Tom cupped his genitals through the denim. He thought of masturbating – he hadn’t done so in weeks. He thought of Atalaya’s breasts pressed against Lincoln’s comatose face. He wondered what Gloria was doing in the adjoining room. Could she be toying with herself? Gloria’s strange fingers pinching Martha’s familiar nipples – pulling the reddening teats up from the pale aureoles. Gloria’s unfamiliar hands caressing the curves of the belly he knew so well – travelling down over wrinkles and creases he had watched being scored and stretched by the years. Gloria’s interloping thumbs hooking into Martha’s panties as the doppelgänger’s hips rose . . .
This was as it should be: the two of them separated by concrete, plaster and wallpaper. Exactly the same as any other married couple, unconsciously seeking estrangement to enhance their waning interest.
Suddenly, Tom was no longer interested at all. He got up, picked up his sweat-stained shorts and went into the bathroom. Here he washed them in the avocado-shaped, avocado-coloured sink. Squeezing the froth through the damp cloth, he reached conclusions. Obviously Adams was referring to Prentice, and, just as obviously, he wasn’t so much warning Tom as telling him to get on with it.
The idea that Prentice would make a pact with the hated bing-bongs to kill Tom was unthinkable. The Righter of Wrongs, the Swift One – no, that wasn’t Prentice at all.
Tom unbuttoned his shirt pocket; the converted tontine was still there. He began to rinse out the shorts, twisting and coiling them into a garrotte. If Prentice were to die, he’d be able to pay off the Intwennyfortee mob, sort out Swai-Phillips’s bill and even have some cash left over to give to Gloria’s charity. It all made perfectly murderous sense; all he needed now was the opportunity. Tom smiled wryly at the wryly smiling man in the mirror: an average-looking man, an ordinary sort. He’d got into this mess because of an accident that everyone viewed as an intentional act; now he was deliberately intending to do something far worse, then try to make it look like an accident.
There were miniatures of Seagram’s and little cans of 7 Up in the minibar. Tom fixed himself a drink – and then a second. He called room service and ordered a club sandwich. He ate this while scanning the contents page of
Songs
of the Tayswengo
. He assumed the section on ‘Recent Cultural and Social Developments’ would cover the charismatic Intwennyfortee leader whom Gloria had spoken of, but this was part of the chunk of pages Tom had cut out in order to hide the $10,000.
Never the less, he continued reading the book, spread out on the bed cover, naked, and investigating his teeth with the toothpick that had pinioned his sandwich. It was dark outside, and Tom had turned the aircon’ up to max. So he floated in a lightbox of no-place, while outside the oasis city dissolved into the mirage of night.
‘The Tayswengo’, Von Sassers were impressing upon Tom, with their usual stolid prose, ‘are intensely fearful of public opinion, even deep in the arid wastes of their desert fastness. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this anxiety enforces certain rigid conventions. Lying behind all of them is the Tayswengo fear of
getankka
, or ritual humiliation. To be humiliated – even in ways that might seem trivial to an Anglo – can be a mortal blow to a Tayswengo’s fierce sense of dignity.
‘Understanding this, even in respect of his own foes, a Tayswengo cannot leave another whom he has so used, and will prefer to watch him die rather than suffer the so-called “shame of the earth” . . .’
It was always the same when he read the Von Sassers: Tom heard the harsh tones of the younger anthropologist’s brother – the Chief Prosecutor back in Vance. Each new fact was an accusation, each insight was put forward by the authors purely to show up their readers’ ignorance.
Yet it lulled Tom. The heavy tome teetered, then tipped forward on to his bare chest. He slept, then dreamed.
Milford, long since. The streetcar tracks still ran along Main Street, and steam clouds billowed from the foundry at Mason’s Avenue and Third Street. This was his sugary childhood: popping Bazooka Joe, slurping Dr Pepper – yet also the early days of his young marriage: keg beer, slap-and-tickle, bashing the books by night for his certification.
‘I’m spotting, Tom, I’m spotting . . .’ She was sitting on a wicker chair by the open window, a towel rammed between her bare legs, a malevolent Gloria mask clamped on her face. Then she was gone. Gone for weeks. A European tour. He couldn’t begrudge her – it was a dreadful experience. He went on studying for his exams and working the day job. Where
had
she gone?
In the dream, Tom was forcibly struck by his own lucidity: a heightened, pinpoint awareness, such as is stimulated by the first heady on-rush of nicotine through the blood. Where had she gone? France, certainly; he remembered a postcard from Arles. And Italy. Then there’d been a few weeks somewhere else, staying with family . . . in Belgium? Could it have been? It was such an improbable destination – Tom hadn’t paid enough attention . . .
Next, he was lying down on the bedroom floor of the first house they had bought, the frame house in the new Scottsdale development, out towards the reservoir . . . And spring was gusting through the open window, but it remained impossible to pay attention, because Tommy Junior, his adoptive son, was sitting on Tom’s chest and punching him in the face with his chubby fists. Pummelling him with a deliberateness that was horribly inappropriate for a one-year-old.
Tom woke up with the fat book crushing him and the sweat chilled on his goose-pimpled skin. He limped to the bathroom and siphoned off the tank full of urine, near-fainting as it hissed into the avocado commode. Then he tottered back into the bedroom, inserted himself between the profane hotel sheets and joined the battle for true oblivion.
T
he fly rubbed its two front legs together: hispid and viscid. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off them: back and forth they went, kinking slightly, the motion creating wrists and hands. It wasn’t cleaning itself; it was instinctively making a gesture of false humility. ‘I’m only a humble fly,’ the fly was saying. ‘You needn’t pay any attention to
me
.’
Yet Tom’s attention was unwavering. The fly’s six bristled sticky feet were planted on the dash, which, with its terrain of vinyl, mirrored the desert outside the car. The fly’s compound eyes – black and shiny – wrapped around its triangular head. Was it Tom’s increasingly unbridled imagination, or was there a warty eruption on the insect’s mandibles? Mandibles that opened to utter: ‘Whoa! Old chap, watch out for that–’
Prentice was cut off as they all rose up to kiss the sky.
At first Tom couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then the whine of the whizzing front tyres, and the fact that he was lying on his back, brought home how utter was their reversal. The dumb little SUV – the off-road capabilities of which Tom had always had severe doubts – had tipped backwards and was resting on its tailgate in the sand, while its snub-nosed hood trumpeted engine noises.
In the rear-view Tom saw Prentice supine in a jumble of cigarette cartons, drug ampoules and baby-bottle nipples. Tom’s bad companion peered up at him with an expression of parental dismay.
Gloria broke the spell. ‘The water!’ she cried. ‘And the bloody, fucking fuel!’
She unclipped her seatbelt and struggled out of her seat. Tom did the same, dropping down awkwardly on to the sand, into which a damp patch was spreading from the dented flanks of the incontinent vehicle.
‘Squashed,’ Tom muttered. ‘Squashed like a fly.’
‘Move it, you fool!’ Gloria screeched, flapping her black robes. ‘We gotta get this thing upright!’
They all hung from the auraca bars, and the SUV tipped forward so readily that they only narrowly escaped as all four wheels were reunited with the ground. The water bag was exposed – a popped blister on the silica skin.
Gloria went to the back of the car. ‘We’re not totally bloody dead, yeah? Amazingly, the gas can is intact.’
‘That’s a deuced relief,’ said Prentice, joining her. He called across to Tom, ‘Look here, y’know what’s happening, don’t you? It was the same on Route 1 before we got to Trangaden. I’d better take over the driving.’
Tom started to argue that it wasn’t his fault: after all, they had never driven the SUV off-road before. Then he faltered – an enormous weariness had slumped on top of him. The gelatinous shreds of the previous night’s dream still clung to his psyche, making any further protest impossible.
Meekly, he helped Prentice sort out the mess in the trunk. He checked the rifles, but the gas can had protected them. Feeling the fake-wood grain of one of the stocks sent a charge through Tom’s hands – this, at least, could vivify him. Silently, Tom climbed into the back seat of the car and took Gloria’s egg-shaped parcel in his flaccid arms. Prentice – who, when he was driving, delighted in flouting Gloria’s edicts – lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. They drove on.
There were flies in this region of the desert. Flies but no cattle or auraca – and they hadn’t seen any moai since before they reached Lake Mulgrene. There were plentiful flies, but nothing that Tom could see for them to feed on. There wasn’t even any spiniflex or thorn scrub; only the oceanic swell of the sands, which, as the car strained towards the crest of another dune, were revealed rippling hazily away towards the horizon. Somewhere over there Beelzebub was shooting flies with a needle gun, then feeding their furry bodies to the mutant maggots he hand-reared in underground caverns.
Penetrating his droning reverie, Tom dimly heard a practical back-and-forth between Prentice and Gloria: talk of the route, the diversion they would have to take to Eyre’s Pit in order to make good their water deficiency. Gloria studied the map; Prentice changed gear with studious zeal.
Tom interrogated the parcel. What are you and where are you going? What are your intentions, please?
A corner of one of the newspaper sheets had come away from the bundle, and he idly flicked it with a fingernail.
Do I really
want
to do that? Tom considered of each millesimal movement. Is this my sole motivation, to watch the frayed fibres vibrate? If so, can I analyse every link of the chain between my brain and my finger? Can I see the very point where my thought becomes an action? Just suppose that, when the little bit of paper moves, it moves the air, and the air becomes a breeze, and the breeze blows on the sand, and the sand starts to cascade, becoming a landslide that ends up burying somebody. Then what? Is it all down to me? Because maybe I kinda lost sight of that thought as it went along the chain. Maybe I stopped wanting to flick a bit of paper . . . and started wanting to pull . . . a trigger.
The car had stopped in the cleavage between two steeply sloping dunes. The flies were shocked out of their humility for a second, then resumed their supplication on Tom’s face.
‘Effel,’ Gloria said, pointing at the dune.
‘What?’ Prentice’s voice seemed to have dropped half an octave.
‘It’s a succulent, grows on the back of dunes. The plants are bloody vast – they can put tap roots down hundreds of metres, yeah, and spread for thousands of square clicks.’ She got out of the car. ‘You could do worse than pull some up, yeah? The bulbs are like little sponges, fulla fluids, yeah? I’m gonna take a piss.’
She strode away over the spur of a dune, wading in its shifting solidity, her black robes riffled by the wind.
Prentice canted round and looked steadily at Tom. ‘Honestly, old chap, I wouldn’t do it to them if they didn’t want me to.’
‘You what?’
‘I admit, quite freely’ – Prentice stroked his smooth, strong jaw – ‘that some of them are on the . . . well, let’s say,
inexperienced
end of things. Still, you’ve got to understand how things are for them.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Come puberty – thirteen, fourteen maybe – they have to go off, leave their mob, lads and lasses both. They stay out in a camp, in the bush. Then, after a month or so, they come back for circumcision–’
‘I know all that,’ Tom snapped. ‘I’ve read the Von Sassers.’
‘Oh, yes, jolly good.’ Prentice fluttered a hand, clearly disdaining such book-learning in the light of his own very practical experience. ‘Well, then, you’ll know what comes next. Bleeding, injured, in dreadful pain, um,
down there
, these poor young things are passed around. First between the makkatas, then all the men in the mob. They’re, um,
used
grievously – it’s a dreadful shame. Better they be introduced to hunt-the-sausage by someone a little gentler, a chap willing to help them out with a little cash. No one
minds
, Tom – not even their own people.’
‘You fucking slime . . .’ Tom began, then stopped. There had been a fracture in space and time, or else this confession was only a product of his own fevered imagination. Prentice was at least a hundred yards off, pulling up long tendrils of vegetation from the face of a dune, then squeezing their scrotal bulbs into his parched gash of a mouth. A fly squatted on the headrest of his vacated seat. It was rubbing its front legs together, hispid and viscid, ever so ’umble.
Tom got out of the car. He felt as weak as a half-drowned kitten. His legs, in the thick denim pants, were running with sweat. He tottered to the back of the SUV, unclipped one of the Galils and removed it from its sleeve. He had to rummage in the trunk for the shells, then inserted them into the magazine. Yet with each action his movements became more decisive. This was, he concluded as he rammed the box into the breech, why all along the rifle had felt so instinctively right.
When Tom lifted it to his shoulder and put his eye to the sights, Prentice was in his face. I can touch him, Tom grimaced. Touch him with my metal finger, spreading death ointment. A stray shot – could’ve been anyone, Gloria . . . Violent place, the desert – you know that . . . Escaped inmates from Eyre’s Pit – crazed smokers . . . Held us up . . .
Tom propped the Galil against the SUV. He began shovelling from the trunk the fresh cartons of cigarettes that Prentice had bought at the last road stop outside Trangaden. He tore a carton open and scattered the fat packs on the sand. Then he stopped and, picking it up, levelled the rifle at Prentice once more.
Get. It. Done. Now. This time Tom Brodzinski could feel the precise weight of every synaptic link in the chain of causality – from intention to action – as it passed between his fingers. His finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. Both cross hairs precisely bisected Prentice’s face, slicing it into four equally loathsome sections. Tom felt the first stage of the trigger mechanism fall into place with a click as loud as an explosion. At this range it would be impossible to miss. Death was a twitch away, a butt-flip. Death profoundly and devoutly willed.
Tom froze. He was locked up in his stance – his finger cramped in the trigger guard, the stock grinding against his cheekbone. He could hear his tendons whining with the tension. He was fervently thrusting, with every iota of his will, towards the future – yet unable to breathe, swallow, blink.
It took a long while for Prentice to wade back down the dune. Tom watched, transfixed, as first one of his boots, then the next, lifted from the silvery sand. Prentice’s movements were so leisurely that his would-be executioner could hear the individual grains as they trickled over the leather. He was dragging a long net of effel tendrils behind him, trawling the dry sea.
Suddenly, Prentice’s face was gone from the sights and he was standing right beside Tom, his ashtray breath in Tom’s nostrils. He carefully – almost tenderly – took the Galil from the spasmed hands and said in a voice that was more parental than any Tom had ever heard before: ‘Come on, old chap, we best put this away now. We wouldn’t want anything silly to happen, now would we?’
Prentice said nothing of all this to Gloria when she returned; he only drove with the skill and concentration that the desert track demanded of him. Tom hunched in the back seat, quietly whimpering, mourning his potency. The news-paper head stared contemptuously at him, while the flies, forgetting their humility, took disgusting liberties with his eyes and mouth. Little company, indeed.
That night the trio slept out in the desert, cocooned in their swags, their breath condensing in the frozen air. A small white-gold moon sailed along the horizon, leaving a gleaming wake on the dune crests. Tom was a ghost exhaling steam. The lush fruit of other stars was heaped in the bowl of the heavens. In the distance a wild dog yapped.
At dawn, Prentice helped Tom to put on his boots, then served him a breakfast of hot tea and moist porridge. He wielded the little gas stove with diligent economy and, as he passed the vessels, remarked: ‘Lucky I had a bottle of mineral water stashed – effel alone wouldn’t’ve got us to Eyre’s Pit.’
By mid morning the crescent-shaped dunes were subsiding; then the sands retreated, exposing the desert floor. Ahead, the earth’s crust had been playing with itself: fashioning barley sugar twists of basalt and dolloping down lumps of molten rock. In places it had cracked itself open, revealing the mighty vermiculation of subterranean lava tubes.
At noon, when the heat and the flies in the car started to bother even the stoical man of action who was driving, they gained the top of a narrow defile through a range of bulbous, stony hills. Gloria was yakking on about how Eyre, the first Anglo explorer to cross this desert, was deceived by his own ‘patriarchal mindset’ into believing the Tayswengo to be like himself. Whereas the reality was that the native women had their own powerful traditions, which were taboo to all men.
Martha, Tom reflected, never talked so much. She kept her clapboard mouth – thin, white-lipped – nailed shut. Tom cradled the head for comfort. He stroked the sweat-damp newsprint, and little balls of it came away on his fingers.
‘What’re you doing?’ Gloria rounded on him. ‘That contains vital equipment for Erich, yeah? If it’s the slightest bit contaminated it’ll be bloody useless.’
‘Erich? Who’s Erich? And whaddya mean, contaminated?’ Tom shouted back. He was on the verge of throwing her parcel back in her bossy face, when there was a roaring noise so loud that it undercut the SUV’s clanking engine.
‘I say, is that the roar of the sands?’ Prentice asked. ‘It’s a sound I’ve always wanted to hear.’
Now it was his turn. Gloria spat at him: ‘No, you bloody drongo, in case you hadn’t noticed we left the sands hours ago. That’s the roar of the bloody bauxite refinery, the roar of the road-trains carrying the bloody stuff off to the coast, and the roar of all the bloody machinery down the bloody pit!’
A few minutes later they came to a checkpoint. A couple of private security men were manning it. They were Tugga-narong – so bored their faces had gone grey. Like a child who has fallen asleep during a long car journey, Tom woke to find a strange new world stocked with the same old things. He marvelled at the heavily armed guards. How could I have confused these guys with the real natives? They’re as out of their element as me.
The guards rousted Prentice out of the car, then Tom and Gloria. Their papers were scrutinized, and Prentice asked if there was any water available. One of the guards told him: ‘You’ll be able to pick up a water bag at the company store, yeah, no worries.’