The Butt: A Novel

by Self, Will

‘I spent a further decade acquiring the necessary skills needed to facilitate Papa’s conception of the good.’ The little baton swung in the direction of the scalpel case. ‘He had reached an impasse. He had cultivated these people, right enough – yet he had failed to harvest them. They still remained passively in the path of the Anglo combines. What was needed were mystics, firebrands and charismatics who would galvanize the embryonic body politic! Papa – who had no formal medical, let alone surgical, training himself – was relying on me to provide them.’

  Von Sasser flexed the spillikin between his slim surgeon’s fingers; with a scarcely audible ‘ping’, a bit snapped off and hit the Consul’s forehead, then dropped to the tabletop. Adams stirred, groaned, drool looping from his slack mouth.

  ‘And that, gentlemen, is enough for one night.’ Von Sasser scraped back his chair and rose. ‘We will resume our discussions tomorrow. Very good!’

  Discussions, Tom thought, was hardly the right word.

  The anthropologist strafed the natives slumped against the wall with the tracer phonemes of his father’s made-up language. They got up – penitent, monkish in their black togas – and filed out. Swai-Phillips brought up the rear with his jazzy plainsong – ‘Oh, yes! The man, OK, the man – he’s said it all, he’s done it all. He’s the big sharp ’un . . .’ which faded into the silvered negative of the starlit desert.

  The Anglos’ exodus was a more awkward affair. Perversely, Adams, Loman and Gloria all chose to behave as if they had been lapping up their host’s every word. They took their time to say their grateful goodbyes, praising Von Sasser’s food, his drink, his conversation. But when they stumped across the veranda and stumbled down the steps, their sleep-cramped legs betrayed them.

  Tom and Prentice followed on behind.

  ‘Until the morning, then.’ Von Sasser bade them goodnight from the top of the stairs. ‘There are some things I’d like the two of you, in particular, to see, yeah.’

  Tom went to his swag in the classroom of the abandoned school, musing on how it was that, for so long as he was lecturing, Von Sasser’s accent was located in the Northern Hemisphere; yet as soon as he ceased, the squawking indigenous vowels came home to roost.

  As he undressed, Tom admired the scissoring of his lean heat-tempered limbs. He slid into the canvas pouch and was soon asleep.

  In the night, first one of his twins and then the second crawled in with him. Tom buried his face in their downy little backs. Later on, more disturbingly, Dixie joined them. Tom had to manouevre a twin in between them, lest he inadvertently press his groin against her thigh. Finally, shortly before dawn, Tommy Junior came into the classroom. ‘Where are you, Dad?’ he called out in the anaemic light. ‘Where are you?’

  Tom wanted to respond to his adoptive son, but he was encumbered by the fleshy straitjacket of his own flesh. He could see Tommy Junior plainly enough, but the boy wasn’t helping himself. He refused – or was unable – to remove the hand-held games console from right in front of his eyes, so he bumped into the desks and collided with the walls.

  He persisted, though: ‘Where are you, Dad? Where are you?’ His own wanderings in the maze of furniture replicated those of the tiny avatars on the screen he was fixated by.

  Dixie, the succubus, rolled over and grasped Tom’s thigh between her own legs. It was she who had the impressive morning erection: a pestle that she ground into him. He screamed, but there was a rock rolled across his mouth, and the cry echoed only in the cave of his skull.

  Between sleep and waking, paralysis and flight, myth and the prosaic, the existential and the universal, Tom watched, horrified, as Tommy Junior at last found a way through. He flopped forward on to the swag, and his adoptive siblings splattered into nothing. Now, there was only the overgrown cuckoo child bearing down on Tom, crushing the life out of him.

  Tom ungummed his swollen lids. Gloria Swai-Phillips was sitting in a chair by the window. She wore a cotton dressing gown patterned with parrots, and her hair was wet from the shower. The sunlight flared on its damp sheen, but her face was deep in shadow.

  ‘You’re gonna haveta get your shit together today, yeah?’

  Why, thought Tom, did no one in this country ever prefix their remarks with the verbal foreplay that made it possible for humans to rub along with each other? Every conversation was as brusque as a military briefing. He slid upright in the sweat-lubricated sheath of the swag.

  ‘I know that,’ he replied, groping underneath the mattress for the reassurance of the envelope with his tontine in it.

  ‘So long as you know, right?’

  She stood and her gown fell open. Her pubis was bare but for a pubescent tuft. The mousetail of a tampon dangled from her cleft. She moved to the door in wifely déshabillé. I’m spotting, Tom . . . and it’s your fault . . .

  As he dressed, Tom reflected on the previous evening. They were all – Adams, Gloria, Loman, the mentally ill Swai-Phillips – in thrall to Von Sasser. It was equally plain that the anthropologist thought little – if anything – of them. However, with Tom himself there was surely a shared bond: the matter of Prentice. Tom may have had a failure of nerve back in the dunes, but Von Sasser’s manner towards him suggested that this need not affect the current situation. The important thing was to act. ‘I am the Swift One,’ Tom said aloud as he splashed brownish water on to his tanned face. ‘I am the Righter of Wrongs.’

  Breakfast was already under way. Last night’s company were seated at a long trestle table that had been set up on the veranda of Von Sasser’s chalet. An awning protected them from the fierce sun. There were thermos jugs of milk and coffee, cartons of juice and cereal boxes dotting the tabletop; among these were salvers heaped with the scary fruit that Tom remembered from the Mimosa.

  ‘See, Brian,’ he said bumptiously to Prentice, who was nursing his hangover with a can of Coke. ‘Aluminium bowls and aluminium cans – even the Intwennyfortee mob can’t do without Eyre’s Pit, so no need for you to become a bleeding heart after all.’

  The long night of serious schnapps-drinking had paradoxically agreed with Tom. It occurred to him, as he munched his Rice Krispies, that this might have been because of the small quantity of gasoline Von Sasser put in the spirit: maybe I was running on empty after all that damn driving and just needed to refuel.

  Ralladayo was less intimidating in full daylight. Tom could recognize that, despite the neglected school building, and the anomaly of Von Sasser’s dwelling, it was a proper settlement – in marked contrast to the hell-hole of the Entreati on the shores of Lake Mulgrene. The Tayswengo’s humpies were roomy tubular shacks of galvanized iron. There was a shower block, and a number of cinder-block buildings were scattered on the bare ground beneath the overarching eucalyptus, one of which had a red cross painted on its tin roof. Most reassuring – with its air of being a steelily efficient conduit to the outside world – was the hundred-metre-high radio mast planted beside the airstrip.

  Tom sprinkled more sugar on his cereal and, as he did so, added generous pinches of salt to the eccentric diatribe that his host had delivered the night before. The kids who were playing in the shade with a tame auraca foal were well fed and dressed in clean clothes. The women doing their laundry in a long trough next to the shower block were chatting merrily. It struck Tom that Von Sasser was probably no different to the other people he had met who dedicated themselves to such development projects: cranky, perhaps, and inclined to take the high moral ground – but this was all understandable, forgivable too, for they had a right to be proud.

  If Tom was feeling refreshed, the same could not be said for the other Anglos. Gloria, Adams, Loman – all were subdued. They spoke little, concentrating on rehydrating themselves with reconstituted orange juice. Gloria had a painful-looking pimple in the dimple of her chin. Vishtar Loman’s hands shook.

  There was no sign of Von Sasser, but Swai-Phillips – who Tom now thought of as the witchy anthropologist’s familiar – emerged haltingly from the chalet and joined the party
. There was no ‘He’s the man!’ gibbering this morning. The lawyer stumped up to the table dragging his right leg behind him. His right arm hung uselessly by his side, and the right side of his face was palsied: a sluggish lip trailed down from his moustache.

  The others ignored Swai-Phillips, while his wrap-around shades pre-emptively deflected Tom’s half-formulated remarks. But, watching him struggling with some muesli, Tom realized that yesterday’s highly unlawyerly behaviour had – quite as much as today’s debility – been the function of an all too common pathology: he must’ve had a stroke. He’s come out here to stay with his pal while he recovers. I guess he must be under Loman’s care . . .

  Dr Loman’s presence in Ralladayo did nag at Tom. Was he on a vacation of some kind or doing Peace Corps-type work? More worrying still, did his being here mean that back in Vance Reginald Lincoln the Third was . . . gone altogether?

  Pouring himself another cup of coffee from the thermos jug, Tom decided that Gloria had been right back at Eyre’s Pit when she hectored him over his passivity; it was high time he got some answers to all these questions. He took an oblique line, by gaining Adams’s attention: ‘What brings you all the way, er, over here to Ralladayo? Consular business?’

  Adams’s manner was more diffident than ever, his pauses seemingly taken up by the conduct of a diplomacy he alone could hear. He slowly inclined his Polaroids to Tom: ‘Ah . . . not exactly. It’s true that Erich’s, ah . . . community has the same semi-autonomous status as the other tribal homelands, and on that basis a consular official might be called on to assist any of our nationals who were, ah . . . over here. But in this case, Tom, it isn’t all about you.’

  Tom bridled. ‘I hadn’t imagined that for a second.’

  ‘No.’ Adams gave a fastidious shudder. ‘I’ve a long-established involvement with the work that Erich does here. I first visited Ralladayo on my drive north after my retirement. His ideas, his, ah . . . vision, his personality too – they all had a profound, ah . . . effect on me.’

  Adams was looking old this morning; he was even unshaven: a silvery blaze on his horsy cheeks. Tom speculated on the hiatuses: was Adams rummaging in the lumber room of his own consciousness, trying to find a useful phrase? Or might there be an Entreati sorceress in there with him, composing these near-instant communiqués? If it was the latter, then the Honorary Consul had received all the instruction he currently needed, because he snapped back to his usual full attention: ‘Erich is unavoidably detained with important work in the dispensary until lunchtime. However, he asked me if I’d be prepared to show you and Mr Prentice over the place – if you’d like me to, that is?’

  ‘Sure,’ Tom said.

  Adams seemed relieved. ‘That’s good. I’ve been coming back here every year since that first visit. Dry season vacations I spend with my, ah, friends in the hill country – but Christmases are always devoted to Ralladayo. It may be something of an exaggeration, but Erich – and the Intwennyfortee mob, of course – have given me a little, ah, job – communications, PR, that kind of thing. It’s undemanding work, but my diplomatic experience can be put to, ah, use.’

  Tom was going to point out that it had been highly unpro- fessional of the Consul to withold this information from him when they were back in Vance, but Adams was already on his feet, slurping down the last of his own unsweetened, undiluted coffee.

  Prentice had also got up. He stood, looking nauseous and rubbing the raw patch of red skin on his neck. Adams leaned over and whispered something into the wiry cloud surrounding Jethro Swai-Phillips’s left ear. Gloria and Vishtar barely glanced up, only muttering ‘Bye’ as the three men quit the veranda. When Tom looked back, he saw that the lawyer had risen, and was awkwardly dragging his stricken leg back inside.

  There were noisy galah birds mucking about in the eucalyptus trees. Their pink plumage and grating cries were faintly uncanny: were they tiny airborne Anglos or had the white interlopers on this island-continent mutated to resemble these plumed natives, whose every song burst ended with a query: ‘Kraa-kra-kraa?’

  First, Adams took them to see the domestic interior of a Tayswengo humpy. Obediently, Tom chatted to its proud inhabitant, a grave matron in a black toga, whose cheek bulged with engwegge. She pointed out cooking pots similar to the ones Tom had bought in Vance, and mimed the preparation of auraca meat.

  Next, they walked to the far end of the airstrip. Hidden behind a low hill was a galvanized-iron barn two storeys high. The noise of machinery – incongruous in this desert fastness – echoed beneath its roof. When they stepped inside, Tom was surprised to find the menfolk who were so conspicuously absent from the rest of Ralladayo. He had assumed they were away hunting; instead, they were hunched over industrial sewing machines and automated cutting equipment. It was a sweat shop – and the garments the Tayswengo were piecing together were the black togas.

  ‘Initially, they were a bit of a novelty,’ Adams explained as they strolled from stage to stage of the manufacturing process. ‘Certain, ah, bohemian types down south adopted the togas as, ah, fashion statements. But increasingly the Anglo market is coming to appreciate that these are beautifully designed for outdoor pursuits.’

  Tom almost laughed at Adams’s attempts to play the marketeer – they were so at odds with his studied circumspection. But then, as they left the baking-hot barn, the Consul threw back at his charges: ‘Erich’s idea, naturally.’

  They doubled back to the airstrip. Here, in a small shack, was the grandly titled ‘Communications Center’. Adams pointed out every part of his little fiefdom – the PC, the photocopier machine, even the water cooler – with unaffected enthusiasm. Tom was reminded of a kid with its playhouse. In a small inner room, Adams introduced the men to a new-looking two-way radio. ‘Feel free’, he said to Tom, ‘to call home. We can patch in to the phone network via a, ah, sympathetic operator in Trangaden.’

  After that, they proceeded in the direction of a double-sized humpy that stood near by, at the end of the main drag. ‘This’, Adams said, ‘is the orphanage I mentioned to you. It’s really only a, ah, marginal undertaking for the community, but Erich is particularly devoted to it . . .’ He broke off and eyed his tour party sceptically.

  Tom had subsided into tedium as the tour progressed: Amish village, historic town centre, Ralladayo – where was the difference? As for Prentice, he had lagged behind the whole way, fiddling with his cigarettes, and now he was baulking at the orphanage.

  ‘I say, Mr Adams,’ he wheedled, ‘I expect you’ll be heading over to the dispensary after this, yes? If it’s no bother, I’ll pop back to the College and pick up the ribavirin, then I’ll meet you there.’

  If Prentice had been requesting permission, he didn’t wait to have it granted. He walked away as fast as he could, with his stiff-legged silent-movie gait. Tom waited until he was a way off, then said snidely: ‘Surely the ribavirin is needed here, at the orphanage?’

  ‘Don’t be, ah, silly,’ said the Consul dismissively. ‘You can’t have barely trained care assistants administering powerful medication like that, can you?’

  ‘Look.’ Involuntarily Tom felt the blistered nap of Adam’s seersucker sleeve. ‘I – I tried my darndest back there, before Eyre’s Pit–’

  Adams shrugged him off. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, Tom, it’s not relevant any more. Besides, you’re forgetting who I am.’

  The Consul put an end to the exchange by opening the gate in the wire fence. Tom sighed, then followed Adams’s long back into the big humpy.

  Inside, there were utilitarian steel cots clustered under the whale-belly curve of the corrugated iron. A few lurid plastic toys were piled on the old piece of carpet that had been laid directly on the earthen floor. Three toddlers were sitting in silence by these injection-moulded bubble cars and sectional toadstools. In the dim light their pupils were dilated, and they emanated bemusement. A young Tayswengo woman sat watching them on a stool; at least, so Tom assumed, for it was completely hidden by the skirts of
her toga. She curled forward from this invisible plinth to wave the flies off the little kids with a switch of leaves.

  ‘Is Miss Swai-Phillips here, Olympia?’ Adams asked her.

  ‘No.’ The girl was as listless as her charges. ‘She stopped by, yeah, now she’s . . . Oh . . . I dunno.’

  A rustling noise coming from one of the cots at the back of the humpy attracted Tom’s attention. Not wanting to – although the resistance also seemed to be in the treacly air – he strolled over to it. A baby lay awkwardly curled in a damp skein of sheet. Distractedly – for the mite was a pitiful sight – Tom fixated on the mattress, which had the same covering of frangipani blossoms as the ones at the Mimosa. The child was the size of a one-year-old, but, on examining it more closely, Tom realized it was much older: maybe two or even three – not a baby at all. Its face was wizened, its skin lumpy and scaly – in places, cracked and weeping. The child was of mixed race.

  Adams joined Tom.

  ‘Is it . . . AIDS?’ Tom asked.

  ‘No’ – the Consul was blithe – ‘although we do see cases here. The young women go off to the road stops. They get themselves into, ah, difficulties. No, this little guy has psoriasis – Vishtar tells me it’s, ah, hereditary.’

  As the Polaroids revealed the Consul’s eyes, so Tom sought them. ‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘what you wanted me to see?’

  Adams wouldn’t look at him. ‘I never wanted you to see anything, Tom,’ he snarled sorrowfully. ‘I wanted you to do something.’

  Prentice was sitting waiting for them outside the dispensary. He eyed Tom through the smoky veil he always wore, presumably trying to gauge Tom’s reaction to the orphanage visit. Rather than respond to this, Tom extended his hand and helped the pathetic fellow up.

  ‘The dispensary’ was a misnomer for this cinder-block building, which was nearly as big as the derelict school. It had an extensive waiting area that was thronged with Tayswengo women holding babies who were sick enough to be there, yet strong enough to bawl about it. There were also a few native men in evidence – and they too exhibited a reassuring lack of stoicism. They had sustained a variety of cuts, bruises and, in one particularly vocal case, a minor gunshot wound. Whenever one of the harassed nurses appeared, the Tayswengo all pounced on him or her, proffering the afflicted portion – or baby – while pleading to be seen by the doctor.