Where had his thoughts gone? Tom thought back to his own thinking back. He had been up in the hills, yes. In the dust beneath the banyan tree, where the hillman refused to sell him the spirit wagon. Had it been in that reverie itself that his own culpability had incubated? Could Tom now locate – with numb, drunk mental fingers – the precise point where his inattention had become a form of intent? The grey roll of ash lying in his palm, the butt pinched between his fingers, the smoke drawn into blue loops. The butt shifted to gather tension, as index finger strained against thumb pad. Then . . . the flip.
Tom slept. And came to in a room bright with chilly winter light. He could see the bare branches of northern trees through cold windowpanes. Directly in front of him there was the icy finality of a perfectly made bed. Tom sensed sterile hospital corners beneath the brightly patterned patchwork quilt.
On the far side of the bed stood his mother. She was erect, dressed in dark slacks and a dark sweater, and smoking. One arm was crossed beneath the 1950s jut of her breasts; the other was crooked up, so that the cigarette was poised before her sharply inscrutable face. Yes, she stood upright, yet her thin frame hung in the room: a shroud dangling from smoky hooks. It was the discarded clothing of her humanity, rather than the woman herself.
‘It’s time for you to go now, Tom,’ she said with characteristic asperity.
He found himself unable to answer – although he yearned to. This, she seemed to understand: ‘It’s time for you to go now,’ she reiterated. ‘I’m married – so are you.’
Tom’s mother, grimacing with the vulgarity of it, morphed into Martha, then back again. Tom shook with horror ague. The transmogrifications continued: mother to wife, wife to mother – back and forth with increasing velocity.
He awoke; the sheet suckered on to him with sweat, the phrase
pia mater
sticking, a shard of meaning, deep in his hurting brain.
Breakfast was last night’s beans – fried up yet again – and reconstituted orange juice. Tom could manage only the juice.
‘We bin thinking,’ Dave Hufferman said, poking through the grille at the nuggets of burned charcoal in the barbecue. ‘It’s still a fortnight till the road-train’s due, and we’ve gotta bust part in our main generator – bin on auxiliary for a while now. Daphne’ll ride into the Tontines with you and pick the spare up.’
Tom stuttered: ‘B-But how will she get back?’
‘No worries there, mate,’ Hufferman said. ‘She can grab a ride with the cops. Ain’t that right, me little darlin’?’
‘Right enough,’ she said, snuggling in under his ham of an arm. ‘And I’ll be in the right place to help these blokes if the shit hits the fan.’
The Huffermans were both wearing canary-yellow baby-gros this morning, and the sloppy expressions of large animals that were sensually replete.
‘It’s really . . . it’s good – I mean . . .’ Tom skidded on the glassy surface of his hangover.
Prentice – who was applying ointment to his psoriasis himself – oozed into the breach: ‘We’re jolly grateful for everything you’ve done for us already – and now this. Thank you
so
much.’
The Huffermans, who, Tom had felt certain, shared his own instinctive repugnance towards Prentice, seemed to have had a change of heart during the night. Dave Hufferman punched Prentice lightly on the shoulder, while grunting: ‘Good on yer, mate.’
Then, limping back from the latrine, where Tom had vomited into the flyblown trench, he was amazed to hear Hufferman holding forth: ‘Y’see, most Anglos have got the bing-bongs all wrong, yeah. After all, they only see the scum that pitch up in the cities ruined by the grog.’
He was striking a pose, with one hand on his towelling hip. It should have been ridiculous – but for some reason wasn’t.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘don’t get me wrong, yeah, I’ve no time for the black bastards that shoot up convoys or plant IEDs – they deserve every damn thing we throw at ’em – but yer natural bing-bong, yer bing-bong in his own environment, well, he’s a different proposition.’
‘Meaning?’ Tom croaked.
‘Meaning, my friend’ – Hufferman put a sceptical eye on his returned guest – ‘that I’ve never met any bloke more generous than a bing-bong. Why, he’ll give yer the last swallow of his canteen when you’re way over there.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘But, by the same token, I’ve never met any bastard more greedy than a bastardly bing-bong – that’s why they go troppo over the tontines. No, there’s no one more humble – or more arrogant, more restrained – he’ll go for months in the desert without even thinking of a root – or more bloody sex-crazed when the oppo’ presents itself.’
He looked over at his wife, who was hanging out damp sheets on the washing line, and the machine-gunner simpered. ‘There’s no bastard braver or more cowardly than a bing-bong. Before all this shit got going, Daph’ ’n’ me used ’em as trackers – best there bloody are. They could smell out moai twenty clicks upwind. The guvvie – the Tuggy coppers, they’ll never get the better of ’em. They don’t understand the bing-bong – and they don’t understand his politics, ’cause yer bing-bong is a highly political bloke. These desert mobs, they’ve got all their own internal conflicts going on, and they hate each other even more than they hate us Anglos and our foot soldiers.’
Tom roused himself: ‘There’s one thing that confuses me, and that’s why they don’t make it clearer what a mess things are, uh, over here. I mean’ – he was gabbling, yet couldn’t prevent himself – ‘there’s TV footage of firefights and that kinduv thing, but the media – the government – they never say outright how dangerous it is – why’s that?’
The pet-food shooter ignored Tom and called across to his wife, ‘Daph’, you leave those things, my pet. These blokes’ll haveta hit the road straight away if you wanna make it through.’ Then he answered his guest. ‘That’s easy, mate, yeah. The security situation’ – he put on a portentous, official voice – ‘cannot be reported for security reasons.’ Then he laughed and threw the dregs of his orange juice on the parched earth. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I reckon your mate’s got the right idea.’
Prentice was already fetching Tom’s rifles from the freezer container. He emerged in a vaporous cloak that was torn off at once. The day was hotting up. Mount Parnassus was bleached bone white in the sun, and the radio mast the pet-food shooters had used to locate Tom and Prentice was an alien space module, touched down on its scarred summit.
‘You wanna make sure the action on those is working,’ Daphne Hufferman called to Prentice. ‘And keep one of ’em in the car,’ she added.
The big woman had left the laundry and was slinging a cartridge belt around her neck as she plodded towards them. She held the machine gun itself in her free hand as casually as any other housewife might tote a shopping bag.
Tom went into the demountable and gathered up his effects, which had been considerately placed there by his companion the night before. He had intended asking the Huffermans if they’d let him have some sun block – moisturizer, even. But the strangeness of seeing Prentice active and helpful distressed him. Was it true, Tom wondered, that their respective grades of astande were changing in relation to one another?
When Tom got back, Prentice was attaching one of the Galils to the rack on the SUV. He fed the other through the back window. He was, Tom noticed, wearing his own automatic in a shoulder holster, and couldn’t forbear from regarding himself in the dusty side mirrors of the shoddy little vehicle.
Dave Hufferman came puffing up with a large trash bag full of empty beer cans. These he proceeded to shove in through the back window.
‘Look out when you drop the recycling off at the eighty-mile bore, Daph’,’ he said.
She replied: ‘Will do, poppet,’ then crunched herself inside with them.
Next, Hufferman tossed a canvas bag in through the front window and on to Tom’s lap. Tom recoiled.
‘Whoa, mate.’ The pet-food shooter grinned. ‘It’s only the bust part – there’ll be plenty of oppos along the way to sharpen yer reflexes.
‘Look,’ he continued, his breath smiting Tom’s face, ‘I’m not gonna put down a fellow Anglo, right, but I sometimes wonder if you blokes from overseas even pay attention to your dicks when you piss . . .’
‘Steady on,’ said Prentice.
But Hufferman silenced him with a menacing look, then said: ‘Everyone knows the security situation is shit over here – any bloody idiot who reads a paper or squints at the TV can see it in a sec’. Daph’ ’n’ me have dug you out of this–’
‘We’re awfully grateful . . .’
Another hard stare. ‘I’m not interested in yer gratitude, right.’ Hufferman sighed deeply. ‘But what I would like is a bit of respect, yeah. A bit of respect for the bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’
With this curious remark, the pet-food shooter straightened up and banged on the SUV’s roof. Tom wrestled the car into a wide turn, and they bumped away from the camp, following the ravelled tracks that twisted away across the desert.
He hoisted up a bottle of mineral water from the compartment under the dash and took a swig. The water of life! In his ruined mouth it tasted like the water of death.
* * *
They drove until the sun was at its zenith: a coruscating rivet hammered into the gunmetal sky. All the stress of the preceding days had gathered in Tom’s shoulders, forming a hard yoke of pain.
Prentice had rearranged the stuff in the back so that the hefty woman was able to sit, bare legs akimbo, with her machine gun cradled in her lap. Whenever Tom chanced to glance in the rear-view, there she was, her pink face gibbous beneath a pink sweat band.
The uplands in the vicinity of Mount Parnassus had declined into blazing white sands and harshly iridescent salt pans. Route 1 stretched ahead, an arrow-straight strip marbled with veins of wind-borne dust. The only life to be seen in all this baking void were carrion birds, their plumage as tattered and oily as the roadkill they pecked at, before the approaching hum of the car startled them, tardily, into ungainly flight.
Tom stayed silent, the deathly aftertaste of the mineral water still in his mouth. His mother continued to reject him with the tip of her cigarette, a brand that, like her, had long since been discontinued.
Insensitive to the atmosphere in the car, Daphne Hufferman chattered away, while Prentice smoked. Each time he brought the flame to the end of one of his successive filter-tips, Tom awaited the swelling of his own need; and each time Prentice flipped a butt out the window, Tom basked in his own radiant pride.
‘I’m confident, right,’ Daphne said, ‘that the security situation is improving. The army is drawing down, right, and most of the patrols over here are conducted by the police.’
This bizarre statement came only minutes after the pet-food shooter had casually remarked: ‘Y’know, the only real economic activity between here and the Tontines is the systematic robbing of travellers, right.’
Then, sounding as if she had memorized her lines from a fourth-rate documentary on an educational cable channel, Daphne came out with: ‘In time, right, the insurgents will tire of their activities and gratefully abandon them for careers in industry, the arts or teaching, right.’
It was while Tom was stuck in the mental groove that these multitudinous affirmations were scoring in his brain – ‘Right, right, right . . .’ – that the insurgents ambushed them.
The IED must have been prematurely detonated, because the flash, then crash, of the charge was a fair way off. Through the fly-smeared windshield Tom saw a small bonfire suddenly lit beside the highway. He thought of delinquent kids chucking firecrackers in a trash can.
One second Daphne Hufferman had a mouthful of nuttiness, the next she was screaming orders: ‘Pull the bloody car off the road, man! Grab yer guns, geddout and geddown on the bloody floor!’
Later, Tom had found it hard to believe the alacrity and efficiency with which they had all acted: a tight little squad marching in the lock-step of adrenalin.
Tom wrenched the wheel, and the SUV skidded off the blacktop and stopped. He reached behind and yanked up the Galil rifle. Prentice was already out of the car, taking cover behind the door. His pistol in his hand, he sighted through the open window.
Daphne Hufferman, despite her size, had somehow managed to twist round in the jump seat, unlatch the tailgate and burst out of the boxes of medical supplies. She now came sidewinding on her belly through the sand, to where Tom and Prentice were quaking on their knees.
The crack of the explosion was still echoing, and grit pattered down on the bundles of diapers strapped to the roof-rack.
‘Down! Down!’ Daphne urged them, and when all three were supine beneath the SUV she pointed south to where a deep gully snaked away into the desert. ‘That’s where they laid the charge, yeah, in the culvert. They’re gonna come up outta there any sec’.’
She was right.
Four figures sprang on to the roadway and, zigzagging crazily in the absence of any cover, came towards them firing staccato bursts from their assault rifles.
Daphne snorted: ‘They’ve screwed up royally, right. They’ve got 300 metres to get across. Chill out, pick your man. If you don’t drop him – I will.’
She commenced firing in concentrated bursts, systematically traversing the road. The cacophony of the gunfire boxed Tom’s ears. He fumbled for the safety and eased it off. He placed the stock to his shoulder, the sights to his eye and crooked his index finger on the trigger. The crazy thought came unbidden: at all costs he must protect not himself . . . but Gloria Swai-Phillips’s parcel, which was under the seat in the car.