Will Self - The Butt

Tom stood off to one side, grinning and swinging his free hands. One after another the insurance men finished their cigarettes. They carefully extinguished them on the ground, then picked up the butts. Pocketing these, they walked over to a couple of beaten-up Japanese hatchbacks, which they piled into.

‘They’re going into the townships to work,’ Prentice explained. ‘That’s why they don’t drive anything flashy.’

‘Selling tontines to poor bastards who’re gonna kill each other for the pay-out,’ Tom spat back. ‘You call that work?’

‘Really, Tom,’ Prentice replied equably, ‘everyone’s got to make a living.’

Tom gulped. ‘And you, uh, Brian, what’s your occupation nowadays — still the Swift One, the Righter of Wrongs?’

Prentice shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other. ‘Ah, well. . I don’t know, old chap,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t you?’ Try as he might, Tom’s voice crept up the register. ‘What exactly went on back there in the desert, Prentice? D’you understand it? Because I sure as hell don’t. And what’s it got to do with this?’ He waved the tissuey paper of the car-rental agreement that he had dug out from his document wallet. ‘I’ve read through all this goddamn corporate legalese. Turns out, that if either one of us gets killed, the other guy’s his legal heir and comes into’ — he examined the small print again — ‘a cool two hundred Gs.

‘I never figured you for such an altruist, Prentice. I mean, you could’ve hesitated for one tiny second back there and you’d’ve come outta that ambush one very wealthy man.’

Prentice puffed up his sunken chest. ‘I don’t know what you’re implying, Tom,’ ‘he blustered. ‘Whatever you may believe about me, old chap, I hope you wouldn’t think for a moment that I’d let a fellow Anglo be shot in cold blood by one of those black bastards.’

‘Black bastards — black bastards. Sheeeooo!’ Tom shook his head in disbelief. ‘You certainly do know how to coin a phrase, my friend. Oh, yes.’ Then he decided to change tack: ‘Your wife’s cousin come through for you, did he?’

‘Come through?’

‘I mean, did he wire you your funds? Seems to me a man with your high moral standards would be anxious to pay his debts.’

Suddenly, Tom felt drained by the effort of it all. The Sector may have been well irrigated, yet the air still crumpled with the desert heat. He sank down into a squat, his head spinning.

The previous night’s dream came to him. Some kind of cookout or camping trip. His daughter, Dixie, still sporting the ridiculous disc of greased hair that he had last seen heading through security at Vance Airport, but otherwise completely naked and lying in the long grass.

Tom had looked wonderingly at her. She was supporting herself on one slim arm, her long legs bent sideways. It was the same posture — he had realized on waking — as that of the girl in the Wyeth reproduction over the bed. But, unlike Wyeth’s Appalachian waif, flopping on to Dixie’s lower thigh — resting there justly and weightily — was a large, perfectly formed penis.

I better not tell her, Tom had reasoned in his swoon. I better not tell her she’s gotta dick — it’ll be upsetting for a teenage girl.

‘Are you all right, Tom?’ Prentice was bending over him blowing smoke into his face.

Tom coughed. ‘Eugh — yeah, yeah, sure. It’s. .’ He pulled himself together and rose. ‘It’s just I feel so goddamn weak. It started back at the Huffermans’ camp — that’s when you started to, like, do stuff. You unloaded the car — then there was the ambush. Come to think of it, you even put your own psoriasis stuff on the night before, didn’t you?’

Tom sank back down into his squat. Grit pricked his palms. He looked up: the dark halo of Prentice’s hat eclipsed the hurtful sun. Tom said, ‘D’you believe what Hufferman said: that it’s changing between us? And what about the tontine — do the two things kind of gear into each other?’

Prentice shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Tom, but I’m keeping an open mind.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and pocketed the butt. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet with Ms Swai-Phillips. After that’ — he adopted a pained expression — ‘I shall visit the bank.

‘Incidentally, Tom,’ Prentice said, hurrying on — the mention of the bank had been an indelicacy — ‘Gloria told me you’re got a package for her; perhaps you should give it to me?’

This reanimated Tom. He stood. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘She entrusted that package to me, alone.’

He stalked towards the doors of the Hilton: their photoelectric cells acknowledged, then admitted him to a shushed lobby, where silk scarves, long unsold, were creatively pinned to velvet cushions. Rubbing the edge of his key card with his callused thumb, Tom rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and the peace of his room.

Which was no peace at all. The key card when he swiped it in the lock; the debris left by Adams when he had made his coffee; Tom’s own paisley-patterned washbag — all of it struck him as horribly grotesque: the corpses of objects rather than the objects themselves. Was it that the TGS was real, while he had become robotic? Or were its pocket office blocks and neat lawns only a zone of reality imposed on the ruggedly anarchic Tontines? Then again, perhaps it was the Tontines that were the mirage, and only the desert truly existed at all?

Concentric rings of mind-bending illusion rippled out from where Tom lay, stretched out like a water boatman on the surface tension of the bed. His legs weakly spasmed, his cordite-coarsened fingers felt gross against the smooth nap of the coverlet. He could hear his own breathing, the ceaseless shushing of the aircon’, the intwakka-lakka-twakka of a helicopter landing in the military base beyond the parking lot.

He was very close now to the hysteria that had courted him, politely opening door after door as he ventured further into his ordained nightmare. He was saved — by the red eye of the message light, blinking on the phone.

Tom picked up the handset and pressed it to his ear. ‘One. New. Message. . Hi, yeah. . It’s Gloria Swai-Phillips here, Mr Brod — Tom. Lissen, that package of mine. Thing is, I’ve had a frantic day, so we’ll have to meet up later, right? I’m hosting a little reception thing — soirée I s’pose you’d say. .’ She giggled girlishly. Soirée, Tom thought. No one says that, not even Adams. ‘Anyway, maybe you could drop by, yeah? It’s downstairs at around six. It’ll be full of dull charity and guvvie types, but there’ll be a raw bar.’

Tom replaced the handset, then roused himself. Now she had called, now that he had a liaison with Gloria, he could entertain the thought of further intimacy. After all, why not? He was a free man.

He looked over at her parcel, which was sitting on the easy-chair. Caught in the beams that shone through the blinds, the columns of the newsprint it was wrapped in seemed to form the contours of a face. A desert tribesman’s face. Tom broke from its hollow stare and called the concierge. ‘I, uh, wondered. .’

‘Sir?’

‘I’d like to go out — out of the Sector, that is, and have a look round. Is this possible?’

‘There’s a walking tour at three this afternoon, sir. Shall I put your name down for it?’

‘Walking? You mean, like, a hike?’

‘Oh, no,’ the concierge laughed. ‘It’s more of a stroll — even our elderly guests manage it, so no worries there.’

* * *

Promptly at three, Tom went down to the lobby, only to discover that he was the sole taker for the excursion. A massive Tugganarong man, wearing a bullet-proof vest and holding a sign with BRODZINSKI written on it, was standing by the concierge’s desk. His name, he informed Tom with great solemnity, was Valldolloppollou — although he was happy to be addressed as Val.