Will Self - The Butt

The three men lingered, chatting on the white marble steps, under the white marble pyramid of the vulgarly grandiose building; then Prentice waved his arm, hoping to gain the attention of one of the cab drivers waiting in the shade of the ornamental palms on the far side of Dundas Boulevard.

‘Can’t I give you a ride, Brian?’ Swai-Phillips asked.

‘No, that’s all right, old chap,’ Prentice said. ‘I’ve got my Hummer to pick up from the garage, and I need to do a few errands in town before I head over—’ He stopped abruptly. Something — or, rather, someone — had caught his eye.

An old wino was shuffling along the arc of the sixteen-metre line, bending down to pick up cigarette butt after butt, then lifting each in turn up to the sky and scrutinizing it, before letting it fall. Every time he bent down he displayed the back of his cropped head to the three spectators, and the white trough of a scar that bisected it from nape to crown.

‘I say,’ Prentice exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that Tom Brodzinski?’

‘Yes,’ Adams said. ‘I believe it is.’

‘What’s he still doing here?’ Prentice demanded.

‘Well, Brian.’ The Consul couldn’t avoid sounding official, if not officious. ‘There have been numerous, ah, complications with his, ah, status. Seems his passport was, ah, mislaid and, given his record, it’s proving tricky to get him another one. He’s stuck in limbo, poor fellow.’

‘He looks like he’s getting a bellyful of grog in limbo,’ Swai-Phillips caustically observed.

‘Well,’ Adams said pedantically, ‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s a lot else he can do, given his, ah, mental-health problems.’

‘At least he’s doing now what he should’ve bloody done in the first place, yeah,’ the lawyer persisted.

‘Oh, and what’s that, old chap?’ Prentice was genuinely curious.

‘Picking up the bloody butts, of course!’

And, although this wasn’t a particularly adroit witticism — even by Swai-Phillips’s unexacting standards — his two friends still rewarded it with laughter: Prentice giving voice to manly guffaws, while the Consul emitted a dry ‘heh-heh-heh’.

Tom heard everything the three men were saying with perfect clarity, and he entirely understood its relevance to him. If he made no response, it was because Prentice and the others were so ridiculously tiny and insignificant: buzzing flies, settled for a split-second on the side of a termite heap, before some still smaller perturbation triggered them into flight.

Astande, who stood beside Tom, enormous and black and beautiful and proud, now pointed out another cigarette butt and said: ‘Pick it up, Tom, yeah.’ Tom did as he was told. ‘Now hold it up, mate.’ Tom held it up, turning the butt this way and that. ‘Yup,’ Astande boomed, ‘I reckon that’s the one, d’you see?’

Tom did see. The crumpled paper tube, with frayed tobacco at one end and its bung of synthetic cellulose acetate at the other, had been accidentally moulded by the sole that had ground it out. The butt was a mashed vee that, from the right angle, was exactly the same shape as the great island-continent itself.

Tom asked his spirit guide: ‘Can I smoke it?’ And Astande said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So Tom scurried into the thin passageway that had been left behind in the scar tissue lining his longitudinal fissure. He burrowed deep inside his own brain, to where Von Sasser’s scalpel had negligently created a small cavity while in the process of clumsily cutting through the tough cells of Tom’s corpus callosum.

Over the intervening years since this slight, Tom had worked away at the cavity with his bare hands and whatever tools he could find lying around, until he had managed to excavate a sizeable den.

The pulsing, pinky-grey walls of the brain-cave sparked with neurones — an unearthly display; but the furniture that Tom had dragged in from his memory was rather prosaic: a couple of plastic-backed chairs taken from Squolly’s interview room, Tom’s crap bed from the Entreati Experience and a gateleg table that he had carried away from Adams’s bedroom. There were plenty of ashtrays.

Tom straightened out the butt and lit it with a match from a book advertising SWAI-PHILLIPS ATTORNEYS, NO WIN-NO FEE. CALL: 1–800-LAW. He took a deep drag and handed it to Astande, who sat opposite him on the other plastic chair. The Swift One took a companionable pull, then passed the butt back.

Will Self is the author of four collections of short stories (the first of which, The Quantity Theory of Insanity , won the 1992 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award), six novels (of which How the Dead Live was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year in 2002), three novellas and five non-fiction works. He is a regular broadcaster on television and radio and, as a journalist, a contributor to a plethora of publications. He lives in London with his wife and four children.

The text of this book is set in Bembo. This type was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo’s De Aetna , and was cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. It was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480–1561) as a model for his Romain de L’Universitë, and so it was the forerunner of what became standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.