The Butt (7 page)

It was, like his damp hand, thin yet fleshy. The eyes were equally unresolved: pinkish lids, reddish lashes and wet pupils like those of an embryo. When he spoke – with his irritating, braying accent – his plump yet bloodless lips rolled back from his gums. Either the man had a bad shaving rash, or he’d picked up a fungal infection in one of Vance’s rank shower stalls, for his weak jaw and turkey neck were lumpy and corrupted. All in all, Tom couldn’t recall ever meeting a more distasteful individual.

Prentice’s handshake was predictably furtive: one finger bent back and caught in Tom’s palm, as if he were an accidental Mason. When Tom let go, the hand fell limply back to Prentice’s side.

Swai-Phillips observed this meeting with ill-concealed mirth. ‘Dr Livingstone,’ he quipped, ‘this is Mr Stanley. Stanley, this is the celebrated Dr Livingstone. I hope you’ll be very happy together!’ Then he turned his attention to the tranced-out makkata and spat a long stream of clipped consonants and palate clicks in his direction.

Tom wasn’t surprised that the lawyer spoke one of the native languages; never the less the vehement sound of the tongue struck him anew. The desert peoples didn’t use the same parts of their mouths to speak as Anglos; or, rather, they hardly used their mouths at all. Teeth, palate and larynx conspired together to produce this percussive noise.

The makkata came out of his reverie at once, ejected the chaw of engwegge into his palm, tucked it into his breechclout and, gathering his stick limbs under him, rose. His wide black eyes were limpid but showed no sign of intoxication. He pointed at Tom and Prentice while rapping away still more emphatically than Swai-Phillips.

The lawyer grinned. ‘He says that he’ll do the ceremonial test right away – you first, Brodzinski.’

Tom quailed; he was a skinny boy once more, being pushed towards the vaulting horse by a sadistic phys. ed. instructor. He wished he could deflect the makkata’s steady gaze.

Swai-Phillips took Prentice by the arm, and they went down the hill towards the jungle wall. Even as he was unbuckling his belt and letting his pants slide down, Tom was wondering if such feeble compliance was still because of nicotine withdrawal. He had no idea what the makkata was going to do to him. The awful thought occurred to Tom, as he stood half naked in the glaring sun, that it was a show, put on for the lawyer’s perverse enjoyment. That he was bent on humiliating Tom, simply because he could. Maybe Prentice was really a crony of Swai-Phillips, brought along to witness this shaming.

The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips. Tom – although he couldn’t conceive of anything less likely – admonished himself not to become aroused. Yet this thought itself was arousing: he felt the familiar prickle on the backs of his thighs, his scrotum tightened. The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle. It was a spicy smell, mixed with the ferrous dust of the desert.

Tom let his head fall back on his sweaty neck. Heavy storm clouds were piled up above, their spongy masses saturated with rain-in-waiting. His fellow tourists – and the native Anglos when they’d had a drink – hymned the beauties of this mighty land. Yet, now that he was left behind here, Tom thought he might be looking at it with the more realistic eyes of the natives, seeing the scarred hillsides of the coastal ranges, smelling the faecal decay of the mangrove swamps. Certainly, there was nothing picturesque in the parts of the interior he had driven through with his family: the salt pans that flaked like eczema, the warty termite mounds, the endless charcoal strokes of the eucalyptus trees on the wrinkled vellum of the grasslands. Even here, on the coast, Tom sensed this alien landscape to his rear, an apprehension of a door ajar in reality itself, through which might be glanced seething horrors.

The makkata, grasping the flesh of Tom’s inner thigh firmly between his thumb and forefinger, said ‘I’ll protect you’ in accentless English. Tom felt a searing stab, jerked his head forward and, appalled, watched as the sorceror slowly withdrew the blade of a steel knife.

Blood coursed from Tom’s thigh. He felt dizzy, staggered and, hobbled by his pants, almost fell. Then Swai-Phillips was supporting him.

‘Be a man,’ the lawyer said. ‘It’s nothing, a flesh wound.’

He gave Tom a wad of Kleenex, which he clamped to his thigh. While Tom rearranged his clothing, the lawyer squatted down by the makkata, who was examining the patch of bloodstained earth, already lucent with feeding flies. The makkata stirred this into red mud with his knife blade while clicking an incantation.

‘B-but, he speaks perfect English,’ Tom said irrelevantly. He moved a few shaky paces off. Prentice was still fifty yards away, his kinked back resolutely turned.

Swai-Phillips came over. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up to the house. My cousin’ll bandage that scratch, and I can tellya, mate, you’ll enjoy that, yeah.’

As Tom was led away, he asked, ‘What about Prentice?’

‘Prentice?’ For a moment the lawyer was confused – then he barked, ‘Oh, him! Right! It’s his turn now, isn’t it? Silly bastard’s got the same problem as you, needs a makkata to judge whether he’s astande.’

The lawyer half dragged Tom up the hill, then began marching him across the open ground. Tom shook himself free. ‘And am I?’ he spat. ‘Am I astande? Because if I’m not, I’m gonna sue you and that fucking witch doctor, you better believe it, man.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ The lawyer swept off his sunglasses, and his good eye twinkled. He was enjoying himself. ‘No worries, mate, you’re good.’

Through the living jalousie of the jungle, Swai-Phillips’s house came into view. Given its size, Tom was astonished that he hadn’t spotted it from the top of the hill. It was three storeys high, with a wide veranda at least a hundred feet long. The entire structure – including the covered walkways that connected the main house to a number of outbuildings – was riveted together out of corrugated iron. Great slabs of this material, streaked with rust, had been bent and bashed into copings, windowsills, pillars, roofs, chimneys and balustrades. There was even a corrugated-iron pool.

Despite the electric throb in his wounded thigh, and the growing anxiety that the makkata’s knife might have had tetanus on it – or worse – Tom still felt like laughing at the lawyer’s absurd pile. Until, that is, it impinged on him what the house was still more reminiscent of: the model minivan Tommy Junior had wanted him to buy, the one the old Anglo had told Tom was a Gandaro spirit wagon. The deftly fashioned artefact that was taboo for an Anglo to even touch, let alone possess.

A few minutes later, sitting in one of the galvanized gazebos, on a galvanized bench, Tom’s breathing began to shudder into some regularity. Swai-Phillips, who was sitting opposite, clapped his hands loudly and cried out: ‘Gloria! Betsy! Drinks, goddamnit! Now!’

From deep within the metallic bowels of the hulk, there came the sound of women’s voices and the clanking noises of their bare footfalls.

Tom studied the house more: creepers thrust between the corrugated-iron sheets of the walkways, while saplings poked through their balustrades. Still larger trees punched through warped walls and rusty roofs, their limbs chafing and squeaking against the metal, as the onshore breeze rose in the gathering darkness.

‘Will he be – I mean, who will . . .’ Tom couldn’t frame his question; he began again: ‘Prentice, will he be able to get up here after . . .’

‘He’s been speared? Oh, yeah, the makkata’ll give him a hand – so long as he’s astande too, that is. ’Course, if he’s inquivoo, he’ll have to leave him where he lies, yeah. That’s the size of it.’

Tom was going to ask the lawyer what Prentice had been accused of, when footfalls sounded loud on the veranda and Martha Brodzinski came towards the two men, a tray held on her upturned hand, as if she were an insouciant waitress in a citified brasserie.

At the sight of Martha’s willowy figure, and her thick dirty-blonde hair swishing against her long neck, Tom gripped the arm of the iron bench. Despite the heat, cold drops of sweat fell from his eyebrows to his cheeks. As Martha advanced along the walkway Tom’s heart burgeoned. Was this why he hadn’t seen her go through the metal detector at the airport? Why she hadn’t come to the phone when he called during their lay-over?

Why had she stayed behind? For moments Tom allowed himself to believe it was because she had decided to be with him, to support him; and that she had hidden out at the lawyer’s house with a view to suprising him, as if they were playful young lovers once more.

The paper dart of this fancy flew true for milliseconds, then hit an iron stanchion, buckled and fell. That wasn’t it at all, Tom realized. On the contrary, Martha was here because she was in cahoots with Swai-Phillips – having an affair with him as well. She’d sent their children back, alone, halfway round the world, so that she could dally here with the moustachioed creep, the laughing cavalier!

He stood up to confront her . . . and fell back, because when the woman came into the gazebo, Tom was presented not with Martha’s pale plate of Puritan features but a face parodic of them: the lips thicker, the nose more bulbous, the eyes smaller. The woman who handed him the tall glass jammed with fruit wasn’t exactly ugly, but she was coarser – grosser, even – than Martha.

Though Swai-Phillips was laughing, he still managed to make an introduction: ‘Brodzinski, this is my second cousin Gloria; she grew up in Liège, Belgium, but she’s been here with us for a while now.’

‘G’day,’ said Gloria.

‘Y – you could’ve warned me!’ Tom rounded on him.

‘Warned you? Warned you of what, exactly?’ The lawyer dipped a finger into the drink his cousin had given him and traced a circle of moisture on his bare chest. ‘Oh, by the way Brodzinski, I have a cousin who’s the spit of your wife . . . You’d’ve thought I was crazy. Better you come up and see her for yourself, right. Still,’ – he paused, took a slug of his drink and placed it on the table – ‘it does explain one thing to you.’

‘What’s that?’ Tom hated himself for playing along with the cruel joke.

‘Why it was I was so taken with Mrs Brodzinski, yeah. Believe me, if she’s anything like as, um, accommodating as my cousin, then you must be – in ordinary circs – a very happy man indeed.’

Tom sat marooned in his own passivity. What was happening to him? Why were events barracking him with his own impotence? The makkata had mixed his blood with the earth and pronounced him astande, yet he sat inert, while Gloria knelt before him, encouraged him to raise his buttocks so she could pull down his pants, then swabbed and dressed the wound.

Sometime later darkness had fallen utterly. Flying foxes chattered in a mango tree at the front of the veranda. Tom could just make out their oilskin wings opening and closing, the shine of their feline eyes. He thought of the makkata – and so it was that he appeared in the circle of light thrown by a hissing gas lamp Gloria had lit before retiring. He was leading Prentice by the hand – the other man seemed devoid of volition as he staggered along the veranda. There was a brutal streak of red mud on Prentice’s cheek, and he’d mislaid his stupid affectation of a hat.

‘It’s the bizzo,’ the girl said. ‘The Von Sassers have been over there for decades – first the father, then the son. They know all there is to know. They’ve collected all the stories – they write beautifully as well.’

Her eyes were a little crazy; her words came in enthusiastic spurts.

Every time he started reading the heavy hardback, Tom fell asleep – only to wake with a start, having dreamed that a malevolent child was sitting on his chest.

Fed up with the Von Sassers, Tom bought more books and scanned them on his sweat-damp bed at the Experience, a mosquito coil smouldering by his elbow. But these writers were just as bewildering. One would propose an outlandish psychological model of the hill tribes, while the next would say this was nonsense: the Handrey were as similar to the Anglos as any one individual is to the next.

There was dispute even about the fundamentals: some experts categorically stated that the desert people had been there for as long as 100,000 years; while others insisted that when the first Anglo explorers crossed the interior, they encountered Inssessitti makkatas, who told them that their people had only been in the region for the past decade, having themselves arrived by sea from the Felthams.

The very shifting sands of the deserts and the sliding rivers of mud in the tropical uplands served to obscure whatever material evidence there might be to support or deny these competing contentions. And so it was that the land itself was amnesiac, forgetful of its own history; and ignorant, even, of its own terrifying extent.

After a couple of days Swai-Phillips called.

‘I’ve no date yet for the prelim’ hearing, right,’ he said without any preamble.

‘Well, when will you?’

‘Hard to say.’

Tom pictured the lawyer in his offices at the top of the Metro-Center, puffing on a stinky engwegge cheroot and bullshitting from behind his mask of a face.

‘But so long as the court accepts the makkata’s evidence you can make the first reparation trip over there, right away, right.’

‘First?’

‘There may have to be several, but the good thing is you can head off while the criminal prosecution continues – which may take many weeks.’

Seeking to deploy his new knowledge, Tom asked, ‘Am I, like, initiated now?’

Swai-Phillips was dismissive. ‘Don’t be under any illusions, Brodzinski,’ he said. ‘If you’d been foolish enough – and some Anglos are – to have gone through initiation to one of the desert mobs, you wouldn’t be idling your days away reading, while waiting for a fair trial. That makkata would’ve broken every bone in your body with a punishment stick – then Atalaya’s women would’ve pissed on you – by way of humiliation.

‘Anyway, when’re you gonna come up to the house again? Gloria’s been asking after you. Squolly’s coming up Sunday with his mob, gonna do a big barbie. There’ll be heaps of fish, heaps of beer, shitloads of kids in and out of the pool. Do you good, mate, have a slice of the old family life.’

Tom didn’t want to see Gloria again; he wasn’t certain he’d be able to cope with her travesty of his wife’s features in broad daylight. Nor was the idea of sinking a few beers with the policeman appealing.

Tom had to report to police HQ every other day. Squolly – or Commander Squoddoloppolollou, as he was properly called – was always laid-back and friendly. Even when the grandiose marble hallways filled with the clatter of steel-shod boots, and open-topped trucks full of paramilitaries screeched in and out of the parking lot, the barrel-shaped officer still found time to get Tom a soda, then sit with him while he sipped it in the pleasantly cool confines of the interview room.

Squolly disdained the Intwennyfortee mob’s ritual business. ‘See, Tom,’ he told him, ‘our belief is that it’s a man’s intentions that count, yeah. We don’t judge an offender for what he’s done, yeah, only for what he thought he was going to do.’

‘But I thought that’s what the native people believed too?’

Squolly laughed and exhaled a patch of condensation into being on the shiny peak of his cap, which he was holding. ‘No, no, the desert mobs – the Tayswengo, who you’re mixed up with; the Aval, Jethro’s dad’s people; the Inssessetti and the renegades, the Entreati – well, they’re harsh, man. Very fierce, yeah. Their line is that every single act a fellow makes is willed, right enough: a hiccup, or a murder.’

Squolly shook his head at the very idea of such foolishness. He drew a handkerchief covered with brownish engwegge stains from his pocket and began polishing the peak of his cap. ‘Now, with us coastal peoples – Anglos, Tugganarong – we’re more rational, right. Man’s accused of doing something bad – like you, yeah – we don’t pull him in and ’terro-gate ’im. We don’t duff him up, right. No, we ob-serve him. We send our blokes out after him – quiet, yeah, no fuss – and check out how he conducts himself in the world. How he orders his morning coffee, buys his paper, deals with all the little irritations of his day. Then we compile a report on what kind of intentions the fellow has. There’s nothing high tech’, we don’t use no fancy psychologists or profilers, it’s just good old-fashioned police leg work.’

Oddly, the surveillance didn’t bother Tom – even though Squolly’s men were trying to read his mind in a way not usually attempted by anyone save for a mother or a lover.

On the contrary, as he splashed through the first storms of the monsoon to buy his newspaper, or sat beneath bulging awnings drinking his coffee, the sight of a cop, loitering by the doors to the mall, dumpy in his rain cape, was almost reassuring. Often his tails would come over to chat with him, mulling over the strength of the previous night’s wind, musing as to whether this year’s monsoon was heavier than the last.

In the afternoons, in the brief interval between one swishing curtain of rain and the next, Tom would put on his old sweat-pants and go for a run. Leaving the dock area, he jogged through the shopping district. At this time of the year the chilled malls were empty but for a few Anglos. The tourists were all gone, and the miners wouldn’t come in from the interior until shortly before Christmas. Nor was the business district buzzing; the occasional clerk or manager, dressed in their tropical version of a suit – jacket and pants both cut short to reveal pale arms and paler legs – would scamper along the sidewalk, leaping over puddles, their faces set, as if to say, ‘This business of leaping over puddles is bloody serious, right.’

Tom slopped by them. He glanced up at the Metro-Center to see if his lawyer was in his office; then, head down, took the wide Trangaden Boulevard, which ran through the outskirts of town, where glass barns sold agricultural equipment, then on between billboards that grew tattier, until it declined into a single strip of concrete, before eventually terminating in the long sable strand of the town beach.

Usually, there would be a couple of other afternoon exercisers out there with Tom, while sea fishermen whipped the slack waves with their lines. The gnarled shapes of the offshore atolls, which in fine weather were lovely ornaments cast down on the azure baize, now resembled crumpled refuse adrift on this oceanic puddle. The clouds shrouded the foothills, obscuring the more elevated suburbs of Vance. So Tom took his constitutional along a sable corridor, between vaporous walls.

To swim in the sea was, of course, out of the question. In the dry season there were sharks and box jellyfish, while the monsoon brought with it the Sangat, or bladder, clams. When the wind rose and the waves pounded, they drummed up these avid crustaceans from the sea bed. Anyone unlucky enough to have one fasten on his skin would soon become the host for a thriving population of necrotic bivalves. Tom had seen bladder-clam victims in Vance, clunking along the sidewalks with their bared arms or legs warty with nacre. They looked like medieval knights, unhorsed and stripped of their armour save for brassards or greaves.

Each afternoon Tom jogged the length of the beach, then back to the Experience. Overall he was covering six or seven miles. But while the first few runs left him heaving for breath, after a week he was managing it easily.

With every breath the humid air was discovering new tissue to invigorate. Tom had read somewhere that, if fully unfurled, the human lung would cover two football fields, and now he felt as if he were reoccupying this living turf, which for so many years had been ploughed over with tar.

Before the rains swished back in there was a small window of opportunity, and gratefully Tom thrust his head into it, breathing deeply with each pace. At these times he was almost glad of his protracted sojourn. He felt a stupefying pride at his own achievement: would I, he wondered, ever have cracked the smoking habit if all this shit hadn’t gone down?

When he’d got back to the apartment, showered off and drunk a couple of bottles of mineral water, Tom ventured out once more. This was the most onerous part of his daily routine: the call home.

There were several call stores in downtown Vance. In these strip-lit caves, the Tugganarong who did the city’s menial jobs paid over their wages for a few minutes’ chitchat with their families in the Feltham Islands.

The call stores doubled in function, also offering money-transfer services. Tom often saw some downtrodden Tugga-narong pay over half his wages to Western Union, then half of the remainder to Bell Telephone. Squolly had told him that the Tugganarong were paid minimal wages, the justification being that their employers – whether domestic, municipal or business – provided accommodation and food. So, once they’d visited the call store, they had only a handful of change left; enough for a brown-bagged bottle to be drunk in the street, then they’d lurch back to their dormitories, festering sheds on the far side of town.

The Tugganarong smelled of the lanolin they used to mould their thick hair into Anglo hairstyles. They were also loud, conducting their calls home with a mixture of frustration and anger. As they shouted in the flimsy booths, their language was impenetrable to Tom, and seemed to consist of sharp consonants, interspersed with syllables that all sounded like ‘olly’. Making his collect calls, which involved negotiating with up to three operators, all on the line simultaneously, Tom had to contend with this background roar: ‘Gollyrollyfollytollybolly!’

When he heard the familiar tone of the wall-mounted phone in his own bright, open-plan kitchen, Tom’s frustration fell away, and he simply felt miserable. On answering, his children dutifully passed the handset, one to the next. He pictured them in a row of descending height on the red-tiled floor: Von Trapped.

The twins prattled on about school and friends – the shiftless, shifting alliances of eight-year-olds – then passed Tom on to Tommy Junior, so the lumpen fourteen-year-old could drone on about his computer games and his trading card collection. ‘Gollyvollytolly . . .’ Tommy Junior seemed to be saying, while all around Tom the Tugganarong kept up the same incomprehensible jabber. Tom pictured Tommy Junior as a Tugganarong, his white skin darkened, his mousy crest greased. And wasn’t it true – Tom mused while the boy babbled – that Tommy Junior was his own guest worker? Foisted on Tom to perform the menial job of stabbing his conscience.

The hardest exchanges were with Dixie. When she came on the line, Tom pressed the handset so hard against his ear that he could hear the cartilage crack. Dixie, who was charged with explaining to her father, half a world away, why it was that at this early hour – 8 a.m. by his reckoning – her mother was not in the kitchen cooking breakfast, cutting sandwiches or combing hair. Not, in short, doing any of the things that a now sole parent might be expected to.

The first few times Tom called and got his daughter in lieu of his wife he was understanding. How could he be anything but? Yes, Martha was already at work, yes, he understood. Of course she had to leave early – he saw that. She was still asleep . . . ? Dixie would wake her if he insisted . . . But no, he didn’t insist, because he entirely understood, you see. Her mother must be tired after getting in so late.

So it went on, for day after day; until Tom at last cracked and shouted at his wife’s proxy: ‘Dixie! Dixie! Where is your goddamn mother? I haven’t spoken to her since you guys got home, and that was more than two weeks ago! Get her for me now. Now! D’you hear me?’