Will Self - The Butt

Now she was under way, Martha could have kept going indefinitely, had not Tommy Junior discovered them in their toxic bower. He stared at his quarelling parents, his brown eyes shiny and indifferent, then he forcibly turned his mother by her shoulders to face the departures board.

Martha said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Snatched up her carry-on bag and started towards the line that snaked into the roped-off pens which directed passengers towards security.

Tom stood sulking for a few moments, then tagged along behind, his arm across his son’s shoulder, which was higher and more solid than his own.

At the barrier there was a confusion of goodbyes and kisses that missed their mark — bouncing off cheekbones, lost in hair. Martha was contrite. She leaned into Tom and whispered: ‘I’m scared, honey, that’s all.’

‘Me too,’ Tom replied, and he would have sealed the rapprochement with a longer embrace had the twins not grabbed his hands and attempted to swing on them. By the time he disengaged, his wife had disappeared, and Dixie was standing on the far side of the metal detector, calling to her father to propel her little brothers through.

Two days later, waking in the deathly monochrome of a tropical dawn, Tom lay listening to the clickety agitation of the roaches in their motel. He thought back to those last few minutes at the airport. Even though Dixie had called him during the family’s lay-over at Agania, Tom couldn’t rid himself of the unsettling notion that Martha hadn’t left the country at all. He hadn’t seen his wife go, and now he felt her presence acutely in the seedy, overheated bedroom of the minute apartment.

The Entreati Experience had turned out to be a backpackers’ hostel, with a few short-let apartments on the top storey. The backpackers’ cubicles were ranged round a grimy courtyard, across which were strung clotheslines festooned with their garish T-shirts and brightly patterned sarongs and Bermudas, which flapped in the bilge-laden breeze from the nearby container port.

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.