Will Self - The Butt

Out of unusual consideration — or calculated disdain — Martha had let Tom sleep in. He awoke to find the apartment empty, and, staggering from room to room, his damp soles sucking on the tiles, he saw the abandoned chrysalises of sheets and counterpanes on the disordered beds. The fans on the ceiling lazily sculpted the claggy atmosphere. Tom went out on to the balcony, then recoiled from the fanfare of the tropical day: its brassy greens and reds, its hot jazz of sunlight.

The previous few hours came winging in on him: the boxy ambulance, its flashing lights slashing the darkness; the glaring white cube of the hospital; the old man being wheeled in on the gurney; the receptionist — freaky, with coiled braids and projecting, ornamental cones of hair — swiping his credit card. By what means — telepathy? — Tom could not comprehend, but by the time they’d reached the hospital room his Mastercard had secured a gaggle of Atalaya’s tribeswomen were already there. Tall, burly women, with pumped-up parodies of her lissom figure, who chattered loudly as the nurses hitched the unconscious old Anglo to tubes and monitors.

The detachment of the desert tribeswomen, and of Martha, had seemed, to Tom, to be two sides of the same strange coin. For, when he finally returned to the apartment, stripped off his short pants, dragged his sore head through the neck of his T-shirt and clambered on to the bed, she only roused sufficiently to hear the sorry tale in sullen silence, before saying: ‘Look, Tom, right now I couldn’t give a damn how you screwed up this time. The kids’ll be up in an hour, and someone — meaning me — will have to look after them.’

Now, observing a long rivulet of dark red leaf-cutter ants that trickled along a branch, bearing upon its crest-wavering, translucent, sail-shapes of vegetation, Tom was ashamed to catch himself — despite all the stress and anxiety of the previous fifteen hours — searching, automatically, through the pockets of his pants.

Perhaps a crumpled paper tube of tobacco would be nestling in there, offering the prospect of temporary repose. Reclusion in a private cubicle, separated from the rest of the world by comforting, hazy, blue, blue-grey, grey and brown drapes.

The Consul — whose name was Adams — found Tom sitting in the breakfast room of the Mimosa, warily contemplating a bowl cluttered with sharp-angled chunks of some strange fruit.

Adams, who wore a faded tan seersucker suit and lace-up shoes, and whose button-down collar had trapped a tie embroidered with the insignia of a major institution — university? military formation? corporation? — that Tom half recognized, sat down across from him, offered a hand clasp as cursory as a dog pat, then began withdrawing papers from an old leather briefcase, talking the while.

‘This, ah, Mr Brodzinski, is a retention guarantee, this is a visa-rights waiver, and this is a credit-rating form issued by the Interior Ministry. I’ll need your signature on all three.’

He offered a fountain pen, which Tom, abandoning his syrup-sticky spoon, took. Adams smiled, exposing bleached teeth in his heavily tanned face. He was, Tom supposed, in his late fifties. Wire-wool hair bunched on top of his long equine head. The Consul sported Polaroid lenses in severe, oblong, wire frames, which, even as Tom contemplated them, were becoming clearer, and revealing watery blue eyes caught in a net of laughter lines. Adams’s shirt collar had wing-tips, there was a plastic pen holder in the breast pocket of his jacket, and a heavy gold signet ring on the pinky finger of his left hand.

‘But, why?’ Tom queried. ‘Why have I got to sign them?’

‘Purely a formality,’ Adams snapped. ‘In a case of this, ah, nature, all the relevant departments want to keep their backs covered, just in case you. . Well, just in case you leave the country.’

‘Leave the country?’ Tom was incredulous. ‘Why in hell would I do such a damn-fool thing?’

Adams sighed. ‘People panic — I’ve seen it plenty of times. They’ve heard. . things, rumours about the way the justice system works here. They figure it might be, ah, better to get out while the going’s good.’

‘Rumours? Justice system? I dunno what you’re talking about — what’s this got to do with the local authorities? Surely, Mr Lincoln and I, I mean, we’re fellow citizens, can’t all this be sorted out by you, here, right now? And if Mr Lincoln requires some kind of, well, compensation, that can be organized back home.’

Adams didn’t answer this immediately. Instead, he pushed himself back on his chair and, breaking from Tom’s fierce stare, trajected a stream of liquid syllables towards a maid who was clearing away the cereal-crusted bowls.

The maid, whose heavily scarred arms and legs gave her the sinister appearance of having been sewn together out of several other people, barked with laughter, then went to the hot plate and poured out a cup of coffee. This she brought straight over to the Consul.

Tom smelled the bitter odour of the five-times-reheated brown gloop. Adams took a slug — unmitigated by milk or sugar — and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a gesture at odds with his fastidious manner.

He burbled at the maid once more, and she crossed the room and snapped off the TV. A TV that, until then, Tom hadn’t even been aware was on. Although, now he considered it, at least some of his gloominess was attributable to the news footage he had been subliminally absorbing. Footage of a dirty firefight: half-tracks scuttling like scorpions over stony, nameless bled, their machine guns spitting death venom.

‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ Adams resumed, ‘ordinarily, what you say would be the case: two guys overseas, one of them assaults the other. .’

‘Assaults?’ Tom expostulated, and then heard, issuing from his own lips, the pathetic excuse he had heard so often from those of his children: ‘But it was an accident.’

‘That’s just it.’ Adams remained reasonable. ‘Or, rather, the two things are interrelated. You see, Mr Lincoln is, in point of fact, a dual-citizen.’

‘A dual-citizen?’ Tom feared these repetitions made him seem moronic, exactly the kind of dumb hick, confounded by the exotic, who he himself despised.

‘Not, you understand’ — a little moue flitted across Adams’s mouth — ‘that he has taken on this status voluntarily; such a thing is incompatible with our own laws. It’s simply that by marrying Atalaya Intwennyfortee he automatically assumed her nationality.’

‘But. . Well. . I mean, I assumed. . that he — that she was. .’

Adams put a stop to Tom’s floundering: ‘No matter what you assumed, they are indeed man and wife. Moreover, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a complex, ah, relationship here between the established and codified system of civil and criminal law, and the customary laws of the indigenous peoples. To get to the, ah, point, Mr Brodzinski, Mrs Lincoln is Tayswengo, and, in common with the other desert tribes, the Tayswengo don’t believe in, ah, accidents.’

Adams placed undue emphasis on the word ‘accidents’; and to Tom, who was beginning to feel as if he was descending into a delirium, it seemed for a moment as if the Consul, himself, obtained to the same view.

‘They don’t believe in accidents,’ Tom murmured.

‘That’s right.’ Adams gestured to the unsigned papers that lay beside Tom’s untouched bowl of fruit. ‘Mrs Lincoln, therefore, considers your, ah, flipping of the butt on to her husband’s head to have been, ipso facto, evidence of malicious intent. And, I’m afraid to say, the law backs her up on this. If she were a third-, or even a second-generation Anglo, the situation would’ve been different. If she were an Ibbolit or, even better, a Tugganarong, the legal status of your action would’ve been different again. However, Mrs Lincoln is none of these things; she is Tayswengo, and therefore you will, almost certainly, face a charge of assault and, potentially, one for attempted murder.’