Will Self - The Butt

‘Down south I’ve a Tugganarong — well, obviously he’s not a friend, but I respect Jonas. .’

Prentice was wittering on when they entered a clearing, where, in the full glare of the noonday sun, two entire squads of paramilitary police were disporting themselves on the red rocks. Some were brewing up tea on portable stoves; others had stripped off their uniforms and were splashing in the crystal waters of a stream. One group were gathered by a large-calibre machine gun on a tripod. As the SUV caromed past, the Anglo officer who lay prone behind it tracked them with the weapon’s vicious muzzle.

This shut Prentice up for a while. They drove on in silence, Tom tormented by Prentice’s very proximity — his rotten, cloacal physicality — yet feeling utterly alone. Like a wife, Prentice encroached on Tom the entire time: borrowing nail clippers and shampoo; asking him to lift this, or tote that. And, equally wifely, the other man left Tom alone to be immolated by his own fiery feelings.

The country was changing. The tree cover became sparser, the road un-kinked itself, the volcanic extrusions retreated into the long grass. Up above, the cumulus clouds condensed — then evaporated, leaving behind only cirrus brush strokes on the cobalt-primed canvas. The heat began to build, and build. Then, at some definite — but, for all that, unnoticed — point, the little SUV tipped over the central fulcrum of the Great Dividing Range, and they were propelled down its far side into a new, old world.

‘This,’ Prentice cried. ‘This is the real over there, all right. Oh, yes, my friend. Oh, yes.’

Tom gritted his teeth, although he too was overwhelmed by the prospect that opened out before them: a country so wide and vast and old-seeming; a country of beige rock formations, smoothly streamlined like cetaceans, as if they had been beached by the retreat of ancient oceans.

A country of tinder-dry yellow grasses and tall spindly eucalyptus trees, their fire-blackened trunks bare for fifty, sixty feet up to the shimmer of the canopy. The trees were so evenly spaced that they gave the impression of a colossal plantation. Tom stared down avenues miles in length to either side of the road, searching for the habitations of the constant foresters.

The metalled road faltered, stuttered, then the blacktop gave out altogether. Route I was now a red dirt road, heavily corrugated, so that the car’s tyres whacked from trough to trough, filling the interior with an insistent thrumming. Tom changed up to prevent skidding, and they bucketed on.

An enormous road sign swam towards them out of the heat-haze — the first they had seen that day. The destinations it listed — TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, KELLIPPI BAUXITE MINES, AMHERST, TRANGADEN — sounded prosaic, while the distances were unthinkable: 2,134 KMS, 2,578 KMS, 5,067 KMS, 5,789 KMS. Tom added on the thousand further kilometres he would have to cover on shifting-desert tracks from Trangaden, to come up with a total that suggested a maritime circumnavigation of a hitherto unknown globe.

Prentice saw them first and barked: ‘Pull over!’

Slewing to a halt, Tom leaned across and followed the waxen wand of Prentice’s finger to where, a quarter of a mile off, the tightly massed giant birds were tramping through the bush. Tom could make out their pearlescent plumage, and the curious movement of their backwards-jointed legs. There must have been over a hundred moai, and even at this range the men could hear their monstrous gravelly burbling.

‘Wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open with that lot, old boy,’ said Prentice. ‘You know they’re incredibly aggressive. Down south—’

He was cut off by a black vortex of flies, which spun in through the open window and corkscrewed into his open mouth. Tom would have laughed — but within seconds the car was a maelstrom of buzzing flakes, shaken up by the two men flailing at them.

‘Oh, yes,’ Prentice spluttered. ‘This is the real over there, godforsaken, flyblown. . and. . and y’know who’s to blame for it?’

‘Who?’ Tom gagged.

‘The bing-bongs, of course. The bloody bing-bongs.’

Tom drove off as fast he could. With the aircon’ blasting and the windows wide open, the suction of the draught extracted most of the flies, but still, entire drifts remained on top of the dash. Prentice put on his hat and rolled down the fly screen, thus completing his transformation into a Victorian spinster missionary. When Tom tried on his own, he discovered that the screen was too opaque for him to see the road. He set his jaw and drove on, determined to become accustomed to the diffident tickling in his nostrils, and at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

The two remained like this — massively stoical in the face of many tiny irritants — for the next two hundred corrugated miles, until Bimple Hot Springs came into view, and Tom suggested they stop to get something to eat.

‘It’s true,’ said Mr Courtney, lazily flicking the flies away from his bulbous grey eyes. ‘What your friend says about the bloody flies. It was the bing-bongs — and worse, they’re still at it, right.’

‘At what?’ Tom queried. He too was flicking but irritably, and he wondered how long it would be before he could treat the flies with such disdain.

‘Oh, yairs.’ Mr Courtney tugged up a handful of hot sludge from the slough they were lying in and applied it to his broad, sun-reddened brow. ‘Y’see, yer bing-bong could kill only the odd moa or flipper with his primitive spears, right. Then we pitched up, and we brought rifles, right.

‘Well, yer bing-bong, he’s a happy little bloke, has no thought for the morrow. He thinks “meat” — now, don’t he, so he goes on one bloody almighty killing spree. Been on it for near on eighty years now. Wiped out most of the moai, wiped out the flippers, wiped out the auraca — bloody feral camels and horses in all, yeah. Now yer bing-bong, he only takes the choicest cuts — even his bloody dogs get sweetmeats! All that bloody meat lying around — all these damn flies.’

Mr Courtney allowed his considerable bulk to slide down still further, so that all that was left of him above the mud bath was the top half of his face; his outsized chipmunk teeth gnawed on the sludge.

Mrs Courtney — who was even bulkier than her husband — gave a hippo snort, shifted in her picnic chair and affirmed, ‘Bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’

Bloody, thought Tom. Bloody, bloody, bloody.

They had found the Courtneys already comfortably ensconsed at the Hot Springs. Their Winnebago was the only vehicle in the parking lot, and, despite the bullet holes that peppered its rusty sides, its candy-striped canopy, with the picnic chairs and table beneath it, gave their little encampment a gay holiday air. As did Mrs Courtney, who, draped in a tent of a dress patterned with hallucinogenic Van Gogh sunflowers, insisted on serving the new arrivals with tea.

‘You’ll be lucky if the fat slag in there will dish up for you, yeah,’ she had said as she pottered with kettle and tea bags. ‘Silly cow’s scared of her own shadow.’

To Tom, who was unknotting the muscles that the drive had tied up, this remark was doubly ridiculous: Mrs Courtney was fatter than any cow.

The scarred clearing in the gum trees, with the steaming wound of the hot springs burping sulphurous fumes, had a minatory atmosphere. As did the motel, a ramshackle corrugated-iron building with a warped veranda that was raised up on stubby stilts.

To test Mrs Courtney’s hypothesis, Tom walked over, unhooked the screen door and went in. A plump girl with carrot hair and cartoon make-up — a purple Cupid’s bow masked her own thin lips — was sitting on a high stool poring over a celebrity-gossip magazine.