The Butt

10

The motel was a blockhouse of blue-grey cinder-blocks with a corrugated-iron roof. It looked like a latrine built by intelligent horses. Each of the stall doors was equipped with a coin-operated lock, into which the ‘guest’ was obliged to feed twenty dollar-pieces in order to obtain his key. There were no staff in evidence.

Tom, having left Prentice at the wheel of the car with strict instructions to pull forward if the line moved — ‘No matter what your degree of fucking astande is’ — now worked his way back along the scores of stalled vehicles, gathering the required change as he went.

Most of the drivers were indifferent to his plea. They sat in their hot boxes, oblivious to the flies dancing on their faces, and listening — Anglos, Tugganarong and natives alike — to the radio commentary on the same interminable sports fixture that Prentice was obsessed by.

As he moved from fan to fan, Tom gathered that this was being played at the Capital City Oval, between the national side and a team from Prentice’s homeland. The commentators spewed the usual trivia, but Tom did learn — with considerable pleasure — that Prentice’s team were losing by many points.

This explained the sulky expression on his face when Tom eventually rejoined him. Tom dumped the forty bucks’ worth of coin into his cupped hands.

‘Go along to the motel and check us in,’ he ordered. ‘You can at least do that, can’t you?’

Prentice stubbed his cigarette out in the car ashtray with unnecessary violence. ‘Only so long as I don’t have to carry anything, Brodzinski.’

‘Anything?’

‘Anything.’ Then Prentice tried to be emollient; it didn’t suit him. ‘Look, y’know I don’t hold with this bing-bong rubbish, but I feel, well, forced to obey it. And. .’ He turned in his seat, eyes flicking to the boxes of medical supplies. ‘Well, if I don’t get this stuff to the Tontines, things could go very badly for me.’

It was the first time Prentice had referred directly to his own crime. Tom again felt the urge arise to force the foul man to reveal exactly what he had done. He pictured a summary execution out in the desert sunset: Prentice kneeling beside a shallow grave he had, in a break with taboo, dug himself. His face was a study in contrition; ‘Goodbye, old chap,’ he was saying. ‘Sorry for any inconvenience I may’ve caused you. .’

‘Whatever.’ Tom snapped back to the present. ‘I’ll wait here; if we don’t fill up with gas now, things will go badly for both of us.’

The sun swelled, grew darker, its ripe bulk squashed against the horizon. The stony bled, so unlovely in full daylight, transited rapidly through a bewildering succession of poignant shades: roseate red, early-spring violet, silvery-grey — until night empurpled the gigantic mesas in the far distance, and bunches of stars dangled down from the empyrean.

The gas line had barely moved.

Prentice’s game had long since been abandoned for the night, and the radio station had ceased transmission soon afterwards. Tom twiddled the dial, but he could find no other. They sat, not talking, and Tom ruminated: would it go as Swai-Phillips had suggested? Once the rifles, the cooking pots and the cash had been delivered, would the constipated legal process back in Vance loosen up? Maybe he would be at home in Milford in time for Thanksgiving. The candles modelled like effigies of the Pilgrim Fathers would be burning on the sideboard in the dining room, wax dripping from the brims of their black hats.

‘Look,’ Tom said eventually, ‘I gotta get some sleep. I’m gonna drive the car off the road a ways, then we can take the valuable stuff and head for the motel. We’ll have to get the gas in the morning.’

‘Are you sure that’s wise, old chap?’

Tom was only grateful he couldn’t see Prentice’s superior expression, and the idiotic lappet of his dyed hair. Tom turned the key in the ignition and pulled off Route 1. With headlights off, they bumped a few hundred yards into the desert. Then, humping the rifles, their ammunition and the boxes of Prentice’s ribavirin and amoxycillin, Tom followed him towards the blazing lights of the road stop.

Later, they stood at the motel’s sixteen-metre line while Prentice smoked and Tom applied the ointment to his psoriasis.

‘The hot springs seem to’ve cleared this up,’ he said. Then, hating his own note of wifely concern, he added: ‘You should’ve stayed there.’

Prentice only grunted.

They were both tired and hungry. There was no hot food available, except for meat pies from the gas station: sad pastry sacks containing a disgusting purée of minced meat and potato. Even Prentice hadn’t been able to finish his.

Besides, rank exhaust and gasoline fumes hung over the whole area, while the heavily armed paramilitary police manning the checkpoint introduced a nervy tension to the soiled atmosphere.

‘I’m gonna bunk down,’ Tom said, and handed Prentice the tube of ointment.

For a few seconds the macho remark sustained him, then Tom found himself alone in the neon light of his rental cubicle, with its blue insecutor fizzing and popping as the night bugs committed unpremeditated self-murder.

Tom woke in the utter darkness. He could hear the wheezing and trickling of the aircon’, a generator pounded, a helicopter chattered overhead. He had fallen asleep reading the Von Sassers, and the weighty tome still sat on his chest, pinning him down, a somnolent lover spent by coitus. Shreds of dream whirled behind his eyes. He had been reading of the engwegge ceremony before he slept: how the women chewed the seared shoots, then passed the wad from their mouths to those of the men. He had dreamed of Gloria doing the same to him, her assiduous tongue pushing the bitter cud.

Tom groped for the cord and yanked it. The tube flickered, then slammed the cinder-block walls, the concrete floor and the rifles propped in the corner into stagy existence. The Gloria succubus flew towards the insecutor, then fizzed and popped out of the playlet. Tom groped for the bottle of mineral water and drank deep of its warm, brackish contents. He felt like a cigarette; felt that deep and visceral need for nicotine that had long been absent. Felt it as if it were a banal mode of lust.

Outside the arc lights blazed down on the checkpoint. The long gas line had evaporated, and the only vehicles Tom could see were a couple of police half-tracks parked in front of the steel bar lowered across Route 1.

He wandered on to the garage forecourt. Behind the plate-glass windows a clerk was sitting by the cash register, drinking a can of Coke. It could have been somewhere on the outskirts of Tom’s own home town — the building was that international, that dull. The oval sign bearing the corporation’s logo was an a priori category: this was how creatures like Tom viewed the world.

He found himself inside, fondling the crackling balloon of a bag of potato chips. The clerk looked up at the sound.

‘Forty Greens,’ Tom said.

The clerk pulled an ectomorphic pack from the rack. ‘We only got fifties, mate,’ he explained, holding it aloft.

Tom pulled limp bills from his jeans pocket. Together with the cigarettes he received a promotional lighter with the legend EYRE’S PIT: EXPERIENCE THE DEPTHS OF PROFUNDITY printed on it.

Back in the night, Tom stalked to the edge of the forecourt, then took sixteen careful paces. Peering at the gravel between his boots, he could make out the expected line of butts, tidal wrack left behind by the great perturbation of human need, its empty troughs and satiated peaks.

He fumbled with his fingertips for the little cellophane ripcord, desperate now for the smoky parachute to open over his head.

Then stopped.

What would be the point? It wasn’t as if he would only have one — he’d have another twenty or thirty thousand, a world-girdling belt of braided tobacco strands. .

Gloria. The dream. The engwegge — her parcel. Tom remembered he’d left the damn thing in the car. He put the unopened pack in his shirt pocket and strode off into the desert. With every step the pride rose up in him: he was Astande, the Swift One; he was the righter, of his own wrongs at least.

If Prentice was grateful to find the car filled up with gas and parked outside the motel block when he emerged the following morning, he did a good job of hiding it. His eyes were like raw eggs in the monochrome dawn: greyish albumen that he rubbed with his ugly fingers.

‘Bloody awful night’s sleep,’ he groaned. ‘Bitten to buggery. I’d swear those insecutor things just ginger up the mozzies.’

‘See here, Prentice.’ Tom was resolute. ‘Last night’s motel was twenty bucks, Tree Top Lodge was sixty-five. The car rental is on my fucking Amex. There’s been gas, counter meals. . How much longer d’you expect me to pick up the goddamn tab?’

‘I say, old chap.’ Prentice was insouciant, as Tom stomped in and out of his motel room, loading the car. ‘You certainly got out of bed on the wrong side this morning.

‘Brodzinski,’ he said, his tone becoming conciliatory, ‘I’m fully intending to pay my way, it’s just that I’m suffering a temporary financial embarrassment — the ribavirin cleaned me out.’

‘Oh, really?’ Tom snidely mimicked Prentice’s accent. ‘How have you been paying our mutual friend, Mr Swai-Phillips, then, old chap?’

‘Well, um, to tell you the truth,’ Prentice said, flustered, ‘he’s handling my case on a no win-no fee basis. But look here.’ He ran on, clearly not wanting this to sink in too deeply. ‘My wife’s cousin promised me he’d wire some funds to the Tontines; we’ll settle up there.’

Tom barely registered this; he was thinking about Swai-Phillips, recalling the lawyer’s brusque assertion: ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases.’ Surely this was further confirmation — if any were needed — that from the outset, Prentice’s offence had been far more serious than his own?

After they had negotiated the maze of blast walls wreathed with razor wire, then sat — mute but tense — while the bored Tugganarong cops checked the underside of the SUV with telescopic mirrors, Tom was surprised by the cursory inspection of their laissez-passers. The officer leaned in through the window and slung the papers on to Tom’s lap.

‘You headed to the Tontines?’ he asked.

‘Sure am,’ Tom replied.

‘You blokes have a good trip, then.’ He waved them on with the muzzle of his sub-machine gun.

Beyond the checkpoint Route I stretched out ahead, a dirty tongue already flexing in the building heat. The surface alternated between metalled and dirt, so Tom concentrated on his driving, changing up when they came off the blacktop to avoid wheelspin.

Apart from the agitation of the flies and the soughing of the wind through the windows, there was silence in the car. After an hour or so, Prentice turned on the radio. There was a faint whoop of joy. ‘Yes! He’s had him! He’s clean-bowled — and he’s not going to like that one little bit, he’s. .’ which then faded into static. With a tortured expression, Prentice hunched forward and dickered with the radio controls as if he were a blind piano-tuner. Then, deflated, he sat back.

Tom wondered: where has all the traffic gone? The road-trains, the pick-ups and the retirees’ Winnebagos that had been in line for gas the night before had all evaporated. The highway was empty, and the hurting blue sky devoid of the twin-rotored helicopters that had clattered overhead the previous day.

Towards mid morning, Tom saw a burned-out car beside the road. He slowed to assess whether this was a recent happening; but then, seeing the rust streaking the buckled panels, and the interior choked with sand, he accelerated.

Soon there were other abandoned vehicles. Some were more or less intact, with perhaps only a rumpled fender, starred windows and a few bullet holes in their side panels. Others had been wrung-out by awesome forces, their bodywork twisted and crushed, as if a giant child, tiring of his toy cars, had had a destructive tantrum. There were SUVs, pick-ups — even the trucks used by the paramilitary police. Every sort of vehicle Tom had seen on Route I was present in this edge city of hulks. Further away from the road, he saw a gasoline tanker, its tank opened out in petals of blackened metal.

Prentice, normally keen to sermonize on the basis of this or that wayside attraction, remained silent, rocking and rolling as the car bucketed along.

Then there came a quite ordinary sedan — ornamental tissue box still intact on its rear-window shelf — that was still alight. Vivid flames licked the mashed hood, dense billows of black smoke clotted in the air. Prentice roused himself a little as they drove by — then relapsed into torpor. Not knowing what else to do, Tom kept driving.

But a few miles further on he had to stop.

The first indication that something was seriously amiss came when a clutch of helicopters roared low over the car. These were single-rotor aircraft with bulbous plastic canopies. Even though they were gone in moments, Tom saw the missiles mounted beneath them. Where the helicopters disappeared over the horizon a column of smoke was visible; although whether this had been caused by them or was an effect they were seeking to dispel, he could not be certain.

Tom slowed to a crawl as two cops approached the SUV. With fluorescent batons, they directed him into a lane formed by striped cones. They also held signs. One read NO WEAPONS, the other GET IN LANE. Beyond the cops, stubbed out in a crater by an inky finger of smoke, was McGowan’s road-train.

Further off on the bled, the helicopters stood, shiny visages facing one another in a conversational grouping. Slow- turning rotors idly chit-chatted, as if these were bored guests at a party, the centre-piece of which was this enormous barbecue.

‘What’s the problem?’ Prentice asked the sergeant who came up to his window.

Tom thought this a deranged denial of the obvious, but the Tugganarong took it in his stride.

‘Bing-bong buggers stuck another IED under the highway, sir,’ he said, taking the sheaf of papers Prentice handed him. ‘No worries, Aval mob, they’ll be way over there by now, yeah.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, then tucked his baton between his thick thighs so he could check through the permits and the laissez-passers.

‘Are those your rifles on the back rack, sir?’ asked the second cop, who had come up to the driver’s window.

‘Uh, yeah. I mean, of course they are,’ Tom replied nervily.

‘Have to take ’em off of you, I’m afraid. Purely routine safety — and your ammo. I’ll hand ’em back to you a half-klick on, where you rejoin the road, OK?’

‘Yeah, fine. I guess.’

Tom handed over the boxes of ammunition, then waited while the cop took the green-sleeved Galils from the rack. When the sergeant handed Prentice their papers and rapped on the roof, Tom pulled away.

The lane of cones took them on a neat diversion across the bled, circumventing the burning road-train. Prentice made to light a cigarette, but Tom snapped at him, ‘Are you fucking crazy, man! Why d’you think they took the guns? There’s spilled fuel all over the place.’

Globs, dashes and even pools of thick black viscosity smirched the sable. One of McGowan’s semi-trailers had been thrown up in the air by the explosion, and come down on top of the other. Both were burning. From a hundred yards off Tom could feel the angry pulse of the flames. Flames that licked the ruptured faces of the giant Neapolitan mamas. Crates smashed by the blast had disgorged their contents: the doughy discs lay scattered on the ground — fast-food fallout, cooked to a turn. The aroma of melting mozzarella mixed weirdly with the gas fumes.

The rig, however, was hardly damaged. It stood on the crown of the highway, only a few detached slats of fairing to suggest that it wasn’t idling for a moment before roaring away. There were these, and there was also McGowan’s corpse, which, as the car bumped back on to the road, they both got a good sight of.

The driver’s face was composed, his posture relaxed, his hair smoothed against his rounded head — all of which was strange, because McGowan was tilted backwards out of the window of the cab, as if he had attempted a Fosbury Flop to safety at the very moment of his expiry. His chest had also been liquidized, so that through each hole in his string undershirt squirmed a worm of tomato purée.

The cone lane terminated in a makeshift roadblock. Cops lounged about, accessorized by their carbines and flying helmets. The sergeant drove up in a jeep and offloaded Tom’s rifles.

Tom got out of the car and went to help him clip them to the rack. ‘Is there any. .’ He decided to change tack: ‘What would your assessment be of the security situation between here and the Tontines, officer?’

Tom hoped this sounded authoritative — brave, even. The sergeant didn’t seem taken in; he looked sceptically at Tom.

‘No worries out here, sir,’ he said. ‘Insurgents’ll only hit fuel or other supply trains — stuff headed for the bauxite mines at Kellippi. This is a basic law and order problem for us — no big drama. And no offence, but these crims couldn’t give a rat’s arse about a couple of stray Anglos.’

‘None taken,’ Tom muttered.

‘Mind you,’ the sergeant continued, ‘that only goes so far as the next thou’ clicks — after that you’ll be in striking distance of the Tontines.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Anything can go down there. Bloody anything.’

Tom laughed as well, in a manner that he hoped suggested shrewd understanding.

The sergeant patted one of the rifles. ‘Galil,’ he remarked. ‘Nice piece. Bing-bongs down south favour them — we’ve got a few too. Two-stage trigger’s a bit of a non-starter; still, whack in a box, put it on fully auto’, and you can take out those black bastards before they get in too close, yeah.’

The sergeant flicked a finger to his shiny origami cap and sidled away to join his colleagues at the checkpoint. Then he turned back. ‘ ’Course, you’ve gotta handgun, yeah?’

‘You heard that, did you?’ Tom asked Prentice, after they had been waved through, and the SUV was rollicking once more along Route 1.

‘Oh, yes, old chap,’ he replied.

Struck by Prentice’s self-satisfied tone, Tom glanced over at him. He was holding an automatic pistol. Agitated, Tom looked at the highway, then back at the gun. It appeared quite alien in Prentice’s soft hand: a space-blaster hefted by a clerk. The automatic had crude, functional lines: rectangular barrel, larger rectangle for the stock. His yellow finger rubbed the trigger guard, then poked inside it and flicked the steel curlicue of the trigger itself.

‘I hope that fucking thing is on safety,’ Tom snapped.

‘ ’Course it is, old chap.’ Prentice spoke with dreamy self-absorption. ‘D’you take me for a moron?’

‘Where’d you get it from? D’you know how to use it properly? Why didn’t you tell me you had it? You could’ve gotten us arrested.’

These remarks ricocheted in the smoky interior of the car. As Tom understood it, handguns were an anathema to Prentice’s countrymen; it hardly seemed likely that he could handle one competently.

Prentice went on titivating the trigger, and when he replied it was with an air of erotic reverie. ‘Honestly, Brodzin-ski, I didn’t take you for such a nervous ninny. There’s nothing illegal about carrying a handgun in these parts — anyone with any sense does. If you weren’t quite so wrapped up in yourself, you’d’ve taken the trouble to assess the security situation a little more thoroughly.’

‘Fuck that,’ Tom spat. ‘Do you know how to use the thing?’

‘It’s my wife’s cousin’s.’ Prentice raised the automatic to his furtive mouth; for a second it seemed he was going to kiss the barrel. ‘I brought it with me from down south; even in Vance you never know when some buck bing-bong might run amok, try and rape your lady.’

Tom yanked the wheel and jabbed the brake pedal. The SUV slewed, then jumped over the ridge of earth at the side of the highway. They came to a halt. Tom rounded on Prentice: ‘Do you know how to use it? By which I mean to say: have you ever actually fired that gun, you fucking poseur?’

For moments there was shocked silence, then the flies, which had been hypnotized by the thrust of glassy hardness against their hairy feet, began to flit.

Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Eurgh-ahem, well, now you come to mention it, Brodzinski, no, I haven’t fired it, as such, although I do have a perfectly good understanding of it as a weapon. It’s a Browning BDM. It has a fifteen-shot magazine, nine-millimetre calibre. This toggle here’ — he fiddled with the stock — ‘switches it to “revolver mode”. .’

Tom wasn’t listening. He slammed the SUV into gear, and it scrambled back on to the blacktop. He didn’t speak until they were humming along.

‘Put it away, Prentice,’ he said. ‘Put it away. Till we know how to fire the thing it’s just another fucking liability. Put it away, and then. .’ he said, groping for conciliation, ‘when we’ve put some distance between us and that, um, incident, we’ll find a quiet spot where we can practise with it and the rifles. OK by you?’

Prentice signalled his assent by withdrawing the magazine from the automatic. With great deliberation he placed it, together with the gun, in the glove compartment.

* * *

The SUV hummed on across the interminable desert. The heat spiralled; the men sweated. Prentice rolled down his fly screen. The landscape, which, since they left the road stop that morning had been intimidatingly featureless, now began imperceptibly to alter, slowly becoming threatening, and then downright scary.

The wavering silhouettes of the mesas on the far northern horizon declined. The bled, absorbing their bulk, buckled and then broke up. Deep furrows appeared in its surface, gathered, then consolidated into severe wadis. The colours went from bright to lurid: rusty reds flared scarlet, subtle sable sands became wastes of pus-yellow dirt. The salt pans’ mineral glitter intensified, bluer and bluer.

With each cigarette Prentice lit, Tom felt his own desire for nicotine rise up his gorge. He swallowed it down with pride. In his self-denial lay his strength, his probity, his — Tom blanched at the phrase, yet embraced it — moral fibre.

The glare lasered through Tom’s Polaroid sunglasses. He could feel his skin tighten, his blistering lips flake. He resolved to buy better glasses, more sun block and moisturizer, as soon as they reached a decent drugstore.

At least the badlands hid the burned-out vehicles. Route 1 maintained its arrow-straight westerly flight, over embankments and through cuttings, while the car carrion was hidden in hollows: ragged metal obscured by ragged rocks, its paintwork camouflaged by the desert’s own deceptive bends. Tom knew that they would never see the ragged rascals coming.

They drove fast for fifty, a hundred, three hundred klicks. It was well after noon, when Prentice — adopting the wheedling, infantile tone that made his requests sound like ‘Are we nearly there, yet?’ — broke the silence. ‘Um,’ he ventured. ‘I’m awfully peckish, Brodzinski, what say we pull over for a picnic?’

‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘Why not? Picnic and pot-shots, eh, Prentice? Just the ticket, old boy.’

They made camp in the bed of a deep, angular wadi that Tom had negotiated the SUV carefully into. They were only a few hundred yards off the road, yet completely hidden from it by bluffs streaked purple with glittering mineral deposits.

Prentice fussed about like an old maid. From the pile of trash that had accumulated on the back seat of the SUV he retrieved a square of whitish cotton that he spread on a flat rock. He found the sandwiches Tom had bought during his night-time provisioning and arranged them, together with two bottles of mineral water, on top of the cloth.

Tom said listlessly: ‘Shrimp cocktail or coriander chicken, Prentice? The choice is yours.’

Prentice unsealed the cellophane pouch of the shrimp cocktail sandwich and recoiled from the smell. Then he dutifully commenced chomping.

Tom took his time, feigning picnicking leisure. He raised one of the hot water bottles to his chapped lips, then held it away so he could scrutinize its label. ‘Deep in the desert wastes of the Western Province,’ the copywriter had written, shivering in a smoked-glass fridgidaire in Capital City, ‘Lake Mulgrene stretches for a thousand kilometres across the land, a crystalline expanse of health, purity and hydrolytic balance.

‘Here, the Entreati people make their winter encampments, on the shores of what they call “The Great Mirror of God’s Face”. And, employing technology perfected throughout millennia, they refine and distil the precious fluid you are about to imbibe. They call it entw’yo-na-heemo, “The Tears of Paradise”. We call it, quite simply, Mulgrene Mineral Water — because we know you like it straight.’

Tom laughed sourly and took a swig of the brackish water. Prentice left off his chomping. ‘You ought to watch that, Brodzinski. We’ve only got two or three more litres.’

‘I got,’ Tom said, and took another long, defiant swig. He wiped his sore mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I got, Prentice — you don’t got nothing, feller. You wrong grade of astande, yeah. You ain’t got nothing but fiddling about, fiddling about.’ He sang: ‘Tra-la-la, fi-fi-fiddling about!’

A vacuum opened up inside Prentice’s head, and his features prolapsed into it. ‘What’re you implying?’ he bellowed. ‘What’re you bloody well implying?’ Then, recovering himself, he added, ‘Old chap.’

‘Nothing.’ Tom was appalled by the way he backed down. ‘Nothing at all. Calm down, Prentice. Eat your fucking shrimp sandwich.’

The rest of the repast passed in silence. They sheltered in the sharp shadow beneath the bank of the wadi. Could it, Tom wondered, get any hotter? Unlike tropical Vance, this was a dry heat. He yearned to sweat more freely — but only leaked. He felt his organs boiling in their own salts.

Prentice finished his sandwich. With vulgar fastidiousness he applied a soiled handkerchief to the deep dimples in his neotenous face.

‘There’s one thing I can do,’ he said.

‘Oh, and what’s that?’

‘Fire a gun — Jethro said that would be fine.’

Tom laughed, but Prentice was already up from the rock where he had been sitting and waddling over to the SUV. Tom scooped up the picnic litter and joined him. Together, they took down the rifles, got out the automatic pistol and found the ammunition.

Hefting the naked Galil rifle in his bare arms, Tom felt right and whole. He lifted the warm stock to his cheek: it smelled, suggestively, of oil. He peered into the telescopic sights. Through a notch in the wadi’s bank a patch of bled 500 yards distant sprang into thrilling proximity: a flipper lizard’s neck wattles shook as it panted in silent congress with its own rightness and wholeness. Tom wanted to touch the wattles with his finger. He slowly crooked it, feeling first a solid click, then a firm shove to his shoulder.

‘GEDDAWAAYWITHYOUeeeeeeouuuuu!’ the rifle sang. The lizard was on its back, hind legs bicycling, claws snatching dirt.

‘Excellent shot, old boy!’ Prentice cried in delight. ‘Excellent bloody shot!’

‘Your turn,’ Tom said modestly, and Prentice took up a stance.

If the Galil sang, the handgun roared: a shuddering boom that echoed through the dry river bed. Arms and knees flexing, Prentice rode out the big Browning’s recoil. The mineral-water bottle he had aimed at was obliterated: plastic shreds lay in the Tears of Paradise.

‘Didya see that? Didya? Didya?’ Prentice was cock-a-hoop. He snatched the bush hat from his head and slapped it against his leg. He hoed down on the sandy ground, his boots kicking up little dust devils that the breeze waltzed away.

A whoop sprang unbidden from Tom’s own chapped lips: ‘Woo-hoo! Way to go, Prentice!’

Suddenly, Prentice was serious, the steely automatic aiming at the ground in front of Tom’s boots.

‘Brian,’ he said. ‘Please, Tom, call me Brian.’

‘Uh, OK.’ Tom was inveigled by the informality of their mutual gunfire. ‘Brian it is, then, uh, Brian.’ And he completed the outbreak of peace by taking the pack of fifty Greens from his shirt pocket and handing it to Prentice.

Tom was utterly seduced by firing the Galil: it all came so easily to him. Taking the shells from their cardboard boxes, slotting them into the magazine, fitting the magazine to the breech, lifting the stock to his cheek — these were rousingly instinctual actions, as, with his pulse quickening, Tom manipulated himself towards ballistic consummation. The two men resumed their stances, and soon the evidence of their lust lay smoking on the rumpled rocks — yet they continued to blast away.

Tom shuffled up a rubbly mound and fired into the mid distance, aiming for rocks that flaked and whined. Prentice assaulted the foreground, loosing off shots with total abandon. The automatic’s magazine emptied before the rifle’s and he called out: ‘I say, Tom, whoa!’

Tom ceased fire. His cheekbone burned where the Galil had delivered an uppercut.

‘How about a photo?’ Prentice was giddy with excitement. ‘My lady wife will get a real kick out of seeing me like this.’

Reluctantly, Tom fetched his camera from the car, and, as Prentice did a macho dumb show, he shuffled more images into its memory card, where they interleaved with Prentice at Bimple Hot Springs, Prentice in the cloud forest, Prentice on top of the Giant Sugar Sachet.

Then Tom’s cellphone rang. He hadn’t even realized it was switched on. How, he stupidly wondered, could its battery not have drained away, as they drove for day after day into the interior?

Tom thumbed the button and the puny carillon cut out. Hand shaking, he brought the clam shell to his ear. Nothing — or, rather, a foamy hiss on the sands of a terminal beach. He slid it back into his pocket.

Prentice’s mouth hung open. ‘What the—’ he began, but was cut off as the cellphone began trilling again. Tom took it out, hit the button, listened to the hiss. Then he held the cellphone away from his face, interrogating it with his stare.

‘Must be a glitch of some kind,’ he said to his companion. ‘I mean, there’s no network coverage out here, is there? Look, I’m gonna switch it off.’

Prentice resumed his stance and loosed off a shot at a sandstone pinnacle. It crumbled.

Then the phone rang yet again.

‘What the fuck! What the fuck!’ Bellowing, Tom wrenched it out and dropped it. It lay on the ground at his feet, peeping like a wounded bird. Prentice walked over and, picking up the cellphone, switched it off again.

‘I don’t know what all this means, Tom,’ said, handing over the cell. ‘But I don’t like it. I think we’d better strike camp.’

Tom walked over to the SUV. He was about to open the door when an unfamiliar voice said — distinctly, although not loudly — ‘G’day, mate.’

The owner of the voice was standing a few feet from the car’s fender. He must, Tom realized with adrenalized clarity, have worked his way along one of the gulleys that led down into the wadi. He was a very tall, very muscular Anglo. He held a rifle so as to suggest he had Tom and Prentice covered, even though he wasn’t pointing it directly at them.

There was silence for a few moments. The plume of flies that had trailed behind Tom dallied down to enfold his head in their humming atomic diagram. The Anglo, despite his sudden materialization, his bulk and his weapon, was hardly a threatening figure. He had a round babyish face; his short pants were so short, and the sleeves of his matching skyblue shirt so truncated, that they resembled a baby’s one-piece garment.

The Anglo saluted Prentice: ‘And g’day to you too, mate.’

Flicking the flies from his eyes, Prentice replied, ‘Was that you? On the mobile phone, I mean.’

The big Anglo chuckled. ‘Oh, yairs, that’s right, mate. Gotta transmitter on the rig, see. We sent out a signal every now and then, right.’

‘But why?’ Tom asked.

The man regarded him as if he were very stupid. ‘IEDs, mate, IE-bloody-Ds. Bing-bongs — yer sophisticated mobs, that is — use cellphones to set ’em off, not just guide wires. If we think there’re insurgents on our patch, we give ’em a little surprise, maybe set off their booby-trap a bit early — or at least screw with their timing. We triangulate our signal with a transmitter way over on Mount Parnassus.’ He jerked a sausage finger over his shoulder. ‘Then we get a position fix, come and check things out, maybe do a little’ — he ratcheted the bolt of his rifle — ‘mopping up.’

To confirm that he had checked things out to his satisfaction, the baby-faced man propped his rifle against the car.

Prentice, perversely, objected to no longer being covered. Keeping his hands up by his shoulders, he said, ‘But don’t you want to see our papers? Don’t you want to know what we’re doing here? Where we’re headed?’

‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, mate.’ For the first time, the Anglo was aggrieved. ‘I’m not some jumped-up fucking Tuggy copper, now, am I.’

‘W-What,’ Prentice said, havering between bravado and cowardice, ‘what if we were armed? I mean, we are, y’know.’

Getting himself out a cigarette and lighting it, the Anglo threw back his head and chortled. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, pointing behind them, ‘meet the wife.’

Prentice spun round. Tom swivelled, squinting into the sun, which was now dropping down from its zenith. Splitting the low-angled rays, arms like the wings of an avenging angel, was a figure spreadeagled behind a machine gun on top of the bluffs. It rose, and called over: ‘Seems like introductions are in order. I’m Daphne Hufferman, and this is my hubby, Dave.’

It was a woman’s voice, although her body was as big and muscular as her husband’s.

‘Look, you two,’ she continued, ‘I dunno what your plans are, but if you were thinking of stopping at the eighty-mile bore roadhouse, then forget it. Bing-bongs took it out a couple of weeks ago. Unless you’re gonna swag down — which I wouldn’t advise — you’re best off coming back to camp with Dave an’ me.’

While she was speaking, the woman lofted the machine gun on to her shoulder and descended towards them. As she drew nearer, Tom saw that, as well as having the same physique as her husband, she also had the same tight pants and shirt. In her case they were bright pink. The full breasts that pushed up into the open vee, strangely, only enhanced the debatability of her sex.

‘Well.’ She stopped in front of Prentice and sceptically eyed him up and down. ‘Whaddya say, sport?’

Like a nervous, comedic suitor, Prentice quailed beneath her steady gaze. ‘Um. . If. . If you, er, folks aren’t cops, then who are you?’ he managed to squeeze out at last.

It was Daphne’s turn to guffaw. ‘Us? Us? We’re pet-food shooters, mate. Bloody pet-food shooters. Now get in yer rig, you blokes. Camp’s a fair haul, and we want to be there before the night’s as black as a bing-bong’s black heart.’