Dixie chose not to hear this outburst.
‘Dad? Dad? What is it, Dad?’ Came echoing under the sea, or through the stratosphere. ‘Dad? Dad?’
Then the line went dead, and the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ swelled up, engulfing Tom Brodzinski with the Tugganarong’s own exile on this fatal shore.
That night, lying in the sweat box of his apartment, the monsoon pouring through the night outside, Tom began thinking about the butt again. He was back on the balcony, looking down on Atalaya Intwennyfortee. Had he examined her breasts too intently? To glance – surely that was only natural; but had he perhaps ogled her lasciviously? He couldn’t recall her seeing him, yet that wasn’t the point – it was his intentions that mattered.
Then there was the butt itself. Lying in bed, the heavy volume of the Von Sassers tented over his belly, Tom pressed the nail of his index finger against the pad of his thumb. How much tension had there been? How much pressure had he exerted? This much – or this? Gloria’s cool fingers had moved expertly, swabbing at the crescent-shaped incision the makkata’s blade had made in Tom’s thigh. Tom had felt no arousal – only relief.
Now he was aroused. The natives who drank in the bar opposite were being herded away by the low squawk of a squad car’s siren. The rains drummed. The first roaches to check into the motel were fretting in their chambers, already regretting their choice of accommodation. Tom sought to yank the handle that delivered repose. Under the sheet it was not his hand but Gloria’s. It went lower, seeking out the raised scar tissue on his thigh . . . Gloria’s fingers probed it – or were they . . . Martha’s?
He shot upright and squeezed on the light that tore into sharp being the nasty walls, the nylon curtains and the late check-ins to the roach motel, skittering and whirring for cover.
‘I was in shock.’ Tom said aloud. ‘I was in shock and she was wearing make-up – perhaps even a prosthesis.’
His wife of nearly twenty years was conniving with that lawyer. Her performance at the Mimosa Apartments had been just that, put on to throw Tom off the scent. He’d never seen her go through security, because she never had; and there Martha was, up at Swai-Phillips’s creepy tin mansion, pretending to be someone else altogether.
‘And for why?’ he implored the night and the roaches.
Too shaky for sleep now, Tom got up and pulled on his clothes. Outside in the street, he gathered the folds of his rain poncho around him and splashed towards the ’nade. He welcomed the company of his tail, although he was surprised to see the cop putting in such late hours. When they reached the boardwalk, they sheltered in the adjacent perspex hoods of two information points. The audio recording in Tom’s was a history of the first colonists, but he didn’t want to hear it again. Instead he waited for the grey dawn, and for the green tide to ebb across the mudflats, exposing the ugly crocodiles.
Once or twice he considered taxing the policeman with the hypocrisy – and possibly even illegality – of his smoking while on assignment; but then he thought better of it, and went back to cursing his own folly and stupidity, his wife’s perfidy and treachery.
The following evening Tom had dinner with Adams, at the Honorary Consul’s house. He took with him a decent bottle of Côte du Rhone that he’d managed to search out from the dusty shelves of a liquor store. Tom presented it to Adams, when his host came bounding along the walkway from his front door and opened the passenger door of Tom’s cab.
‘Excellent, excellent,’ the Consul muttered to himself, while Tom paid off the driver. Then, when Adams turned to face him, he said: ‘This will go very well with the main course. My, ah, friends have scared up some binturang for us.’
He leaned into Tom, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re not a, ah, vegetarian, are you, Brodzinski?’
By night Adams’s house achieved a certain elegance. The dark floors reflected the fan blades, and the splashes of colour which were the Consul’s native daubs glowed in the lamplight. Seated in a rattan chair, Tom accepted a Daquiri and resolved to make it last. As if by unspoken agreement, the two men didn’t discuss the business of the butt at all. Instead, Tom told Adams how struck he’d been by the bladder-clam victims who clonked through downtown.
‘Yes, distressing, isn’t it?’ Adams took a sip of his drink, his tone suggesting that he found it anything but.
‘The research centre here is doing some first-rate work on the problem. They already have an effective palliative; however, it’s expensive, well beyond the means of any but the, ah, elites – and they don’t tend to be the ones foolish, or desperate, enough to swim in the sea.’ He smiled insidiously. ‘They have pools.’
Tom was content to sit like this, getting gently soused on the Consul’s Daquiris and talking of this and that. As long as he didn’t require anything from Adams, the man was a decent companion. Besides, he had something he wanted to give his host: a revelation he kept to himself, as a child does a guilty yet treasured secret.
The rains started up outside, as sudden as a twisted faucet, and the Consul raised his voice to combat the pounding on the wooden roof. He was telling Tom, at considerable length – and with certain embellishments suggesting either that he was extrapolating from something that he had written down or that this wasn’t the first time he had recounted the tale – about his trip up to Vance in the town car.
From time to time one of the Handrey women came into the room, her bare feet sucking on the floorboards, and bent over Adams to whisper in his ear. On each occasion this happened, he’d report to Tom: ‘Nearly there, binturang’s damn tricky to cook – it’s the timing that’s crucial.’
Once, Tom thought he saw Adams cup the heavy breast of one of the women and give it a squeeze, but he couldn’t be sure. He took it as read that Adams’s involvement with these native women was exploitative – probably on both sides.
Adams was describing how the car broke down and he became trapped in the Tontine Townships of the bauxite belt. ‘Parts were impossible to get hold of locally, and it took several weeks for them to be freighted in. The situation at that time was . . . well, to be frank I was frightened. But there was no question of my abandoning the car. It had become’ – he smiled in a self-deprecating way – ‘well, become part of my, ah, quest to discover this country. To truly be part of it.’
Tom couldn’t have cared less about Adams’s quest, nor was he eagerly awaiting the binturang. He’d seen the animals in the wild, when the Brodzinskis toured a nature reserve in the Highlands. Binturang was the native name for these large arboreal mammals, which were anthropoid in their form and bulk, yet feline in their movements and manner of reclining, usually full-length on the horizontal limbs of the high jungle canopy.
While Tom had been keen to sample the local cuisine when his family had been with him – the thick creamy stews of the hill tribes, the fruity curries of the Tugganarong – now that he was alone he yearned for down-home junk food. He went into fast-food joints and sat there uptaking hydrolysed fat and corn syrup, his hands wrenching at the bolted-down tables. Sipping on his waxed-paper bucket of soda, Tom hearkened to the familiar gravelly sounds of the ice chips inside and, narrowing his eyes, attempted to screen out anything in his visual field – a spike of alien greenery against the plate-glass window, the oiled pompadour of a dining Tugganarong – that jibed with this homeyness.
A spindly gateleg table had been set for the two men in the Honorary Consul’s bedroom. In the corner of the austere room, with its white walls and polished wooden floor, stood a narrow army cot, made up with a brown blanket and a neatly folded sheet. On top of a chest of drawers, in front of an oval mirror, were arranged silver hairbrushes and crystal scent atomizers.
Tom would have commented on the oddness of all this, were it not for the presence of the cooked binturang. The long pink glistening skinned corpse lay on an enormous chopping board that had been placed on the table, which hardly seemed strong enough to support it.
The Handrey women had removed the binturang’s head before they spit-roasted it. It rested to one side in a heap of arugula, its eye sockets black and crispy, its needle-sharp teeth bared. Tom thought the animal looked like a faked photograph of an alien’s corpse lying in a secret military installation. He steeled himself with a slug of Daquiri before sitting, then set his glass down with a clonk, hoping one of the women would get him a refill.
Adams registered this and said irritatedly, ‘I think I’ll ask for that excellent vino you brought to be poured, Brodzinski. Liquor doesn’t sit well with binturang.’
He began to sharpen a long carving knife with slow, deliberate strokes on a cylindrical whetstone. Then Tom watched, repulsed, as Adams began sawing through one of the fully extended back legs. The table moved back and forth under the impetus, the claws of the leg Adams was severing flicking droplets of grease across the front of his tan cotton pants. He stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then bent back to his task.
‘Wayne?’ said a Handrey woman, passing Tom a brimming goblet. He took it gratefully.
The Binturang turned out to be very tasty. The flesh was so tender it could be forked apart into long filaments as twirlable as spaghetti. The flavour was between that of partridge and of pork. With the assistance of half a bottle of Côte du Rhone, and the Handrey women who ladled taro paste and vegetable curry on to his plate, Tom ate most of a leg, together with a little of the belly meat, which Adams told him was the most prized part of the beast.
The woman who served them stayed in the bedroom, squatting against the baseboard. She slowly exposed the knuckle bones of the paw Adams had carved for her. Occasionally, Tom glanced across and observed the way she gently held the paw, as if it were the hand of a small child.
They were silent while they ate. Adams bent low over his plate, his jaw knotting with steady effort. The fan thrummed, the rain drummed. After a few false starts the Handrey women’s chanting got going underneath the house. The volume rose until the beat of their ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ competed with the overhead percussion.
Tom was half-cut when the chopping board, bearing most of the binturang still intact, was borne off below to feed the chanters. Because of this, he considered his conversational gambit fairly astute. Wiping his mouth with a starched napkin, he asked his host: ‘D’you know this guy, Brian Prentice, that Swai-Phillips is representing?’
Adams seemed not to have heard. ‘I think we may as well have our coffee next door,’ he said, fastidiously wiping his own downturned mouth. ‘I didn’t ask them to trouble with dessert; I hope you don’t mind?’
Tom grunted that he didn’t and stumbled back into the other room, where he collapsed into one of the creaking rattan chairs. After fiddling with a music deck on one of the shelving units, the Consul slumped down opposite him. A trickle of New Age music – wind chimes, flutes and a theramin – percolated through the heavy rhythmic soundscape of the house. Tom thought the choice a modest revelation, not what he expected from the tightly buttoned Adams. His host absent-mindedly fluttered his fingers as if conducting the puny tune, then said: ‘Prentice? Well, he’s not one of ours, so he’s no direct concern of mine. Obviously, I take a closer interest than I would with other foreign nationals, and, as it happens, I have spoken to their attaché here in Vance, Sir Colm, ah, Mulgrene. Without in any way being loose-mouthed, we were able to ascertain that your situations had certain, ah, similarities.’
‘They have an attaché right here in Vance?’ Tom was surprised; this hardly tallied with the respective global reaches of the two nations.
‘It’s a hangover, of course,’ Adams said. ‘Not that they were the colonial power here, but they had extensive interests over many years. Incidentally’ – his horse lips puckered – ‘I’m aware you harbour doubts concerning my own, ah, capabilities–’
Tom tried to issue a denial, but Adams wouldn’t permit it. ‘I may no longer be a salaried official of the State Department, but, believe me, this is a fully functioning consulate, and I am empowered to do anything that’s necessary to assist you. Anything.’
He regarded Tom icily, before adding, ‘The same does not apply to, ah, Prentice.’
‘What’s he accused of?’ Tom asked bluntly.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Adams snapped back.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ Tom needled him.
‘Can’t. Won’t. Mustn’t. There are strict laws here, criminal cases can’t be, ah, bruited about – especially when the charges involve the traditional peoples. You’ll be grateful for such a, ah, close-mouthed approach when it comes to your own preliminary hearing. It means that the judges can’t be influenced by knowledge of what the defendant has been accused of, right up until he steps into the dock.’
Tom swam up through the watery music towards the light. ‘Swai-Phillips said Squolly would give a child abuser bail if he could come up with the right cash. Is that true? Is that what Prentice has done, screwed a native kid? He certainly looks the type.’
Tom would have gone on if a Handrey woman hadn’t come in carrying a tray with coffee things and a small dish of truffles on it. When the coffee had been poured and she had withdrawn, Adams slowly inclined his teaspoon so that some large granules of the Turkish sugar tumbled into his tiny cup. Then he sighed. ‘Look, let’s not fence, Brodzinski; we both know it’s not Prentice who’s bothering you, it’s Swai-Phillips.’
Tom regretted having taken a truffle. His thumb and forefinger now had pads of melted chocolate on them as shiny as paint. He sucked these in what he hoped was a sage and meditative fashion, before replying: ‘Martha – my wife. I saw her up at Swai-Phillips’s place. She’s still here. I think – I think . . .’ A pause, then the words came in a rush: ‘I think she’s mixed up with him in something. I’ve tried calling her again and again – she’s sure as hell not back in Milford.’