by Self, Will
‘Not acting – y’know, that can reveal a lot concerning a bloke’s intentions. After her miscarriage, when Martha came to visit us in Liège, then, when she came back, and a few months later you guys adopted Tommy Junior, well, you didn’t act: you never asked the questions a conscientious man – a man with good intentions – would’ve asked, yeah?’
It was the SUV – that was the difference. It was gone. Tom scrutinized the patch of dirt where the little vehicle had been standing only half an hour before. Why were there no tyre tracks to show that it had been driven away?
‘But you’re not a conscientious man, are you Tom? You’re the kinduv man who feasts his eyes on a young black girl’s tits, then wants to screw his wife with the hard-on, aren’t cha?’
There was something where the SUV had been, and bizarrely it was car shaped. Ignoring Gloria, Tom moved towards it. He felt a perverse affection for the SUV, whatever its design weaknesses; it had managed to carry him all this way.
‘You’re the kinduv man who pays no attention to a woman at all unless she’s a sexual-bloody-prospect.’ The ghastly crow came pecking after him. ‘Winthrop’s Handrey women friends? They’re only fuck-buddies, fat gals beneath your contempt – same goes for my cousin Betsy, who you never so much as said “hi” to. Daphne Hufferman saves your life, but she has to ride in the bloody back like a kid.’
The object that had replaced the SUV was a car; or, rather, it was a 1:10 scale model of one. Tom squatted down and picked up the Gandaro spirit wagon. He ran his hand over the artfully bent and hammered sides of the tiny MPV, marvelling again at the skill with which it had been soldered together out of tin cans.
Glancing up, Tom saw that Prentice was as intrigued by the spirit wagon as he was; although, of course, Prentice could have no idea what an astonishing coincidence it was to find it here, thousands of miles from where Tom had first seen the cult object.
‘I wonder what you think Atalaya Intwennyfortee feels about her husband – a respected elder of this community – being so viciously bloody assaulted, yeah? Then lying for all these weeks on the brink of bloody death? You sure as hell don’t know, Tom, ’cause you’ve never once taken the time to talk to her, despite having big mobs of bloody chances, right?’ I’m spotting, Tom . . . I’m spotting . . .
Tom set the spirit wagon down on the wall next to Prentice, who, somehow managing to summon his famed national reserve, gave him a look that implied – at one and the same time – that he too was withering under Gloria’s onslaught, while never the less being too polite to have heard a single word of it. He touched his waxy finger to the flying vee of the spirit wagon’s spoiler.
‘It’s bloody incredible how you’ve behaved since you flew in, Tom, when all Martha was ever trying to do was show the kid his roots, and get you to face up to your bloody responsibilities as his father!’
This penetrated – and Prentice flinched as if it had been aimed at him. Tom thought: bloody this, bloody that, bloody every-bloody-thing. I’m spotting, Tom . . . I’m spotting . . .and it’s your fault.
He rounded on his Jesuitical tormentor. ‘Are you telling me’ – Tom was amazed by the control he was exhibiting; he must still be astande – ‘that I, we – the whole damn family – weren’t here for a vacation?’
Squolly was sitting in the deliciously air-conditioned interview room. Tom was opposite him, sipping a soda, the bubbles fizzing on his culpable tongue. Attached to the shiny peak of the squat Tugganarong’s complicated cap was a Tommy Junior mask. It fitted perfectly.
But Gloria refused to be interviewed. ‘What did Erich say to you at lunch, Tom? You Anglos are always the bloody same; you’re as happy as a pig in shit – and this is shit, Tom, believe it – so long as there’s an ending to the sorry bloody tale. Well, I’m happy to provide you with one, Tom, and like I said, I’m happy to be your wife too. You wanna know why? Aw, I’ll save you the bloody bother of asking, yeah? It’s ’cause, exactly like Martha, I’m gonna leave you.’
Tom was still righteously empowered, yet finding it hard work to maintain what he knew to be the correct perspective. Instead of looking out through his own eyes, he kept seeing the three of them from off to one side and slightly above.
It was a stagy scene: the two men, identically costumed in jeans, bush shirts and elastic-sided boots, being berated by the one-woman Greek chorus. What was needed, Tom thought, was an entrance by another character, otherwise this could go on for ever, strophe and antistrophe, until the audience got bored and went home.
Providentially, Von Sasser materialized. The anthropologist stepped out from behind the derelict Technical College. He had his bunched-up scrubs stuffed under one of his arms, while in his free hand he held Tom’s roach motel. Coming up to them he said: ‘Some of the kids have taken that SUV of yours off to be cleaned. They found this wedged under one of the seats – yours, is it?’ He held the roach motel out to Tom, who took it, stuttering, ‘Y – yes, it is.’
‘Walk with me, Tom,’ Von Sasser said, draping his bony arm over Tom’s shoulder. ‘There’s some stuff we need to talk about, yeah.’
Apart from the ‘yeah’, it was exactly the same phrase that Tom’s own father had used when he wanted to have a man-to-man chat with his son. Momentarily gulled into thinking himself back with Mitch Brodzinski, swishing through the fall leaves that lay deep on the farm track out to Hermansburg, Tom went respectfully along.
Von Sasser unhitched the gate to the auraca paddock and guided him through. They were halfway across before the older man began to speak. ‘I’ve been hacking away since 8 a.m., and I can tellya, I’m tuckered out. Still, at the end of a stressful day in the oppo theatre, a stroll out here never fails to relax me. ’Course, it’s too bloody far to go the whole way, but from the top of this rise we’ll be able to see Gethsemane Springs in the distance.’
The familiar, leaden inanition was creeping up Tom’s legs: his arteries were sucking up sand, his veins were choking with dust. So he said nothing, concentrating only on forcing one clod of a foot in front of the other.
‘The mobs way out in the desert – the Aval, the Inssessitti, the Entreati – even some of the hill mobs and the feral Tuggies squatting on the north-west coast – they all send their cases down to me, here in Ralladayo.’ Von Sasser talked as he walked, with an easy, loping rhythm.
‘We-ell, some of ’em are A-1 bad fellers – murderers, kiddie-fiddlers, rapists – you name it. Others, we-ell.’ He laughed shortly. ‘I s’pose in your part of the world people’d say they were minor offenders – but that’s not how we see things here. You’ve gotta remember, right, for the Tayswengo – for me too – nothing happens by accident.’
On they went up the hill. They reached the next fence, and Von Sasser pulled the top wire up so that Tom could drag himself beneath it. The roach motel was a deadweight, its sharp corners cutting into his hand. The grass had straggled away, and, as they went on, Tom’s footfalls scraped the bare earth. The sun slammed into his head – he regretted having left his hat behind.
‘Ho-hum,’ Von Sasser sighed. ‘I’ve gotta say, Tom, the primary purpose of this procedure was never intended to be behaviour modification, right. It was more or less by chance that we found out how well it worked.’
‘So . . . you – you, like, castrate them?’ Tom managed to ask. And once the words were out, they became incontrovertible: this was where the makkata’s blade had been tending, this was why Prentice’s white thigh had remained unmarked.
But Von Sasser was consumed by merriment. He swept off his odd little Tyrolean hat and beat it against his leather-clad thigh.
‘Ha, ha, ha! Oh, no. No – no. What the hell would we want to cut their balls off for? We’re not bloody vets, right. Papa didn’t want big mobs of bloody eunuchs roaming the desert.’
‘But I thought . . . Prentice – the kids–?’
‘Didn’t you listen to what I said last night?’ Von Sasser admonished. ‘Papa invented these people’s culture himself, ex nihilo – fr
om bloody nothing. He knew what they needed: mystics, firebrands, charismatic makkatas who’d take the Anglos by the bloody neck and shake ’em till their brains rattled!’
They reached the top of the rise, and Von Sasser urged Tom down on to a flat rock. He didn’t take much persuasion. The sun was plunging, and Tom’s remaining energy reserves were falling with it. Straight ahead there was a vertical escarpment parted by a wide gorge; through this could be seen the drained sea bed of the desert floor, a tired expanse of tide-ground hills and wave-scoured depressions.
The anthropologist got out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘ ’Course,’ he meditated, ‘I don’t mean that literally, but the trouble with Anglo civilization is that it’s a left-brain business, all to do with order, systematization, push-button-bloody-A. Papa understood this, as well as knowing enough anatomy – and anthropology – to see the solution. He became the first neuro-anthropologist the world has ever seen, and I’ – he inflated with pride – ‘am the bloody second.’ He paused to light his pipe, his limbs twisting into a protective cage for the wavering flame.
‘The corpus callosum – that’s the bloody enemy, Tom, it’s a tough little bugger.’ He swished his pipe stem in the gloom, slicing grey matter. ‘Information-bloody-superhighway of the human brain, that’s what it is, yeah. Same as the internet, the corpus callosum fuses together two hemispheres, the right and the left. Movement, speech, sensation, visual recognition – they dominate, yeah, they’re the Anglos of the brain. But over on the right, well, that’s where dreams are, that’s where the spirits find their voice, and that’s where humans have the imagination to actually hear what they’re bloody saying!
‘Look.’ The neuro-anthropologist put an avuncular hand on Tom’s leg. ‘I’ll grant you, we may’ve got our act together now, but quite a few of the early oppos . . .’ The boy’s hair with its scent of warm hay. The dreadful scar seaming the back of his sweet, small head. ‘But even these, er, failures, have turned out to be pretty useful. Obviously, with better equipment – scanners, lasers, that kinda thing – it’d be a whole heap easier, yeah.’ It wasn’t as if he was stupid – he was in the same grade as other kids his age, he was just a bit . . . cut off. ‘We either go straight down through the longitudinal fissure . . .’ The white trough of a scar that bisected the old wino’s grizzled head from nape to crown. ‘. . . or angle our way in between the parietal lobe and the parieto-occipital salens. ’Course, wherever we make the incision, we stretch and suture the scalp so the scar won’t be below the hairline.’ Adams, was bent over the three-panelled mirror on the vanity table, examining the back of his head. ‘The important thing to hold on to, Tom’ – for once Von Sasser had a kindly twinkle in his deep-set eyes – ‘is this: it isn’t painful; it doesn’t hurt.’
The foody perfume of pipe smoke braided with the clean-smelling desert breeze; the sunset, as ever, was spectacular: a ruddy blush rushing up the face of the sky. Tom found his external voice. ‘B – but a little kid, a baby?’
‘Like I say, mate, there were some balls-ups, but b’lieve me, by far the majority of those early oppos were done on patients that already had some, y’know, neuroses – or even actual brain damage. It wasn’t like we were messing with something in working order, right.’
Tom, dodging dream fists, levering the weight off his chest, searched for the sympathy he knew he didn’t have. Yet if only he could find it, he was sure the appropriate outrage would be there too.
‘He – Tommy, my, uh, son. Y’know he isn’t . . .’ He dredged up one of Martha’s weary pronouncements: ‘Adequately socialized.’
Von Sasser snorted. ‘Tell me about it, Tom. Those boys up in the north aren’t adequately-bloody-socialized either! Some of ’em can be pretty vicious – we aren’t talking clean-kills here, yeah. There’s rape – torture even. Lissen, I’m not saying I condone such behaviour, but you’ve gotta offset it against the positive impact the insurgency has on the left-brain hegemony: their infrastructure, mines, their financial-bloody-services, their drinks industry, and especially the Tuggy foot soldiers who do the Anglos’ dirty work for ’em.
‘Thing is’ – the neuro-anthropologist brought his sharp knees up under his sharper chin, a surprisingly adolescent posture for a middle-aged man – ‘say they don’t, I dunno, function that well, at the very least they can advance the desertification programme. I mean, y’don’t haveta be a makkata to string a length of chain between a couple of utes, now do you?’
Despite the impression that he and Von Sasser were speaking wildly at cross purposes, Tom persisted: ‘If – if you can’t be, uh, can’t know, definitely, what the results are gonna be, then how does this, like, operation, work to, y’know, modify behaviour? I mean, it seems to me that in this case, uh, castration might be, I dunno, more effective.’
Von Sasser sighed, a long exhalation of waste-compassion: ‘Ye-es, it’s true, the human brain is – viewed with the Western medicalized paradigm – a complex system; it seems always to be striving to reach homeostasis. Even with all connection between them severed, left-brain functions can be reestablished on the right, and vice versa. Still, these are only minor drawbacks, while the benefits can be astonishing, and anyway, when it comes to a case such as this, I don’t think castration is a good comparison at all, yeah. I mean, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? Whereas you can try thinking of the oppo – and I suggest you do – as a reward.’
‘A reward?’
‘You’ve got it: a reward, a reparation payment that I can help you to give, if you help me.’
‘Me? In the, uh, oppo?’ A cut – a nick even – the very image of scarlet pulsing from capillaries made Tom gag. ‘H – how? How the hell can I help?’
‘Lissen.’ Von Sasser smiled at him again. ‘What’s your idiom . . .’ He thought for a second. ‘That’s it: “sucks”. Coercion, Tom, sucks in my view, right. I mean, I could make you, but I’m certain once you get to considering all the possible benefits – the goodwill of my brother, Hippolyte, Atalaya and the Intwennyfortee mob’s as well – you’ll come round to the idea of volunteering, yeah.’
And Tom, who no longer had any power to resist this outrageous proposition, understood that, by default, he had already come round and round again, and round once more, until he was all dried out, the last desiccated guest in the roach motel.
‘Schweinsaxe?’ Von Sasser asked Adams, holding up a pair of serving tongs with a whole pig’s trotter wedged in them.
‘Thanks, Erich,’ the Consul replied. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’
Von Sasser deposited the truncated foot on a plastic bowl, then ladled thick brown gravy on top. The Tayswengo waitresses in their starch-stiff dirndls were still loitering by the kitchen door, but this evening the neuro-anthropologist had elected to serve the food himself.
Tom supposed this was partly to promote an atmosphere of cosy domesticity, but also because – with some sensitivity – Von Sasser didn’t want to draw attention to Prentice. After all, if the Tayswengo had refused to serve him, he might have made a scene. At the very least, it would’ve looked as if a ‘Nil by mouth’ sign had been hung from his scrawny neck. In the event, when it was his turn, Von Sasser simply passed over Prentice in silence, and dished up for the next person at the table.
When Tom’s turn came, Von Sasser neglected him as well. For a moment, Tom thought to protest, but then his volunteer status came back to him, and he appreciated that a full stomach wasn’t something he wanted to have on his first outing to an operating room.
Prentice wasn’t remotely discomfited by his fast. He helped himself to the bottle of Hock, and sat smoking and chatting, more animated than he had been at any time since his arrival at Ralladayo. He discussed, quite openly, the two mixed-race children he had ‘fathered’: one in the Tontines, and one who had recently been transferred here, to the orphanage.
Was it only Tom who could see the parentheses around ‘fathered’? It can’t be, he thought, because without them Prentice’s remarks were psychopathic
ally unabashed. ‘I’ve made a decision,’ he was now telling Gloria. ‘No matter what the consequences are for my marriage, I’m going to tell my lady wife the entire truth.’
Gloria nodded sympathetically, then said, ‘That’s good, Brian.’
‘I’ve made the first reparations to two of the ladies involved, so I’ve got to jolly well do right by the third as well.’
‘That’s excellent, Brian.’
‘Yes, honesty is the best policy and all that sort of thing. I – I’m not terribly articulate, you know, but it did something to me – seeing the kiddies. I’ve never thought of myself as a fatherly sort of chap, but it stirred me up, and I want to – if I’m allowed, that is – try and, sort of, look after them.’
It stretched the bounds of Tom’s credulity that Gloria Swai-Phillips – who had cared for the results of Prentice’s paedophilia – could sit there encouraging this grotesque fantasizing. Yet he found himself sitting and listening to it, and, perhaps by his very passivity alone, encouraging him as well.
Walking back to the settlement, Tom had been so unsteady on his feet that Von Sasser had to hold him up. Never the less, with his head already swimming, Tom still couldn’t prevent himself from taking shots of schnapps from the bottle that had thoughtfully been left beside his empty plate. The oily aftertaste of the spirit was curiously moreish.
With no food of his own to eat, Tom was at leisure to examine each of his dining companions in turn, and analyse what they were saying with the benefit of his new background knowledge. With his, ah . . . harkening to his master’s inner voice, and his slavish espousal of Von Sasser’s made-up folkways, there was no doubt that Adams had had the ‘oppo’. Tom deduced that Vishtar Loman must have had it too. Gloria? No – she didn’t need it, she was one of life’s self-appointed Head Girl scouts, ever ready to boss a troop, whether of baboons or bankers. If her corpus callosum had been cut, Tom thought ruefully, the only spirit voices Gloria would hear would be those of sullen inner-children refusing to respond to her remorseless questioning.