The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

  The DA and the Chief Prosecutor came sweeping past. Then Von Sasser turned back and approached Tom. ‘Mr Brodzinski.’ He pecked down with his hawkish beak.

  ‘Y-yes?’

  ‘You will almost certainly be heading over there in the near future. If you chance to encounter my brother, Erich . . .’ He paused.

  ‘Yes?’ Tom was perplexed. ‘What about him? I mean, is it likely? Isn’t “over there” a big place?’

  ‘That is correct.’ Von Sasser spoke with pernickety precision. ‘Never the less, my brother’s is a very expansive personality – he takes up a lot of the interior, he . . .’ But then Von Sasser broke off, clearly feeling he had said too much, and, turning on his heel, stalked away, without any goodbye.

  When Swai-Phillips came back, Tom told him about the encounter.

  ‘Those Von Sassers,’ the lawyer snorted. ‘They act like it’s their personal bloody fiefdom over there. Y’know, it’s been years now . . .’ But then he too bit his tongue and, together with Adams, began ushering Tom down a corridor that led towards the back of the building.

  ‘I thought Von Sasser and the DA had to come to the judge’s chambers as well?’ Tom protested.

  Swai-Phillips snorted again. ‘That? Oh, that was just for show, yeah.’

  But whose? Tom thought, as Adams knocked on a nondescript door, and they were admitted by the beadle.

  At once, Tom had a strong impression of cloying homeliness. There were lace doilies on occasional tables, muddy watercolours of the cloud forest on the panelled walls, while an electric jug chuckled and spat on a tray.

  Then he saw the Intwennyfortee mob. They were sitting on drab easy-chairs around a coffee table slathered with magazines: Atalaya, the Entreati sorceress and two other women Tom recognized from the hospital. With them was the zebra-striped makkata judge. The kettle must have boiled once already, for the natives were all nursing steaming mugs, and, as he watched, the makkata leaned forward to pop two sweeteners in his. Atalaya was chomping on a chocolate-chip cookie.

  ‘Tea, Mr Brodzinski?’

  Tom turned abruptly; hovering by his shoulder was a tiny old Anglo man wearing only paisley-patterned boxers and a string undershirt, through which snaggled a few limp chest hairs.

  ‘I – I’m sorry?’ he stuttered.

  ‘Tea,’ the old man reiterated. ‘Would you like some?’

  It was only then that Tom noticed the judicial robe, with its hanks of multicoloured ribbons, hanging on a coat stand and realized that he was being addressed by the judge.

  ‘Um, yuh, sure, thanks, your honour,’ he floundered.

  ‘Brodzinski.’ Swai-Phillips gripped his upper arm. ‘This is Chief Justice Hogg.’

  ‘S – Sir.’ Tom half bowed to the old man, uncertain whether he should offer his hand. Justice Hogg seemed not in the least put out. He skipped away, and began shooting out remarks as he made tea for the new arrivals.

  ‘Excuse my informality. Bloody robes so uncomfortable – never got used to them, yeah. My colleague, Justice Antollopollollou, skedaddled. You appreciate – restitutional arrangements, interim stuff . . . of no concern to him. Sugar? Milk? Lemon, perhaps?’

  Throughout this the Intwennyfortee mob and the makkata judge stolidly chomped cookies. However, once the defence party were seated in their own easy-chairs, and Justice Hogg had perched on the corner of his large knee-hole desk, the makkata loosed off a volley of tooth clacks and palate clicks. Swai-Phillips returned fire, then the two went on, peppering each other with plosives.

  Tom looked over at Atalaya. She sat like a teenager, with her legs over the arm of her chair, and smirked at her cookie. Tom took a sip of his tea. Sweet and milky, it dissolved the whisky crud in his anxious mouth.

  Leaning forward to Tom, Justice Hogg explained: ‘This’ll go on for a while, right.’

  ‘What’re they talking about?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose your people would call it horse trading, but here such bargaining has a ritual function as well, right. They’re negotiating the terms of your restitutional payment to the Intwennyfortee mob.’

  ‘And my lawyer – he’s trying to get it, uh, reduced?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Hogg smiled. ‘Since you’ve been deemed astande, it’s incumbent on you to offer more than they can rightly accept, yeah. You are the righter of wrongs. The makkata and Mrs Lincoln’s spiritual manager will gradually reduce their claims on you to a point at which they are acceptable.’

  Acceptable to whom? Tom wanted to ask, but Swai-Phillips, breaking off the negotiations, turned to him, saying, ‘We’re nearly there, Brodzinski. I don’t know why, exactly, but the plaintiff is being most accommodating.’ Then he resumed yakking.

  Tom couldn’t see that Atalaya was being anything much at all. While the other native women hung on to the rapid-fire exchanges, she went on munching, while staring distractedly through the sole window in the room, a tiny glass oblong hung with chintz curtains.

  Some kind of conclusion was being reached, for, on a piece of copier paper he’d obtained from the judge, the makkata was laboriously inscribing a list with a felt-tip pen. When he’d finished, he held this up so that everyone present could read it:

  TWO GOOD HUNTING RIFFLES

  ONE COMPLEAT SET COKING POTS

  $10,000.

  ‘That’s it?’ Tom queried. ‘What about medicines? Prentice has to get hold of medicines.’

  ‘Different, ah, strokes for different folks,’ Adams said fatuously. ‘The mob Prentice has to deal with are mostly in the Tontine Townships; yours are way over there.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Out beyond Eyre’s Pit in the Tayswengo tribal heartland. These are desert people, Brodzinski, these are the things they most need.’

  The Intwennyfortee contingent were getting ready to leave. The makkata stood, stretched languorously and withdrew an engwegge quid from his breechclout. The Tayswengo women, and the frightening apparition that was her neutered spiritual manager, were clucking over the vacant Atalaya. Tom was torn: would it be acceptable for him to ask after the old man – or would he be breaking another taboo? The natives forestalled him by heaving Atalaya upright and quitting the room, without any farewells.

  ‘So,’ Tom asked Swai-Phillips, who was standing beside Justice Hogg while the latter pulled some short pants on over his boxers, ‘what happens now? Do I simply give them the money, the pots and the rifles, and that’s that?’

  The big man laughed. ‘Ho-ho! Oh, no, Brodzinski, nothing here’s ever that simple. All restitution has to be made in person. You’ll have to rent a car and head out over there – you’ve gotta lot of driving to to do. There’s some good news, though.’

  The lawyer and the judge exchanged knowing glances. Nettled, Tom snapped: ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Why,’ Swai-Phillips said, grinning, ‘Prentice has to head for the Tontines, so the two of you can share costs, and you’ll have a road buddy – at least for the first few thousand klicks.’

  8

  Have you rented from us before, sir?’

  The clerk regarded Tom Brodzinski with professional detachment. Tom inferred from her routine eyes that, while the tourist season may have been over, one Anglo was still much the same to her as another. He took in the purple patches beneath those incurious eyes. Her nappy hair had been severely cut to conform to Western expectations, while her ample, café au lait flesh was scooped into the red A-line skirt and white blouse with red epaulettes that was the company uniform the world over.

  Adams had told Tom that many of the hill people resident in Vance had diabetes. They lacked the enzymes necessary to break down the sugar and the other additives in the processed foods they consumed, either out of indolence or economic necessity, or both.

  ‘I – I have.’ Tom was flustered. Not only had he rented from the company before, he’d dealt with this very clerk when hiring the MPV the Brodzinski family had taken on their tour of the Highlands.

  Tom had spoken with her – on both pick-up
and drop-off – for at least twenty minutes. They’d chatted while they checked over the vehicle together. There had also been a couple of phone calls with her concerning the location of the spare tyre, and a dink in the fender. Tom knew her name – which was on her badge, anyway – yet she had forgotten he even existed.

  ‘My name’s Brodzinski,’ he stressed. ‘It’s gotta be in your system.’

  She riffled her keyboard, eyes flicking from screen to paperwork. She made terse remarks without looking at him. ‘Collision-damage waiver? Unlimited mileage? Fuel-surcharge waiver? Personal indemnity? Tontine policy?’

  Tom grunted affirmatively to all of these save the last. ‘I’m sorry,’ he asked. ‘Tontine policy, what’s that?’

  ‘Your personal indemnity won’t cover you in the Tontine Townships, sir. So we offer our own tontine policy, right.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  The clerk sighed deeply. ‘If either driver or passenger is rendered non-life-viable in the townships, the basic premium provides between $10,000 and $200,000 to the other party, depending on proximate cause. This is guaranteed by the Company in association with Premium Eagle Assurance. Full details of all tontines are set out in subsection A19 of the rental agreement, right.’

  The clerk rattled all this off so fast that, although the oddity of the idea struck Tom, all he said was. ‘Is that why they’re called that? I mean, the Tontine Townships?’

  She looked directly at him for the first time – and it was as if he were stupid. ‘Tontine policy?’ she pressed him.

  Tom glanced behind him, to where Prentice sat on a low chair, his pretentious hat on one of his bony knees, his bald patch sheltered by the waxy leaf of an undistinguished shrub. Prentice nodded.

  ‘Uh, OK, I guess,’ Tom said to the clerk.

  ‘In that case’ – her chubby fingers flopped on to the keys and a printer chattered into life. She swivelled, ripped off the printout, swivelled back, slapped it down on the counter. ‘Sign here, here and here. Initial here, here, here, here, here and here. Mr Prentice will need to sign here for the tontine.’

  Tom wanted to ask her why she knew Prentice’s name but not his; especially given that Prentice couldn’t drive. However, she was rattling on: ‘Here’s your driver’s licence and credit card. We’ve deducted a $2,000 deposit, standard for rentals heading over there. Here are the keys; if you’ll give me a few seconds to get my rain cape and checklist, I’ll meet you in the lot to inspect the vehicle, yeah.’

  Tom’s and Prentice’s respective government envoys were waiting out there. Sir Colm Mulgrene drew Prentice to one side, while Tom asked Adams about the tontine. But the Consul didn’t seem to hear him; he was rummaging in a drugstore bag. Tom could imagine the medicaments the older man had been buying: corn plasters, fungicidal powders, pills to relieve the stringy fellow of the bloating engendered by too much rich Handrey cooking.

  The cloud cover was very low this morning. So low that the top half of the Metro-Center disappeared in its draggled fringes. There were dashes of rain on the pitted, oily surface of the lot, although the day’s serious downpours were still some way off.

  Tom prodded Adams: ‘C’mon, what is a goddamn tontine?’

  But the Consul wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I daresay you’ll discover, ah, en route, Brodzinski. Think of it as adding a little excitement to the journey. Frankly, I envy you. Driving for day after day across that amazing landscape, towering mountains like mere ripples on the horizon . . .

  ‘Y’know, Tom’ – the romantic image tilted Adams into intimacy – ‘the desert folks believe the land is always becoming – never, ah, finished. That every time a traveller visits a region it, ah, springs into being for him, taking on the characteristics of his own mind . . .’

  As he trailed off, Tom thought back to their first encounter in the breakfast room at the Mimosa Apartments. Then, Adams had seemed the very epitome of buttoned-down, diplomatic rectitude: the kind of Ivy League second-rater who reaches his peak when he makes the right fraternity, and who then finds a niche in the State Department where he can slowly decline. Now, Tom wasn’t so sure. Was Adams perhaps a little unhinged?

  Perhaps to confirm this – as well as to display his mind-reading abilities – the Honorary Consul lifted his left hand high in the air, then brought it down to truffle in the hair at the back of his head. It was an action Tom had seen him perform before, yet it was too studied to be gestural.

  The car-rental clerk rustled up. Drawing Tom’s attention to the unusual position of the spare wheel – which was housed beneath the front fender – she said, ‘It’s only an emergency tyre, yeah, so don’t do over forty on it, or go off the hardtop.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little dumb?’ Tom objected. ‘I mean, it’s an off-roader, and as I understand it mostly we’ll be driving on dirt, with big distances between road stops – hundreds of miles.’

  She slapped this down with a hard fact: ‘Lissen, this here is the only rental car you’ll get for over there – I mean, blokes like you.’

  Her eyes slid across to where Mulgrene was unloading plastic-wrapped bales of diapers from the back of his Land-cruiser. Prentice loitered near by, smoking as usual.

  ‘It’s not a bad car,’ she continued emolliently, as she slid into the front seat. ‘You can drive a stick-shift, yeah? Five front, one rear, then this switch here takes you into 4WD, right.’

  The SUV looked too short in the wheelbase for rough terrain, and the roof was as high as Tom’s head. The front seats were cramped – the back one only a narrow bench, and the trunk was clearly inadequate. Tom began to fret.

  ‘Where am I gonna put my bag? Let alone all the stuff I’ve gotta take on to Ralladayo?’

  Nor did he like the fact that the SUV was a bright white. He’d assumed they would be given one with desert colours – or even a camouflage job.

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Prentice said jocularly. ‘There’s a roof-rack, y’know.’

  Ever since Prentice had turned up at the Entreati Experience that morning, he had been the dead soul of bumptiousness. He seemed to think it a fine jaunt to be travelling thousands of miles to make reparation for the sick crimes he had committed. Either that – or his crimes had been so vile that the desert trip was judicial leniency.

  Tom thrust his flight bag into the cavity behind the driver’s seat. There was hardly anything in it anyway: just toiletries, a few T-shirts and pairs of short pants, some underwear, and his copy of the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo. The rest of the pathetic flotsam left behind after the wreck of his family holiday, he had dumped in a cardboard box that the manager of the Experience said he would keep safe.

  Then there was the parcel that Gloria Swai-Phillips had left at the hostel for Tom to take to the Tontines. Football-sized and shaped, it was wrapped in layers of newspaper and tied up with string; ready, apparently, for children’s hands to tear it apart when the music stopped.

  Prentice pointed at his own bag – which was of the squashed, retro-Gladstone type – with the tip of his cigarette. ‘I say, Brodzinski, d’you mind?’

  ‘Mind?’ Tom snapped. ‘Mind what?’

  ‘Mind slinging it in the boot for me. My elbow’s playing up.’ He flexed it pathetically. ‘Beastly gyp – can’t seem to shake it.’

  Adams came over. ‘Commander Squolloppoloppou’s men will meet you at the Goods Shed Store; it’s at Webley and Frangipani–’

  ‘I know,’ Prentice put in.

  The Consul ignored him and continued: ‘You can get the rifles and such there. Prentice, I believe, needs to obtain his, ah, medications. You’ll have to give the police this copy of the Court Mandate, and this one of your original visa-rights waiver; in return they’ll give you your laissez-passer. I’m afraid I’ll have to take your passport now; you won’t, ah, be needing it.’

  They exchanged the relevant documentation, Adams neatly tucking Tom’s passport away in his floppy briefcase. To Tom, it felt as if they had come full circle,
back to the breakfast room of the Mimosa. Adams had retreated from him since the night they had eaten binturang together. The Consul had sealed himself inside the ziplock bag of his professional detachment.

  Tom got into the car. Adams leaned down to the window and fixed him with his chilly blue eyes. ‘As I’ve had cause to remark before, the law here works in a roundabout way. Trust me, Brodzinski, deliver the goods to the Intwenny-fortee, come back here, and the situation will have changed – maybe not today or tomorrow, but some day soon, and then it will have changed for the rest of your life.’

  By way of an answer, Tom turned the key in the ignition. The SUV spluttered into life. He glanced sideways to check out if Prentice had finished his deliberations with his own diplomat, then said: ‘Understood.’

  ‘OK?’ Adams probed.

  ‘OK,’ Tom reluctantly conceded.

  The clerk shouldered Adams aside. ‘The law of the car is that it takes diesel, not petrol. Remember that,’ she laughed. ‘Or you’ll be in big shit.’

  Tom revved the engine, and it clattered like that of an old prop plane.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Adams resumed, obviously reluctant to let Tom go, ‘that I may, ah, run into you in the Tontine Townships. I have consular business that takes me–’

  But Adams’s valedictory words were blown away as Tom, tiring of the situation, banged his foot on the gas. The SUV shot across the lot and skidded into the roadway.

  ‘Whoa!’ Prentice cried. ‘Sir Colm had his hand on the window – you could’ve hurt him.’

  Tom pulled up at a cross street and glared across at him. ‘I want one goddamn thing straight with you, Prentice, from the start.’

  ‘W-What’s that?’

  ‘No smoking in the fucking car. Got it? No smoking in the fucking car. Do that, and we just might make it through this without me wringing your goddamn neck.’

  Tom drove on. The anger felt good – a deep-heat embro-cation rubbed into his irritation, which was – he thought – the psychic equivalent of Prentice’s increasingly disgusting fungal infection.