The Butt

13

They missed the left turn that Route 1 made for Trangaden and the south. Missed it, and didn’t even realize that they had until they reached an enormous ‘Route 2’ waymark, and a sign saying that Kellippi was a mere 807 kilometres further.

Tom pulled up abruptly and began manhandling the SUV into a three-point turn.

‘Better not,’ Gloria said, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Look up ahead.’

Low-flying helicopters were circling over the blast walls of a checkpoint. Even from several hundred yards off, Tom could see the coils of razor wire flaring in the evening sun.

‘They’ll’ve seen us,’ Gloria went on. ‘Better go through, yeah?’

By the time they had negotiated the checkpoint, it was twilight — too late to go back through and resume the right road. The sergeant on duty told them there was a decent motel a few klicks on, so Tom, close to collapsing with the frustration of it all, drove there.

It had been a long day, most of which had been taken up with having their papers checked. The 300 kilometres of Route 1 that ran through the Tontine Townships had more checkpoints than the previous 4,000.

The townships were at once desultory and threatening: the plantation settlements, each with its paramilitary blockhouse, dusty maidan and empty boulevards lined with converted containers, were identical to each other. As Route 1 turned into yet another central boulevard, to either side of which were ranged the same insurance offices, so another flock of prostitutes rose up and flapped after them, their wings beating invisible meat, their throats gobbling.

Stopping at the fifth checkpoint of the morning, and noting the paramilitaries’ Humvees, equipped with steel skirting to prevent hand grenades being tossed under them, Tom asked Gloria: ‘Why don’t the authorities stop the selling of tontines if it’s fuelling the violence?’

‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ she explained, employing the sing-song voice patronizing people use for children — or idiots. ‘The financial-services industry down south would have an absolute bloody fit if the guvvie messed with them, yeah? No pol who wants to hang on to office could risk that.’

Now, Tom waited while Gloria showed her ID card to the security camera, then pulled the SUV in through the motel’s steel gates. Prentice — who had been banished to the jump seat — took his time getting out. He had been forbidden to smoke by Gloria, who, like most of the native Anglos, seemed untroubled by the flies. Tom waited for him to make his usual lame excuses, before skulking off for a ‘fag’. But instead, Prentice stretched, clapped his hands together and said, ‘Right. You must be worn out after that drive, Tom. You go get a sundowner while I unload the gear and check the firearms into the motel armoury.’

Tom’s hand went to the tontine conversion certificate concealed in his pocket — was its juju not working? Were his and Prentice’s grades of astande shifting once more? Certainly, Tom felt worryingly debilitated, and as he shuffled into the motel he heard Gloria saying, ‘Mind you check that parcel into the motel safe as well, Brian.’

The motel bar was full of fleshy red-faced men who stood drinking outsized wineglasses full of dark Belgian beer. Equally fleshy women, with peroxide hair, sat at the small tables eating dishes of what appeared to be cooked chicory. Obnoxious fleshy kids charged across the tiled floor from the reception desk and flung themselves into a small swimming pool that stank of chlorine. The bored Belgian barmaid explained to Tom that it had been built inside on account of the security situation.

‘I should think things’ll be easier tomorrow on the driving front, right?’ Gloria speculated, perching on the bar stool next to Tom’s.

He looked at his badly drawn wife. Gone was the hesitant charity worker recounting statistics in the function room of the Hilton. Gloria had been acting all day as if Tom and Prentice were annoying boys and she their competent elder sister. Tom wanted to reconnect with a still other Gloria: the woman who had swabbed the makkata’s gash on his inner thigh, then caressed him at the law courts. But, while his longing had grown through the long, flyblown day, she had became steadily more distant.

Tom was so weary that once he’d had a couple of beers and tottered to his cabin, he didn’t have the energy to rejoin his companions for supper. Instead, he fell asleep, fully clothed, on the bed, the sanitary strip he had removed from the toilet bowl twined in his fingers.

This time giant fingers pinched his waist, then rolled him back and forth. Tom heard a rib crack — yet couldn’t cry out. Next, violent acceleration. Tom flew end over end, his mind smouldering with the effort of trying to alter his course: a bullet in dread of its own trajectory. If only, he smouldered, if only I can twist myself this way and hold my arms out, then I can go that much further, and fall harmlessly into the flower bed at the front of the apartment block. . But he had no arms.

He reached the zenith of his parabola and, screaming, plummeted back down into the tangled and hairy mess of the bedding, where he burned.

In the morning Prentice had the SUV loaded up by the time Tom managed to drag himself along from his cabin. He felt terrible, and Gloria greeted him with ‘You look bloody terrible.’ It was a nagging enervation that reminded Tom of the aftermath of flu.

What was Gloria wearing? She stood in the colourless void of the pre-dawn desert entirely swathed in a black toga, the complicated drapes of which covered her face, her hands and even her feet. Her costume was creepily completed by green-tinted goggles.

‘It’s gonna be hot where we’re headed, yeah?’ Gloria said as Tom drove the SUV out of the motel compound and they set off back along Route 2.

He snorted, ‘And what’s it been here? This is the desert, isn’t it?’

‘Strictly speaking,’ said Prentice, pushing his face forward between the seats, ‘this is only the channel country, the River Mulgrene Delta. That’s why there’s so much gravel, and so many wadis — which are the dried-up tributaries. When it rains here — which only happens once or twice a decade — all this floods.’

‘What is this? A fucking geography class?’

Prentice, aggrieved, sat back, but Gloria said: ‘You’d do well to pay attention to geography, read the land — that’s how the traditional people survive here, right?

‘Take this Tayswengo toga,’ she continued. ‘It’s perfectly adapted to handle fifty-degree heat, yeah? The black cloth absorbs the sun’s rays, you sweat, then the folds hold and cool that sweat, so that you’ve gotta kinduv sleeve of coolness, yeah?’

As ever, Tom reflected, Gloria didn’t sound that sure of what she was saying.

This time they made the right turn to the south. The blacktop that had carried them through the Tontines, on towards Kellippi and now back again gave out after a few kilometres. There was a last road sign — TRANGADEN 1,570 KMS, LAKE MULGRENE NATURE PARK 876 KMS — then the impacted dirt corrugations began, the constant judder making further conversation, or even thought, an effort.

The trio were abandoned, each to his or her own discomfort. The flies infiltrated themselves into the rotten environment of the little vehicle. The heat built — then built some more. The stony bled crumpled up — then disappeared, subsumed by sand dunes that came flowing in from the east and the west.

At first these were low swells, then gradually they whipped up and up, until the rutted track was plunging through a mountainous sea of eighty-foot-high dunes. The SUV, never the easiest car to control, twisted and slid on the uncertain surface.

Tom couldn’t suspend disbelief in his own driving: it felt as if he was being rolled over and over through the desert. The lack of low-flying helicopters, checkpoints and even the threat of ambush, far from being a relief, was a further oppression; for without tension he couldn’t prevent himself from lapsing into a stupor.

After five draining hours, two signs staggered towards them out of the heat-haze. The first read TIREDNESS KILLS — TAKE A BREAK, the second YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ENTREATI TRIBAL LAND, SMOKING PERMITTED.

‘Smoking permitted,’ Tom croaked. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Exactly what it says, right?’ Gloria replied sententiously. ‘The desert tribes — the Entreati in particular — have never been fully subjugated. They live, for the most part, as they’ve always done. Not, you understand, that smoking is widespread, for the most part the mobs use—’

‘Engwegge, yeah, I know that.’

Prentice was gurgling with suppressed laughter. In the rear-view, Tom saw that he had one of his fat packs of Reds out and was fondling it suggestively, sweaty fingers slipping on the cellophane.

Two oil drums sprang up in the road, and, as Tom brought the car to a halt, two toga-swathed figures came from behind a dune and strolled towards them. They carried long hunting spears in one hand, automatic rifles in the other.

‘Entreati checkpoint, yeah?’ Gloria said superfluously. ‘Let me do all the talking — I’m the rabia. And remember,’ she preened, ‘don’t worry — you are my companions and your safety — both of your blood and your possessions — is in my face.’

‘Mind if I get out, old chap?’ Prentice ventured. ‘I need to stretch my legs.’

Tom got out and tipped his seat forward. Prentice emerged blinking into the harsh sunlight. He immediately scrabbled open his cigarettes, ostentatiously lit one, then paced up and down beside the Entreati tribesmen, taking exaggerated puffs.

Tom observed him with clinical loathing.

Gloria spoke to the men in a pidgin of clicks, clucks, tooth clacks, rights and yeahs. She indicated her companions, then led the Entreati to the rear of the SUV so she could point out the rifles and the ribavirin boxes in the trunk.

The Entreati were interested in all this. As they bobbed along with Gloria, their black garb and fast-nodding heads made them seem not threatening but pantomimic: children’s TV presenters taking part in an ethnological playlet.

Eventually, Gloria came over to where Tom was slumped in the shadow of a dune, sipping tepid water from his bottle.

‘There’s not exactly a problem,’ she began. ‘More of. . an issue.’

‘Issue?’

‘It’s a ceremonial thing, yeah? These blokes’ makkata needs to examine you and Brian — your cuts, that is.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Tom knew full well what Gloria meant; he just didn’t want to know. The Entreati were leaning on the SUV, smoking. Gloria had presented them both with cartons of cigarettes. Snaggle-toothed grins unzipped in the hoods of their black robes as they drew on them.

There was a rustling on the face of the dune, and, glancing round, Tom saw the spidery figure of a makkata surfing down it, hanging ten on an invisible board.

The ceremony — if that’s what it was — was mercifully short. Tom was first: he followed the makkata a few paces from the road and dropped his pants. Feeling the light inquisition of the makkata’s fingers on his inner thigh, Tom flashed back to Bimple Hot Springs. Surely Prentice would fail this test? He had no scar. He would be unmasked while half naked. But Prentice showed no apprehension when it was his turn to go with the wizard.

When the makkata returned, he entered into muttered conference with the two other Entreati. This lasted a long time, many cigarettes were smoked, and the sand at the makkata’s feet was dashed by the long streams of engwegge juice he had ejected. Eventually, one of the robed men approached the three travellers, who were squatting in the ditch beside the road. He squatted as well and consulted with Gloria.

This is it, Tom thought, scrutinizing Prentice’s venal features. It’s the end of the road for you, kiddie-fiddler.

The clicking stopped and Gloria said, ‘Uh, OK, that figures.’

‘What?’ Tom said. ‘What figures?’

‘This bloke says the makkata has determined that your degrees of astande have been swapped over. We’re allowed to proceed, yeah? But since Brian is now astande vel dyav and you, Tom, are astande por mio, you can’t drive the car any more, right?’

‘What?’ Tom cried.

‘You heard me.’ Gloria was adamant. ‘Brian will have to drive — if he can, that is.’

‘Of course I can bloody drive,’ Prentice said huffily.

‘Why can’t you drive?’ Tom asked Gloria. He was unwilling to trust his safety to Prentice, even though he doubted his own ability to drive the car any further.

‘I can’t drive because I’m a rabia, yeah? I’m only along for the ride — if I drive I compromise my status. It’s obvious, yeah?’

Prentice tamped his latest butt into the sand with a fussy motion of his boot. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s settled, then.’ He marched over to the SUV, a resolute expression on his face.

His face? Clambering into the SUV, where he then sat awkwardly pinioned, knees tucked up to his chest, Tom took surreptitious peeps at the hateful countenance. In the rear-view he confirmed his suspicion: ‘It’s cleared up.’

‘Whassat?’ Prentice was yanking at the stick shift.

‘Your psoriasis — it’s gone.’ Tom leaned forward between the front seats. ‘Yesterday it was as bad as ever — don’t you remember, I had to smear your fucking cream on? Now it’s gone.’

‘Yes, well, it does clear up like that sometimes; it could be the desert air, y’know.’ He had managed to get the SUV going and was piloting them along the track — it was barely a road any more — with hesitant pumps of the gas pedal.

‘Bullshit,’ Tom said succinctly. ‘It’s to do with the astande stuff; your skin has righted its own goddamn wrongs.’

‘Don’t bicker, you two,’ their big sister intervened.

Tom fell back. The jump seat was savagely uncomfortable. If he sat sideways, he got cramp in his legs; if he faced to the front, his back ached. The boxes stacked in the tiny trunk kept sliding forward and jabbing Tom in the neck. Then there was Gloria’s package, which she insisted on having in the back so whoever was sitting there could ‘Keep an eye on it, right?’

Tom kept an eye on it — and it eyed him. The trompe l’oeil effect he had noticed in his room at the Hilton was no illusion: the package really did have eyes — and a nose and mouth. It was a severed head, Tom realized with mounting horror, its putrefying skin legible with coded messages: ‘600-Horsepower Chrysler Marine Engines. . Premium Aluminium Siding. . Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. . Would like to meet M 45–50, GSOH. .’ He read the enigma of its features as, uncomfortably lulled by the bumps in the track, he began to slide in and out of consciousness.

The package was on Tom’s lap and he was chatting to it. ‘Sorry I had to take you out like that, old chap,’ he said, undoing the string and pulling away the newspaper to reveal Prentice’s ancient foetal features. ‘Nothing I could do to prevent it. You shouldn’t have fucked with the kiddies, man; no one likes that.’

Tom groped out a tube of psoriasis ointment from his shirt pocket, uncapped it and spread the oily gunk on to the squamous severed neck. ‘Like I say,’ he burbled on, ‘I had to do it. I’m, like. .’ He snickered. ‘The butt of this situation as much as you are — more, even. They were all on to me, fucking riding me, man — Adams, Swai-Phillips, Squolly, the judge, even Gloria here.’

Gloria swivelled in the passenger seat and showed Tom her face — which was Martha’s. He took this in his stride, resumed his soliloquy. ‘They all wanted to be rid of you — I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uh-oh!’ He lifted the head to his lips and reverently kissed it. ‘Uh-oh, poor Yorick, I fucking hated you, man. .’

‘Tom! Tom! Wake up, right?’ It was Gloria, shaking him. He came to, fumbling to check that his tontine was still where he had put it, then immediately examined her face to see whether he’d been talking in his sleep. But if he had, she made no sign.

They were at another checkpoint. Prentice was already out of the SUV and strutting up and down the road, puffing away. Struggling out, Tom saw that he had been asleep long enough for the desert’s character to have changed. Previously, the sand dunes had been rolling downs; now they had closed up and grown in height. To either side of Route 1 they marched away: vast, pyramidical hills, 500, 600 feet high, with steep slopes, soaring arêtes and summits from which the wind unwound long ribbons of sand.

It was an awesome sight. Gloria stretched and took a deep breath, then exhaled: ‘Aaaah! The erg!’ As any proud suburbanite might hymn the praises of her garden.

Again Tom was summoned by a leathery-skinned, leather-aproned makkata. Again he went along meekly, this time behind the spur of a dune. Again the meaty breath, and the brown engwegge flecks on his pale thigh, as the makkata’s fingers sought out the scar. He dragged himself back to where Gloria was squatting and remarked: ‘I guess it’s gonna be like this the whole way — I mean, these guys having to, uh, examine us.’

‘Well, they aren’t exactly examining you, yeah?’ Gloria had acquired the pedantic tone Tom associated with Adams. ‘They know what grade of astande you are — the guys at the last checkpoint will have told them.’

‘But how?’

She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say. The point is, the desert is a crowded place, yeah? Here, everyone knows everyone’s business, and if a man does something noteworthy, right? It’s at least with the hope that his deed will be sung of, yeah? In the camps of the Entreati and the settlements of the Tayswengo. In the cliff-cut houses of the Aval, and among the vagabond miners of Eyre’s Pit — from the Feltham coast to the Great Divide.

‘The desert people are tremendously proud, Tom, you must understand this. Proud and fierce and just and terrible, yeah? They would rather see a man dead, yeah? Than humiliated.’ She stopped perorating and gave Tom a significant look. It struck him that it was his own future deed — the homicide that was hardening in his heart — that she meant.

These bare-buttocked makkatas — they knew. They knew that Prentice had no grade of astande at all, that he had never had the cut. They realized exactly who and what he was. Now they were simply confirming it: ushering him towards the death seat.

‘So, why the exam?’ Tom asked Gloria, as Prentice returned, buckling his belt.

‘That’s easy, old chap,’ he butted in. ‘As Ms Swai-Phillips was saying, no one wants to be left out. I expect these chaps will still want to jaw for a while, have a good old powwow before they decide whether we have the right rabia to go on.’

‘And if we don’t, smarty-pants?’

But that was the limit of Prentice’s desert lore, and he only shrugged.

The Entreati did want to jaw — at length. They chewed it over with their makkata; they talked with Gloria. They went back to the makkata, then they talked among themselves. Tom drowsed in the lea of a dune. It was unbearably hot: a fierce, dry heat. Frazzling hair — frying skin. Tom couldn’t believe the flies were still able to get aloft — but they were.

Eventually, the deliberations were concluded. Gloria came to report: ‘They want us to spend the night at their settlement. It’s only seventy clicks from here, down at the shore of Lake Mulgrene, right? Frankly, it’s a good idea. I’d been hoping to stop with a different mob, but that’s at least another 200, and it’s too late now.’

As he inserted himself into the hot-box-on-wheels, Tom was appalled by his own lack of foresight. He had never given a thought to where they were going to stay on this leg of the journey. He hadn’t asked if there were road stops, he hadn’t considered the availability of fuel. He hadn’t even checked if there was enough water in the ten-gallon hessian bag that hung on the back rack beside the rifles.

Yet it transpired that Prentice had done all of this — and more; because when they were under way, following the Entreati’s fish tailing, sand-spewing pick-up, he produced an aerosol and, passing it back to Tom, said, ‘Spray some of that thingamajig on your face and hands, old chap, it’ll cool you down.’

It did, deliciously so, and Tom was applying it liberally when Gloria barked, ‘Watch out for the bloody package!’ Cowed, Tom went back to his tortured introspection.

This alternation between childlike yearning and murderous repulsion was familiar; so too was the lust that now flushed through him with a desperate intensity. This was not to do with mere coupling with another human body; it was an urge to universally propagate in defiance of both space and time: tumescence that might raise up from the dead the innumerable creatures lost in the great extinctions. . Then he collapsed back into a torpor that was equally global: the world was balled up in his palsied hand, yet he hadn’t the strength to chuck it in the trash can.

It was, he decided, nicotine withdrawal — but grown gargantuan; nicotine withdrawal experienced as a full-blown mental illness. Nicotine craving that no quantity of actual nicotine could ever assuage, even if he were to smoke all day long, then pace all night, chaining furiously.

* * *

The rough track they were following began to dip towards the west, where the white-hot iron sun was puddling into molten fire. The parcel head nuzzled against Tom’s thigh, and he pushed it away. From some memory cranny crawled the following words: ‘Deep in the desert wastes of the Western Province, Lake Mulgnene 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. . And employing technology perfected throughout millennia, they refine and distil the precious fluid—’

‘That’s all gammon, that is!’ Gloria expostulated.

‘Gammon?’

‘Gammon — bloody bullshit; the lake’s crystalline all right, but only ’cause of the salt and all the run-off from the mines.’

‘So, no swimming, then?’

Gloria almost spat. ‘No, no bloody swimming at all, yeah?’

She was growing coarser, Tom felt, as they journeyed into the interior. The floral-patterned charity worker who had hesitantly addressed the reception in the Tontines had been returned to a closet full of hanging personae; then this tough, capable identity had been slipped on.

‘You don’t know how these people live at all, do you, yeah?’ she said.

‘Well, I’ve read the Von Sassers,’ he blustered, but then conceded: ‘I did find it tough going.’

Tom remembered the nights at the Entreati Experience in Vance and then on the road: the enormous anthropology book pinning him to the bed, crouching malevolently on his chest, almost as if it were aware of the blood money he had hidden in its papery belly.

‘The important thing to grasp, yeah?’ Gloria hectored Tom as Prentice pulled up behind the pick-up. ‘Is that these people have never been subjugated, right? They live now as they always have, beautifully and harmoniously. Respect their harmony — and they’ll respect you.’

If the copywriter’s screed on the bottle of Lake Mulgrene mineral water had been hyperbole, then so was the term ‘settlement’ when applied to the Entreati camp. It was a dump. Fifty or sixty men, women and children grovelled in the dirt, dragging themselves from beneath corrugated-iron sheets that had been laid over pits to sit chewing engwegge around smoky fires.

Then there were the dogs: slinking, squirming, yapping curs. There were chunks missing out of their mangy fur, their tails were twisted, their legs seized up. It struck Tom how few dogs he had seen — either over here or back on the coast. The dogs smelled, and they came dallying in — canine flies — to thrust their proboscises against his bare legs.

At the first moist contact, Tom’s own nose unblocked and a crowd of stenches — human and animal waste, rotting meat, wood smoke, singed hair, gasoline fumes — jostled for admission. Smell, the most ancient and canny of the senses. Apart from the very strongest, the most rank of odours, he had for a long time now been smell-blind, the white lines of his cigarettes blocking them out indiscriminately. Tom’s nose backtracked along Route 1, sniffing sweat, perfume, eucalyptus tang and foody bouquet. Back and back to Vance, where Tom had snuffled in the hollow of one of his twin’s neck, unaware that it — and he — were both redolent of ashtray.

In the midden the Entreati tenanted, shit, trash and broken glass were scattered everywhere. The pot-bellied children’s eyes were filled with pus from untreated trachoma, while fully a third of the adults were completely blind. All of them, except for the active young men, had streptococcal infections. Tom also saw the spavined legs of rickets sufferers, and heard the popping wheeze of tuberculosis.

Shortly before they had arrived a dead auraca had been thrown on a fire. It lay there, its coat smouldering, with a startled expression on its lama-like features. ‘It’s a great honour,’ Gloria explained. ‘They’re welcoming us to their cosmos, right?’

She seemed not to notice the disease, the malnutrition, the trash or the dogs. She strode from one humpy to the next in her black robes, a ministering nun handing out cartons of cigarettes and packets of bubble gum.

Soon, everyone over the age of seven was holding a fat packet of Reds and puffing away — some, preposterously, on more than one cigarette at a time. Meanwhile, the little kids blew blue bubbles that burst on their pinched black faces. Soon the dump became yet more littered, with butts and the slick films of the cellophane wrappers.

One thing that wasn’t hyperbole was Gloria’s estimation of their welcome. The Entreati were warm towards them, effusively so. Tom sat by the fire, torn between shame and disgust, as toothless old men and leprous children embraced him with their diseases. At last he managed to drag himself away and set off towards the unearthly limelight that played about the lake shore.

‘Don’t even touch the water,’ Gloria called after him.

Night was encroaching. Away to the east, back in the direction of Route 1, enormous crescent-shaped dunes marched along the horizon, each like the cast of a giant worm that was boring beneath the sands. The wind was soughing in off the lake, laden with mephitic fumes. There could be no question of even attempting to dabble in its celebrated waters, for the shoreline consisted of hundreds of yards of crusted salt and cracked mud. Oily fluid oozed between these platelets, streaking them cobalt, viridian and carmine — colours that belonged in a nail parlour, not the natural world.

As the last rays of the setting sun fingered the limpid surface of the immense depression, they caught on strange-looking rafts of some bubbly excrescence — like enormous frogspawn — that were floating perhaps a mile offshore.

Tom stood, swaying slightly, staring out over this desolate scene. After a while he realized he was not alone. One of the young Entreati men from the checkpoint had followed him down, and stood a way off, smoking, and apparently lost in his own thoughts.

Tom approached him: ‘Do you — can you speak—?’

‘English, mate? Yairs, ’course I bloody can. Did elementary in Trangaden — we all have, right.’

The Entreati was younger than Tom had supposed — little more than a boy, despite his height. Although he had directly contradicted Gloria’s insistence on the cultural isolation of the tribe, it wasn’t this that Tom wished to pursue.

‘Those’ — he pointed — ‘um, like, rafts out there — d’you know what they are?’

The Entreati lad laughed bitterly. ‘Them? They’re corpses, mate, big bloody mobs of corpses.’

‘Corpses? Have they been there long, I mean, shouldn’t you. .’

‘Some of ’em’, the lad said philosophically, ‘must be bloody historic — they’ve been out there all my life. See, here’s how it is,’ he went on, becoming animated. ‘When a bloke gets karked up in the Tontines, they dump his body in a wadi. Come the rains, they get washed down here, yeah. But the water in the lake — well, you can see what it’s like. It doesn’t matter if the bodies are rotting when they’re chucked in, yeah, when they get to Mulgrene they’re pickled for-bloody-ever.

‘Weird thing is’ — the young man poked meditatively at the crusted salt with the barrel of his gun — ‘the way they cluster together like that into those rafts. There’s no current out there, but they still do it. Bloody big bunk-ups — it’s like they’re keeping each other company, yeah.’

When they returned to camp the auraca had been buried in the ground and the fire raked over it, then built up.

‘It’s a traditional earth oven,’ Prentice told him.

‘Where do they get the fuel?’ Tom asked.

‘There’s mulga scrub south of here, apparently. Devilish stuff when it’s living — burns like billy-o once it’s dead.’

There was a bustling purposiveness about Prentice as he unloaded the SUV, taking three fat canvas bundles down from the roof-rack. Tom rubbed his sore eyes — he hadn’t noticed them before.

‘Got these in the Tontines, together with the other gear,’ the newly Swift One said, unrolling one of these. ‘Swags — you can’t sleep out in the desert without one.’

He left off his preparations and took a sheaf of receipts and bills from his jeans pocket. ‘The swags, a water bag, emergency flares, medical kit, gifts for the native mobs — it’s all here. I’ve added it up, old chap, and here’s the balance of what I owe you in cash.’ He gave Tom an affable smile and passed the money and papers over. ‘Thanks for the loans; we should be even now.’

Tom spyed another difference in Prentice as the other man readied the swags. He looked leaner and more ascetic — altogether less ridiculous. Then it struck Tom what it was: ‘Prentice — Brian. You’ve — you’ve. .’ he tailed off, stupidly embarrassed.

‘It’s my thatch, isn’t it, old chap?’ Prentice patted his bare forehead. ‘Ye-es, I shaved that daft fringe off — dunno why I hung on to it for so long.’ He laughed. ‘Nostalgia, I suppose. Better to face up to the fact that I’m going bald. It’s most peculiar. .’ He tilted his face up and his clear complexion glowed in the firelight. ‘I don’t think I could’ve, y’know, accepted that, without coming out here and being with the bing. . with these people.’

He stopped, clearly feeling that he had said rather too much, and busied himself with setting up their little subcamp for the night.

The following day Tom was even weaker. They set off from the Entreati camp at dawn, and until mid afternoon were still in the tribal lands, stopping at checkpoints approximately every fifty kilometres, so the the rabia debate could be rejoined.

Then, at the point when Tom felt he could stand the constant lurching over the impacted sand no more, and the newspaper head was, once again, assuming a slack-mouthed, garrulous appearance, they came to an enormous billboard erected on the side of a dune. It showed a muscle-bound man wrestling with a giant cigarette butt. The caption to this bizarre cartoon was: ‘Wrestle that filthy addiction to the ground and swim away from it!’

‘Swim where?’ Tom muttered to himself. ‘Lake Mulgrene?’

A few yards on a second sign appeared: YOU ARE ENTERING THE TRANGADEN REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE. ALL TOBACCO AND ENGWEGGE CONSUMPTION IS ILLEGAL. DEPOSIT ANY SUCH MATERIALS IN BIN PROVIDED BEFORE PROCEEDING. POSSESSION IS A FELONY. MINIMUM PENALTY: 3 MONTHS’ HARD LABOUR AT EYRE’S PIT AND $5,000 FINE.

‘Y’know,’ Gloria said wistfully. ‘it’s funny, but whenever I see that sign it’s almost like I’m coming home, yeah?’

Prentice pulled over and began fussing around. He tipped up the seat, rootled in the glove compartments, the side pockets of the doors and the trunk, pulling out cigarette packs, disposable lighters — even turning clothes pockets inside out so that the tobacco residue could be scattered by the sirocco. The transformation from the tough character who had been driving the SUV with dash and competence was immediate and complete. Furtive, old-maidish, lubricious Prentice had returned. Prentice the kiddie-fiddler, Prentice who was in search of a ‘little company’ — preferably black — and who now, to Tom, seemed to be rehearsing just such an outrage, as he nervously fed his paper tubes into the slot of the bin provided. What made the sight absurd was that Prentice was standing in a slag heap of discarded cigarettes, cigars, pipes, loose tobacco and engwegge quids.

Tom found he was laughing: deep guffaws that expanded his ribcage, so that he sucked in gouts of healthy, arid, desert air.

Gloria ignored him: ‘I did my social work training in Trangaden, yeah?’

Yeah, Tom thought. Like fuck you did.

‘It’s a backward kinduv place, and the people are total bloody wowsers, but I still have a great affection for it, right?’

Tom thought: whatever.

Prentice’s gait was crabbed as he returned to the car; with his new olfactory powers Tom smelled fear and sweat and need. Prentice put one chicken wing on the steering wheel, while with the other he groped out a blisterpack of nicotine gum. As he tucked one in his ugly mouth, Tom snidely observed: ‘Isn’t that a tobacco product?’

‘Strictly speaking, old chap.’ Prentice put the SUV in gear, and they drove away. ‘It is, but so long as it’s on prescription you’re allowed it in the TRAZ.’

‘And yours is?’

‘Absolutely. I fixed it up before we left the Tontines — you have to look ahead.’

But when he said this Prentice hadn’t been looking ahead: there was an auraca on the highway — the first live one they had seen since the badlands before the Tontines. He had to swerve violently at the last second to avoid hitting it. The car stopped on the very edge of the road, teetering. Prentice was draped over the steering wheel, shaking, his jaw working his nicotine gum; a jaw that bore the unmistakable marks — pink, lumpy, scaly — of fast-returning psoriasis.

‘Lissen, Prentice, you goddamn nearly got us all killed!’ Tom said. ‘You know the auraca bars on this heap are as flimsy as fucking paperclips! We better swap over. I’ll drive for a while — you can concentrate on your dumb addiction.’

They changed places. As soon as Tom was holding the wheel, he felt a surge of energy coming through it: the transmission directly connected to his nervous system.

The linked chains of mighty dunes that had marched away to either side of Route 1 slowly collapsed in on themselves, dumping out into a dull and featureless bled. A road-train came barrelling towards them, and Tom expertly took evasive action. It thundered past: four semi-trailers, their double sets of wheels throwing out cannonades of grit and pebbles.

A gas station loomed up out of the rumpled atmosphere, the first they had seen for 2,000 kilometres. Parked cars were ranged on its pristine blacktop apron. Leaning on the open doors, fiddling with the sound systems that blasted out rap music, were Anglo teenagers. They were drinking sodas as the wind riffled their T-shirts and sweatpants.

‘Y’know,’ Tom observed to Gloria, ‘I’m not completely ignorant, I did absorb some of what the Von Sassers wrote.’ He reeled off a few of the prosaic field notes he had internalized: the Tayswengo’s traditional range was between Ralladayo and the foothills of the Great Divide; they subsisted on hunting moai and digging succulent tubers called effel; their kinship system was matrilineal, with children raised by their maternal uncles; they believed that the desert — which was their entire world — rested on a massive flipper lizard, which they called Engeddii, meaning ‘Back of the World’.

Gloria kept nodding her head to all of this, although when she voiced her ‘yeahs’ and ‘rights’ they remained questions rather than affirmations. They drove over a wide, empty watercourse on a long box girder bridge. The SUV’s tyres thwacked the concrete. Finally she interrupted him: ‘Thing is, yeah? All that has some truth in it, but what stands out about the Intwennyfortee is that, unlike most other Tayswengo mobs, they have a remarkable. . Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him a leader, yeah? Such a status would be incompatible with their profound democratizing spirit, yeah?’

Profound democratizing spirit? Tom withered internally, recalling the flyblown Entreati ‘settlement’ that Gloria had hymned the praises of. ‘Who is this guy?’ he said aloud. ‘And how does it affect me?’

‘Well, you’ll see,’ Gloria said enigmatically. ‘I felt you oughta know, right?’

Trangaden shimmered towards them, the chlorophyl city at the end of the yellow sand road. Then they were in it, driving down a wide boulevard lined with tall palm trees. There were beautifully maintained flower beds along the dividing strip. Behind pillowy verges stood neat suburban villas, each with its own strip of emerald lawn constantly being strewn with watery diamonds.

They came to a checkpoint manned by Anglo cops — the first time Tom had seen any so employed. They barely glanced at his and Prentice’s laissez-passers, being more concerned with establishing that the latter had a prescription for his nicotine gum. Then one of the cops asked them all very politely to get out, and he searched the car thoroughly. In the ashtray he discovered a desiccated butt that must have been there when Tom rented the car, because Prentice always flipped his out the window.

‘Ordinarily,’ the sergeant said, holding up the evidence bag that contained the butt, ‘this would be a misdemeanour, right. But as you folks are new in town I’m gonna let you go with a caution.’

Prentice was fawningly grateful — Tom knew why. Presumably, with Prentice’s charges even a misdemeanour could get his bail revoked. Prentice, in the slammer with Anglo truckers coming down off crystal meth’ and ravenous for ass. Prentice, stuck in a cell with a haunted Entreati tribesman, too weak to stop it, and forced to watch as the man, crazed by his confinement, cracked open a disposable razor, then drew the thin blade across his throat.

The familiar black tower of a Marriott hauled itself up above the suburban oasis. Gloria said: ‘They’ve gotta excellent mid-week deal, yeah? Room and Continental breakfast for thirty-nine bucks.’

Tom smirked, and pulled the SUV into the hotel parking lot.

At reception they checked in, and Tom handed over the two Galil rifles for the hotel armoury. Prentice came struggling through the doors, his shoulder holster slung round his thin neck, a single box of ribaviarin in his scrawny arms. His psoriasis was definitely back; the receptionist noticed it and a wrinkle of disgust bent her lipstick bow.

‘I–I say, Tom — Brodzinski, I’m awfully fagged out.’ Prentice slumped, wheezing, against the desk. ‘You couldn’t help me out with the rest of my clobber, could you?’

For hundreds of kilometres Tom had been longing for this: a cool, private space with no flies in it, and a bathroom that didn’t stink of shit. But there was no repose to be found in Room 1617. It was a repeat of his experience at the Hilton in the Tontines: the silent valet crushed Tom, the blinds sliced him, the ventilation grilles diced him. He ranged the $39 cage appalled by these things — what were they for?

He got his cellphone out and switched it on. There were voice messages; the first was from Adams. ‘Ah. . Brodzinski,’ he began hesitantly, and, for the second time, Tom had the impression that he was listening to someone else even as he spoke. ‘I think I ought to — not exactly warn — but certainly inform you, that your, ah. . companion may — and I stress may, I don’t know for certain — have become, ah. . aware of Mr Lincoln’s deteriorating condition. I have no idea if he is in contact with the defen — with. . well, suffice to say: watch out, Tom. Mind your, ah. . back.’

The second message was from Martha and the kids, who had put the home phone on conference. Tom could picture them, standing in the living room. The kids were apple-cheeked, snow was falling outside, a too-tall Christmas tree bowed over the mantelpiece and logs crackled in the grate below.

‘Hi, Dad!’ the kids chorused, while Martha’s voice simply stated: ‘Tom.’ The kids all cried, ‘Merry Christmas!’ Then Dixie added, ‘We’re gonna sing you a carol.’ They launched into ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’. The twins’ voices were reedy and off-key, Tommy Junior grunted the words, and Dixie led them by example on to the next line. Martha wasn’t singing at all.

Tom unstuck the cellphone from his ear and deleted the message. It would be time to wrap himself in the cosy swag of familial love later on, when the job was done. He picked up his digital camera, then set it down again. The images were consorting in their aluminium cell. Clad in a glittery mail of pixels, Prentice was sidling up on Tom’s twins, wheedling them for their little company. While Tommy Junior — who ought to protect them — remained idiotically oblivious: a bulgy teddy bear, the size of a full-grown — yet sexless — man.

Tom could scarcely believe that once upon a time he had cuddled that body; held that hydrocephalic head to his chest and breathed in the warm hay of boy hair, while tenderly exploring the raised scar and wondering what misery had inflicted it. To cuddle Tommy Junior now — what would that be like? He would feel as alien as. . a Tugganarong cop. . Football head. . Flat face. . Bronze skin. . Gollyfollyfolly. .

Tom cupped his genitals through the denim. He thought of masturbating — he hadn’t done so in weeks. He thought of Atalaya’s breasts pressed against Lincoln’s comatose face. He wondered what Gloria was doing in the adjoining room. Could she be toying with herself? Gloria’s strange fingers pinching Martha’s familiar nipples — pulling the reddening teats up from the pale aureoles. Gloria’s unfamiliar hands caressing the curves of the belly he knew so well — travelling down over wrinkles and creases he had watched being scored and stretched by the years. Gloria’s interloping thumbs hooking into Martha’s panties as the doppelgänger’s hips rose. .

This was as it should be: the two of them separated by concrete, plaster and wallpaper. Exactly the same as any other married couple, unconsciously seeking estrangement to enhance their waning interest.

Suddenly, Tom was no longer interested at all. He got up, picked up his sweat-stained shorts and went into the bathroom. Here he washed them in the avocado-shaped, avocado-coloured sink. Squeezing the froth through the damp cloth, he reached conclusions. Obviously Adams was referring to Prentice, and, just as obviously, he wasn’t so much warning Tom as telling him to get on with it.

The idea that Prentice would make a pact with the hated bing-bongs to kill Tom was unthinkable. The Righter of Wrongs, the Swift One — no, that wasn’t Prentice at all.

Tom unbuttoned his shirt pocket; the converted tontine was still there. He began to rinse out the shorts, twisting and coiling them into a garrotte. If Prentice were to die, he’d be able to pay off the Intwennyfortee mob, sort out Swai-Phillips’s bill and even have some cash left over to give to Gloria’s charity. It all made perfectly murderous sense; all he needed now was the opportunity. Tom smiled wryly at the wryly smiling man in the mirror: an average-looking man, an ordinary sort. He’d got into this mess because of an accident that everyone viewed as an intentional act; now he was deliberately intending to do something far worse, then try to make it look like an accident.

There were miniatures of Seagram’s and little cans of 7 Up in the minibar. Tom fixed himself a drink — and then a second. He called room service and ordered a club sandwich. He ate this while scanning the contents page of Songs of the Tayswengo. He assumed the section on ‘Recent Cultural and Social Developments’ would cover the charismatic Intwennyfortee leader whom Gloria had spoken of, but this was part of the chunk of pages Tom had cut out in order to hide the $10,000.

Never the less, he continued reading the book, spread out on the bed cover, naked, and investigating his teeth with the toothpick that had pinioned his sandwich. It was dark outside, and Tom had turned the aircon’ up to max. So he floated in a lightbox of no-place, while outside the oasis city dissolved into the mirage of night.

‘The Tayswengo’, Von Sassers were impressing upon Tom, with their usual stolid prose, ‘are intensely fearful of public opinion, even deep in the arid wastes of their desert fastness. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this anxiety enforces certain rigid conventions. Lying behind all of them is the Tayswengo fear of getankka, or ritual humiliation. To be humiliated — even in ways that might seem trivial to an Anglo — can be a mortal blow to a Tayswengo’s fierce sense of dignity.

‘Understanding this, even in respect of his own foes, a Tayswengo cannot leave another whom he has so used, and will prefer to watch him die rather than suffer the so-called “shame of the earth”. .’

It was always the same when he read the Von Sassers: Tom heard the harsh tones of the younger anthropologist’s brother — the Chief Prosecutor back in Vance. Each new fact was an accusation, each insight was put forward by the authors purely to show up their readers’ ignorance.

Yet it lulled Tom. The heavy tome teetered, then tipped forward on to his bare chest. He slept, then dreamed.

Milford, long since. The streetcar tracks still ran along Main Street, and steam clouds billowed from the foundry at Mason’s Avenue and Third Street. This was his sugary childhood: popping Bazooka Joe, slurping Dr Pepper — yet also the early days of his young marriage: keg beer, slap-and-tickle, bashing the books by night for his certification.

‘I’m spotting, Tom, I’m spotting. .’ She was sitting on a wicker chair by the open window, a towel rammed between her bare legs, a malevolent Gloria mask clamped on her face. Then she was gone. Gone for weeks. A European tour. He couldn’t begrudge her — it was a dreadful experience. He went on studying for his exams and working the day job. Where had she gone?

In the dream, Tom was forcibly struck by his own lucidity: a heightened, pinpoint awareness, such as is stimulated by the first heady on-rush of nicotine through the blood. Where had she gone? France, certainly; he remembered a postcard from Arles. And Italy. Then there’d been a few weeks somewhere else, staying with family. . in Belgium? Could it have been? It was such an improbable destination — Tom hadn’t paid enough attention. .

Next, he was lying down on the bedroom floor of the first house they had bought, the frame house in the new Scottsdale development, out towards the reservoir. . And spring was gusting through the open window, but it remained impossible to pay attention, because Tommy Junior, his adoptive son, was sitting on Tom’s chest and punching him in the face with his chubby fists. Pummelling him with a deliberateness that was horribly inappropriate for a one-year-old.

Tom woke up with the fat book crushing him and the sweat chilled on his goose-pimpled skin. He limped to the bathroom and siphoned off the tank full of urine, near-fainting as it hissed into the avocado commode. Then he tottered back into the bedroom, inserted himself between the profane hotel sheets and joined the battle for true oblivion.