The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

  After a couple of days Swai-Phillips called.

  ‘I’ve no date yet for the prelim’ hearing, right,’ he said without any preamble.

  ‘Well, when will you?’

  ‘Hard to say.’

  Tom pictured the lawyer in his offices at the top of the Metro-Center, puffing on a stinky engwegge cheroot and bullshitting from behind his mask of a face.

  ‘But so long as the court accepts the makkata’s evidence you can make the first reparation trip over there, right away, right.’

  ‘First?’

  ‘There may have to be several, but the good thing is you can head off while the criminal prosecution continues – which may take many weeks.’

  Seeking to deploy his new knowledge, Tom asked, ‘Am I, like, initiated now?’

  Swai-Phillips was dismissive. ‘Don’t be under any illusions, Brodzinski,’ he said. ‘If you’d been foolish enough – and some Anglos are – to have gone through initiation to one of the desert mobs, you wouldn’t be idling your days away reading, while waiting for a fair trial. That makkata would’ve broken every bone in your body with a punishment stick – then Atalaya’s women would’ve pissed on you – by way of humiliation.

  ‘Anyway, when’re you gonna come up to the house again? Gloria’s been asking after you. Squolly’s coming up Sunday with his mob, gonna do a big barbie. There’ll be heaps of fish, heaps of beer, shitloads of kids in and out of the pool. Do you good, mate, have a slice of the old family life.’

  Tom didn’t want to see Gloria again; he wasn’t certain he’d be able to cope with her travesty of his wife’s features in broad daylight. Nor was the idea of sinking a few beers with the policeman appealing.

  Tom had to report to police HQ every other day. Squolly – or Commander Squoddoloppolollou, as he was properly called – was always laid-back and friendly. Even when the grandiose marble hallways filled with the clatter of steel-shod boots, and open-topped trucks full of paramilitaries screeched in and out of the parking lot, the barrel-shaped officer still found time to get Tom a soda, then sit with him while he sipped it in the pleasantly cool confines of the interview room.

  Squolly disdained the Intwennyfortee mob’s ritual business. ‘See, Tom,’ he told him, ‘our belief is that it’s a man’s intentions that count, yeah. We don’t judge an offender for what he’s done, yeah, only for what he thought he was going to do.’

  ‘But I thought that’s what the native people believed too?’

  Squolly laughed and exhaled a patch of condensation into being on the shiny peak of his cap, which he was holding. ‘No, no, the desert mobs – the Tayswengo, who you’re mixed up with; the Aval, Jethro’s dad’s people; the Inssessetti and the renegades, the Entreati – well, they’re harsh, man. Very fierce, yeah. Their line is that every single act a fellow makes is willed, right enough: a hiccup, or a murder.’

  ‘I knew that much. I’ve been reading the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo.’

  ‘OK, sure, very . . . authentic.’ The policeman grinned, revealing teeth as strong and squared off as his own torso. ‘The hill tribes, yeah, they’re different again. They believe in spirits big time. A spirit gets between a man and his wife, a man and his kiddies, a man’s hand and a can of bloody peaches! They’re praying all the time, making offerings – trying to get these bloody spirits to stop ’em spilling their grog.

  ‘If a Handrey or an Ibbolit does a big bad one – a rape, a murder – we have to get ’im down here, yeah, get his bloody makkata and get him to summon the right spirit, so he can tell the makkata why he made the fellow do it!’

  Squolly shook his head at the very idea of such foolishness. He drew a handkerchief covered with brownish engwegge stains from his pocket and began polishing the peak of his cap. ‘Now, with us coastal peoples – Anglos, Tugganarong – we’re more rational, right. Man’s accused of doing something bad – like you, yeah – we don’t pull him in and ’terro-gate ’im. We don’t duff him up, right. No, we ob-serve him. We send our blokes out after him – quiet, yeah, no fuss – and check out how he conducts himself in the world. How he orders his morning coffee, buys his paper, deals with all the little irritations of his day. Then we compile a report on what kind of intentions the fellow has. There’s nothing high tech’, we don’t use no fancy psychologists or profilers, it’s just good old-fashioned police leg work.’

  Oddly, the surveillance didn’t bother Tom – even though Squolly’s men were trying to read his mind in a way not usually attempted by anyone save for a mother or a lover.

  On the contrary, as he splashed through the first storms of the monsoon to buy his newspaper, or sat beneath bulging awnings drinking his coffee, the sight of a cop, loitering by the doors to the mall, dumpy in his rain cape, was almost reassuring. Often his tails would come over to chat with him, mulling over the strength of the previous night’s wind, musing as to whether this year’s monsoon was heavier than the last.

  In the afternoons, in the brief interval between one swishing curtain of rain and the next, Tom would put on his old sweat-pants and go for a run. Leaving the dock area, he jogged through the shopping district. At this time of the year the chilled malls were empty but for a few Anglos. The tourists were all gone, and the miners wouldn’t come in from the interior until shortly before Christmas. Nor was the business district buzzing; the occasional clerk or manager, dressed in their tropical version of a suit – jacket and pants both cut short to reveal pale arms and paler legs – would scamper along the sidewalk, leaping over puddles, their faces set, as if to say, ‘This business of leaping over puddles is bloody serious, right.’

  Tom slopped by them. He glanced up at the Metro-Center to see if his lawyer was in his office; then, head down, took the wide Trangaden Boulevard, which ran through the outskirts of town, where glass barns sold agricultural equipment, then on between billboards that grew tattier, until it declined into a single strip of concrete, before eventually terminating in the long sable strand of the town beach.

  Usually, there would be a couple of other afternoon exercisers out there with Tom, while sea fishermen whipped the slack waves with their lines. The gnarled shapes of the offshore atolls, which in fine weather were lovely ornaments cast down on the azure baize, now resembled crumpled refuse adrift on this oceanic puddle. The clouds shrouded the foothills, obscuring the more elevated suburbs of Vance. So Tom took his constitutional along a sable corridor, between vaporous walls.

  To swim in the sea was, of course, out of the question. In the dry season there were sharks and box jellyfish, while the monsoon brought with it the Sangat, or bladder, clams. When the wind rose and the waves pounded, they drummed up these avid crustaceans from the sea bed. Anyone unlucky enough to have one fasten on his skin would soon become the host for a thriving population of necrotic bivalves. Tom had seen bladder-clam victims in Vance, clunking along the sidewalks with their bared arms or legs warty with nacre. They looked like medieval knights, unhorsed and stripped of their armour save for brassards or greaves.

  Each afternoon Tom jogged the length of the beach, then back to the Experience. Overall he was covering six or seven miles. But while the first few runs left him heaving for breath, after a week he was managing it easily.

  With every breath the humid air was discovering new tissue to invigorate. Tom had read somewhere that, if fully unfurled, the human lung would cover two football fields, and now he felt as if he were reoccupying this living turf, which for so many years had been ploughed over with tar.

  Before the rains swished back in there was a small window of opportunity, and gratefully Tom thrust his head into it, breathing deeply with each pace. At these times he was almost glad of his protracted sojourn. He felt a stupefying pride at his own achievement: would I, he wondered, ever have cracked the smoking habit if all this shit hadn’t gone down?

  When he’d got back to the apartment, showered off and drunk a couple of bottles of mineral water, Tom ventured out once more. This was the most onerous part of his
daily routine: the call home.

  There were several call stores in downtown Vance. In these strip-lit caves, the Tugganarong who did the city’s menial jobs paid over their wages for a few minutes’ chitchat with their families in the Feltham Islands.

  The call stores doubled in function, also offering money-transfer services. Tom often saw some downtrodden Tugga-narong pay over half his wages to Western Union, then half of the remainder to Bell Telephone. Squolly had told him that the Tugganarong were paid minimal wages, the justification being that their employers – whether domestic, municipal or business – provided accommodation and food. So, once they’d visited the call store, they had only a handful of change left; enough for a brown-bagged bottle to be drunk in the street, then they’d lurch back to their dormitories, festering sheds on the far side of town.

  The Tugganarong smelled of the lanolin they used to mould their thick hair into Anglo hairstyles. They were also loud, conducting their calls home with a mixture of frustration and anger. As they shouted in the flimsy booths, their language was impenetrable to Tom, and seemed to consist of sharp consonants, interspersed with syllables that all sounded like ‘olly’. Making his collect calls, which involved negotiating with up to three operators, all on the line simultaneously, Tom had to contend with this background roar: ‘Gollyrollyfollytollybolly!’

  When he heard the familiar tone of the wall-mounted phone in his own bright, open-plan kitchen, Tom’s frustration fell away, and he simply felt miserable. On answering, his children dutifully passed the handset, one to the next. He pictured them in a row of descending height on the red-tiled floor: Von Trapped.

  The twins prattled on about school and friends – the shiftless, shifting alliances of eight-year-olds – then passed Tom on to Tommy Junior, so the lumpen fourteen-year-old could drone on about his computer games and his trading card collection. ‘Gollyvollytolly . . .’ Tommy Junior seemed to be saying, while all around Tom the Tugganarong kept up the same incomprehensible jabber. Tom pictured Tommy Junior as a Tugganarong, his white skin darkened, his mousy crest greased. And wasn’t it true – Tom mused while the boy babbled – that Tommy Junior was his own guest worker? Foisted on Tom to perform the menial job of stabbing his conscience.

  The hardest exchanges were with Dixie. When she came on the line, Tom pressed the handset so hard against his ear that he could hear the cartilage crack. Dixie, who was charged with explaining to her father, half a world away, why it was that at this early hour – 8 a.m. by his reckoning – her mother was not in the kitchen cooking breakfast, cutting sandwiches or combing hair. Not, in short, doing any of the things that a now sole parent might be expected to.

  The first few times Tom called and got his daughter in lieu of his wife he was understanding. How could he be anything but? Yes, Martha was already at work, yes, he understood. Of course she had to leave early – he saw that. She was still asleep . . . ? Dixie would wake her if he insisted . . . But no, he didn’t insist, because he entirely understood, you see. Her mother must be tired after getting in so late.

  So it went on, for day after day; until Tom at last cracked and shouted at his wife’s proxy: ‘Dixie! Dixie! Where is your goddamn mother? I haven’t spoken to her since you guys got home, and that was more than two weeks ago! Get her for me now. Now! D’you hear me?’

  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 thi
s, 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.