The Butt

11

The pet-food shooters’ camp consisted of a demountable motorhome and a refrigerated container. The container sat beneath a stand of gum trees, gurgling. Leaking coolant dripped between its steel ribs, ribs that were warty with paint blisters. The demountable was a silvery aluminium capsule, humanized — if that was the right word — by net curtains in its portholes, and a striped awning staked out in front of the door.

Tom stopped the car by the Huffermans’ pick-up and got out.

Behind the camp a network of dry watercourses scored the land: veins on the palm of a giant hand. In the mid distance, the fingers of this hand twisted into the spurs of a rocky mountain that rose some 5,000 feet above the desert floor. Mount Parnassus. A hot, gritty zephyr came scooting down from its peak, stinging Tom’s sore lips.

‘Not a lot, but we call it home,’ said Dave Hufferman, clambering down from his pick-up. He was altogether relaxed — at home, in fact — but his wife bolted to the back of the demountable and began to take down what appeared to be enormous towelling diapers from a clothesline.

Dave Hufferman got out folding chairs for his guests and lit the barbecue. Next, he went over to the container, unbolted it and pulled the tailgate down. A thick white cloud of condensation rushed out to meet him. He emerged clutching an armful of beer cans. Tom hurried across to help him close the tailgate.

The container was stacked high with the jointed portions of scores of moai. The outsized wings, legs and breasts were laquered with ice, and fitted tightly together, pieces of a bizarre three-dimensional puzzle. The few square feet in front of this rampart of frozen fowl were scattered with the Huffermans’ frosty provisions: boxes of pizzas and TV dinners, tubs of vanilla ice cream and plastic bags full of steaks.

‘I put these in here before we left to check you out,’ Hufferman explained — assuming the question uppermost in his guest’s mind would be why the beer wasn’t frozen solid.

It wasn’t. There had also been a box of babies’ feeding bottles in the container. Could the pet-food shooters have a kid out here? If so, it was a very large infant — the bottles were three or four times the size Tom remembered. He thought of Tommy Junior, but asked: ‘What happens when the container’s full?’

‘Well, mate,’ Dave Hufferman continued as they strolled back to where Prentice was sitting smoking, ‘we slow our work rate down towards the end of the month when the road-train’s due, yeah.’ He tossed a can to Prentice, handed one to Tom, and all three men snapped the ring pulls and took swigs. ‘Trouble is — Oi, mate,’ he barked at Prentice. ‘You’re inside the bloody line!’

‘Line?’ Prentice was bemused.

‘The sixteen-metre line, mate. Shift your arse over there, yeah.’ Hufferman indicated an arc of cigarette butts pressed into the red dirt. ‘I like a smoke-o myself, but the container is classed as a workplace, and rules is rules.’

Prentice shuffled his picnic chair over the invisible line. Hufferman snorted. Then, judging that Tom was interested, led him away from the camp.

After a hundred yards they passed through a screen of eucalyptus. The sight that met Tom’s eyes was extreme: an al fresco abattoir. There were heavy trestle tables with chopping boards on them and a steel rack hung with cleavers and butchers’ knives. A winch dangled from the trunk of a dead tree, bloody feathers caught in its links. There were drifts of feathers trapped in the wiry grass, while bits of bone and shreds of flesh were scattered on the bare earth. The flies were clustered so densely on the large scabs of dried blood that they transformed them into glinting black rugs.

Hufferman said: ‘The missus and I can bring down ten moai a day, load ’em on the ute, get ’em back here, joint ’em and bung ’em in the freezer. But, as I was saying, only prob’ is the truck ain’t so regular nowadays on account of the bing-bongs hitting the convoys. So, we don’t like to fill it right up till we’re sure they’re through, right. It’s piece work, see, and if the container ain’t packed as tight as a fag’s strides we don’t get our full whack.’

But Tom didn’t see this at all — he saw McGowan, the road-train driver, strung up on the winch. An enraged insurgent was sawing away at one of his jerking arms. The beating heat from McGowan’s burning semi-trailers crumpled the evening into Hades.

Tom took another metallic draught of the cold beer and turned to his host. ‘I hate to say it,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you worried by the, uh, insurgents?’

‘Us?’ He was incredulous. ‘We’ve gotta motion-senser system right round the camp, yeah, rigged up to thermite bombs. If the black bastards aren’t burnt to a crisp, Daphne an’ me ’ll take ’em out. We’ve got night goggles, and we’re pros, ferchrissakes. Bloody pros. Daphne’ — Hufferman’s honk muted with tenderness — ‘she’s only the finest bloody shot in the Eastern Province.’

Later, the odd couples ate moa breast under the silvery horns of the risen moon. The beers kept coming. The gum trees whispered in the wind, one that carried with it an oddly appealing, astringent smell. Tom asked Hufferman what this was, and the pet-food shooter said: ‘Engwegge, ’course. Where there’s engwegge, there’s moai, right. There’s bing-bongs too, I’ll grant you that — but not yer real head cases.’

The moa was dark, powerful meat. Tom slumped low in his picnic chair, slurping the gamy juices from his paper plate. After a while he ventured: ‘Are there really enough moai here to, uh, make it worth while? I mean, given the secur. . the security situation.’

The euphemism sounded ridiculous, a kitten’s miaow in this terrible fastness.

‘It’s not only worth it financially,’ Daphne Hufferman said, ‘it’s worth it morally, right.’

‘Morally?’

The big woman, who had barbecued the meat and served up re-fried beans and thawed-out coleslaw with hardly a word, now grew animated. ‘Down south, in the cities, yeah, a little boy or girl loves their little darlin’ pussy or puppy. Loves it, yeah. I tellya, Tom, that’s what we’re fighting for — that love. That’s what we’re living for — and that’s what we’re shooting the bloody moai for, right.’

‘I–I didn’t mean to offend. .’

‘None taken, mate, none taken,’ Daphne said, then relapsed back into contemplative, beer-sucking silence.

Prentice had been silent throughout the meal, his scant hair plastered on his brow, his scrawny neck pale and flaky, his thin torso kinked. To Tom, he appeared more than ever to be at once weak — and dangerous. He found himself repeating his companion’s name over and over in his mind: Prentice, Prentice, Prentice. . Until consonants were ground down, and Tom was thinking: penis, penis, penis. .

Prentice chose this point to break his silence. ‘Look, er, Dave, you wouldn’t happen to know the score in the Test, would you, old chap?’

Dave Hufferman laughed. ‘Your lot got creamed, mate. All out for two-two-nine in their second innings — it’s done and bloody dusted.’

‘H-How did you know that?’ Prentice was outraged but managed to keep it in check. Tom, jerked out of his reverie, sat up.

‘There’s not a lot we don’t hear about over here,’ Daphne put in. ‘There’s the short-wave radio, and people like to use it.’

‘And the Tontines?’ Tom inquired. ‘What are people saying at the moment? Are they bad?’

Before answering, Dave Hufferman drained his beer, then crumpled the can in his ham fist and chucked it on the growing pile of empties.

‘For blokes with your grades of astande? Well, tricky I’d say.’

It was Tom’s turn to splutter: ‘How did you know that?’

‘Well,’ Hufferman drawled, ‘like Daphne said, in these parts a man’s deeds go before him.’ He looked significantly at Prentice. ‘But that can change, mate — your respective grades, that is. It’s all up for grabs in the Tontines. You signed the rider, yeah?’

‘The rider?’

‘The tontine rider on the car-rental agreement.’

Tom thought back to the rental company in Vance, the bored hillwoman rattling through the paperwork. The tontine policy she’d outlined, the oddity of which had stayed with Tom for a while, only to be supplanted by other oddities along the way.

‘Yeah,’ he conceded. ‘Yeah, I did sign for the policy, the woman said it was in place of personal cover.’

Hufferman laughed again. ‘Oh, yairs, they always say that — and overseas tourists always sign.

‘Thing is, mate, the tontine kinda loops you in, right. Yer tontine is a special kind of insurance policy, yeah — a collective one. It’s taken out by a group, yeah, a family, a mob, a bunch of work mates, whoever. Now, whenever one of yer tontine holders karks it — and it don’t matter if it’s natural causes or a machete — then the principal derives on to the remaining blokes, and so on, until there’s only one of ’em left and he gets the lot!’

It took a while for Tom to absorb this — because he was saturated with beer.

Prentice grasped it first: ‘B-But, if all the money goes to the last policy holder left, then there’s every motive for them to—’

‘Do fer each other,’ Hufferman laughed. ‘Bang-on, mate. You ain’t so dusty.’

He leaned forward and chucked a handful of dry bark on to the still smouldering barbecue. It flared up, licks of flame that illuminated the pet-food shooter’s babyish bulk. Huffer-man went on intoning: a witch doctor over a crucible.

‘ ’Course, guvvie banned tontines for Anglos down south ages ago — caused way too much agg. But over here. . well, some say the whole point of introducing them was to get the bing-bongs to think, er, constructively — invest for the future. Others — yer bleedin’ hearts — they figure the tontines were a cynical move, a way of finishing off the desert tribes altogether.

‘These mobs believe nothing happens by accident — but there’s plenty of accidents over here. Plenty — specially in the bauxite mines, where a lot of ’em work. Feller gets crushed by a slag heap, truck drives over him — his mob go after the other tontine holders — stands to reason, right. Then their mobs go after his mob, and so-bloody-on. The tontine’s like a virus — goes straight into their brains, drives ’em haywire. They can’t stop. They take out more tontines, do more killing, take out more. Round and bloody round it goes.’

‘And the Tontine Townships? How do they relate to it all?’

Tom couldn’t take his eyes from Daphne Hufferman’s bovine face, as, in answer to his question she uttered these dreadful moos: ‘The Tontines suck the bing-bongs in, yeah. Nothing there to begin with but a road stop and the guvvie sector. Now there’s a whole heap of brokers flogging tontines, and the killings are 24/7, yeah.’

‘Thing is,’ Dave Hufferman said, sounding almost sympathetic, ‘once you’ve gotta tontine yerself, well. . Like I say, it kinda loops you in, right. Even the best of mates can fall out in those circs’, and a bing-bong hitman’ll cost yer no more that a pack of bloody cigs.’

‘So what can we do?’ Tom hated the drunken, hysterical edge to his voice. ‘Can we cancel our tontine?’

‘Ha-ha, no way, mate. It’s a Catch-22 sitch, see. You can’t travel this way without one — it’s on your laissez-passer. No, your best shot is to head straight for the guvvie sector; you’ll be safe there. Then you’ll have to negotiate for a rabia.’

‘A rabia — what’s that?’

But this was one question too many for the pet-food shooters. Husband and wife both stood and stretched, quite unselfconsciously pulling at the sweat-soaked towelling of their crotches.

‘Reckon that’s enough jawing for one night,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll give you the rest of the gen come dawn. The missus’ll show you blokes where you can sack down. Dunny’s over by the container if you need it, right. Take a torch, though, there can be stingers at night.’

Tom’s head swam. He struggled to rise, his boots rattling the discarded cans. Then there were hands in his pulling him up, gently but firmly. Tom realized it was Prentice.

He led Tom to the latrine, then waited while Tom swayed and gushed. Prentice guided him to the demountable, then into the cubicle where Hufferman had said they could sleep. Narrow steel bunks were bolted to the curving wall; on them, flowery coverlets were stretched tight.

Tom was too drunk to protest that Prentice was helping him to undress, but, as he unbuckled his belt, Tom said: ‘Whassup? You wrong kinduv. . astande. .’

The aircon’ in the demountable was blissfully efficient. Lying stretched out in the cot, Tom was almost chilly. This sobered him up. Over the unit’s rhythmic clunking he could hear voices coming from the pet-food shooters’ cubicle. He tried to ignore them. Prentice was already asleep, his smoker’s snore sawing through the bunk above.

Then Daphne Hufferman lowed: ‘You’re a big bad baby boy.’

‘Ma-Ma. Goo-goo,’ her husband rumbled.

‘Mummy’s gonna have to change you before bye-byes,’ Daphen cooed, then came the loud ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the big man’s babygro.

‘Want bottle. Want powder,’ he whined.

‘You’ll get a good old wipe, right, before you have bottle, or powder, or cuddle, young man.’

After that, Tom blocked his ears to the increasingly rambunctious horseplay of the adult baby and his carer.

The familiar flashback took possession of him: the leafy balcony at the Mimosa, the aerial view of Atalaya’s perfect breasts, the moonscape off Lincoln’s scalp — then the final fervent pulls on the terminal cigarette.

Where had his thoughts gone? Tom thought back to his own thinking back. He had been up in the hills, yes. In the dust beneath the banyan tree, where the hillman refused to sell him the spirit wagon. Had it been in that reverie itself that his own culpability had incubated? Could Tom now locate — with numb, drunk mental fingers — the precise point where his inattention had become a form of intent? The grey roll of ash lying in his palm, the butt pinched between his fingers, the smoke drawn into blue loops. The butt shifted to gather tension, as index finger strained against thumb pad. Then. . the flip.

Tom slept. And came to in a room bright with chilly winter light. He could see the bare branches of northern trees through cold windowpanes. Directly in front of him there was the icy finality of a perfectly made bed. Tom sensed sterile hospital corners beneath the brightly patterned patchwork quilt.

On the far side of the bed stood his mother. She was erect, dressed in dark slacks and a dark sweater, and smoking. One arm was crossed beneath the 1950s jut of her breasts; the other was crooked up, so that the cigarette was poised before her sharply inscrutable face. Yes, she stood upright, yet her thin frame hung in the room: a shroud dangling from smoky hooks. It was the discarded clothing of her humanity, rather than the woman herself.

‘It’s time for you to go now, Tom,’ she said with characteristic asperity.

He found himself unable to answer — although he yearned to. This, she seemed to understand: ‘It’s time for you to go now,’ she reiterated. ‘I’m married — so are you.’

Tom’s mother, grimacing with the vulgarity of it, morphed into Martha, then back again. Tom shook with horror ague. The transmogrifications continued: mother to wife, wife to mother — back and forth with increasing velocity.

He awoke; the sheet suckered on to him with sweat, the phrase pia mater sticking, a shard of meaning, deep in his hurting brain.

Breakfast was last night’s beans — fried up yet again — and reconstituted orange juice. Tom could manage only the juice.

‘We bin thinking,’ Dave Hufferman said, poking through the grille at the nuggets of burned charcoal in the barbecue. ‘It’s still a fortnight till the road-train’s due, and we’ve gotta bust part in our main generator — bin on auxiliary for a while now. Daphne’ll ride into the Tontines with you and pick the spare up.’

Tom stuttered: ‘B-But how will she get back?’

‘No worries there, mate,’ Hufferman said. ‘She can grab a ride with the cops. Ain’t that right, me little darlin’?’

‘Right enough,’ she said, snuggling in under his ham of an arm. ‘And I’ll be in the right place to help these blokes if the shit hits the fan.’

The Huffermans were both wearing canary-yellow baby-gros this morning, and the sloppy expressions of large animals that were sensually replete.

‘It’s really. . it’s good — I mean. .’ Tom skidded on the glassy surface of his hangover.

Prentice — who was applying ointment to his psoriasis himself — oozed into the breach: ‘We’re jolly grateful for everything you’ve done for us already — and now this. Thank you so much.’

The Huffermans, who, Tom had felt certain, shared his own instinctive repugnance towards Prentice, seemed to have had a change of heart during the night. Dave Hufferman punched Prentice lightly on the shoulder, while grunting: ‘Good on yer, mate.’

Then, limping back from the latrine, where Tom had vomited into the flyblown trench, he was amazed to hear Hufferman holding forth: ‘Y’see, most Anglos have got the bing-bongs all wrong, yeah. After all, they only see the scum that pitch up in the cities ruined by the grog.’

He was striking a pose, with one hand on his towelling hip. It should have been ridiculous — but for some reason wasn’t.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘don’t get me wrong, yeah, I’ve no time for the black bastards that shoot up convoys or plant IEDs — they deserve every damn thing we throw at ’em — but yer natural bing-bong, yer bing-bong in his own environment, well, he’s a different proposition.’

‘Meaning?’ Tom croaked.

‘Meaning, my friend’ — Hufferman put a sceptical eye on his returned guest — ‘that I’ve never met any bloke more generous than a bing-bong. Why, he’ll give yer the last swallow of his canteen when you’re way over there.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘But, by the same token, I’ve never met any bastard more greedy than a bastardly bing-bong — that’s why they go troppo over the tontines. No, there’s no one more humble — or more arrogant, more restrained — he’ll go for months in the desert without even thinking of a root — or more bloody sex-crazed when the oppo’ presents itself.’

He looked over at his wife, who was hanging out damp sheets on the washing line, and the machine-gunner simpered. ‘There’s no bastard braver or more cowardly than a bing-bong. Before all this shit got going, Daph’ ’n’ me used ’em as trackers — best there bloody are. They could smell out moai twenty clicks upwind. The guvvie — the Tuggy coppers, they’ll never get the better of ’em. They don’t understand the bing-bong — and they don’t understand his politics, ’cause yer bing-bong is a highly political bloke. These desert mobs, they’ve got all their own internal conflicts going on, and they hate each other even more than they hate us Anglos and our foot soldiers.’

Tom roused himself: ‘There’s one thing that confuses me, and that’s why they don’t make it clearer what a mess things are, uh, over here. I mean’ — he was gabbling, yet couldn’t prevent himself — ‘there’s TV footage of firefights and that kinduv thing, but the media — the government — they never say outright how dangerous it is — why’s that?’

The pet-food shooter ignored Tom and called across to his wife, ‘Daph’, you leave those things, my pet. These blokes’ll haveta hit the road straight away if you wanna make it through.’ Then he answered his guest. ‘That’s easy, mate, yeah. The security situation’ — he put on a portentous, official voice — ‘cannot be reported for security reasons.’ Then he laughed and threw the dregs of his orange juice on the parched earth. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I reckon your mate’s got the right idea.’

Prentice was already fetching Tom’s rifles from the freezer container. He emerged in a vaporous cloak that was torn off at once. The day was hotting up. Mount Parnassus was bleached bone white in the sun, and the radio mast the pet-food shooters had used to locate Tom and Prentice was an alien space module, touched down on its scarred summit.

‘You wanna make sure the action on those is working,’ Daphne Hufferman called to Prentice. ‘And keep one of ’em in the car,’ she added.

The big woman had left the laundry and was slinging a cartridge belt around her neck as she plodded towards them. She held the machine gun itself in her free hand as casually as any other housewife might tote a shopping bag.

Tom went into the demountable and gathered up his effects, which had been considerately placed there by his companion the night before. He had intended asking the Huffermans if they’d let him have some sun block — moisturizer, even. But the strangeness of seeing Prentice active and helpful distressed him. Was it true, Tom wondered, that their respective grades of astande were changing in relation to one another?

When Tom got back, Prentice was attaching one of the Galils to the rack on the SUV. He fed the other through the back window. He was, Tom noticed, wearing his own automatic in a shoulder holster, and couldn’t forbear from regarding himself in the dusty side mirrors of the shoddy little vehicle.

Dave Hufferman came puffing up with a large trash bag full of empty beer cans. These he proceeded to shove in through the back window.

‘Look out when you drop the recycling off at the eighty-mile bore, Daph’,’ he said.

She replied: ‘Will do, poppet,’ then crunched herself inside with them.

Next, Hufferman tossed a canvas bag in through the front window and on to Tom’s lap. Tom recoiled.

‘Whoa, mate.’ The pet-food shooter grinned. ‘It’s only the bust part — there’ll be plenty of oppos along the way to sharpen yer reflexes.

‘Look,’ he continued, his breath smiting Tom’s face, ‘I’m not gonna put down a fellow Anglo, right, but I sometimes wonder if you blokes from overseas even pay attention to your dicks when you piss. .’

‘Steady on,’ said Prentice.

But Hufferman silenced him with a menacing look, then said: ‘Everyone knows the security situation is shit over here — any bloody idiot who reads a paper or squints at the TV can see it in a sec’. Daph’ ’n’ me have dug you out of this—’

‘We’re awfully grateful. .’

Another hard stare. ‘I’m not interested in yer gratitude, right.’ Hufferman sighed deeply. ‘But what I would like is a bit of respect, yeah. A bit of respect for the bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’

With this curious remark, the pet-food shooter straightened up and banged on the SUV’s roof. Tom wrestled the car into a wide turn, and they bumped away from the camp, following the ravelled tracks that twisted away across the desert.

He hoisted up a bottle of mineral water from the compartment under the dash and took a swig. The water of life! In his ruined mouth it tasted like the water of death.

* * *

They drove until the sun was at its zenith: a coruscating rivet hammered into the gunmetal sky. All the stress of the preceding days had gathered in Tom’s shoulders, forming a hard yoke of pain.

Prentice had rearranged the stuff in the back so that the hefty woman was able to sit, bare legs akimbo, with her machine gun cradled in her lap. Whenever Tom chanced to glance in the rear-view, there she was, her pink face gibbous beneath a pink sweat band.

The uplands in the vicinity of Mount Parnassus had declined into blazing white sands and harshly iridescent salt pans. Route 1 stretched ahead, an arrow-straight strip marbled with veins of wind-borne dust. The only life to be seen in all this baking void were carrion birds, their plumage as tattered and oily as the roadkill they pecked at, before the approaching hum of the car startled them, tardily, into ungainly flight.

Tom stayed silent, the deathly aftertaste of the mineral water still in his mouth. His mother continued to reject him with the tip of her cigarette, a brand that, like her, had long since been discontinued.

Insensitive to the atmosphere in the car, Daphne Hufferman chattered away, while Prentice smoked. Each time he brought the flame to the end of one of his successive filter-tips, Tom awaited the swelling of his own need; and each time Prentice flipped a butt out the window, Tom basked in his own radiant pride.

‘I’m confident, right,’ Daphne said, ‘that the security situation is improving. The army is drawing down, right, and most of the patrols over here are conducted by the police.’

This bizarre statement came only minutes after the pet-food shooter had casually remarked: ‘Y’know, the only real economic activity between here and the Tontines is the systematic robbing of travellers, right.’

Then, sounding as if she had memorized her lines from a fourth-rate documentary on an educational cable channel, Daphne came out with: ‘In time, right, the insurgents will tire of their activities and gratefully abandon them for careers in industry, the arts or teaching, right.’

It was while Tom was stuck in the mental groove that these multitudinous affirmations were scoring in his brain — ‘Right, right, right. .’ — that the insurgents ambushed them.

The IED must have been prematurely detonated, because the flash, then crash, of the charge was a fair way off. Through the fly-smeared windshield Tom saw a small bonfire suddenly lit beside the highway. He thought of delinquent kids chucking firecrackers in a trash can.

One second Daphne Hufferman had a mouthful of nuttiness, the next she was screaming orders: ‘Pull the bloody car off the road, man! Grab yer guns, geddout and geddown on the bloody floor!’

Later, Tom had found it hard to believe the alacrity and efficiency with which they had all acted: a tight little squad marching in the lock-step of adrenalin.

Tom wrenched the wheel, and the SUV skidded off the blacktop and stopped. He reached behind and yanked up the Galil rifle. Prentice was already out of the car, taking cover behind the door. His pistol in his hand, he sighted through the open window.

Daphne Hufferman, despite her size, had somehow managed to twist round in the jump seat, unlatch the tailgate and burst out of the boxes of medical supplies. She now came sidewinding on her belly through the sand, to where Tom and Prentice were quaking on their knees.

The crack of the explosion was still echoing, and grit pattered down on the bundles of diapers strapped to the roof-rack.

‘Down! Down!’ Daphne urged them, and when all three were supine beneath the SUV she pointed south to where a deep gully snaked away into the desert. ‘That’s where they laid the charge, yeah, in the culvert. They’re gonna come up outta there any sec’.’

She was right.

Four figures sprang on to the roadway and, zigzagging crazily in the absence of any cover, came towards them firing staccato bursts from their assault rifles.

Daphne snorted: ‘They’ve screwed up royally, right. They’ve got 300 metres to get across. Chill out, pick your man. If you don’t drop him — I will.’

She commenced firing in concentrated bursts, systematically traversing the road. The cacophony of the gunfire boxed Tom’s ears. He fumbled for the safety and eased it off. He placed the stock to his shoulder, the sights to his eye and crooked his index finger on the trigger. The crazy thought came unbidden: at all costs he must protect not himself. . but Gloria Swai-Phillips’s parcel, which was under the seat in the car.

The insurgent running directly towards him sprang into view. Tom wasn’t expecting this tubby youth, with doe eyes under the brim of his baseball cap; rather, some fearsome male version of the Entreati sorceress. A scarred apparition with an erect penis sheath, bellowing a death chant: ‘In-twakka-lakka-twakka-ka-ka-la!’ In time with his rifle fire.

The advancing figure swelled in the telescopic sights. The cross hairs wavered across the bulbous letters and figures on his green nylon football shirt: GREEN BAY PACKERS 69. The clumps of nappy hair pushed out by his cap were Mickey Mouse ears, his mouth was agape.

Tom felt the first stage of the Galil’s trigger action snap — then the youth tried to perform a backflip in the road, a ridiculously ambitious gymnastic feat for somebody so overweight. No wonder he failed, and instead ended up sprawled on his behind, a maroon loser’s badge pinned to his chest.

As soon as it was done, Tom returned from the murderous realm he had bolted into. Jittery, he rose to his feet and lurched away from the SUV. From a long way off in the mental fog, he was aware of the gunfire having ceased, and three other losers recuperating on the ground.

But one of the insurgents must have been lying in wait to the north of Route 1, because, as Tom stumbled into the desert, he reared up from behind a ridge. The boom of the heavy Browning automatic fused with the gory hole punched in his shoulder. He went down bellowing, ‘Ya-yaaa! Ya-yaaa!’

Tom turned to see Prentice, who first blew the wisps of cordite smoke from the barrel of the gun, then broke down in sobs.

And was still sobbing — albeit muffled by the cigarettes he held to his lips — as they trundled on towards the Tontines.

Tom was only relieved that he, personally, hadn’t killed anyone. After the dust had settled, Daphne Hufferman pointed out that the Green Bay Packers kid had her bullets in his chest. ‘I dunno where your shot went, Tom,’ she told him. ‘But you were game for a rookie — I’ll give you that.’

Then she went from corpse to corpse and, taking them by the ankles with workwomanly efficiency, dragged them off Route 1. As for the insurgent Prentice had shot in the shoulder, she gave him a hefty shot of morphine from the medical emergency pack she carried with her. Then she and Tom got the man on his feet and led him into the shade of a rocky overhang.

At first the Aval tribesman had been shocked — latterly he was stoned. Tom had sat with him, while Daphne walked away into the desert, found the insurgents’ pick-up and used their short-wave radio to call the grid reference into the police.

‘What will the cops do to him?’ Tom asked as he drove.

‘Shit knows, yeah,’ Daphne replied. ‘Might drag him into choky in the Tontines, yeah. Might just do him there and dig a pit.’ She chuckled. ‘That might seem a little harsh to you, right, but that one ain’t gonna abandon killing for a career in industry. You should’ve seen the bumper sticker on his ute: WE SHALL KNOCK ON THE GATES OF HEAVEN WITH ANGLO SKULLS. Makes yer think, right.’

Tom wasn’t thinking much at all. His tongue curled back and probed the dry gulches of his mouth, then extended into his psyche and explored its numbness. So, he thought, this is what real shock feels like: nothing at all. Self-defence was moral dentistry, accompanied by a whole-conscience shot of Novocaine.

He tried to thank Prentice for what he had done — but the gratitude fizzled out on his parched tongue. Besides, Prentice was engaged in some peculiar introspection of his own: as the sobs died down, the tempo of his smoking increased. He began, once more, to toy with his automatic, taking out the magazine, ramming it back home, then aiming at the lengthening shadows out in the desert.

Daphne instructed Tom to stop at the buckled steel skeleton of the eighty-mile bore. While the two men covered her, she bolted over and deposited the bag full of beer empties in the recycling bin. When Prentice, at long last, tucked the Browning away in its shoulder holster, he wasn’t himself again — he was more than himself: an anthropoid mosquito full of sucked-up blood. Tom could make out the words in his ultrasonic whine: ‘I am the Swift One, I am the Righter of Wrongs. .’ While from time to time, Prentice muttered aloud, ‘It’s just not cricket.’

Twenty kilometres before the Tontines the ghostly cavalcade of burned-out vehicles began. Ten kilometres later they saw a perfectly ordinary grader working on the road and were waved through by gangers in fluorescent safety jackets. Then they reached the city limits.

The sign was as stark as a gibbet in the desert twilight: WELCOME TO THE TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, it read. TWINNED WITH OENDERMONDE, BELGIUM. The three vertical stripes of the Belgian flag — black, yellow, red — were set beside the shield of the Republic. Next to the sign’s rusty posts lay a bloated body with greyish patches on the dark skin of its outstretched arms. They were travelling at too great a speed for Tom to be able to tell if it was a corpse or a drunk.

He pushed the SUV on down a long, dusty boulevard with outsized concrete flowerpots on its dividing strip. To either side there were street after street of identically shaped bungalows, each one a steel shoebox with a veranda tacked on one side and an aircon’ unit on the other. On top of the bungalows were sloping aluminium roofs, painted tile-red.

‘They’re modified freight containers,’ Daphne explained. ‘Guvvie ships ’em in and plonks ’em down. If one of ’em gets whacked by the insurgents, or the bing-bongs that live in it have a party and burn it out, they ship in another one.’

There wasn’t anyone much on the streets, only the occasional skulking figure that recoiled from the vehicle’s approach, and disappeared into one of the identical bungalows. A police checkpoint hove into view: a series of blast walls and a chain-link fence twenty-five feet high, topped by angle-irons strung with razor wire. The Tugganarong police stamped the trio’s papers while exchanging desultory chit-chat with Daphne about the ambush. Then they waved them on.

They turned into another wide boulevard. This one had fat-trunked baobab trees with whitewashed trunks planted along its dividing strip. Here, the containers had been installed side-on, and there were paved sidewalks. The containers lacked roofs, but windows had been cut in their sides. These were covered with security grilles. Each of these commercial premises had a large electric sign on top of it, and, with darkness fast falling, a robotic finger pressed a button. Slogans cascaded along the blank façades, racing the little SUV: APEX ASSURANCE, COVENTRY REAL ASSURANCE, PERSONAL FIDELITY, AMHERST LIFE, TIP-TOP TONTINES. . Tom wondered who these were aimed at, for there was still hardly anyone on the streets.

They reached another checkpoint with more bored cops, more blast walls, more razor wire. The cops checked under the car with their mirrors-on-poles. Then there was a third checkpoint, a fourth and even a fifth. Each necessitated the same laborious procedures, the same routine interrogations.

Prentice had come down from his maiming high, and in the short transits between the checkpoints he nodded out. His forehead, pressed against the window, looked in the sodium glare of the spotlights as brittle as glass.

Rousing himself, at what it transpired was the final checkpoint, Prentice reached for his cigarettes, only to have a flat-faced Tugganarong non-com’ snap at him, ‘You better not spark that one, yeah,’ and gesture to a sign that was bolted to the blast wall. The sign shouted: NO IFS, NO BUTTS, STUB IT OUT!

‘If I were you, yeah, I’d take your stay in the TGS as an opportunity to kick the habit. Perhaps it’s the Lord’s way of persuading you to stop.’ Then he slung the sheaf of their papers back into Prentice’s lap and waved them through the raised barrier with a negligent flick of his rifle barrel.

It was the first time Tom had heard the Lord referred to since the courtroom had lustily sung the National Anthem, back in Vance.

There was no time to dwell on this. Daphne Hufferman’s hand was on Tom’s shoulder, tending him this way and that, along driveways as smooth and dark as chocolate cake. Miniature office blocks with mirrored-glass walls were set in pocket-sized lawns upon which sprinklers played. Apart from the swishing caress of these, and the tired grumble of the SUV’s engine, the Sector was unnaturally silent: a man-made oasis, where interloping blossoms skulked in the moist beds at the foot of the buildings.

A perfect little Hilton emerged from the orangey gloom. It was exact in every way, from its pseudo-Hellenic portico to its ornamental ponds dappled with water lilies, but maybe one fifth the size of any other Hilton Tom had ever seen.

And there, standing by the main doors, apparently forewarned of their arrival, a swirl of black-winged moths fluttering round his fastidious form, stood Adams, the Honorary Consul. While beside him was the morphed version of Tom’s own wife: Gloria Swai-Phillips, wearing a floral-print cotton dress.