‘I – I guess so,’ said Tom, who, although he could now distinguish the hill from the desert tribes, still had difficulty with further subdivisions.
‘Bastard hill mobs.’ The lawyer took a swig of beer and beckoned over the barman, who brought a fresh thimble-sized glass and took twenty-five cents from the pile on the bar. Then he retreated to his own perch, a high stool next to a peanut dispenser shaped like a peanut. The chiller cabinets ranged along the back of the bar cast a forensic light on the barman’s shaven and cicatrized scalp. The raised white scars must, Tom thought, observing his ugly scowl, indicate the seats of his ill-will and bad character.
‘They don’t think anything much is what it damn well is, yeah,’ the lawyer continued enigmatically. ‘There’s that cargo-cult nonsense, and these damn-fool names they take. Think it’ll give ’em power, see, keep the bad spirits offa their backs, right.’ He snorted. ‘Nonsense! Total bloody superstition. Anyways, Brodzinski, what’re you doing shopping?’
Tom took a sip of his own beer before replying. They were both on beer – the weather demanded it. But Tom had also had a few shots before Swai-Phillips showed up. He was a little drunk and tried to conceal it by speaking deliberately. ‘I’ve taken to cooking for myself at the Experience. There’s a kitchenette, and it’s cheaper.’
‘Bullshit!’ the lawyer expostulated. ‘You can eat good for a few cents at the food court. What’s the real reason?’ He rounded on Tom, lifted his shades, gave him the bad eye.
‘Well, if you must know, it’s Prentice.’
‘He bothering you – or, what, interfering?’ As so often with Swai-Phillips, Tom had the uneasy feeling he was being laughed at.
‘No, not exactly bothering, it’s more that he kind of fastens on to me whenever I step outta the goddamn hostel. Where’s he staying, anyway?’
‘Prentice?’ Swai-Phillips seemed confused by the question. ‘I dunno – with Mulgrene, their attaché, I think. You’d have to ask him yourself – or Squolly. Prentice is on more restrictive bail conditions than you.’
Everything Swai-Phillips said concerning Prentice appeared to tease Tom with his ignorance of the other man’s crime. Not that he felt ignorant any longer, as he’d had enough hints: Prentice was a sex-offender of some kind, probably what the lawyer termed a ‘kiddie-fiddler’. He certainly looked the part, with his crazy fringe, his doughy face and his dude’s outfit.
Prentice must, Tom thought, be staking out the Experience, just like the cops. For the past week, whenever Tom left the hostel, Prentice was there, strolling towards him along the sidewalk, his dumb hat – or a dumb replacement – tucked under his poultry wing of an arm.
‘Mind if I take a turn with you?’ he’d say, and, even if Tom demurred, he’d insist: ‘Look, old chap, I haven’t a pal in Vance to speak of, so I’d be awfully grateful for a little company.’
Little company, eh. Tom nearly slapped him in the face, a face that was becoming increasingly corrupted by the rash spreading up from his jaw. Perhaps it was pity, but Tom always gave in, and together they would thread their way between the other, less culpable pedestrians.
In instalments that lasted the time it took to get to the mall or the call store, Tom heard Prentice’s story.
‘My lady wife’, he said, ‘is staying down south. Cousin of hers has a little spread a couple of hundred clicks from Capital City. He migrated here for the good life – you know how it is. My countrymen, well, we have strong links with this place, as you know. It’s not exactly a sense of ownership, more, well . . . stewardship. We need to keep an eye on it, make sure the local Anglos aren’t too rash.’
‘You really believe that bullshit?’ Tom was incredulous; Prentice was coming on like some lordling, sent out to the colonies to tote the white man’s burden.
‘Oh, absolutely.’ Prentice was unfazed. ‘You take my wife’s cousin’s station. He’s got almost a whole section – but he can’t make it pay any more. You see’ – he leaned in conspiratorially – ‘those bing-bongs, they burnt off the scrub for bloody years. It’s completely messed up the water table, leached all the nutrients out of the soil and replaced them with salt. Gerard – that’s my wife’s cousin – he needs a square mile or more to raise a single head of cattle.’
And Prentice, bandy-legged, clumped on along the sidewalk, lost in his fantasy of stewardship.
Tom wondered what he made of his bing-bong-blooded lawyer. Prentice was beyond caricature; the lines that described him were too distorted. In every exchange Tom had with him, he was on the verge of blurting out: ‘What exactly is it that you’ve done? Tell me now – right now!’
Yet he never did. Moreover, as their desultory promenades continued, Tom found a curious respite in this mutual circumspection. It was as if their inability to talk of what held them here, in Vance, was a kind of stoicism – manliness, even.
Swai-Phillips had an alternative explanation, one he tossed out as he tossed back another beer: ‘The makkata, yeah. Well, he divines degrees of astande: astande por mio, astande vel dyav, astande hikkal. Some are for men, some for women, some only for the Tayswengo – others the Inssessitti. There are cross-over, or hybrid, mobs as well, and every degree of astande relates in a different way – both to all the degrees of inquivoo and to each other, yeah.’
‘It sounds bewildering,’ Tom observed idly. He’d read as much in
Songs of the Tayswengo
, but then – as now – he’d found it impossibly fiddly to link the hooks of this byzantine magical system to the eyes of his own numb understanding.
There was a flapping noise from outside the bar. One of Squolly’s men was shaking the water off his rain cape. He came in, sat down at the bar and nodded familiarly to Tom and Swai-Phillips. Then he unslung his automatic rifle and checked the safety, before placing it carefully on a towelling bar mat. The magazine curved up like a penis machined on a lathe. The cop began chatting to the barman, who, without needing to be asked, had brought him a beer.
Swai-Phillips continued in an undertone: ‘It is bewildering – even to me, and I grew up with it. But the strangest thing is that you find out which degree of astande you are in action, by the things you can do for other people – and they can do for you. You and Prentice, ’cause you’re both mixed up with the Tayswengo, you’ll discover, if you haven’t already, that there are things only you can do for him – as well as vice versa.’
‘Like buying his goddamn “fags”,’ Tom muttered derisively. For it had occurred to him that maybe this was why Prentice was dogging him. Every time they were on one of their forced promenandes, Prentice would slap the pocket of his khaki bush shirt and exclaim: ‘Bugger! I’ve forgotten them again. Look here, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t mind popping into the shop for me, would you? Thing is – I don’t know exactly why – but I can’t bring myself to buy a pack of fags. You wouldn’t mind, would you? Terribly grateful and all that. Thirty Reds’ll do the trick.’
Standing at the counter, Prentice’s $10 bill cocked in his hand, Tom wondered why it was that he agreed so readily to fetch the ‘fags’, an epithet he found at once risible and sinister – exactly like Prentice himself. Moreover, his asking Tom to buy them implied that the other Anglo, despite what their lawyer had claimed, knew full well what the charges against him were.
Watching Prentice scrabble with his quick-bitten fingers at the cellophane on the fat red pack of cigarettes, his fish-belly-white face haunted by cellular need, Tom felt, once again, a surge of righteous pride at his own sterling efforts to break the addiction. Efforts that had already been rewarded with this pay-off: not having to look at the medico-horror photos with which the health authorities disfigured the packets – lurid pictures of mouths eaten out from within and noses picked to a cancerous mush.
Swai-Phillips was staring intently at Tom, a smudge of beer foam on the fleece above his full top lip. ‘Yeah, well,’ said the lawyer. ‘After tomorrow’s prelim’ you may never see the bloke again. I dunno that I’ll be able to swing it for him, yeah.’
‘What d’you mean? Are you saying Prentice is in court tomorrow as well?’
‘That’s right,’ the lawyer drawled. ‘I managed to square it with the DA and the Tayswengo mob – guess you’d call it a block booking. Suits the court – the Tayswengo too. There are the makkatas, the managers, the witnesses . . .’
‘Witnesses? What witnesses? D’you mean Atalaya?’
‘The witnesses,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’ve all gotta come in from over there.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Besides,’ he continued, raising his fresh glass of beer to the cop, ‘Squolly’s blokes can’t go off patrol too long to testify, or who knows what hell might break out round here!’
The cop guffawed at this and downed his beer. The barman laughed too, and Swai-Phillips, naturally, was mightily amused by his own feeble joke. Unwilling to be left out, Tom laughed as well and, sinking his beer, slid further into the nauseating jacuzzi of drunkenness.
Later, Swai-Phillips drove Tom back to the Experience. Sitting outside in the Landcruiser he asked: ‘You’ve got your dress kit sorted out now, have you?’
‘Yeah.’ Who is this man? Tom wondered. My mother?
He’d been to the tailor Swai-Phillips recommended: a jaundiced Asian who ran his business out of his house, which was in among the dive shops by the jetties where, in the season, the boats set off for the Angry Reef. Prentice accompanied Tom, for he too needed to be outfitted.
Tom opted for a cotton fabric, but Prentice had picked up a swatch of woollen cloths and, flipping through them, selected a pinstripe that a bank president or a CEO would have worn back home.
Tom laughed at him. ‘You can’t wear a suit cut from that! It’ll be wringing wet with sweat before they’ve even sworn in the jury.’
Prentice’s face darkened, and with unaccustomed sharpness he snapped back: ‘There’s aircon’ in all the courts, Brodzinski, you’ll see. And no jury for a prelim’,’ he added as an after-barb.
Up in the crappy little apartment, Tom lit a mosquito coil and sat down on a chair covered with diarrhoea-coloured vinyl. Within minutes it was slippery with his own sweat. The aircon’ in the apartment sounded like a stick running along a picket fence – and it leaked brownish fluid. Most days Tom didn’t even bother to switch it on, preferring to suffer the soupy humidity.
He sat staring at the ludicrous truncated suit, which was hanging from the closet door. Perhaps, he mused, I should’ve gone for a darker fabric? The judge may be a bing . . . the judge may have some blue taboo I know nothing about.
He sighed, then picked up a brown-paper bag, the mouth of which had been folded into a ruff. He set the fifth of whisky down again: it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a hangover.
Tom picked up his digital camera. He couldn’t recall having unpacked it when he moved over from the Mimosa. He certainly hadn’t used it these past three weeks – what would he have photographed? Prentice? The makkata making the cut?
He switched it on, selected the archive and began clicking his way through the photographs of the Brodzinskis’ family holiday. There they all were, Martha, Dixie and the twins, sporting in a swimming hole in the cloud forest, striking poses next to the car, eating at a road stop. The pictures were crisp and vivid – far more so than the sodden world he now trod water in. Despite his hefty bulk, Tommy Junior was hardly present in this album. There were one or two shots that showed the broad expanse of his back but none of his face.
Tom scrutinized that back – or, more exactly, the back of Tommy Junior’s neck. In one photo the vertical scar that ran from the base of the boy’s skull up to his crown was clearly visible, exposed by the way he’d gelled his hair. Tommy Junior had come to them with it – an ugly mark on a pretty baby. Martha, who handled all the particulars of the adoption, had implied to Tom that what lay behind the scar explained, in part, why an otherwise perfect – and more or less white – baby was available through this particular agency, which usually sourced children from poorer, browner regions of the world.
The scar . . . Tom had seen one like it very recently – but where? Then it came to him: the old Anglo, bending to pick up the butt by the ATM in the hill town.
Tom sighed and switched off the camera. He unscrewed the whisky and took a slug. He gathered up his cash and the key to the apartment, then he set off for the call store to make his evening visit to his family.
In his tipsy state it seemed to Tom that the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ of the Tugganarong was even louder than usual. He had to stick a finger in one ear and press the handset hard against his other, so as to hear Dixie tell him: ‘I kind of stood . . . like, next to . . . not Stacey, but, uh, Brian, and he picked up one, like, medium and two supersize, yuh? So that was, like, it sucked.’
She halted and Tom, heedless of her feelings, asked her to put one of her brothers on.
‘They’re, like, out, Dad,’ she explained. ‘But Mom’s right here – d’you wanna speak with her?’
Since Adams had seen fit to notify Tom of his wife’s estrangement, Tom had stopped bothering even to ask if Martha was in the house. He was taken aback and could only mutter: ‘Uh, yeah, OK, I guess.’
There was a ‘clonk’ down the line, followed by a hiss of static so loud that Tom jerked the handset from his ear. When he replaced it, Martha was saying, ‘Are you there, Tom?’ And sounding concerned.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m here, honey,’ he blurted. ‘I’m here, how’re you? I was getting worried.’