Will Self - The Butt

Gloria joined the three men at the table and poured herself a beaker of lemonade. At breakfast she had been in her black toga; now she was wearing the same cotton dress she’d had on when Tom first encountered her at the Swai-Phillips compound. It did flattering things to her bust — which Tom admired while eating. There was no sign of her crazy cousin.

Loman and Von Sasser came ambling through the eucalyptus grove from the direction of the dispensary. They climbed on to the veranda and helped themselves to large plates of pig, cabbage and carb’. Neither man had troubled to take off his scrubs, but only undone the tapes at the back, so that the green garments gaped open. Both were wearing short pants, and when they came to the table, the blotches of blood on their chests gave them the creepy — yet comic — appearance of patients who had escaped the knife in order to enjoy a hearty meal.

The others had finished their own food, yet no one made to leave the table; they stayed to watch a bravura performance by the men in theatre costumes. Von Sasser and Loman steadily tunnelled their way through their food mountains, pausing only to call for salt, water or beer. The anthropologist, predictably, drank his beer from a stein half a yard high. Overhead, the awning rat-a-tat-tatted in the rising sirocco. In his blood-stained scrubs, the skeletal Von Sasser was a giant praying mantis devouring its mate.

Tearing his eyes from the grisly spectacle, Tom saw the little SUV standing where Prentice had parked it the evening before. Some Tayswengo kids were sitting inside. The one in the driver’s seat was wrestling the wheel; the others were aiming pretend cameras, miming Anglos on vacation. They captured the occupants of the veranda in their invisible boxes, then turned them on the tame auraca grazing the sparse grass in the paddock.

With the air of men who had for a long time been working as a team, Von Sasser and Loman finished their plates at the same time, then pushed them aside. Von Sasser called for coffee, and the Tayswengo waitress swished away in her humiliating dirndl. Von Sasser produced his long-stemmed pipe. He filled it with tobacco from a leather pouch, then lit it. The assembled company were all riveted by this matinée, but Tom was now convinced that Von Sasser’s spoken lines were intended for him — and Prentice — alone.

‘How does it all end?’ was how the anthropologist began today’s homily. ‘Isn’t that the question that torments the Anglo — bothers him like a fly in his eye? The Third Act problem, the thrilling climax. . then the drowsy resolution. Yes, yes, the Anglos’ lust for this is blatantly bloody sexual — they’re not like the true natives of this great land. Those poor bastards have had it hammered into them for so long that they’re shit, that they just sit on their arses while the flies eat them! Especially the children — the poor bloody kids. It’s almost as if,’ — he shifted to confront Prentice — ‘they’re born with this fatalism.’

Von Sasser stopped. Prentice no longer had the energy to even quail beneath his raptor’s stare: his psoriasis was back with a vengeance; the badlands of cracked and humped skin had spread right up on to his face. ‘You!’ Von Sasser spat. ‘You can do whatever you like to the poor bloody kids. . except’ — the shotgun eyes came back to Tom — ‘tell them stories with clap-happy bloody endings!’

He took a long draw on his pipe, then resumed more evenly: ‘You’re probably wondering why the Technical College is such a dump, when the rest of Ralladayo — thanks, in no small part, to those present’ — he nodded to Adams, Loman and Gloria in turn — ‘who have given their hearts and bloody minds to the community — is ticking over pretty damn efficiently.’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess I was kinda intrigued,’ Tom said lamely.

‘My father, Otto, is buried at Gethsemane Springs, forty clicks east of here, yeah, on the track to the coast. The Technical College was his own brainchild, right. He laboured for it — strived to make it a reality. He even went south, put on dress kit and gave after-dinner bloody speeches to raise money for it from Anglo fat cats, who — once his back was turned — went back to cursing the bloody bing-bongs.’

With forensic fingers, Von Sasser picked up his tiny espresso cup and took a sip. He smacked his lips with an ‘ah’, then went on. ‘Be that as it bloody may, when my dad was dying he made me promise that I’d sack the Anglo teachers and let the College decay back into the bloody dust.

‘ “Erich,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether our people study the sciences, the arts, maths or languages — the result is the same: it makes them lust for an end; that, Erich, is the true leitmotif of Western civilization, and it’s the very one we’ve come here to rid them of. Don’t let our people fall victim to the narrative fallacy of the Anglos!”

‘ ’Course, I’m not claiming that those were his actual last words — that’d be a bit bloody rich! But he was dead in days, and I respected his final wish — why wouldn’t I? By then I’d already begun the work he’d had me trained for; it’s true, the first results were not exactly, er. . conclusive’ — Tom noted the hesitation — ‘but in spite of that we were both confident we’d found a way forward, so that these people’ — he threw an arm wide to encompass all of Ralladayo — ‘would never, ever waste their lives waiting for the bloody end. Sitting in the dark and smelly multiplex of their minds, gagging to know how their lives would turn out, while completely neglecting to bloody live them!’

There was silence for a few seconds, then Tom heard an electronic whirr. Its source was Swai-Phillips: the lawyer was hovering at the corner of the chalet, a camcorder held to his good eye. He switched it off and let it fall by its lanyard on to his bare chest. He approached the table, walking normally and banging his big, square hands together with slow, resounding claps. He stopped, bowed low, then gravely intoned: ‘Here endeth the second lesson.’

Von Sasser ignored him, instead rattling off a series of commands: ‘Winnie, take Brodzinski here over to the comms shack; he’ll be needing to call his people. Brodzinski, you take your man Prentice along with — you wanna keep a close eye on that one. Vishtar and I’ve got more bloody carving to get on with s’arvo.’ He rose. ‘Till sundown, then!’ And, with Dr Loman in his train, swept off the veranda and back through the gum trees towards the dispensary.

Adams came to life. ‘ ‘C’mon,’ he said to Tom. ‘Erich’s right; the early afternoon’s the best time to patch across.’

Tom was about to protest at this assumption that he even wanted to call Milford, but something in Adams’s tone prevented him. This wasn’t to do with his calling home; it was about Prentice not being allowed to. Prentice, who was now a pitiful sight: a pile of dirty dude’s clothes slung over a seat back. Not one for his good lady’s album.

Tom, with an access of hypocritical pity, helped him to his feet and said, ‘D’you want me to get some ointment for you? I don’t mind putting it on. .’

‘Don’t bother, old chap,’ Prentice muttered. ‘Let’s go make your call.’ Then he gave the lopsided smile of a beaten cur, and added: ‘Not long now.’

In the comms shack Adams adopted the persona of a radio ham. He put on headphones — or ‘cans’, as he pretentiously referred to them — and played with the switches and dials on the transmitter. Prentice dumped his bundle of a body form down on an upturned crate, while Tom took a swivel chair beside Adam’s. The ether whistled and warbled, then, once the appliance was humming nicely to itself, Adams took his headphones off.