Will Self - The Butt

Again, there was a clonk, then a hiss.

‘I’m fine.’ Martha’s voice emerged from the sonic fog, poised, imperturbable. ‘But it must be nearly time for your court hearing. The kids have told me all about it.’

Tom waited, assuming she would add to this. She didn’t — the thousands of miles separating them twanged.

‘It’s tomorrow,’ Tom said eventually. ‘It’s only a prelim’ hearing. Swai-Phillips says I can then make, uh, reparations to the Intwennyfortee mob — to Mrs Lincoln’s people — then we can proceed on a, uh, better basis.’

Clonk-hiss.

‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer.’ Now Tom thought he could detect a peculiar flatness in Martha’s intonation. ‘I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

This wasn’t Martha’s way of speaking at all. Confused, Tom let the handset drop. It clonked on to the ledge the phone sat on, then there was another static hiss and, reedily, he heard Martha’s voice reiterate: ‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer. I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

Slowly and carefully, Tom replaced the venomous snake of the handset on its cradle. He stood smearing the sweat from his brow into his hair. The ‘Gollymollydolly’ of the Tugganarong swelled up like the chafing of crickets. Tom went to pay the call store’s manager, who sat in a booth watching a TV show set among surfers and lifeguards, which was beamed from down south.

Late that night, when Tom was dreaming of a desert corroboree — hundreds of naked Entreati women, their breasts missing, howling at a bloody moon — his cellphone was taken with ague. It shook, then fell from the compartmentalized headboard on to his head. Dazed, he snatched it up and held it to his sleepy ear.

At first there were disordered noises, then they resolved into a rhythmic jingling trudge. Assuming that someone had left their cell unlocked and it had dialled him automatically, Tom was about to break the connection, when over the trudge came a tinkling laugh.

‘Ah! Tee-hee-hee!’ Followed by Martha’s voice: ‘Well, y’know how it is, you’ve gotta say these things to keep ’em happy, yeah? I mean, their pathetic little egos require it, yeah?’

Except, it couldn’t be Martha — unless, that is, she was deliberately impersonating the local Anglos’ accent, its raucous vowels and the useless affirmatives with which every other statement was concluded.

Feeling conspicuous in his sky-blue tailored suit, with its short-sleeved jacket and short pants, Tom arrived at the court at what he hoped was an early hour. It was only 7 a.m., yet Vance’s office workers were already hurrying through the rain-soaked streets.

The Central Criminal Court stood on Dundas Boulevard. It was an ugly lump of a building five storeys high. The concrete façade was textured so as to resemble the intricate pattern of logs seen in a Gandaro longhouse. Slitted windows like the embrasures of a medieval castle laid waste to the architect’s pathetic delusion: this was an Anglo building, at once threatening and ridiculous — a dictator wearing a party hat.

An escutcheon was fixed over the chunky pediment. It was an enlarged version of the badges on the cops’ shiny caps. With mouth and beak, an auraca and a moa held aloft the Crown of the Republic against a field of southern stars. Beneath hooves and claws undulated a stylized strip of parchment, upon which was inscribed the motto of the Criminal Justice Department: ABYSSUS ABYSSUM IN VOCAT.

Like a gawky schoolgirl, Tom bent to pull up the white knee-socks that completed his outfit; socks that he had hand-washed in the kitchenette sink at his miserable apartment. A slow hand clap of thunder rolled in across Vance Bay.

Straightening up, Tom saw that, far from being early, he was barely on time; for ranged in a semicircle sixteen metres from the main entrance were a number of suited men smoking with studious concentration. At the middle of this arc was Jethro Swai-Phillips, and, despite the engwegge cheroot stuck in his full lips, the lawyer looked dapper in his dress kit.

Was it coincidence or had Prentice — who stood puffing alongside, basking in the lawyer’s reflected elegance — been primed? For Swai-Phillips’s suit was cut from the same cloth as his own. On the lawyer the dark pinstripe was magisterial: brilliant white cuffs were turned over the short sleeves of the jacket and fastened with oval gold cuff links. Swai-Phillips’s knee-socks were held up with gold-tasselled garters, while from his broad shoulders hung a short pleated gown, decorated with purple and pink ribbons. On top of his Afro perched an antiquated horsehair wig — yet even this only confirmed the dignity of his bearing.

He was accompanied by an Anglo with a jolly Celtic face; bat ears, gap teeth, freckled cheeks. The man had a drinker’s red nose. Tom assumed this must be Mulgrene, the attaché, and wondered where Adams, his own government’s representative, was hiding himself.

As Tom approached, he realized that Swai-Phillips’s trademark shades were gone, and the glaucoma had miraculously vanished from his right eye. In its place there was a glazed copy of an eye: the white too white, the pupil too black, the brown iris fixed and unwavering. Seeing Tom’s consternation, the lawyer snapped, ‘It’s a contact lens, Brodzinski, no need to be afraid.’ And Prentice snickered.

‘You’re mighty cool,’ Swai-Phillips continued. ‘The lists will be posted any minute now, and we’ll find out who’s up first.’

He turned to the man smoking beside him in the line, and Tom recognized the clerk he’d met at the Metro-Center. ‘Have you got the depositions, Abdul?’ Swai-Phillips barked, and the clerk displayed a leather valise bulging with scrolls that were tied up with the same kind of ribbons that dangled from his boss’s gown.

‘OK.’ Swai-Phillips drew Tom and Prentice into a huddle. ‘That fellow over there’ — he used the nub of his cheroot as a pointer — ‘is the DA, Tancroppollopp.’

The man was enormous — six and a half feet of taut solidity. Adams had said the DA had Tugganarong blood — Tom suspected him of being the Ur-Tugganarong, the Ancestor, who had propelled his outrigger from the Feltham Islands, using only his own paddle-sized hands. In one of these the DA held the smoking digit of a cigarette, cupped on the inside, as a skulking schoolboy would. The contrast between this homely gesture and the giant’s sinewy forearms would have been comical, were it not for the belligerent expression on his copper face, and the two aggressive tattoos that spiralled down from his shaven scalp to loop his shark’s fin ears.

‘Who the hell is he talking to?’ Tom blurted out.

‘Pipe down!’ Swai-Phillips snapped — and Prentice giggled, because the man in conversation with Tancroppollopp was smoking a pipe: a long curved one with a ceramic bowl.

Perhaps the man had chosen this pipe because it conformed to his morphology; for he too was long and curved. An Anglo, almost as tall as the DA but stick-thin like a desert tribesman. The pants of the Anglo’s dress kit were cut high, exposing a great length of scrawny thigh. It should have made him look ridiculous — but didn’t, for he had the taut watchfulness of a raptor. The pipe-smoker’s face was also avian: a sharp beak of veined nose, close-set yellowy eyes and hollow cheeks. He sported a gold pince-nez and a gown the same as Swai-Phillips’s — although his ribbons were red and white.

‘That’s Von Sasser,’ Tom’s lawyer explained. ‘He’s the Chief Prosecutor — must be acting as Counsel for the Eastern Province. I’d hoped he’d be down south, yeah. He normally only handles the most serious cases. I’m not in the habit of showing any damn weakness.’ Swai-Phillips drew deep on his cheroot, then spoke through a personal thunderhead: ‘But he’s a formidible bloody antagonist.’