Will Self - The Butt

That night, in their beautiful cabin — a small-scale replica of a Handrey longhouse — Tom and Martha had tenderly embraced. This was enough.

The Handrey mob had gone. Tom dredged up some names and put them to the wet-season manager, a mean-featured old Anglo man who sat behind the reception desk in the darkened lobby.

‘Hildegard,’ he inquired, ‘and is it Harry? I thought they ran the place. . on behalf of the Tribal Council.’

‘Tribal Council!’ The old man guffawed. ‘Don’t make me shit meself. The owner puts them bing-bongs in during high season for local colour.’ He was chewing engwegge, and Tom found it difficult to take his eyes off the long bristly hairs that crawled on the old man’s Adam’s apple.

He missed a spittoon with a stream of juice.

‘That mob,’ he said, smacking his stained lips. ‘They couldn’t run a piss-up in a bloody brewery.’

The old Anglo’s hands shook as Tom handed over his and Prentice’s documents. He glanced cursorily at the laissez-passers, then turned the register so Tom could sign it.

‘You can sign for him too,’ the old man rasped, and Tom wondered if he had been over here so long that he could tell their respective grades of astande simply by looking.

Prentice stood a way off, behind a rattan divan on which lay the other partner in this dubious enterprise: an obese Tugganarong, who, utterly drunk, was drooling in front of a TV screen that made the lobby surreally cosy, with its close-up picture of the crackling flames from another ambushed convoy of fuel trucks.

Besides this, the only light in the entire compound was shed by the storm lanterns that hung from nails in the walls and the tree trunks lancing up through the boardwalks that connected the cabins. As he limped ahead of them along one of these, the manager chuckled self-indulgently: ‘Generator’s on the fritz. Only got enough juice in the solar batteries for the telly. Gotta have the telly, yeah?’

He showed them to adjoining cabins; then, before leaving Tom, asked, ‘Have you got any firearms in the car?’

When Tom conceded that they had, the manager became obliging. ‘I’ll get Stephen to bring ’em in and lock ’em up in the gun cabinet. Pissed as he is,’ he chuckled, ‘he’s the same as any other Tuggy when it comes to handling a rifle, yeah.’

Left alone, Tom went straight to the bathroom for a shower. He couldn’t find soap or shampoo; instead of the basket packed with toiletries he remembered, it was empty except for a crumpled piece of paper, which, when he smoothed it out, proved to be an IOU for ‘sundry bathing requisites’, signed in a shaky hand by ‘W. F. Turpin, Manager’.

It was the same story with the minibar, only this time there were several IOUs, dated over a period of weeks and reading, ‘IOU one miniature gin, London Particular brand’, all of them signed with the same Dickensian signature.

Tom didn’t have long to think on this, because Prentice tapped on his door to complain: ‘How am I supposed to shower after a bally-hard day’s driving in a trickle of cold water?’

Taunting him with its own superfluity, the sky chose that moment to gush, and rain hissed into thatch above their heads. Tom pointed out that it was he who had done all the driving, but Prentice wheedled on: ‘I say, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t happen to have a pair of fresh underpants I could have the loan of?’

Dinner was a morose affair. They sat on the long veranda, looking down at the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. In the feeble light from the storm lanterns, the manager limped from the swing doors leading to the kitchens. Behind these, Stephen, the fat Tugganarong, was, he explained, ‘cooking up a storm’. A remark confirmed by the loud curses, crashes and bangs that did battle with the thunder rolling overhead.

The appetizer was a grub as pale as Prentice’s face slathered in pink, creamy dressing. Tom couldn’t even begin to contemplate this; his companion, however, slurped his own down and then, with a curt ‘D’you mind, old boy?’, took on Tom’s as well.

Then, a long wait.

A road-train with two semi-trailers sloshed into the muddy parking lot. In the gloom, the two identical grinning Mediterranean women painted on their sides were sinister: votive icons of ancient goddesses. Beneath their leering faces was inscribed the slogan MAMAS WITH FORESIGHT ALWAYS SERVE SIBYLLINE PIZZA.

The rig’s four powerful headlights were lidded with a mascara of bugs, and a still-twitching auraca calf was caught in the mandibles of its steel bars.

With a sharp hiss, the driver applied his air brakes. He cut the engine and leaped down from the cab; a bulky, hairy fellow in a soiled string undershirt. Tom, noting regular features and slanting eyes, as the man clambered stiffly up to the veranda, guessed that he had a dash of Tugganarong blood.

The driver haled the manager with ‘Oi! William! Beer!’, then sat down at a table as far removed from his fellow guests as possible. He drank his beer and ate his grub cocktail in silence. The auraca calf became still on the grille.

Tom shivered — he was hungry as well as cold. He fixated on the blood-spotted sphincter of an ancient Bandaid that lay on the decking. Beside the pool there was a mouldy pair of cut-off jeans, a perished rubber sandal, a cracked snorkelling mask.

Prentice, detecting a bulletin of interest to him, disappeared into the lobby to watch the TV. Eventually, the manager — or William, as Tom now thought of him — came scuttling from the kitchen, three large platters cradled in his arms. He presented one to Tom with a flourish, intoning, ‘Smoked moa collation, Stephen’s pièce de résistance , yeah.’ Then set the second platter down in Prentice’s place before scuttling across to the driver.

‘Tough drive, Mr McGowan?’ he said ingratiatingly.

The driver only grunted: ‘More beer, William.’ He burped, withdrew a handgun from the waist of his pants and placed it on the table.

The moa collation consisted of thin white slices of the giant flightless bird’s flesh laid over two hunks of buttered bread. On the margins of the platter, diced pineapple and star fruit glistened. The unappetizing spectacle was finished off by a slurry of the same pinkish sauce that had coated the appetizer.

Tom groaned and took a long pull on his own beer. William had sententiously informed him that there was no whisky available, and this despite the fact that Stephen had been flagrantly drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Prentice came back from the lobby. ‘They’ve followed on,’ he told Tom, then tucked into his moa.

Tom still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He stared down miserably at his own meat-shrouded lumps. Already, the drive had begun to give him constipation, as with each bumpy mile the road impacted his fundament. Tom thought wistfully of the coconut-milk curries that the jolly Handrey women had served on this very veranda in the summer. He poked at his food with his fork, and one of the long chunks wobbled.

Sometime later Mr McGowan stamped over to their table and stood bearing down on them with a confused expression. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, then, without waiting for a reply, pulled a chair from an adjoining table and slumped down. ‘William!’ he cried. ‘Beers all round!’

Then, nothing.

The trio sat in unconvivial silence for a long while. Tom and McGowan drank; Prentice methodically worked his way through the mound of food. In the kitchen, Stephen was having some kind of mental breakdown. Tom could hear him sobbing, and the whispered imprecations of William, as he tried to shut the temperamental chef up.

Tom felt drunk enough — but unpleasantly so. The beer lay on top of his belly, a subcutaneous demijohn, cold and slopping. Eventually, McGowan gestured at the SUV, which was parked beside his own rig. ‘Yours?’