The Butt: A Novel Read online

  Ten feet below, in the thin wedge of shadow at the base of the platform, sat a very tall, matt-black man. Even at a glance, Tom could see that he was extremely thin, his long thighs no thicker than his calves. All the man’s limbs were tucked in, so that he resembled a collapsed umbrella.

  Tom slithered down the friable earth of the hillside. Up close the man was still more outlandish. He sported only a dirty leather breechclout, which called to mind Adams’s gardening apron. Apart from three long tufts of hair above either pendulous ear, his head was shaven; it was like a fifth, etiolated limb, the face as dimpled as an elbow, the almond eyes glazed. A swelling in the man’s cheek was the only part of him which moved, revolving slowly. Tom could almost taste the bitter sloosh of the engwegge, and he understood that this must be the makkata.

  Not wanting to disrupt the sorceror’s trance – it might be prejudicial – Tom turned away. Yet, reluctant to leave, he sat down a few feet away on a tree stump. Into the shimmering oppression of the tropical noon came the rhythmic slurping sound of the makkata’s mastication. Tom wondered if he was deep in a vision of the future and, if so, whether he could see Swai-Phillips’s new house, its terrace strewn with loungers tenanted by the lawyer’s influential friends? Was the makkata watching while topless party girls dove into the pool, their breasts swaying as they went off the springboard? But no – a springboard was out of the question. Tom hadn’t seen one in years, and here in Vance – of all places – such a dangerous pleasure would surely be illegal.

  Swai-Phillips, as was his gift, popped up from nowhere. One instant he wasn’t there – the next he was, looking frowsty and unshaven, in dirty-white jeans hacked off at the knee and nothing else. There were small balls of greying hair on his chest, Tom noted, each one a mini-Afro. Had he forgotten to shave this as well?

  Swai-Phillips was standing some yards down the hill, beckoning and calling to someone up on the platform. ‘C’mon, Prentice!’ he cried. ‘Get your sorry white arse down here, yeah!’

  Earth and pebbles rattled. Swai-Phillips pushed up his sunglasses and winked at Tom with his bad eye. Tom got up from his stump and turned to see an Anglo of about his own age making his way, very unsteadily, down the slope.

  The man had a preposterous coif: the top of his head was completely bald, while there was brown hair not only at the sides but also on his forehead. This fringe wasn’t a few straggly threads that he’d combed over; rather, it appeared to have been left behind when the rest of his hair retreated.

  The Anglo came right up to Tom with a waddling gait – he walked like a fat man, even though he was not. He offered Tom a hand at once thin and yet fleshy. ‘Brian Prentice.’

  ‘Tom,’ Tom said, reluctantly taking the hand. ‘Tom Brodzinski.’

  Prentice wore very new, very stiff blue jeans, cut narrow in the style favoured by the country’s cattlemen. On his feet were steel-toed, elastic-sided boots, on his back a khaki bush shirt. The whole authentic outfit was rounded off by a wide-brimmed hat with a neatly rolled fly net attached to its brim, which Prentice carried in his free hand. The gear pegged Prentice as a wannabe adventurer, determined to strike out for the lawless wastes of the interior – or at least to give that impression. Tom instantly despised him, for Prentice’s face belied any such resolve.

  It was, like his damp hand, thin yet fleshy. The eyes were equally unresolved: pinkish lids, reddish lashes and wet pupils like those of an embryo. When he spoke – with his irritating, braying accent – his plump yet bloodless lips rolled back from his gums. Either the man had a bad shaving rash, or he’d picked up a fungal infection in one of Vance’s rank shower stalls, for his weak jaw and turkey neck were lumpy and corrupted. All in all, Tom couldn’t recall ever meeting a more distasteful individual.

  Prentice’s handshake was predictably furtive: one finger bent back and caught in Tom’s palm, as if he were an accidental Mason. When Tom let go, the hand fell limply back to Prentice’s side.

  Swai-Phillips observed this meeting with ill-concealed mirth. ‘Dr Livingstone,’ he quipped, ‘this is Mr Stanley. Stanley, this is the celebrated Dr Livingstone. I hope you’ll be very happy together!’ Then he turned his attention to the tranced-out makkata and spat a long stream of clipped consonants and palate clicks in his direction.

  Tom wasn’t surprised that the lawyer spoke one of the native languages; never the less the vehement sound of the tongue struck him anew. The desert peoples didn’t use the same parts of their mouths to speak as Anglos; or, rather, they hardly used their mouths at all. Teeth, palate and larynx conspired together to produce this percussive noise.

  The makkata came out of his reverie at once, ejected the chaw of engwegge into his palm, tucked it into his breechclout and, gathering his stick limbs under him, rose. His wide black eyes were limpid but showed no sign of intoxication. He pointed at Tom and Prentice while rapping away still more emphatically than Swai-Phillips.

  The lawyer grinned. ‘He says that he’ll do the ceremonial test right away – you first, Brodzinski.’

  Tom quailed; he was a skinny boy once more, being pushed towards the vaulting horse by a sadistic phys. ed. instructor. He wished he could deflect the makkata’s steady gaze.

  ‘What about Prentice, here? I mean – no offence, Prentice – but what the hell is he doing here? Is he a client of yours, Jethro? I think I have a right to know.’

  ‘Rights!’ Swai-Phillips guffawed. ‘Rights, rights, rights – it’s always your bloody rights with you people. Property rights, personal rights, human rights, animal-bloody-rights. Brodzinski, I’m your lawyer, for pity’s sake, and let me tellya, this has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s bloody rights at all, yeah. This is a very simple, very quick ritual procedure. This man has come thousands of clicks to perform it. He’s an extremely important man, and, strange as it may seem to you, yeah, he’s actually in a bloody hurry. So, if it’s all the same to you’ – Swai-Phillips paused, the better to impress on Tom that this was not negotiable – ‘I think my advice, as your lawyer, is that you do exactly what he wants, which is for you to drop your strides – now. Please.’

  Swai-Phillips took Prentice by the arm, and they went down the hill towards the jungle wall. Even as he was unbuckling his belt and letting his pants slide down, Tom was wondering if such feeble compliance was still because of nicotine withdrawal. He had no idea what the makkata was going to do to him. The awful thought occurred to Tom, as he stood half naked in the glaring sun, that it was a show, put on for the lawyer’s perverse enjoyment. That he was bent on humiliating Tom, simply because he could. Maybe Prentice was really a crony of Swai-Phillips, brought along to witness this shaming.

  The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips. Tom – although he couldn’t conceive of anything less likely – admonished himself not to become aroused. Yet this thought itself was arousing: he felt the familiar prickle on the backs of his thighs, his scrotum tightened. The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle. It was a spicy smell, mixed with the ferrous dust of the desert.

  Tom let his head fall back on his sweaty neck. Heavy storm clouds were piled up above, their spongy masses saturated with rain-in-waiting. His fellow tourists – and the native Anglos when they’d had a drink – hymned the beauties of this mighty land. Yet, now that he was left behind here, Tom thought he might be looking at it with the more realistic eyes of the natives, seeing the scarred hillsides of the coastal ranges, smelling the faecal decay of the mangrove swamps. Certainly, there was nothing picturesque in the parts of the interior he had driven through with his family: the salt pans that flaked like eczema, the warty termite mounds, the endless charcoal strokes of the eucalyptus trees on the wrinkled vellum of the grasslands. Even here, on the coast, Tom sensed this alien landscape to his rear, an apprehension of a door ajar in reality itself, through which might be glanced seething horrors.

  The makkata, grasping
the flesh of Tom’s inner thigh firmly between his thumb and forefinger, said ‘I’ll protect you’ in accentless English. Tom felt a searing stab, jerked his head forward and, appalled, watched as the sorceror slowly withdrew the blade of a steel knife.

  Blood coursed from Tom’s thigh. He felt dizzy, staggered and, hobbled by his pants, almost fell. Then Swai-Phillips was supporting him.

  ‘Be a man,’ the lawyer said. ‘It’s nothing, a flesh wound.’

  He gave Tom a wad of Kleenex, which he clamped to his thigh. While Tom rearranged his clothing, the lawyer squatted down by the makkata, who was examining the patch of bloodstained earth, already lucent with feeding flies. The makkata stirred this into red mud with his knife blade while clicking an incantation.

  ‘B-but, he speaks perfect English,’ Tom said irrelevantly. He moved a few shaky paces off. Prentice was still fifty yards away, his kinked back resolutely turned.

  Swai-Phillips came over. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up to the house. My cousin’ll bandage that scratch, and I can tellya, mate, you’ll enjoy that, yeah.’

  As Tom was led away, he asked, ‘What about Prentice?’

  ‘Prentice?’ For a moment the lawyer was confused – then he barked, ‘Oh, him! Right! It’s his turn now, isn’t it? Silly bastard’s got the same problem as you, needs a makkata to judge whether he’s astande.’

  The lawyer half dragged Tom up the hill, then began marching him across the open ground. Tom shook himself free. ‘And am I?’ he spat. ‘Am I astande? Because if I’m not, I’m gonna sue you and that fucking witch doctor, you better believe it, man.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The lawyer swept off his sunglasses, and his good eye twinkled. He was enjoying himself. ‘No worries, mate, you’re good.’

  Through the living jalousie of the jungle, Swai-Phillips’s house came into view. Given its size, Tom was astonished that he hadn’t spotted it from the top of the hill. It was three storeys high, with a wide veranda at least a hundred feet long. The entire structure – including the covered walkways that connected the main house to a number of outbuildings – was riveted together out of corrugated iron. Great slabs of this material, streaked with rust, had been bent and bashed into copings, windowsills, pillars, roofs, chimneys and balustrades. There was even a corrugated-iron pool.

  The effect was at once silly and magnificent: it was the dwelling of an idiot-savant bricoleur, who, having glimpsed a picture of an antebellum mansion, had then fashioned his own copy, using whatever came to hand.

  Despite the electric throb in his wounded thigh, and the growing anxiety that the makkata’s knife might have had tetanus on it – or worse – Tom still felt like laughing at the lawyer’s absurd pile. Until, that is, it impinged on him what the house was still more reminiscent of: the model minivan Tommy Junior had wanted him to buy, the one the old Anglo had told Tom was a Gandaro spirit wagon. The deftly fashioned artefact that was taboo for an Anglo to even touch, let alone possess.

  A few minutes later, sitting in one of the galvanized gazebos, on a galvanized bench, Tom’s breathing began to shudder into some regularity. Swai-Phillips, who was sitting opposite, clapped his hands loudly and cried out: ‘Gloria! Betsy! Drinks, goddamnit! Now!’

  From deep within the metallic bowels of the hulk, there came the sound of women’s voices and the clanking noises of their bare footfalls.

  Tom studied the house more: creepers thrust between the corrugated-iron sheets of the walkways, while saplings poked through their balustrades. Still larger trees punched through warped walls and rusty roofs, their limbs chafing and squeaking against the metal, as the onshore breeze rose in the gathering darkness.

  ‘Will he be – I mean, who will . . .’ Tom couldn’t frame his question; he began again: ‘Prentice, will he be able to get up here after . . .’

  ‘He’s been speared? Oh, yeah, the makkata’ll give him a hand – so long as he’s astande too, that is. ’Course, if he’s inquivoo, he’ll have to leave him where he lies, yeah. That’s the size of it.’

  Tom was going to ask the lawyer what Prentice had been accused of, when footfalls sounded loud on the veranda and Martha Brodzinski came towards the two men, a tray held on her upturned hand, as if she were an insouciant waitress in a citified brasserie.

  At the sight of Martha’s willowy figure, and her thick dirty-blonde hair swishing against her long neck, Tom gripped the arm of the iron bench. Despite the heat, cold drops of sweat fell from his eyebrows to his cheeks. As Martha advanced along the walkway Tom’s heart burgeoned. Was this why he hadn’t seen her go through the metal detector at the airport? Why she hadn’t come to the phone when he called during their lay-over?

  Why had she stayed behind? For moments Tom allowed himself to believe it was because she had decided to be with him, to support him; and that she had hidden out at the lawyer’s house with a view to suprising him, as if they were playful young lovers once more.

  The paper dart of this fancy flew true for milliseconds, then hit an iron stanchion, buckled and fell. That wasn’t it at all, Tom realized. On the contrary, Martha was here because she was in cahoots with Swai-Phillips – having an affair with him as well. She’d sent their children back, alone, halfway round the world, so that she could dally here with the moustachioed creep, the laughing cavalier!

  He stood up to confront her . . . and fell back, because when the woman came into the gazebo, Tom was presented not with Martha’s pale plate of Puritan features but a face parodic of them: the lips thicker, the nose more bulbous, the eyes smaller. The woman who handed him the tall glass jammed with fruit wasn’t exactly ugly, but she was coarser – grosser, even – than Martha.

  Though Swai-Phillips was laughing, he still managed to make an introduction: ‘Brodzinski, this is my second cousin Gloria; she grew up in Liège, Belgium, but she’s been here with us for a while now.’

  ‘G’day,’ said Gloria.

  ‘Y – you could’ve warned me!’ Tom rounded on him.

  ‘Warned you? Warned you of what, exactly?’ The lawyer dipped a finger into the drink his cousin had given him and traced a circle of moisture on his bare chest. ‘Oh, by the way Brodzinski, I have a cousin who’s the spit of your wife . . . You’d’ve thought I was crazy. Better you come up and see her for yourself, right. Still,’ – he paused, took a slug of his drink and placed it on the table – ‘it does explain one thing to you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Tom hated himself for playing along with the cruel joke.

  ‘Why it was I was so taken with Mrs Brodzinski, yeah. Believe me, if she’s anything like as, um, accommodating as my cousin, then you must be – in ordinary circs – a very happy man indeed.’

  Tom sat marooned in his own passivity. What was happening to him? Why were events barracking him with his own impotence? The makkata had mixed his blood with the earth and pronounced him astande, yet he sat inert, while Gloria knelt before him, encouraged him to raise his buttocks so she could pull down his pants, then swabbed and dressed the wound.

  Sometime later darkness had fallen utterly. Flying foxes chattered in a mango tree at the front of the veranda. Tom could just make out their oilskin wings opening and closing, the shine of their feline eyes. He thought of the makkata – and so it was that he appeared in the circle of light thrown by a hissing gas lamp Gloria had lit before retiring. He was leading Prentice by the hand – the other man seemed devoid of volition as he staggered along the veranda. There was a brutal streak of red mud on Prentice’s cheek, and he’d mislaid his stupid affectation of a hat.

  5

  Tom holed up at the Experience and waited for the wound in his thigh to heal. Bored, he ventured out to a book store he’d noticed in the nearby mall. When he let slip to the clerk that he might be going ‘over there’, she pressed upon him a fat volume called Songs of the Tayswengo by O. M. and E. F. von Sasser.

  ‘It’s the bizzo,’ the girl said. ‘The Von Sassers have been over there for decades – first the father, then the son. They kn
ow all there is to know. They’ve collected all the stories – they write beautifully as well.’

  Her eyes were a little crazy; her words came in enthusiastic spurts.

  Tom didn’t find Songs of the Tayswengo to be beautifully written at all. It was turgid, loaded with anthropological jargon, and the songs themselves seemed at once silly and incomprehensible: ‘Jabber up to me, flipper lizard / Let me rub sand on your sad gizzard’ was a representative couplet.

  Every time he started reading the heavy hardback, Tom fell asleep – only to wake with a start, having dreamed that a malevolent child was sitting on his chest.

  Fed up with the Von Sassers, Tom bought more books and scanned them on his sweat-damp bed at the Experience, a mosquito coil smouldering by his elbow. But these writers were just as bewildering. One would propose an outlandish psychological model of the hill tribes, while the next would say this was nonsense: the Handrey were as similar to the Anglos as any one individual is to the next.

  There was dispute even about the fundamentals: some experts categorically stated that the desert people had been there for as long as 100,000 years; while others insisted that when the first Anglo explorers crossed the interior, they encountered Inssessitti makkatas, who told them that their people had only been in the region for the past decade, having themselves arrived by sea from the Felthams.

  The very shifting sands of the deserts and the sliding rivers of mud in the tropical uplands served to obscure whatever material evidence there might be to support or deny these competing contentions. And so it was that the land itself was amnesiac, forgetful of its own history; and ignorant, even, of its own terrifying extent.