The Butt (9 page)

Tom stopped. Adams had stood up abruptly and now loomed over him, a queer half-smile on his diffident lips. ‘First off,’ he said firmly, calming a fractious child, ‘I know who you mean – at Swai-Phillips’s place, that is – his cousin Gloria Swai-Phillips. Remarkable lady, runs several orphanages in the Tontine Townships. And yes, there is a striking resemblance between her and your wife.’ He paused, sighed. ‘If you want the truth, the reason why you and your family were, ah, noticed in the first place, was because of that resemblance.’

‘Noticed?’ Tom said wonderingly.

‘Well,’ Adams laughed shortly, ‘we get a lot of Anglo tourists through here in the season, and one bunch looks pretty much the same as the next. Your wife made your family stand out – Gloria Swai-Phillips is a very popular, very influential person.’

Adams crossed to his drinks cabinet. ‘I believe a Seven and Seven is your poison,’ he said, holding up the whisky bottle. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any 7 Up; will you take a little branch water with your Seagram’s?’

Adams saved his clincher until the drinks were poured and he’d sat down once more. ‘The thing is, Brodzinski, your wife can’t possibly still be here in Vance.’

‘Oh, really?’ Tom sipped the drink; it didn’t taste right without the sugary gloss of the soda. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I’ve spoken to her myself. She called me – and I called her back in, ah, Milford.’

‘She called you? Why? Was she worried about me?’ The rains stilled, a fissure opened up in the lowering sky, and through it shone the reinvigorated sun of Martha’s regard.

Adams put a stop to it: ‘Look, I appreciate that this must be painful for you, Brodzinski; that I, a comparative stranger, should be, ah, privy to your wife’s estrangement; but facts are, ah . . .’ He pulled on a long bony finger. ‘ . . . facts. She wishes to reassure you of her, ah, concern – but not to speak to you. She called on another matter, in some, ah, distress because of something – or, rather, somebody – she had seen in your local mall.’

‘In the mall? Who?’ Tom had definitely had too much to drink. His words lurched from his mouth and found themselves suddenly on the glossy floor.

‘It would’, Adams said, shifting to academic mode, ‘have been almost exactly at the time the makkata was doing the astande ceremony at Swai-Phillips’s place – perhaps twenty minutes later. Your wife saw – or thought she saw – a Tayswengo man in L. L. Bean.’

‘In L. L. Bean?’

‘In L. L. Bean, trying on a pair of, ah, pants. Which was just as well!’ Perversely, Adams seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘Because, apart from his breechclout, he was completely naked.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Tom staggered on, following the Consul’s crazy logic. ‘You’re saying my wife called you because she saw . . . the makkata in Milford Mall, in L. L. Bean?’

Despite the ludicrousness of this, Tom realized that he too had no difficulty in picturing the wizard right there: beside an aluminium rail, hung with jeans and slacks, while on the other side of the plate glass zitty teenagers in their lumpy puffa jackets watched the guy riding the resurfacing machine describe bold figures on the ice rink.

‘Magic’, Adams said, ‘is a much misunderstood, ah, concept. Besides, Brodzinski, I’m not even necessarily saying that’s what this was. But no one can live here for long without becoming aware of the traditional people’s ability to, ah, shall we say, influence certain coincidences.’

Tom didn’t know how to reply to this – so he said nothing. This, in terms of Adam’s recondite etiquette, must have been the right thing to do. Because, after looking at Tom from under his wire-wool eyebrows for a while, the Consul said: ‘Good, I’m glad you understand. Now, to more mundane business. Jethro dropped off some of the prosecution’s depositions earlier on.’

Adams rose, went back to the shelving, picked up a plastic wallet and lobbed it into Tom’s lap. ‘They’re ballistics reports, witness statements – that kind of thing. Jethro’s over there’ – a thumb jerk over one shoulder – ‘right now. He’ll be back in time for the prelim’ hearing, which is now set for this Friday. In the meantime, he asked me if I’d go through these with you.’

Adams hooked a bamboo stool between them with his foot, then began dealing forms and diagrams out of the wallet.

‘See here,’ he began. ‘This is a computer-generated diagram of the, ah, butt’s parabola; these figures are the force estimated to have been exerted on it by your fingers, and these the velocity the butt reached before impacting with Mr Lincoln’s head. Should the DA decide to push an evidential-intentional line, it will be necessary for the defence to take issue with them.’

Tom took a judicious sip of his whisky, then said: ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Adams echoed him witheringly. ‘Why? Because, Brodzinski, if these, ah, calculations are allowed to stand unopposed, they would suggest that you employed more force in, ah, flipping the butt than a negligent act would imply. The prosecution then has you lining up the butt like a – like a grenade launcher, or any other offensive weapon.’

Tom hunched forward and, taking the diagram from the stool, flapped it in Adam’s horsy face. ‘What’, Tom demanded, ‘could possibly be my motive for attacking Mr Lincoln?’

‘Motive? Motive?’ Strange wheezing sounds issued from Adams, his eyelids flickered, his pale-blue eyes watered. He was laughing. ‘There’s motivation in abundance, Brodzinski,’ he managed to choke out at last. ‘Jealousy, for one. Atalaya has already told Commander Squoddolop-polollou that you were looking at her, ah, breasts, before you flipped the butt–’

‘Oh, ferchrissakes!’ Tom cried.

But Adams continued: ‘Or, should the police choose to paint you up, ah, blacker still, they could say this was a race-hate crime.’

‘Lincoln’s not black!’ Tom expostulated.

‘Mr Lincoln is an initiate of the Tayswengo, Brodzinski.’ His lips twisted with the irony. ‘And, so far as they’re concerned, they only come in one, ah, colour.’

An hour or so later Adams escorted Tom along the slippery walkway to where a cab was idling at the kerb. The Consul had only a small umbrella, and it was awkward manoeuvring it so as to protect them both. Adams kept on bumping against Tom’s behind. Drunkenly, he wondered if Adams might be a little drunk.

Tom opened the car door and turned to face his host. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I kinda lost my cool back then. You’ve – you’ve been decent to me, Adams – I know you’re trying your best to help, and thanks for the dinner – the binturang was great.’

The rain was now falling so heavily that it was as if the two of them were standing under a waterfall. Adam’s hand, clenched round the umbrella’s handle, was within an inch of Tom’s cheek.

‘Well, ah, thank you, Brod – I mean, hell, let me call you Tom, d’you mind?’

‘N-No.’ Tom was taken aback.

‘And you’ll call me Winnie, yes?’ There was a pathetic eagerness in Adam’s eyes.

‘S-Sure, Winnie,’ Tom said.

Then, as if to seal this contract, the Consul inclined his head and kissed Tom on the forehead, his lips remaining there for several seconds. Tom was struck by how wet and plump Adam’s lips felt, considering how dry and diffident his mouth appeared. When he removed them, it was with an audible ‘plop’ of un-suction.

Tom stood, staring at the Consul’s face, grey and washed out in the sodden night. He felt a bead of consular saliva trickle down the bridge of his nose.

‘W-Winnie,’ Tom said to break the spell. ‘Is there anything else I can do, anything at all?’

Adams inclined his head once more, coercing Tom’s eyes to his own. ‘You know, don’t you, who Astande is?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘He is “the Swift One” in Tayswengo cosmology, the “Righter of Wrongs”; so there’s always more you can do. You’ve been to visit Mr Lincoln; well, go again. However off-putting he may be, keep talking to him. If anything can mitigate the charges levelled against you, it’s the, ah, willingness to be astande despite his inquivoo. So, go. Go now.’

With this, Adams placed a hand on Tom’s shoulder and pressed him down into the ear.

Tom rolled down the window so he could say goodbye, but Adams was already slipping back along the walkway to his front door. By the time the cab drove off, the lights on the small veranda had been extinguished. Adams and his five fat Handrey women were bedding down for the night.

Tom pictured the Consul stretched out full length on his army cot, the rough blanket pulled up under his long chin.

‘But how?’ he asked out loud. ‘How did he know that I drink Seven and Sevens?’

‘Whozzat?’ the cabbie interjected; however, his passenger didn’t explain, only asked him to drive to the hospital.

Seeing the cop who’d tailed him to the ’nade the previous morning, Tom approached and was waved through. After the mêlée outside, the silence of the white-tiled corridors was eerie. There was no sign of any staff as he walked towards the central elevator lobby. Through head-height windows in the ward doors, Tom could see rows of beds, most of which were empty, although here and there was the outsized foetus of a sleeping patient.

As he waited for the elevator, Tom wondered why it was that so many casualties were being left out in the rain, while inside the hospital snoozed, dreaming its dreams of antiseptic purity.

There was more activity on the fifth floor. An orderly carrying a kidney dish full of foul-smelling fluid got into the elevator as Tom stepped out. An Anglo nurse stood by the nurses’ station chatting with an Anglo patient in a bathrobe. She left off and asked Tom what he wanted.

Without understanding why he did so, Tom pulled up the leg of his short pants and pointed to the three-inch scar left by the makkata’s blade.

‘A-Astande,’ he said. Both Anglos nodded vigorously, as if to say: that explains everything.

‘Go through, yeah,’ the nurse said to Tom. ‘I think the Intwennyfortee mob have finished their ritual now.’ He thanked her and moved on.

By night the corridor that led to Lincoln’s room seemed longer. It kinked and turned, passing bays in which stood mysterious machines, their coiled electrical flexes and rubber wheels suggesting they were deadly as well as silent. Then Tom heard the pitter-patter of water falling on to the tiled floor and the crackle of flames.

He rounded the next corner: someone had built a small fire in the corridor by piling twigs up against the wall, then setting them alight. The smoke curled up into the sucking mouth of a ventilation duct; a fire sprinkler had been activated and the spray from this was splattering the floor. Where the water splashed the fire, it hissed into steam, which diffused the harsh strip-lighting into its component colours, so that a small rainbow arced from wall to floor.

Tom was transfixed by this indoor weather system. Then, seeing an alarm button, he reached for it, only to have his hand detained.

‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, right.’

It was a doctor, wearing a white coat of military cut. A stethoscope was tucked beneath one epaulette.

‘Why not?’ Tom asked.

The man, who had the strained yet authoritative air of hospital doctors the world over, seemed flummoxed for a moment, then explained: ‘It’s the Intwennyfortee mob: they’re doing their business along here, yeah. The engwegge – it has to be seared.’

The doctor knelt and, picking up some greenish stalks that were lying by the fire, raised one to his lips and nibbled it. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, smiling up at Tom. He was very young, with a helmet of auburn hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. The doctor’s magnified eyes – at once jaded and quizzical – were trapped in these little tanks.

‘I’m, um, surprised,’ Tom said, choosing his words with tipsy circumspection. ‘That you allow the traditional people to hold such, um, ceremonies in the hospital.’

‘We’ve got no choice, right.’ The doctor rose and faced Tom. ‘Once they’re in – they’re bloody in. Besides, fires in hospital corridors, criminal charges for blokes disposing of cigarette ends – it’s all part of the same topsy-turvy sitch, right.’

‘You – you know who I am, then?’ Tom wasn’t that surprised.

‘Yeah, obviously. With the state the old man’s in and you astande, you’d be a fool not to pitch up. I’ll ask Atalaya’s spiritual manager if it’s OK now for you to see him, yeah.’

‘Manager?’ Tom was bemused.

The young doctor laughed. ‘Her spirit intercessor. No Tayswengo can talk directly to her makkata; ritual business is organized by a manager, right. ’Course, that’s not their own term; a literal translation is something like “informed explicator of the mind–world–body conundrum” .’

‘It’s incredible to me how much you guys–’

‘Know about the bing-bongs’ shit?’ The doctor grinned, while Tom searched his open face for irony. ‘It goes with the territory, yeah. You can’t doctor them if you don’t.

‘I’m Vishtar Loman by the way.’ He held out his hand and Tom took it.

They slopped along the corridor to the door of Lincoln’s room. Dr Loman opened it and slid inside. Tom waited. A smell of meat cooking tickled his nostrils. The little fire succumbed to the sprinklers and they cut out. The shreds of smoke and steam were inhaled by ventilation ducts. It fell silent, replete, and once more Tom could hear the natives in the parking lot baying for admission.

The doctor was back.

‘You can come in now.’ He leaned forward and whispered: ‘Lissen, mate, I’m not gonna bullshit you, yeah. Your man’s in a bloody bad way. No matter what antibiotics we pump into him, we can’t seem to get on top of the septicaemia. If it carries on like this, we’re gonna have to try to drain the core of the infection.

‘That’s why the Intwennyfortee mob’re here; Atalaya’s makkata’s gotta, like, purify me and Mr Bridges – that’s the house surgeon – before we do the op’.’

Peering into the darkened interior of the room, Tom could see that a battery of equipment had been installed since his last visit: metallic boxes with winking LCD readouts, a pump that kerchunked with machine vigour, a monitor upon which undulated eight real-time graphs. Yet, jibing with this high-tech were tiny oil lamps, each fashioned from half a tincan. They had been set upon every available flat surface, and the room was thick with their sooty smoke.

Still whispering, the doctor drew Tom inside. ‘I’ve given Reggie a shot of diamorphine so he can cope with the ritual, yeah. He’s a bit high.’

Growing accustomed to the gloom, Tom saw Reginald Lincoln’s etched features well up on the white pile of pillows. The old man’s eyes glittered feverishly as he lifted a claw from the snowy covers and beckoned. ‘Tommy.’ His voice was oddly strong and confident. ‘C’mere, kiddo, we need to have a pow-wow.’

As he made his way across, a body surged up and wiry arms bound him. Tom was drawn in to breasts so resolute their nipples felt like probing digits. Atalaya Intwennyfortee’s hair was arranged in the Tayswengo style, and the edge of the discoid coif brushing against Tom’s neck sent an erotic jolt from his nape to his base.

‘I knew you was coming down,’ she husked into his clavicle. ‘Now youse astande, any damn thing can go up rightways.’

Tom was rigid in her circling arms, but when she introduced her leg between his thighs, he enfolded her, his hands swarming over the dry matt of her beautiful black skin.

Reluctantly lifting his eyes from Atalaya’s hair, Tom saw that he could see – and be seen. The functional furnishings of the hospital room – its high bed, the Venetian blinds on the wide window, a brutal commode, an articulated electric light – were exposed in all their obscene prosaism.

In addition to Lincoln, Dr Loman, Atalaya and himself, there were five others in the room. A naked makkata sat beside the bed leafing through a golfing magazine. Side by side on the couch below the window were three Tayswengo women, all with discs of hair set at jaunty angles on their long, thin skulls. Standing by the glass door that opened on to the balcony was a fifth Tayswengo woman. Or was she a Tayswengo – or even a woman – at all?

She stood, cocksure, one skeletal leg advanced. She was naked and entirely hairless, with her eyebrows and pubis shaven as well as her head. A long time since, she’d had a radical double mastectomy, the scars of which marked her chest like two badly sewn darts in the back of a dress. In one hand she held a long-handled spoon, while between her scissor shins Tom could see a camping stove with a bubbling aluminium pot on top of it.

‘Intwakka-lakka-twakka-ka-ka-la!’

Tom half understood what the woman said. He somehow comprehended that she was an Entreati sorceress, from the wildest and least assimilated of the desert tribes; and, further, that she was Atalaya’s so-called manager.

Tom felt his scrotum tighten and one of his knees began waggling uncontrollably. There was no one in the hospital room save him and the sorceress: the night, the rain, the others had all receded. The sorceress was standing in the lumber room of Tom’s life, her feet like blades cutting into the poorly cherished memories of forgotten friends. She stooped to pick up a rusty ice skate, a mildewed college year book. Clearly, she was searching for anything she might use.

One of the Tayswengo women got up and opened the door to the balcony. It broke the spell. Rain and wind gushed in, the oil lamps guttered and went out. Dr Loman snapped on the overhead lights. Everyone started; their hands went to their eyes. Muttering, the sorceress retreated to the balcony.

The infection on the old man’s head had swelled massively. It rose to an angry red summit, and lava flows of sepsis wended into his sparse hair. The infection had a distinct and malignant psychic presence. Lincoln’s eyebrows and one of his cheeks were swollen and taut – yet still the eyes glittered, the arthritic finger beckoned. ‘C’mere, Tommy-lad,’ he said. ‘C’mere.’

‘Iss OK, you go fer ’im.’ Atalaya squeezed Tom’s arm. ‘You get smeared now – you astande.’

Another of the Tayswengo women rose from the couch and passed her a small pot. Atalaya poked a finger into this and withdrew it coated in a viscous substance. She reached up and anointed Tom on either cheek and on the bridge of his nose.

‘You go fer ’im,’ she reiterated. ‘Go.’

Tom approached the high bed warily, but Lincoln croaked, ‘C’mon, sit beside me.’

Careful not to disturb his tubes and wires, Tom propped himself on the mattress. Lincoln smelled meatier than the meat stewing on the sorceress’s stove. His decrepit body had been tenderized by thousands of carnal pummellings, cured by the smoke of sixty times that many cigarettes. Now it was putrid. He grabbed the neck of Tom’s shirt and pulled his face to his own. There was shit and mischief on the old man’s breath.

‘Get in there, boy,’ he grated.

‘I’m sorry?’ Tom queried.

‘Get in there, boy,’ Lincoln said again; and, following the pinpricks of the old man’s pupils, Tom noted first the preposterous engorgement tenting the bed covers, and then, beyond it, exposed by the wifely act of placing a urine bottle on a shelf, the gaping vulva of Atalaya Intwennyfortee.

Tom tried to pull away, but the old man’s grip on his shirt tightened. Gravy-coloured spittle spattered Tom’s chest. ‘Fix her up real good,’ he was almost shouting. ‘I need you to, boy – then get out. Get out!’

Lincoln spasmed, then collapsed back on the pillows. Atalaya came with a cardboard dish, and her husband coughed brown matter into it.

‘Engwegge,’ Dr Loman sighed. Then, turning to Tom, he said, ‘I think you’d better leave now.’

Atalaya smiled broadly at Tom as he followed the white coat out of the room.

The hospital had returned to some semblance of normality. There were medical and support staff in the main lobby. Drunken and damaged patients were slumped on moulded plastic seating.

‘What was going on earlier?’ Tom asked Loman. ‘They weren’t admitting anyone.’

‘It’s the engwegge,’ the doctor explained. ‘Look here.’

He led Tom out through Emergency, then pointed to the black gloss of the parking lot. ‘You see those little brown dollops?’

Tom could just make out the discarded engwegge chaws sixteen metres off, disintegrating in the rain.

‘Thing is,’ Loman continued, ‘engwegge isn’t allowed in the hospital, yeah. We have to get ’em to spit their plugs out before they can be seen to.’

‘No matter how hurt they are?’

‘They can be bloody dying, mate, but we won’t treat ’em while they’re damaging their health. Look,’ Loman said, shrugging, ‘I’ve gotta go back in. You can prob’ly get a cab down by the main gate – there’s usually a few loitering, even this late.’ He moved off.

‘What – I mean, the engwegge,’ Tom called after him. The doctor turned and eyed him quizzically. ‘They had it up in the room – they were giving it to Mr Lincoln.’

‘Oh, that,’ Loman laughed. ‘There are exceptions to the rules so far as the desert mobs are concerned – very important exceptions.’

The clerk in the convenience store where Tom got his groceries had a name badge on her lapel. It read HITLER. Tom asked Swai-Phillips about it, and the lawyer said. ‘Sure, that’ll be her name, right enough. What was she, Ibbolit? Gandaro p’raps?’