Will Self - The Butt

‘Oh, yes, jolly good.’ Prentice fluttered a hand, clearly disdaining such book-learning in the light of his own very practical experience. ‘Well, then, you’ll know what comes next. Bleeding, injured, in dreadful pain, um, down there , these poor young things are passed around. First between the makkatas, then all the men in the mob. They’re, um, used grievously — it’s a dreadful shame. Better they be introduced to hunt-the-sausage by someone a little gentler, a chap willing to help them out with a little cash. No one minds , Tom — not even their own people.’

‘You fucking slime. .’ Tom began, then stopped. There had been a fracture in space and time, or else this confession was only a product of his own fevered imagination. Prentice was at least a hundred yards off, pulling up long tendrils of vegetation from the face of a dune, then squeezing their scrotal bulbs into his parched gash of a mouth. A fly squatted on the headrest of his vacated seat. It was rubbing its front legs together, hispid and viscid, ever so ’umble.

Tom got out of the car. He felt as weak as a half-drowned kitten. His legs, in the thick denim pants, were running with sweat. He tottered to the back of the SUV, unclipped one of the Galils and removed it from its sleeve. He had to rummage in the trunk for the shells, then inserted them into the magazine. Yet with each action his movements became more decisive. This was, he concluded as he rammed the box into the breech, why all along the rifle had felt so instinctively right.

When Tom lifted it to his shoulder and put his eye to the sights, Prentice was in his face. I can touch him, Tom grimaced. Touch him with my metal finger, spreading death ointment. A stray shot — could’ve been anyone, Gloria. . Violent place, the desert — you know that. . Escaped inmates from Eyre’s Pit — crazed smokers. . Held us up. .

Tom propped the Galil against the SUV. He began shovelling from the trunk the fresh cartons of cigarettes that Prentice had bought at the last road stop outside Trangaden. He tore a carton open and scattered the fat packs on the sand. Then he stopped and, picking it up, levelled the rifle at Prentice once more.

Get. It. Done. Now. This time Tom Brodzinski could feel the precise weight of every synaptic link in the chain of causality — from intention to action — as it passed between his fingers. His finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. Both cross hairs precisely bisected Prentice’s face, slicing it into four equally loathsome sections. Tom felt the first stage of the trigger mechanism fall into place with a click as loud as an explosion. At this range it would be impossible to miss. Death was a twitch away, a butt-flip. Death profoundly and devoutly willed.

Tom froze. He was locked up in his stance — his finger cramped in the trigger guard, the stock grinding against his cheekbone. He could hear his tendons whining with the tension. He was fervently thrusting, with every iota of his will, towards the future — yet unable to breathe, swallow, blink.

It took a long while for Prentice to wade back down the dune. Tom watched, transfixed, as first one of his boots, then the next, lifted from the silvery sand. Prentice’s movements were so leisurely that his would-be executioner could hear the individual grains as they trickled over the leather. He was dragging a long net of effel tendrils behind him, trawling the dry sea.

Suddenly, Prentice’s face was gone from the sights and he was standing right beside Tom, his ashtray breath in Tom’s nostrils. He carefully — almost tenderly — took the Galil from the spasmed hands and said in a voice that was more parental than any Tom had ever heard before: ‘Come on, old chap, we best put this away now. We wouldn’t want anything silly to happen, now would we?’

Prentice said nothing of all this to Gloria when she returned; he only drove with the skill and concentration that the desert track demanded of him. Tom hunched in the back seat, quietly whimpering, mourning his potency. The news-paper head stared contemptuously at him, while the flies, forgetting their humility, took disgusting liberties with his eyes and mouth. Little company, indeed.

That night the trio slept out in the desert, cocooned in their swags, their breath condensing in the frozen air. A small white-gold moon sailed along the horizon, leaving a gleaming wake on the dune crests. Tom was a ghost exhaling steam. The lush fruit of other stars was heaped in the bowl of the heavens. In the distance a wild dog yapped.

At dawn, Prentice helped Tom to put on his boots, then served him a breakfast of hot tea and moist porridge. He wielded the little gas stove with diligent economy and, as he passed the vessels, remarked: ‘Lucky I had a bottle of mineral water stashed — effel alone wouldn’t’ve got us to Eyre’s Pit.’

By mid morning the crescent-shaped dunes were subsiding; then the sands retreated, exposing the desert floor. Ahead, the earth’s crust had been playing with itself: fashioning barley sugar twists of basalt and dolloping down lumps of molten rock. In places it had cracked itself open, revealing the mighty vermiculation of subterranean lava tubes.

At noon, when the heat and the flies in the car started to bother even the stoical man of action who was driving, they gained the top of a narrow defile through a range of bulbous, stony hills. Gloria was yakking on about how Eyre, the first Anglo explorer to cross this desert, was deceived by his own ‘patriarchal mindset’ into believing the Tayswengo to be like himself. Whereas the reality was that the native women had their own powerful traditions, which were taboo to all men.

Martha, Tom reflected, never talked so much. She kept her clapboard mouth — thin, white-lipped — nailed shut. Tom cradled the head for comfort. He stroked the sweat-damp newsprint, and little balls of it came away on his fingers.

‘What’re you doing?’ Gloria rounded on him. ‘That contains vital equipment for Erich, yeah? If it’s the slightest bit contaminated it’ll be bloody useless.’

‘Erich? Who’s Erich? And whaddya mean, contaminated?’ Tom shouted back. He was on the verge of throwing her parcel back in her bossy face, when there was a roaring noise so loud that it undercut the SUV’s clanking engine.

‘I say, is that the roar of the sands?’ Prentice asked. ‘It’s a sound I’ve always wanted to hear.’

Now it was his turn. Gloria spat at him: ‘No, you bloody drongo, in case you hadn’t noticed we left the sands hours ago. That’s the roar of the bloody bauxite refinery, the roar of the road-trains carrying the bloody stuff off to the coast, and the roar of all the bloody machinery down the bloody pit!’

A few minutes later they came to a checkpoint. A couple of private security men were manning it. They were Tugga-narong — so bored their faces had gone grey. Like a child who has fallen asleep during a long car journey, Tom woke to find a strange new world stocked with the same old things. He marvelled at the heavily armed guards. How could I have confused these guys with the real natives? They’re as out of their element as me.

The guards rousted Prentice out of the car, then Tom and Gloria. Their papers were scrutinized, and Prentice asked if there was any water available. One of the guards told him: ‘You’ll be able to pick up a water bag at the company store, yeah, no worries.’

Prentice plodded away towards an ersatz massif of slag heaps.

It was too hot to wait in the car, so Tom and Gloria hid from the sun in the shadow of a smoking shelter, where ectoplasm was sucked from dirty-faced miners by powerful ducts. Sitting on the rubble, Tom asked again: ‘Who’s Erich, and what’s that freakin’ parcel got to do with him?’