by Self, Will
Tom woke up with the fat book crushing him and the sweat chilled on his goose-pimpled skin. He limped to the bathroom and siphoned off the tank full of urine, near-fainting as it hissed into the avocado commode. Then he tottered back into the bedroom, inserted himself between the profane hotel sheets and joined the battle for true oblivion.
14
The fly rubbed its two front legs together: hispid and viscid. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off them: back and forth they went, kinking slightly, the motion creating wrists and hands. It wasn’t cleaning itself; it was instinctively making a gesture of false humility. ‘I’m only a humble fly,’ the fly was saying. ‘You needn’t pay any attention to me.’
Yet Tom’s attention was unwavering. The fly’s six bristled sticky feet were planted on the dash, which, with its terrain of vinyl, mirrored the desert outside the car. The fly’s compound eyes – black and shiny – wrapped around its triangular head. Was it Tom’s increasingly unbridled imagination, or was there a warty eruption on the insect’s mandibles? Mandibles that opened to utter: ‘Whoa! Old chap, watch out for that–’
Prentice was cut off as they all rose up to kiss the sky.
At first Tom couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then the whine of the whizzing front tyres, and the fact that he was lying on his back, brought home how utter was their reversal. The dumb little SUV – the off-road capabilities of which Tom had always had severe doubts – had tipped backwards and was resting on its tailgate in the sand, while its snub-nosed hood trumpeted engine noises.
In the rear-view Tom saw Prentice supine in a jumble of cigarette cartons, drug ampoules and baby-bottle nipples. Tom’s bad companion peered up at him with an expression of parental dismay.
Gloria broke the spell. ‘The water!’ she cried. ‘And the bloody, fucking fuel!’
She unclipped her seatbelt and struggled out of her seat. Tom did the same, dropping down awkwardly on to the sand, into which a damp patch was spreading from the dented flanks of the incontinent vehicle.
‘Squashed,’ Tom muttered. ‘Squashed like a fly.’
‘Move it, you fool!’ Gloria screeched, flapping her black robes. ‘We gotta get this thing upright!’
They all hung from the auraca bars, and the SUV tipped forward so readily that they only narrowly escaped as all four wheels were reunited with the ground. The water bag was exposed – a popped blister on the silica skin.
Gloria went to the back of the car. ‘We’re not totally bloody dead, yeah? Amazingly, the gas can is intact.’
‘That’s a deuced relief,’ said Prentice, joining her. He called across to Tom, ‘Look here, y’know what’s happening, don’t you? It was the same on Route 1 before we got to Trangaden. I’d better take over the driving.’
Tom started to argue that it wasn’t his fault: after all, they had never driven the SUV off-road before. Then he faltered – an enormous weariness had slumped on top of him. The gelatinous shreds of the previous night’s dream still clung to his psyche, making any further protest impossible.
Meekly, he helped Prentice sort out the mess in the trunk. He checked the rifles, but the gas can had protected them. Feeling the fake-wood grain of one of the stocks sent a charge through Tom’s hands – this, at least, could vivify him. Silently, Tom climbed into the back seat of the car and took Gloria’s egg-shaped parcel in his flaccid arms. Prentice – who, when he was driving, delighted in flouting Gloria’s edicts – lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. They drove on.
There were flies in this region of the desert. Flies but no cattle or auraca – and they hadn’t seen any moai since before they reached Lake Mulgrene. There were plentiful flies, but nothing that Tom could see for them to feed on. There wasn’t even any spiniflex or thorn scrub; only the oceanic swell of the sands, which, as the car strained towards the crest of another dune, were revealed rippling hazily away towards the horizon. Somewhere over there Beelzebub was shooting flies with a needle gun, then feeding their furry bodies to the mutant maggots he hand-reared in underground caverns.
Penetrating his droning reverie, Tom dimly heard a practical back-and-forth between Prentice and Gloria: talk of the route, the diversion they would have to take to Eyre’s Pit in order to make good their water deficiency. Gloria studied the map; Prentice changed gear with studious zeal.
Tom interrogated the parcel. What are you and where are you going? What are your intentions, please?
A corner of one of the newspaper sheets had come away from the bundle, and he idly flicked it with a fingernail.
Do I really want to do that? Tom considered of each millesimal movement. Is this my sole motivation, to watch the frayed fibres vibrate? If so, can I analyse every link of the chain between my brain and my finger? Can I see the very point where my thought becomes an action? Just suppose that, when the little bit of paper moves, it moves the air, and the air becomes a breeze, and the breeze blows on the sand, and the sand starts to cascade, becoming a landslide that ends up burying somebody. Then what? Is it all down to me? Because maybe I kinda lost sight of that thought as it went along the chain. Maybe I stopped wanting to flick a bit of paper . . . and started wanting to pull . . . a trigger.
The car had stopped in the cleavage between two steeply sloping dunes. The flies were shocked out of their humility for a second, then resumed their supplication on Tom’s face.
‘Effel,’ Gloria said, pointing at the dune.
‘What?’ Prentice’s voice seemed to have dropped half an octave.
‘It’s a succulent, grows on the back of dunes. The plants are bloody vast – they can put tap roots down hundreds of metres, yeah, and spread for thousands of square clicks.’ She got out of the car. ‘You could do worse than pull some up, yeah? The bulbs are like little sponges, fulla fluids, yeah? I’m gonna take a piss.’
She strode away over the spur of a dune, wading in its shifting solidity, her black robes riffled by the wind.
Prentice canted round and looked steadily at Tom. ‘Honestly, old chap, I wouldn’t do it to them if they didn’t want me to.’
‘You what?’
‘I admit, quite freely’ – Prentice stroked his smooth, strong jaw – ‘that some of them are on the . . . well, let’s say, inexperienced end of things. Still, you’ve got to understand how things are for them.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Come puberty – thirteen, fourteen maybe – they have to go off, leave their mob, lads and lasses both. They stay out in a camp, in the bush. Then, after a month or so, they come back for circumcision–’
‘I know all that,’ Tom snapped. ‘I’ve read the Von Sassers.’
‘Oh, yes, jolly good.’ Prentice fluttered a hand, clearly disdaining such book-learning in the light of his own very practical experience. ‘Well, then, you’ll know what comes next. Bleeding, injured, in dreadful pain, um, down there, these poor young things are passed around. First between the makkatas, then all the men in the mob. They’re, um, used grievously – it’s a dreadful shame. Better they be introduced to hunt-the-sausage by someone a little gentler, a chap willing to help them out with a little cash. No one minds, Tom – not even their own people.’
‘You fucking slime . . .’ Tom began, then stopped. There had been a fracture in space and time, or else this confession was only a product of his own fevered imagination. Prentice was at least a hundred yards off, pulling up long tendrils of vegetation from the face of a dune, then squeezing their scrotal bulbs into his parched gash of a mouth. A fly squatted on the headrest of his vacated seat. It was rubbing its front legs together, hispid and viscid, ever so ’umble.
Tom got out of the car. He felt as weak as a half-drowned kitten. His legs, in the thick denim pants, were running with sweat. He tottered to the back of the SUV, unclipped one of the Galils and removed it from its sleeve. He had to rummage in the trunk for the shells, then inserted them into the magazine. Yet with each action his movements became more decisive. This was, he concluded as he rammed the box into the
breech, why all along the rifle had felt so instinctively right.
When Tom lifted it to his shoulder and put his eye to the sights, Prentice was in his face. I can touch him, Tom grimaced. Touch him with my metal finger, spreading death ointment. A stray shot – could’ve been anyone, Gloria . . . Violent place, the desert – you know that . . . Escaped inmates from Eyre’s Pit – crazed smokers . . . Held us up . . .
Tom propped the Galil against the SUV. He began shovelling from the trunk the fresh cartons of cigarettes that Prentice had bought at the last road stop outside Trangaden. He tore a carton open and scattered the fat packs on the sand. Then he stopped and, picking it up, levelled the rifle at Prentice once more.
Get. It. Done. Now. This time Tom Brodzinski could feel the precise weight of every synaptic link in the chain of causality – from intention to action – as it passed between his fingers. His finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. Both cross hairs precisely bisected Prentice’s face, slicing it into four equally loathsome sections. Tom felt the first stage of the trigger mechanism fall into place with a click as loud as an explosion. At this range it would be impossible to miss. Death was a twitch away, a butt-flip. Death profoundly and devoutly willed.
Tom froze. He was locked up in his stance – his finger cramped in the trigger guard, the stock grinding against his cheekbone. He could hear his tendons whining with the tension. He was fervently thrusting, with every iota of his will, towards the future – yet unable to breathe, swallow, blink.
It took a long while for Prentice to wade back down the dune. Tom watched, transfixed, as first one of his boots, then the next, lifted from the silvery sand. Prentice’s movements were so leisurely that his would-be executioner could hear the individual grains as they trickled over the leather. He was dragging a long net of effel tendrils behind him, trawling the dry sea.
Suddenly, Prentice’s face was gone from the sights and he was standing right beside Tom, his ashtray breath in Tom’s nostrils. He carefully – almost tenderly – took the Galil from the spasmed hands and said in a voice that was more parental than any Tom had ever heard before: ‘Come on, old chap, we best put this away now. We wouldn’t want anything silly to happen, now would we?’
Prentice said nothing of all this to Gloria when she returned; he only drove with the skill and concentration that the desert track demanded of him. Tom hunched in the back seat, quietly whimpering, mourning his potency. The news-paper head stared contemptuously at him, while the flies, forgetting their humility, took disgusting liberties with his eyes and mouth. Little company, indeed.
That night the trio slept out in the desert, cocooned in their swags, their breath condensing in the frozen air. A small white-gold moon sailed along the horizon, leaving a gleaming wake on the dune crests. Tom was a ghost exhaling steam. The lush fruit of other stars was heaped in the bowl of the heavens. In the distance a wild dog yapped.
At dawn, Prentice helped Tom to put on his boots, then served him a breakfast of hot tea and moist porridge. He wielded the little gas stove with diligent economy and, as he passed the vessels, remarked: ‘Lucky I had a bottle of mineral water stashed – effel alone wouldn’t’ve got us to Eyre’s Pit.’
By mid morning the crescent-shaped dunes were subsiding; then the sands retreated, exposing the desert floor. Ahead, the earth’s crust had been playing with itself: fashioning barley sugar twists of basalt and dolloping down lumps of molten rock. In places it had cracked itself open, revealing the mighty vermiculation of subterranean lava tubes.
At noon, when the heat and the flies in the car started to bother even the stoical man of action who was driving, they gained the top of a narrow defile through a range of bulbous, stony hills. Gloria was yakking on about how Eyre, the first Anglo explorer to cross this desert, was deceived by his own ‘patriarchal mindset’ into believing the Tayswengo to be like himself. Whereas the reality was that the native women had their own powerful traditions, which were taboo to all men.
Martha, Tom reflected, never talked so much. She kept her clapboard mouth – thin, white-lipped – nailed shut. Tom cradled the head for comfort. He stroked the sweat-damp newsprint, and little balls of it came away on his fingers.
‘What’re you doing?’ Gloria rounded on him. ‘That contains vital equipment for Erich, yeah? If it’s the slightest bit contaminated it’ll be bloody useless.’
‘Erich? Who’s Erich? And whaddya mean, contaminated?’ Tom shouted back. He was on the verge of throwing her parcel back in her bossy face, when there was a roaring noise so loud that it undercut the SUV’s clanking engine.
‘I say, is that the roar of the sands?’ Prentice asked. ‘It’s a sound I’ve always wanted to hear.’
Now it was his turn. Gloria spat at him: ‘No, you bloody drongo, in case you hadn’t noticed we left the sands hours ago. That’s the roar of the bloody bauxite refinery, the roar of the road-trains carrying the bloody stuff off to the coast, and the roar of all the bloody machinery down the bloody pit!’
A few minutes later they came to a checkpoint. A couple of private security men were manning it. They were Tugga-narong – so bored their faces had gone grey. Like a child who has fallen asleep during a long car journey, Tom woke to find a strange new world stocked with the same old things. He marvelled at the heavily armed guards. How could I have confused these guys with the real natives? They’re as out of their element as me.
The guards rousted Prentice out of the car, then Tom and Gloria. Their papers were scrutinized, and Prentice asked if there was any water available. One of the guards told him: ‘You’ll be able to pick up a water bag at the company store, yeah, no worries.’
Prentice plodded away towards an ersatz massif of slag heaps.
It was too hot to wait in the car, so Tom and Gloria hid from the sun in the shadow of a smoking shelter, where ectoplasm was sucked from dirty-faced miners by powerful ducts. Sitting on the rubble, Tom asked again: ‘Who’s Erich, and what’s that freakin’ parcel got to do with him?’
Gloria arranged herself beside him and coyly covered her ankles with the hem of her robe. ‘You’ve known him almost as long as you’ve known me, yeah?’ she said. ‘He’s one of the authors of that magnificent book you’ve been struggling with for weeks now.’
‘You mean Erich von Sasser, the anthropologist?’ Tom pictured the hawkish Chief Prosecutor, pecking at him back in Vance: If you chance to encounter my brother, Erich . . . ‘Is this some kinduv a set-up?’ He struggled to restrain his anger.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,’ she replied. ‘It’s common knowledge that the Von Sassers – first father, then son – have been living with the Tayswengo for many, many years now. If you’d made the effort to get through their book, then you’d know how closely involved Erich is with the Intwennyfortee mob.
‘Jesus, Tom, I’ve kids in my bloody orphanages who’ve seen their parents shot dead over tontines right in front of their eyes. They weren’t too traumatized to ask the right questions, but you, you carry on sitting there, yeah? Day after day, letting yourself be dragged along by other people, not even bothering to find out where the hell they’re taking you, yeah?’
Another bloody Martha on my back, thought Tom. At least the flies are being kept off by the miners’ smoke. He was thirsty; although less, he thought, than he should be, given that he was sweating heavily. Moreover, Tom felt a surge of energy between his shoulders, electrifying his spine. He stretched expansively.
‘Did you even hear what I said?’ Tom’s substitute wife nagged him.
The phone rang in the guards’ booth. One of them answered it, spoke for a while, then came over to the shelter.
He addressed Tom: ‘It’s your man, yeah. Says he’s crook, wants you to go down there and give ’im a hand, right.’ He went away again.
Tom stood. ‘Dragged along by other people, am I?’ he said to Gloria. ‘We’ll see about that.’
He strode off along the road leading to the mine, past DANGER and NO SMOKING signs, then
under a banner that advertised: EYRE’S PIT EXTRACTION FACILITY, A DIVISION OF MAES-PEETERS INDUSTRIES. OPERATIONAL DAYS THIS YEAR: 360. ORE EXTRACTED: 75,655 TONNES. INJURIES: 1,309. FATALITIES: 274. The figures, Tom thought, were nothing to brag about.
The background roar gained definition: there was the massed clanking of heavy machinery and the hammering of the engines that powered them, while soaring above it was the bellowing of thousands of voices. Skirting the slag heaps, he made decisively for a stack of Portakabins that he assumed were the mine’s offices and stores.
Eyre’s Pit yawned open beside him – a massive chomp out of the world, with nibbled edges defended only by a single strand of barbed wire. Tom reeled back and sat down abruptly on the pebbly ground. Then, summoning himself, he crawled forward on hands and knees until he could gaze down into it.
The pit was at least 6,000 feet deep and a mile across: so immense an absence where there ought to be presence that it created its own distortions in natural law. Tom felt as if he were staring into an earthy empyrean – while also experiencing nauseating vertigo. He grabbed handfuls of the ground, lest he be torn down into the subterranean sky.
There were entire weather systems inside the pit: steamy wraiths wrestled with the black clouds spewed by burn-off pipes; turbo-charged thermals carried flocks of grey and black ash high over Tom’s head, ashes that seconds before had been floating far below him.
At the very bottom, mechanical diggers tore at the sides of the pit, scouring out ochreous grooves. There were hundreds of these galleries, and thousands of miners stood in them. Some hacked away with pickaxes, while others formed chains to deposit bucket after bucket of ore on to the ever-clanking conveyor belts. Tom was reminded of the leaf-cutter ants on the shrubbery at the Mimosa.
The chthonic pit also created its own warped acoustics, so that while the machinery was muted, the groans of the tormented souls carried up to Tom’s ears: the ‘hhns’ and ‘gaars’ of the ants hammering at the rock; the ‘oofs’ and ‘aarghs’ of their comrades hefting the buckets. Then, very distinctly, a small voice wheedled, ‘Gissa ciggie, mate, I’m on smoke-o in ten.’