Will Self - The Butt

‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘Absolutely, uh, Winnie. She can rely on me.’

And they parted.

Back up in his room, Tom began packing his stuff. The flimsy clothing designed for walking from poolside to lounger, the tubes of scientifically formulated skin unguents, his digital camera, cellphone and the roach motel, to which he had become sentimentally attached — all these he reverently slotted into his battered and filthy flight bag.

Once, he sat down on the bed and started to dial the familiar digits of his home phone, but halfway through he stopped, then replaced the femoral handset on its pelvic cradle. Tom put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He peeked out between his fingers. Gloria’s head-shaped parcel sat on the plinth of the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo , watching him with its newsprint eyes.

They missed the left turn that Route 1 made for Trangaden and the south. Missed it, and didn’t even realize that they had until they reached an enormous ‘Route 2’ waymark, and a sign saying that Kellippi was a mere 807 kilometres further.

Tom pulled up abruptly and began manhandling the SUV into a three-point turn.

‘Better not,’ Gloria said, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Look up ahead.’

Low-flying helicopters were circling over the blast walls of a checkpoint. Even from several hundred yards off, Tom could see the coils of razor wire flaring in the evening sun.

‘They’ll’ve seen us,’ Gloria went on. ‘Better go through, yeah?’

By the time they had negotiated the checkpoint, it was twilight — too late to go back through and resume the right road. The sergeant on duty told them there was a decent motel a few klicks on, so Tom, close to collapsing with the frustration of it all, drove there.

It had been a long day, most of which had been taken up with having their papers checked. The 300 kilometres of Route 1 that ran through the Tontine Townships had more checkpoints than the previous 4,000.

The townships were at once desultory and threatening: the plantation settlements, each with its paramilitary blockhouse, dusty maidan and empty boulevards lined with converted containers, were identical to each other. As Route 1 turned into yet another central boulevard, to either side of which were ranged the same insurance offices, so another flock of prostitutes rose up and flapped after them, their wings beating invisible meat, their throats gobbling.

Stopping at the fifth checkpoint of the morning, and noting the paramilitaries’ Humvees, equipped with steel skirting to prevent hand grenades being tossed under them, Tom asked Gloria: ‘Why don’t the authorities stop the selling of tontines if it’s fuelling the violence?’

‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ she explained, employing the sing-song voice patronizing people use for children — or idiots. ‘The financial-services industry down south would have an absolute bloody fit if the guvvie messed with them, yeah? No pol who wants to hang on to office could risk that .’

Now, Tom waited while Gloria showed her ID card to the security camera, then pulled the SUV in through the motel’s steel gates. Prentice — who had been banished to the jump seat — took his time getting out. He had been forbidden to smoke by Gloria, who, like most of the native Anglos, seemed untroubled by the flies. Tom waited for him to make his usual lame excuses, before skulking off for a ‘fag’. But instead, Prentice stretched, clapped his hands together and said, ‘Right. You must be worn out after that drive, Tom. You go get a sundowner while I unload the gear and check the firearms into the motel armoury.’

Tom’s hand went to the tontine conversion certificate concealed in his pocket — was its juju not working? Were his and Prentice’s grades of astande shifting once more? Certainly, Tom felt worryingly debilitated, and as he shuffled into the motel he heard Gloria saying, ‘Mind you check that parcel into the motel safe as well, Brian.’

The motel bar was full of fleshy red-faced men who stood drinking outsized wineglasses full of dark Belgian beer. Equally fleshy women, with peroxide hair, sat at the small tables eating dishes of what appeared to be cooked chicory. Obnoxious fleshy kids charged across the tiled floor from the reception desk and flung themselves into a small swimming pool that stank of chlorine. The bored Belgian barmaid explained to Tom that it had been built inside on account of the security situation.

‘I should think things’ll be easier tomorrow on the driving front, right?’ Gloria speculated, perching on the bar stool next to Tom’s.

He looked at his badly drawn wife. Gone was the hesitant charity worker recounting statistics in the function room of the Hilton. Gloria had been acting all day as if Tom and Prentice were annoying boys and she their competent elder sister. Tom wanted to reconnect with a still other Gloria: the woman who had swabbed the makkata’s gash on his inner thigh, then caressed him at the law courts. But, while his longing had grown through the long, flyblown day, she had became steadily more distant.

Tom was so weary that once he’d had a couple of beers and tottered to his cabin, he didn’t have the energy to rejoin his companions for supper. Instead, he fell asleep, fully clothed, on the bed, the sanitary strip he had removed from the toilet bowl twined in his fingers.

This time giant fingers pinched his waist, then rolled him back and forth. Tom heard a rib crack — yet couldn’t cry out. Next, violent acceleration. Tom flew end over end, his mind smouldering with the effort of trying to alter his course: a bullet in dread of its own trajectory. If only, he smouldered, if only I can twist myself this way and hold my arms out, then I can go that much further, and fall harmlessly into the flower bed at the front of the apartment block. . But he had no arms.

He reached the zenith of his parabola and, screaming, plummeted back down into the tangled and hairy mess of the bedding, where he burned.

In the morning Prentice had the SUV loaded up by the time Tom managed to drag himself along from his cabin. He felt terrible, and Gloria greeted him with ‘You look bloody terrible.’ It was a nagging enervation that reminded Tom of the aftermath of flu.

What was Gloria wearing? She stood in the colourless void of the pre-dawn desert entirely swathed in a black toga, the complicated drapes of which covered her face, her hands and even her feet. Her costume was creepily completed by green-tinted goggles.

‘It’s gonna be hot where we’re headed, yeah?’ Gloria said as Tom drove the SUV out of the motel compound and they set off back along Route 2.

He snorted, ‘And what’s it been here? This is the desert, isn’t it?’

‘Strictly speaking,’ said Prentice, pushing his face forward between the seats, ‘this is only the channel country, the River Mulgrene Delta. That’s why there’s so much gravel, and so many wadis — which are the dried-up tributaries. When it rains here — which only happens once or twice a decade — all this floods.’

‘What is this? A fucking geography class?’

Prentice, aggrieved, sat back, but Gloria said: ‘You’d do well to pay attention to geography, read the land — that’s how the traditional people survive here, right?

‘Take this Tayswengo toga,’ she continued. ‘It’s perfectly adapted to handle fifty-degree heat, yeah? The black cloth absorbs the sun’s rays, you sweat, then the folds hold and cool that sweat, so that you’ve gotta kinduv sleeve of coolness, yeah?’

As ever, Tom reflected, Gloria didn’t sound that sure of what she was saying.

This time they made the right turn to the south. The blacktop that had carried them through the Tontines, on towards Kellippi and now back again gave out after a few kilometres. There was a last road sign — TRANGADEN 1,570 KMS, LAKE MULGRENE NATURE PARK 876 KMS — then the impacted dirt corrugations began, the constant judder making further conversation, or even thought, an effort.