Will Self - The Butt

‘Engwegge,’ Dr Loman sighed. Then, turning to Tom, he said, ‘I think you’d better leave now.’

Atalaya smiled broadly at Tom as he followed the white coat out of the room.

The hospital had returned to some semblance of normality. There were medical and support staff in the main lobby. Drunken and damaged patients were slumped on moulded plastic seating.

‘What was going on earlier?’ Tom asked Loman. ‘They weren’t admitting anyone.’

‘It’s the engwegge,’ the doctor explained. ‘Look here.’

He led Tom out through Emergency, then pointed to the black gloss of the parking lot. ‘You see those little brown dollops?’

Tom could just make out the discarded engwegge chaws sixteen metres off, disintegrating in the rain.

‘Thing is,’ Loman continued, ‘engwegge isn’t allowed in the hospital, yeah. We have to get ’em to spit their plugs out before they can be seen to.’

‘No matter how hurt they are?’

‘They can be bloody dying, mate, but we won’t treat ’em while they’re damaging their health. Look,’ Loman said, shrugging, ‘I’ve gotta go back in. You can prob’ly get a cab down by the main gate — there’s usually a few loitering, even this late.’ He moved off.

‘What — I mean, the engwegge,’ Tom called after him. The doctor turned and eyed him quizzically. ‘They had it up in the room — they were giving it to Mr Lincoln.’

‘Oh, that,’ Loman laughed. ‘There are exceptions to the rules so far as the desert mobs are concerned — very important exceptions.’

The clerk in the convenience store where Tom got his groceries had a name badge on her lapel. It read HITLER. Tom asked Swai-Phillips about it, and the lawyer said. ‘Sure, that’ll be her name, right enough. What was she, Ibbolit? Gandaro p’raps?’

‘I–I guess so,’ said Tom, who, although he could now distinguish the hill from the desert tribes, still had difficulty with further subdivisions.

‘Bastard hill mobs.’ The lawyer took a swig of beer and beckoned over the barman, who brought a fresh thimble-sized glass and took twenty-five cents from the pile on the bar. Then he retreated to his own perch, a high stool next to a peanut dispenser shaped like a peanut. The chiller cabinets ranged along the back of the bar cast a forensic light on the barman’s shaven and cicatrized scalp. The raised white scars must, Tom thought, observing his ugly scowl, indicate the seats of his ill-will and bad character.

‘They don’t think anything much is what it damn well is, yeah,’ the lawyer continued enigmatically. ‘There’s that cargo-cult nonsense, and these damn-fool names they take. Think it’ll give ’em power, see, keep the bad spirits offa their backs, right.’ He snorted. ‘Nonsense! Total bloody superstition. Anyways, Brodzinski, what’re you doing shopping?’

Tom took a sip of his own beer before replying. They were both on beer — the weather demanded it. But Tom had also had a few shots before Swai-Phillips showed up. He was a little drunk and tried to conceal it by speaking deliberately. ‘I’ve taken to cooking for myself at the Experience. There’s a kitchenette, and it’s cheaper.’

‘Bullshit!’ the lawyer expostulated. ‘You can eat good for a few cents at the food court. What’s the real reason?’ He rounded on Tom, lifted his shades, gave him the bad eye.

‘Well, if you must know, it’s Prentice.’

‘He bothering you — or, what, interfering?’ As so often with Swai-Phillips, Tom had the uneasy feeling he was being laughed at.

‘No, not exactly bothering, it’s more that he kind of fastens on to me whenever I step outta the goddamn hostel. Where’s he staying, anyway?’

‘Prentice?’ Swai-Phillips seemed confused by the question. ‘I dunno — with Mulgrene, their attaché, I think. You’d have to ask him yourself — or Squolly. Prentice is on more restrictive bail conditions than you.’

Everything Swai-Phillips said concerning Prentice appeared to tease Tom with his ignorance of the other man’s crime. Not that he felt ignorant any longer, as he’d had enough hints: Prentice was a sex-offender of some kind, probably what the lawyer termed a ‘kiddie-fiddler’. He certainly looked the part, with his crazy fringe, his doughy face and his dude’s outfit.

Prentice must, Tom thought, be staking out the Experience, just like the cops. For the past week, whenever Tom left the hostel, Prentice was there, strolling towards him along the sidewalk, his dumb hat — or a dumb replacement — tucked under his poultry wing of an arm.

‘Mind if I take a turn with you?’ he’d say, and, even if Tom demurred, he’d insist: ‘Look, old chap, I haven’t a pal in Vance to speak of, so I’d be awfully grateful for a little company.’

Little company, eh. Tom nearly slapped him in the face, a face that was becoming increasingly corrupted by the rash spreading up from his jaw. Perhaps it was pity, but Tom always gave in, and together they would thread their way between the other, less culpable pedestrians.

In instalments that lasted the time it took to get to the mall or the call store, Tom heard Prentice’s story.

‘My lady wife’, he said, ‘is staying down south. Cousin of hers has a little spread a couple of hundred clicks from Capital City. He migrated here for the good life — you know how it is. My countrymen, well, we have strong links with this place, as you know. It’s not exactly a sense of ownership, more, well. . stewardship. We need to keep an eye on it, make sure the local Anglos aren’t too rash.’

‘You really believe that bullshit?’ Tom was incredulous; Prentice was coming on like some lordling, sent out to the colonies to tote the white man’s burden.

‘Oh, absolutely.’ Prentice was unfazed. ‘You take my wife’s cousin’s station. He’s got almost a whole section — but he can’t make it pay any more. You see’ — he leaned in conspiratorially — ‘those bing-bongs, they burnt off the scrub for bloody years. It’s completely messed up the water table, leached all the nutrients out of the soil and replaced them with salt. Gerard — that’s my wife’s cousin — he needs a square mile or more to raise a single head of cattle.’

And Prentice, bandy-legged, clumped on along the sidewalk, lost in his fantasy of stewardship.

Tom wondered what he made of his bing-bong-blooded lawyer. Prentice was beyond caricature; the lines that described him were too distorted. In every exchange Tom had with him, he was on the verge of blurting out: ‘What exactly is it that you’ve done? Tell me now — right now!’

Yet he never did. Moreover, as their desultory promenades continued, Tom found a curious respite in this mutual circumspection. It was as if their inability to talk of what held them here, in Vance, was a kind of stoicism — manliness, even.

Swai-Phillips had an alternative explanation, one he tossed out as he tossed back another beer: ‘The makkata, yeah. Well, he divines degrees of astande: astande por mio, astande vel dyav, astande hikkal. Some are for men, some for women, some only for the Tayswengo — others the Inssessitti. There are cross-over, or hybrid, mobs as well, and every degree of astande relates in a different way — both to all the degrees of inquivoo and to each other, yeah.’

‘It sounds bewildering,’ Tom observed idly. He’d read as much in Songs of the Tayswengo , but then — as now — he’d found it impossibly fiddly to link the hooks of this byzantine magical system to the eyes of his own numb understanding.

There was a flapping noise from outside the bar. One of Squolly’s men was shaking the water off his rain cape. He came in, sat down at the bar and nodded familiarly to Tom and Swai-Phillips. Then he unslung his automatic rifle and checked the safety, before placing it carefully on a towelling bar mat. The magazine curved up like a penis machined on a lathe. The cop began chatting to the barman, who, without needing to be asked, had brought him a beer.