The Butt (31 page)

‘Not acting – y’know, that can reveal a lot concerning a bloke’s intentions. After her miscarriage, when Martha came to visit us in Liège, then, when she came back, and a few months later you guys adopted Tommy Junior, well, you didn’t act: you never asked the questions a conscientious man – a man with good intentions – would’ve asked, yeah?’

It was the SUV – that was the difference. It was gone. Tom scrutinized the patch of dirt where the little vehicle had been standing only half an hour before. Why were there no tyre tracks to show that it had been driven away?

‘But you’re not a conscientious man, are you Tom? You’re the kinduv man who feasts his eyes on a young black girl’s tits, then wants to screw his wife with the hard-on, aren’t cha?’

‘You’re the kinduv man who pays no attention to a woman at all unless she’s a sexual-bloody-prospect.’ The ghastly crow came pecking after him. ‘Winthrop’s Handrey women friends? They’re only fuck-buddies, fat gals beneath your contempt – same goes for my cousin Betsy, who you never so much as said “hi” to. Daphne Hufferman saves your life, but she has to ride in the bloody back like a kid.’

Glancing up, Tom saw that Prentice was as intrigued by the spirit wagon as he was; although, of course, Prentice could have no idea what an astonishing coincidence it was to find it here, thousands of miles from where Tom had first seen the cult object.

Tom set the spirit wagon down on the wall next to Prentice, who, somehow managing to summon his famed national reserve, gave him a look that implied – at one and the same time – that he too was withering under Gloria’s onslaught, while never the less being too polite to have heard a single word of it. He touched his waxy finger to the flying vee of the spirit wagon’s spoiler.

‘It’s bloody incredible how you’ve behaved since you flew in, Tom, when all Martha was ever trying to do was show the kid his roots, and get you to face up to your bloody responsibilities as his father!’

He rounded on his Jesuitical tormentor. ‘Are you telling me’ – Tom was amazed by the control he was exhibiting; he must still be astande – ‘that I, we – the whole damn family – weren’t here for a vacation?’

Squolly was sitting in the deliciously air-conditioned interview room. Tom was opposite him, sipping a soda, the bubbles fizzing on his culpable tongue. Attached to the shiny peak of the squat Tugganarong’s complicated cap was a Tommy Junior mask. It fitted perfectly.

But Gloria refused to be interviewed. ‘What did Erich say to you at lunch, Tom? You Anglos are always the bloody same; you’re as happy as a pig in shit – and this is shit, Tom, believe it – so long as there’s an ending to the sorry bloody tale. Well, I’m happy to provide you with one, Tom, and like I said, I’m happy to be your wife too. You wanna know why? Aw, I’ll save you the bloody bother of asking, yeah? It’s ’cause, exactly like Martha, I’m gonna leave you.’

Tom was still righteously empowered, yet finding it hard work to maintain what he knew to be the correct perspective. Instead of looking out through his own eyes, he kept seeing the three of them from off to one side and slightly above.

It was a stagy scene: the two men, identically costumed in jeans, bush shirts and elastic-sided boots, being berated by the one-woman Greek chorus. What was needed, Tom thought, was an entrance by another character, otherwise this could go on for ever, strophe and antistrophe, until the audience got bored and went home.

Providentially, Von Sasser materialized. The anthropologist stepped out from behind the derelict Technical College. He had his bunched-up scrubs stuffed under one of his arms, while in his free hand he held Tom’s roach motel. Coming up to them he said: ‘Some of the kids have taken that SUV of yours off to be cleaned. They found this wedged under one of the seats – yours, is it?’ He held the roach motel out to Tom, who took it, stuttering, ‘Y – yes, it is.’

‘Walk with me, Tom,’ Von Sasser said, draping his bony arm over Tom’s shoulder. ‘There’s some stuff we need to talk about, yeah.’

Apart from the ‘yeah’, it was exactly the same phrase that Tom’s own father had used when he wanted to have a man-to-man chat with his son. Momentarily gulled into thinking himself back with Mitch Brodzinski, swishing through the fall leaves that lay deep on the farm track out to Hermansburg, Tom went respectfully along.

Von Sasser unhitched the gate to the auraca paddock and guided him through. They were halfway across before the older man began to speak. ‘I’ve been hacking away since 8 a.m., and I can tellya, I’m tuckered out. Still, at the end of a stressful day in the oppo theatre, a stroll out here never fails to relax me. ’Course, it’s too bloody far to go the whole way, but from the top of this rise we’ll be able to see Gethsemane Springs in the distance.’

The familiar, leaden inanition was creeping up Tom’s legs: his arteries were sucking up sand, his veins were choking with dust. So he said nothing, concentrating only on forcing one clod of a foot in front of the other.

‘The mobs way out in the desert – the Aval, the Inssessitti, the Entreati – even some of the hill mobs and the feral Tuggies squatting on the north-west coast – they all send their cases down to me, here in Ralladayo.’ Von Sasser talked as he walked, with an easy, loping rhythm.

‘We-ell, some of ’em are A-1 bad fellers – murderers, kiddie-fiddlers, rapists – you name it. Others, we-ell.’ He laughed shortly. ‘I s’pose in your part of the world people’d say they were minor offenders – but that’s not how we see things here. You’ve gotta remember, right, for the Tayswengo – for me too – nothing happens by accident.’

On they went up the hill. They reached the next fence, and Von Sasser pulled the top wire up so that Tom could drag himself beneath it. The roach motel was a deadweight, its sharp corners cutting into his hand. The grass had straggled away, and, as they went on, Tom’s footfalls scraped the bare earth. The sun slammed into his head – he regretted having left his hat behind.

‘Ho-hum,’ Von Sasser sighed. ‘I’ve gotta say, Tom, the primary purpose of this procedure was never intended to be behaviour modification, right. It was more or less by chance that we found out how well it worked.’

‘So . . . you – you, like, castrate them?’ Tom managed to ask. And once the words were out, they became incontrovertible: this was where the makkata’s blade had been tending, this was why Prentice’s white thigh had remained unmarked.

But Von Sasser was consumed by merriment. He swept off his odd little Tyrolean hat and beat it against his leather-clad thigh.

‘But I thought . . . Prentice – the kids–?’

‘Didn’t you listen to what I said last night?’ Von Sasser admonished. ‘Papa invented these people’s culture himself, ex nihilo – from bloody nothing. He knew what they needed: mystics, firebrands, charismatic makkatas who’d take the Anglos by the bloody neck and shake ’em till their brains rattled!’

They reached the top of the rise, and Von Sasser urged Tom down on to a flat rock. He didn’t take much persuasion. The sun was plunging, and Tom’s remaining energy reserves were falling with it. Straight ahead there was a vertical escarpment parted by a wide gorge; through this could be seen the drained sea bed of the desert floor, a tired expanse of tide-ground hills and wave-scoured depressions.

The anthropologist got out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘ ’Course,’ he meditated, ‘I don’t mean that literally, but the trouble with Anglo civilization is that it’s a left-brain business, all to do with order, systematization, push-button-bloody-A. Papa understood this, as well as knowing enough anatomy – and anthropology – to see the solution. He became the first neuro-anthropologist the world has ever seen, and I’ – he inflated with pride – ‘am the bloody second.’ He paused to light his pipe, his limbs twisting into a protective cage for the wavering flame.

The foody perfume of pipe smoke braided with the clean-smelling desert breeze; the sunset, as ever, was spectacular: a ruddy blush rushing up the face of the sky. Tom found his external voice. ‘B – but a little kid, a baby?’

‘Like I say, mate, there were some balls-ups, but b’lieve me, by far the majority of those early oppos were done on patients that already had some, y’know, neuroses – or even actual brain damage. It wasn’t like we were messing with something in working order, right.’

Tom, dodging dream fists, levering the weight off his chest, searched for the sympathy he knew he didn’t have. Yet if only he could find it, he was sure the appropriate outrage would be there too.

‘He – Tommy, my, uh, son. Y’know he isn’t . . .’ He dredged up one of Martha’s weary pronouncements: ‘Adequately socialized.’

Von Sasser snorted. ‘Tell me about it, Tom. Those boys up in the north aren’t adequately-bloody-socialized either! Some of ’em can be pretty vicious – we aren’t talking clean-kills here, yeah. There’s rape – torture even. Lissen, I’m not saying I condone such behaviour, but you’ve gotta offset it against the positive impact the insurgency has on the left-brain hegemony: their infrastructure, mines, their financial-bloody-services, their drinks industry, and especially the Tuggy foot soldiers who do the Anglos’ dirty work for ’em.

Despite the impression that he and Von Sasser were speaking wildly at cross purposes, Tom persisted: ‘If – if you can’t be, uh, can’t know, definitely, what the results are gonna be, then how does this, like, operation, work to, y’know, modify behaviour? I mean, it seems to me that in this case, uh, castration might be, I dunno, more effective.’

Von Sasser sighed, a long exhalation of waste-compassion: ‘Ye-es, it’s true, the human brain is – viewed with the Western medicalized paradigm – a complex system; it seems always to be striving to reach homeostasis. Even with all connection between them severed, left-brain functions can be reestablished on the right, and vice versa. Still, these are only minor drawbacks, while the benefits can be astonishing, and anyway, when it comes to a case such as this, I don’t think castration is a good comparison at all, yeah. I mean, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? Whereas you can try thinking of the oppo – and I suggest you do – as a reward.’