The Butt (6 page)

Tom grunted non-committally. He looked at the bland wall: a print of a nineteenth-century hunting scene hung beside a magnetic year planner. The red-jacketed huntsmen were on horseback, racing after a flock of moai, the giant indigenous flightless birds.

‘What’re you gonna do when you leave here?’ Swai-Phillips barked.

‘I – I hadn’t thought . . .’

‘You should go over to the hospital and see Lincoln,’ the lawyer commanded. ‘You may not be able to after tomorrow, yeah.’

When Tom entered the room, he found Lincoln reading a golfing magazine. There was no sign of Atalaya or her desert sorority. An Anglo nurse squeaked hither and thither on the shiny floor, changing the old man’s saline drip with studious efficiency.

‘Lissen,’ Lincoln said, putting his reading material aside and taking Tom’s hand in his own. ‘You must’ve maxed out your credit card getting me in here – and there was no need – my insurance’ll cover it.’

‘I thought, I mean – given that you’re a Tayswengo, it’d be part of the payback.’

The old man laughed. He certainly looked frail, and there was a thick dressing taped to his now shorn head, but his hand continued to gently pressure Tom’s, and his eyes twinkled with amused affection. ‘I’m not Tayswengo,’ Lincoln said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I love Atalaya, she and me . . . well.’ He shook his head on the snowy pillow. ‘We’re soul mates . . . I wish, I wish I’d met her twenty years ago . . .’

Except for the fact that she’d then have been minus-two, Tom thought – then checked himself, for the old man was being so sweet, he felt craven for not having come to see him before.

He cleared his throat and indicated the supermarket bag he’d put on the bedside cabinet. ‘I brought some fruit, magazines and candy. I got a selection, ’cause I don’t know what you like.’

‘Thanks.’ Lincoln smiled but made no move to look in the bag. ‘Don’t get me off the point, young man, this is important. You probably think – or you’ve been told by that tight-ass Adams – if you lay out for my medical bills, it’ll play well with the Intwennyfortee mob, but it ain’t that way at all . . .’ He tailed off, and Tom realized that even this short speech had exhausted Lincoln.

He made to disengage his hand from the old man’s, while muttering, ‘I don’t want to tire you out–’

But Lincoln gripped Tom’s hand tighter. ‘I’m inquivoo, see, nothing I say or do counts for any damn thing any more. Thing is’ – he looked at the door through which the nurse had exited, as if he suspected she might be eavesdropping – ‘you’re nothing until you’ve had the cut.’ His hand tightened still more, his voice grated up the scale. ‘The cut, Tommy boy, the cut – you gotta have it! Now, Tommy boy, now!’

Lincoln’s insistence on ‘the cut’ – whatever that might be – jarred Tom, as did his bad-mouthing Adams. On leaving the hospital, he finally followed Martha’s advice and called the embassy, which was in Capital City, 5,000 miles to the south, across the desert heart of the crumpled island-continent.

After holding and holding again, being transferred from this clerical assistant to that secretary, he finally spoke to a junior attaché. To begin with the woman’s chirpy tone was as redolent of home as a ball-game commentary. ‘Uh-huh, sure, I see,’ she interjected as Tom explained his predicament. He tried not to sound as if he had misgivings concerning the Honorary Consul, but the attaché still picked them up. ‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ she sighed. ‘I appreciate that you’re in a pretty lousy situation, but there’s not a lot we can do from way down here. Adams is the man on the spot, and he has the full support of the Ambassador. He’s sent us a report, and he’s confident it can be settled without any jail time.

‘If I were you, Mr Brodzinski, I’d go with him on this one. Should anything left-field emerge from the prelim’ hearing, either someone from my department will come up or, if the judge permits it, you can fly down here for a meeting.

‘One thing’s for sure, sir, and that’s our mission: we never, ever, leave our citizens out in the cold. Citizenship is a sacred bond for us – you should appreciate that. No matter what one of our own is accused of, he remains exactly that: one of our own.’

But then, as Tom tried to convey the absurdity of a mere accident being treated as a crime, the attaché’s manner changed abruptly, her tone becoming clipped. ‘See here,’ she said. ‘I’m not in a position either to judge your intentions or even to know exactly what it is you did. One thing I do know is that Mr Lincoln is an elderly man, and a very sick one. Another thing I know for a fact is that cigarette smoking is both personally and publically injurious–’

‘I was giving up!’ Tom spat into the cell. ‘It was my last goddamn cigarette!’

‘I’m going to have to stop you right there, Mr Brodzin-ski.’ The attaché’s prissiness was shot through with menacing self-righteousness. ‘Embassy staff have the right to undertake our work free from the threat of physical violence or verbal intimidation. I’m going to have to terminate this call immediately, as a direct result of your speech acts. I suggest you cool off and pay a little more attention to your own responsibilities, rather than seeking more victims for your dangerous hostility.’

Later, sitting on his corpse of a bed at the Entreati, it occurred to to Tom that this conversation had been a sickening replay of the butt-flick itself: an unthinking ejaculation into the attaché’s ear, followed by a massive overreaction.

Musing in this way brought Tom Brodzinski closer to the essence of what had happened to him. Standing on the balcony of the Mimosa, convincing himself that this would be the last acrid dug he’d ever suck, Tom hadn’t been considering his, his family’s or indeed anyone else’s health; he hadn’t plotted the steeply rising curve of medical expenditure against the slowly declining one of chronic disease. No.

Tom now realized, with mounting horror, that his carelessly discarded cigarette butt had flown on its – perhaps fatal – trajectory powered by one fuel alone: a tank of combustible pride. He was Doing the Right Thing – and for that alone should be accorded the uttermost respect.

So the butt had described its parabola and hit its target, creating a minor entry wound, a tiny blister. But oh, the exit wound! The massive, gaping and bloody exit wound, through which the butt had sped on, fragmenting into scores of smaller butts, which were now hitting his children, his wife, and causing terrible collateral damage.

Tom ate at the café on the ’nade. It was empty, and they served him an underdone burger, still frozen at its core. Too cowed to complain, he nibbled its edges. The waiter stood at the sixteen-metre line smoking and looking out to sea: the last of the cruise ships was sinking into the horizon, and above its fo’c’sle reared a mile-high genie of gibbous thunder cloud, struggling to escape from the tropical night.

In that night, Tom dreamed he was staying in the roach motel. It was fully booked, and the other guests, who wore zooty batik T-shirts and tinted shades, tickled him mercilessly with their antennae. It was a relief when the warder of this plastic prison bent down to pick it up and empty them all into the sea. Tumbling end over end, Tom looked up to the quayside and saw the giant Swai-Phillips, his grey Afro coruscating like the corona of the eclipsed sun around his dark impassive face.

The lawyer’s house was further out of Vance than the Honorary Consul’s, at the top of the Great Dividing Range’s first foothills. As the cab laboured up the hairpin bends of the single-track road, Tom was confronted first by walls of impenetrable shrubbery, then by vistas of the city below growing smaller and smaller, reduced from its dirty, confused status as a place of human habitation to a mere scattering of pristine white cubes beside the aquamarine bay.

When the cab eventually stopped, so did the road. The blacktop looped through the scrub and petered out in deep ruts of reddish dust. Struggling to turn his vehicle, the cabbie, an obese Tugganarong, grunted, ‘This is it.’

And when Tom queried the location, saying, ‘Are you sure?’, the man laughed increduously. ‘’Caws I’m fuggin sure. Phillips ’ouse bin ’ere longest time. Longer than bloody Vance, yeah.’

Tom watched as the cab bounced back on to the road and disappeared down the hill. There was a mailbox nailed high up on a tree trunk, and beyond this a path led into the indecipherable bush – so many plants and trees Tom didn’t comprehend, their myriad leafy foreign tongues still further complicated by parasitic mosses and squiggling creepers.

Reluctantly, Tom summoned himself and began to pick his way into the jungle. It was oppressively still – not a breath of wind. The sun’s rays struck down through the foliage, spearing the back of his neck. His sandals slithered through leaf fall and caught on tree roots. He tried not to think about the seven species of venomous snake, or the three kinds of venomous spider.

Tom came upon a kennel. Two of the sharp-muzzled, brindled, native dogs lay asleep in it. He crept past. Next, the lawyer’s Landcruiser emerged from the greenery, parked on an apron at the end of a metalled drive.

The dogs must have been roused despite Tom’s wary tread, because there was an anguish of yelps and the crash of heavy paws through the undergrowth. Tom took flight along the path, staggering and tripping, until he was propelled into the full glare of noon.

He found himself by a fence of corrugated-iron sheets, beyond which spread a large compound that occupied the summit of the hill. He was on the point of throwing himself over this – for he could see no other means of access – when the yelps were throttled off. Turning, Tom saw the big dog, its muzzle dashed with saliva, dancing frantically on its hind legs: it had reached the end of its long chain.

Tom laughed callously, then took his time discovering the stile and mounting it, looking back with each step in order to taunt the watchdog still more.

On the far side he expected to meet the lawyer, or one of his retainers, but there was no one, only cracked earth, and scattered across it bits of scaffolding, a cement mixer, piles of cinder-blocks and mounds of hardened mortar. Towards the far side of the compound, projecting out where the hill fell away, there was a concrete platform upon which a few negligent courses of bricks had been laid. An indication, Tom thought, of where a house might be sited if anyone – in this stifling heat – could be bothered to build one.

Tom walked across and stood on the platform. He checked his cell. There was a signal – if Swai-Phillips didn’t appear, he’d call him. Then he heard a skittering noise, as of a lizard’s flit, and, peering over the edge of the platform, saw that he was not alone.

Ten feet below, in the thin wedge of shadow at the base of the platform, sat a very tall, matt-black man. Even at a glance, Tom could see that he was extremely thin, his long thighs no thicker than his calves. All the man’s limbs were tucked in, so that he resembled a collapsed umbrella.

Tom slithered down the friable earth of the hillside. Up close the man was still more outlandish. He sported only a dirty leather breechclout, which called to mind Adams’s gardening apron. Apart from three long tufts of hair above either pendulous ear, his head was shaven; it was like a fifth, etiolated limb, the face as dimpled as an elbow, the almond eyes glazed. A swelling in the man’s cheek was the only part of him which moved, revolving slowly. Tom could almost taste the bitter sloosh of the engwegge, and he understood that this must be the makkata.

Not wanting to disrupt the sorceror’s trance – it might be prejudicial – Tom turned away. Yet, reluctant to leave, he sat down a few feet away on a tree stump. Into the shimmering oppression of the tropical noon came the rhythmic slurping sound of the makkata’s mastication. Tom wondered if he was deep in a vision of the future and, if so, whether he could see Swai-Phillips’s new house, its terrace strewn with loungers tenanted by the lawyer’s influential friends? Was the makkata watching while topless party girls dove into the pool, their breasts swaying as they went off the springboard? But no – a springboard was out of the question. Tom hadn’t seen one in years, and here in Vance – of all places – such a dangerous pleasure would surely be illegal.

Swai-Phillips, as was his gift, popped up from nowhere. One instant he wasn’t there – the next he was, looking frowsty and unshaven, in dirty-white jeans hacked off at the knee and nothing else. There were small balls of greying hair on his chest, Tom noted, each one a mini-Afro. Had he forgotten to shave this as well?

Swai-Phillips was standing some yards down the hill, beckoning and calling to someone up on the platform. ‘C’mon, Prentice!’ he cried. ‘Get your sorry white arse down here, yeah!’

Earth and pebbles rattled. Swai-Phillips pushed up his sunglasses and winked at Tom with his bad eye. Tom got up from his stump and turned to see an Anglo of about his own age making his way, very unsteadily, down the slope.

The man had a preposterous coif: the top of his head was completely bald, while there was brown hair not only at the sides but also on his forehead. This fringe wasn’t a few straggly threads that he’d combed over; rather, it appeared to have been left behind when the rest of his hair retreated.

The Anglo came right up to Tom with a waddling gait – he walked like a fat man, even though he was not. He offered Tom a hand at once thin and yet fleshy. ‘Brian Prentice.’

‘Tom,’ Tom said, reluctantly taking the hand. ‘Tom Brodzinski.’

Prentice wore very new, very stiff blue jeans, cut narrow in the style favoured by the country’s cattlemen. On his feet were steel-toed, elastic-sided boots, on his back a khaki bush shirt. The whole authentic outfit was rounded off by a wide-brimmed hat with a neatly rolled fly net attached to its brim, which Prentice carried in his free hand. The gear pegged Prentice as a wannabe adventurer, determined to strike out for the lawless wastes of the interior – or at least to give that impression. Tom instantly despised him, for Prentice’s face belied any such resolve.