Will Self - The Butt

Tom’s head swam. He struggled to rise, his boots rattling the discarded cans. Then there were hands in his pulling him up, gently but firmly. Tom realized it was Prentice.

He led Tom to the latrine, then waited while Tom swayed and gushed. Prentice guided him to the demountable, then into the cubicle where Hufferman had said they could sleep. Narrow steel bunks were bolted to the curving wall; on them, flowery coverlets were stretched tight.

Tom was too drunk to protest that Prentice was helping him to undress, but, as he unbuckled his belt, Tom said: ‘Whassup? You wrong kinduv. . astande. .’

The aircon’ in the demountable was blissfully efficient. Lying stretched out in the cot, Tom was almost chilly. This sobered him up. Over the unit’s rhythmic clunking he could hear voices coming from the pet-food shooters’ cubicle. He tried to ignore them. Prentice was already asleep, his smoker’s snore sawing through the bunk above.

Then Daphne Hufferman lowed: ‘You’re a big bad baby boy.’

‘Ma-Ma. Goo-goo,’ her husband rumbled.

‘Mummy’s gonna have to change you before bye-byes,’ Daphen cooed, then came the loud ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the big man’s babygro.

‘Want bottle. Want powder,’ he whined.

‘You’ll get a good old wipe, right, before you have bottle, or powder, or cuddle, young man.’

After that, Tom blocked his ears to the increasingly rambunctious horseplay of the adult baby and his carer.

The familiar flashback took possession of him: the leafy balcony at the Mimosa, the aerial view of Atalaya’s perfect breasts, the moonscape off Lincoln’s scalp — then the final fervent pulls on the terminal cigarette.

Where had his thoughts gone? Tom thought back to his own thinking back. He had been up in the hills, yes. In the dust beneath the banyan tree, where the hillman refused to sell him the spirit wagon. Had it been in that reverie itself that his own culpability had incubated? Could Tom now locate — with numb, drunk mental fingers — the precise point where his inattention had become a form of intent? The grey roll of ash lying in his palm, the butt pinched between his fingers, the smoke drawn into blue loops. The butt shifted to gather tension, as index finger strained against thumb pad. Then. . the flip.

Tom slept. And came to in a room bright with chilly winter light. He could see the bare branches of northern trees through cold windowpanes. Directly in front of him there was the icy finality of a perfectly made bed. Tom sensed sterile hospital corners beneath the brightly patterned patchwork quilt.

On the far side of the bed stood his mother. She was erect, dressed in dark slacks and a dark sweater, and smoking. One arm was crossed beneath the 1950s jut of her breasts; the other was crooked up, so that the cigarette was poised before her sharply inscrutable face. Yes, she stood upright, yet her thin frame hung in the room: a shroud dangling from smoky hooks. It was the discarded clothing of her humanity, rather than the woman herself.

‘It’s time for you to go now, Tom,’ she said with characteristic asperity.

He found himself unable to answer — although he yearned to. This, she seemed to understand: ‘It’s time for you to go now,’ she reiterated. ‘I’m married — so are you.’

Tom’s mother, grimacing with the vulgarity of it, morphed into Martha, then back again. Tom shook with horror ague. The transmogrifications continued: mother to wife, wife to mother — back and forth with increasing velocity.

He awoke; the sheet suckered on to him with sweat, the phrase pia mater sticking, a shard of meaning, deep in his hurting brain.

Breakfast was last night’s beans — fried up yet again — and reconstituted orange juice. Tom could manage only the juice.

‘We bin thinking,’ Dave Hufferman said, poking through the grille at the nuggets of burned charcoal in the barbecue. ‘It’s still a fortnight till the road-train’s due, and we’ve gotta bust part in our main generator — bin on auxiliary for a while now. Daphne’ll ride into the Tontines with you and pick the spare up.’

Tom stuttered: ‘B-But how will she get back?’

‘No worries there, mate,’ Hufferman said. ‘She can grab a ride with the cops. Ain’t that right, me little darlin’?’

‘Right enough,’ she said, snuggling in under his ham of an arm. ‘And I’ll be in the right place to help these blokes if the shit hits the fan.’

The Huffermans were both wearing canary-yellow baby-gros this morning, and the sloppy expressions of large animals that were sensually replete.

‘It’s really. . it’s good — I mean. .’ Tom skidded on the glassy surface of his hangover.

Prentice — who was applying ointment to his psoriasis himself — oozed into the breach: ‘We’re jolly grateful for everything you’ve done for us already — and now this. Thank you so much.’

The Huffermans, who, Tom had felt certain, shared his own instinctive repugnance towards Prentice, seemed to have had a change of heart during the night. Dave Hufferman punched Prentice lightly on the shoulder, while grunting: ‘Good on yer, mate.’

Then, limping back from the latrine, where Tom had vomited into the flyblown trench, he was amazed to hear Hufferman holding forth: ‘Y’see, most Anglos have got the bing-bongs all wrong, yeah. After all, they only see the scum that pitch up in the cities ruined by the grog.’

He was striking a pose, with one hand on his towelling hip. It should have been ridiculous — but for some reason wasn’t.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘don’t get me wrong, yeah, I’ve no time for the black bastards that shoot up convoys or plant IEDs — they deserve every damn thing we throw at ’em — but yer natural bing-bong, yer bing-bong in his own environment, well, he’s a different proposition.’

‘Meaning?’ Tom croaked.

‘Meaning, my friend’ — Hufferman put a sceptical eye on his returned guest — ‘that I’ve never met any bloke more generous than a bing-bong. Why, he’ll give yer the last swallow of his canteen when you’re way over there.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘But, by the same token, I’ve never met any bastard more greedy than a bastardly bing-bong — that’s why they go troppo over the tontines. No, there’s no one more humble — or more arrogant, more restrained — he’ll go for months in the desert without even thinking of a root — or more bloody sex-crazed when the oppo’ presents itself.’

He looked over at his wife, who was hanging out damp sheets on the washing line, and the machine-gunner simpered. ‘There’s no bastard braver or more cowardly than a bing-bong. Before all this shit got going, Daph’ ’n’ me used ’em as trackers — best there bloody are. They could smell out moai twenty clicks upwind. The guvvie — the Tuggy coppers, they’ll never get the better of ’em. They don’t understand the bing-bong — and they don’t understand his politics, ’cause yer bing-bong is a highly political bloke. These desert mobs, they’ve got all their own internal conflicts going on, and they hate each other even more than they hate us Anglos and our foot soldiers.’

Tom roused himself: ‘There’s one thing that confuses me, and that’s why they don’t make it clearer what a mess things are, uh, over here. I mean’ — he was gabbling, yet couldn’t prevent himself — ‘there’s TV footage of firefights and that kinduv thing, but the media — the government — they never say outright how dangerous it is — why’s that?’

The pet-food shooter ignored Tom and called across to his wife, ‘Daph’, you leave those things, my pet. These blokes’ll haveta hit the road straight away if you wanna make it through.’ Then he answered his guest. ‘That’s easy, mate, yeah. The security situation’ — he put on a portentous, official voice — ‘cannot be reported for security reasons.’ Then he laughed and threw the dregs of his orange juice on the parched earth. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I reckon your mate’s got the right idea.’