The Butt (5 page)

‘Yeah – yeah, no worries, mate,’ the lawyer replied, and, still embracing Tom, he wheeled him round and marched him up the steps and under the massive marble portico – a feature that Tom, even in his shocked and sozzled state, could recognize as being absurdly grandiose for a provincial station.

In the lobby, which was equally imposing – shiny marble floor, inset with gold brilliants forming the outline of the southern constellations – Swai-Phillips embraced Tom still more closely. ‘You,’ he breathed, his sandalwood-scented Afro tickling Tom’s cheek, ‘say nothing. Keep it zipped.’

Then the lawyer advanced on the reception desk, which had been roughly, but artistically, hewn from a block of rusty-red native rock. Behind it sat an Anglo cop in camouflage uniform. She also wore a bulletproof vest that was cut low, like a décolletage. An assault rifle was propped beside her computer terminal, while leaning against the wall behind her was a bundle of hunting spears, some at least twelve feet long.

Once Swai-Phillips had explained their business, another officer ushered them into an interview room. Here, there were a couple of plastic chairs and a steel table that had built into it some kind of apparatus; this, judging by the buttons and LED displays, Tom assumed to be recording equipment. Surveillance cameras were mounted in all four corners of the room; they were the same compact models that he’d seen all over town, loitering in alleyways, squatting on top of poles like remote-control stylites.

Feeling the effects of Adams’s Daquiri, Tom sat down heavily on one of the chairs. Swai-Phillips went to the window and, parting the slats of the Venetian blinds, pointed out to him a powerboat moored in the marina. The high white superstructure was trimmed with silvery aluminium, and a thicket of whiplash radio antennae sprouted from the wheelhouse roof, while a stand of thick sea-fishing rods was planted by the stern.

‘Mine,’ Swai-Phillips said casually. ‘I’ll take you out one day.’

The door whooshed open behind them, and Tom turned to see a very stocky brown-skinned man enter. He was clearly a high-ranking officer, for, while he wore the same military-style uniform as the state police, and his massive head was surmounted with the same shiny origami cap – all sharp angles, with a peak like a stork’s bill – his was festooned with ornate enamelled medallions.

The officer – who Tom assumed, rightly, to be a Tugga-narong – marched up to him, smelled his breath through pump-action nostrils and spat out: ‘Drinking, eh? Anglo’s ruin over here.’ Then he laughed and turned to the lawyer. ‘Gettinoff on your pot an’ stuff, are you, Jethro?’ He jerked a thumb towards the marina. ‘I ken tellya ’ow that tub ainfor the thing. You gotta veep-creep up on ’em fishy-fellers. Veep-creep awlways. I bin out lass Satenday for tuckerbully, an’ gotta 500-pounder juss offa me skiff.’

The two men – one, two heads taller than the other – continued their hobbyists’ boasting for another five minutes or so, their claims becoming more and more fantastical.

At some point Swai-Phillips must have passed the officer, whom he called Squolly, the Milford Chemical Bank’s faxed notification of Tom’s asset transfer, because he no longer had it in his hand when he broke off and said to Tom, ‘We’re off now’; then to Squolly, ‘Gotta get this diddy one back ’fore ’e karks wiv de stress of itall.’

The two friends – for, clearly, that’s what they were – then touched palms, and, grasping his client’s shoulder as if it were the tiller of a sluggish sailboat, Swai-Phillips guided Tom out of the building.

Once they were in the lawyer’s SUV, and a fair way off from police headquarters, cruising along the wide boulevards through the commercial district, Tom recovered his thick tongue and asked Swai-Phillips: ‘What happened there? I mean, Adams said I’d be arrested.’

‘You were.’

‘Then what about Miranda? He, S-Squolly, he never read me my rights.’

‘Rights!’ Swai-Phillips laughed. ‘The only rights hereabouts are the ones we make!’

And to illustrate this witticism, he signalled and took the next right into a cross street.

Tom absorbed this for a while, then said: ‘When will the judge decide if I get bail?’

This time the lawyer laughed long and hard; a series of independent bellows of such force that even the oversized car rocked.

‘Oh.’ He recovered himself and patted Tom’s bare knee. ‘You got bail alrighty, no worries there, my friend, yeah. With a hundred K down flat, Squolly would’ve given bail to a kiddie-fiddler!’

And Swai-Phillips erupted all over again, his preposterous silvery Afro shaking like the foliage of a birch tree.

Put out, Tom almost inquired whether, since there had been no sign of a judge, a bribe had been involved. But then he thought better of it: he was beginning to understand how far out of his depth he was. To ask his own lawyer such a thing would only be to flounder still more in this treacherous quicksand.

The shock, the heat and the leaden charge of Adams’s palm spirit Daquiri were all puddling together into a bad headache, when the SUV pulled into the Mimosa’s parking lot. Swai-Phillips hit a button on the dash, and the native music that had been unobtrusively playing – and which, Tom now realized, had the same, insistent bing-bong beat as the ring tone on his hired cellphone – cut out.

The lawyer stopped the car and turned in his seat. Tom looked into the wrap-around shades and saw in their bulbous lenses his own pale face, leeched of any colour or composure.

‘OK, Brodzinski.’ The lawyer was all business now. ‘Come by my office tomorrow morning, as soon as you’ve moved your stuff over to a longer-let apartment. Budget will be a consideration for you now, yeah? I can recommend the Entreati Experience on Trangaden Boulevard.

‘I’ll be needing a deposit from you. Another wire transfer would be fine, although I’d prefer cash. Either way, say $5,000. My secretary will make sure you get an itemization at the end of every week.

‘Luckily for you, I’m called to the local bar as a solicitor-advocate, so there’ll be no need to take on a trial lawyer. I’m going to see the DA this afternoon, and I’m hoping to persuade him to set an early date for the combined hearing, right?’

‘Combined hearing?’ Tom queried weakly.

‘That’s right. Bail has to be confirmed by a senior judge; at the same time traditional makkatas will rule on the combo. The judge is no prob’, but the makkatas have to come in from over there.’ Swai-Phillips jerked a thumb over his shoulder; then, seeing his client’s incomprehension, qualified this: ‘Y’know, from the desert. Anyways, so long as you’ve been deemed astande, you can immediately begin restitution to the Intwennyfortee mob–’

Tom waved the lawyer down; none of this arcane legal stuff was getting through to him. What had registered, however, was Swai-Phillips’s earlier assumption. ‘What makes you so certain’ – Tom chose his words carefully – ‘that I’ll be moving out of the Mimosa in the morning? My wife and kids aren’t set to fly until–’

‘Please, Mr Brodzinski, look behind you.’

Tom whipped round: the twins, Jeremy and Lucas, were playing in the flower bed at the front of the apartment block. As he watched, Jerry picked up a handful of bark chips and slung them at his brother. Tommy Junior was preoccupied, lost in a solipsistic frolic, leadenly cavorting at the kerbside, his partner a wheeled flight bag that he jerked back and forth by its handle.

At that moment, the double glass doors swung open, and Martha and Dixie emerged, between them manhandling the enormous suitcase that conveyed the bulk of the family’s effects.

Tom swivelled back to face Swai-Phillips’s bug eyes. It was a disconcerting reprise of the scene that had been played in the same location, by the same cast, that morning. Only this time, Tom voiced his unease: ‘How did’ya know they were leaving? How! Are, are you . . .’ he said, floundering, ‘. . . psychic or something?’

Swai-Phillips began to utter his maddening, stagy laugh. However, he was forestalled by Martha, who let go of the suitcase and came barrelling across to the SUV. She wrenched the passenger door open and, leaning across her husband, began shouting at the lawyer: ‘What the fuck’s your game, mister? Have you got your hooks into my husband? Whaddya want from us, money? Slimy, fucking money!’

Even the imperturbable Swai-Phillips seemed taken aback by this turn of events. Involuntarily, he reached up and swept off his glasses. It was as if – it occurred to Tom later – he was refusing a blindfold, the better to impress his insouciance on this one-woman firing squad by staring her down.

Except that the lawyer couldn’t really stare anyone down once his mask was removed. For, while one of his eyes was keenly green and steady, the other was rolled back in its socket, and half obscured by a pink gelatinous membrane that cut obliquely across the white. The three of them froze, shocked in different ways by the revelation of this deformity. Certainly, neither Tom nor Martha Brodzinski had ever seen anything like it before.

It was a mistake. Up until that moment they’d been getting on. Tom had accepted there was little to be gained by Martha and the kids staying, while, if they left immediately, they’d be able to fly home direct, with only one brief stop for refuel-ling in Agania.

For her part, Martha had refrained from berating her husband in front of the children. She had even, as they sat jammed beside each other in the back of the cab, taken Tom’s sweaty hand in her own cool one and given it a series of rhythmic squeezes, as if seeking to pump into him a little of her steely resolve.

However, when Tom raised the issue of Swai-Phillips, Martha’s expression hardened. She turned away from him, completed the check-in procedure, then sent the kids over to the gift shop with a couple of bills. Motioning to Tom, she led him in the opposite direction, towards a towering shrubbery: entire trees, strung with creepers, were planted in an enormous container, together with a basalt boulder.

Once they were concealed behind this, Martha let him have it. ‘I understand you made a mistake, Tom,’ she began reasonably enough, ‘but the way you insist on compounding it is beyond me. It’s like you’ve got some kinda urge to drag yourself down – and the rest of us with you. Jesus Christ!’ she spat, then gnawed with perfect teeth at the heel of her hand, a pathetic signal of distress that Tom couldn’t remember her making since the dark days, shortly after they’d adopted Tommy Junior, and he was – albeit tentatively – being diagnosed.

‘I – I . . . I’m not sure I know . . .’ He groped for the right formula to appease her. ‘I mean, I thought you – you were angry when I was rude to him, to Swai-Phillips.’

Tom ran a hand over his brush-cut hair; its thickness reassured him, and his headache had succumbed to two hefty painkillers. He felt gutsy enough to come back at her: ‘Look, Martha, maybe you’re right, in part, but I do know where I am – right here, and Swai-Phillips is a local attorney, he knows all about this local stuff, the way native and codified laws work together. Shit, even Adams, the Consul, he says Swai-Phillips is the man in Vance – or one of them.’

‘The man, the man,’ Martha mocked him. ‘And what does that make you, a man’s man? No, lissen to me, Tom. I told you before we came here to read those books, really read them, not just drift off over them ’cause you’d had your evening toke and your Seven and fucking Seven. This is a big, dangerous, confused country, and these people are not your friends – none of them.

‘While you were getting in with them, I was making my own inquiries. Seems Adams hasn’t been with the State Department for over ten years – he’s just the Honorary Consul, he hasn’t got any more leverage than you.’

Tom was unmanned. He stood face down to the polished floor of the terminal. The scissoring brushes wielded by a downtrodden-looking Tugganarong pushed a sausage of lint past where they stood.

Eventually, he said what he thought she wanted to hear: ‘What should I do, then?’

Martha pursed her lips; her long neck kinked in irritation. It had been the wrong thing to say.

‘Do? I dunno, Tom, but if I was you, I’d at least check with the embassy down south. If they can’t advise you by phone, I’d get on a goddamn flight and go see them. You’ve got bail, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure if–’ He was going to explain about state and federal jurisdictions in this part of the world, thereby demonstrating that he wasn’t completely ignorant.

After twenty years of marriage Martha could anticipate this from tone alone. ‘One thing I need you to realize, Tom, is this: this is all your own doing, one hundred per cent. You’ve screwed this one up, just like you screwed up that real estate business in Munnings, and my goddamn brother’s health insurance.’

‘That–’

‘I don’t want to hear it. You’ve screwed this up like you’ve screwed up your relationship with Dixie, with Tommy Junior, and the way you’re on target to do the same with the twins . . .’

Now she was under way, Martha could have kept going indefinitely, had not Tommy Junior discovered them in their toxic bower. He stared at his quarelling parents, his brown eyes shiny and indifferent, then he forcibly turned his mother by her shoulders to face the departures board.

Martha said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Snatched up her carry-on bag and started towards the line that snaked into the roped-off pens which directed passengers towards security.

Tom stood sulking for a few moments, then tagged along behind, his arm across his son’s shoulder, which was higher and more solid than his own.

At the barrier there was a confusion of goodbyes and kisses that missed their mark – bouncing off cheekbones, lost in hair. Martha was contrite. She leaned into Tom and whispered: ‘I’m scared, honey, that’s all.’

‘Me too,’ Tom replied, and he would have sealed the rapprochement with a longer embrace had the twins not grabbed his hands and attempted to swing on them. By the time he disengaged, his wife had disappeared, and Dixie was standing on the far side of the metal detector, calling to her father to propel her little brothers through.

Two days later, waking in the deathly monochrome of a tropical dawn, Tom lay listening to the clickety agitation of the roaches in their motel. He thought back to those last few minutes at the airport. Even though Dixie had called him during the family’s lay-over at Agania, Tom couldn’t rid himself of the unsettling notion that Martha hadn’t left the country at all. He hadn’t seen his wife go, and now he felt her presence acutely in the seedy, overheated bedroom of the minute apartment.

The Entreati Experience had turned out to be a backpackers’ hostel, with a few short-let apartments on the top storey. The backpackers’ cubicles were ranged round a grimy courtyard, across which were strung clotheslines festooned with their garish T-shirts and brightly patterned sarongs and Bermudas, which flapped in the bilge-laden breeze from the nearby container port.

Down here, at the rougher end of Vance, there were few Anglo faces to be seen on the streets. Across the road from the Experience, there was a bar frequented by natives, where surly drunks squatted all day and evening, before, in the small hours, beginning noisily incompetent fights.

Swai-Phillips had been right, though: the monthly rate for Tom’s apartment was nugatory; a fact explained by the manager, who reminded him that the tourist season was ending. Soon, all the tanned kids would shoulder their packs and flip-flop halfway across the world back to college.

Tom felt ambivalent about this. The college kids were infuriating, revving the engines of their Campervans at all hours of the night, touristic vehicles that were incongruously pitted with bullet holes.

Beardless blond giants cornered Tom in the dank corridors of the hostel and spun him yarns of their adventures in the interior. Their girlfriends loitered near by, snickering, chewing gum, rearranging the straps of their bikinis to expose more of themselves.

Still, once the kids had finally gone, Tom would be all alone. He felt an aching nostalgia for the very idea of air travel, as if the computer-targeted silvery fuselages belonged to a bygone era. Here he was grounded: that most pitiful of things, a left-behind tourist. In his pitiful suitcase were his pitiful effects: half-squeezed tubes of sun cream, trunks with a big word written across them, airport novels that would never go through an airport again, a digital camera loaded with pin-prick-sharp images of ghostly happiness.

The sheet of paper listing his lawyer’s impositions was stuck to the scabrous door of the fridge by a magnet in the squashed L-shape of the great desertified island-continent itself.

Each day now the humidity was building and building towards the monsoon. Most days, it took Tom until noon to rouse himself, pull on some clothes and venture out into the hot sponge of Vance. Standing on the sidewalk, he looked up at enormous cumulo-nimbus formations coasting in from the ocean; their bulbous white peaks and horizontal grey bases mirrored the superstructures and hulls of the cruise ships out in the bay – vessels that were readying themselves to depart, scooting out from beneath the gathering storm and heading for safer waters, busier cities, better shopping.

At the quayside Tom took the roach motel out of the plastic bag. He opened the little perspex door, and the roaches, their feelers probing liberty, fell end over end into the scummy water. The waves washing against the concrete gathered their bodies into an agitated raft. Tom turned and scuttled off in the direction of the nearest mall.

Here he had doughnuts for breakfast in a coffee shop, while scanning the paper. The local news he ignored, preferring to peer the wrong way down a 15,000-mile-long telescope, at events diminished out of all significance.

After a few days of this, Tom felt himself sinking into swampy inertia. It was now so humid in Vance that the atmosphere seemed as thick and moist as a hot towel; it was a relief when his lawyer called and summoned Tom to his office.

Swai-Phillips’s office was in the Metro-Center, the 22-storey block that towered over Vance’s relatively low-rise business district. Ushered in by a furtive, brown-skinned man, who introduced himself as Abdul, the lawyer’s clerk, Tom discovered Swai-Phillips with his bare feet up on his desk, his sunglasses clamped on and his impenetrable gaze levelled at the big windows along the far wall. Tom assumed that, like the rest of Vance’s dwindling population, he was mesmerized by the anticipation of the rains.

Swai-Phillips was also smoking a large loosely rolled cigar, the outer leaf of which was partially detached. As Tom watched, appalled, he dabbed spittle on to a finger, then applied it to the vegetative glans.

‘But what about Abdul?’ Tom asked.

‘Him? That feller . . .’ Swai-Phillips grinned wolfishly. ‘He’s my son, kind of, right.’

Tom asked about the building: why was it so much higher than all the rest? This was an earthquake zone, wasn’t it?

The lawyer did his Father Christmas shtick again. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! You may well ask – not only is this an earthquake zone, this building is slap on the crack, man. I’ve been sitting here one time, yeah, and seen the streets rucking up like a rug that’s been kicked! I tellya why it’s so high – the Metro-Center, it’s ’cause the pols in this town are so damn low, that’s why!’

Tom felt shaky and sat down abruptly on a low chair.

‘I would ask if my cigar bothered you,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ‘but why bother, I know the answer.’

Was it mere rudeness or sheer arrogance on the lawyer’s part? Tom shook his head, uncomprehending. The thick coils of smoke lay so heavily on the carpeted deck of the office that when Swai-Phillips’s secretary came in with a cup of coffee for Tom, she appeared tangled up in its bluey-grey hanks.

While the lawyer continued to puff on the monstrous stogie, it dawned on Tom that his own alternations between belligerence and passivity in the face of this whole grotesque situation could be entirely accounted for by the effects of nicotine withdrawal. That’s why he’d been so emotionally labile: whining, inveigling, then inveighing. That’s why his encounters – with Adams, Swai-Phillips, even the clerk in the cellphone store – had the vibrant, darkly hilarious character of hallucinations. That’s why his judgement had been so clouded: for, instead of the smoke venting from Tom at regular intervals, it was backing up inside his head, getting inside his eyes.

‘It wouldn’t matter a damn, right,’ Swai-Phillips hectored him, ‘if you were to take up smoking again, so far as the traditional people are concerned. Engwegge – that’s the native tobacco – is used so widely here. Shee-it, they don’t only smoke the stuff, they chew it, sniff it, rub it on their gums. They even mix it up into enemas and squirt it up their black arses, right. No, it isn’t the Intwennyfortee mob you need to worry about on that score.’

He took his feet off the desk and, dropping the cigar in an ashtray, adopted a more lawyerly air. ‘However, should we go to a full trial – which I hope won’t happen – we’ll more than likely be facing a majority Anglo jury; the defence has no rights to veto jurors here; and, as you’ve probably realized, the whole anti-smoking drive is, at root, racially motivated. The Anglos have a lot of things stuffed up their arses, but engwegge ain’t one of them, yeah.

‘So, if you don’t want to risk smoking, yeah, you can always chew a few engwegge leaf-tips. I’ve gotta batch of the finest here.’ The lawyer opened a desk drawer and slung a packet made from a banana leaf on to the blotter. It lay there: grossly organic on the workaday surface.

Tom grimaced. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Jethro,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll take a rain check.’

‘Please yourself.’ The lawyer sounded miffed. ‘This ain’t just a fiery little treat – it’s ritual stuff. My old feller sends them from over there. The tips are dew-picked, then fire-baked. The makkatas of my dad’s mob chew quids as big as tennis balls; then . . . past, present, future’ – he dug his spade-like hands into the ineluctable modality of his own engwegge trance – ‘they can see ’em all at once. Still’ – the lawyer hunched forward and quit desert mysticism for the prosaic office – ‘none of that need concern you – not yet, yeah. I want you to come up to my place tomorrow; there’s a bloke you need to see, right.’