The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

  He was very close now to the hysteria that had courted him, politely opening door after door as he ventured further into his ordained nightmare. He was saved – by the red eye of the message light, blinking on the phone.

  Tom picked up the handset and pressed it to his ear. ‘One. New. Message . . . Hi, yeah . . . It’s Gloria Swai-Phillips here, Mr Brod – Tom. Lissen, that package of mine. Thing is, I’ve had a frantic day, so we’ll have to meet up later, right? I’m hosting a little reception thing – soirée I s’pose you’d say . . .’ She giggled girlishly. Soirée, Tom thought. No one says that, not even Adams. ‘Anyway, maybe you could drop by, yeah? It’s downstairs at around six. It’ll be full of dull charity and guvvie types, but there’ll be a raw bar.’

  Tom replaced the handset, then roused himself. Now she had called, now that he had a liaison with Gloria, he could entertain the thought of further intimacy. After all, why not? He was a free man.

  He looked over at her parcel, which was sitting on the easy-chair. Caught in the beams that shone through the blinds, the columns of the newsprint it was wrapped in seemed to form the contours of a face. A desert tribesman’s face. Tom broke from its hollow stare and called the concierge. ‘I, uh, wondered . . .’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’d like to go out – out of the Sector, that is, and have a look round. Is this possible?’

  ‘There’s a walking tour at three this afternoon, sir. Shall I put your name down for it?’

  ‘Walking? You mean, like, a hike?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the concierge laughed. ‘It’s more of a stroll – even our elderly guests manage it, so no worries there.’

  * * *

  Promptly at three, Tom went down to the lobby, only to discover that he was the sole taker for the excursion. A massive Tugganarong man, wearing a bullet-proof vest and holding a sign with BRODZINSKI written on it, was standing by the concierge’s desk. His name, he informed Tom with great solemnity, was Valldolloppollou – although he was happy to be addressed as Val.

  Val went with Tom to get one of his rifles from the hotel armoury. Here, Tom was also issued with his own vest and a helmet with the Hilton logo on it.

  ‘Is all this strictly necessary?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really, sir,’ Val replied. ‘There’s no real action, yeah, until the end of the week, when the miners, yeah, come in from Kellippi. Then all kinds of shit happens.

  ‘Besides,’ he continued, snapping a magazine into his own rifle as they strolled towards the first of the checkpoints, ‘when you checked in, you signed a tontine transfer.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That if some pissed bing-bong drops you while we’re out, the balance of your tontine is assigned to Hilton International. So the flak jacket and helmet are only a courtesy, yeah.’

  Tom reflected on this as the cop at the barrier stamped his laissez-passer, then waved them through. Perhaps this was why, with each step he took out of the TGS, Tom felt his strength returning: he was no longer in thrall to Prentice.

  By the time they had negotiated the third checkpoint the fresh greens of the TGS had been filmed over: the atmosphere was saturated with gritty particles, and Tom could taste the ferrous crud. Then there were the flies. How could he, even for a few short hours, have abandoned them? They made straight for the corners of his mouth and clustered there to engage in interspecific French kissing.

  Outside the final blast wall, Val quartered the empty, dusty maidan with his rifle. Tom, not wanting to appear a wuss, did the same.

  ‘Sir, yeah, I’d keep your safety on – if you shoot someone, the paperwork’s a nightmare, yeah,’ the tour guide gently advised him.

  Tom was digesting this when they were mobbed by a crowd of native women who materialized from nowhere. They wore dirty shift dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them: Hello Kitty. They crowded round Tom and Val – yet didn’t touch them. The women’s hands jerked up and down in front of their faces, while their cheeks bulged spasmodically. It took a few moments, then Tom realized: they were miming fellatio.

  As the two men proceeded across the maidan, then down the main bouleward, still more prostitutes debouched from the trash-choked alleys, skipping over open drains running with raw sewage. They all importuned Tom and his guide with this obscene pantomime, but they never touched them. It was too eerie to comment on; so it was in silence that the men moved from window to window of the containerized offices that Tom had noticed the previous evening. Inside they were kitted out with desks, chairs and plexiglas holders full of brightly coloured leaflets.

  Tom halted outside Endeavour Surety. ‘Can we go in?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said the big Tugganarong. ‘Press the buzzer – all the tourists check it out, yeah.’

  Responding to the rasp, an armed guard rose up from behind a seating area. He unlocked the door, and, as he ushered them in, a thin, harried-looking Anglo came out from the back office, then carefully shut and locked the door behind him.

  ‘Are you selling, buying or only bloody gawping?’ was his salutation, and, when Tom failed to reply immediately, he went on: ‘I see, another bloody gawper, right.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘I didn’t mean to–’

  ‘It’s OK, mate.’ The insurance salesman waved away the apology. ‘I understand, you’ve blown into town and you wanna know what’s what, right. Well, here’s the listing.’

  He reached under the counter and pulled up a pegboard with rows of letters and numbers stuck to it. ‘If you’ve gotta car-rental policy rider, I can give you 12.2 percent on it, seeing that it’s midweek. If you’re buying outright, there’s not a lot happening, though this here is interesting.’ He indicated a quotation with a nicotine-stained finger. ‘These blokes, right, they’re down to seven now; tontine’s been running for twenty-two months, pay-out’s in the region of eighty-eight K, and’ – he paused for emphasis – ‘they bought right at the bottom of the market, so the premiums are low. There are two blokes who want to sell right now, or the entire tontine is offering a randomized spread bet of threes.’

  The Anglo may have been grumpy to begin with, but he started to be taken in by his own spiel. ‘These blokes,’ he laughed, rubbing his crew cut with the knuckles of one hand, ‘they’re miners out at Kellippi, Inssessitti mob – never thought they’d last this long, right. Sold ’em the policy myself.’

  The salesman finished his pitch, and, with a note of childlike wonderment, Tom asked him: ‘You mean I can buy someone else’s tontine, and if the other policy holders . . .’

  ‘Kark it, you get the lot. That’s right, mate. You’re from overseas, aren’t you? I s’pose you don’t have tontines in your neck of the woods. Yeah.’ He warmed still more, his pinched nostrils flared, sniffing out the prospect of a sale. ‘We’ll sell you a tontine. We’ll sell you tontine options or futures. We can even sell you a weighted basket of high-performing tontines. You may’ve been gawping, my friend, but it so happens that here at Endeavour we specialize in tontine derivatives. A lot of the fancier ones are designed by our financial engineers down south.’

  ‘When you say high performing,’ Tom said, choosing his words carefully, ‘you mean that the original tontine holders are, uh, dying pretty . . . fast?’

  The salesman was delighted. ‘That’s bang-on. ’Course, the beauty of it is that the longer the tontine runs, the less able these blokes are to keep up their premiums. They start out thinking it’ll all be cushty, right.’ He shook his head amusedly. ‘That once a few of their mates’ve been done in, they’ll have the incentive to keep off the grog – but it never happens that way. Your tontine holder – specially your bing-bong – basically comes in two types: killer or be killed. Once the tontine’s up and running, both types give in to paranoia; they’re always looking over their shoulder to see who’s creeping up on them. Can’t stand the tension – so they drink. Then they can’t keep up the payments – so they sell out.’

  Despite the salesman’s sly face, Tom had to
admit to himself that he was becoming a prospect.

  ‘But if I buy out only some of the policy holders,’ he said, ‘what’s to stop the rest of them coming after me?’

  The salesman laughed. ‘Ha! Do you think they’ll get it together, my friend? You’re a blow-through – they’re stuck right here. All you gotta do is make it home, then you can sit by the pool with a tinnie and wait for your investment to mature, yeah.’

  Tom leaned forward and placed his sunburned arms on the counter. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Val was listening, but he was over by the window chatting with the guard.

  ‘What about my, uh, tontine? I thought that was only valid while I and my, er, fellow policy holder were actually here, in the Tontines?’

  The salesman gave a broad grin; gold crowns gleamed in the cave of his mouth. He picked up the phone and punched a button. ‘Darlin’,’ he drawled, ‘would you bring me out a couple of glasses of that Volsted Pinot Noir?’ He replaced the handset and said to Tom: ‘That’s true, but not a lot of carpet-baggers know what I’m about to tell you, my friend. You can convert the car-rental tontine to a standard one, then there’s no limit on its territory. You can be bushed in the middle of Aval country, you can be at the bottom of Eyre’s-bloody-Pit; hell, you can be boogying the night away at a disco in Capital City, but if your fellow policy holder gets it, you’re his beneficiary.’

  He stopped, while a desert tribeswoman, incongruous in a neat navy two-piece, emerged from the back office and handed them both glasses of white wine filmed with condensation. The salesman took a sip, put his glass down, listened for the click of the door closing, then added with a wink: ‘Or hers.’

  Later, Tom dressed for Gloria Swai-Phillips’s charity reception.

  ‘I am the Swift One,’ he said aloud, as he used the tiny hotel iron to press the short pants of his absurd suit. ‘I am the Righter of Wrongs.’

  He checked himself in the mirror. The tie he had worn in court was speckled with stains; never the less, he dutifully knotted it. He looked, he thought, OK. Was it his imagination or had the long journey with its violent incidents mysteriously agreed with him? The Tom Brodzinski in the mirror was fitter and leaner – younger even.

  There was a knock at the door. Prentice stood in the dimly lit corridor, his head tilted back, his scrawny neck exposed. ‘It’s a beastly fag, Tom.’ He held up the tube of psoriasis ointment. ‘But I just don’t seem able to do this again. I was all right last night and this morning . . . Would you mind awfully?’

  Tom said: ‘It’ll be my pleasure.’

  Then, after it was done and Tom had washed his hands, they took the elevator together down to the lobby. Tom carried Gloria’s parcel, and, of course, the muzak never stopped.

  It wasn’t until they were almost in the function room, and level with a sign on an easel that said, the three rivers childhood development agency welcomes tgs employees, that Prentice hurriedly excused himself, claiming he had to ‘buy some fags’. Tom, who had noticed the usual oblong bulge in his shirt pocket, snorted and turned on his heel.

  Gloria had been right – the reception was insufferably dull. Shortie-suited bureaucrats stood here and there on the pinkish carpet, holding plates with wine glasses clipped to them – a buffet accessory Tom hadn’t seen in decades. The conversations he overheard as he made his way across the large room, with its oppressively low polystyrene ceiling, were banal to the point of being surreal. One man’s gutters were choked with leaves; a second was having difficulty getting his car serviced. A woman in a frumpy dress with puffed sleeves was telling another woman – in an equally frumpy outfit – that she suspected the super’ in her apartment building of having ‘a tiddly prob’ with the grog’.

  The only person Tom recognized was Daphne Hufferman, who was over by the raw bar, defiantly out of place in her canary-yellow towelling babygro, and with a hessian sack lying on the carpet by her big booted feet.

  ‘Wow,’ Tom exclaimed as he joined her. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Daphne replied, then paused to suck up a large shelled shrimp, as a child might a spaghetti string, before adding, ‘It’s quite a thing, right enough.’

  The raw bar stretched the entire length of the room: a vast trough of galvanized zinc heaped with ice chips, upon which were piled shrimp, clams, crayfish, lobster tails, whole softshell crabs, oysters and still more Crustacea that Tom didn’t recognize – spidery arthropods, the spindly basketry of their legs as big as a football; tiger-striped shellfish with the flat, coiled aspect of ammonites; and some sort of sea bug like a giant woodlouse. This dead reef was fringed with bowls of salad, sauces, and tumblers stuffed with celery stalks and whole carrots.

  ‘Tom,’ Daphne said, ‘this is Jean Lejeune. He’s the child protection officer for Tontine 901, out towards Kellippi. Jean – Tom.’

  Tom turned to this man, muttering an apology for having interrupted, then recoiled. Lejeune was a six-footer with a bear-like build. He wore spectacles with round frames and combed his black hair straight back; yet this was all beside the point – mere details, because surrounding Lejeune’s full-lipped mouth was a lustrous goatee of Sangat clams.

  Tom’s eyes involuntarily slid to the raw bar, then back to this extraordinary sight. Lejeune was unperturbed. ‘You’re taken by my infestation, yeah,’ he stated.

  ‘Uh, yeah, well . . .’ Tom demurred.

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed – it’s in yer face, yeah.’

  Daphne Hufferman snorted with merriment and, grasping Lejune’s arm, bent to pick up the sack. ‘Got the part, right,’ she said, hefting it. ‘Soon as this is done I’m back over there.’ A jerk of her thumb. ‘Gotta seat with a Tuggie patrol.’

  Lejeune pursed his lips, and the clams crepitated. Tom wondered if the man had been making a move on Daphne; it wouldn’t have been a bad bet, given her own interest in child protection. He addressed Tom: ‘The lady here tells me you’re from overseas; some of you blokes are a bit critical of the way we do things here.’

  ‘No, not really – not at all.’

  He felt awkward with the newspaper-wrapped parcel in his arms, but there was nowhere he could set it down.

  Lejeune resumed at an odd tangent: ‘I’m from Amherst myself, yeah – so’s the rest of the seafood here. You might think it a waste of resources, freighting all this stuff thousands of clicks over here, but lemme tellya, yeah’ – he crowded Tom with his clams – ‘the interior of the entire bloody continent was once under water. That’s right, mate, if we were standing here millions of years ago there’d be sea over our bloody heads. So what I say is . . .’ He leaned in still further, and Tom could see rotting kelp between the shells. ‘What goes around bloody comes around. It’s a measure of Anglo civilization, yeah, that we can do such marvellous things.’

  Tom was struggling to digest this when the man offered him another tid-bit: ‘Besides, I was going to grow a beard anyway, yeah. Can’t stand bloody shaving.’

  Searching for a pretext to break from this repellent fellow, Tom spotted Adams skulking behind a trough of shrubbery. Tom was making his excuses, when there was a sudden ‘thwock-thwock-thwock!’ Gloria Swai-Phillips was standing on a small rostrum tapping a mic’. The desultory hubbub died away altogether, and she addressed the throng. ‘TRCDA is pleased to welcome you all to this gala reception, right?’ she began. ‘It’s a great honour to have such distinguished company here to meet our staff and field workers, yeah? I’d like to extend an especial welcome to the Proconsul’ – she inclined her head towards a hefty blond man in a Mao tunic – ‘Mr Fabien Renard, CEO of Endeavour Surety’ – this one had salt-and-pepper hair, a shiny suit – ‘and, of course, Commander Ellanoppolloppolou, for without the cooperation of him and his men, our work here would be impossible, yeah?’

  The police commander’s hair was so sharply sculpted that it sat on his round head like one of the angular caps worn by his men. He withdrew a swagger stick from under his arm and conducted himself in a curt bow.

&
nbsp; ‘As you all know,’ Gloria resumed, ‘this is the fifth anniversary of our project being up and running in the Tontine Townships, yeah? During that time, we’ve helped some 700 tontine orphans to find new domiciles, yeah? These can be state facilities or private institutions, yeah? Other children stay in our own homes, and in several cases we’ve even managed to secure adoptions, yeah?’

  Tom heard everything that Gloria said as a question. For weeks now he had ignored the locals’ nonsensical interrogatives – but she seemed genuinely to be querying reality, rather than simply affirming it.

  There was a polite scattering of applause, and Gloria blushed. When she began speaking again, Tom found he couldn’t concentrate on her words. He stared at the flapping red slot of her mouth. It was no longer her resemblance to Martha that made him feel he knew Gloria intimately; it was an overpowering sense of déjà vu. He had been in this function room before, with these people and those chairs. He had been with a woman exactly like Gloria, who nurtured him, cuddled him, loved him as a mother loves her child.

  She was saying. ‘There are real signs of change and progress, yeah?’ when Tom began to cry. The tears ran down the inside of his eyes, smearing this commonplace: the middle-aged woman giving a halting speech.

  Adams sidled up. ‘We need to have a chat,’ he said in an undertone. ‘I’m afraid we got off on the wrong, ah, foot this morning. My apologies.’

  He turned and discreetly worked his way towards the exit. Tom followed.

  He found the Consul in the lobby. He was sitting on a leather divan, beside a smoked-glass coffee table with a large ashtray on it. Tom sat down. There was a NO SMOKING sign inside the ashtray. There was the iconic red roundel, with its oblique bar anulling a stylized cigarette. The slogan below this read: NO IFS, NO BUTTS, STUB IT OUT.

  ‘Tell me,’ Adams asked, ‘have you ever heard the term “rabia”?’

  Tom thought for a moment, then said: ‘Yeah, I have – the Huffermans, Dave, Daphne’s husband. He said I’d need one if I was heading down to Ralladayo, but he never told me what it was.’