The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

  ‘Like buying his goddamn “fags”,’ Tom muttered derisively. For it had occurred to him that maybe this was why Prentice was dogging him. Every time they were on one of their forced promenandes, Prentice would slap the pocket of his khaki bush shirt and exclaim: ‘Bugger! I’ve forgotten them again. Look here, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t mind popping into the shop for me, would you? Thing is – I don’t know exactly why – but I can’t bring myself to buy a pack of fags. You wouldn’t mind, would you? Terribly grateful and all that. Thirty Reds’ll do the trick.’

  Standing at the counter, Prentice’s $10 bill cocked in his hand, Tom wondered why it was that he agreed so readily to fetch the ‘fags’, an epithet he found at once risible and sinister – exactly like Prentice himself. Moreover, his asking Tom to buy them implied that the other Anglo, despite what their lawyer had claimed, knew full well what the charges against him were.

  Watching Prentice scrabble with his quick-bitten fingers at the cellophane on the fat red pack of cigarettes, his fish-belly-white face haunted by cellular need, Tom felt, once again, a surge of righteous pride at his own sterling efforts to break the addiction. Efforts that had already been rewarded with this pay-off: not having to look at the medico-horror photos with which the health authorities disfigured the packets – lurid pictures of mouths eaten out from within and noses picked to a cancerous mush.

  Swai-Phillips was staring intently at Tom, a smudge of beer foam on the fleece above his full top lip. ‘Yeah, well,’ said the lawyer. ‘After tomorrow’s prelim’ you may never see the bloke again. I dunno that I’ll be able to swing it for him, yeah.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Are you saying Prentice is in court tomorrow as well?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the lawyer drawled. ‘I managed to square it with the DA and the Tayswengo mob – guess you’d call it a block booking. Suits the court – the Tayswengo too. There are the makkatas, the managers, the witnesses . . .’

  ‘Witnesses? What witnesses? D’you mean Atalaya?’

  ‘The witnesses,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’ve all gotta come in from over there.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Besides,’ he continued, raising his fresh glass of beer to the cop, ‘Squolly’s blokes can’t go off patrol too long to testify, or who knows what hell might break out round here!’

  The cop guffawed at this and downed his beer. The barman laughed too, and Swai-Phillips, naturally, was mightily amused by his own feeble joke. Unwilling to be left out, Tom laughed as well and, sinking his beer, slid further into the nauseating jacuzzi of drunkenness.

  Later, Swai-Phillips drove Tom back to the Experience. Sitting outside in the Landcruiser he asked: ‘You’ve got your dress kit sorted out now, have you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Who is this man? Tom wondered. My mother?

  He’d been to the tailor Swai-Phillips recommended: a jaundiced Asian who ran his business out of his house, which was in among the dive shops by the jetties where, in the season, the boats set off for the Angry Reef. Prentice accompanied Tom, for he too needed to be outfitted.

  Tom opted for a cotton fabric, but Prentice had picked up a swatch of woollen cloths and, flipping through them, selected a pinstripe that a bank president or a CEO would have worn back home.

  Tom laughed at him. ‘You can’t wear a suit cut from that! It’ll be wringing wet with sweat before they’ve even sworn in the jury.’

  Prentice’s face darkened, and with unaccustomed sharpness he snapped back: ‘There’s aircon’ in all the courts, Brodzinski, you’ll see. And no jury for a prelim’,’ he added as an after-barb.

  Up in the crappy little apartment, Tom lit a mosquito coil and sat down on a chair covered with diarrhoea-coloured vinyl. Within minutes it was slippery with his own sweat. The aircon’ in the apartment sounded like a stick running along a picket fence – and it leaked brownish fluid. Most days Tom didn’t even bother to switch it on, preferring to suffer the soupy humidity.

  He sat staring at the ludicrous truncated suit, which was hanging from the closet door. Perhaps, he mused, I should’ve gone for a darker fabric? The judge may be a bing . . . the judge may have some blue taboo I know nothing about.

  He sighed, then picked up a brown-paper bag, the mouth of which had been folded into a ruff. He set the fifth of whisky down again: it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a hangover.

  Tom picked up his digital camera. He couldn’t recall having unpacked it when he moved over from the Mimosa. He certainly hadn’t used it these past three weeks – what would he have photographed? Prentice? The makkata making the cut?

  He switched it on, selected the archive and began clicking his way through the photographs of the Brodzinskis’ family holiday. There they all were, Martha, Dixie and the twins, sporting in a swimming hole in the cloud forest, striking poses next to the car, eating at a road stop. The pictures were crisp and vivid – far more so than the sodden world he now trod water in. Despite his hefty bulk, Tommy Junior was hardly present in this album. There were one or two shots that showed the broad expanse of his back but none of his face.

  Tom scrutinized that back – or, more exactly, the back of Tommy Junior’s neck. In one photo the vertical scar that ran from the base of the boy’s skull up to his crown was clearly visible, exposed by the way he’d gelled his hair. Tommy Junior had come to them with it – an ugly mark on a pretty baby. Martha, who handled all the particulars of the adoption, had implied to Tom that what lay behind the scar explained, in part, why an otherwise perfect – and more or less white – baby was available through this particular agency, which usually sourced children from poorer, browner regions of the world.

  The scar . . . Tom had seen one like it very recently – but where? Then it came to him: the old Anglo, bending to pick up the butt by the ATM in the hill town.

  Tom sighed and switched off the camera. He unscrewed the whisky and took a slug. He gathered up his cash and the key to the apartment, then he set off for the call store to make his evening visit to his family.

  In his tipsy state it seemed to Tom that the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ of the Tugganarong was even louder than usual. He had to stick a finger in one ear and press the handset hard against his other, so as to hear Dixie tell him: ‘I kind of stood . . . like, next to . . . not Stacey, but, uh, Brian, and he picked up one, like, medium and two supersize, yuh? So that was, like, it sucked.’

  She halted and Tom, heedless of her feelings, asked her to put one of her brothers on.

  ‘They’re, like, out, Dad,’ she explained. ‘But Mom’s right here – d’you wanna speak with her?’

  Since Adams had seen fit to notify Tom of his wife’s estrangement, Tom had stopped bothering even to ask if Martha was in the house. He was taken aback and could only mutter: ‘Uh, yeah, OK, I guess.’

  There was a ‘clonk’ down the line, followed by a hiss of static so loud that Tom jerked the handset from his ear. When he replaced it, Martha was saying, ‘Are you there, Tom?’ And sounding concerned.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m here, honey,’ he blurted. ‘I’m here, how’re you? I was getting worried.’

  Again, there was a clonk, then a hiss.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Martha’s voice emerged from the sonic fog, poised, imperturbable. ‘But it must be nearly time for your court hearing. The kids have told me all about it.’

  Tom waited, assuming she would add to this. She didn’t – the thousands of miles separating them twanged.

  ‘It’s tomorrow,’ Tom said eventually. ‘It’s only a prelim’ hearing. Swai-Phillips says I can then make, uh, reparations to the Intwennyfortee mob – to Mrs Lincoln’s people – then we can proceed on a, uh, better basis.’

  Clonk-hiss.

  ‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer.’ Now Tom thought he could detect a peculiar flatness in Martha’s intonation. ‘I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

  This wasn’t Martha’s way of speaking at all. Confused, Tom let the handset drop. It clonk
ed on to the ledge the phone sat on, then there was another static hiss and, reedily, he heard Martha’s voice reiterate: ‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer. I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

  Slowly and carefully, Tom replaced the venomous snake of the handset on its cradle. He stood smearing the sweat from his brow into his hair. The ‘Gollymollydolly’ of the Tugganarong swelled up like the chafing of crickets. Tom went to pay the call store’s manager, who sat in a booth watching a TV show set among surfers and lifeguards, which was beamed from down south.

  Late that night, when Tom was dreaming of a desert corroboree – hundreds of naked Entreati women, their breasts missing, howling at a bloody moon – his cellphone was taken with ague. It shook, then fell from the compartmentalized headboard on to his head. Dazed, he snatched it up and held it to his sleepy ear.

  At first there were disordered noises, then they resolved into a rhythmic jingling trudge. Assuming that someone had left their cell unlocked and it had dialled him automatically, Tom was about to break the connection, when over the trudge came a tinkling laugh.

  ‘Ah! Tee-hee-hee!’ Followed by Martha’s voice: ‘Well, y’know how it is, you’ve gotta say these things to keep ’em happy, yeah? I mean, their pathetic little egos require it, yeah?’

  Except, it couldn’t be Martha – unless, that is, she was deliberately impersonating the local Anglos’ accent, its raucous vowels and the useless affirmatives with which every other statement was concluded.

  7

  Feeling conspicuous in his sky-blue tailored suit, with its short-sleeved jacket and short pants, Tom arrived at the court at what he hoped was an early hour. It was only 7 a.m., yet Vance’s office workers were already hurrying through the rain-soaked streets.

  The Central Criminal Court stood on Dundas Boulevard. It was an ugly lump of a building five storeys high. The concrete façade was textured so as to resemble the intricate pattern of logs seen in a Gandaro longhouse. Slitted windows like the embrasures of a medieval castle laid waste to the architect’s pathetic delusion: this was an Anglo building, at once threatening and ridiculous – a dictator wearing a party hat.

  An escutcheon was fixed over the chunky pediment. It was an enlarged version of the badges on the cops’ shiny caps. With mouth and beak, an auraca and a moa held aloft the Crown of the Republic against a field of southern stars. Beneath hooves and claws undulated a stylized strip of parchment, upon which was inscribed the motto of the Criminal Justice Department: ABYSSUS ABYSSUM IN VOCAT.

  Like a gawky schoolgirl, Tom bent to pull up the white knee-socks that completed his outfit; socks that he had hand-washed in the kitchenette sink at his miserable apartment. A slow hand clap of thunder rolled in across Vance Bay.

  Straightening up, Tom saw that, far from being early, he was barely on time; for ranged in a semicircle sixteen metres from the main entrance were a number of suited men smoking with studious concentration. At the middle of this arc was Jethro Swai-Phillips, and, despite the engwegge cheroot stuck in his full lips, the lawyer looked dapper in his dress kit.

  Was it coincidence or had Prentice – who stood puffing alongside, basking in the lawyer’s reflected elegance – been primed? For Swai-Phillips’s suit was cut from the same cloth as his own. On the lawyer the dark pinstripe was magisterial: brilliant white cuffs were turned over the short sleeves of the jacket and fastened with oval gold cuff links. Swai-Phillips’s knee-socks were held up with gold-tasselled garters, while from his broad shoulders hung a short pleated gown, decorated with purple and pink ribbons. On top of his Afro perched an antiquated horsehair wig – yet even this only confirmed the dignity of his bearing.

  He was accompanied by an Anglo with a jolly Celtic face; bat ears, gap teeth, freckled cheeks. The man had a drinker’s red nose. Tom assumed this must be Mulgrene, the attaché, and wondered where Adams, his own government’s representative, was hiding himself.

  As Tom approached, he realized that Swai-Phillips’s trademark shades were gone, and the glaucoma had miraculously vanished from his right eye. In its place there was a glazed copy of an eye: the white too white, the pupil too black, the brown iris fixed and unwavering. Seeing Tom’s consternation, the lawyer snapped, ‘It’s a contact lens, Brodzinski, no need to be afraid.’ And Prentice snickered.

  ‘You’re mighty cool,’ Swai-Phillips continued. ‘The lists will be posted any minute now, and we’ll find out who’s up first.’

  He turned to the man smoking beside him in the line, and Tom recognized the clerk he’d met at the Metro-Center. ‘Have you got the depositions, Abdul?’ Swai-Phillips barked, and the clerk displayed a leather valise bulging with scrolls that were tied up with the same kind of ribbons that dangled from his boss’s gown.

  ‘OK.’ Swai-Phillips drew Tom and Prentice into a huddle. ‘That fellow over there’ – he used the nub of his cheroot as a pointer – ‘is the DA, Tancroppollopp.’

  The man was enormous – six and a half feet of taut solidity. Adams had said the DA had Tugganarong blood – Tom suspected him of being the Ur-Tugganarong, the Ancestor, who had propelled his outrigger from the Feltham Islands, using only his own paddle-sized hands. In one of these the DA held the smoking digit of a cigarette, cupped on the inside, as a skulking schoolboy would. The contrast between this homely gesture and the giant’s sinewy forearms would have been comical, were it not for the belligerent expression on his copper face, and the two aggressive tattoos that spiralled down from his shaven scalp to loop his shark’s fin ears.

  ‘Who the hell is he talking to?’ Tom blurted out.

  ‘Pipe down!’ Swai-Phillips snapped – and Prentice giggled, because the man in conversation with Tancroppollopp was smoking a pipe: a long curved one with a ceramic bowl.

  Perhaps the man had chosen this pipe because it conformed to his morphology; for he too was long and curved. An Anglo, almost as tall as the DA but stick-thin like a desert tribesman. The pants of the Anglo’s dress kit were cut high, exposing a great length of scrawny thigh. It should have made him look ridiculous – but didn’t, for he had the taut watchfulness of a raptor. The pipe-smoker’s face was also avian: a sharp beak of veined nose, close-set yellowy eyes and hollow cheeks. He sported a gold pince-nez and a gown the same as Swai-Phillips’s – although his ribbons were red and white.

  ‘That’s Von Sasser,’ Tom’s lawyer explained. ‘He’s the Chief Prosecutor – must be acting as Counsel for the Eastern Province. I’d hoped he’d be down south, yeah. He normally only handles the most serious cases. I’m not in the habit of showing any damn weakness.’ Swai-Phillips drew deep on his cheroot, then spoke through a personal thunderhead: ‘But he’s a formidible bloody antagonist.’

  ‘Von Sasser?’ Tom queried. ‘I thought he was an anthropologist?’

  ‘The brother,’ Swai-Phillips replied. ‘This is Hippolyte – the other one’s Erich. You’d never catch him up here in Vance, too much civilization for the man to bear, yeah . . .’

  It seemed as if the lawyer was going to add to this, but suddenly – as if responding to an ultrasonic whistle audible only to smokers – the men formed a line at the steel dolmen of an ashtray, and one after another shed their butts. Von Sasser carefully knocked out his pipe before replacing it in a leather case. Then they all filed up the steps and into the Central Criminal Court.

  The lobby was stygian, even after the sepia gloom of the monsoonal outdoors. There was a tremendous scurrying as clerks, police, court officials and lawyers scuttled over to consult the long lists pinned up on bulletin boards, then hurried back to consult with their clients. Abdul dove into this free-for-all, and, emerging a few minutes later, he went across and whispered to Swai-Phillips.

  The lawyer rounded on his clients. ‘Good news!’ he boomed. ‘You’re up this morning, Prentice, and you, Brodzinski, will be dealt with first thing this afternoon.

  ‘You.’ He yanked Prentice by his tie. ‘Come with me. And you’ – he pressed Tom down by his shoulder on to
a bench – ‘stay here.’

  Tom gazed at Prentice being led away like a mangy sheep to the slaughter. He expected some anxiety to show on the abuser’s ovine features, yet Prentice appeared altogether unconcerned.

  Once the morning sessions had begun, the bustle died away. A few hill people remained in the darkest recess of the lobby, huddling together and chanting their ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ so mutedly that Tom couldn’t be certain that it was them and not his own agitated blood pulsing in his ears.

  At the main reception desk a cop checked his armaments over in thorough yet listless fashion, removing every bullet from its clip, polishing them with his handkerchief, slotting them back in.

  From time to time a lawyer or a court official exited from one of the high double doors ranged across the back of the lobby and scurried outside. There they paced along the sixteen-metre line, snatching smoke from their mouths and yakking on their cellphones, before scurrying back inside.

  Tom sat and looked down at the white billow of his thighs. He wondered where Adams had gotten to – and Atalaya Intwennyfortee for that matter. He was missing the Honorary Consul and the plaintiff acutely: as if he were still a smoker and they a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Once or twice Tom caught himself patting the pockets of his suit jacket, as if in expectation of feeling small bodies tucked inside them: Adams with his seersucker smile, Atalaya with her matt-black skin.

  There came more slow hand claps of thunder; then, at last, like a strained-for ejaculation, the hiss of the rains. Tom felt islanded in the lobby, listening to the ‘bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh’ of the natives, the scrape of a faulty aircon’ unit and the measured slap of a large digital clock.