The Butt: A Novel Read online

  Again, the smokeless blow: ‘Er, no – not exactly.’ Adams leaned forward, steepling long, aristocratic fingers. ‘Certainly, Mr Lincoln’s goodwill is a desirable thing, but once he’s been harmed by another, he becomes inquivoo – which is to say, inert, passive in the matter. For the desert tribes, all important aspects of their existence are governed by this principle: when to act, and when to remain still. Astande and inquivoo. If–’

  Adams was warming to his little anthropology seminar. Tom cut him short: ‘What if Mr Lincoln gets worse – sicker, I mean?’

  ‘Let’s consider that eventuality if it happens, shall we?’ Adams hadn’t taken kindly to the interruption. He tapped the papers. ‘Sign and date, here, here and here. I need to lodge these papers right away at the Interior Ministry.’

  Tom picked up the fountain pen and did as he was told. Then he handed the pen and papers back to the Consul, who took a final slug of his coffee, then unfolded himself from beneath the table. Tom accompanied the long drip-dry streak of neatness out into the parking lot, feeling slobbish and juvenile in his short pants and sandals.

  Outside the sun was jackhammering down on whitish concrete, viridian grass, bluish blacktop. A mile or so to the south, the pale blocks of Vance’s civic centre – the big hotels, municipal and corporate offices, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial State Assembly – flapped in the convection, as if they were the sails of an urban clipper, about to cast off from this protracted and alien shore. Beyond them, the green hills of the Great Dividing Range mounted, in a seemingly endless procession of lush dips and heavily forested spurs, to the horizon.

  Tom was surprised to discover that, far from driving one of the ubiquitous SUVs which anyone of consequence in Vance – Anglo, Tugganarong or native – owned, Adams had a distinctly battered old Japanese hatchback. He slung his briefcase on to the back seat of this, then took off his seersucker jacket and folded it with precise movements. Before getting into the car, he turned to Tom. ‘Where, may I ask, are your wife and children?’

  ‘I think they went downtown. We’re scheduled to fly home tomorrow, and the kids wanted to see the terrarium, and . . .’ he said, tripping into despondency, ‘. . . a whole lot of other stuff.’

  Adams ignored this remark. ‘Do you have a local cellphone, Mr Brodzinski?’

  ‘No, and my own can’t use the local networks.’

  ‘Then I suggest you, ah, rent one; you may be needing it. Also, you need to consider the possibility of a lawyer.’

  Clearly, this was Adams’s way of saying that Tom would have to stay behind, while Martha and the kids flew home. As if to emphasize this, the Consul reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a card. ‘You can reach me on my cell at any time,’ he said, ‘or leave a message on the ansaphone. I pick them up regularly.’

  Tom took the card with one hand and stretched out the other. Once again, the Consul patted it. Adams got down into the little car. It was going to be an awkward parting. Adams wound down the window, but his gaze was fixed straight ahead, to where sprinkler jets played on the hurting, emerald green of the sports field, with its three anomalous goal posts like keep-fit gibbets. He started the car.

  Hating himself for doing it, Tom leaned down and, to prevent Adams from driving away, placed his hands on the car door.

  Where has my cool gone? I’m blabbing like a fucking wimp . . . Tom railed at himself, but to the Consul he said: ‘I – I didn’t realize any of this stuff, you know. About, um, customary law. I though this was, like, a developed country – it certainly sells itself that way so it can rake in the tourist bucks.’

  The Consul withered up at Tom. It would have been a relief if he’d given another of his bite-sized lectures, pointing out that ignorance of the law was no defence, or perhaps detailing a few more ethnographic facts. Instead, Adams only withered at him for a while longer, then resolutely put the car into shift.

  ‘Call me later,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll call you.’ Then he pulled away. The tin-pot Toyota halted at the cross street for a moment, then turned right along Dundas Boulevard, towards the ridiculous white marble pyramid of the casino on the seafront.

  Tom stood for a while looking after him, then peered down at the card in his hand. It had the usual heavy weave of government service stationery. Underneath the flag, and the mysteriously armed bird of prey – what could it possibly do with those spears and lightning bolts? – was embossed WINTHROP ADAMS, HONORARY CONSUL; then an address, which Tom, despite his ignorance of Vance, recognized as being residential.

  ‘Honorary Consul’? Tom mused. Presumably, this meant that Adams wasn’t a full-time government employee, or even that he came under the auspices of the embassy in the capital down south?

  Tom was pondering this when a large red SUV swerved into the parking lot and bounced to a halt beside him. He recoiled, then stepped forward, intent on giving the reckless driver a piece of his disordered mind. But before he could, the driver’s window was reeled down to disclose a truly striking visage, while the back door of the SUV burst open, and Tom’s younger children came galumphing out.

  The eight-year-old twins, Jeremy and Lucas, leaped at Tom, pummelling his chest, and both piping at once.

  ‘We saw crocodiles, Dad!’

  ‘And snakes! Big snakes!’

  ‘One had eaten, like, a goat!’

  ‘And you could see hoofs sticking out of its tummy!’

  Tom’s daughter, Dixie, put one long leg down from the vehicle, and her father noted, with annoyance, that she had had her blonde hair done up in the discoid coif of a desert tribeswoman. Tom had seen other female Anglo tourists affecting this look, and he’d remarked to Dixie and Martha how unbecoming it was: their hair scraped up and oiled, so that their pink scalps were exposed. He would have forcefully expressed his displeasure right away, were it not for the imposing oddity of the SUV’s driver.

  He must have been ten years or so younger than Tom – a man in the full rude vigour of his mid thirties. Certainly, the copper-skinned torso framed by the SUV’s window was highly toned: every pectoral and abdominal muscle clearly defined. That the man was naked from the waist up was not that remarkable, but his Afro of tight, almost white-grey curls was striking, as was the goatee-and-moustache combination he sported, which was beautifully trimmed.

  The man also wore wrap-around reflective sunglasses, the cord of which lay on his broad shoulders. Yet, far from annulling his features, this near-clownish mask of plastic and hair only enhanced them.

  Tom couldn’t tell what ethnic group – or mixture of ethnicities – the man’s face betokened. The sharp, flat triangle of a nose and the high cheekbones suggested he was Asiatic, but his skin was too red for this. His sheer bulk might mean he was Tugganarong – or had Tugganarong blood – for the Feltham Islanders often tipped the scales at over 300 pounds. However, the island people, unlike the mainland natives, had only sparse and wispy body hair.

  Could the hair be the result of a generous measure of Anglo genes? Tom considered. Or was the man a member of some grouping previously unknown to him?

  The driver forestalled all of this by flicking a finger to his brow in casual salute, and saying a single word: ‘Hi.’

  This ‘Hi’ – lazy, apparently unconcerned – brought with it an astonishingly physical sensation of psychic intrusion. Tom felt the hairs rise on his neck – and even his arms. He began to sweat. It was as if the clown-masked man had walked in through one of his eyes, and was now crouching down in the bony cave of Tom’s skull. It was altogether uncanny, and Tom couldn’t recall ever having had such a vivid first impression of anyone before.

  Certainly not of Martha. Martha, who now emerged from the SUV herself. The way she sidled from one haunch to the other, the way she extended a slim foot to the ground, the way her long neck arched – all of it recalled to her husband the first time he had seen her, across a crowded room, at a dull party in their home town. It was this air of languorous self-containment that had attracted him twenty year
s before, and which now impinged upon him once again. For, just as the clown-masked man had marched into his head, so Martha, quietly and deliberately, seemed to be quitting it.

  ‘Tom,’ she said, coming across to him, ‘this is Mister–’

  ‘Jethro, Jethro Swai-Phillips,’ the man cut in, and reached out his hand. Tom noted that the fingers were of equal length, so that the whole appendage seemed squared off and artificial. Tom took hold of it reluctantly, thinking: how many goddamn times am I gonna have to shake hands today? It’s like these people really do have to check that a man’s not packing a gun.

  ‘Jethro saw us waiting at the taxi stand in town,’ Martha explained. ‘There were no cabs; apparently there’s some kind of a race meet on today, so he, very kindly, offered us a ride.’

  ‘It’s the least I could do for visitors to my country, yeah,’ Swai-Phillips boomed. He had the deep yet ebullient tones of a voiceover for a radio advertisement. ‘We have a saying here,’ he continued. ‘ “The wayside inn should have as many beds as there are folk under the setting sun.” ’

  ‘Is that what you do?’ Tom asked, keen to put the conversation on the ground of masculine competitiveness. ‘Are you a hotelier?’

  ‘Lord, no!’ Swai-Phillips laughed – a big rich laugh with overtones of helpless hilarity. ‘No, no, I’m a lawyer. And I hope you’ll forgive me, but your good lady here took the liberty of filling me in on your current difficulties, right?’

  Christ! How that meaningless interrogative the locals involuntarily added to the end of their sentences annoyed Tom.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he snapped at the lawyer. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  Realizing he was overreacting, yet powerless to stop himself, Tom took a twin in each hand, gripping their shoulders as if they were suitcase handles, and started back towards the front door of the Mimosa. Martha sucked her breath in through gritted teeth. However, Swai-Phillips refused to be snubbed. ‘No,’ he boomed after Tom, ‘I don’t believe it is nothing. You’re not in your own country now, Mr Brodzinski. Personal-injury cases here can be more than just financially costly, yeah?’

  Tom let go of the eight-year-olds – who were already protesting at their frogmarch – and whirled about. ‘What is this?’ he cried. ‘Are you some fucking ambulance-chaser? Is that your thing, man?’

  Martha made as if to admonish her husband, but Swai-Phillips seemed not in the least put out. ‘I mean it,’ he said coolly. ‘Not just financially costly, although good representation can be expensive.’ He extended the strange hand again, a white oblong aligned with its blocky digits. Martha took the card. ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases,’ he remarked perfunctorily. ‘In fact, few lawyers here in Vance will, and certainly not if the plaintiff has any connection to traditional people. But then, the Consul probably told you that already, right?’

  Swai-Phillips inclined his neat globe of a head towards Martha, as if he were tipping his hat to her. Then he repositioned his sunglasses.

  ‘Good day, madam,’ he said. ‘It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and, of course, that of your children.’ Then the mirror-tinted window of the SUV whined upwards, replacing Swai-Phillips’s clownish mask with a reflection of the Brodzinskis’ own stunned faces, and the big car pulled away.

  They stared after its tail lights as it bounced up on to the roadway. Martha was almost exploding with rage, but Tom felt utterly disconnected.

  How could he have known? he uselessly interrogated himself. How the hell did he know that I’d seen the Consul?

  3

  After a full – obscenely costly – hour on the phone in the apartment, Tom managed to secure three days’ postponement on their flights home. First he blustered, then he wheedled, and finally he begged the airline clerk. In the end, he was charged only $500 extra, but the changed bookings meant they would have to depart Vance at 4 a.m., then make two stopovers: the first at Faikwong, and the second at Tippurliah, which Tom had never heard of before, but which turned out to be a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific.

  ‘How can, like, international flights stop there?’ Dixie asked him when he’d come off the call, and was consulting his pocket atlas. ‘I mean, it’s like the size of a, like, fingernail or something.’

  ‘I dunno,’ her father groaned. ‘It must be ’cause there’s a military installation in that neck of the woods. At the end of World War II, they laid out strips for Superfortresses on some of these flyspecks. Anyway, we’re gonna be there for seventeen hours, so we’ll have plenty of time to find out.’

  ‘I’ve gotta, like, jones for Faikwong,’ Dixie said, changing tack; ‘everyone says the malls there are, like, totally out of this world. I wanna get some cool stuff.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Tommy Junior had lumbered into the main room of the apartment and stood gurning up at his games console, which he held in an outstretched hand. ‘This thing is way obsolete – they’ll have the latest VX90 in Faikwong. It’ll be way cheap too.’

  ‘I don’t know where you guys think the money for all this is going to come from . . .’ Tom began reasonably enough, but as he spoke his voice began to rise and rise, with little aggrieved yelps. ‘Neither of you seems to’ve sicked on to the fact that your father – that’s me, guys – is in some serious trouble, here.

  ‘Changing the flights has already cost five hundred bucks; there isn’t any money left over for your toys. I may need a lot more money than we’ve got to deal with this situation at all. I don’t even expect Tommy to understand any of this, but you, Dixie, are you as goddamn stupid as him, or are you just INCREDIBLY FUCKING SELFISH!’

  The blood drained from the teenage girl’s tanned face, leaving bone-white patches underneath her eyes. Her long neck jerked back, and the absurd disc of greased blonde hair, which sat on her head like an ugly halo, knocked against a hotel-chain abstract in an aluminium frame.

  The frame rattled on the brick wall. Dixie’s hairstyle was now all mashed up, like a bird’s nest found lying by the roots of a tree. She bit her lip. Tears lay in her eye sockets – misery bifocals. She bit her knuckles and spluttered, ‘You . . . you!’ Then she turned abruptly, mashing the halo still further, and bolted into the back bedroom, where, after a few more seconds, Tom heard her begin to wail, with all the mundane anguish of an ambulance siren.

  Tommy Junior remained standing exactly where he was, gurning at his games console.

  Later on, when the kids had cooled off in the Mimosa’s pool, the Brodzinskis walked across the stretch of park to the ’nade.

  When they’d first arrived in Vance, three weeks before, the prospect had both charmed and reassured Tom: the neatly mown grass and the oval beds of tropical shrubbery, which spread smoothly down to the ’nade, the long boardwalk that ran clear around Vance Bay, its supporting piles sunk deep in the muddy foreshore.

  Now, however, he was conscious only of what an alien imposition this all was: the flowers were too lurid and fleshy, the heavily irrigated grass too green. As for the ’nade, while the weathered wood used to build it was meant to make the serpentine structure harmonize with its surroundings, this effect was ruined by the regularly spaced ‘information points’ – each with its perspex rain hood, each blazoned with a stentorian NO SMOKING sign, complete with obligatory list of grave penalties.

  Alongside the ’nade, there was a beautifully equipped playground. Bright, primary-coloured climbing frames, see-saws and swings stood in safety pits of fine white sand. There was even a water play area, where concealed jets created an artificial stream. Yet, the high-flown municipal pride in inclusiveness, which had even produced a swing for wheelchair-bound children, now seemed strange to Tom, set beside the brackish ooze of the bay, in which wallowed the occasional salt-water crocodile or prehistoric-looking bird.

  As they ate their burgers and fries on one of the trestle tables by the café, Martha pointed out what Tom had known only too well – even as he’d wheedled the airline clerk – yet hadn’t dared to acknowledge
to himself. ‘There are only two alternatives, Tom,’ she began.

  And he, forlornly, tried to stop her, with a ‘Perhaps we should discuss this in private. . . ?’

  Which she waved away with ‘The kids may as well hear it right now. It’s a valuable lesson for them’ – she turned to include all the children in the homily – ‘about how all our actions have consequences. Your daddy has signed a bond, see, and that bond is his word, because he’s an honest man; and because he’s given his word, he’ll have to stay here for a few more days, so he can sort out this business with Mr Lincoln, the man he injured.

  ‘OK. But if we want to get home in time for you guys to start school, and me to start work’ – here, Martha darted a particularly sharp look at Tom, who, she maintained, never accorded her career the same importance that he attached to his own – ‘then we’ll have to go without him. See’ – she turned to Tom again – ‘wasn’t that easy?’

  Jeremy squeezed a French fry between his grubby fingers, until it ejaculated white pulp on to his ketchup-smeared paper plate.

  ‘What’s a bond?’ he said.

  On leaving his family, Tom went straight to the CellPoint store that he’d spotted the day before. It was half a mile along Dundas Boulevard, the wide straight avenue that ran from the terracotta block of the Mimosa into the downtown area of Vance.

  The CellPoint store, with its plate-glass window plastered with blue and orange decals, and its modular plastic stands that held the gleaming clam shells of the cellphones, was deeply comforting to Tom. There was an outlet exactly like it in the mall near their home town of Milford.

  The CellPoint store spoke to him of efficient global communications and, more importantly, of what was being communicated: namely, certain standards of human decency and best business practice.

  As Tom stepped inside, the air con’ separated his damp shirt from his back. The workaday formalities of renting a phone were also comforting, yet Tom couldn’t stop himself from examining the sales clerks with new and warier eyes.