Will Self: The Butt

Standing on one of the balconies of the Mimosa serviced apartments, Tom Brodzinski sucked on the moist filter-tip of his cigarette, and swore to himself it would be his last.

But then, it occurred to him, that’s something I’ve sworn a whole heap of times before. This time, though, it would be different.

For the three weeks of the Brodzinskis’ vacation, Tom had found the prohibitions on smoking, in this vast and sunbaked country, particularly intrusive. There were strident signs in — and on — every restaurant, bar and public building, threatening fines and imprisonment not only for smokers themselves but even for those who — whether wittingly or not — allowed smoking to take place.

Moreover, outside the public buildings, there were yellow lines painted on the sidewalks and roadways, indicating where smokers could legally congregate: sixteen metres from their entrance.

Such measures, of course, existed in Tom’s homeland; yet there they hardly seemed so egregious. Besides, the bulk of the population had long since kicked the habit. While here, the whole garish infrastructure of this public-health campaign appeared, even to Tom’s indolent ethical eye, to have been imposed on the country’s polyglot and heavy-puffing population, in place of any more commanding civic morality.

And so it all had grated on Tom, turning those little interludes of cloudy self-absorption into hurried and unsatisfying liaisons with La Divina Nicotina.

Yes, giving up would free him from such bondages, while, at the same time, he would find liberation in doing the right thing, facing up to his mortality, his responsibilities as a father, a husband and a citizen. No longer would he sustain his individualism with such puerile puffing.

Tom was no fool; he understood that smoking was really only of any interest to smokers — and that, increasingly, that was all that interested them. Once free of the habit, he would be in a new world, where he could see things clearly and understand their significance, rather than being hectored by signs and lines.

Thinking of stubbing his final cigarette out, Tom looked around the balcony for an ashtray, or any other receptacle which could receive the worm’s cast of ash. But there was none. Next, he peered over the balustrade, down on to the balcony below, which projected out from the façade of the apartment block that much further.

An elderly Anglo man was spread out on a lounger. The thin legs that stuck out from his Bermudas were lumpy with bunches of varicose veins. The onion-skin sheets of an international edition of the Wall Street Journal lay on his deflated chest. From Tom’s vantage, the old man’s face was foreshortened to a nubbin of a nose and chin, while his bald pate flaked beneath an artificially lustrous comb-over.

Tom tipped the ash into his own cupped hand, tamped it into dust and blew this into the heavy, humid air. From below there came the noise of metal scraping on tile. A young woman had emerged from the sliding doors that, Tom assumed, must separate the balcony from the old man’s own serviced apartment. A very young woman — a girl, in fact.

She wore only a sarong, which was wrapped around her slim, sinuous hips, and, from where Tom stood, he could appreciate the orchidaceous perfection of her breasts, the taut purity of her matt-black skin. She must, he thought, be a desert tribeswoman, but what the hell was she doing with this dried-up stick of a guy?

What she was doing was drawing up a small metal table and placing upon it a tall glass, frosted with condensation and choked with fruit. She removed the newspaper, tidied its pages and folded it. What she was doing was unaffectedly ministering to the old man’s needs, to the point that she seemed quite unconscious of the way one of her long, pinky-brown nipples pressed against his neck, as she smoothed the sweat-damp hair on his forehead.

‘Thanks, honey,’ the old man rasped, and the complacent tone of his voice summoned up Tom’s righteous indignation, reserves of which were generous to begin with, and always easily replenished by the follies of his countrymen.

Jesus Christ! Tom internally expostulated. That sick creep is one of those disgusting sex tourists. He’s come over here to get his gross old body fondled by one of these young girls! It’s revolting — he can’t be allowed to get away with it!

Tom’s grasp on the ethnic complexities of the country wasn’t strong, but he did know that the Tugganarong — the copper-skinned natives of the offshore Feltham Islands — came here as guest workers; and that many of the young women ended up prostituting themselves. But this girl was clearly a desert tribeswoman, and he hadn’t seen any like her hanging around outside the bars and strip clubs of Vance’s small — but savage — red-light district.

In truth, the whole bizarre palimpsest of race and culture in this vast land bamboozled Tom. In theory, the Anglo descendants of the former colonial power still constituted the elite. Yet, only the previous morning, in the highland township where they’d stopped to get gas and cash, Tom had found himself in line at an ATM behind a shambolic, shaking figure that was bent almost double and wearing a dirty-blue patterned native toga. But when his turn came at the brushed-steel keyboard, it transpired that the man hadn’t been waiting to make a withdrawal at all. Rather, he stooped to retrieve a half-smoked cigarette butt from the dusty ground.

Tom found himself fixated on the white trough of a scar that bisected the old wino’s grizzled head from nape to crown. Was this, Tom wondered, the most extreme of tribal markings? Or had the man stumbled, drunk, into a buzz-saw?

Then, as the figure straightened up, and the turtle head swung up and round, Tom was confronted by the sun-cracked features of an ancient Anglo, whose mouth was crusted with dried yellow goo.

Later on, as Tom struggled to pilot the preposterously large minivan — which he had hired in an excess of foolish grandiosity — through the maddening mêlée of the main street, he spotted the same old Anglo wino, in the shade of a fat-trunked tree set back from the road.

Now, recalling the unpleasant scene that had followed, Tom took a particularly deep draw on his cigarette, and it fizzed and popped in the humid atmosphere. He deposited another quarter-inch of ash into his hand, tamped and blew. Tommy Junior, who, as usual, had been right at the back of the car, had also seen the old wino. More importantly, he’d seen what the indigenes with whom the wino was sitting and drinking palm spirit were selling.

‘Dad! Dad!’ he had boomed out — why couldn’t he control his volume? ‘They’ve got one of those model things we saw back a ways. Can we stop and get this one? Can we? Can we, please?’

Tom was going to give this request no more attention than the previous score, but Tommy’s mother had decided to intercede. ‘Why don’t we stop and see if we can buy it, Tom?’ Martha suggested, gently enough. ‘Tommy’s been real good the last couple of days — and they haven’t been easy for him. The other kids have all gotten stuff they wanted; why not get him something too?’