Will Self - The Butt

They all laughed full-throatedly, while Prentice joined in with his snide little snicker.

The sergeant turned back to Tom. ‘You’ll be needing kecks, boots and such for over there. Thorn scrub’ll rip you to shreds. Flake rock an’ pummy-stuff’ll tear yer feet up ’n’ all. Your mate, here’ — he thumbed at Prentice — ‘he’s got the right idea.’

He turned to the clerk. ‘Get this bloke here down some desert kecks and the rest of the clobber he’ll need. Get some ammo for these rifles while you’re at it, yeah, and some eskis for this bloke’s pharmaceuticals. There’s no aircon’ to speak of in that clunker,’ he said to Tom and Prentice. ‘Drugs’ll be perished before you get through cane country.

‘And make it snappy!’ he called after the clerk. ‘We gotta get these two to city limits and make it back in time for the game.’

This manly admission of dereliction of duty was the most hilarious thing of all; so the cops, the clerks and Prentice began laughing all over again.

* * *

It was almost four by the time they reached the peculiar juncture where the four-lane blacktop of the City of Vance — complete with its colour-coded kerbs, bright red fire hydrants and fluorescent signage — came to a sudden finish, and was replaced by the single potholed track of Interprovince Route I.

The cops’ unmarked car scrunched to a halt on the shoulder, and Tom pulled up behind. They all got out, and Sergeant Elldollopollollou directed his colleagues to get the two Galil rifles, in their olive-green prophylactic sleeves, from the trunk of their car and attach them to the rack on the back of the SUV. The rest of the reparations were already loaded: boxes filled the narrow trunk of the SUV, while the bundles of diapers were strapped to the roof-rack.

‘Here are your permits for the Tontines,’ he said to the two Anglos. ‘And in your case, Brodzinski, for Tayswengo Tribal Land. Remember, you’re subject to Provincial Police jurisdiction — that’s why your passports are held back here in Vance. This means you have to get these laissez-passers, issued by the Ulterior Deployment Agency, stamped at every checkpoint you reach. If you don’t, you’ll end up in choky.’

He handed the plastic wallet containing the documents to Tom. ‘Now remember, boys,’ Elldollopollollou added, ‘there’s a big bowl of wrong over there.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘So check it’s cooled before you gulp it down.’

He lowered his oil drum of a torso down into the passenger seat of the car. The last bit of him that Tom saw was the deeply creased back of his shaved neck. There, looping down from the speckle of his hairline, were several raised white curlicues: all that was left, Tom assumed, of the Tugganarong’s tribal tattooing, lasered away by the police medics when he joined the force.

The cops’ car bumped over the hump of Route I, fishtailed back on to the rain-slick boulevard, then nosed through the rainy drapes towards downtown Vance.

Tom stood staring after them, until Prentice called from the car:

‘I say, you haven’t got a camera, have you? I feel we ought to mark the occasion.’

Through the viewfinder Tom saw the small miracle of three distinct weather systems in the sky simultaneously. The monsoon shaded the gap between the whitish cubes of the civic centre and the maroon cloudbank. A rainbow arced over the Metro-Center itself, the spectrum as neat as an educational diagram. Further north, towards the airport, thunder surged and banged, and as Tom watched a lightning fork plunged into the mudflats of Vance. Yet, in the foreground, Prentice stood, his face illumined by bright afternoon sunlight, the grassy verge at his feet faintly steaming. The shutter caught Prentice in this expansive setting and put him in the tiny aluminium box: another specimen.

A few hundred yards away a cement mixer began to rotate noisily. Observing the piles of cinder-blocks and the bare hilltop fringed by a stockade, Tom suddenly grasped where they were: close to Swai-Phillips’s compound.

Tom knew the lawyer had gone ‘over there’. The day after the prelim’ hearing Swai-Phillips had called Tom. He was sitting in Cap’n Bob’s, the kiddie café on the ’nade, eating a hotdog and drinking a Coke.

‘You better go and say goodbye,’ the lawyer had said without preamble.

‘Say goodbye to who?’

‘Lincoln, of course.’

‘But he’s in a coma, he won’t even know I’m there.’

The hotdog was ruined now — a bit of medical waste on a wad of of bloodstained sutures.

‘How many times have I gotta tellya, Brodzinski, you’re the righter of wrongs. .’

At the hospital Lincoln had been camping alone in an oxygen tent. There was no sign of Atalaya or any of the other Tayswengo. Tom had asked for Vishtar Loman, but the young doctor was on leave, and he too had gone over there.

In daylight Lincoln’s room was once again prosaic; terrifying in its anticipation of mundane extinction, human lives switched off like the electrical appliances used to keep it clean.

Tom had stood, together with a monitoring nurse, and observed the old man for a while; all his pep, his busy venality, exhausted. The comatose state, Tom thought, looked worse than death: a provisional finality, the equivalent — in terms of brain states — of one of Adams’s ‘ahs’.

Now, following Prentice back to the snub-nosed SUV, Tom realized that even at this late stage he had been hoping for a sign — or even a miraculous recovery: the old man sitting bolt upright in bed, laughing merrily, ‘Only fooling!’ Groping the nurse’s crotch, then calling for a beer and a cigarette.

At least Tom had shaken off Prentice that morning. He’d had to see a dentist to get a troubling abscess dealt with. Tom thought this dated dental problem suited Prentice. He hoped the treatment would be commensurately old-fashioned: an extraction, without anaesthetic.

‘Damn nuisance, but I suppose it has to be done.’ Prentice had held his swollen cheek in his hand as he explained, ‘I mean, we’re hardly likely to find a competent practitioner over there.’

He reminded Tom of the colonial civil servants that his country had sent out to the wilds, during their brief imperial era. Tom had read somewhere that these men had to undergo appendectomies before they left; pre-emptive strikes against their own redundant organs, lest their inflammation prevent them from putting down tribal risings.

Tom now took one final look at the vista. As the storm moved off to the north, the rain-washed buildings shone in the sunlight. The happy, clean, rational city of Vance, with its wide boulevards and its hedges of jacaranda, frangipani and mimosa, where jewel-bright hummingbirds hovered, then vanished.

The marble pyramid of the casino, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial State Assembly building, the bulk of the Central Criminal Court — these were the true actors occupying the proscenium arch of Vance Bay. Naked makkatas and judges in their underwear, kissing consuls and wifely doppelgängers — these were the creatures of mere fancy, with no more substance than the clouds that sailed over the city from the open sea, the lenticular vanguards of which bore a distinct resemblance to the lenses of enormous, wrap-around sunglasses.

Tom shook his head. Behind his own new sunglasses his eyes tiredly wobbled. He hadn’t slept well. He thought of the roach motel, which, after much deliberation, he had decided to bring; this, despite the fact that, even with an old chopstick he had found in the grease-spattered kitchen of his apartment at the Experience, he had been unable to remove the corpse of its latest resident.

Getting into the car, Tom scowled at his companion, who was halfway out of the passenger door, blowing smoke.