Will Self - The Butt

In the dream, Tom was forcibly struck by his own lucidity: a heightened, pinpoint awareness, such as is stimulated by the first heady on-rush of nicotine through the blood. Where had she gone? France, certainly; he remembered a postcard from Arles. And Italy. Then there’d been a few weeks somewhere else, staying with family. . in Belgium? Could it have been? It was such an improbable destination — Tom hadn’t paid enough attention. .

Next, he was lying down on the bedroom floor of the first house they had bought, the frame house in the new Scottsdale development, out towards the reservoir. . And spring was gusting through the open window, but it remained impossible to pay attention, because Tommy Junior, his adoptive son, was sitting on Tom’s chest and punching him in the face with his chubby fists. Pummelling him with a deliberateness that was horribly inappropriate for a one-year-old.

Tom woke up with the fat book crushing him and the sweat chilled on his goose-pimpled skin. He limped to the bathroom and siphoned off the tank full of urine, near-fainting as it hissed into the avocado commode. Then he tottered back into the bedroom, inserted himself between the profane hotel sheets and joined the battle for true oblivion.

The fly rubbed its two front legs together: hispid and viscid. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off them: back and forth they went, kinking slightly, the motion creating wrists and hands. It wasn’t cleaning itself; it was instinctively making a gesture of false humility. ‘I’m only a humble fly,’ the fly was saying. ‘You needn’t pay any attention to me .’

Yet Tom’s attention was unwavering. The fly’s six bristled sticky feet were planted on the dash, which, with its terrain of vinyl, mirrored the desert outside the car. The fly’s compound eyes — black and shiny — wrapped around its triangular head. Was it Tom’s increasingly unbridled imagination, or was there a warty eruption on the insect’s mandibles? Mandibles that opened to utter: ‘Whoa! Old chap, watch out for that—’

Prentice was cut off as they all rose up to kiss the sky.

At first Tom couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then the whine of the whizzing front tyres, and the fact that he was lying on his back, brought home how utter was their reversal. The dumb little SUV — the off-road capabilities of which Tom had always had severe doubts — had tipped backwards and was resting on its tailgate in the sand, while its snub-nosed hood trumpeted engine noises.

In the rear-view Tom saw Prentice supine in a jumble of cigarette cartons, drug ampoules and baby-bottle nipples. Tom’s bad companion peered up at him with an expression of parental dismay.

Gloria broke the spell. ‘The water!’ she cried. ‘And the bloody, fucking fuel!’

She unclipped her seatbelt and struggled out of her seat. Tom did the same, dropping down awkwardly on to the sand, into which a damp patch was spreading from the dented flanks of the incontinent vehicle.

‘Squashed,’ Tom muttered. ‘Squashed like a fly.’

‘Move it, you fool!’ Gloria screeched, flapping her black robes. ‘We gotta get this thing upright!’

They all hung from the auraca bars, and the SUV tipped forward so readily that they only narrowly escaped as all four wheels were reunited with the ground. The water bag was exposed — a popped blister on the silica skin.

Gloria went to the back of the car. ‘We’re not totally bloody dead, yeah? Amazingly, the gas can is intact.’

‘That’s a deuced relief,’ said Prentice, joining her. He called across to Tom, ‘Look here, y’know what’s happening, don’t you? It was the same on Route 1 before we got to Trangaden. I’d better take over the driving.’

Tom started to argue that it wasn’t his fault: after all, they had never driven the SUV off-road before. Then he faltered — an enormous weariness had slumped on top of him. The gelatinous shreds of the previous night’s dream still clung to his psyche, making any further protest impossible.

Meekly, he helped Prentice sort out the mess in the trunk. He checked the rifles, but the gas can had protected them. Feeling the fake-wood grain of one of the stocks sent a charge through Tom’s hands — this, at least, could vivify him. Silently, Tom climbed into the back seat of the car and took Gloria’s egg-shaped parcel in his flaccid arms. Prentice — who, when he was driving, delighted in flouting Gloria’s edicts — lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. They drove on.

There were flies in this region of the desert. Flies but no cattle or auraca — and they hadn’t seen any moai since before they reached Lake Mulgrene. There were plentiful flies, but nothing that Tom could see for them to feed on. There wasn’t even any spiniflex or thorn scrub; only the oceanic swell of the sands, which, as the car strained towards the crest of another dune, were revealed rippling hazily away towards the horizon. Somewhere over there Beelzebub was shooting flies with a needle gun, then feeding their furry bodies to the mutant maggots he hand-reared in underground caverns.

Penetrating his droning reverie, Tom dimly heard a practical back-and-forth between Prentice and Gloria: talk of the route, the diversion they would have to take to Eyre’s Pit in order to make good their water deficiency. Gloria studied the map; Prentice changed gear with studious zeal.

Tom interrogated the parcel. What are you and where are you going? What are your intentions, please?

A corner of one of the newspaper sheets had come away from the bundle, and he idly flicked it with a fingernail.

Do I really want to do that? Tom considered of each millesimal movement. Is this my sole motivation, to watch the frayed fibres vibrate? If so, can I analyse every link of the chain between my brain and my finger? Can I see the very point where my thought becomes an action? Just suppose that, when the little bit of paper moves, it moves the air, and the air becomes a breeze, and the breeze blows on the sand, and the sand starts to cascade, becoming a landslide that ends up burying somebody. Then what? Is it all down to me? Because maybe I kinda lost sight of that thought as it went along the chain. Maybe I stopped wanting to flick a bit of paper. . and started wanting to pull. . a trigger.

The car had stopped in the cleavage between two steeply sloping dunes. The flies were shocked out of their humility for a second, then resumed their supplication on Tom’s face.

‘Effel,’ Gloria said, pointing at the dune.

‘What?’ Prentice’s voice seemed to have dropped half an octave.

‘It’s a succulent, grows on the back of dunes. The plants are bloody vast — they can put tap roots down hundreds of metres, yeah, and spread for thousands of square clicks.’ She got out of the car. ‘You could do worse than pull some up, yeah? The bulbs are like little sponges, fulla fluids, yeah? I’m gonna take a piss.’

She strode away over the spur of a dune, wading in its shifting solidity, her black robes riffled by the wind.

Prentice canted round and looked steadily at Tom. ‘Honestly, old chap, I wouldn’t do it to them if they didn’t want me to.’

‘You what?’

‘I admit, quite freely’ — Prentice stroked his smooth, strong jaw — ‘that some of them are on the. . well, let’s say, inexperienced end of things. Still, you’ve got to understand how things are for them.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Come puberty — thirteen, fourteen maybe — they have to go off, leave their mob, lads and lasses both. They stay out in a camp, in the bush. Then, after a month or so, they come back for circumcision—’

‘I know all that,’ Tom snapped. ‘I’ve read the Von Sassers.’