The Butt

14

The fly rubbed its two front legs together: hispid and viscid. Tom couldn’t take his eyes off them: back and forth they went, kinking slightly, the motion creating wrists and hands. It wasn’t cleaning itself; it was instinctively making a gesture of false humility. ‘I’m only a humble fly,’ the fly was saying. ‘You needn’t pay any attention to me.’

Yet Tom’s attention was unwavering. The fly’s six bristled sticky feet were planted on the dash, which, with its terrain of vinyl, mirrored the desert outside the car. The fly’s compound eyes — black and shiny — wrapped around its triangular head. Was it Tom’s increasingly unbridled imagination, or was there a warty eruption on the insect’s mandibles? Mandibles that opened to utter: ‘Whoa! Old chap, watch out for that—’

Prentice was cut off as they all rose up to kiss the sky.

At first Tom couldn’t figure out what had happened. Then the whine of the whizzing front tyres, and the fact that he was lying on his back, brought home how utter was their reversal. The dumb little SUV — the off-road capabilities of which Tom had always had severe doubts — had tipped backwards and was resting on its tailgate in the sand, while its snub-nosed hood trumpeted engine noises.

In the rear-view Tom saw Prentice supine in a jumble of cigarette cartons, drug ampoules and baby-bottle nipples. Tom’s bad companion peered up at him with an expression of parental dismay.

Gloria broke the spell. ‘The water!’ she cried. ‘And the bloody, fucking fuel!’

She unclipped her seatbelt and struggled out of her seat. Tom did the same, dropping down awkwardly on to the sand, into which a damp patch was spreading from the dented flanks of the incontinent vehicle.

‘Squashed,’ Tom muttered. ‘Squashed like a fly.’

‘Move it, you fool!’ Gloria screeched, flapping her black robes. ‘We gotta get this thing upright!’

They all hung from the auraca bars, and the SUV tipped forward so readily that they only narrowly escaped as all four wheels were reunited with the ground. The water bag was exposed — a popped blister on the silica skin.

Gloria went to the back of the car. ‘We’re not totally bloody dead, yeah? Amazingly, the gas can is intact.’

‘That’s a deuced relief,’ said Prentice, joining her. He called across to Tom, ‘Look here, y’know what’s happening, don’t you? It was the same on Route 1 before we got to Trangaden. I’d better take over the driving.’

Tom started to argue that it wasn’t his fault: after all, they had never driven the SUV off-road before. Then he faltered — an enormous weariness had slumped on top of him. The gelatinous shreds of the previous night’s dream still clung to his psyche, making any further protest impossible.

Meekly, he helped Prentice sort out the mess in the trunk. He checked the rifles, but the gas can had protected them. Feeling the fake-wood grain of one of the stocks sent a charge through Tom’s hands — this, at least, could vivify him. Silently, Tom climbed into the back seat of the car and took Gloria’s egg-shaped parcel in his flaccid arms. Prentice — who, when he was driving, delighted in flouting Gloria’s edicts — lit a cigarette and put the car in gear. They drove on.

There were flies in this region of the desert. Flies but no cattle or auraca — and they hadn’t seen any moai since before they reached Lake Mulgrene. There were plentiful flies, but nothing that Tom could see for them to feed on. There wasn’t even any spiniflex or thorn scrub; only the oceanic swell of the sands, which, as the car strained towards the crest of another dune, were revealed rippling hazily away towards the horizon. Somewhere over there Beelzebub was shooting flies with a needle gun, then feeding their furry bodies to the mutant maggots he hand-reared in underground caverns.

Penetrating his droning reverie, Tom dimly heard a practical back-and-forth between Prentice and Gloria: talk of the route, the diversion they would have to take to Eyre’s Pit in order to make good their water deficiency. Gloria studied the map; Prentice changed gear with studious zeal.

Tom interrogated the parcel. What are you and where are you going? What are your intentions, please?

A corner of one of the newspaper sheets had come away from the bundle, and he idly flicked it with a fingernail.

Do I really want to do that? Tom considered of each millesimal movement. Is this my sole motivation, to watch the frayed fibres vibrate? If so, can I analyse every link of the chain between my brain and my finger? Can I see the very point where my thought becomes an action? Just suppose that, when the little bit of paper moves, it moves the air, and the air becomes a breeze, and the breeze blows on the sand, and the sand starts to cascade, becoming a landslide that ends up burying somebody. Then what? Is it all down to me? Because maybe I kinda lost sight of that thought as it went along the chain. Maybe I stopped wanting to flick a bit of paper. . and started wanting to pull. . a trigger.

The car had stopped in the cleavage between two steeply sloping dunes. The flies were shocked out of their humility for a second, then resumed their supplication on Tom’s face.

‘Effel,’ Gloria said, pointing at the dune.

‘What?’ Prentice’s voice seemed to have dropped half an octave.

‘It’s a succulent, grows on the back of dunes. The plants are bloody vast — they can put tap roots down hundreds of metres, yeah, and spread for thousands of square clicks.’ She got out of the car. ‘You could do worse than pull some up, yeah? The bulbs are like little sponges, fulla fluids, yeah? I’m gonna take a piss.’

She strode away over the spur of a dune, wading in its shifting solidity, her black robes riffled by the wind.

Prentice canted round and looked steadily at Tom. ‘Honestly, old chap, I wouldn’t do it to them if they didn’t want me to.’

‘You what?’

‘I admit, quite freely’ — Prentice stroked his smooth, strong jaw — ‘that some of them are on the. . well, let’s say, inexperienced end of things. Still, you’ve got to understand how things are for them.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Come puberty — thirteen, fourteen maybe — they have to go off, leave their mob, lads and lasses both. They stay out in a camp, in the bush. Then, after a month or so, they come back for circumcision—’

‘I know all that,’ Tom snapped. ‘I’ve read the Von Sassers.’

‘Oh, yes, jolly good.’ Prentice fluttered a hand, clearly disdaining such book-learning in the light of his own very practical experience. ‘Well, then, you’ll know what comes next. Bleeding, injured, in dreadful pain, um, down there, these poor young things are passed around. First between the makkatas, then all the men in the mob. They’re, um, used grievously — it’s a dreadful shame. Better they be introduced to hunt-the-sausage by someone a little gentler, a chap willing to help them out with a little cash. No one minds, Tom — not even their own people.’

‘You fucking slime. .’ Tom began, then stopped. There had been a fracture in space and time, or else this confession was only a product of his own fevered imagination. Prentice was at least a hundred yards off, pulling up long tendrils of vegetation from the face of a dune, then squeezing their scrotal bulbs into his parched gash of a mouth. A fly squatted on the headrest of his vacated seat. It was rubbing its front legs together, hispid and viscid, ever so ’umble.

Tom got out of the car. He felt as weak as a half-drowned kitten. His legs, in the thick denim pants, were running with sweat. He tottered to the back of the SUV, unclipped one of the Galils and removed it from its sleeve. He had to rummage in the trunk for the shells, then inserted them into the magazine. Yet with each action his movements became more decisive. This was, he concluded as he rammed the box into the breech, why all along the rifle had felt so instinctively right.

When Tom lifted it to his shoulder and put his eye to the sights, Prentice was in his face. I can touch him, Tom grimaced. Touch him with my metal finger, spreading death ointment. A stray shot — could’ve been anyone, Gloria. . Violent place, the desert — you know that. . Escaped inmates from Eyre’s Pit — crazed smokers. . Held us up. .

Tom propped the Galil against the SUV. He began shovelling from the trunk the fresh cartons of cigarettes that Prentice had bought at the last road stop outside Trangaden. He tore a carton open and scattered the fat packs on the sand. Then he stopped and, picking it up, levelled the rifle at Prentice once more.

Get. It. Done. Now. This time Tom Brodzinski could feel the precise weight of every synaptic link in the chain of causality — from intention to action — as it passed between his fingers. His finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. Both cross hairs precisely bisected Prentice’s face, slicing it into four equally loathsome sections. Tom felt the first stage of the trigger mechanism fall into place with a click as loud as an explosion. At this range it would be impossible to miss. Death was a twitch away, a butt-flip. Death profoundly and devoutly willed.

Tom froze. He was locked up in his stance — his finger cramped in the trigger guard, the stock grinding against his cheekbone. He could hear his tendons whining with the tension. He was fervently thrusting, with every iota of his will, towards the future — yet unable to breathe, swallow, blink.

It took a long while for Prentice to wade back down the dune. Tom watched, transfixed, as first one of his boots, then the next, lifted from the silvery sand. Prentice’s movements were so leisurely that his would-be executioner could hear the individual grains as they trickled over the leather. He was dragging a long net of effel tendrils behind him, trawling the dry sea.

Suddenly, Prentice’s face was gone from the sights and he was standing right beside Tom, his ashtray breath in Tom’s nostrils. He carefully — almost tenderly — took the Galil from the spasmed hands and said in a voice that was more parental than any Tom had ever heard before: ‘Come on, old chap, we best put this away now. We wouldn’t want anything silly to happen, now would we?’

Prentice said nothing of all this to Gloria when she returned; he only drove with the skill and concentration that the desert track demanded of him. Tom hunched in the back seat, quietly whimpering, mourning his potency. The news-paper head stared contemptuously at him, while the flies, forgetting their humility, took disgusting liberties with his eyes and mouth. Little company, indeed.

That night the trio slept out in the desert, cocooned in their swags, their breath condensing in the frozen air. A small white-gold moon sailed along the horizon, leaving a gleaming wake on the dune crests. Tom was a ghost exhaling steam. The lush fruit of other stars was heaped in the bowl of the heavens. In the distance a wild dog yapped.

At dawn, Prentice helped Tom to put on his boots, then served him a breakfast of hot tea and moist porridge. He wielded the little gas stove with diligent economy and, as he passed the vessels, remarked: ‘Lucky I had a bottle of mineral water stashed — effel alone wouldn’t’ve got us to Eyre’s Pit.’

By mid morning the crescent-shaped dunes were subsiding; then the sands retreated, exposing the desert floor. Ahead, the earth’s crust had been playing with itself: fashioning barley sugar twists of basalt and dolloping down lumps of molten rock. In places it had cracked itself open, revealing the mighty vermiculation of subterranean lava tubes.

At noon, when the heat and the flies in the car started to bother even the stoical man of action who was driving, they gained the top of a narrow defile through a range of bulbous, stony hills. Gloria was yakking on about how Eyre, the first Anglo explorer to cross this desert, was deceived by his own ‘patriarchal mindset’ into believing the Tayswengo to be like himself. Whereas the reality was that the native women had their own powerful traditions, which were taboo to all men.

Martha, Tom reflected, never talked so much. She kept her clapboard mouth — thin, white-lipped — nailed shut. Tom cradled the head for comfort. He stroked the sweat-damp newsprint, and little balls of it came away on his fingers.

‘What’re you doing?’ Gloria rounded on him. ‘That contains vital equipment for Erich, yeah? If it’s the slightest bit contaminated it’ll be bloody useless.’

‘Erich? Who’s Erich? And whaddya mean, contaminated?’ Tom shouted back. He was on the verge of throwing her parcel back in her bossy face, when there was a roaring noise so loud that it undercut the SUV’s clanking engine.

‘I say, is that the roar of the sands?’ Prentice asked. ‘It’s a sound I’ve always wanted to hear.’

Now it was his turn. Gloria spat at him: ‘No, you bloody drongo, in case you hadn’t noticed we left the sands hours ago. That’s the roar of the bloody bauxite refinery, the roar of the road-trains carrying the bloody stuff off to the coast, and the roar of all the bloody machinery down the bloody pit!’

A few minutes later they came to a checkpoint. A couple of private security men were manning it. They were Tugga-narong — so bored their faces had gone grey. Like a child who has fallen asleep during a long car journey, Tom woke to find a strange new world stocked with the same old things. He marvelled at the heavily armed guards. How could I have confused these guys with the real natives? They’re as out of their element as me.

The guards rousted Prentice out of the car, then Tom and Gloria. Their papers were scrutinized, and Prentice asked if there was any water available. One of the guards told him: ‘You’ll be able to pick up a water bag at the company store, yeah, no worries.’

Prentice plodded away towards an ersatz massif of slag heaps.

It was too hot to wait in the car, so Tom and Gloria hid from the sun in the shadow of a smoking shelter, where ectoplasm was sucked from dirty-faced miners by powerful ducts. Sitting on the rubble, Tom asked again: ‘Who’s Erich, and what’s that freakin’ parcel got to do with him?’

Gloria arranged herself beside him and coyly covered her ankles with the hem of her robe. ‘You’ve known him almost as long as you’ve known me, yeah?’ she said. ‘He’s one of the authors of that magnificent book you’ve been struggling with for weeks now.’

‘You mean Erich von Sasser, the anthropologist?’ Tom pictured the hawkish Chief Prosecutor, pecking at him back in Vance: If you chance to encounter my brother, Erich. . ‘Is this some kinduv a set-up?’ He struggled to restrain his anger.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,’ she replied. ‘It’s common knowledge that the Von Sassers — first father, then son — have been living with the Tayswengo for many, many years now. If you’d made the effort to get through their book, then you’d know how closely involved Erich is with the Intwennyfortee mob.

‘Jesus, Tom, I’ve kids in my bloody orphanages who’ve seen their parents shot dead over tontines right in front of their eyes. They weren’t too traumatized to ask the right questions, but you, you carry on sitting there, yeah? Day after day, letting yourself be dragged along by other people, not even bothering to find out where the hell they’re taking you, yeah?’

Another bloody Martha on my back, thought Tom. At least the flies are being kept off by the miners’ smoke. He was thirsty; although less, he thought, than he should be, given that he was sweating heavily. Moreover, Tom felt a surge of energy between his shoulders, electrifying his spine. He stretched expansively.

‘Did you even hear what I said?’ Tom’s substitute wife nagged him.

The phone rang in the guards’ booth. One of them answered it, spoke for a while, then came over to the shelter.

He addressed Tom: ‘It’s your man, yeah. Says he’s crook, wants you to go down there and give ’im a hand, right.’ He went away again.

Tom stood. ‘Dragged along by other people, am I?’ he said to Gloria. ‘We’ll see about that.’

He strode off along the road leading to the mine, past DANGER and NO SMOKING signs, then under a banner that advertised: EYRE’S PIT EXTRACTION FACILITY, A DIVISION OF MAES-PEETERS INDUSTRIES. OPERATIONAL DAYS THIS YEAR: 360. ORE EXTRACTED: 75,655 TONNES. INJURIES: 1,309. FATALITIES: 274. The figures, Tom thought, were nothing to brag about.

The background roar gained definition: there was the massed clanking of heavy machinery and the hammering of the engines that powered them, while soaring above it was the bellowing of thousands of voices. Skirting the slag heaps, he made decisively for a stack of Portakabins that he assumed were the mine’s offices and stores.

Eyre’s Pit yawned open beside him — a massive chomp out of the world, with nibbled edges defended only by a single strand of barbed wire. Tom reeled back and sat down abruptly on the pebbly ground. Then, summoning himself, he crawled forward on hands and knees until he could gaze down into it.

The pit was at least 6,000 feet deep and a mile across: so immense an absence where there ought to be presence that it created its own distortions in natural law. Tom felt as if he were staring into an earthy empyrean — while also experiencing nauseating vertigo. He grabbed handfuls of the ground, lest he be torn down into the subterranean sky.

There were entire weather systems inside the pit: steamy wraiths wrestled with the black clouds spewed by burn-off pipes; turbo-charged thermals carried flocks of grey and black ash high over Tom’s head, ashes that seconds before had been floating far below him.

At the very bottom, mechanical diggers tore at the sides of the pit, scouring out ochreous grooves. There were hundreds of these galleries, and thousands of miners stood in them. Some hacked away with pickaxes, while others formed chains to deposit bucket after bucket of ore on to the ever-clanking conveyor belts. Tom was reminded of the leaf-cutter ants on the shrubbery at the Mimosa.

The chthonic pit also created its own warped acoustics, so that while the machinery was muted, the groans of the tormented souls carried up to Tom’s ears: the ‘hhns’ and ‘gaars’ of the ants hammering at the rock; the ‘oofs’ and ‘aarghs’ of their comrades hefting the buckets. Then, very distinctly, a small voice wheedled, ‘Gissa ciggie, mate, I’m on smoke-o in ten.’

This wasn’t an industrial enterprise at all — it was manmade hell.

Tom found Prentice slumped by the Portakabins, partly resting on the sloppy gonad of a hessian water bag. Tom picked this up by its handle, then helped Prentice to his feet. Together, they limped back to the checkpoint, Prentice leaning heavily on Tom’s shoulder.

‘Did you see. .’ Prentice croaked, the psoriasis splitting the inflamed skin along his jaw. ‘Did you see inside that bally pit, it’s. . it — it shouldn’t be permitted.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ Tom teased him. ‘Get a hold of yourself, man. You wouldn’t want a world without aluminium, now would you? There’d be no forks, no planes, no tinfoil to wrap your fags — somebody has to make the sacrifice.’

Tom was still pumped up when he attached the water bag to the back of the SUV. He got in and drove them all away with manly dispatch. But his rejuvenation didn’t last for long; by the time they were ten klicks away from the mine, Tom was finding it difficult to keep the car on the track. When they had travelled twenty, he had to pull over and let Prentice take the wheel.

Tom had blundered into a psychic quagmire, and for the next day and a half he floundered there. He was incapable of unzipping his pants without the assistance of his good buddy Brian Prentice. Between feeding sessions — when Prentice coaxed Tom to swallow gritty mouthfuls of oatmeal — and criticism ones — when Gloria hectored him with his ignorance — Tom lay awkwardly along the back seat. The boxes of ribavirin and cartons of cigarettes jabbed his neck, while the desert mutated beyond the filmy windows of the car.

Once they were away from the bled surrounding Eyre’s Pit, the track to Ralladayo coiled back into the volcanic badlands. They drove over escarpments of crumbling breccia, then through canyons the cliffs of which were threaded with mineral seams. Rocky outcrops, sand-blasted by the wind, had assumed the most phantasamagoric shapes: cellphones of scoria and obsidian digital cameras rushed towards the car. A Tommy Junior-shaped spire of tufa loomed overhead that had geological indifference etched into its stony features. Tom shuddered and, cleaving to Gloria’s parcel, pressed its tattered wrapping to his bristly face. It cooed to him: soon over. . soon over. .

Towards sunset on the second day the track descended, and the badlands vomited them out. A flock of moai, startled by their approach, rose up from the shade of some gum trees and goosestepped away, their useless pigeon wings flapping. Hypersensitized, all three of them smelled water. Gloria said, ‘Nearly there, yeah?’

Then, without warning, they were, jolting between wonky fence posts, past the welcoming sign: YOU ARE ENTERING TAYSWENGO TRIBAL LAND. SMOKING PERMITTED. RESPECT THE ANCESTORS; then a second: RALLADAYO, TWINNED WITH DIMBELENGE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO.

Gloria felt moved to hector Tom some more: ‘Erich von Sasser has given everything to these people, yeah? They revere him as a — well, perhaps they revere him — and we all do — a little more than we should. But that’s no reason for you not to be respectful: he’s brought all sorts of benefits to the Intwennyfortee mob, yeah? Fresh water, education, healthcare. Jobs too — and that’s had a knock-on effect for the rest of the tribe, who range from here to the Great Dividing Range.

‘Most of all, Erich’s provided them with a real belief system and a workable social structure, yeah?’

‘Given them a real belief system,’ Tom rasped, ‘what the hell d’you mean?’

But before Gloria could reply, the SUV thrummed over the ties of a wooden bridge and humped into a turning circuit. Prentice hit the brakes — and the flies were upon them, streaming in through the open windows.

In a plantation of widely spaced gum trees stood a long, low building that reminded Tom of the twins’ elementary school in Milford. It had the same steel-framed windows and modular construction: one classroom bolted on to the next. A short way off there was a structure in complete contrast, a Tyrolean chalet with elaborately fret-worked doors and shutters, and a wide shallow-pitched roof. The incongruity of this dinky wooden confection was completed by the trio of mismatched men who stood upon its raised veranda, a veranda that was sprinkled with snow-white dust.

Tom shaded his aching eyes. The skeletal figure of Hippolyte von Sasser’s brother was unmistakable — they might have been twins. If anything, Erich was even more predatory-looking than the Chief Prosecutor. His skinny legs were emphasized by tight lederhosen; the bib of these and a voluminous cotton shirt provided him with an avian breast. An alpine hat balancing on the sharp summit of his bald head completed the costume. This Von Sasser was a pipe-smoker as well, yet the tiny cumuli that rose from its tall porcelain bowl did little to discourage the flies that preyed on his raptor features.

Standing beside Von Sasser, his naked chest decorated with the medallions of several cameras, camcorders and voice recorders, was Jethro Swai-Phillips; while on the other side of the imposing anthropologist, his bleached teeth showing in a diplomatic rictus, stood the Honorary Consul.

For a long time the two groups stared at one another. Gloria sighed deeply. Prentice detached his hands from the steering wheel with an audible ‘tchupp’. Tom hugged Gloria’s ovoid parcel. If the three men on the veranda shifted at all, it only confirmed them in their stasis.

Then Swai-Phillips broke the spell. He lunged down the wooden stairs and came towards the SUV. From the way he moved, alone — his head tucked well forward, his arms pumping, his sandalled feet dancing in the dust — Tom saw a complete personality change in the once imposing lawyer. Swai-Phillips was doggy — there was no other word for it. He doggily opened the car door and snuffled Prentice out, then he bounded round and did the same to Gloria. He thrust his moustachioed muzzle into the car, while yapping: ‘He’s the man, see, Doc von S, yeah, he’s the man — c’mon Tommy, man. C’mon and meet him — he’s been waiting for you. . He wants to meet with you. . tell you stuff, right.’

Swai-Phillips was without his wrap-around shades. His bad eye was gooey, his good one roved crazily. Flies grazed on his furry top lip. ‘C’mon, Tommy, yeah. C’mon. .’ He grabbed Tom’s hand and bodily hauled him from the back seat. The parcel came too, in the crook of Tom’s arm. ‘It’s here — it’s now, it’s all times, man,’ he blethered, ‘ ’cause he’s the man, the big bloke. .’ His Afro agitated like a wind-blown bush.

Von Sasser stirred. Puffing his pipe, he squeaked down on high leather boots and came over to where Tom stood, his head reeling. The flies moiled in the deep sockets of Von Sasser’s eyes.

‘I believe you have something for me, yeah.’ Raucous vowels misbehaved on Teutonic bedrock. ‘Is that it’ — the anthropologist pointed with his pipe stem — ‘under your arm?’

Mute, Tom passed him the parcel, and as soon as Von Sasser took it he experienced a fresh surge of vigour; his vision pinged into acuity. Then, over Von Sasser’s high shoulder, Tom saw the corrugated-iron humpies of the Intwennyfortee mob. There were at least forty of them, each with its own fenced yard and aircon’ unit. They were strung out along an airstrip, at one end of which stood a light aircraft. A wind sock kicked at the sky. A diesel generator hammered in the near-distance. Of the natives themselves there was no sign. Tom stared into the ice-blue eyes. He felt no fear, for once again he was Astande, the Swift One, the Righter of Wrongs.

‘Why’, Tom demanded, ‘was it so important for me to bring this to you? Swai-Phillips or Adams could’ve, after all; they fucking flew here.’

Von Sasser threw back his head and laughed — ‘Aha-ha-ha’ — then stopped abruptly. He tore away the remaining shreds of newspaper to reveal a translucent pod fastened with two clips. Inside this hermetic egg were five wicked-looking scalpels, formed like embryonic harpoons. ‘It’s difficult to get hold of such beauties,’ he ruminated. ‘These are made by Furtwangler Gesellschaft of Leipzig, right. In answer to your very reasonable question, Mr Brodzinski, because of ritual considerations, they had to be brought here together with the individual they’re going to be used to operate on.’

Von Sasser darted Prentice a meaningful look. Then, with a ‘Hup!’, he passed the instrument case sideways to Swai-Phillips, who caught it on the fly and sprinted away towards the school building, still yapping: ‘The man, hoo-ee, yeah! He’s the man!’

It was an unsettling sight, but Tom focused on what the anthropologist had said. ‘Whose ritual considerations?’ he queried.

‘Why’ — Von Sasser smiled — a worrying expression — ‘mine, of course.’

Adams had hung back during this exchange. Now he approached them, saying, ‘I think all necessary, ah. . explanations will be forthcoming in good time, Tom. You must be tired after your long journey. I believe you are to be accommodated in the Technical College. Allow me to escort you there. Herr Doktor has invited you — me’ — he made an inclusive gesture — ‘all of us, to dinner at his house in an hour. I’m sure then he will do us the honour of expounding further.’

But the skeletal anthropologist made no response to this démarche. He swivelled on his heel, squeaked back up the stairs and disappeared into the gingerbread chalet.

The College was derelict but in an anomalous way. Bull dust lay inches deep in the wide corridors, and every classroom had had a rock chucked through its window. There was an air of chronic desuetude — the air musty, drifts of dead flies on all the surfaces. Yet wanton destruction was confined to isolated acts of vandalism: a photocopier broken down into its smallest component parts, steel lockers that had been opened like tin cans, a laptop computer that had been snapped into four equal portions, then neatly stacked on a desk.

Adams allocated one classroom to Tom, the next to Prentice and the one beyond that to Gloria, who hung back, flattening her robe against empty bulletin boards, as the two men ranged along the corridors. Prentice waited outside, smoking against a wall.

Tom pushed four desks together, then unrolled his swag on the capacious platform. He retrieved his shortie suit from the bottom of his battered flight bag. In the boys’ washroom he shaved himself as best he could. He had to bend down low to capture sections of his sunburned face in the single remaining shard of mirror.

Back in the classroom he dressed, then got his pocket knife and excised the bundle of currency from its hiding place in Songs of the Tayswengo. He had just put it in his jacket pocket when the clanging of an iron bar began reverberating against the sole intact windowpane.

The bar was still being struck when Tom stepped out from the main doors. He had one of the Galil rifles slung over each shoulder; he held the handle of the set of cooking pots in his hand, and as he marched towards Von Sasser’s chalet they rattled against his leg. As Tom mounted the stairs to the veranda, Swai-Phillips left off banging and recommenced babbling. ‘Yee-ha!’ he cried in cowpoke style. ‘Howdy, pardner, I see you with my lil’ ol’ eye.’ Seamlessly, he morphed into holy roller. ‘You’ve come to bow down before the man, come to reverence the man! For he speaks of many things! He has a mul-ti-tude of revelations! And yea! Verily! He speaks the truth!’

Tom placed his hand on Swai-Phillips’s bare shoulder and, concerned, said, ‘What’s wrong with you, Jethro?’

Instantly, the lawyer transformed: his clownish moustache and goatee froze on his strong features. From the bunch of accessories dangling from his neck, he hoisted up his wrap-around shades. From behind this reassumed mask he fired at Tom: ‘Nothing wrong, Brodzinski. I’ve gotta job t’do and I’ll do it, yeah. I’m the chronicler of this community. I haven’t been favoured with the kindest cut, but-that-needn’t-concern-you. .’ In his haste to appear sane Swai-Phillips’s words leapfrogged crazily: ‘. . allnecessarytellyouthat’syoumeimpressionsyourfirst.’

He thrust a voice camera in Tom’s face: ‘Campthisman-thenjourneyinsurgencykinduvthing, yeah?’ Tom pushed it aside, and it was replaced with a camera. Swai-Phillips pumped the shutter, while ranting, ‘Importantofpicture AnglojoinsVonSasser’sgreatprojectonthemanspot, right.’ Tom placed a hand over the zoom lens and gently pushed it down. Then he sidestepped the lawyer and entered the house.

A long Formica-topped table was set for dinner with Tupperware plates, brightly coloured plastic beakers, and plastic knives and forks. The room was far larger than Tom was expecting, and there was enough space for three distinct groups of people to have formed. Standing along the walls were Tayswengo women dressed in black togas and sporting discoid hairstyles. Immediately behind each of the place settings were more Tayswengo women, only these were costumed as Bavarian waitresses in dirndls and aprons embroidered with flowers. Their hair had been oiled and twisted into braids. Beyond the table, grouped by a fireplace with pine logs crackling in its grate, were five Anglos: Brian Prentice, Gloria Swai-Phillips, Winthrop Adams and Erich von Sasser. Together with them was Vishtar Loman, the doctor from Vance Hospital.

Tom tried to catch Dr Loman’s eye, but he was deep in conversation with the anthropologist. Atalaya Intwennyfortee was among the Tayswengo women, her lissom figure hidden in the heavy black cloth. She too avoided Tom’s gaze, instead fidgeting with the hem of her robe.

Seeing that Tom had arrived, Von Sasser broke off and addressed the company: ‘Gentlemen, Ms Swai-Phillips, dinner is served.’

Von Sasser took the head of the table, the other Anglos whichever was the nearest seat. The natives hunkered down where they had been standing. The waitresses tripped in and out of the kitchen, depositing dish after dish on the table: sauerkraut, Wiener schnitzel, sausages, boiled potatoes, some sort of broth with dumplings floating in it. The light from the setting sun streamed through the fret-worked shutters, scattering shining heart shapes among the fat-filled platters.

Von Sasser raised his face from his bowl of broth and saw the Galils that Tom had stood by the door. ‘Weapons, Mr Brodzinski? We’ll have none of those in here. This is a peaceful house.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘My restitutional payment for Atalaya — for the Intwennyfortee.’

He got up to remove the rifles but was beaten to it by Swai-Phillips, who scampered in the door and snatched them.

‘I have the ten thousand here as well.’ Tom pulled out the wad of currency from his pocket.

‘Really?’ Von Sasser sounded underwhelmed. ‘Well, Atalaya, no doubt our wayward friends in the north can use the firearms; the cash will go to the common fund. You can have the cooking pots.’

She darted forward, took the rifles from Swai-Phillips and slung them expertly on her shoulders. Then she picked up the pots and departed. In the still evening she could be heard rattling off towards the native camp. Swai-Phillips took the cash out of Tom’s hands and disappeared into a back room.

Deflated, Tom sat down. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. He had anticipated an elaborate ceremony, graceful female dancers, preferably naked, shimmying towards him in a line. Then a tremendous ululation as he was shriven by a prancing makkata. Instead, there was only this odd scene: the Anglos, waited on by fräulein impersonators, stolidly working their way through plate after plate of heavy food, and washing it down with beakers full of dry, light, white wine.

At one point Prentice looked up from his schnitzel and said: ‘I’ve brought the riba—’

Von Sasser cut him off with a wave of his knife. ‘No need to speak of that either,’ he said. ‘Dr Loman will deal with it at the dispensary tomorrow, right.’ The anthropologist picked up a chunk of rye bread and tossed it to the Tayswengo women sitting on the floor. One of them deftly caught this and subdivided it among her companions.

Von Sasser acted, Tom thought, more like a monarch than a social scientist. There was ruthless superiority in his every word and gesture to the Tayswengo, while the Anglos were his courtiers: treated with civility, sometimes, yet no more powerful than those who served them.

As night fell, the waitresses brought in old-fashined brass oil lamps with elegant glass shades. Their soft yellow light welled up, filling the chalet with the distillation of other, more elegant eras. Conversation at the table was general: talk of hunting, rainfall, supply difficulties because of reported bandits along the thousand klicks of track to Trangaden — all matters of predictable importance to an isolated desert community.

Adams, who was seated on Tom’s right, was talkative, unbuttoned even. He was also — Tom was amazed to see — smoking. But then all the Anglos were smoking. Smoking before the food was served, smoking between courses and — in the case of Prentice and Von Sasser — even smoking within them, inhaling food and smoke simultaneously. Meanwhile, from the Tayswengo women squatting along the wall, there arose the squelching noise of engwegge mastication.

When the last helping of Apfelstrudel had been served, the cream pot had done its final round, and each of the diners had ladled out a generous dollop, Von Sasser pushed back his chair, relit his pipe and called for ‘Schnapps! Coffee! Double-quick time!’ The waitresses hurried to do his bidding, their dirndls rusting against the chair backs, their aprons suggestive white patches in the lamplight.

Tom tossed back the first shot of oily schnapps and his glass was immediately refilled. A warm muzziness was creeping over him: there was something almost sexual about this gemütlich scene. Gloria had exchanged her black toga for a high-collared white dress with full skirts, and Tom imagined himself throwing these up and exploring her own suggestive patches.

He — she — they had survived, mastered the insurgents, got through the Tontines and traversed the desert. The first reparation payment had been made — so what if there had to be others? Nothing was more terrifying than the unknown. Besides, Tom was properly astande now: he had righted his most egregious wrong. Moreover, even though the tobacco smoke lay as heavily over the table as mustard gas in a trench system, he was also — he exulted — utterly free of smoking, no longer a smoker at all.

He was free to lose himself in the wisps and curls of blue and grey, to aesthetically appreciate these subtle brush strokes on the glowing canvas of the chalet’s interior — a painterly rendition of the very timeless present itself, which, from one second to the next, altered irrevocably. Even Von Sasser had acquired an air of benignity. He was no hawk — but an elegant Audobon heron, his streamlined form garbed in silky, smoky plumage.

Even so, when the anthropologist tapped his pipe stem against his coffee cup, Tom understood that this wasn’t only the command for silence; it was also the toastmaster’s gavel, signalling the beginning of a long speech — an oration, perhaps — and that the orator himself would tolerate no interruptions.