Will Self - The Butt

Later, Tom dressed for Gloria Swai-Phillips’s charity reception.

‘I am the Swift One,’ he said aloud, as he used the tiny hotel iron to press the short pants of his absurd suit. ‘I am the Righter of Wrongs.’

He checked himself in the mirror. The tie he had worn in court was speckled with stains; never the less, he dutifully knotted it. He looked, he thought, OK. Was it his imagination or had the long journey with its violent incidents mysteriously agreed with him? The Tom Brodzinski in the mirror was fitter and leaner — younger even.

There was a knock at the door. Prentice stood in the dimly lit corridor, his head tilted back, his scrawny neck exposed. ‘It’s a beastly fag, Tom.’ He held up the tube of psoriasis ointment. ‘But I just don’t seem able to do this again. I was all right last night and this morning. . Would you mind awfully?’

Tom said: ‘It’ll be my pleasure.’

Then, after it was done and Tom had washed his hands, they took the elevator together down to the lobby. Tom carried Gloria’s parcel, and, of course, the muzak never stopped.

It wasn’t until they were almost in the function room, and level with a sign on an easel that said, the three rivers childhood development agency welcomes tgs employees, that Prentice hurriedly excused himself, claiming he had to ‘buy some fags’. Tom, who had noticed the usual oblong bulge in his shirt pocket, snorted and turned on his heel.

Gloria had been right — the reception was insufferably dull. Shortie-suited bureaucrats stood here and there on the pinkish carpet, holding plates with wine glasses clipped to them — a buffet accessory Tom hadn’t seen in decades. The conversations he overheard as he made his way across the large room, with its oppressively low polystyrene ceiling, were banal to the point of being surreal. One man’s gutters were choked with leaves; a second was having difficulty getting his car serviced. A woman in a frumpy dress with puffed sleeves was telling another woman — in an equally frumpy outfit — that she suspected the super’ in her apartment building of having ‘a tiddly prob’ with the grog’.

The only person Tom recognized was Daphne Hufferman, who was over by the raw bar, defiantly out of place in her canary-yellow towelling babygro, and with a hessian sack lying on the carpet by her big booted feet.

‘Wow,’ Tom exclaimed as he joined her. ‘What’s all this?’

‘Yeah,’ Daphne replied, then paused to suck up a large shelled shrimp, as a child might a spaghetti string, before adding, ‘It’s quite a thing, right enough.’

The raw bar stretched the entire length of the room: a vast trough of galvanized zinc heaped with ice chips, upon which were piled shrimp, clams, crayfish, lobster tails, whole softshell crabs, oysters and still more Crustacea that Tom didn’t recognize — spidery arthropods, the spindly basketry of their legs as big as a football; tiger-striped shellfish with the flat, coiled aspect of ammonites; and some sort of sea bug like a giant woodlouse. This dead reef was fringed with bowls of salad, sauces, and tumblers stuffed with celery stalks and whole carrots.

‘Tom,’ Daphne said, ‘this is Jean Lejeune. He’s the child protection officer for Tontine 901, out towards Kellippi. Jean — Tom.’

Tom turned to this man, muttering an apology for having interrupted, then recoiled. Lejeune was a six-footer with a bear-like build. He wore spectacles with round frames and combed his black hair straight back; yet this was all beside the point — mere details, because surrounding Lejeune’s full-lipped mouth was a lustrous goatee of Sangat clams.

Tom’s eyes involuntarily slid to the raw bar, then back to this extraordinary sight. Lejeune was unperturbed. ‘You’re taken by my infestation, yeah,’ he stated.

‘Uh, yeah, well. .’ Tom demurred.

‘Don’t be embarrassed — it’s in yer face, yeah.’

Daphne Hufferman snorted with merriment and, grasping Lejune’s arm, bent to pick up the sack. ‘Got the part, right,’ she said, hefting it. ‘Soon as this is done I’m back over there.’ A jerk of her thumb. ‘Gotta seat with a Tuggie patrol.’

Lejeune pursed his lips, and the clams crepitated. Tom wondered if the man had been making a move on Daphne; it wouldn’t have been a bad bet, given her own interest in child protection. He addressed Tom: ‘The lady here tells me you’re from overseas; some of you blokes are a bit critical of the way we do things here.’

‘No, not really — not at all.’

He felt awkward with the newspaper-wrapped parcel in his arms, but there was nowhere he could set it down.

Lejeune resumed at an odd tangent: ‘I’m from Amherst myself, yeah — so’s the rest of the seafood here. You might think it a waste of resources, freighting all this stuff thousands of clicks over here, but lemme tellya, yeah’ — he crowded Tom with his clams — ‘the interior of the entire bloody continent was once under water. That’s right, mate, if we were standing here millions of years ago there’d be sea over our bloody heads. So what I say is. .’ He leaned in still further, and Tom could see rotting kelp between the shells. ‘What goes around bloody comes around. It’s a measure of Anglo civilization, yeah, that we can do such marvellous things.’

Tom was struggling to digest this when the man offered him another tid-bit: ‘Besides, I was going to grow a beard anyway, yeah. Can’t stand bloody shaving.’

Searching for a pretext to break from this repellent fellow, Tom spotted Adams skulking behind a trough of shrubbery. Tom was making his excuses, when there was a sudden ‘thwock-thwock-thwock!’ Gloria Swai-Phillips was standing on a small rostrum tapping a mic’. The desultory hubbub died away altogether, and she addressed the throng. ‘TRCDA is pleased to welcome you all to this gala reception, right?’ she began. ‘It’s a great honour to have such distinguished company here to meet our staff and field workers, yeah? I’d like to extend an especial welcome to the Proconsul’ — she inclined her head towards a hefty blond man in a Mao tunic — ‘Mr Fabien Renard, CEO of Endeavour Surety’ — this one had salt-and-pepper hair, a shiny suit — ‘and, of course, Commander Ellanoppolloppolou, for without the cooperation of him and his men, our work here would be impossible, yeah?’

The police commander’s hair was so sharply sculpted that it sat on his round head like one of the angular caps worn by his men. He withdrew a swagger stick from under his arm and conducted himself in a curt bow.

‘As you all know,’ Gloria resumed, ‘this is the fifth anniversary of our project being up and running in the Tontine Townships, yeah? During that time, we’ve helped some 700 tontine orphans to find new domiciles, yeah? These can be state facilities or private institutions, yeah? Other children stay in our own homes, and in several cases we’ve even managed to secure adoptions, yeah?’

Tom heard everything that Gloria said as a question. For weeks now he had ignored the locals’ nonsensical interrogatives — but she seemed genuinely to be querying reality, rather than simply affirming it.

There was a polite scattering of applause, and Gloria blushed. When she began speaking again, Tom found he couldn’t concentrate on her words. He stared at the flapping red slot of her mouth. It was no longer her resemblance to Martha that made him feel he knew Gloria intimately; it was an overpowering sense of déjà vu. He had been in this function room before, with these people and those chairs. He had been with a woman exactly like Gloria, who nurtured him, cuddled him, loved him as a mother loves her child.

She was saying. ‘There are real signs of change and progress, yeah?’ when Tom began to cry. The tears ran down the inside of his eyes, smearing this commonplace: the middle-aged woman giving a halting speech.