Will Self - The Butt

Val went with Tom to get one of his rifles from the hotel armoury. Here, Tom was also issued with his own vest and a helmet with the Hilton logo on it.

‘Is all this strictly necessary?’ he asked.

‘Not really, sir,’ Val replied. ‘There’s no real action, yeah, until the end of the week, when the miners, yeah, come in from Kellippi. Then all kinds of shit happens.

‘Besides,’ he continued, snapping a magazine into his own rifle as they strolled towards the first of the checkpoints, ‘when you checked in, you signed a tontine transfer.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That if some pissed bing-bong drops you while we’re out, the balance of your tontine is assigned to Hilton International. So the flak jacket and helmet are only a courtesy, yeah.’

Tom reflected on this as the cop at the barrier stamped his laissez-passer, then waved them through. Perhaps this was why, with each step he took out of the TGS, Tom felt his strength returning: he was no longer in thrall to Prentice.

By the time they had negotiated the third checkpoint the fresh greens of the TGS had been filmed over: the atmosphere was saturated with gritty particles, and Tom could taste the ferrous crud. Then there were the flies. How could he, even for a few short hours, have abandoned them? They made straight for the corners of his mouth and clustered there to engage in interspecific French kissing.

Outside the final blast wall, Val quartered the empty, dusty maidan with his rifle. Tom, not wanting to appear a wuss, did the same.

‘Sir, yeah, I’d keep your safety on — if you shoot someone, the paperwork’s a nightmare, yeah,’ the tour guide gently advised him.

Tom was digesting this when they were mobbed by a crowd of native women who materialized from nowhere. They wore dirty shift dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them: Hello Kitty. They crowded round Tom and Val — yet didn’t touch them. The women’s hands jerked up and down in front of their faces, while their cheeks bulged spasmodically. It took a few moments, then Tom realized: they were miming fellatio.

As the two men proceeded across the maidan, then down the main bouleward, still more prostitutes debouched from the trash-choked alleys, skipping over open drains running with raw sewage. They all importuned Tom and his guide with this obscene pantomime, but they never touched them. It was too eerie to comment on; so it was in silence that the men moved from window to window of the containerized offices that Tom had noticed the previous evening. Inside they were kitted out with desks, chairs and plexiglas holders full of brightly coloured leaflets.

Tom halted outside Endeavour Surety. ‘Can we go in?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ said the big Tugganarong. ‘Press the buzzer — all the tourists check it out, yeah.’

Responding to the rasp, an armed guard rose up from behind a seating area. He unlocked the door, and, as he ushered them in, a thin, harried-looking Anglo came out from the back office, then carefully shut and locked the door behind him.

‘Are you selling, buying or only bloody gawping?’ was his salutation, and, when Tom failed to reply immediately, he went on: ‘I see, another bloody gawper, right.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘It’s OK, mate.’ The insurance salesman waved away the apology. ‘I understand, you’ve blown into town and you wanna know what’s what, right. Well, here’s the listing.’

He reached under the counter and pulled up a pegboard with rows of letters and numbers stuck to it. ‘If you’ve gotta car-rental policy rider, I can give you 12.2 percent on it, seeing that it’s midweek. If you’re buying outright, there’s not a lot happening, though this here is interesting.’ He indicated a quotation with a nicotine-stained finger. ‘These blokes, right, they’re down to seven now; tontine’s been running for twenty-two months, pay-out’s in the region of eighty-eight K, and’ — he paused for emphasis — ‘they bought right at the bottom of the market, so the premiums are low. There are two blokes who want to sell right now, or the entire tontine is offering a randomized spread bet of threes.’

The Anglo may have been grumpy to begin with, but he started to be taken in by his own spiel. ‘These blokes,’ he laughed, rubbing his crew cut with the knuckles of one hand, ‘they’re miners out at Kellippi, Inssessitti mob — never thought they’d last this long, right. Sold ’em the policy myself.’

The salesman finished his pitch, and, with a note of childlike wonderment, Tom asked him: ‘You mean I can buy someone else’s tontine, and if the other policy holders. .’

‘Kark it, you get the lot. That’s right, mate. You’re from overseas, aren’t you? I s’pose you don’t have tontines in your neck of the woods. Yeah.’ He warmed still more, his pinched nostrils flared, sniffing out the prospect of a sale. ‘We’ll sell you a tontine. We’ll sell you tontine options or futures. We can even sell you a weighted basket of high-performing tontines. You may’ve been gawping, my friend, but it so happens that here at Endeavour we specialize in tontine derivatives. A lot of the fancier ones are designed by our financial engineers down south.’

‘When you say high performing,’ Tom said, choosing his words carefully, ‘you mean that the original tontine holders are, uh, dying pretty. . fast?’

The salesman was delighted. ‘That’s bang-on. ’Course, the beauty of it is that the longer the tontine runs, the less able these blokes are to keep up their premiums. They start out thinking it’ll all be cushty, right.’ He shook his head amusedly. ‘That once a few of their mates’ve been done in, they’ll have the incentive to keep off the grog — but it never happens that way. Your tontine holder — specially your bing-bong — basically comes in two types: killer or be killed. Once the tontine’s up and running, both types give in to paranoia; they’re always looking over their shoulder to see who’s creeping up on them. Can’t stand the tension — so they drink. Then they can’t keep up the payments — so they sell out.’

Despite the salesman’s sly face, Tom had to admit to himself that he was becoming a prospect.

‘But if I buy out only some of the policy holders,’ he said, ‘what’s to stop the rest of them coming after me?’

The salesman laughed. ‘Ha! Do you think they’ll get it together, my friend? You’re a blow-through — they’re stuck right here. All you gotta do is make it home, then you can sit by the pool with a tinnie and wait for your investment to mature, yeah.’

Tom leaned forward and placed his sunburned arms on the counter. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Val was listening, but he was over by the window chatting with the guard.

‘What about my, uh, tontine? I thought that was only valid while I and my, er, fellow policy holder were actually here, in the Tontines?’

The salesman gave a broad grin; gold crowns gleamed in the cave of his mouth. He picked up the phone and punched a button. ‘Darlin’,’ he drawled, ‘would you bring me out a couple of glasses of that Volsted Pinot Noir?’ He replaced the handset and said to Tom: ‘That’s true, but not a lot of carpet-baggers know what I’m about to tell you, my friend. You can convert the car-rental tontine to a standard one, then there’s no limit on its territory. You can be bushed in the middle of Aval country, you can be at the bottom of Eyre’s-bloody-Pit; hell, you can be boogying the night away at a disco in Capital City, but if your fellow policy holder gets it, you’re his beneficiary.’

He stopped, while a desert tribeswoman, incongruous in a neat navy two-piece, emerged from the back office and handed them both glasses of white wine filmed with condensation. The salesman took a sip, put his glass down, listened for the click of the door closing, then added with a wink: ‘Or hers.’