by Self, Will
Tom groaned and took a long pull on his own beer. William had sententiously informed him that there was no whisky available, and this despite the fact that Stephen had been flagrantly drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Prentice came back from the lobby. ‘They’ve followed on,’ he told Tom, then tucked into his moa.
Tom still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He stared down miserably at his own meat-shrouded lumps. Already, the drive had begun to give him constipation, as with each bumpy mile the road impacted his fundament. Tom thought wistfully of the coconut-milk curries that the jolly Handrey women had served on this very veranda in the summer. He poked at his food with his fork, and one of the long chunks wobbled.
Sometime later Mr McGowan stamped over to their table and stood bearing down on them with a confused expression. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, then, without waiting for a reply, pulled a chair from an adjoining table and slumped down. ‘William!’ he cried. ‘Beers all round!’
Then, nothing.
The trio sat in unconvivial silence for a long while. Tom and McGowan drank; Prentice methodically worked his way through the mound of food. In the kitchen, Stephen was having some kind of mental breakdown. Tom could hear him sobbing, and the whispered imprecations of William, as he tried to shut the temperamental chef up.
Tom felt drunk enough – but unpleasantly so. The beer lay on top of his belly, a subcutaneous demijohn, cold and slopping. Eventually, McGowan gestured at the SUV, which was parked beside his own rig. ‘Yours?’
‘Yeah,’ Tom conceded, and then added, as if to imply that were he to possess such a vehicle, it would be a far better model, ‘It’s a rental.’
‘Figured that.’ McGowan shook his head. ‘Thing is’ – he hooked his thumbs into the straps of his undershirt – ‘You’ll be needing a bit more fuel capacity if you’re headed over there, right.’ A thumb jerked. ‘At least a ten-gallon can – maybe fifteen, right.’
‘I kind of understood’, Tom said, ‘that there were regular road stops all the way down Route 1 to the Tontines . . .’ He paused, then for the first time ever, added the super-fluidity: ‘. . . right.’
McGowan stared at him for about thirty seconds in silence, then burst into uncontrollable laughter. ‘Tee-hee! Ho-ho-ho! Oh, yeah.’ He gulped back his beery guffaws. ‘There’re regular road stops, all right. Just don’t be too fixed on stopping at them, my friend.’
Shortly after this exchange Tom made his excuses and headed for his cabin. When he swung his storm lantern inside the door, its bright whirl caught a shiny rill of roaches, which flowed up the trailing sheet on to the double bed, then snaked across to where a lapping pool of their conspecifics were seeking entry to the motel Tom had brought with him from Vance. Still more roaches flowed over the smooth contours of Gloria Swai-Phillips’s parcel, which Tom had also left on the bed.
Tom almost dropped the lantern. Then, hating himself for it, he circled back to the lobby, avoiding Prentice and McGowan, who were smoking studiously in the parking lot, sixteen paces from the veranda and five from each other.
William chuckled when he saw the roaches. ‘Kids drop food in these cabins,’ he said. ‘Their parents do all sorts. I tellya, mate, it’s a full, rich environment.’
He’d brought a squeezy bottle with sugared water in it. With this he laid a trail from the bed to the door.
‘Leave the door open and they’ll soon clear out,’ he instructed Tom, then he added, ‘Sleep well.’
Tom didn’t.
The woman in his convoluted dreamscape was Martha, was Gloria, was both. She sat in the chair in the corner of the cabin and complained of the way the rattan was biting into her bare buttocks. Her stretchmarks were exaggerated – red claw marks on her white belly. She held the parcel Gloria had entrusted to Tom in both hands and pounded her thighs. ‘Court is in session,’ she announced. ‘I am presiding – and I’m spotting, Tom, I’m spotting . . .’
This was minimization, for the teak boards beneath the chair were awash with her blood, blood that fell from the slits in the woven seat as the monsoon fell from the fleshy clouds above the Great Dividing Range.
The nightmare woke him, and, after he had tottered to the bathroom to pee, Tom fell back to sleep and entered another.
He lay in bed smoking; or, rather, he himself was made of dry golden shreds, sheathed in the papery cylinder of his skin. He exhaled, amd his mouth burned terribly as the smoke jetted out.
‘You got fever,’ Atalaya said. ‘Lie still, I bathe your head.’
She leaned over him, pressing her breasts against his face.
‘D - Don’t,’ Tom tried to warn her – but too late. She yelped, jerked away from him.
‘Why you fuggin do that?’ she spat at him.
Tom’s mouth burned terribly; he exhaled another plume of smoke . . .
And awoke with a start. He was lying on his back. Light beams flooded through the blinds, and in them he could see the smoke of his own condensing breath.
Tom climbed on to the veranda to find Prentice already hard at work on an elaborate fried breakfast. ‘Heart attack on a plate,’ he remarked jovially. ‘Best thing for a hangover.’ He conducted Tom to the seat opposite with a fork lurid with egg yolk.
There was no sign of McGowan or his rig. Their own mud-splattered SUV had several chickens roosting on the raised cowling of its hood. Lumps of their excrement clung to the windshield. Tom gloomily massaged his sandpapery muzzle, foreseeing that he would have to be the one who cleaned this off.
Stephen, the hysterical chef, deposited a platter in front of him and grunted, ‘Coffee?’
Tom sat, nauseated by the foody stench, and stared at the Day-Glo eggs, the rumble strips of bacon, the discs of blood sausage that glistened like oily bitumen.
Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Erumph. I hate to say it, but’ – he took out the pack of Reds from this breast pocket – ‘there’s no better way to round off a breakfast like that than with a fag.’
Tom hunched on the commode in the tiny bathroom. He kneaded the folds of his belly, while inventing spells to magic evacuation. It didn’t work. The cups of Nescafé with which he had sluiced his brain made him jittery. He might, he thought, do something truly dreadful today: load one of the Galil’s magazines with the long, evil-looking cartridges. Aim lazily at Prentice’s denim leg, then shatter it with a burst of fire.
‘I say,’ said Prentice, looking down at his stump, ‘what the devil did you do that for?’
Tom snickered, twirled the toilet paper holder, rasped at the sore skin.
He couldn’t find either William or Stephen, although the rifles in their olive-green sleeves had been clipped on the SUV’s rack, and the chicken shit was gone from the windshield. Finding a tariff list on reception, Tom counted out the requisite bills. It was high time he and Prentice had a reckoning: so far everything was either on Tom’s credit card or he had paid cash. Prentice hadn’t even offered to contribute, yet for some reason Tom found it difficult to ask him.
Tom called out, ‘Stephen? William?’
Parakeets chattered on the back veranda, but the Lodge was silent – ominously so. Even the TV was switched off. Tom pictured their hosts, loosely entwined on a mattress damp with come. William’s ratty brow nestled between the breasts of his Tugganarong friend. Tom tiptoed out of the lobby and down the wooden steps to the parking lot. He was conscious of leaving something irrevocably behind – and had an impulse to return to the cabin and check it again. Prentice was already waiting for him in the SUV, sitting sideways in the passenger seat, blowing cigarette smoke into the golden morning light.
They drove all morning, stopping only to fill up with gas and pick up the can McGowan had recommended.
The landscape was reaching a kind of crescendo: the road tying itself in knots as it worked its way through a maze of volcanic features. The cloud forest frothed up, so that they drove through dappled tunnels, long, mossy creepers fondling the windshield.
There was hardly any other motor traffic, but from time to time they rounded a bend to find the road ahead filled with a slowly plodding mob of Handrey, the women plump and swathed in brightly patterned togas, the men herding laden auracas, the children naked, skipping along and playing tag.
As the brown mass of humanity parted to allow them passage, Tom wound down his window and exchanged greetings, happy to be enfolded – albeit temporarily – by the jolly hill people.
Prentice was unmoved. He sat stock-still, eyes front, his young-old features twisted in disgust; and when Tom accelerated, he delivered a stream of invective: ‘Bloody lazy bing-bongs. The liberals say they’re closer to God – but they’re hand in paw with the bloody monkeys. I tell you, Brodzinski, the desert mobs are still worse, naked bloody savages. Only your Tugganarong is worth a damn, see, because he’s been subjected to a proper colonial power. Trained up, taught to be a servant to his masters. Without the work we put into the Tugganarong who’ve now come over here, these Anglos would be finished already. Kaput.’
Tom now knew better than to interrupt: to counter whatever Prentice came out with would only call forth still more of the same.
‘Down south I’ve a Tugganarong – well, obviously he’s not a friend, but I respect Jonas . . .’
Prentice was wittering on when they entered a clearing, where, in the full glare of the noonday sun, two entire squads of paramilitary police were disporting themselves on the red rocks. Some were brewing up tea on portable stoves; others had stripped off their uniforms and were splashing in the crystal waters of a stream. One group were gathered by a large-calibre machine gun on a tripod. As the SUV caromed past, the Anglo officer who lay prone behind it tracked them with the weapon’s vicious muzzle.
This shut Prentice up for a while. They drove on in silence, Tom tormented by Prentice’s very proximity – his rotten, cloacal physicality – yet feeling utterly alone. Like a wife, Prentice encroached on Tom the entire time: borrowing nail clippers and shampoo; asking him to lift this, or tote that. And, equally wifely, the other man left Tom alone to be immolated by his own fiery feelings.
The country was changing. The tree cover became sparser, the road un-kinked itself, the volcanic extrusions retreated into the long grass. Up above, the cumulus clouds condensed – then evaporated, leaving behind only cirrus brush strokes on the cobalt-primed canvas. The heat began to build, and build. Then, at some definite – but, for all that, unnoticed – point, the little SUV tipped over the central fulcrum of the Great Dividing Range, and they were propelled down its far side into a new, old world.
‘This,’ Prentice cried. ‘This is the real over there, all right. Oh, yes, my friend. Oh, yes.’
Tom gritted his teeth, although he too was overwhelmed by the prospect that opened out before them: a country so wide and vast and old-seeming; a country of beige rock formations, smoothly streamlined like cetaceans, as if they had been beached by the retreat of ancient oceans.
A country of tinder-dry yellow grasses and tall spindly eucalyptus trees, their fire-blackened trunks bare for fifty, sixty feet up to the shimmer of the canopy. The trees were so evenly spaced that they gave the impression of a colossal plantation. Tom stared down avenues miles in length to either side of the road, searching for the habitations of the constant foresters.
The metalled road faltered, stuttered, then the blacktop gave out altogether. Route I was now a red dirt road, heavily corrugated, so that the car’s tyres whacked from trough to trough, filling the interior with an insistent thrumming. Tom changed up to prevent skidding, and they bucketed on.
An enormous road sign swam towards them out of the heat-haze – the first they had seen that day. The destinations it listed – TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, KELLIPPI BAUXITE MINES, AMHERST, TRANGADEN – sounded prosaic, while the distances were unthinkable: 2,134 KMS, 2,578 KMS, 5,067 KMS, 5,789 KMS. Tom added on the thousand further kilometres he would have to cover on shifting-desert tracks from Trangaden, to come up with a total that suggested a maritime circumnavigation of a hitherto unknown globe.
Prentice saw them first and barked: ‘Pull over!’
Slewing to a halt, Tom leaned across and followed the waxen wand of Prentice’s finger to where, a quarter of a mile off, the tightly massed giant birds were tramping through the bush. Tom could make out their pearlescent plumage, and the curious movement of their backwards-jointed legs. There must have been over a hundred moai, and even at this range the men could hear their monstrous gravelly burbling.
‘Wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open with that lot, old boy,’ said Prentice. ‘You know they’re incredibly aggressive. Down south–’
He was cut off by a black vortex of flies, which spun in through the open window and corkscrewed into his open mouth. Tom would have laughed – but within seconds the car was a maelstrom of buzzing flakes, shaken up by the two men flailing at them.
‘Oh, yes,’ Prentice spluttered. ‘This is the real over there, godforsaken, flyblown . . . and . . . and y’know who’s to blame for it?’
‘Who?’ Tom gagged.
‘The bing-bongs, of course. The bloody bing-bongs.’
Tom drove off as fast he could. With the aircon’ blasting and the windows wide open, the suction of the draught extracted most of the flies, but still, entire drifts remained on top of the dash. Prentice put on his hat and rolled down the fly screen, thus completing his transformation into a Victorian spinster missionary. When Tom tried on his own, he discovered that the screen was too opaque for him to see the road. He set his jaw and drove on, determined to become accustomed to the diffident tickling in his nostrils, and at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
The two remained like this – massively stoical in the face of many tiny irritants – for the next two hundred corrugated miles, until Bimple Hot Springs came into view, and Tom suggested they stop to get something to eat.
‘It’s true,’ said Mr Courtney, lazily flicking the flies away from his bulbous grey eyes. ‘What your friend says about the bloody flies. It was the bing-bongs – and worse, they’re still at it, right.’
‘At what?’ Tom queried. He too was flicking but irritably, and he wondered how long it would be before he could treat the flies with such disdain.
‘Oh, yairs.’ Mr Courtney tugged up a handful of hot sludge from the slough they were lying in and applied it to his broad, sun-reddened brow. ‘Y’see, yer bing-bong could kill only the odd moa or flipper with his primitive spears, right. Then we pitched up, and we brought rifles, right.
‘Well, yer bing-bong, he’s a happy little bloke, has no thought for the morrow. He thinks “meat” – now, don’t he, so he goes on one bloody almighty killing spree. Been on it for near on eighty years now. Wiped out most of the moai, wiped out the flippers, wiped out the auraca – bloody feral camels and horses in all, yeah. Now yer bing-bong, he only takes the choicest cuts – even his bloody dogs get sweetmeats! All that bloody meat lying around – all these damn flies.’
Mr Courtney allowed his considerable bulk to slide down still further, so that all that was left of him above the mud bath was the top half of his face; his outsized chipmunk teeth gnawed on the sludge.
Mrs Courtney – who was even bulkier than her husband – gave a hippo snort, shifted in her picnic chair and affirmed, ‘Bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’
Bloody, thought Tom. Bloody, bloody, bloody.
They had found the Courtneys already comfortably ensconsed at the Hot Springs. Their Winnebago was the only vehicle in the parking lot, and, despite the bullet holes that peppered its rusty sides, its candy-striped canopy, with the picnic chairs and table beneath it, gave their little encampment a gay holiday air. As did Mrs Courtney, who, draped in a tent of a dress patterned with hallucinogenic Van Gogh sunflowers, insisted on serving the new arrivals with tea.
‘You’ll be lucky if the fat slag in there will dish up for you, yeah,’ she had said as she pottered with kettle and tea bags. ‘Silly cow’s scared of her own shadow.’
&nb
sp; To Tom, who was unknotting the muscles that the drive had tied up, this remark was doubly ridiculous: Mrs Courtney was fatter than any cow.
The scarred clearing in the gum trees, with the steaming wound of the hot springs burping sulphurous fumes, had a minatory atmosphere. As did the motel, a ramshackle corrugated-iron building with a warped veranda that was raised up on stubby stilts.
To test Mrs Courtney’s hypothesis, Tom walked over, unhooked the screen door and went in. A plump girl with carrot hair and cartoon make-up – a purple Cupid’s bow masked her own thin lips – was sitting on a high stool poring over a celebrity-gossip magazine.
Tom was taken aback: apart from a narrow walkway running from the door to the counter, the entire room was behind bars – solid, steel bars that extended from floor to ceiling. In front of the counter there was a slit through which keys or candy bars could be exchanged for money. There were plenty of candy bars on the warped wooden shelves, together with cans of soda and beans, and stacks of Bimple Hot Springs postcards. There was an automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the girl.
Tom remained silent; so did she. He looked first through a blurred windowpane, then at the floor, where between his booted feet flies clustered in neat buttons, each a mutated splash of spilt, sticky fluid.
The girl, very deliberately, licked first her finger and then her thumb. She didn’t appear scared of anything. She turned a page.
‘We’re full,’ she said dreamily. ‘And there’re no take-outs ’cept burgers – bloody bing-bongs hit the last convoy.’
* * *
Prentice now brought the burgers Tom had ordered across to the springs. When he had seen the name on the map, together with the symbol denoting a road stop, Tom had pictured sylvan glades and clear pools of invigorating, mineral-tangy water. The reality was this smelly mire fringed by ghost gums, the bark peeling from their emaciated trunks. The naiads were these obese Anglo retirees from down south, who were wandering the interior on a permanent vacation.