The Butt

16

The others had finished their own food, yet no one made to leave the table; they stayed to watch a bravura performance by the men in theatre costumes. Von Sasser and Loman steadily tunnelled their way through their food mountains, pausing only to call for salt, water or beer. The anthropologist, predictably, drank his beer from a stein half a yard high. Overhead, the awning rat-a-tat-tatted in the rising sirocco. In his blood-stained scrubs, the skeletal Von Sasser was a giant praying mantis devouring its mate.

Tearing his eyes from the grisly spectacle, Tom saw the little SUV standing where Prentice had parked it the evening before. Some Tayswengo kids were sitting inside. The one in the driver’s seat was wrestling the wheel; the others were aiming pretend cameras, miming Anglos on vacation. They captured the occupants of the veranda in their invisible boxes, then turned them on the tame auraca grazing the sparse grass in the paddock.

With the air of men who had for a long time been working as a team, Von Sasser and Loman finished their plates at the same time, then pushed them aside. Von Sasser called for coffee, and the Tayswengo waitress swished away in her humiliating dirndl. Von Sasser produced his long-stemmed pipe. He filled it with tobacco from a leather pouch, then lit it. The assembled company were all riveted by this matinée, but Tom was now convinced that Von Sasser’s spoken lines were intended for him — and Prentice — alone.

‘How does it all end?’ was how the anthropologist began today’s homily. ‘Isn’t that the question that torments the Anglo — bothers him like a fly in his eye? The Third Act problem, the thrilling climax. . then the drowsy resolution. Yes, yes, the Anglos’ lust for this is blatantly bloody sexual — they’re not like the true natives of this great land. Those poor bastards have had it hammered into them for so long that they’re shit, that they just sit on their arses while the flies eat them! Especially the children — the poor bloody kids. It’s almost as if,’ — he shifted to confront Prentice — ‘they’re born with this fatalism.’

Von Sasser stopped. Prentice no longer had the energy to even quail beneath his raptor’s stare: his psoriasis was back with a vengeance; the badlands of cracked and humped skin had spread right up on to his face. ‘You!’ Von Sasser spat. ‘You can do whatever you like to the poor bloody kids. . except’ — the shotgun eyes came back to Tom — ‘tell them stories with clap-happy bloody endings!’

He took a long draw on his pipe, then resumed more evenly: ‘You’re probably wondering why the Technical College is such a dump, when the rest of Ralladayo — thanks, in no small part, to those present’ — he nodded to Adams, Loman and Gloria in turn — ‘who have given their hearts and bloody minds to the community — is ticking over pretty damn efficiently.’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess I was kinda intrigued,’ Tom said lamely.

‘My father, Otto, is buried at Gethsemane Springs, forty clicks east of here, yeah, on the track to the coast. The Technical College was his own brainchild, right. He laboured for it — strived to make it a reality. He even went south, put on dress kit and gave after-dinner bloody speeches to raise money for it from Anglo fat cats, who — once his back was turned — went back to cursing the bloody bing-bongs.’

With forensic fingers, Von Sasser picked up his tiny espresso cup and took a sip. He smacked his lips with an ‘ah’, then went on. ‘Be that as it bloody may, when my dad was dying he made me promise that I’d sack the Anglo teachers and let the College decay back into the bloody dust.

‘ “Erich,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether our people study the sciences, the arts, maths or languages — the result is the same: it makes them lust for an end; that, Erich, is the true leitmotif of Western civilization, and it’s the very one we’ve come here to rid them of. Don’t let our people fall victim to the narrative fallacy of the Anglos!”

‘ ’Course, I’m not claiming that those were his actual last words — that’d be a bit bloody rich! But he was dead in days, and I respected his final wish — why wouldn’t I? By then I’d already begun the work he’d had me trained for; it’s true, the first results were not exactly, er. . conclusive’ — Tom noted the hesitation — ‘but in spite of that we were both confident we’d found a way forward, so that these people’ — he threw an arm wide to encompass all of Ralladayo — ‘would never, ever waste their lives waiting for the bloody end. Sitting in the dark and smelly multiplex of their minds, gagging to know how their lives would turn out, while completely neglecting to bloody live them!’

There was silence for a few seconds, then Tom heard an electronic whirr. Its source was Swai-Phillips: the lawyer was hovering at the corner of the chalet, a camcorder held to his good eye. He switched it off and let it fall by its lanyard on to his bare chest. He approached the table, walking normally and banging his big, square hands together with slow, resounding claps. He stopped, bowed low, then gravely intoned: ‘Here endeth the second lesson.’

Von Sasser ignored him, instead rattling off a series of commands: ‘Winnie, take Brodzinski here over to the comms shack; he’ll be needing to call his people. Brodzinski, you take your man Prentice along with — you wanna keep a close eye on that one. Vishtar and I’ve got more bloody carving to get on with s’arvo.’ He rose. ‘Till sundown, then!’ And, with Dr Loman in his train, swept off the veranda and back through the gum trees towards the dispensary.

Adams came to life. ‘ ‘C’mon,’ he said to Tom. ‘Erich’s right; the early afternoon’s the best time to patch across.’

Tom was about to protest at this assumption that he even wanted to call Milford, but something in Adams’s tone prevented him. This wasn’t to do with his calling home; it was about Prentice not being allowed to. Prentice, who was now a pitiful sight: a pile of dirty dude’s clothes slung over a seat back. Not one for his good lady’s album.

Tom, with an access of hypocritical pity, helped him to his feet and said, ‘D’you want me to get some ointment for you? I don’t mind putting it on. .’

‘Don’t bother, old chap,’ Prentice muttered. ‘Let’s go make your call.’ Then he gave the lopsided smile of a beaten cur, and added: ‘Not long now.’

In the comms shack Adams adopted the persona of a radio ham. He put on headphones — or ‘cans’, as he pretentiously referred to them — and played with the switches and dials on the transmitter. Prentice dumped his bundle of a body form down on an upturned crate, while Tom took a swivel chair beside Adam’s. The ether whistled and warbled, then, once the appliance was humming nicely to itself, Adams took his headphones off.

‘There’s some news you, ah. . might like to tell the folks back home,’ he said. ‘It’s, ah. . concerning Mr Lincoln.’

Tom marvelled at how such a heavy lunch could rise up his gorge so easily: here it came, another hateful display of amateur dramatics by the Queen Ham. ‘What?’ Tom yelped. ‘Has the old man died?’

‘On the contrary.’ Adams chose his words as fastidiously as a spinster selecting Scrabble tiles. ‘Dr Loman spoke with one of his colleagues in Vance this morning. It would appear that Mr Lincoln has, regained, ah. . consciousness. It’s an astonishing case — the infection is, ah. . subsiding. It’s early days, but the feeling is that he may well make a full, ah. . recovery. Of course, the consequences for your own, ah. . situation — especially now an initial reparation payment has been made — can be nothing but, ah. .’ — the longest pause, dry-stick fingers fondling the slack vocab’ bag — ‘. . good.’

And with that Adams resumed his other communication duties, rapping out a call sign into the mic’ once, twice, a third time. Between each announcement his equine face quivered with the strain of listening. He pointed to some other headphones, and Tom put them on. He was in time to hear the radio operator in Trangaden say: ‘. . receiving you RAL20–40. You’re faint — but you’re there, yeah. How can I help ya today, Winnie? Over.’

Adams read out the Brodzinskis’ home phone number and asked to be patched through. The sounds of the Trangaden man dialling were suddenly very loud: each digit a klaxon beep, then there came the leonine purring of the ringing phone. ‘WE’LL LEAVE YOU TO IT,’ Adams mouthed exaggeratedly, and Tom revolved to see him hoik Prentice unceremoniously to his feet and lead him out the door.

Tom pressed the headphones firmly against his ears, and the purring lion padded into his head: ‘pprrrupp-prrrup; pprrrupp-prrrup; pprr—’ Then stopped. ‘Martha Lambert speaking,’ said Martha’s voice. Hearing it, Tom allowed himself to fully accept what Prentice had said: it wasn’t long, now. Long before he would be back in Milford; long before he would be able to mend this crazy breach between them; long before he would be at home with her — and the kids.

He pushed his mouth into the mic’s steel mesh: ‘Martha, it’s me, Tom, can you hear me, honey?’ The etheric birds had been netted; every one of his words sounded as clear as a bell that resonated with cravenly hopeful expectation.

‘Tom, is that you?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m in Ralladayo, where Atalaya’s — Mrs Lincoln’s — people live. Lissen.’ He couldn’t stop himself gabbling. ‘There’s fantastic news — it’s incredible. The old man — Mr Lincoln — he’s, he’s making a recovery, and I’ve, I’ve made the, like, restitution I hadta, so, it looks as if — I mean, I can’t be certain — but it looks like I might be home soon.’ He stopped. There was no sense of the half-world that separated them, only a voracious nullity, sucking on his ears with foam-padded lips.

‘That’s. . excellent news, Tom. .’ Had her voice ever sounded more like her? More completely Martha: each snicked syllable and sharply enunciated consonant a tight brush stroke, vividly describing her slim body — so very dear, so very familiar, so utterly strange. ‘I’m so happy for you. .’ There was a small yellow-tinted perspex window in front of the table the transmitter sat on. As he listened to his wife, Tom Brodzinski stared at this acrylic of an alien land: the streaks of the gum trees’ trunks, the pointillism of their foliage, the brown splodge of a humpy in the mid-distance, the painterly distortions of the sun’s own strokes. ‘It’ll be good to have you back home, sometimes I think you don’t realize. .’ Looking like Death, a figure in a black native toga walked into the picture from the left. ‘. . how much the kids’ve. .’ It turned towards the comms shack, and in the shadow of the hood bloomed a pale face. It was Gloria Swai-Phillips, talking on a cellphone. ‘. . missed you. .’ Martha’s words, which had pulsed along wires, been thrown into space, bounced off a satellite, then cast back down to earth, were now dubbed precisely on to Gloria’s lips. Tom registered this, because Gloria completed Martha’s sentence: ‘. . especially Tommy Junior.’ Then she looked through the window straight at him and gave him a playful little wave.

Hispid and viscid: the sweat-damp hairs on Tom’s nape lifted and stretched themselves, each chafing against its neighbour. Hispid and viscid: Beelzebub’s proboscis was nuzzling at the sweet nooks and crannies of Tom’s cerebrum. It tickled.

Tom found himself outside without any awareness of having torn off headphones or slammed through doors. He was temporarily blinded — than he groped his way, hands on sunbeams, to where Gloria stood in her sack. The race was over; she snapped the cellphone shut and disappeared it in the folds of her robe.

‘You — she. . W-What? W-What have you done? Are you — have you been fuckin’ copying my wife?’ He spluttered his childish accusation.

Gloria looked him up and down matter-of-factly. ‘If you want me to be your wife, Tom, then that’s fine, yeah?’

‘I–I dunno. . Have you been talking — on the phone, to me?’ He ranged back in time to the night before the prelim’ hearing in Vance, and the rhythmic jingling trudge he had heard when he held his own cellphone to his ear. The Martha voice impersonating Gloria. What was it she — they — had said: you’ve gotta say these things to keep ’em happy, yeah? I mean, their pathetic little egos require it, yeah?

But that was then.

Gloria Swai-Phillips led Tom back towards the Technical College by the arm. She guided him between the gum trees, holding him firmly in case he should trip on their roots. As they walked, she gave him an explanation — at least, that’s how she saw it.

‘Squolly — Commander Squoddoloppolollou — he read your rights to you when you were arrested, right?’

‘Rights?’ Tom murmured. All he remembered was Swai-Phillips ridiculing him for even raising the matter.

‘What I mean is, Squolly would’ve told you how the police were gonna investigate you, yeah? How they were gonna tail you, check out what your intentions were, yeah? Figure out what kinduv a guy you are.’

‘And those were my rights?’

‘So far as the Tugganarong and Anglo communities here are concerned, yeah, those are your rights. The thing is, Tom’ — still holding his arm, Gloria drew Tom round so that he was facing her — ‘Squolly’s men’ve been tailing you for a long time now — years in fact, yeah? Y’see, when you were a young bloke, Tom, you kinduv took your eye off the ball.’

‘Eye off the ball?’

They had reached the low wall that bounded the Technical College. Tom’s eye — still off the ball — rolled over crab grass, cracked earth, the sawn-off stumps of a mulga thicket. The thrift-shop donation that was Prentice was piled on top of the wall, smoking. There was something different about this small prospect — a change that bothered Tom. He fixated on this, instead of listening to the harpy.

‘Not acting — y’know, that can reveal a lot concerning a bloke’s intentions. After her miscarriage, when Martha came to visit us in Liège, then, when she came back, and a few months later you guys adopted Tommy Junior, well, you didn’t act: you never asked the questions a conscientious man — a man with good intentions — would’ve asked, yeah?’

It was the SUV — that was the difference. It was gone. Tom scrutinized the patch of dirt where the little vehicle had been standing only half an hour before. Why were there no tyre tracks to show that it had been driven away?

‘But you’re not a conscientious man, are you Tom? You’re the kinduv man who feasts his eyes on a young black girl’s tits, then wants to screw his wife with the hard-on, aren’t cha?’

There was something where the SUV had been, and bizarrely it was car shaped. Ignoring Gloria, Tom moved towards it. He felt a perverse affection for the SUV, whatever its design weaknesses; it had managed to carry him all this way.

‘You’re the kinduv man who pays no attention to a woman at all unless she’s a sexual-bloody-prospect.’ The ghastly crow came pecking after him. ‘Winthrop’s Handrey women friends? They’re only fuck-buddies, fat gals beneath your contempt — same goes for my cousin Betsy, who you never so much as said “hi” to. Daphne Hufferman saves your life, but she has to ride in the bloody back like a kid.’

The object that had replaced the SUV was a car; or, rather, it was a 1:10 scale model of one. Tom squatted down and picked up the Gandaro spirit wagon. He ran his hand over the artfully bent and hammered sides of the tiny MPV, marvelling again at the skill with which it had been soldered together out of tin cans.

Glancing up, Tom saw that Prentice was as intrigued by the spirit wagon as he was; although, of course, Prentice could have no idea what an astonishing coincidence it was to find it here, thousands of miles from where Tom had first seen the cult object.

‘I wonder what you think Atalaya Intwennyfortee feels about her husband — a respected elder of this community — being so viciously bloody assaulted, yeah? Then lying for all these weeks on the brink of bloody death? You sure as hell don’t know, Tom, ’cause you’ve never once taken the time to talk to her, despite having big mobs of bloody chances, right?’ I’m spotting, Tom. . I’m spotting. .

Tom set the spirit wagon down on the wall next to Prentice, who, somehow managing to summon his famed national reserve, gave him a look that implied — at one and the same time — that he too was withering under Gloria’s onslaught, while never the less being too polite to have heard a single word of it. He touched his waxy finger to the flying vee of the spirit wagon’s spoiler.

‘It’s bloody incredible how you’ve behaved since you flew in, Tom, when all Martha was ever trying to do was show the kid his roots, and get you to face up to your bloody responsibilities as his father!’

This penetrated — and Prentice flinched as if it had been aimed at him. Tom thought: bloody this, bloody that, bloody every-bloody-thing. I’m spotting, Tom. . I’m spotting. .and it’s your fault.

He rounded on his Jesuitical tormentor. ‘Are you telling me’ — Tom was amazed by the control he was exhibiting; he must still be astande — ‘that I, we — the whole damn family — weren’t here for a vacation?’

Squolly was sitting in the deliciously air-conditioned interview room. Tom was opposite him, sipping a soda, the bubbles fizzing on his culpable tongue. Attached to the shiny peak of the squat Tugganarong’s complicated cap was a Tommy Junior mask. It fitted perfectly.

But Gloria refused to be interviewed. ‘What did Erich say to you at lunch, Tom? You Anglos are always the bloody same; you’re as happy as a pig in shit — and this is shit, Tom, believe it — so long as there’s an ending to the sorry bloody tale. Well, I’m happy to provide you with one, Tom, and like I said, I’m happy to be your wife too. You wanna know why? Aw, I’ll save you the bloody bother of asking, yeah? It’s ’cause, exactly like Martha, I’m gonna leave you.’

Tom was still righteously empowered, yet finding it hard work to maintain what he knew to be the correct perspective. Instead of looking out through his own eyes, he kept seeing the three of them from off to one side and slightly above.

It was a stagy scene: the two men, identically costumed in jeans, bush shirts and elastic-sided boots, being berated by the one-woman Greek chorus. What was needed, Tom thought, was an entrance by another character, otherwise this could go on for ever, strophe and antistrophe, until the audience got bored and went home.

Providentially, Von Sasser materialized. The anthropologist stepped out from behind the derelict Technical College. He had his bunched-up scrubs stuffed under one of his arms, while in his free hand he held Tom’s roach motel. Coming up to them he said: ‘Some of the kids have taken that SUV of yours off to be cleaned. They found this wedged under one of the seats — yours, is it?’ He held the roach motel out to Tom, who took it, stuttering, ‘Y — yes, it is.’

‘Walk with me, Tom,’ Von Sasser said, draping his bony arm over Tom’s shoulder. ‘There’s some stuff we need to talk about, yeah.’

Apart from the ‘yeah’, it was exactly the same phrase that Tom’s own father had used when he wanted to have a man-to-man chat with his son. Momentarily gulled into thinking himself back with Mitch Brodzinski, swishing through the fall leaves that lay deep on the farm track out to Hermansburg, Tom went respectfully along.

Von Sasser unhitched the gate to the auraca paddock and guided him through. They were halfway across before the older man began to speak. ‘I’ve been hacking away since 8 a.m., and I can tellya, I’m tuckered out. Still, at the end of a stressful day in the oppo theatre, a stroll out here never fails to relax me. ’Course, it’s too bloody far to go the whole way, but from the top of this rise we’ll be able to see Gethsemane Springs in the distance.’

The familiar, leaden inanition was creeping up Tom’s legs: his arteries were sucking up sand, his veins were choking with dust. So he said nothing, concentrating only on forcing one clod of a foot in front of the other.

‘The mobs way out in the desert — the Aval, the Inssessitti, the Entreati — even some of the hill mobs and the feral Tuggies squatting on the north-west coast — they all send their cases down to me, here in Ralladayo.’ Von Sasser talked as he walked, with an easy, loping rhythm.

‘We-ell, some of ’em are A-1 bad fellers — murderers, kiddie-fiddlers, rapists — you name it. Others, we-ell.’ He laughed shortly. ‘I s’pose in your part of the world people’d say they were minor offenders — but that’s not how we see things here. You’ve gotta remember, right, for the Tayswengo — for me too — nothing happens by accident.’

On they went up the hill. They reached the next fence, and Von Sasser pulled the top wire up so that Tom could drag himself beneath it. The roach motel was a deadweight, its sharp corners cutting into his hand. The grass had straggled away, and, as they went on, Tom’s footfalls scraped the bare earth. The sun slammed into his head — he regretted having left his hat behind.

‘Ho-hum,’ Von Sasser sighed. ‘I’ve gotta say, Tom, the primary purpose of this procedure was never intended to be behaviour modification, right. It was more or less by chance that we found out how well it worked.’

‘So. . you — you, like, castrate them?’ Tom managed to ask. And once the words were out, they became incontrovertible: this was where the makkata’s blade had been tending, this was why Prentice’s white thigh had remained unmarked.

But Von Sasser was consumed by merriment. He swept off his odd little Tyrolean hat and beat it against his leather-clad thigh.

‘Ha, ha, ha! Oh, no. No — no. What the hell would we want to cut their balls off for? We’re not bloody vets, right. Papa didn’t want big mobs of bloody eunuchs roaming the desert.’

‘But I thought. . Prentice — the kids—?’

‘Didn’t you listen to what I said last night?’ Von Sasser admonished. ‘Papa invented these people’s culture himself, ex nihilo — from bloody nothing. He knew what they needed: mystics, firebrands, charismatic makkatas who’d take the Anglos by the bloody neck and shake ’em till their brains rattled!’

They reached the top of the rise, and Von Sasser urged Tom down on to a flat rock. He didn’t take much persuasion. The sun was plunging, and Tom’s remaining energy reserves were falling with it. Straight ahead there was a vertical escarpment parted by a wide gorge; through this could be seen the drained sea bed of the desert floor, a tired expanse of tide-ground hills and wave-scoured depressions.

The anthropologist got out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘ ’Course,’ he meditated, ‘I don’t mean that literally, but the trouble with Anglo civilization is that it’s a left-brain business, all to do with order, systematization, push-button-bloody-A. Papa understood this, as well as knowing enough anatomy — and anthropology — to see the solution. He became the first neuro-anthropologist the world has ever seen, and I’ — he inflated with pride — ‘am the bloody second.’ He paused to light his pipe, his limbs twisting into a protective cage for the wavering flame.

‘The corpus callosum — that’s the bloody enemy, Tom, it’s a tough little bugger.’ He swished his pipe stem in the gloom, slicing grey matter. ‘Information-bloody-superhighway of the human brain, that’s what it is, yeah. Same as the internet, the corpus callosum fuses together two hemispheres, the right and the left. Movement, speech, sensation, visual recognition — they dominate, yeah, they’re the Anglos of the brain. But over on the right, well, that’s where dreams are, that’s where the spirits find their voice, and that’s where humans have the imagination to actually hear what they’re bloody saying!

‘Look.’ The neuro-anthropologist put an avuncular hand on Tom’s leg. ‘I’ll grant you, we may’ve got our act together now, but quite a few of the early oppos. .’ The boy’s hair with its scent of warm hay. The dreadful scar seaming the back of his sweet, small head. ‘But even these, er, failures, have turned out to be pretty useful. Obviously, with better equipment — scanners, lasers, that kinda thing — it’d be a whole heap easier, yeah.’ It wasn’t as if he was stupid — he was in the same grade as other kids his age, he was just a bit. . cut off. ‘We either go straight down through the longitudinal fissure. .’ The white trough of a scar that bisected the old wino’s grizzled head from nape to crown. ‘. . or angle our way in between the parietal lobe and the parieto-occipital salens. ’Course, wherever we make the incision, we stretch and suture the scalp so the scar won’t be below the hairline.’ Adams, was bent over the three-panelled mirror on the vanity table, examining the back of his head. ‘The important thing to hold on to, Tom’ — for once Von Sasser had a kindly twinkle in his deep-set eyes — ‘is this: it isn’t painful; it doesn’t hurt.’

The foody perfume of pipe smoke braided with the clean-smelling desert breeze; the sunset, as ever, was spectacular: a ruddy blush rushing up the face of the sky. Tom found his external voice. ‘B — but a little kid, a baby?’

‘Like I say, mate, there were some balls-ups, but b’lieve me, by far the majority of those early oppos were done on patients that already had some, y’know, neuroses — or even actual brain damage. It wasn’t like we were messing with something in working order, right.’

Tom, dodging dream fists, levering the weight off his chest, searched for the sympathy he knew he didn’t have. Yet if only he could find it, he was sure the appropriate outrage would be there too.

‘He — Tommy, my, uh, son. Y’know he isn’t. .’ He dredged up one of Martha’s weary pronouncements: ‘Adequately socialized.’

Von Sasser snorted. ‘Tell me about it, Tom. Those boys up in the north aren’t adequately-bloody-socialized either! Some of ’em can be pretty vicious — we aren’t talking clean-kills here, yeah. There’s rape — torture even. Lissen, I’m not saying I condone such behaviour, but you’ve gotta offset it against the positive impact the insurgency has on the left-brain hegemony: their infrastructure, mines, their financial-bloody-services, their drinks industry, and especially the Tuggy foot soldiers who do the Anglos’ dirty work for ’em.

‘Thing is’ — the neuro-anthropologist brought his sharp knees up under his sharper chin, a surprisingly adolescent posture for a middle-aged man — ‘say they don’t, I dunno, function that well, at the very least they can advance the desertification programme. I mean, y’don’t haveta be a makkata to string a length of chain between a couple of utes, now do you?’

Despite the impression that he and Von Sasser were speaking wildly at cross purposes, Tom persisted: ‘If — if you can’t be, uh, can’t know, definitely, what the results are gonna be, then how does this, like, operation, work to, y’know, modify behaviour? I mean, it seems to me that in this case, uh, castration might be, I dunno, more effective.’

Von Sasser sighed, a long exhalation of waste-compassion: ‘Ye-es, it’s true, the human brain is — viewed with the Western medicalized paradigm — a complex system; it seems always to be striving to reach homeostasis. Even with all connection between them severed, left-brain functions can be reestablished on the right, and vice versa. Still, these are only minor drawbacks, while the benefits can be astonishing, and anyway, when it comes to a case such as this, I don’t think castration is a good comparison at all, yeah. I mean, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? Whereas you can try thinking of the oppo — and I suggest you do — as a reward.’

‘A reward?’

‘You’ve got it: a reward, a reparation payment that I can help you to give, if you help me.’

‘Me? In the, uh, oppo?’ A cut — a nick even — the very image of scarlet pulsing from capillaries made Tom gag. ‘H — how? How the hell can I help?’

‘Lissen.’ Von Sasser smiled at him again. ‘What’s your idiom. .’ He thought for a second. ‘That’s it: “sucks”. Coercion, Tom, sucks in my view, right. I mean, I could make you, but I’m certain once you get to considering all the possible benefits — the goodwill of my brother, Hippolyte, Atalaya and the Intwennyfortee mob’s as well — you’ll come round to the idea of volunteering, yeah.’

And Tom, who no longer had any power to resist this outrageous proposition, understood that, by default, he had already come round and round again, and round once more, until he was all dried out, the last desiccated guest in the roach motel.

‘Schweinsaxe?’ Von Sasser asked Adams, holding up a pair of serving tongs with a whole pig’s trotter wedged in them.

‘Thanks, Erich,’ the Consul replied. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

Von Sasser deposited the truncated foot on a plastic bowl, then ladled thick brown gravy on top. The Tayswengo waitresses in their starch-stiff dirndls were still loitering by the kitchen door, but this evening the neuro-anthropologist had elected to serve the food himself.

Tom supposed this was partly to promote an atmosphere of cosy domesticity, but also because — with some sensitivity — Von Sasser didn’t want to draw attention to Prentice. After all, if the Tayswengo had refused to serve him, he might have made a scene. At the very least, it would’ve looked as if a ‘Nil by mouth’ sign had been hung from his scrawny neck. In the event, when it was his turn, Von Sasser simply passed over Prentice in silence, and dished up for the next person at the table.

When Tom’s turn came, Von Sasser neglected him as well. For a moment, Tom thought to protest, but then his volunteer status came back to him, and he appreciated that a full stomach wasn’t something he wanted to have on his first outing to an operating room.

Prentice wasn’t remotely discomfited by his fast. He helped himself to the bottle of Hock, and sat smoking and chatting, more animated than he had been at any time since his arrival at Ralladayo. He discussed, quite openly, the two mixed-race children he had ‘fathered’: one in the Tontines, and one who had recently been transferred here, to the orphanage.

Was it only Tom who could see the parentheses around ‘fathered’? It can’t be, he thought, because without them Prentice’s remarks were psychopathically unabashed. ‘I’ve made a decision,’ he was now telling Gloria. ‘No matter what the consequences are for my marriage, I’m going to tell my lady wife the entire truth.’

Gloria nodded sympathetically, then said, ‘That’s good, Brian.’

‘I’ve made the first reparations to two of the ladies involved, so I’ve got to jolly well do right by the third as well.’

‘That’s excellent, Brian.’

‘Yes, honesty is the best policy and all that sort of thing. I–I’m not terribly articulate, you know, but it did something to me — seeing the kiddies. I’ve never thought of myself as a fatherly sort of chap, but it stirred me up, and I want to — if I’m allowed, that is — try and, sort of, look after them.’

It stretched the bounds of Tom’s credulity that Gloria Swai-Phillips — who had cared for the results of Prentice’s paedophilia — could sit there encouraging this grotesque fantasizing. Yet he found himself sitting and listening to it, and, perhaps by his very passivity alone, encouraging him as well.

Walking back to the settlement, Tom had been so unsteady on his feet that Von Sasser had to hold him up. Never the less, with his head already swimming, Tom still couldn’t prevent himself from taking shots of schnapps from the bottle that had thoughtfully been left beside his empty plate. The oily aftertaste of the spirit was curiously moreish.

With no food of his own to eat, Tom was at leisure to examine each of his dining companions in turn, and analyse what they were saying with the benefit of his new background knowledge. With his, ah. . harkening to his master’s inner voice, and his slavish espousal of Von Sasser’s made-up folkways, there was no doubt that Adams had had the ‘oppo’. Tom deduced that Vishtar Loman must have had it too. Gloria? No — she didn’t need it, she was one of life’s self-appointed Head Girl scouts, ever ready to boss a troop, whether of baboons or bankers. If her corpus callosum had been cut, Tom thought ruefully, the only spirit voices Gloria would hear would be those of sullen inner-children refusing to respond to her remorseless questioning.

As for her cousin, who had joined them at table, he was definitely one of the neuro-anthropologist’s less successful outcomes. This evening, Jethro Swai-Phillips was part-way between his two impairments: he could move his crabbed right hand — although he accidentally dabbed it in the gravy — but couldn’t prevent himself from intermittently slurring: ‘Heesh the ma-an!’

Tom speculated: had Jethro had his oppo recently? Or was his violated brain mysteriously reacting to the enviroment itself? Back in Vance, Jethro had been such a vivid character — decisive, self-possessed, the courtroom colossus of the Tropics. Yet, Tom now understood, the lawyer had always been serving this other, far more heavyweight client.

Was this why Martha had reacted so vehmently to him? Tom shook his muzzy head, desperate to gain purchase. But it was no good; he’d never be able to get a grip on the conundrum of his wife’s intentions; the well-oiled links of the chains that dragged effects behind her causes simply slid through his hands.

What was it Jethro had said, sitting under his hunting prints in his office at the top of the Metro-Center? That it didn’t matter a damn if Tom began smoking again — that the entire apparatus of prohibition was solely a product of race politics?

Tonight, the dense tobacco smoke alone identified the chalet as the command centre of the insurgency. Long pennants of it furled and unfurled in the warm draughts. A particularly thick standard of pipe smoke was draped behind Von Sasser’s chair, and now, rallying to it, the neuro-anthropologist addressed his staff, who, with the exception of Tom and Prentice, were working their way through big wedges of Black Forest Gateau, slathered with cream.

‘You cannot conceive’, the rhetorician of Ralladayo began, ‘of a cannibal sending back his enemy pie simply to avoid a statutory fine or a short term of imprisonment, any more than a Parsee would forgo the excarnation of his mum, or an Inuit his hunt for the narwhal’s tusk — but this, yeah, is precisely what the Anglos have done.

‘I’m not saying that this is all t’do with smoking, right, but you’ve gotta admit it’s pretty bloody key. Y’see,’ he said, shaking his hatchet head incredulously, ‘that’s the way an Anglo thinks — that’s the way he conceives of himself. He thinks: I’m giving up smoking and that’s a good thing; it’s such a bloody good thing that I better go looking for some other poor bastard I can impose it on. No, it’s this — this imposition, this sixteen-metre line we all haveta stand beyond, because we’re bad little boys and girls, that my father — and now me — have dedicated our entire lives to getting rid of, yeah.

‘I’m not saying, yeah. .’ But he was saying, and saying, and bloody saying some more, his sharp words cutting into Tom’s very flesh, his bloody convictions splattering the lapels of Tom’s crumpled, sky-blue suit. ‘. . I’m not saying that what we do here isn’t similar — that’s bloody obvious! We come from the same bloody tradition. But see, when me and Vishtar do an oppo, yeah, we’re not simply imposing our idea of the good, we’re turning people into living, breathing, walking-bloody-instruments — instruments that can hear a voice right inside their heads telling them, loud and clear, what they should actually bloody do!

‘Y’see’ — relighting his hideous pipe, Von Sasser dribbled smoke — ‘you’ve gotta fight fire with bloody fire.’

But Tom Brodzinski didn’t see this at all. What he did see — and what he cleaved to, even now — was that the best thing he had done in years — perhaps in his entire life — had been to give up smoking. He felt much better, despite his current weakened state; indeed, if he hadn’t quit, Tom felt sure he would now be seriously ill — what with the stress and the fatigue, and the sheer monotony of listening, for hour after hour, to this insane man lecture his lobotomized confrères.

Tom thrashed in smoky whirlpools, struggling to stay afloat on the wreckage of his reasoning, but it was no use — he shouldn’t have had that last schnapps, and so he submerged into unconsciousness. .

. . And popped back up to be dashed with song spray:

This golden realm of unutterable promise. .

We give it to you, O Lord, our country,

We give. . it. . to. . you-ooo. .!

The lamps had long since been lit and now burned down low. The paraffin fumes were choking, the tobacco smoke was stale, and the meat was already putrefying between the gaping teeth from which these words spewed. They were all standing to attention behind their chairs. Prentice even had his hand on his heart. His angular Adam’s apple bobbed as he sang, stretching the smooth healthy skin of his neck.

They finished the anthem. There were tears in Gloria’s eyes, and Von Sasser’s, the latter said: ‘There she blows! Poor bugger’s had a skinful of grog, you better get him to his swag, Brian, yeah.’

Tom had no real awareness of the walk back to the derelict College; nor of Prentice, once again, readying him for bed. He switched off the lights and shut the door, but, as soon as Tom shut his eyes, he found himself back out in the dusty corridor, together with Tommy Junior, who mooched up and down puffing a cigarette. What was the slob of a teenager doing? Cutting class was one thing — but smoking in the school; that wasn’t merely delinquent, it was insane. Tom would’ve berated his adoptive son — as he had so many times before — with his lack of concern for anyone’s feelings other than his own, were it not for the uncomfortable fact that what the boy was smoking was Tom himself.

Tommy Junior stuck Tom’s feet in his mouth and slobbered on them: a suck of incestuous satisfaction. His father’s head burned with shame. Then the boy pinched Tom’s legs, hard, and flipped him. Tom flew, end over end over end, yet never reached the end of the dusty corridor; while up ahead the woman that was Martha, that was Atalaya, that was Gloria — that was all of them — turned and turned and turned the corner, avoiding him for an eternity, her words floating back, over and over, to her rejected spouse: ‘I’m scared, honey. I’m scared. .’

It was still early when Prentice came to wake him. When they got outside the Technical College, the first dull light of the pre-dawn showed up the sloppy grin on Prentice’s face. He had changed his clothes as well as his complexion; the slogan on his too-tight, white T-shirt read NEXT PUB 859 KMS. He must’ve scored last night and the T-shirt is his sick trophy. . Prentice took Tom’s hand and led him into the eucalyptus grove.

As they walked towards the dispensary, he prattled away: ‘Have you ever noticed, old chap, how the water here goes down the plughole the other way? Y’know, anti-clockwise. I’m not good at expressing myself at all, but it did occur to me that this was a sort of meta-thingy.’

‘Metaphor.’

‘That’s it, metaphor — for what’s happened to me. I mean, a good deal of pressure was applied, don’t get me wrong. Jethro told me I’d be seeing the inside of the old prison walls. Then there’s the racialism thing. Well, I’d be the first to admit that my, um, standpoint — rumpy-pumpy aside — was pretty old-fashioned, but, well. .’ He laughed. ‘Seeing your behaviour — how crass you were — and then meeting my own children for the first time. . Well, it turned me completely round, twisted me anti-clockwise. Now I believe in what I’ve done, Tom. It’s like Erich says: it doesn’t matter what my intentions were, I was a good tool.’

There was barely enough current in Tom’s brain for the connections to be made — but then they were. At high speed the entire narrative spooled through the viewfinder of his awareness, and the depth and complexity of the set-up, and the shallowness and simplicity of his own responses, stunned him with blow after blow.

Adams — who’d known so very much about Tom without even having to ask, right down to the fact that he drank Seven and Sevens — had been omniscient in the break-fast room at the Mimosa — and then there was Swai-Phillips, who had already known that Tom had met with the Consul. The indifference and then hostility of the junior embassy attaché — who had been got to long before Tom called.

Then, once things were up and running, they had a legman keeping an eye on Tom’s every move. First there were tails from behind — Squolly’s men — and then they were replaced by a better tail, one who worked from the front and was able to anticipate which way he’d go before Tom knew himself.

The man who knew what the inside of the courtroom was like — even knew that it had good airconditioning; the man the car-rental clerk knew the name of without having to be told; the man who’d slipped it to the clerk in the Goods Shed Store that the rifles weren’t for Tom; the man who was never marked by the makkata in Vance to begin with, and whose thigh was checked by other makkatas along the way, purely to confirm that he was the plant. Yes, the man whose case was being handled on a no-win-no-fee basis, and who performed brilliantly as an instrument to be played upon by the wills of others.

Lincoln, Tom kicked himself. The old man was the only damn one of them who had told the truth. He tried to warn me — the rest of them were all in on it. And to Prentice, he croaked: ‘That makkata.’

‘What’s that, old chap? Speak up.’

‘That makkata, back in Vance, he was a fucking fraud, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Prentice laughed. ‘Pissed out of his brains, the ceremony was a total cock-up. You must’ve realized, Tom, you were inquivoo all along.’

They had reached the dispensary, and Prentice let go of Tom’s hand to withdraw an envelope from the back pocket of his jeans. It was identical to the one that Tom had left under his swag — the one that contained Tom’s copy of the tontine.

‘All tontines are, of course, fully reciprocal, Tom,’ Prentice said, waggling the envelope. ‘You may have thought you could convert it unilaterally, but I’m afraid you couldn’t. I’m surprised the man at Endeavour didn’t spell it out for you, but then insurance salesmen aren’t the most honest of chaps. The natives are easy to rook; however, it’s different with an Anglo — they couriered a copy round to me at the Hilton within an hour.’

Prentice smiled complicitly. ‘Our tontine covers — you’ll’ve noticed, if you’ve read the small print — severe mental impairment, as well as injury and death. In the absence of your having appointed someone to hold your power of attorney. . Well, let’s just put it this way, since I can see you’re still a little groggy: it seems I’m on the verge of coming into a considerable sum of money.

‘But don’t think I’m going to be selfish,’ he continued, holding the dispensary door open for Tom. ‘By far the bulk of it will go to support my kids — and to help Erich’s work, naturally. So, best not to look on this, um, procedure as a punishment at all; rather it’s your way of giving a lot of people a much deserved reward.’

Erich von Sasser was waiting for them in the anteroom to the operating room, together with Vishtar Loman. The doctors were already in their gowns and masks, but a third shrouded figure — smaller, slimmer — was scrubbing up at a sink in the corner.

Prentice helped Tom on to the gurney, then went to take his turn at the sink. The other operating assistant was Atalaya Intwennyfortee, and it seemed she was playing the part of of anaesthetist, because she came over to where Tom lay bearing a kidney dish, and looked down at him. Her beautiful dark eyes were joined by Von Sasser’s hollow sockets.

‘I’m afraid, Tom,’ the neuro-anthropologist said breezily, ‘that a lack of funds means we aren’t able to give you a pre-med’, but Ms Intwennyfortee here has something that should help you relax.’

Atalaya took a quid of engwegge from the kidney dish and pushed it into Tom’s defenceless mouth. Biting down on it, feeling the nicotine immediately perfuse through his gums and into his bloodstream, Tom ruminated on what a pity it was that his last smells were so bitterly antiseptic.

In gown and mask, Prentice joined the other two standing over Tom, and Von Sasser put one rubber-gloved hand on his shoulder and the other on Atalaya’s. ‘Well, Tom,’ he said, ‘if you’re puzzled as to why Brian is helping out with your oppo, cast your mind back to Papa’s Songs. You’ll recall that there’s nothing a Tayswengo fears more than gettanka, or ritualized humiliation, and that he — or she — would rather see a man die — or at any rate, experience an ego-death — than suffer such a fate.’

However, Tom wasn’t casting his mind back anywhere; he was adrift in his engwegge trance, and faintly amused by the way things had turned out. After all, he was only doing what he had always done: passively conforming to an invented belief system.