The Butt (21 page)

The insurgent running directly towards him sprang into view. Tom wasn’t expecting this tubby youth, with doe eyes under the brim of his baseball cap; rather, some fearsome male version of the Entreati sorceress. A scarred apparition with an erect penis sheath, bellowing a death chant: ‘In-twakka-lakka-twakka-ka-ka-la!’ In time with his rifle fire.

The advancing figure swelled in the telescopic sights. The cross hairs wavered across the bulbous letters and figures on his green nylon football shirt: GREEN BAY PACKERS 69. The clumps of nappy hair pushed out by his cap were Mickey Mouse ears, his mouth was agape.

Tom felt the first stage of the Galil’s trigger action snap – then the youth tried to perform a backflip in the road, a ridiculously ambitious gymnastic feat for somebody so overweight. No wonder he failed, and instead ended up sprawled on his behind, a maroon loser’s badge pinned to his chest.

As soon as it was done, Tom returned from the murderous realm he had bolted into. Jittery, he rose to his feet and lurched away from the SUV. From a long way off in the mental fog, he was aware of the gunfire having ceased, and three other losers recuperating on the ground.

But one of the insurgents must have been lying in wait to the north of Route 1, because, as Tom stumbled into the desert, he reared up from behind a ridge. The boom of the heavy Browning automatic fused with the gory hole punched in his shoulder. He went down bellowing, ‘Ya-yaaa! Ya-yaaa!’

Tom turned to see Prentice, who first blew the wisps of cordite smoke from the barrel of the gun, then broke down in sobs.

And was still sobbing – albeit muffled by the cigarettes he held to his lips – as they trundled on towards the Tontines.

Tom was only relieved that he, personally, hadn’t killed anyone. After the dust had settled, Daphne Hufferman pointed out that the Green Bay Packers kid had her bullets in his chest. ‘I dunno where your shot went, Tom,’ she told him. ‘But you were game for a rookie – I’ll give you that.’

Then she went from corpse to corpse and, taking them by the ankles with workwomanly efficiency, dragged them off Route 1. As for the insurgent Prentice had shot in the shoulder, she gave him a hefty shot of morphine from the medical emergency pack she carried with her. Then she and Tom got the man on his feet and led him into the shade of a rocky overhang.

At first the Aval tribesman had been shocked – latterly he was stoned. Tom had sat with him, while Daphne walked away into the desert, found the insurgents’ pick-up and used their short-wave radio to call the grid reference into the police.

‘What will the cops do to him?’ Tom asked as he drove.

‘Shit knows, yeah,’ Daphne replied. ‘Might drag him into choky in the Tontines, yeah. Might just do him there and dig a pit.’ She chuckled. ‘That might seem a little harsh to you, right, but that one ain’t gonna abandon killing for a career in industry. You should’ve seen the bumper sticker on his ute: WE SHALL KNOCK ON THE GATES OF HEAVEN WITH ANGLO SKULLS. Makes yer think, right.’

Tom wasn’t thinking much at all. His tongue curled back and probed the dry gulches of his mouth, then extended into his psyche and explored its numbness. So, he thought, this is what real shock feels like: nothing at all. Self-defence was moral dentistry, accompanied by a whole-conscience shot of Novocaine.

He tried to thank Prentice for what he had done – but the gratitude fizzled out on his parched tongue. Besides, Prentice was engaged in some peculiar introspection of his own: as the sobs died down, the tempo of his smoking increased. He began, once more, to toy with his automatic, taking out the magazine, ramming it back home, then aiming at the lengthening shadows out in the desert.

Daphne instructed Tom to stop at the buckled steel skeleton of the eighty-mile bore. While the two men covered her, she bolted over and deposited the bag full of beer empties in the recycling bin. When Prentice, at long last, tucked the Browning away in its shoulder holster, he wasn’t himself again – he was more than himself: an anthropoid mosquito full of sucked-up blood. Tom could make out the words in his ultrasonic whine: ‘I am the Swift One, I am the Righter of Wrongs . . .’ While from time to time, Prentice muttered aloud, ‘It’s just not cricket.’

Twenty kilometres before the Tontines the ghostly cavalcade of burned-out vehicles began. Ten kilometres later they saw a perfectly ordinary grader working on the road and were waved through by gangers in fluorescent safety jackets. Then they reached the city limits.

The sign was as stark as a gibbet in the desert twilight: WELCOME TO THE TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, it read. TWINNED WITH OENDERMONDE, BELGIUM. The three vertical stripes of the Belgian flag – black, yellow, red – were set beside the shield of the Republic. Next to the sign’s rusty posts lay a bloated body with greyish patches on the dark skin of its outstretched arms. They were travelling at too great a speed for Tom to be able to tell if it was a corpse or a drunk.

He pushed the SUV on down a long, dusty boulevard with outsized concrete flowerpots on its dividing strip. To either side there were street after street of identically shaped bungalows, each one a steel shoebox with a veranda tacked on one side and an aircon’ unit on the other. On top of the bungalows were sloping aluminium roofs, painted tile-red.

‘They’re modified freight containers,’ Daphne explained. ‘Guvvie ships ’em in and plonks ’em down. If one of ’em gets whacked by the insurgents, or the bing-bongs that live in it have a party and burn it out, they ship in another one.’

There wasn’t anyone much on the streets, only the occasional skulking figure that recoiled from the vehicle’s approach, and disappeared into one of the identical bungalows. A police checkpoint hove into view: a series of blast walls and a chain-link fence twenty-five feet high, topped by angle-irons strung with razor wire. The Tugganarong police stamped the trio’s papers while exchanging desultory chit-chat with Daphne about the ambush. Then they waved them on.

They turned into another wide boulevard. This one had fat-trunked baobab trees with whitewashed trunks planted along its dividing strip. Here, the containers had been installed side-on, and there were paved sidewalks. The containers lacked roofs, but windows had been cut in their sides. These were covered with security grilles. Each of these commercial premises had a large electric sign on top of it, and, with darkness fast falling, a robotic finger pressed a button. Slogans cascaded along the blank façades, racing the little SUV: APEX ASSURANCE, COVENTRY REAL ASSURANCE, PERSONAL FIDELITY, AMHERST LIFE, TIP-TOP TONTINES . . . Tom wondered who these were aimed at, for there was still hardly anyone on the streets.

They reached another checkpoint with more bored cops, more blast walls, more razor wire. The cops checked under the car with their mirrors-on-poles. Then there was a third checkpoint, a fourth and even a fifth. Each necessitated the same laborious procedures, the same routine interrogations.

Prentice had come down from his maiming high, and in the short transits between the checkpoints he nodded out. His forehead, pressed against the window, looked in the sodium glare of the spotlights as brittle as glass.

Rousing himself, at what it transpired was the final checkpoint, Prentice reached for his cigarettes, only to have a flat-faced Tugganarong non-com’ snap at him, ‘You better not spark that one, yeah,’ and gesture to a sign that was bolted to the blast wall. The sign shouted: NO IFS, NO BUTTS, STUB IT OUT!

‘If I were you, yeah, I’d take your stay in the TGS as an opportunity to kick the habit. Perhaps it’s the Lord’s way of persuading you to stop.’ Then he slung the sheaf of their papers back into Prentice’s lap and waved them through the raised barrier with a negligent flick of his rifle barrel.

It was the first time Tom had heard the Lord referred to since the courtroom had lustily sung the National Anthem, back in Vance.

There was no time to dwell on this. Daphne Hufferman’s hand was on Tom’s shoulder, tending him this way and that, along driveways as smooth and dark as chocolate cake. Miniature office blocks with mirrored-glass walls were set in pocket-sized lawns upon which sprinklers played. Apart from the swishing caress of these, and the tired grumble of the SUV’s engine, the Sector was unnaturally silent: a man-made oasis, where interloping blossoms skulked in the moist beds at the foot of the buildings.

A perfect little Hilton emerged from the orangey gloom. It was exact in every way, from its pseudo-Hellenic portico to its ornamental ponds dappled with water lilies, but maybe one fifth the size of any other Hilton Tom had ever seen.

And there, standing by the main doors, apparently forewarned of their arrival, a swirl of black-winged moths fluttering round his fastidious form, stood Adams, the Honorary Consul. While beside him was the morphed version of Tom’s own wife: Gloria Swai-Phillips, wearing a floral-print cotton dress.

He admitted Adams, who walked past him and crossed at once to the far side of the room. Tom moved his discarded clothes from the easy-chair to the floor and invited the Consul to sit.

‘Good trip?’ Adams asked, crossing one thin shank over the other. He wore his habitual tan seersucker suit, and Tom was underwhelmed by the clocks on his red socks.

Adams took a while answering. Then Tom heard the flat chink of hotel china and the bubbling of the dwarf kettle. Adams was making himself a cup of Nescafé. Tom concentrated on flossing his teeth, then pulling the hairs from his nostrils with a pair of tweezers. The sharp little twinges were reminders: You’re here! You’re here!

Eventually, he heard a slurping intake, followed by: ‘Don’t get snippy with me.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Tom went back into the bedroom. Adams was bent over the three-panelled mirror on the vanity table, examining the back of his head. He looked round. ‘I said, don’t get snippy with me. I’ve had a, ah, hard-enough morning already.’

The Consul set his coffee cup down on the carpet and peered at Tom through his increasingly pellucid spectacles. Clearly, like a batty old hypochondriac, he was soliciting sympathy.

Tom obliged. ‘Oh, why’s that?’

‘Fellow countryman of ours called Weiss – he was caught smoking in the john of a flight coming into Amherst–’

‘Serious enough.’ Adams glared at him with eyes now entirely visible. ‘He’s doing ninety days at Kellippi, and even after a month he’s not in very good, ah, shape.

‘Have you ever seen a bauxite mine, Brodzinski? The convicts get the worst jobs. It’s very brutal, ah, extraction – huge machines, a lot of highly toxic dust. The Belgian outfit that operates the mine isn’t overly concerned with safety, given that the workforce consists of convict labour, native, desperate, or all three.’

The Consul took another slurp of his Nescafé before answering. ‘Miss Swai-Phillips and I flew to Amherst, then drove along Route 2. The mine people did offer us a light aircraft, but, as I’m sure you, ah, appreciate, I have to keep my distance . . .’

He fell silent. He was staring past Tom’s shoulder – not at the Andrew Wyeth reproduction that hung above the bed, but the fifth of whisky that stood, half empty, on the beside table.

‘I kinduv assumed your, uh, jurisdiction wouldn’t extend this far,’ Tom said. He was trying deliberately to nettle the Consul. ‘I mean, isn’t this the Western Province?’

Adams was unperturbed. ‘Yes, but I’m a servant not of the national government, Brodzinski, but of our own. It’s in that capacity that I’ve driven another thousand kilometres through the Tontines to come and, ah, liaise with you.’

‘I can see you’re upset,’ Adams said, and Tom had the gnawing insight that this was all diplomacy ever consisted of: the understatement of the obvious. ‘Have you spoken to your family yet? You’ll find that you can dial them direct from here without the country code – a little, ah, quirk of the Tontine Governmental Sector.’

He stood up and set his stained cup down on the vanity table. ‘Paradoxically,’ he added, ‘if you want to phone someone in the actual Tontines, it’s an international call.’

‘What about Gloria?’ Tom had meant to say ‘Martha’ – the two women were, once again, confused in his mind.

‘I’m sorry?’ Adams fastidiously detached Tom’s hand from his arm – a hand Tom hadn’t been aware of laying on him.

‘W-What’s she doing here?’

‘I thought Miss Swai-Phillips explained that to you back in Vance? She’s responsible for running orphanages here in the Tontines; she’s a well-respected charity worker and philanthropist. I believe her charity is holding a function this evening, here in the hotel. No doubt you can be invited if you’d like to find out more.’

Adams was making for the door when Tom had a sudden intuition: ‘That’s bullshit, Winnie.’ He hadn’t used this intimacy since the night they had eaten the binturang together at Adams’s house. It pulled the Consul up short, and, when he turned, Tom saw he had lost some of his aloofness. ‘It’s to do with Prentice, isn’t it? It’s to do with . . . his . . . With what he did. I mean, she looks after kids – and he . . .’ Tom left the insinuation hanging there: an ugly odour that the hotel’s aircon’ could never dispel.

Adams’s voice softened. ‘You know perfectly well that I can’t discuss that with you, Tom.’

‘But you’re not denying it, are you? Those drugs – the baby stuff, it’s for her orphanages, isn’t it? Jesus! I dunno what’s worse, carrying the can for my own dumb mistakes or chauffeuring that sicko.’

‘As I understand it, Tom, you have every reason to be grateful to Brian Prentice. Mrs Hufferman told me that whole story yesterday evening. I believe the technical term for what he did’ – the Consul’s long face warped into sarcasm – ‘is saving your life.’

Tom stood, cowed, as Adams reached for the door handle. Then the Consul detonated one of his deadpan devices: ‘Incidentally, Brodzinski, I think you should know this. Shortly before I left Vance I had a call from the DA’s office. Mrs Lincoln has instructed the medical staff at Vance Hospital not to resuscitate her husband if he should have a, ah, crisis. Bluntly, this means you probably haven’t got long to get down to Ralladayo and make your reparations. As I’m sure Jethro Swai-Phillips explained, all bets are off if this becomes a capital offence.’

With that, he quit the room.

Tom found Prentice smoking behind the Hilton parking lot. The sixth sense by which the local smokers always knew exactly where the sixteen-metre demarcation line ran never failed to amaze Tom. There were so many public buildings clustered in the TGS that the intersection of several lines allowed smokers only a small curvilinear plot, within which to stand, sucking and blowing.

Clustered with Prentice were seven other Anglos. Their short-pants suits, pressed shirts and flamboyant ties gave them the look of insurance salesmen – which is precisely what they were. It was tragicomic the way these men were compelled to stand, shoulder to shoulder, steeped in their own fumes, while on all sides there was the cool play of sprinkler systems on beautifully manicured lawns.

Tom stood off to one side, grinning and swinging his free hands. One after another the insurance men finished their cigarettes. They carefully extinguished them on the ground, then picked up the butts. Pocketing these, they walked over to a couple of beaten-up Japanese hatchbacks, which they piled into.

‘They’re going into the townships to work,’ Prentice explained. ‘That’s why they don’t drive anything flashy.’

‘Selling tontines to poor bastards who’re gonna kill each other for the pay-out,’ Tom spat back. ‘You call that work?’

‘Really, Tom,’ Prentice replied equably, ‘everyone’s got to make a living.’

Tom gulped. ‘And you, uh, Brian, what’s your occupation nowadays – still the Swift One, the Righter of Wrongs?’

Prentice shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other. ‘Ah, well . . . I don’t know, old chap,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t you?’ Try as he might, Tom’s voice crept up the register. ‘What exactly went on back there in the desert, Prentice? D’you understand it? Because I sure as hell don’t. And what’s it got to do with this?’ He waved the tissuey paper of the car-rental agreement that he had dug out from his document wallet. ‘I’ve read through all this goddamn corporate legalese. Turns out, that if either one of us gets killed, the other guy’s his legal heir and comes into’ – he examined the small print again – ‘a cool two hundred Gs.

‘I never figured you for such an altruist, Prentice. I mean, you could’ve hesitated for one tiny second back there and you’d’ve come outta that ambush one very wealthy man.’

Prentice puffed up his sunken chest. ‘I don’t know what you’re implying, Tom,’ ‘he blustered. ‘Whatever you may believe about me, old chap, I hope you wouldn’t think for a moment that I’d let a fellow Anglo be shot in cold blood by one of those black bastards.’

‘Black bastards – black bastards. Sheeeooo!’ Tom shook his head in disbelief. ‘You certainly do know how to coin a phrase, my friend. Oh, yes.’ Then he decided to change tack: ‘Your wife’s cousin come through for you, did he?’

‘Come through?’

‘I mean, did he wire you your funds? Seems to me a man with your high moral standards would be anxious to pay his debts.’

Suddenly, Tom felt drained by the effort of it all. The Sector may have been well irrigated, yet the air still crumpled with the desert heat. He sank down into a squat, his head spinning.

The previous night’s dream came to him. Some kind of cookout or camping trip. His daughter, Dixie, still sporting the ridiculous disc of greased hair that he had last seen heading through security at Vance Airport, but otherwise completely naked and lying in the long grass.

Tom had looked wonderingly at her. She was supporting herself on one slim arm, her long legs bent sideways. It was the same posture – he had realized on waking – as that of the girl in the Wyeth reproduction over the bed. But, unlike Wyeth’s Appalachian waif, flopping on to Dixie’s lower thigh – resting there justly and weightily – was a large, perfectly formed penis.

I better not tell her, Tom had reasoned in his swoon. I better not tell her she’s gotta dick – it’ll be upsetting for a teenage girl.

‘Are you all right, Tom?’ Prentice was bending over him blowing smoke into his face.

Tom sank back down into his squat. Grit pricked his palms. He looked up: the dark halo of Prentice’s hat eclipsed the hurtful sun. Tom said, ‘D’you believe what Hufferman said: that it’s changing between us? And what about the tontine – do the two things kind of gear into each other?’

Prentice shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Tom, but I’m keeping an open mind.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and pocketed the butt. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet with Ms Swai-Phillips. After that’ – he adopted a pained expression – ‘I shall visit the bank.

‘Incidentally, Tom,’ Prentice said, hurrying on – the mention of the bank had been an indelicacy – ‘Gloria told me you’re got a package for her; perhaps you should give it to me?’

This reanimated Tom. He stood. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘She entrusted that package to me, alone.’

He stalked towards the doors of the Hilton: their photoelectric cells acknowledged, then admitted him to a shushed lobby, where silk scarves, long unsold, were creatively pinned to velvet cushions. Rubbing the edge of his key card with his callused thumb, Tom rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and the peace of his room.

Which was no peace at all. The key card when he swiped it in the lock; the debris left by Adams when he had made his coffee; Tom’s own paisley-patterned washbag – all of it struck him as horribly grotesque: the corpses of objects rather than the objects themselves. Was it that the TGS was real, while he had become robotic? Or were its pocket office blocks and neat lawns only a zone of reality imposed on the ruggedly anarchic Tontines? Then again, perhaps it was the Tontines that were the mirage, and only the desert truly existed at all?

Concentric rings of mind-bending illusion rippled out from where Tom lay, stretched out like a water boatman on the surface tension of the bed. His legs weakly spasmed, his cordite-coarsened fingers felt gross against the smooth nap of the coverlet. He could hear his own breathing, the ceaseless shushing of the aircon’, the intwakka-lakka-twakka of a helicopter landing in the military base beyond the parking lot.

He was very close now to the hysteria that had courted him, politely opening door after door as he ventured further into his ordained nightmare. He was saved – by the red eye of the message light, blinking on the phone.

Tom picked up the handset and pressed it to his ear. ‘One. New. Message . . . Hi, yeah . . . It’s Gloria Swai-Phillips here, Mr Brod – Tom. Lissen, that package of mine. Thing is, I’ve had a frantic day, so we’ll have to meet up later, right? I’m hosting a little reception thing – soirée I s’pose you’d say . . .’ She giggled girlishly. Soirée, Tom thought. No one says that, not even Adams. ‘Anyway, maybe you could drop by, yeah? It’s downstairs at around six. It’ll be full of dull charity and guvvie types, but there’ll be a raw bar.’