The Butt: A Novel Read online

Down here, at the rougher end of Vance, there were few Anglo faces to be seen on the streets. Across the road from the Experience, there was a bar frequented by natives, where surly drunks squatted all day and evening, before, in the small hours, beginning noisily incompetent fights.

  Swai-Phillips had been right, though: the monthly rate for Tom’s apartment was nugatory; a fact explained by the manager, who reminded him that the tourist season was ending. Soon, all the tanned kids would shoulder their packs and flip-flop halfway across the world back to college.

  Tom felt ambivalent about this. The college kids were infuriating, revving the engines of their Campervans at all hours of the night, touristic vehicles that were incongruously pitted with bullet holes.

  Beardless blond giants cornered Tom in the dank corridors of the hostel and spun him yarns of their adventures in the interior. Their girlfriends loitered near by, snickering, chewing gum, rearranging the straps of their bikinis to expose more of themselves.

  Still, once the kids had finally gone, Tom would be all alone. He felt an aching nostalgia for the very idea of air travel, as if the computer-targeted silvery fuselages belonged to a bygone era. Here he was grounded: that most pitiful of things, a left-behind tourist. In his pitiful suitcase were his pitiful effects: half-squeezed tubes of sun cream, trunks with a big word written across them, airport novels that would never go through an airport again, a digital camera loaded with pin-prick-sharp images of ghostly happiness.

  The sheet of paper listing his lawyer’s impositions was stuck to the scabrous door of the fridge by a magnet in the squashed L-shape of the great desertified island-continent itself.

  Each day now the humidity was building and building towards the monsoon. Most days, it took Tom until noon to rouse himself, pull on some clothes and venture out into the hot sponge of Vance. Standing on the sidewalk, he looked up at enormous cumulo-nimbus formations coasting in from the ocean; their bulbous white peaks and horizontal grey bases mirrored the superstructures and hulls of the cruise ships out in the bay – vessels that were readying themselves to depart, scooting out from beneath the gathering storm and heading for safer waters, busier cities, better shopping.

  At the quayside Tom took the roach motel out of the plastic bag. He opened the little perspex door, and the roaches, their feelers probing liberty, fell end over end into the scummy water. The waves washing against the concrete gathered their bodies into an agitated raft. Tom turned and scuttled off in the direction of the nearest mall.

  Here he had doughnuts for breakfast in a coffee shop, while scanning the paper. The local news he ignored, preferring to peer the wrong way down a 15,000-mile-long telescope, at events diminished out of all significance.

  After a few days of this, Tom felt himself sinking into swampy inertia. It was now so humid in Vance that the atmosphere seemed as thick and moist as a hot towel; it was a relief when his lawyer called and summoned Tom to his office.

  Swai-Phillips’s office was in the Metro-Center, the 22-storey block that towered over Vance’s relatively low-rise business district. Ushered in by a furtive, brown-skinned man, who introduced himself as Abdul, the lawyer’s clerk, Tom discovered Swai-Phillips with his bare feet up on his desk, his sunglasses clamped on and his impenetrable gaze levelled at the big windows along the far wall. Tom assumed that, like the rest of Vance’s dwindling population, he was mesmerized by the anticipation of the rains.

  Swai-Phillips was also smoking a large loosely rolled cigar, the outer leaf of which was partially detached. As Tom watched, appalled, he dabbed spittle on to a finger, then applied it to the vegetative glans.

  There must have been eight notices detailing Vance’s anti-smoking ordinances between the elevator doors and the frosted ones of the lawyer’s suite. Yet, when Tom pointed this out, Swai-Phillips only belched smoke and laughter. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! They don’t apply in here; this is a home office, yeah, special zoning.’

  ‘But what about Abdul?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Him? That feller . . .’ Swai-Phillips grinned wolfishly. ‘He’s my son, kind of, right.’

  Tom asked about the building: why was it so much higher than all the rest? This was an earthquake zone, wasn’t it?

  The lawyer did his Father Christmas shtick again. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! You may well ask – not only is this an earthquake zone, this building is slap on the crack, man. I’ve been sitting here one time, yeah, and seen the streets rucking up like a rug that’s been kicked! I tellya why it’s so high – the Metro-Center, it’s ’cause the pols in this town are so damn low, that’s why!’

  Tom felt shaky and sat down abruptly on a low chair.

  ‘I would ask if my cigar bothered you,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ‘but why bother, I know the answer.’

  Was it mere rudeness or sheer arrogance on the lawyer’s part? Tom shook his head, uncomprehending. The thick coils of smoke lay so heavily on the carpeted deck of the office that when Swai-Phillips’s secretary came in with a cup of coffee for Tom, she appeared tangled up in its bluey-grey hanks.

  While the lawyer continued to puff on the monstrous stogie, it dawned on Tom that his own alternations between belligerence and passivity in the face of this whole grotesque situation could be entirely accounted for by the effects of nicotine withdrawal. That’s why he’d been so emotionally labile: whining, inveigling, then inveighing. That’s why his encounters – with Adams, Swai-Phillips, even the clerk in the cellphone store – had the vibrant, darkly hilarious character of hallucinations. That’s why his judgement had been so clouded: for, instead of the smoke venting from Tom at regular intervals, it was backing up inside his head, getting inside his eyes.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter a damn, right,’ Swai-Phillips hectored him, ‘if you were to take up smoking again, so far as the traditional people are concerned. Engwegge – that’s the native tobacco – is used so widely here. Shee-it, they don’t only smoke the stuff, they chew it, sniff it, rub it on their gums. They even mix it up into enemas and squirt it up their black arses, right. No, it isn’t the Intwennyfortee mob you need to worry about on that score.’

  He took his feet off the desk and, dropping the cigar in an ashtray, adopted a more lawyerly air. ‘However, should we go to a full trial – which I hope won’t happen – we’ll more than likely be facing a majority Anglo jury; the defence has no rights to veto jurors here; and, as you’ve probably realized, the whole anti-smoking drive is, at root, racially motivated. The Anglos have a lot of things stuffed up their arses, but engwegge ain’t one of them, yeah.

  ‘So, if you don’t want to risk smoking, yeah, you can always chew a few engwegge leaf-tips. I’ve gotta batch of the finest here.’ The lawyer opened a desk drawer and slung a packet made from a banana leaf on to the blotter. It lay there: grossly organic on the workaday surface.

  Tom grimaced. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Jethro,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll take a rain check.’

  ‘Please yourself.’ The lawyer sounded miffed. ‘This ain’t just a fiery little treat – it’s ritual stuff. My old feller sends them from over there. The tips are dew-picked, then fire-baked. The makkatas of my dad’s mob chew quids as big as tennis balls; then . . . past, present, future’ – he dug his spade-like hands into the ineluctable modality of his own engwegge trance – ‘they can see ’em all at once. Still’ – the lawyer hunched forward and quit desert mysticism for the prosaic office – ‘none of that need concern you – not yet, yeah. I want you to come up to my place tomorrow; there’s a bloke you need to see, right.’

  Tom grunted non-committally. He looked at the bland wall: a print of a nineteenth-century hunting scene hung beside a magnetic year planner. The red-jacketed huntsmen were on horseback, racing after a flock of moai, the giant indigenous flightless birds.

  ‘What’re you gonna do when you leave here?’ Swai-Phillips barked.

  ‘I – I hadn’t thought . . .’

  ‘You should go over to the hospital and see Lincoln,’ the lawyer commanded. ‘You may not be able to afte
r tomorrow, yeah.’

  When Tom entered the room, he found Lincoln reading a golfing magazine. There was no sign of Atalaya or her desert sorority. An Anglo nurse squeaked hither and thither on the shiny floor, changing the old man’s saline drip with studious efficiency.

  ‘Lissen,’ Lincoln said, putting his reading material aside and taking Tom’s hand in his own. ‘You must’ve maxed out your credit card getting me in here – and there was no need – my insurance’ll cover it.’

  ‘I thought, I mean – given that you’re a Tayswengo, it’d be part of the payback.’

  The old man laughed. He certainly looked frail, and there was a thick dressing taped to his now shorn head, but his hand continued to gently pressure Tom’s, and his eyes twinkled with amused affection. ‘I’m not Tayswengo,’ Lincoln said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I love Atalaya, she and me . . . well.’ He shook his head on the snowy pillow. ‘We’re soul mates . . . I wish, I wish I’d met her twenty years ago . . .’

  Except for the fact that she’d then have been minus-two, Tom thought – then checked himself, for the old man was being so sweet, he felt craven for not having come to see him before.

  He cleared his throat and indicated the supermarket bag he’d put on the bedside cabinet. ‘I brought some fruit, magazines and candy. I got a selection, ’cause I don’t know what you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Lincoln smiled but made no move to look in the bag. ‘Don’t get me off the point, young man, this is important. You probably think – or you’ve been told by that tight-ass Adams – if you lay out for my medical bills, it’ll play well with the Intwennyfortee mob, but it ain’t that way at all . . .’ He tailed off, and Tom realized that even this short speech had exhausted Lincoln.

  He made to disengage his hand from the old man’s, while muttering, ‘I don’t want to tire you out–’

  But Lincoln gripped Tom’s hand tighter. ‘I’m inquivoo, see, nothing I say or do counts for any damn thing any more. Thing is’ – he looked at the door through which the nurse had exited, as if he suspected she might be eavesdropping – ‘you’re nothing until you’ve had the cut.’ His hand tightened still more, his voice grated up the scale. ‘The cut, Tommy boy, the cut – you gotta have it! Now, Tommy boy, now!’

  Lincoln’s insistence on ‘the cut’ – whatever that might be – jarred Tom, as did his bad-mouthing Adams. On leaving the hospital, he finally followed Martha’s advice and called the embassy, which was in Capital City, 5,000 miles to the south, across the desert heart of the crumpled island-continent.

  After holding and holding again, being transferred from this clerical assistant to that secretary, he finally spoke to a junior attaché. To begin with the woman’s chirpy tone was as redolent of home as a ball-game commentary. ‘Uh-huh, sure, I see,’ she interjected as Tom explained his predicament. He tried not to sound as if he had misgivings concerning the Honorary Consul, but the attaché still picked them up. ‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ she sighed. ‘I appreciate that you’re in a pretty lousy situation, but there’s not a lot we can do from way down here. Adams is the man on the spot, and he has the full support of the Ambassador. He’s sent us a report, and he’s confident it can be settled without any jail time.

  ‘If I were you, Mr Brodzinski, I’d go with him on this one. Should anything left-field emerge from the prelim’ hearing, either someone from my department will come up or, if the judge permits it, you can fly down here for a meeting.

  ‘One thing’s for sure, sir, and that’s our mission: we never, ever, leave our citizens out in the cold. Citizenship is a sacred bond for us – you should appreciate that. No matter what one of our own is accused of, he remains exactly that: one of our own.’

  Out in the cold. What a ridiculous expression, Tom thought, as the cellphone slipped between his sweaty fingers.

  But then, as Tom tried to convey the absurdity of a mere accident being treated as a crime, the attaché’s manner changed abruptly, her tone becoming clipped. ‘See here,’ she said. ‘I’m not in a position either to judge your intentions or even to know exactly what it is you did. One thing I do know is that Mr Lincoln is an elderly man, and a very sick one. Another thing I know for a fact is that cigarette smoking is both personally and publically injurious–’

  ‘I was giving up!’ Tom spat into the cell. ‘It was my last goddamn cigarette!’

  ‘I’m going to have to stop you right there, Mr Brodzin-ski.’ The attaché’s prissiness was shot through with menacing self-righteousness. ‘Embassy staff have the right to undertake our work free from the threat of physical violence or verbal intimidation. I’m going to have to terminate this call immediately, as a direct result of your speech acts. I suggest you cool off and pay a little more attention to your own responsibilities, rather than seeking more victims for your dangerous hostility.’

  Later, sitting on his corpse of a bed at the Entreati, it occurred to to Tom that this conversation had been a sickening replay of the butt-flick itself: an unthinking ejaculation into the attaché’s ear, followed by a massive overreaction.

  Musing in this way brought Tom Brodzinski closer to the essence of what had happened to him. Standing on the balcony of the Mimosa, convincing himself that this would be the last acrid dug he’d ever suck, Tom hadn’t been considering his, his family’s or indeed anyone else’s health; he hadn’t plotted the steeply rising curve of medical expenditure against the slowly declining one of chronic disease. No.

  Tom now realized, with mounting horror, that his carelessly discarded cigarette butt had flown on its – perhaps fatal – trajectory powered by one fuel alone: a tank of combustible pride. He was Doing the Right Thing – and for that alone should be accorded the uttermost respect.

  So the butt had described its parabola and hit its target, creating a minor entry wound, a tiny blister. But oh, the exit wound! The massive, gaping and bloody exit wound, through which the butt had sped on, fragmenting into scores of smaller butts, which were now hitting his children, his wife, and causing terrible collateral damage.

  Tom ate at the café on the ’nade. It was empty, and they served him an underdone burger, still frozen at its core. Too cowed to complain, he nibbled its edges. The waiter stood at the sixteen-metre line smoking and looking out to sea: the last of the cruise ships was sinking into the horizon, and above its fo’c’sle reared a mile-high genie of gibbous thunder cloud, struggling to escape from the tropical night.

  In that night, Tom dreamed he was staying in the roach motel. It was fully booked, and the other guests, who wore zooty batik T-shirts and tinted shades, tickled him mercilessly with their antennae. It was a relief when the warder of this plastic prison bent down to pick it up and empty them all into the sea. Tumbling end over end, Tom looked up to the quayside and saw the giant Swai-Phillips, his grey Afro coruscating like the corona of the eclipsed sun around his dark impassive face.

  * * *

  The lawyer’s house was further out of Vance than the Honorary Consul’s, at the top of the Great Dividing Range’s first foothills. As the cab laboured up the hairpin bends of the single-track road, Tom was confronted first by walls of impenetrable shrubbery, then by vistas of the city below growing smaller and smaller, reduced from its dirty, confused status as a place of human habitation to a mere scattering of pristine white cubes beside the aquamarine bay.

  When the cab eventually stopped, so did the road. The blacktop looped through the scrub and petered out in deep ruts of reddish dust. Struggling to turn his vehicle, the cabbie, an obese Tugganarong, grunted, ‘This is it.’

  And when Tom queried the location, saying, ‘Are you sure?’, the man laughed increduously. ‘’Caws I’m fuggin sure. Phillips ’ouse bin ’ere longest time. Longer than bloody Vance, yeah.’

  Tom watched as the cab bounced back on to the road and disappeared down the hill. There was a mailbox nailed high up on a tree trunk, and beyond this a path led into the indecipherable bush – so many plants and trees Tom didn’t comprehend, their myriad leaf
y foreign tongues still further complicated by parasitic mosses and squiggling creepers.

  Reluctantly, Tom summoned himself and began to pick his way into the jungle. It was oppressively still – not a breath of wind. The sun’s rays struck down through the foliage, spearing the back of his neck. His sandals slithered through leaf fall and caught on tree roots. He tried not to think about the seven species of venomous snake, or the three kinds of venomous spider.

  Tom came upon a kennel. Two of the sharp-muzzled, brindled, native dogs lay asleep in it. He crept past. Next, the lawyer’s Landcruiser emerged from the greenery, parked on an apron at the end of a metalled drive.

  The dogs must have been roused despite Tom’s wary tread, because there was an anguish of yelps and the crash of heavy paws through the undergrowth. Tom took flight along the path, staggering and tripping, until he was propelled into the full glare of noon.

  He found himself by a fence of corrugated-iron sheets, beyond which spread a large compound that occupied the summit of the hill. He was on the point of throwing himself over this – for he could see no other means of access – when the yelps were throttled off. Turning, Tom saw the big dog, its muzzle dashed with saliva, dancing frantically on its hind legs: it had reached the end of its long chain.

  Tom laughed callously, then took his time discovering the stile and mounting it, looking back with each step in order to taunt the watchdog still more.

  On the far side he expected to meet the lawyer, or one of his retainers, but there was no one, only cracked earth, and scattered across it bits of scaffolding, a cement mixer, piles of cinder-blocks and mounds of hardened mortar. Towards the far side of the compound, projecting out where the hill fell away, there was a concrete platform upon which a few negligent courses of bricks had been laid. An indication, Tom thought, of where a house might be sited if anyone – in this stifling heat – could be bothered to build one.

  Tom walked across and stood on the platform. He checked his cell. There was a signal – if Swai-Phillips didn’t appear, he’d call him. Then he heard a skittering noise, as of a lizard’s flit, and, peering over the edge of the platform, saw that he was not alone.