case – the infection is, ah . . . subsiding. It’s early days, but the feeling is that he may well make a full, ah . . . recovery. Of course, the consequences for your own, ah . . . situation – especially now an initial reparation payment has been made – can be nothing but, ah . . .’ – the longest pause, dry-stick fingers fondling the slack vocab’ bag – ‘. . . good.’

And with that Adams resumed his other communication duties, rapping out a call sign into the mic’ once, twice, a third time. Between each announcement his equine face quivered with the strain of listening. He pointed to some other headphones, and Tom put them on. He was in time to hear the radio operator in Trangaden say: ‘. . . receiving you RAL20–40. You’re faint – but you’re there, yeah. How can I help ya today, Winnie? Over.’

Adams read out the Brodzinskis’ home phone number and asked to be patched through. The sounds of the Trangaden man dialling were suddenly very loud: each digit a klaxon beep, then there came the leonine purring of the ringing phone. ‘WE’LL LEAVE YOU TO IT,’ Adams mouthed exaggeratedly, and Tom revolved to see him hoik Prentice unceremoniously to his feet and lead him out the door.

Tom pressed the headphones firmly against his ears, and the purring lion padded into his head: ‘pprrrupp-prrrup; pprrrupp-prrrup; pprr–’ Then stopped. ‘Martha Lambert speaking,’ said Martha’s voice. Hearing it, Tom allowed himself to fully accept what Prentice had said: it wasn’t long, now. Long before he would be back in Milford; long before he would be able to mend this crazy breach between them; long before he would be at home with her – and the kids.

He pushed his mouth into the mic’s steel mesh: ‘Martha, it’s me, Tom, can you hear me, honey?’ The etheric birds had been netted; every one of his words sounded as clear as a bell that resonated with cravenly hopeful expectation.

‘Tom, is that you?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m in Ralladayo, where Atalaya’s – Mrs Lincoln’s – people live. Lissen.’ He couldn’t stop himself gabbling. ‘There’s fantastic news – it’s incredible. The old man – Mr Lincoln – he’s, he’s making a recovery, and I’ve, I’ve made the, like, restitution I hadta, so, it looks as if – I mean, I can’t be certain – but it looks like I might be home soon.’ He stopped. There was no sense of the half-world that separated them, only a voracious nullity, sucking on his ears with foam-padded lips.

Hispid and viscid: the sweat-damp hairs on Tom’s nape lifted and stretched themselves, each chafing against its neighbour. Hispid and viscid: Beelzebub’s proboscis was nuzzling at the sweet nooks and crannies of Tom’s cerebrum. It tickled.

Tom found himself outside without any awareness of having torn off headphones or slammed through doors. He was temporarily blinded – than he groped his way, hands on sunbeams, to where Gloria stood in her sack. The race was over; she snapped the cellphone shut and disappeared it in the folds of her robe.

‘You – she . . . W-What? W-What have you done? Are you – have you been fuckin’ copying my wife?’ He spluttered his childish accusation.

Gloria looked him up and down matter-of-factly. ‘If you want me to be your wife, Tom, then that’s fine, yeah?’

But that was then.

Gloria Swai-Phillips led Tom back towards the Technical College by the arm. She guided him between the gum trees, holding him firmly in case he should trip on their roots. As they walked, she gave him an explanation – at least, that’s how she saw it.

‘Squolly – Commander Squoddoloppolollou – he read your rights to you when you were arrested, right?’

‘Rights?’ Tom murmured. All he remembered was Swai-Phillips ridiculing him for even raising the matter.

‘What I mean is, Squolly would’ve told you how the police were gonna investigate you, yeah? How they were gonna tail you, check out what your intentions were, yeah? Figure out what kinduv a guy you are.’

‘So far as the Tugganarong and Anglo communities here are concerned, yeah, those are your rights. The thing is, Tom’ – still holding his arm, Gloria drew Tom round so that he was facing her – ‘Squolly’s men’ve been tailing you for a long time now – years in fact, yeah? Y’see, when you were a young bloke, Tom, you kinduv took your eye off the ball.’

‘Eye off the ball?’

They had reached the low wall that bounded the Technical College. Tom’s eye – still off the ball – rolled over crab grass, cracked earth, the sawn-off stumps of a mulga thicket. The thrift-shop donation that was Prentice was piled on top of the wall, smoking. There was something different about this small prospect – a change that bothered Tom. He fixated on this, instead of listening to the harpy.