The Butt

15

I am an anthropologist — not an apologist, right.’ Amusement sparked around the table, but Von Sasser extinguished it with a foaming hiss of pipe smoke. ‘And I view human morality, in the final analysis, yeah, to be a purely instrumental attribute of social systems.’

To illustrate this contention, Von Sasser snapped open the scalpel case that sat beside his place, withdrew one and used it to sever a wispy tumour from the tobacco fug. ‘A man’s or a woman’s very best intentions count for nothing, yeah, when the result of his actions is harm inflicted on another, weaker person.’ He levelled the scalpel’s tang at Prentice, who quailed, then put it back down.

‘ “Goodwill”,’ Von Sasser spat, ‘there’s a bloody oxymoron for you!’ He laughed sardonically, and Prentice, misreading his tone, giggled sycophantically. ‘Mind you’ — the anthropologist looked in turn at the diplomat, the doctor and the charity worker — ‘bad will is equally nonsensical.

‘The pols down south, running scared, bleat about winning hearts and minds — and they call this goodwill. Now, setting aside the truth — which is that they’d like to cut out black hearts and wash out black minds — let’s tell it like it is: their goodwill is really’ — he paused for a beat — ‘God will, because all ideas of human free will amount to the same bloody old bullshit. We know, deep in our animal hearts, every last bloody ape of us, that everything we do, we do instinctively. From painting the Sistine-bloody-Chapel to taking a piss, right.

‘If you ask me who God is,’ Von Sasser declaimed, ‘then this is my answer: you see this moth?’ All eyes fixed on the moth that fluttered by the lamp. ‘Then see its shadow.’ The eyes slid to the wall, where the shadow agitated for a moment, then was engulfed by a larger darkness.

‘God is dead.’ The anthropologist rubbed moth dust on to the tabletop. ‘And all ideas of human free will die with him — or her, or it. I put it to you: cannot a man or woman be programmed to perform, like a robot, any action, no matter how contrary to their intentions? You know they can. We’re lab’ rats, without any Jehova, or Allah, or Yah-bloody-weh sporting the white coat. Only one thing is for deffo: if any given action doesn’t contribute to the good, then it is, by definition, a bad action; and that individual — whatever he believes’ — the anthropologist’s hollow eyes bored into Prentice — ‘is a bad person.’

A curious thing was happening: as Von Sasser’s statements grew more and more adamant, so his tone softened. The raucous vowels were quelled, the harsh consonants churned to Mittel-European slush, the rights and yeahs died a death as the meaningless interrogative swoop flatlined.

‘So,’ Von Sasser soothed, ‘you ask me the next logical question: what is this “good” of which I speak? I’ll tell you. The individual, the family, the group, the tribe, the national power bloc — each seeks its own benefit in the exploitation of another individual, family, etcetera, etcetera. . Who is to be the arbiter, now that the moth’s so dusty? A fascist dictator? Or, as in the white parts of this country and the homelands of our visitors, an elective dictatorship — albeit, one voted in by apathy?’

He relit his pipe and had a glass of schnapps. Peering into his own glass, Tom saw a rainbow whorl supported on the clear fluid. He tossed it back, and his eyes swirled with the spectrum. The buttery flames of the oil lamps smeared, then righted. Tom felt keenly the massive void of the desert surrounding them, a cloud chamber, thousands miles wide, across which trailed Von Sasser’s vaporous fancies.

‘Well, we — the people, that is’ — he smiled sharkishly — ‘have always desired a more perfect union, justice for ourselves, if not our blacker conspecifics. Domestic harmony, mutual defence, common welfare — the blessing of liberty — for now, and for posterity! These are ringing phrases, deffo, but smokescreens all the same.’ The scalpel came out again, and he operated on the smoky carcinoma that metastasized from moment to moment.

All but one of the waitresses had joined the women slumped against the wall. Apart from Tom and Prentice, the Anglos were drowsing. During the meal Tom had heard his lawyer’s deranged chattering orbiting the room. Swai-Phillips’s voice fell from the rafters, flew in through the windows, was even thrown up from beneath the floor: ‘He tells it like it is, yeah. He says what he knows, right. Time to lissen up, you bloody buggeraters! Time to foooo-cuss!’ But at last he had crept in and huddled together with the tribeswomen.

Von Sasser resumed. ‘The more tenderly ambitious the commonwealth in the domestic sphere, the more rapacious its foreign adventuring: the standard of Rome speared in the barbarian heart, Cromwell’s mailed fist punched through the Irish kidney, the Belgian neutralists who still run amok here. Who decides what shall be ordained “the good”? Why, those who have the power — we’ve always known that.

‘ “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath.” The colonized have been taught to turn cheek after cheek, while receiving slap after slap.’

Von Sasser stopped, and Tom wondered where all this was going. Could it be aimed at Prentice, who sat across the table, his face, even in the lamplight, as pale and flat as paper? If so, was it the preamble to even rougher justice than Tom himself had contemplated? The waitress poured him yet another shot, and he injected it into the carburettor of his mouth, where it exploded. Tom gagged, spluttered, headlights bore down on him — from inside his eyes.

Ignoring this, Von Sasser continued: ‘Of course, times change, and, rather than admit that he wants to rip off your bauxite, the white man’s burden has become the Coke can he made from it, which you’re too inconsiderately bloody poor to buy off him. And in their own despotisms of dull, the Anglos abuse their wrinklies, their sickies, their dole bludgers, with a conception of “the good” that reeks of formaldehyde and the morgue. Their utilitarianism — how I bloody despise it! The noble Athenian polis rebuilt — on the never-never — in a general medical ward. Socrates is denied his hemlock and put on a morphine pump — as if that were any kind of death!’

The dirndl rustled by Tom’s ear; the shot was poured. Before drinking it Tom had the temerity to interrupt the anthropologist: ‘Excuse me, uh, Herr Doktor, but what exactly is in this stuff? It tastes kinda funny.’

‘A drop of petrol,’ Von Sasser told him. ‘Only a drop, mind. The desert tribes sniff it, and drink it — it’s a bloody scourge. I insist on all my guests having a little themselves. As a medical man I can assure you that it’ll do you no harm.’

A medical man? Tom was preparing to probe Von Sasser on this, when the anthropologist changed tack: ‘When my father arrived here fifty years ago, he found these people’ — he gestured towards the bundled-up tribeswomen — ‘on the brink of extinction. Winthrop. . Gloria, Vishtar — they’ve heard this tale many times before. .’ And besides, Tom thought, they’re beyond hearing.

They were: the fastidious Consul had slumped forward on to the table, while both Gloria and Loman were tipped back in their chairs. Gloria’s didgeridoo snores were a droning accompaniment to her cousin’s continuing jibber: ‘He’s the man, yeah, the number-one big bloke. Hear him!’

‘. . but I think it’s important for newcomers to know the background to what we do here.

‘As I say, my father came here as a young anthropologist. He had studied with Mauss, with Lévi-Strauss — he was eager to get into the field and make a name for himself. In those days, well’ — Von Sasser dismissed a genie of smoke with a wave — ‘the authorities in Capital City had no more shame than they do now. He easily obtained a permit to work among the desert people. Then, when he arrived — in a convoy of bloody Land Rovers! All heavily laden with canvas tents, picks, shovels, all the gear and supplies he needed for six months in the wilderness! Y’know’ — he leaned forward, digging at Tom with his pipe stem — ‘anthropology itself has always been a kind of imperialism: the noble conquest of authenticity. . Yes, when he arrived, instead of a state-of-bloody-nature, he discovered that the Belgians had long since rounded up all the able-bodied men, women and even children they could find and put ’em to work in Eyre’s Pit. You’ve seen the pit, yeah?’

‘We, uh, swung by on our way here,’ Tom said. ‘It’s. . I dunno. . terrifying—’

‘Terrifying, exactly! And that’s now, when there’s mechanization, and Anglo miners are also down there. Then, well, hundreds — thousands — were dying every bloody month. They were being forced, at gunpoint, to dig out the ore with their bare-bloody-hands.

‘The mining company had shot all the game — there was nothing for the people to eat. An entire generation — maybe two — had already been decimated. The guvvie encouraged this genocide, cynically offering so-called “development grants” for every native inducted into the certain death of the mine. There were no human-rights monitors in those days, Mr Brodzinski. None of the voyeuristic gear of an international community, which in our own era sees fit to come and see such atrocity exhibitions.

‘No, this was the heart of darkness, all right. And my father found out that the indigenous people, most of all, had forgotten its anatomy. The tribal groups — if they’d ever existed to begin with — had been broken up. Isolated mobs of old men and women, and young children, roamed the bled searching for water, feeding on each other’s corpses when they fell.

‘These people had bugger-all. Nothing. No language but a debased Anglo pidgin, no identity except as concentration camp inmates or escapees. They had no songs, no dances, no myths, no cosmology — not even the most rudimentary creation myths, such as are found among remote islanders. There were no rituals or holy men and women, no leaders — or taboos. These benighted people had only engwegge — and death.’

Von Sasser lapsed into silence and relit his pipe. The drawing of the match flame into the high ceramic bowl cast crazy highlights on Prentice’s black button eyes — for he sat in a trance. The other Anglos snored, Swai-Phillips muttered, the Tayswengo squelched their nicotine cuds.

At length, Tom ventured: ‘So, uh, if you don’t mind my asking, what did your father do?’

‘A good question, Mr Brodzinski. I’ll tell you what my papa did.’ The anthropologist’s tone softened still more, to a didactic caress: ‘He taught them, that’s what he did. He distilled all of his study of other traditional peoples, all of their myths and songs and dances, into a new and viable belief system for these terminally deracinated souls. He devised an entire new vocabulary for them, then grafted this on to the stump that remained where their own language had been amputated. Then he taught this to them as well. Of course, such instruction would’ve been impossible for a mere rabble, so Papa gave birth to new kinship systems, while inculcating them with the beginnings of a hierarchy.

‘This was true bloody fieldwork: meticulous, slow, painstaking — every step of the way profoundly engaged. My papa was something that was rare enough in the world in those days, and has now totally disappeared: a heroic man — maybe a superman. He had all the skills he needed. He could hunt, he was a crack shot, he could doctor, speak fluent Homeric Greek, and his embroidery was indistinguishable — to an expert — from that of the most refined Viennese seamstresses. He did the dirndls. Even so, this undertaking tested him to his limits — yet he persisted, for year after year.

‘It took him twenty to educate a core group of the natives — the mob that still live here, with me. He called them the Intwennyfortee mob, for he planned ahead, Papa, way ahead. By 2040 he hoped — believed — that this entire land would be under the sway of these new — old traditions. If I’m able to continue the noble work he started for that long, well,’ the anthropologist sighed, ‘perhaps it will.

‘By the time I was finishing school in Bavaria, the process of wider dissemination was under way. From here, emissaries went out to the north and the west. Attracted by these proud pioneers, the tribes now known as the Inssessitti, the Aval and the Entreati coalesced.

‘My mother. .’ Von Sasser’s voice stretched, then twanged with emotion. ‘Fair Elise.’ His fingers played a few notes on smoky keys. ‘She was a woman of uncommon intelligence — the most refined sensibilities. She supported Papa to the hilt. Not for her the bloody whingeing that women indulge in today, with their drivel about “sexual fulfilment” and “my career”, making of their menfolk handmaidens with penises!

‘I don’t think my parents spent more than three months together in their entire marriage — which lasted over forty years. She understood the enormous significance of her work, she knew her feelings were of no consequence at all, while the knowledge that somewhere, over here, out in the desert, a young girl — or boy — was being infibulated, was fulfilment enough. When Papa sent her instructions, my mother followed them to the letter.

‘He decided that I should go to uni, first to read anthropology, while my brother, Hippolyte, came straight out here to law school in Capital City. If either of us had nurtured any other ambitions — to play at poetry or rebellion, travel the world, perhaps — then we made of them mere arrière-pensées. By our late teens we already knew our destinies: Hippolyte was to become my father’s secret agent, working within the very law itself to undermine the Anglos’ hegemony; while I was to join Papa here, once I’d completed my medical training, then qualified as a surgeon.’

‘A surgeon?’ Tom seized on this inconsistency. ‘I thought you said you’d studied anthropology.’

‘First with the anthropology!’ Von Sasser snapped. ‘Then, next, the medicine. Papa had two vital tasks for me — I was, you no doubt realise, the favoured son. First, I was to infiltrate his bold creative synthesis into the relevant academic journals. Those impoverished dullards!’ he laughed. ‘With their mania for systemization, the ceaseless recycling of mental trash they call knowledge!

‘I agitated these people on my father’s behalf to obtain the necessary peer evaluations. In due course the academic papers appeared that eventually were assembled and published as Songs of the Tayswengo.’

‘But. . you. .’ Tom ventured timorously, ‘you, like, made it up?’

‘Mr Brodzinski — Tom — there was no likeness whatsoever. But then, haven’t the sages of the West also, like, made it up? With their World Spirits, their noble savages, their categorical-bloody-imperatives? Isn’t what passes for the epitome of Western knowledge no less creative — and, if I may be forgiven a little pride — far less well written than the tales Papa and I spun?

‘Ours, Tom, was an instrumental morality, not the “will” of a delusory sky god. Papa — he took the long view. In the subsequent years our literary endeavours enabled Hippolyte to campaign for native customary law to be incorporated into the Anglos’ civil and penal codes, thus ensuring us — the desert tribes — with a steady stream of income.’

‘You mean — my $10,000?’

‘Precisely, Tom. It’s an elegant form of justice, you might say. Certainly more elegant than theirs, which is what? The crudest calculus of human existence — an abacus of beady little lives slid hither and thither by spiritual accountants.

‘What do they want, Tom? Why, you of all people should understand by now. Six billion? Nine? A hundred billion human apes soiling this already fouled little ball of a world — that’s their conception of the good. Is that what they — what you — want?’

This was not, Tom thought, a question that demanded an answer — least of all from him. His eyes smarted, and he could feel the oily residue of the last shot of schnapps slick in his gullet.

Now Von Sasser tilted his beak towards Prentice and hawked: ‘Then there’s the kiddies, eh, Prentice? We mustn’t forget them, must we?’

Prentice roused himself. The cigarette between his fingers had burned down. His waxy features had melted in the night-time heat. He was transfixed by Von Sasser, a feeble rodent pinioned by relentless talons. ‘Euch, no,’ he coughed, ‘we mustn’t forget them.’ Then he jerked upright and pushed his cigarette butt into the crowded ashtray.

A wild dog howled out in the desert, a cry that was taken up by others on all sides of the Tyrolean chalet. Tom thought: perhaps if I open the shutters there will be icing-sugar snow sparkling in the moon-light, a huddle of happy carollers under a cheery lantern. I fucked up in the dunes — but maybe he’s gonna give me a second chance?

‘The kiddies, yes. .’ the anthropologist mused enigmatically, and set his long pipe down at last. ‘They bring us back to where we started.’ The hollow eyes sucked in Tom and Prentice’s tacit assent. ‘We are in complete agreement, then: morality is always an instrumental affair. For the Anglo governments those instruments are the survey, the bell curve, and the statistician with no more imagination than this plastic fork.’ He held it up and deftly snapped off a single tine. This then became a diminutive baton, with which he conducted his own final remarks.

‘I spent a further decade acquiring the necessary skills needed to facilitate Papa’s conception of the good.’ The little baton swung in the direction of the scalpel case. ‘He had reached an impasse. He had cultivated these people, right enough — yet he had failed to harvest them. They still remained passively in the path of the Anglo combines. What was needed were mystics, firebrands and charismatics who would galvanize the embryonic body politic! Papa — who had no formal medical, let alone surgical, training himself — was relying on me to provide them.’

Von Sasser flexed the spillikin between his slim surgeon’s fingers; with a scarcely audible ‘ping’, a bit snapped off and hit the Consul’s forehead, then dropped to the tabletop. Adams stirred, groaned, drool looping from his slack mouth.

‘And that, gentlemen, is enough for one night.’ Von Sasser scraped back his chair and rose. ‘We will resume our discussions tomorrow. Very good!’

Discussions, Tom thought, was hardly the right word.

The anthropologist strafed the natives slumped against the wall with the tracer phonemes of his father’s made-up language. They got up — penitent, monkish in their black togas — and filed out. Swai-Phillips brought up the rear with his jazzy plainsong — ‘Oh, yes! The man, OK, the man — he’s said it all, he’s done it all. He’s the big sharp ’un. .’ which faded into the silvered negative of the starlit desert.

The Anglos’ exodus was a more awkward affair. Perversely, Adams, Loman and Gloria all chose to behave as if they had been lapping up their host’s every word. They took their time to say their grateful goodbyes, praising Von Sasser’s food, his drink, his conversation. But when they stumped across the veranda and stumbled down the steps, their sleep-cramped legs betrayed them.

Tom and Prentice followed on behind.

‘Until the morning, then.’ Von Sasser bade them goodnight from the top of the stairs. ‘There are some things I’d like the two of you, in particular, to see, yeah.’

Tom went to his swag in the classroom of the abandoned school, musing on how it was that, for so long as he was lecturing, Von Sasser’s accent was located in the Northern Hemisphere; yet as soon as he ceased, the squawking indigenous vowels came home to roost.

As he undressed, Tom admired the scissoring of his lean heat-tempered limbs. He slid into the canvas pouch and was soon asleep.

In the night, first one of his twins and then the second crawled in with him. Tom buried his face in their downy little backs. Later on, more disturbingly, Dixie joined them. Tom had to manouevre a twin in between them, lest he inadvertently press his groin against her thigh. Finally, shortly before dawn, Tommy Junior came into the classroom. ‘Where are you, Dad?’ he called out in the anaemic light. ‘Where are you?’

Tom wanted to respond to his adoptive son, but he was encumbered by the fleshy straitjacket of his own flesh. He could see Tommy Junior plainly enough, but the boy wasn’t helping himself. He refused — or was unable — to remove the hand-held games console from right in front of his eyes, so he bumped into the desks and collided with the walls.

He persisted, though: ‘Where are you, Dad? Where are you?’ His own wanderings in the maze of furniture replicated those of the tiny avatars on the screen he was fixated by.

Dixie, the succubus, rolled over and grasped Tom’s thigh between her own legs. It was she who had the impressive morning erection: a pestle that she ground into him. He screamed, but there was a rock rolled across his mouth, and the cry echoed only in the cave of his skull.

Between sleep and waking, paralysis and flight, myth and the prosaic, the existential and the universal, Tom watched, horrified, as Tommy Junior at last found a way through. He flopped forward on to the swag, and his adoptive siblings splattered into nothing. Now, there was only the overgrown cuckoo child bearing down on Tom, crushing the life out of him.

Tom ungummed his swollen lids. Gloria Swai-Phillips was sitting in a chair by the window. She wore a cotton dressing gown patterned with parrots, and her hair was wet from the shower. The sunlight flared on its damp sheen, but her face was deep in shadow.

‘You’re gonna haveta get your shit together today, yeah?’

Why, thought Tom, did no one in this country ever prefix their remarks with the verbal foreplay that made it possible for humans to rub along with each other? Every conversation was as brusque as a military briefing. He slid upright in the sweat-lubricated sheath of the swag.

‘I know that,’ he replied, groping underneath the mattress for the reassurance of the envelope with his tontine in it.

‘So long as you know, right?’

She stood and her gown fell open. Her pubis was bare but for a pubescent tuft. The mousetail of a tampon dangled from her cleft. She moved to the door in wifely déshabillé. I’m spotting, Tom. . and it’s your fault. .

As he dressed, Tom reflected on the previous evening. They were all — Adams, Gloria, Loman, the mentally ill Swai-Phillips — in thrall to Von Sasser. It was equally plain that the anthropologist thought little — if anything — of them. However, with Tom himself there was surely a shared bond: the matter of Prentice. Tom may have had a failure of nerve back in the dunes, but Von Sasser’s manner towards him suggested that this need not affect the current situation. The important thing was to act. ‘I am the Swift One,’ Tom said aloud as he splashed brownish water on to his tanned face. ‘I am the Righter of Wrongs.’

Breakfast was already under way. Last night’s company were seated at a long trestle table that had been set up on the veranda of Von Sasser’s chalet. An awning protected them from the fierce sun. There were thermos jugs of milk and coffee, cartons of juice and cereal boxes dotting the tabletop; among these were salvers heaped with the scary fruit that Tom remembered from the Mimosa.

‘See, Brian,’ he said bumptiously to Prentice, who was nursing his hangover with a can of Coke. ‘Aluminium bowls and aluminium cans — even the Intwennyfortee mob can’t do without Eyre’s Pit, so no need for you to become a bleeding heart after all.’

The long night of serious schnapps-drinking had paradoxically agreed with Tom. It occurred to him, as he munched his Rice Krispies, that this might have been because of the small quantity of gasoline Von Sasser put in the spirit: maybe I was running on empty after all that damn driving and just needed to refuel.

Ralladayo was less intimidating in full daylight. Tom could recognize that, despite the neglected school building, and the anomaly of Von Sasser’s dwelling, it was a proper settlement — in marked contrast to the hell-hole of the Entreati on the shores of Lake Mulgrene. The Tayswengo’s humpies were roomy tubular shacks of galvanized iron. There was a shower block, and a number of cinder-block buildings were scattered on the bare ground beneath the overarching eucalyptus, one of which had a red cross painted on its tin roof. Most reassuring — with its air of being a steelily efficient conduit to the outside world — was the hundred-metre-high radio mast planted beside the airstrip.

Tom sprinkled more sugar on his cereal and, as he did so, added generous pinches of salt to the eccentric diatribe that his host had delivered the night before. The kids who were playing in the shade with a tame auraca foal were well fed and dressed in clean clothes. The women doing their laundry in a long trough next to the shower block were chatting merrily. It struck Tom that Von Sasser was probably no different to the other people he had met who dedicated themselves to such development projects: cranky, perhaps, and inclined to take the high moral ground — but this was all understandable, forgivable too, for they had a right to be proud.

If Tom was feeling refreshed, the same could not be said for the other Anglos. Gloria, Adams, Loman — all were subdued. They spoke little, concentrating on rehydrating themselves with reconstituted orange juice. Gloria had a painful-looking pimple in the dimple of her chin. Vishtar Loman’s hands shook.

There was no sign of Von Sasser, but Swai-Phillips — who Tom now thought of as the witchy anthropologist’s familiar — emerged haltingly from the chalet and joined the party. There was no ‘He’s the man!’ gibbering this morning. The lawyer stumped up to the table dragging his right leg behind him. His right arm hung uselessly by his side, and the right side of his face was palsied: a sluggish lip trailed down from his moustache.

The others ignored Swai-Phillips, while his wrap-around shades pre-emptively deflected Tom’s half-formulated remarks. But, watching him struggling with some muesli, Tom realized that yesterday’s highly unlawyerly behaviour had — quite as much as today’s debility — been the function of an all too common pathology: he must’ve had a stroke. He’s come out here to stay with his pal while he recovers. I guess he must be under Loman’s care. .

Dr Loman’s presence in Ralladayo did nag at Tom. Was he on a vacation of some kind or doing Peace Corps-type work? More worrying still, did his being here mean that back in Vance Reginald Lincoln the Third was. . gone altogether?

Pouring himself another cup of coffee from the thermos jug, Tom decided that Gloria had been right back at Eyre’s Pit when she hectored him over his passivity; it was high time he got some answers to all these questions. He took an oblique line, by gaining Adams’s attention: ‘What brings you all the way, er, over here to Ralladayo? Consular business?’

Adams’s manner was more diffident than ever, his pauses seemingly taken up by the conduct of a diplomacy he alone could hear. He slowly inclined his Polaroids to Tom: ‘Ah. . not exactly. It’s true that Erich’s, ah. . community has the same semi-autonomous status as the other tribal homelands, and on that basis a consular official might be called on to assist any of our nationals who were, ah. . over here. But in this case, Tom, it isn’t all about you.’

Tom bridled. ‘I hadn’t imagined that for a second.’

‘No.’ Adams gave a fastidious shudder. ‘I’ve a long-established involvement with the work that Erich does here. I first visited Ralladayo on my drive north after my retirement. His ideas, his, ah. . vision, his personality too — they all had a profound, ah. . effect on me.’

Adams was looking old this morning; he was even unshaven: a silvery blaze on his horsy cheeks. Tom speculated on the hiatuses: was Adams rummaging in the lumber room of his own consciousness, trying to find a useful phrase? Or might there be an Entreati sorceress in there with him, composing these near-instant communiqués? If it was the latter, then the Honorary Consul had received all the instruction he currently needed, because he snapped back to his usual full attention: ‘Erich is unavoidably detained with important work in the dispensary until lunchtime. However, he asked me if I’d be prepared to show you and Mr Prentice over the place — if you’d like me to, that is?’

‘Sure,’ Tom said.

Adams seemed relieved. ‘That’s good. I’ve been coming back here every year since that first visit. Dry season vacations I spend with my, ah, friends in the hill country — but Christmases are always devoted to Ralladayo. It may be something of an exaggeration, but Erich — and the Intwennyfortee mob, of course — have given me a little, ah, job — communications, PR, that kind of thing. It’s undemanding work, but my diplomatic experience can be put to, ah, use.’

Tom was going to point out that it had been highly unpro- fessional of the Consul to withold this information from him when they were back in Vance, but Adams was already on his feet, slurping down the last of his own unsweetened, undiluted coffee.

Prentice had also got up. He stood, looking nauseous and rubbing the raw patch of red skin on his neck. Adams leaned over and whispered something into the wiry cloud surrounding Jethro Swai-Phillips’s left ear. Gloria and Vishtar barely glanced up, only muttering ‘Bye’ as the three men quit the veranda. When Tom looked back, he saw that the lawyer had risen, and was awkwardly dragging his stricken leg back inside.

There were noisy galah birds mucking about in the eucalyptus trees. Their pink plumage and grating cries were faintly uncanny: were they tiny airborne Anglos or had the white interlopers on this island-continent mutated to resemble these plumed natives, whose every song burst ended with a query: ‘Kraa-kra-kraa?’

First, Adams took them to see the domestic interior of a Tayswengo humpy. Obediently, Tom chatted to its proud inhabitant, a grave matron in a black toga, whose cheek bulged with engwegge. She pointed out cooking pots similar to the ones Tom had bought in Vance, and mimed the preparation of auraca meat.

Next, they walked to the far end of the airstrip. Hidden behind a low hill was a galvanized-iron barn two storeys high. The noise of machinery — incongruous in this desert fastness — echoed beneath its roof. When they stepped inside, Tom was surprised to find the menfolk who were so conspicuously absent from the rest of Ralladayo. He had assumed they were away hunting; instead, they were hunched over industrial sewing machines and automated cutting equipment. It was a sweat shop — and the garments the Tayswengo were piecing together were the black togas.

‘Initially, they were a bit of a novelty,’ Adams explained as they strolled from stage to stage of the manufacturing process. ‘Certain, ah, bohemian types down south adopted the togas as, ah, fashion statements. But increasingly the Anglo market is coming to appreciate that these are beautifully designed for outdoor pursuits.’

Tom almost laughed at Adams’s attempts to play the marketeer — they were so at odds with his studied circumspection. But then, as they left the baking-hot barn, the Consul threw back at his charges: ‘Erich’s idea, naturally.’

They doubled back to the airstrip. Here, in a small shack, was the grandly titled ‘Communications Center’. Adams pointed out every part of his little fiefdom — the PC, the photocopier machine, even the water cooler — with unaffected enthusiasm. Tom was reminded of a kid with its playhouse. In a small inner room, Adams introduced the men to a new-looking two-way radio. ‘Feel free’, he said to Tom, ‘to call home. We can patch in to the phone network via a, ah, sympathetic operator in Trangaden.’

After that, they proceeded in the direction of a double-sized humpy that stood near by, at the end of the main drag. ‘This’, Adams said, ‘is the orphanage I mentioned to you. It’s really only a, ah, marginal undertaking for the community, but Erich is particularly devoted to it. .’ He broke off and eyed his tour party sceptically.

Tom had subsided into tedium as the tour progressed: Amish village, historic town centre, Ralladayo — where was the difference? As for Prentice, he had lagged behind the whole way, fiddling with his cigarettes, and now he was baulking at the orphanage.

‘I say, Mr Adams,’ he wheedled, ‘I expect you’ll be heading over to the dispensary after this, yes? If it’s no bother, I’ll pop back to the College and pick up the ribavirin, then I’ll meet you there.’

If Prentice had been requesting permission, he didn’t wait to have it granted. He walked away as fast as he could, with his stiff-legged silent-movie gait. Tom waited until he was a way off, then said snidely: ‘Surely the ribavirin is needed here, at the orphanage?’

‘Don’t be, ah, silly,’ said the Consul dismissively. ‘You can’t have barely trained care assistants administering powerful medication like that, can you?’

‘Look.’ Involuntarily Tom felt the blistered nap of Adam’s seersucker sleeve. ‘I–I tried my darndest back there, before Eyre’s Pit—’

Adams shrugged him off. ‘I don’t want to hear about it, Tom, it’s not relevant any more. Besides, you’re forgetting who I am.’

The Consul put an end to the exchange by opening the gate in the wire fence. Tom sighed, then followed Adams’s long back into the big humpy.

Inside, there were utilitarian steel cots clustered under the whale-belly curve of the corrugated iron. A few lurid plastic toys were piled on the old piece of carpet that had been laid directly on the earthen floor. Three toddlers were sitting in silence by these injection-moulded bubble cars and sectional toadstools. In the dim light their pupils were dilated, and they emanated bemusement. A young Tayswengo woman sat watching them on a stool; at least, so Tom assumed, for it was completely hidden by the skirts of her toga. She curled forward from this invisible plinth to wave the flies off the little kids with a switch of leaves.

‘Is Miss Swai-Phillips here, Olympia?’ Adams asked her.

‘No.’ The girl was as listless as her charges. ‘She stopped by, yeah, now she’s. . Oh. . I dunno.’

A rustling noise coming from one of the cots at the back of the humpy attracted Tom’s attention. Not wanting to — although the resistance also seemed to be in the treacly air — he strolled over to it. A baby lay awkwardly curled in a damp skein of sheet. Distractedly — for the mite was a pitiful sight — Tom fixated on the mattress, which had the same covering of frangipani blossoms as the ones at the Mimosa. The child was the size of a one-year-old, but, on examining it more closely, Tom realized it was much older: maybe two or even three — not a baby at all. Its face was wizened, its skin lumpy and scaly — in places, cracked and weeping. The child was of mixed race.

Adams joined Tom.

‘Is it. . AIDS?’ Tom asked.

‘No’ — the Consul was blithe — ‘although we do see cases here. The young women go off to the road stops. They get themselves into, ah, difficulties. No, this little guy has psoriasis — Vishtar tells me it’s, ah, hereditary.’

As the Polaroids revealed the Consul’s eyes, so Tom sought them. ‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘what you wanted me to see?’

Adams wouldn’t look at him. ‘I never wanted you to see anything, Tom,’ he snarled sorrowfully. ‘I wanted you to do something.’

Prentice was sitting waiting for them outside the dispensary. He eyed Tom through the smoky veil he always wore, presumably trying to gauge Tom’s reaction to the orphanage visit. Rather than respond to this, Tom extended his hand and helped the pathetic fellow up.

‘The dispensary’ was a misnomer for this cinder-block building, which was nearly as big as the derelict school. It had an extensive waiting area that was thronged with Tayswengo women holding babies who were sick enough to be there, yet strong enough to bawl about it. There were also a few native men in evidence — and they too exhibited a reassuring lack of stoicism. They had sustained a variety of cuts, bruises and, in one particularly vocal case, a minor gunshot wound. Whenever one of the harassed nurses appeared, the Tayswengo all pounced on him or her, proffering the afflicted portion — or baby — while pleading to be seen by the doctor.

They all got the same answer: ‘Dr Loman is busy assisting the surgeon today — you all know that, yeah.’

Prentice handed over his boxes of ribavirin to one of these nurses, who whisked them off without comment. The making of his reparations had been as anticlimactic as Tom’s. ‘Wampum,’ Adams muttered, then he led them down the corridor that ran the length of the building, pointing out the treatment rooms to one side and the wards to the other.

The dispensary, Tom thought, had been built and equipped perhaps two decades before as a small state-of-the-art hospital. Some time during the intervening years, it had begun to be severely neglected. Now the floors were unwashed — stained with blood, and worse. Perished rubber hoses dangled from oxygen cylinders, while used hypodermic syringes lay in the drifts of dead leaves that had blown in through the warped un-shuttable windows. In one ward there was a waist-high heap of soiled gauze pads; in a second, a broken pipe leaked bilious water on to the cracked tiles. The aircon’ wasn’t working, and the flies — unlike the medical staff — were in constant attendance.

They reached the end of the corridor and stood there, looking through the dirty window which faced the airstrip. On the far side of this some young Tayswengo men were breaking in an auraca bull. They circled the enraged animal, chucking dust and pebbles in its supercilious face. When, inevitably, it lunged at one them with its tiny head, the youth leaped up and neatly pincered its long neck with his legs. They both crashed to the ground and writhed there, their spasmodic movements compellingly pornographic. Tom looked away.

‘The scalpels I brought,’ he said to Adams. ‘They were for these operations, then?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And the surgeon is—’

‘Erich — Herr Doktor von Sasser, you must’ve guessed that. I address him as “Herr Doktor” because he holds a medical degree. His father, Otto, had a Ph.D. in anthropology, but Erich’s own contribution to Songs, well, academics can be incredibly, ah, narrow-minded.’

‘He has to do lots of these operations?’ Tom persisted, while out of the corner of his eye he noticed Prentice, up against the wall, arms and legs crossed defensively.

‘As many as he possibly can,’ Adams answered. ‘These are relatively straightforward procedures, Tom, not too invasive. The patients can, in most cases, leave the dispensary the same day. At a modern hospital — say in Trangaden — they would be entirely routine; the costs are, ah, minimal. Out here, with the particular problems a community like this faces, they’re absolutely essential. That’s why Erich has devoted himself to them so, ah, single-mindedly.’

Lunch was on the veranda. Tom was hungry. He was finally getting accustomed to the local Anglos’ proclivity for stuffing themselves with wads of hot food in the very baking oven of midday. At Von Sasser’s the culinary accent remained resolutely Germanic: ham hocks stood in the top of a double-boiler, paddling in apple sauce. A fresh hayrick of sauerkraut had been pitch-forked, steaming, on to an aluminium platter. The potato was mashed today — and piping hot.

Gloria joined the three men at the table and poured herself a beaker of lemonade. At breakfast she had been in her black toga; now she was wearing the same cotton dress she’d had on when Tom first encountered her at the Swai-Phillips compound. It did flattering things to her bust — which Tom admired while eating. There was no sign of her crazy cousin.

Loman and Von Sasser came ambling through the eucalyptus grove from the direction of the dispensary. They climbed on to the veranda and helped themselves to large plates of pig, cabbage and carb’. Neither man had troubled to take off his scrubs, but only undone the tapes at the back, so that the green garments gaped open. Both were wearing short pants, and when they came to the table, the blotches of blood on their chests gave them the creepy — yet comic — appearance of patients who had escaped the knife in order to enjoy a hearty meal.