Will Self - The Butt

Gloria arranged herself beside him and coyly covered her ankles with the hem of her robe. ‘You’ve known him almost as long as you’ve known me, yeah?’ she said. ‘He’s one of the authors of that magnificent book you’ve been struggling with for weeks now.’

‘You mean Erich von Sasser, the anthropologist?’ Tom pictured the hawkish Chief Prosecutor, pecking at him back in Vance: If you chance to encounter my brother, Erich. . ‘Is this some kinduv a set-up?’ He struggled to restrain his anger.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,’ she replied. ‘It’s common knowledge that the Von Sassers — first father, then son — have been living with the Tayswengo for many, many years now. If you’d made the effort to get through their book, then you’d know how closely involved Erich is with the Intwennyfortee mob.

‘Jesus, Tom, I’ve kids in my bloody orphanages who’ve seen their parents shot dead over tontines right in front of their eyes. They weren’t too traumatized to ask the right questions, but you, you carry on sitting there, yeah? Day after day, letting yourself be dragged along by other people, not even bothering to find out where the hell they’re taking you, yeah?’

Another bloody Martha on my back, thought Tom. At least the flies are being kept off by the miners’ smoke. He was thirsty; although less, he thought, than he should be, given that he was sweating heavily. Moreover, Tom felt a surge of energy between his shoulders, electrifying his spine. He stretched expansively.

‘Did you even hear what I said?’ Tom’s substitute wife nagged him.

The phone rang in the guards’ booth. One of them answered it, spoke for a while, then came over to the shelter.

He addressed Tom: ‘It’s your man, yeah. Says he’s crook, wants you to go down there and give ’im a hand, right.’ He went away again.

Tom stood. ‘Dragged along by other people, am I?’ he said to Gloria. ‘We’ll see about that.’

He strode off along the road leading to the mine, past DANGER and NO SMOKING signs, then under a banner that advertised: EYRE’S PIT EXTRACTION FACILITY, A DIVISION OF MAES-PEETERS INDUSTRIES. OPERATIONAL DAYS THIS YEAR: 360. ORE EXTRACTED: 75,655 TONNES. INJURIES: 1,309. FATALITIES: 274. The figures, Tom thought, were nothing to brag about.

The background roar gained definition: there was the massed clanking of heavy machinery and the hammering of the engines that powered them, while soaring above it was the bellowing of thousands of voices. Skirting the slag heaps, he made decisively for a stack of Portakabins that he assumed were the mine’s offices and stores.

Eyre’s Pit yawned open beside him — a massive chomp out of the world, with nibbled edges defended only by a single strand of barbed wire. Tom reeled back and sat down abruptly on the pebbly ground. Then, summoning himself, he crawled forward on hands and knees until he could gaze down into it.

The pit was at least 6,000 feet deep and a mile across: so immense an absence where there ought to be presence that it created its own distortions in natural law. Tom felt as if he were staring into an earthy empyrean — while also experiencing nauseating vertigo. He grabbed handfuls of the ground, lest he be torn down into the subterranean sky.

There were entire weather systems inside the pit: steamy wraiths wrestled with the black clouds spewed by burn-off pipes; turbo-charged thermals carried flocks of grey and black ash high over Tom’s head, ashes that seconds before had been floating far below him.

At the very bottom, mechanical diggers tore at the sides of the pit, scouring out ochreous grooves. There were hundreds of these galleries, and thousands of miners stood in them. Some hacked away with pickaxes, while others formed chains to deposit bucket after bucket of ore on to the ever-clanking conveyor belts. Tom was reminded of the leaf-cutter ants on the shrubbery at the Mimosa.

The chthonic pit also created its own warped acoustics, so that while the machinery was muted, the groans of the tormented souls carried up to Tom’s ears: the ‘hhns’ and ‘gaars’ of the ants hammering at the rock; the ‘oofs’ and ‘aarghs’ of their comrades hefting the buckets. Then, very distinctly, a small voice wheedled, ‘Gissa ciggie, mate, I’m on smoke-o in ten.’

This wasn’t an industrial enterprise at all — it was manmade hell.

Tom found Prentice slumped by the Portakabins, partly resting on the sloppy gonad of a hessian water bag. Tom picked this up by its handle, then helped Prentice to his feet. Together, they limped back to the checkpoint, Prentice leaning heavily on Tom’s shoulder.

‘Did you see. .’ Prentice croaked, the psoriasis splitting the inflamed skin along his jaw. ‘Did you see inside that bally pit, it’s. . it — it shouldn’t be permitted.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ Tom teased him. ‘Get a hold of yourself, man. You wouldn’t want a world without aluminium, now would you? There’d be no forks, no planes, no tinfoil to wrap your fags — somebody has to make the sacrifice.’

Tom was still pumped up when he attached the water bag to the back of the SUV. He got in and drove them all away with manly dispatch. But his rejuvenation didn’t last for long; by the time they were ten klicks away from the mine, Tom was finding it difficult to keep the car on the track. When they had travelled twenty, he had to pull over and let Prentice take the wheel.

Tom had blundered into a psychic quagmire, and for the next day and a half he floundered there. He was incapable of unzipping his pants without the assistance of his good buddy Brian Prentice. Between feeding sessions — when Prentice coaxed Tom to swallow gritty mouthfuls of oatmeal — and criticism ones — when Gloria hectored him with his ignorance — Tom lay awkwardly along the back seat. The boxes of ribavirin and cartons of cigarettes jabbed his neck, while the desert mutated beyond the filmy windows of the car.

Once they were away from the bled surrounding Eyre’s Pit, the track to Ralladayo coiled back into the volcanic badlands. They drove over escarpments of crumbling breccia, then through canyons the cliffs of which were threaded with mineral seams. Rocky outcrops, sand-blasted by the wind, had assumed the most phantasamagoric shapes: cellphones of scoria and obsidian digital cameras rushed towards the car. A Tommy Junior-shaped spire of tufa loomed overhead that had geological indifference etched into its stony features. Tom shuddered and, cleaving to Gloria’s parcel, pressed its tattered wrapping to his bristly face. It cooed to him: soon over. . soon over. .

Towards sunset on the second day the track descended, and the badlands vomited them out. A flock of moai, startled by their approach, rose up from the shade of some gum trees and goosestepped away, their useless pigeon wings flapping. Hypersensitized, all three of them smelled water. Gloria said, ‘Nearly there, yeah?’

Then, without warning, they were, jolting between wonky fence posts, past the welcoming sign: YOU ARE ENTERING TAYSWENGO TRIBAL LAND. SMOKING PERMITTED. RESPECT THE ANCESTORS; then a second: RALLADAYO, TWINNED WITH DIMBELENGE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO.

Gloria felt moved to hector Tom some more: ‘Erich von Sasser has given everything to these people, yeah? They revere him as a — well, perhaps they revere him — and we all do — a little more than we should. But that’s no reason for you not to be respectful: he’s brought all sorts of benefits to the Intwennyfortee mob, yeah? Fresh water, education, healthcare. Jobs too — and that’s had a knock-on effect for the rest of the tribe, who range from here to the Great Dividing Range.

‘Most of all, Erich’s provided them with a real belief system and a workable social structure, yeah?’