The Butt (11 page)

Again, there was a clonk, then a hiss.

‘I’m fine.’ Martha’s voice emerged from the sonic fog, poised, imperturbable. ‘But it must be nearly time for your court hearing. The kids have told me all about it.’

Tom waited, assuming she would add to this. She didn’t – the thousands of miles separating them twanged.

‘It’s tomorrow,’ Tom said eventually. ‘It’s only a prelim’ hearing. Swai-Phillips says I can then make, uh, reparations to the Intwennyfortee mob – to Mrs Lincoln’s people – then we can proceed on a, uh, better basis.’

Clonk-hiss.

‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer.’ Now Tom thought he could detect a peculiar flatness in Martha’s intonation. ‘I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

This wasn’t Martha’s way of speaking at all. Confused, Tom let the handset drop. It clonked on to the ledge the phone sat on, then there was another static hiss and, reedily, he heard Martha’s voice reiterate: ‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer. I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

Slowly and carefully, Tom replaced the venomous snake of the handset on its cradle. He stood smearing the sweat from his brow into his hair. The ‘Gollymollydolly’ of the Tugganarong swelled up like the chafing of crickets. Tom went to pay the call store’s manager, who sat in a booth watching a TV show set among surfers and lifeguards, which was beamed from down south.

Late that night, when Tom was dreaming of a desert corroboree – hundreds of naked Entreati women, their breasts missing, howling at a bloody moon – his cellphone was taken with ague. It shook, then fell from the compartmentalized headboard on to his head. Dazed, he snatched it up and held it to his sleepy ear.

At first there were disordered noises, then they resolved into a rhythmic jingling trudge. Assuming that someone had left their cell unlocked and it had dialled him automatically, Tom was about to break the connection, when over the trudge came a tinkling laugh.

‘Ah! Tee-hee-hee!’ Followed by Martha’s voice: ‘Well, y’know how it is, you’ve gotta say these things to keep ’em happy, yeah? I mean, their pathetic little egos require it, yeah?’

Except, it couldn’t be Martha – unless, that is, she was deliberately impersonating the local Anglos’ accent, its raucous vowels and the useless affirmatives with which every other statement was concluded.

The Central Criminal Court stood on Dundas Boulevard. It was an ugly lump of a building five storeys high. The concrete façade was textured so as to resemble the intricate pattern of logs seen in a Gandaro longhouse. Slitted windows like the embrasures of a medieval castle laid waste to the architect’s pathetic delusion: this was an Anglo building, at once threatening and ridiculous – a dictator wearing a party hat.

An escutcheon was fixed over the chunky pediment. It was an enlarged version of the badges on the cops’ shiny caps. With mouth and beak, an auraca and a moa held aloft the Crown of the Republic against a field of southern stars. Beneath hooves and claws undulated a stylized strip of parchment, upon which was inscribed the motto of the Criminal Justice Department: ABYSSUS ABYSSUM IN VOCAT.

Like a gawky schoolgirl, Tom bent to pull up the white knee-socks that completed his outfit; socks that he had hand-washed in the kitchenette sink at his miserable apartment. A slow hand clap of thunder rolled in across Vance Bay.

Straightening up, Tom saw that, far from being early, he was barely on time; for ranged in a semicircle sixteen metres from the main entrance were a number of suited men smoking with studious concentration. At the middle of this arc was Jethro Swai-Phillips, and, despite the engwegge cheroot stuck in his full lips, the lawyer looked dapper in his dress kit.

Was it coincidence or had Prentice – who stood puffing alongside, basking in the lawyer’s reflected elegance – been primed? For Swai-Phillips’s suit was cut from the same cloth as his own. On the lawyer the dark pinstripe was magisterial: brilliant white cuffs were turned over the short sleeves of the jacket and fastened with oval gold cuff links. Swai-Phillips’s knee-socks were held up with gold-tasselled garters, while from his broad shoulders hung a short pleated gown, decorated with purple and pink ribbons. On top of his Afro perched an antiquated horsehair wig – yet even this only confirmed the dignity of his bearing.

He was accompanied by an Anglo with a jolly Celtic face; bat ears, gap teeth, freckled cheeks. The man had a drinker’s red nose. Tom assumed this must be Mulgrene, the attaché, and wondered where Adams, his own government’s representative, was hiding himself.

As Tom approached, he realized that Swai-Phillips’s trademark shades were gone, and the glaucoma had miraculously vanished from his right eye. In its place there was a glazed copy of an eye: the white too white, the pupil too black, the brown iris fixed and unwavering. Seeing Tom’s consternation, the lawyer snapped, ‘It’s a contact lens, Brodzinski, no need to be afraid.’ And Prentice snickered.

‘You’re mighty cool,’ Swai-Phillips continued. ‘The lists will be posted any minute now, and we’ll find out who’s up first.’

He turned to the man smoking beside him in the line, and Tom recognized the clerk he’d met at the Metro-Center. ‘Have you got the depositions, Abdul?’ Swai-Phillips barked, and the clerk displayed a leather valise bulging with scrolls that were tied up with the same kind of ribbons that dangled from his boss’s gown.

‘OK.’ Swai-Phillips drew Tom and Prentice into a huddle. ‘That fellow over there’ – he used the nub of his cheroot as a pointer – ‘is the DA, Tancroppollopp.’

The man was enormous – six and a half feet of taut solidity. Adams had said the DA had Tugganarong blood – Tom suspected him of being the Ur-Tugganarong, the Ancestor, who had propelled his outrigger from the Feltham Islands, using only his own paddle-sized hands. In one of these the DA held the smoking digit of a cigarette, cupped on the inside, as a skulking schoolboy would. The contrast between this homely gesture and the giant’s sinewy forearms would have been comical, were it not for the belligerent expression on his copper face, and the two aggressive tattoos that spiralled down from his shaven scalp to loop his shark’s fin ears.

‘Who the hell is he talking to?’ Tom blurted out.

‘Pipe down!’ Swai-Phillips snapped – and Prentice giggled, because the man in conversation with Tancroppollopp was smoking a pipe: a long curved one with a ceramic bowl.

Perhaps the man had chosen this pipe because it conformed to his morphology; for he too was long and curved. An Anglo, almost as tall as the DA but stick-thin like a desert tribesman. The pants of the Anglo’s dress kit were cut high, exposing a great length of scrawny thigh. It should have made him look ridiculous – but didn’t, for he had the taut watchfulness of a raptor. The pipe-smoker’s face was also avian: a sharp beak of veined nose, close-set yellowy eyes and hollow cheeks. He sported a gold pince-nez and a gown the same as Swai-Phillips’s – although his ribbons were red and white.

‘That’s Von Sasser,’ Tom’s lawyer explained. ‘He’s the Chief Prosecutor – must be acting as Counsel for the Eastern Province. I’d hoped he’d be down south, yeah. He normally only handles the most serious cases. I’m not in the habit of showing any damn weakness.’ Swai-Phillips drew deep on his cheroot, then spoke through a personal thunderhead: ‘But he’s a formidible bloody antagonist.’

‘Von Sasser?’ Tom queried. ‘I thought he was an anthropologist?’

‘The brother,’ Swai-Phillips replied. ‘This is Hippolyte – the other one’s Erich. You’d never catch him up here in Vance, too much civilization for the man to bear, yeah . . .’

It seemed as if the lawyer was going to add to this, but suddenly – as if responding to an ultrasonic whistle audible only to smokers – the men formed a line at the steel dolmen of an ashtray, and one after another shed their butts. Von Sasser carefully knocked out his pipe before replacing it in a leather case. Then they all filed up the steps and into the Central Criminal Court.

The lobby was stygian, even after the sepia gloom of the monsoonal outdoors. There was a tremendous scurrying as clerks, police, court officials and lawyers scuttled over to consult the long lists pinned up on bulletin boards, then hurried back to consult with their clients. Abdul dove into this free-for-all, and, emerging a few minutes later, he went across and whispered to Swai-Phillips.

The lawyer rounded on his clients. ‘Good news!’ he boomed. ‘You’re up this morning, Prentice, and you, Brodzinski, will be dealt with first thing this afternoon.

‘You.’ He yanked Prentice by his tie. ‘Come with me. And you’ – he pressed Tom down by his shoulder on to a bench – ‘stay here.’

Tom gazed at Prentice being led away like a mangy sheep to the slaughter. He expected some anxiety to show on the abuser’s ovine features, yet Prentice appeared altogether unconcerned.

Once the morning sessions had begun, the bustle died away. A few hill people remained in the darkest recess of the lobby, huddling together and chanting their ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ so mutedly that Tom couldn’t be certain that it was them and not his own agitated blood pulsing in his ears.

At the main reception desk a cop checked his armaments over in thorough yet listless fashion, removing every bullet from its clip, polishing them with his handkerchief, slotting them back in.

From time to time a lawyer or a court official exited from one of the high double doors ranged across the back of the lobby and scurried outside. There they paced along the sixteen-metre line, snatching smoke from their mouths and yakking on their cellphones, before scurrying back inside.

Tom sat and looked down at the white billow of his thighs. He wondered where Adams had gotten to – and Atalaya Intwennyfortee for that matter. He was missing the Honorary Consul and the plaintiff acutely: as if he were still a smoker and they a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Once or twice Tom caught himself patting the pockets of his suit jacket, as if in expectation of feeling small bodies tucked inside them: Adams with his seersucker smile, Atalaya with her matt-black skin.

There came more slow hand claps of thunder; then, at last, like a strained-for ejaculation, the hiss of the rains. Tom felt islanded in the lobby, listening to the ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ of the natives, the scrape of a faulty aircon’ unit and the measured slap of a large digital clock.

At eleven, scattering raindrops from her plastic poncho, Gloria Swai-Phillips swept in. She scanned the lobby and, spotting Tom on his bench, came across and sat down beside him. Her approximation of Martha’s features was at once imperious and consoling: the wide mouth and long top lip writhed as she struggled out of her rainwear. Underneath she wore a cream linen two-piece with a pleated skirt. Tom fixated on the raw pores of her freshly shaven calves.

At first, Gloria said nothing, only leaned over and probed Tom’s own leg. Her fingers found the makkata’s wound.

‘Does it hurt, yeah?’ she asked.

‘Did you call last–’ Tom began, then checked himself. ‘Not much,’ he answered instead. ‘It’s like a war wound – aches when the rains are coming.’

Gloria laughed curtly and withdrew her hand. ‘I’m leaving this arvo’,’ she said. ‘Flying first to Amherst on the west coast, then heading along Route 2 with a convoy for the Tontine Townships . . .’ She paused and looked at Tom. He looked back, wondering what any of this had to do with him. ‘Y’know,’ she continued, ‘the orphanages I run there, they’ve gotta be supplied, right?’

‘Sure,’ Tom said. ‘Of course – I understand.’

‘I – I . . .’ She took up his hand in her own, turning it this way and that. Her fingernails were long, sickle-curved and steelily varnished. ‘I hope to see you there, yeah?’

Before Tom could think of a response, Gloria was struggling back into her poncho. Her heels clacked the stone floor to the main doors. She glanced back at him over her shoulder, then covered her blonde hank of hair with the pointy hood and swept out into the rain.

Tom had no time to analyse this visitation: the doors to Court No. 3 banged open, and Gloria’s cousin came striding out. In his train were Abdul, the clerk, and Mulgrene, the attaché. Then came Prentice, together with a huddle of court officials. Mulgrene was saying, very loudly, as if advertising for prospective Swai-Phillips clients: ‘That was inspiring, Jethro, absolutely bloody inspiring. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone tackle Von Sasser with quite such sheer brio before. You deserve a drink, man.’

The whole posse came across to where Tom was sitting and grouped themselves around him, ignoring him while recounting loudly the feats of advocacy they had just witnessed. Tom tried to catch Prentice’s eye, but it was fixed on Swai-Phillips with an expression of nauseating adoration.

Tancroppollopp and Von Sasser came past and straight out into the rain. A clerk came up to the defendants’ party and handed a scrap of paper to Mulgrene. The attaché scanned it with goggling eyes, his sad clown’s smile turned upside down.

‘Four gross of reusable teats, ditto of disposable nappies. Ribavirin – 400 doses in ampoules, amoxycillin, antiseptic wipes–’ He broke off and turned to Prentice. ‘Nothing here that we weren’t expecting. You have the credit available, yes?’

Prentice nodded.

‘Then you can load up tomorrow,’ Swai-Phillips barked. ‘Then get the fuck outta here!’

Lunch dragged on for hours. The party sat at Formica-topped tables ranged around a shrubbery that threatened them with its saw-toothed leaves. Swai-Phillips, taking a moment out from the continuous toasting of beer that was celebrating his signal victory, explained to Tom: ‘The court won’t sit again till at least three, right. They’ve gotta put up a rood screen so Atalaya and her manager can give evidence to the makkatas. Try not to be so uptight, Brodzinski; it’ll play out fine. Have a bloody beer and relax, yeah.’

Tom couldn’t. He stepped outside of the food court. Rain hammered down on the glass porch as he hit redial for the twentieth time that day: ‘This phone is temporarily unavailable, your call is being answered by AdVance messaging . . .’

When the peep-prompt came, Tom decanted all his pent-up anxiety: ‘Jesus-H-Christ, Adams. Are you gonna hang me out to dry, or what?’

Back inside, a wheeled icebox was being pushed from one man to the next. In turn they drew off glasses of beer, then made another toast, to ‘Justice!’, or ‘Rhetoric!’, or ‘Reason!’ Jackets had been slung over chair backs. Bare forearms lay among the curry-smeared pannikins, together with a dandruff of coconut flakes.

Swai-Phillips sat at the head of the table, his tie loosened, his globe of hair so beaded with sweat that it resembled a jewelled snood. Yet he was sober compared to Mulgrene and Prentice – both of whom were straightforwardly drunk.

At two thirty, Tom palmed one of the waiters forty bucks to go to the liquor store and get him a fifth of Seagram’s. When the man returned, Tom took two swift shots. The whisky slapped him lazily in the face, a knuckle of intoxication catching him beneath one eye. His head spinning, Tom looked up to see the rains smashing through the skylight. Swai-Phillips aimed his painted lens at his client. The lawyer’s strong jaw was bearded with bladder clams, his mouth a robotic speaker through which he crackled: ‘It’s gone two forty-five, Brodzinski. The court’ll sit in fifteen minutes; we don’t wanna be late, mate.’

Leaving Prentice, Mulgrene and the others, they splashed back through the afternoon downpour. Abdul draped a waxed coat over his boss’s broad shoulders. Beneath this, the lawyer’s suit and gown remained obstinately crisp; while Tom, who only had a folding umbrella for protection, discovered that his jacket was covered with damp splodges.