The Butt (3 page)

He must have been ten years or so younger than Tom – a man in the full rude vigour of his mid thirties. Certainly, the copper-skinned torso framed by the SUV’s window was highly toned: every pectoral and abdominal muscle clearly defined. That the man was naked from the waist up was not that remarkable, but his Afro of tight, almost white-grey curls was striking, as was the goatee-and-moustache combination he sported, which was beautifully trimmed.

The man also wore wrap-around reflective sunglasses, the cord of which lay on his broad shoulders. Yet, far from annulling his features, this near-clownish mask of plastic and hair only enhanced them.

Tom couldn’t tell what ethnic group – or mixture of ethnicities – the man’s face betokened. The sharp, flat triangle of a nose and the high cheekbones suggested he was Asiatic, but his skin was too red for this. His sheer bulk might mean he was Tugganarong – or had Tugganarong blood – for the Feltham Islanders often tipped the scales at over 300 pounds. However, the island people, unlike the mainland natives, had only sparse and wispy body hair.

Could the hair be the result of a generous measure of Anglo genes? Tom considered. Or was the man a member of some grouping previously unknown to him?

The driver forestalled all of this by flicking a finger to his brow in casual salute, and saying a single word: ‘Hi.’

This ‘Hi’ – lazy, apparently unconcerned – brought with it an astonishingly physical sensation of psychic intrusion. Tom felt the hairs rise on his neck – and even his arms. He began to sweat. It was as if the clown-masked man had walked in through one of his eyes, and was now crouching down in the bony cave of Tom’s skull. It was altogether uncanny, and Tom couldn’t recall ever having had such a vivid first impression of anyone before.

Certainly not of Martha. Martha, who now emerged from the SUV herself. The way she sidled from one haunch to the other, the way she extended a slim foot to the ground, the way her long neck arched – all of it recalled to her husband the first time he had seen her, across a crowded room, at a dull party in their home town. It was this air of languorous self-containment that had attracted him twenty years before, and which now impinged upon him once again. For, just as the clown-masked man had marched into his head, so Martha, quietly and deliberately, seemed to be quitting it.

‘Tom,’ she said, coming across to him, ‘this is Mister–’

‘Jethro, Jethro Swai-Phillips,’ the man cut in, and reached out his hand. Tom noted that the fingers were of equal length, so that the whole appendage seemed squared off and artificial. Tom took hold of it reluctantly, thinking: how many goddamn times am I gonna have to shake hands today? It’s like these people really do have to check that a man’s not packing a gun.

‘Jethro saw us waiting at the taxi stand in town,’ Martha explained. ‘There were no cabs; apparently there’s some kind of a race meet on today, so he, very kindly, offered us a ride.’

‘It’s the least I could do for visitors to my country, yeah,’ Swai-Phillips boomed. He had the deep yet ebullient tones of a voiceover for a radio advertisement. ‘We have a saying here,’ he continued. ‘ “The wayside inn should have as many beds as there are folk under the setting sun.” ’

‘Is that what you do?’ Tom asked, keen to put the conversation on the ground of masculine competitiveness. ‘Are you a hotelier?’

‘Lord, no!’ Swai-Phillips laughed – a big rich laugh with overtones of helpless hilarity. ‘No, no, I’m a lawyer. And I hope you’ll forgive me, but your good lady here took the liberty of filling me in on your current difficulties, right?’

Christ! How that meaningless interrogative the locals involuntarily added to the end of their sentences annoyed Tom.

‘It’s nothing,’ he snapped at the lawyer. ‘Everything’s fine.’

Realizing he was overreacting, yet powerless to stop himself, Tom took a twin in each hand, gripping their shoulders as if they were suitcase handles, and started back towards the front door of the Mimosa. Martha sucked her breath in through gritted teeth. However, Swai-Phillips refused to be snubbed. ‘No,’ he boomed after Tom, ‘I don’t believe it is nothing. You’re not in your own country now, Mr Brodzinski. Personal-injury cases here can be more than just financially costly, yeah?’

Tom let go of the eight-year-olds – who were already protesting at their frogmarch – and whirled about. ‘What is this?’ he cried. ‘Are you some fucking ambulance-chaser? Is that your thing, man?’

Martha made as if to admonish her husband, but Swai-Phillips seemed not in the least put out. ‘I mean it,’ he said coolly. ‘Not just financially costly, although good representation can be expensive.’ He extended the strange hand again, a white oblong aligned with its blocky digits. Martha took the card. ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases,’ he remarked perfunctorily. ‘In fact, few lawyers here in Vance will, and certainly not if the plaintiff has any connection to traditional people. But then, the Consul probably told you that already, right?’

Swai-Phillips inclined his neat globe of a head towards Martha, as if he were tipping his hat to her. Then he repositioned his sunglasses.

‘Good day, madam,’ he said. ‘It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and, of course, that of your children.’ Then the mirror-tinted window of the SUV whined upwards, replacing Swai-Phillips’s clownish mask with a reflection of the Brodzinskis’ own stunned faces, and the big car pulled away.

They stared after its tail lights as it bounced up on to the roadway. Martha was almost exploding with rage, but Tom felt utterly disconnected.

How could he have known? he uselessly interrogated himself. How the hell did he know that I’d seen the Consul?

‘How can, like, international flights stop there?’ Dixie asked him when he’d come off the call, and was consulting his pocket atlas. ‘I mean, it’s like the size of a, like, fingernail or something.’

‘I dunno,’ her father groaned. ‘It must be ’cause there’s a military installation in that neck of the woods. At the end of World War II, they laid out strips for Superfortresses on some of these flyspecks. Anyway, we’re gonna be there for seventeen hours, so we’ll have plenty of time to find out.’

‘I’ve gotta, like, jones for Faikwong,’ Dixie said, changing tack; ‘everyone says the malls there are, like, totally out of this world. I wanna get some cool stuff.’

‘Me too.’

Tommy Junior had lumbered into the main room of the apartment and stood gurning up at his games console, which he held in an outstretched hand. ‘This thing is way obsolete – they’ll have the latest VX90 in Faikwong. It’ll be way cheap too.’

‘I don’t know where you guys think the money for all this is going to come from . . .’ Tom began reasonably enough, but as he spoke his voice began to rise and rise, with little aggrieved yelps. ‘Neither of you seems to’ve sicked on to the fact that your father – that’s me, guys – is in some serious trouble, here.

‘Changing the flights has already cost five hundred bucks; there isn’t any money left over for your toys. I may need a lot more money than we’ve got to deal with this situation at all. I don’t even expect Tommy to understand any of this, but you, Dixie, are you as goddamn stupid as him, or are you just INCREDIBLY FUCKING SELFISH!’

The blood drained from the teenage girl’s tanned face, leaving bone-white patches underneath her eyes. Her long neck jerked back, and the absurd disc of greased blonde hair, which sat on her head like an ugly halo, knocked against a hotel-chain abstract in an aluminium frame.

The frame rattled on the brick wall. Dixie’s hairstyle was now all mashed up, like a bird’s nest found lying by the roots of a tree. She bit her lip. Tears lay in her eye sockets – misery bifocals. She bit her knuckles and spluttered, ‘You . . . you!’ Then she turned abruptly, mashing the halo still further, and bolted into the back bedroom, where, after a few more seconds, Tom heard her begin to wail, with all the mundane anguish of an ambulance siren.

Tommy Junior remained standing exactly where he was, gurning at his games console.

Later on, when the kids had cooled off in the Mimosa’s pool, the Brodzinskis walked across the stretch of park to the ’nade.

When they’d first arrived in Vance, three weeks before, the prospect had both charmed and reassured Tom: the neatly mown grass and the oval beds of tropical shrubbery, which spread smoothly down to the ’nade, the long boardwalk that ran clear around Vance Bay, its supporting piles sunk deep in the muddy foreshore.

Now, however, he was conscious only of what an alien imposition this all was: the flowers were too lurid and fleshy, the heavily irrigated grass too green. As for the ’nade, while the weathered wood used to build it was meant to make the serpentine structure harmonize with its surroundings, this effect was ruined by the regularly spaced ‘information points’ – each with its perspex rain hood, each blazoned with a stentorian NO SMOKING sign, complete with obligatory list of grave penalties.

Alongside the ’nade, there was a beautifully equipped playground. Bright, primary-coloured climbing frames, see-saws and swings stood in safety pits of fine white sand. There was even a water play area, where concealed jets created an artificial stream. Yet, the high-flown municipal pride in inclusiveness, which had even produced a swing for wheelchair-bound children, now seemed strange to Tom, set beside the brackish ooze of the bay, in which wallowed the occasional salt-water crocodile or prehistoric-looking bird.

As they ate their burgers and fries on one of the trestle tables by the café, Martha pointed out what Tom had known only too well – even as he’d wheedled the airline clerk – yet hadn’t dared to acknowledge to himself. ‘There are only two alternatives, Tom,’ she began.

And he, forlornly, tried to stop her, with a ‘Perhaps we should discuss this in private. . . ?’

Which she waved away with ‘The kids may as well hear it right now. It’s a valuable lesson for them’ – she turned to include all the children in the homily – ‘about how all our actions have consequences. Your daddy has signed a bond, see, and that bond is his word, because he’s an honest man; and because he’s given his word, he’ll have to stay here for a few more days, so he can sort out this business with Mr Lincoln, the man he injured.

‘OK. But if we want to get home in time for you guys to start school, and me to start work’ – here, Martha darted a particularly sharp look at Tom, who, she maintained, never accorded her career the same importance that he attached to his own – ‘then we’ll have to go without him. See’ – she turned to Tom again – ‘wasn’t that easy?’

Jeremy squeezed a French fry between his grubby fingers, until it ejaculated white pulp on to his ketchup-smeared paper plate.

‘What’s a bond?’ he said.

On leaving his family, Tom went straight to the CellPoint store that he’d spotted the day before. It was half a mile along Dundas Boulevard, the wide straight avenue that ran from the terracotta block of the Mimosa into the downtown area of Vance.

The CellPoint store, with its plate-glass window plastered with blue and orange decals, and its modular plastic stands that held the gleaming clam shells of the cellphones, was deeply comforting to Tom. There was an outlet exactly like it in the mall near their home town of Milford.

The CellPoint store spoke to him of efficient global communications and, more importantly, of what was being communicated: namely, certain standards of human decency and best business practice.

As Tom stepped inside, the air con’ separated his damp shirt from his back. The workaday formalities of renting a phone were also comforting, yet Tom couldn’t stop himself from examining the sales clerks with new and warier eyes.

Whereas, throughout his vacation, he’d been blithely blind to the racial differences of the country’s inhabitants – for, was it not, he asked of his flabby liberal conscience, exactly like home? – he now found the woman behind the counter disconcertingly alien. Even though she riffled her computer keyboard, exhibiting all the vapid efficiency of a First World employee, Tom couldn’t help fixating on her café-au-lait complexion. Her wrists were encircled with the same raised bands of whitened flesh as the limbs of the maid at the Mimosa. Cicratization, wasn’t that what it was called? And how did they do it? By inflicting a regular pattern of burns, then rubbing ash into them? But what kind of ash? Surely not cigarette?

Cicratization. It wasn’t the kind of body-modification that Dixie and her friends snuck off to get at that stoners’ piercing joint behind the Milford Mall, now was it? Those alien wrists . . . this reeked of wood-smoked firelight, the jumble and thrash of naked limbs, the jabber of alien tongues . . .

His homely fugue dispelled, Tom couldn’t wait to sign the papers and get back outside.

As soon as he’d texted Adams with his new cellphone number, the silvery shell in his palm rattled into life. A loud percussive ring tone issued from its little speaker; the noise entirely drowned out the lazy ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the automated pedestrian crossing. One of the ubiquitous Vance meter maids was passing by: a faded Anglo in a militaristic orange uniform, toting a handheld computer and a digital camera. She looked over at Tom and grimaced.

He answered the incoming call – it was Adams. ‘I’m glad you fixed yourself up with a cellphone,’ he said, without any preamble. ‘There have been, ah, developments. I need you to come right out to my place; the address is on the card I gave you.’

‘Developments?’ Tom was bemused.

‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,’ Adams came back at him. ‘Just get a cab and give the driver the address. He’ll know how to find it. Come right out. Right out.’

The cabbie was languid to the point of inanition, and Tom could have sworn he drove half the way there steering with his knees. He dropped Tom on a suburban street that curled up into the foothills. Single-storey clapboard houses were set back from the road behind grassy verges. They stood upon stilts, surrounded by stands of palms and bamboo.

At first glance, the lazy S of bluey-blacktop and the neat gardens could have belonged to any suburb in the subtropical developed world. But then Tom noticed the basement areas beneath the houses: there were heaps of old washing machines, discarded TVs and crazy hanks of chicken wire lying on the dirty concrete pans between the stilts. The odour of the place was more decayed than floral, and, sniffing this, Tom made his way between two thorny hedges, then over a rickety wooden walkway that linked the front yard of Adams’s house to its single upper storey.

He opened the screen door and, finding the front door ajar with no sign of buzzer or knocker, called out: ‘Anyone about?’ In what he hoped was a strong assertive voice.

There was no reply. Tom pushed the door open. The room that confronted him was unremarkable: there were woven rush mats on the highly polished floorboards; rattan easy-chairs with padded cushions; a couple of small bookcases, stacked vertically with books and piled horizontally with periodicals. There were native paintings on the plain white walls: jaggy swirls of bright pigments and finger daubs, applied to curved bark shields. With its slight air of bachelor’s asperity, and its fussy co-option of native artefacts, the interior was exactly what Tom had expected of the Consul.

Then, above the steady pulse of the cicadas, which had swelled to occupy the sonic vacuum left by the departing cab, Tom became aware of the cooing and tongue slapping of native speech coming from below.

Retracing his steps across the walkway, Tom made his way awkwardly down the steep bank to the underside of the house. Here, in the stripy cacophony of sunbeams, an arresting spectacle met his eyes: five heavy-set hillwomen were seated inside a long black town car. Tom immediately recognized them as being Handrey. This much he did know, for the tourist lodge the Brodzinskis had stayed at in the cloud forest was run by the Handrey Tribal Council.

The women were chattering away to one another, the two in the front seats twisted round, so that they could address the three others sandwiched in the back. Initially, Tom found it incredible that they could have driven down here in the big black car, a vehicle he associated with the downtown of cities back home. But then, on looking more closely, he realized that the car was only a shell: the tinted windows punched out, the bodywork peppered with rusty holes. Two of the doors were missing altogether, and instead of sitting on Firestones, the automobile carcass was jacked up on bricks.

The fat, jolly women were wrapped up in their chatter, just as their fingers were twined in each other’s wiry hair. They picked and pulled as they yattered, teasing out the cooties, which they then deftly crushed between their fingernails, before flicking them away.

The women ignored him; Tom stared at them.

He thought of the ads he’d seen at home: big billboards that had encouraged him to fly his family halfway around the world to this island-continent. On these, smiling Anglo servitors, clad in spotless white, were laying out tableware on immaculate linen, while behind them a towering rock formation burned orange in the low-angled sun. ‘We’ve set the table and checked under it for flippers,’ the slogan read. ‘So where the hell are you?’

What was missing from these huge photographs, with their groups of grinning models, was the myriad of bit players: the insects. Tom thought of the leaf-cutter ants he’d seen from the balcony that morning, the black ants porting the Rice Krispies in the breakfast room, the crickets filling Adam’s backyard with their monotonous fricative noise. Up in the hills, he’d seen the gothic mounds of termites, which were five and even six yards high.

And, of course, the billboards – which also featured laughing surfers on the beaches down south, and bubbling snorkellers on the Angry Reef up north – were devoid of black or brown faces. The natives, like the insects, were not a tourist attraction. It occurred to Tom that if the government had had its way, all visitors to the country would have seen of its indigenous people were their bright, naive patterns: black and white stripes, red dots and blue spirals, on T-shirts, sarongs and the tailfins of aircraft.

The kids had all got cooties – Martha too. The foul-smelling chemicals Tom got at the drugstore had no effect, so, in the end, Martha had spent a good part of her vacation combing her children’s hair and her own. Martha’s patience frayed, as she pulled at the infested locks.

These Handrey women were different. As he watched them, Tom began to appreciate that their delousing was part of an unforced intimacy, one in which their happy conversation was complemented by the reassurance of touch. They reminded him of the hefty Polynesian maidens painted by Gauguin, but what were they doing here?