Will Self - The Butt

After that, they proceeded in the direction of a double-sized humpy that stood near by, at the end of the main drag. ‘This’, Adams said, ‘is the orphanage I mentioned to you. It’s really only a, ah, marginal undertaking for the community, but Erich is particularly devoted to it. .’ He broke off and eyed his tour party sceptically.

Tom had subsided into tedium as the tour progressed: Amish village, historic town centre, Ralladayo — where was the difference? As for Prentice, he had lagged behind the whole way, fiddling with his cigarettes, and now he was baulking at the orphanage.

‘I say, Mr Adams,’ he wheedled, ‘I expect you’ll be heading over to the dispensary after this, yes? If it’s no bother, I’ll pop back to the College and pick up the ribavirin, then I’ll meet you there.’

If Prentice had been requesting permission, he didn’t wait to have it granted. He walked away as fast as he could, with his stiff-legged silent-movie gait. Tom waited until he was a way off, then said snidely: ‘Surely the ribavirin is needed here, at the orphanage?’

‘Don’t be, ah, silly,’ said the Consul dismissively. ‘You can’t have barely trained care assistants administering powerful medication like that, can you?’

‘Look.’ Involuntarily Tom felt the blistered nap of Adam’s seersucker sleeve. ‘I–I tried my darndest back there, before Eyre’s Pit—’

Adams shrugged him off. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, Tom, it’s not relevant any more. Besides, you’re forgetting who I am.’

The Consul put an end to the exchange by opening the gate in the wire fence. Tom sighed, then followed Adams’s long back into the big humpy.

Inside, there were utilitarian steel cots clustered under the whale-belly curve of the corrugated iron. A few lurid plastic toys were piled on the old piece of carpet that had been laid directly on the earthen floor. Three toddlers were sitting in silence by these injection-moulded bubble cars and sectional toadstools. In the dim light their pupils were dilated, and they emanated bemusement. A young Tayswengo woman sat watching them on a stool; at least, so Tom assumed, for it was completely hidden by the skirts of her toga. She curled forward from this invisible plinth to wave the flies off the little kids with a switch of leaves.

‘Is Miss Swai-Phillips here, Olympia?’ Adams asked her.

‘No.’ The girl was as listless as her charges. ‘She stopped by, yeah, now she’s. . Oh. . I dunno.’

A rustling noise coming from one of the cots at the back of the humpy attracted Tom’s attention. Not wanting to — although the resistance also seemed to be in the treacly air — he strolled over to it. A baby lay awkwardly curled in a damp skein of sheet. Distractedly — for the mite was a pitiful sight — Tom fixated on the mattress, which had the same covering of frangipani blossoms as the ones at the Mimosa. The child was the size of a one-year-old, but, on examining it more closely, Tom realized it was much older: maybe two or even three — not a baby at all. Its face was wizened, its skin lumpy and scaly — in places, cracked and weeping. The child was of mixed race.

Adams joined Tom.

‘Is it. . AIDS?’ Tom asked.

‘No’ — the Consul was blithe — ‘although we do see cases here. The young women go off to the road stops. They get themselves into, ah, difficulties. No, this little guy has psoriasis — Vishtar tells me it’s, ah, hereditary.’

As the Polaroids revealed the Consul’s eyes, so Tom sought them. ‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘what you wanted me to see?’

Adams wouldn’t look at him. ‘I never wanted you to see anything, Tom,’ he snarled sorrowfully. ‘I wanted you to do something.’

Prentice was sitting waiting for them outside the dispensary. He eyed Tom through the smoky veil he always wore, presumably trying to gauge Tom’s reaction to the orphanage visit. Rather than respond to this, Tom extended his hand and helped the pathetic fellow up.

‘The dispensary’ was a misnomer for this cinder-block building, which was nearly as big as the derelict school. It had an extensive waiting area that was thronged with Tayswengo women holding babies who were sick enough to be there, yet strong enough to bawl about it. There were also a few native men in evidence — and they too exhibited a reassuring lack of stoicism. They had sustained a variety of cuts, bruises and, in one particularly vocal case, a minor gunshot wound. Whenever one of the harassed nurses appeared, the Tayswengo all pounced on him or her, proffering the afflicted portion — or baby — while pleading to be seen by the doctor.

They all got the same answer: ‘Dr Loman is busy assisting the surgeon today — you all know that, yeah.’

Prentice handed over his boxes of ribavirin to one of these nurses, who whisked them off without comment. The making of his reparations had been as anticlimactic as Tom’s. ‘Wampum,’ Adams muttered, then he led them down the corridor that ran the length of the building, pointing out the treatment rooms to one side and the wards to the other.

The dispensary, Tom thought, had been built and equipped perhaps two decades before as a small state-of-the-art hospital. Some time during the intervening years, it had begun to be severely neglected. Now the floors were unwashed — stained with blood, and worse. Perished rubber hoses dangled from oxygen cylinders, while used hypodermic syringes lay in the drifts of dead leaves that had blown in through the warped un-shuttable windows. In one ward there was a waist-high heap of soiled gauze pads; in a second, a broken pipe leaked bilious water on to the cracked tiles. The aircon’ wasn’t working, and the flies — unlike the medical staff — were in constant attendance.

They reached the end of the corridor and stood there, looking through the dirty window which faced the airstrip. On the far side of this some young Tayswengo men were breaking in an auraca bull. They circled the enraged animal, chucking dust and pebbles in its supercilious face. When, inevitably, it lunged at one them with its tiny head, the youth leaped up and neatly pincered its long neck with his legs. They both crashed to the ground and writhed there, their spasmodic movements compellingly pornographic. Tom looked away.

‘The scalpels I brought,’ he said to Adams. ‘They were for these operations, then?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And the surgeon is—’

‘Erich — Herr Doktor von Sasser, you must’ve guessed that. I address him as “Herr Doktor” because he holds a medical degree. His father, Otto, had a Ph.D. in anthropology, but Erich’s own contribution to Songs , well, academics can be incredibly, ah, narrow-minded.’

‘He has to do lots of these operations?’ Tom persisted, while out of the corner of his eye he noticed Prentice, up against the wall, arms and legs crossed defensively.

‘As many as he possibly can,’ Adams answered. ‘These are relatively straightforward procedures, Tom, not too invasive. The patients can, in most cases, leave the dispensary the same day. At a modern hospital — say in Trangaden — they would be entirely routine; the costs are, ah, minimal. Out here, with the particular problems a community like this faces, they’re absolutely essential. That’s why Erich has devoted himself to them so, ah, single-mindedly.’

Lunch was on the veranda. Tom was hungry. He was finally getting accustomed to the local Anglos’ proclivity for stuffing themselves with wads of hot food in the very baking oven of midday. At Von Sasser’s the culinary accent remained resolutely Germanic: ham hocks stood in the top of a double-boiler, paddling in apple sauce. A fresh hayrick of sauerkraut had been pitch-forked, steaming, on to an aluminium platter. The potato was mashed today — and piping hot.