Will Self - The Butt

There was silence for a few moments. The plume of flies that had trailed behind Tom dallied down to enfold his head in their humming atomic diagram. The Anglo, despite his sudden materialization, his bulk and his weapon, was hardly a threatening figure. He had a round babyish face; his short pants were so short, and the sleeves of his matching skyblue shirt so truncated, that they resembled a baby’s one-piece garment.

The Anglo saluted Prentice: ‘And g’day to you too, mate.’

Flicking the flies from his eyes, Prentice replied, ‘Was that you? On the mobile phone, I mean.’

The big Anglo chuckled. ‘Oh, yairs, that’s right, mate. Gotta transmitter on the rig, see. We sent out a signal every now and then, right.’

‘But why?’ Tom asked.

The man regarded him as if he were very stupid. ‘IEDs, mate, IE-bloody-Ds. Bing-bongs — yer sophisticated mobs, that is — use cellphones to set ’em off, not just guide wires. If we think there’re insurgents on our patch, we give ’em a little surprise, maybe set off their booby-trap a bit early — or at least screw with their timing. We triangulate our signal with a transmitter way over on Mount Parnassus.’ He jerked a sausage finger over his shoulder. ‘Then we get a position fix, come and check things out, maybe do a little’ — he ratcheted the bolt of his rifle — ‘mopping up.’

To confirm that he had checked things out to his satisfaction, the baby-faced man propped his rifle against the car.

Prentice, perversely, objected to no longer being covered. Keeping his hands up by his shoulders, he said, ‘But don’t you want to see our papers? Don’t you want to know what we’re doing here? Where we’re headed?’

‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, mate.’ For the first time, the Anglo was aggrieved. ‘I’m not some jumped-up fucking Tuggy copper, now, am I.’

‘W-What,’ Prentice said, havering between bravado and cowardice, ‘what if we were armed? I mean, we are, y’know.’

Getting himself out a cigarette and lighting it, the Anglo threw back his head and chortled. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, pointing behind them, ‘meet the wife.’

Prentice spun round. Tom swivelled, squinting into the sun, which was now dropping down from its zenith. Splitting the low-angled rays, arms like the wings of an avenging angel, was a figure spreadeagled behind a machine gun on top of the bluffs. It rose, and called over: ‘Seems like introductions are in order. I’m Daphne Hufferman, and this is my hubby, Dave.’

It was a woman’s voice, although her body was as big and muscular as her husband’s.

‘Look, you two,’ she continued, ‘I dunno what your plans are, but if you were thinking of stopping at the eighty-mile bore roadhouse, then forget it. Bing-bongs took it out a couple of weeks ago. Unless you’re gonna swag down — which I wouldn’t advise — you’re best off coming back to camp with Dave an’ me.’

While she was speaking, the woman lofted the machine gun on to her shoulder and descended towards them. As she drew nearer, Tom saw that, as well as having the same physique as her husband, she also had the same tight pants and shirt. In her case they were bright pink. The full breasts that pushed up into the open vee, strangely, only enhanced the debatability of her sex.

‘Well.’ She stopped in front of Prentice and sceptically eyed him up and down. ‘Whaddya say, sport?’

Like a nervous, comedic suitor, Prentice quailed beneath her steady gaze. ‘Um. . If. . If you, er, folks aren’t cops, then who are you?’ he managed to squeeze out at last.

It was Daphne’s turn to guffaw. ‘Us? Us? We’re pet-food shooters, mate. Bloody pet-food shooters. Now get in yer rig, you blokes. Camp’s a fair haul, and we want to be there before the night’s as black as a bing-bong’s black heart.’

The pet-food shooters’ camp consisted of a demountable motorhome and a refrigerated container. The container sat beneath a stand of gum trees, gurgling. Leaking coolant dripped between its steel ribs, ribs that were warty with paint blisters. The demountable was a silvery aluminium capsule, humanized — if that was the right word — by net curtains in its portholes, and a striped awning staked out in front of the door.

Tom stopped the car by the Huffermans’ pick-up and got out.

Behind the camp a network of dry watercourses scored the land: veins on the palm of a giant hand. In the mid distance, the fingers of this hand twisted into the spurs of a rocky mountain that rose some 5,000 feet above the desert floor. Mount Parnassus. A hot, gritty zephyr came scooting down from its peak, stinging Tom’s sore lips.

‘Not a lot, but we call it home,’ said Dave Hufferman, clambering down from his pick-up. He was altogether relaxed — at home, in fact — but his wife bolted to the back of the demountable and began to take down what appeared to be enormous towelling diapers from a clothesline.

Dave Hufferman got out folding chairs for his guests and lit the barbecue. Next, he went over to the container, unbolted it and pulled the tailgate down. A thick white cloud of condensation rushed out to meet him. He emerged clutching an armful of beer cans. Tom hurried across to help him close the tailgate.

The container was stacked high with the jointed portions of scores of moai. The outsized wings, legs and breasts were laquered with ice, and fitted tightly together, pieces of a bizarre three-dimensional puzzle. The few square feet in front of this rampart of frozen fowl were scattered with the Huffermans’ frosty provisions: boxes of pizzas and TV dinners, tubs of vanilla ice cream and plastic bags full of steaks.

‘I put these in here before we left to check you out,’ Hufferman explained — assuming the question uppermost in his guest’s mind would be why the beer wasn’t frozen solid.

It wasn’t. There had also been a box of babies’ feeding bottles in the container. Could the pet-food shooters have a kid out here? If so, it was a very large infant — the bottles were three or four times the size Tom remembered. He thought of Tommy Junior, but asked: ‘What happens when the container’s full?’

‘Well, mate,’ Dave Hufferman continued as they strolled back to where Prentice was sitting smoking, ‘we slow our work rate down towards the end of the month when the road-train’s due, yeah.’ He tossed a can to Prentice, handed one to Tom, and all three men snapped the ring pulls and took swigs. ‘Trouble is — Oi, mate,’ he barked at Prentice. ‘You’re inside the bloody line!’

‘Line?’ Prentice was bemused.

‘The sixteen-metre line, mate. Shift your arse over there, yeah.’ Hufferman indicated an arc of cigarette butts pressed into the red dirt. ‘I like a smoke-o myself, but the container is classed as a workplace, and rules is rules.’

Prentice shuffled his picnic chair over the invisible line. Hufferman snorted. Then, judging that Tom was interested, led him away from the camp.

After a hundred yards they passed through a screen of eucalyptus. The sight that met Tom’s eyes was extreme: an al fresco abattoir. There were heavy trestle tables with chopping boards on them and a steel rack hung with cleavers and butchers’ knives. A winch dangled from the trunk of a dead tree, bloody feathers caught in its links. There were drifts of feathers trapped in the wiry grass, while bits of bone and shreds of flesh were scattered on the bare earth. The flies were clustered so densely on the large scabs of dried blood that they transformed them into glinting black rugs.

Hufferman said: ‘The missus and I can bring down ten moai a day, load ’em on the ute, get ’em back here, joint ’em and bung ’em in the freezer. But, as I was saying, only prob’ is the truck ain’t so regular nowadays on account of the bing-bongs hitting the convoys. So, we don’t like to fill it right up till we’re sure they’re through, right. It’s piece work, see, and if the container ain’t packed as tight as a fag’s strides we don’t get our full whack.’