Will Self - The Butt

Tom was taken aback: apart from a narrow walkway running from the door to the counter, the entire room was behind bars — solid, steel bars that extended from floor to ceiling. In front of the counter there was a slit through which keys or candy bars could be exchanged for money. There were plenty of candy bars on the warped wooden shelves, together with cans of soda and beans, and stacks of Bimple Hot Springs postcards. There was an automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the girl.

Tom remained silent; so did she. He looked first through a blurred windowpane, then at the floor, where between his booted feet flies clustered in neat buttons, each a mutated splash of spilt, sticky fluid.

The girl, very deliberately, licked first her finger and then her thumb. She didn’t appear scared of anything. She turned a page.

‘We’re full,’ she said dreamily. ‘And there’re no take-outs ’cept burgers — bloody bing-bongs hit the last convoy.’

* * *

Prentice now brought the burgers Tom had ordered across to the springs. When he had seen the name on the map, together with the symbol denoting a road stop, Tom had pictured sylvan glades and clear pools of invigorating, mineral-tangy water. The reality was this smelly mire fringed by ghost gums, the bark peeling from their emaciated trunks. The naiads were these obese Anglo retirees from down south, who were wandering the interior on a permanent vacation.

At least the mephitic stench kept most of the flies off. Tom struggled out of the morass. His torso and limbs were smoothly coated with coffee-coloured mud.

‘You look like a bloody bing-bong,’ Mrs Courtney laughed, and Prentice snickered through a mouthful of burger.

By the time Tom got back from dousing himself under an outside shower, Prentice had finished his own snack and was gingerly removing his clothes, a towel — which Tom recognized as one of his own — wrapped around his waist like a kilt.

Prentice shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other, struggling out of his jeans. He hunched over to hide his crotch from view. Tom grimaced. But, despite his effortful modesty, as Prentice pulled up his swimming trunks, the towel’s flaps parted, exposing white thighs and a pink hairless scrotum.

Tom felt the twinge of the scar the makkata’s knife had left in his own thigh. Yet it wasn’t until Prentice was on his back in the mud bath that Tom realized what had provoked this: Prentice’s own groin had been devoid of marks of any kind.

Once he had reached the mud bath, Prentice lowered himself in and began to flop about in the muck, pushing his whole head under and squirming. Coming up for air, he made arcs for his eyes with fingers-for-wipers, then said: ‘I say, Brodzinski. I expect I’m quite a funny sight covered in all this — you wouldn’t mind bagging a photo, would you? My lady wife will find this awfully jolly.’

The burger was inedible — burned at the edges, near frozen at its centre. The stale bun flaked away on to the beaten earth beneath the Courtneys’ picnic table; the sesame seeds pattered on to Tom’s damp lap. He recalled the advertising copy on the billboards; ‘The table’s set, the silver’s polished, we’ve checked under the table for flippers — so where the hell are you?’

The child molester wallowed in the springs, applying mud to the corruption on his neck.

‘That’ll help,’ Mr Courtney observed. ‘Bloody good for eczema and such things, yeah. These springs are the only decent spot left in these parts,’ he continued. ‘Bloody bing-bongs have done for all the good land ’tween here and the Tontines.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Tom asked.

‘Just what I say.’ Mr Courtney lifted another handful of mud and let it plop on to his occiput. ‘They’ve grubbed up all the trees. They get a length of chain, stretch it between two utes and drive through the bush. Once the tree cover’s gone, the first few downpours’ll wash away the topsoil. But if it ain’t turning to desert quick enough to satisfy their black hearts, then they salt it for good measure.

‘All this land’ — he gestured grandly — ‘was bloody bonzer for stock before the bing-bongs crawled in from over there. They did for the game; now they’re doing for the bush ’n’ all.’

‘But why?’ Tom interjected.

But Mr Courtney kept right on: ‘You wanna know the sickest thing?’

‘What?’

‘Those sicko liberal pols down south, they’re giving the bing-bongs bloody grants to do it, yeah.’

‘They are! They bloody are!’ chimed in Mrs Courtney, who had popped out of the Winnebago’s door and now came flapping towards them, a gaudy moa that had somehow managed to escape the natives’ hideous decimations.

They were an hour out of Bimple Hot Springs when the country began to change again — change in such a way as to confirm Mr Courtney’s description, if not necessarily his analysis.

The gaps between the gums grew greater, while the tinder-dry grasses straggled away, revealing jagged stumps, supine trunks and bone-white fallen boughs. Salt pans fingered their way between the remaining trees, their rims glinting in the burning sun, which beat down mercilessly on their little SUV.

The flies too were merciless. In desperation, Tom said Prentince could smoke in the car; he even asked him to blow smoke into his face. Prentice happily obliged. To Tom, the cigarette smoke smelled unbelievably piquant — as if a filet mignon were being griddled between his companion’s fingers. To counteract the dreadful hunger, Tom asked him: ‘You don’t believe that stuff about the natives getting deser-tification grants, do you?’

‘Of course I believe it, old chap,’ Prentice exhaled back. ‘Because it’s absolutely bloody true.’

‘But surely it’s the Anglos’ ranching that did for. .’ He waved at the moribund bush. ‘. . all this?’

‘So the bleeding hearts would have people think.’ Prentice self-satisfiedly crossed his arms. ‘But the truth is they want the bing-bongs to have more of their beloved desert. They hand out a thousand bucks for every hectare they clear — that’s what my wife’s cousin says.

‘Some elements’, he continued, ‘won’t rest until all the cultivated land is gone — the cane country up north, even the good pasturage and arable land round Amherst. Bloody all of it.’

Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Why was it, Tom wondered, that this was the entire nation’s favoured intensifier? Besides, with this much bloodying going on, there must be a lot of actual blood. This rumination clotted his flyblown mind, and a chant started up in his inner ear: ‘Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Bloody-this, bloody-that, bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh. .’ for mile after mile, as the fireball arced over them and Prentice puffed.

Tom was so mindless in this mantra that he scarcely noticed the first few burned-out vehicles to the side of the road, with bullet holes peppering their bodywork, their windshields smashed and tyres fire-flayed. Then, twin-rotored helicopters began to chatter overhead. These lurched in the hot air, as awkward in flight as roaches.

Then Tom saw the back of the line.

There were Winnebagos and saloons, road-trains with multiple semi-trailers and smaller trucks, pick-ups and SUVS — all crammed with native hunters, their kills lashed to the fenders.

The line was off to one side of the road, and there was room to drive by it. This Tom did for a mile or two, until, with no sign of an end to the procession of vehicles, he pulled up and turned to Prentice: ‘How long to the next road stop?’

Prentice examined the map. ‘Maybe another five klicks.’

Tom hailed a native, who sat erect behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pick-up. ‘What’re you guys in line for?’