The Butt

4

Later on, as the Brodzinskis waited at the check-in for an elderly Anglo couple to redistribute their hoard of native knick-knacks, Tom asked his wife why she’d reacted with such vehemence.

It was a mistake. Up until that moment they’d been getting on. Tom had accepted there was little to be gained by Martha and the kids staying, while, if they left immediately, they’d be able to fly home direct, with only one brief stop for refuel-ling in Agania.

For her part, Martha had refrained from berating her husband in front of the children. She had even, as they sat jammed beside each other in the back of the cab, taken Tom’s sweaty hand in her own cool one and given it a series of rhythmic squeezes, as if seeking to pump into him a little of her steely resolve.

However, when Tom raised the issue of Swai-Phillips, Martha’s expression hardened. She turned away from him, completed the check-in procedure, then sent the kids over to the gift shop with a couple of bills. Motioning to Tom, she led him in the opposite direction, towards a towering shrubbery: entire trees, strung with creepers, were planted in an enormous container, together with a basalt boulder.

Once they were concealed behind this, Martha let him have it. ‘I understand you made a mistake, Tom,’ she began reasonably enough, ‘but the way you insist on compounding it is beyond me. It’s like you’ve got some kinda urge to drag yourself down — and the rest of us with you. Jesus Christ!’ she spat, then gnawed with perfect teeth at the heel of her hand, a pathetic signal of distress that Tom couldn’t remember her making since the dark days, shortly after they’d adopted Tommy Junior, and he was — albeit tentatively — being diagnosed.

‘I–I. . I’m not sure I know. .’ He groped for the right formula to appease her. ‘I mean, I thought you — you were angry when I was rude to him, to Swai-Phillips.’

‘Jesus-fucking-Christ!’ she spat again. ‘I wanted you to be polite to the man, not sign away our entire fucking livelihood to him. Don’t you get anything? Don’t you realize where you are? These people are laughing at you — laughing all the way to the fucking bank.’

Tom ran a hand over his brush-cut hair; its thickness reassured him, and his headache had succumbed to two hefty painkillers. He felt gutsy enough to come back at her: ‘Look, Martha, maybe you’re right, in part, but I do know where I am — right here, and Swai-Phillips is a local attorney, he knows all about this local stuff, the way native and codified laws work together. Shit, even Adams, the Consul, he says Swai-Phillips is the man in Vance — or one of them.’

‘The man, the man,’ Martha mocked him. ‘And what does that make you, a man’s man? No, lissen to me, Tom. I told you before we came here to read those books, really read them, not just drift off over them ’cause you’d had your evening toke and your Seven and fucking Seven. This is a big, dangerous, confused country, and these people are not your friends — none of them.

‘While you were getting in with them, I was making my own inquiries. Seems Adams hasn’t been with the State Department for over ten years — he’s just the Honorary Consul, he hasn’t got any more leverage than you.’

Tom was unmanned. He stood face down to the polished floor of the terminal. The scissoring brushes wielded by a downtrodden-looking Tugganarong pushed a sausage of lint past where they stood.

Eventually, he said what he thought she wanted to hear: ‘What should I do, then?’

Martha pursed her lips; her long neck kinked in irritation. It had been the wrong thing to say.

‘Do? I dunno, Tom, but if I was you, I’d at least check with the embassy down south. If they can’t advise you by phone, I’d get on a goddamn flight and go see them. You’ve got bail, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure if—’ He was going to explain about state and federal jurisdictions in this part of the world, thereby demonstrating that he wasn’t completely ignorant.

After twenty years of marriage Martha could anticipate this from tone alone. ‘One thing I need you to realize, Tom, is this: this is all your own doing, one hundred per cent. You’ve screwed this one up, just like you screwed up that real estate business in Munnings, and my goddamn brother’s health insurance.’

‘That—’

‘I don’t want to hear it. You’ve screwed this up like you’ve screwed up your relationship with Dixie, with Tommy Junior, and the way you’re on target to do the same with the twins. .’

Now she was under way, Martha could have kept going indefinitely, had not Tommy Junior discovered them in their toxic bower. He stared at his quarelling parents, his brown eyes shiny and indifferent, then he forcibly turned his mother by her shoulders to face the departures board.

Martha said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Snatched up her carry-on bag and started towards the line that snaked into the roped-off pens which directed passengers towards security.

Tom stood sulking for a few moments, then tagged along behind, his arm across his son’s shoulder, which was higher and more solid than his own.

At the barrier there was a confusion of goodbyes and kisses that missed their mark — bouncing off cheekbones, lost in hair. Martha was contrite. She leaned into Tom and whispered: ‘I’m scared, honey, that’s all.’

‘Me too,’ Tom replied, and he would have sealed the rapprochement with a longer embrace had the twins not grabbed his hands and attempted to swing on them. By the time he disengaged, his wife had disappeared, and Dixie was standing on the far side of the metal detector, calling to her father to propel her little brothers through.

Two days later, waking in the deathly monochrome of a tropical dawn, Tom lay listening to the clickety agitation of the roaches in their motel. He thought back to those last few minutes at the airport. Even though Dixie had called him during the family’s lay-over at Agania, Tom couldn’t rid himself of the unsettling notion that Martha hadn’t left the country at all. He hadn’t seen his wife go, and now he felt her presence acutely in the seedy, overheated bedroom of the minute apartment.

The Entreati Experience had turned out to be a backpackers’ hostel, with a few short-let apartments on the top storey. The backpackers’ cubicles were ranged round a grimy courtyard, across which were strung clotheslines festooned with their garish T-shirts and brightly patterned sarongs and Bermudas, which flapped in the bilge-laden breeze from the nearby container port.

Down here, at the rougher end of Vance, there were few Anglo faces to be seen on the streets. Across the road from the Experience, there was a bar frequented by natives, where surly drunks squatted all day and evening, before, in the small hours, beginning noisily incompetent fights.

Swai-Phillips had been right, though: the monthly rate for Tom’s apartment was nugatory; a fact explained by the manager, who reminded him that the tourist season was ending. Soon, all the tanned kids would shoulder their packs and flip-flop halfway across the world back to college.

Tom felt ambivalent about this. The college kids were infuriating, revving the engines of their Campervans at all hours of the night, touristic vehicles that were incongruously pitted with bullet holes.

Beardless blond giants cornered Tom in the dank corridors of the hostel and spun him yarns of their adventures in the interior. Their girlfriends loitered near by, snickering, chewing gum, rearranging the straps of their bikinis to expose more of themselves.

Still, once the kids had finally gone, Tom would be all alone. He felt an aching nostalgia for the very idea of air travel, as if the computer-targeted silvery fuselages belonged to a bygone era. Here he was grounded: that most pitiful of things, a left-behind tourist. In his pitiful suitcase were his pitiful effects: half-squeezed tubes of sun cream, trunks with a big word written across them, airport novels that would never go through an airport again, a digital camera loaded with pin-prick-sharp images of ghostly happiness.

The sheet of paper listing his lawyer’s impositions was stuck to the scabrous door of the fridge by a magnet in the squashed L-shape of the great desertified island-continent itself.

Each day now the humidity was building and building towards the monsoon. Most days, it took Tom until noon to rouse himself, pull on some clothes and venture out into the hot sponge of Vance. Standing on the sidewalk, he looked up at enormous cumulo-nimbus formations coasting in from the ocean; their bulbous white peaks and horizontal grey bases mirrored the superstructures and hulls of the cruise ships out in the bay — vessels that were readying themselves to depart, scooting out from beneath the gathering storm and heading for safer waters, busier cities, better shopping.

At the quayside Tom took the roach motel out of the plastic bag. He opened the little perspex door, and the roaches, their feelers probing liberty, fell end over end into the scummy water. The waves washing against the concrete gathered their bodies into an agitated raft. Tom turned and scuttled off in the direction of the nearest mall.

Here he had doughnuts for breakfast in a coffee shop, while scanning the paper. The local news he ignored, preferring to peer the wrong way down a 15,000-mile-long telescope, at events diminished out of all significance.

After a few days of this, Tom felt himself sinking into swampy inertia. It was now so humid in Vance that the atmosphere seemed as thick and moist as a hot towel; it was a relief when his lawyer called and summoned Tom to his office.

Swai-Phillips’s office was in the Metro-Center, the 22-storey block that towered over Vance’s relatively low-rise business district. Ushered in by a furtive, brown-skinned man, who introduced himself as Abdul, the lawyer’s clerk, Tom discovered Swai-Phillips with his bare feet up on his desk, his sunglasses clamped on and his impenetrable gaze levelled at the big windows along the far wall. Tom assumed that, like the rest of Vance’s dwindling population, he was mesmerized by the anticipation of the rains.

Swai-Phillips was also smoking a large loosely rolled cigar, the outer leaf of which was partially detached. As Tom watched, appalled, he dabbed spittle on to a finger, then applied it to the vegetative glans.

There must have been eight notices detailing Vance’s anti-smoking ordinances between the elevator doors and the frosted ones of the lawyer’s suite. Yet, when Tom pointed this out, Swai-Phillips only belched smoke and laughter. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! They don’t apply in here; this is a home office, yeah, special zoning.’

‘But what about Abdul?’ Tom asked.

‘Him? That feller. .’ Swai-Phillips grinned wolfishly. ‘He’s my son, kind of, right.’

Tom asked about the building: why was it so much higher than all the rest? This was an earthquake zone, wasn’t it?

The lawyer did his Father Christmas shtick again. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! You may well ask — not only is this an earthquake zone, this building is slap on the crack, man. I’ve been sitting here one time, yeah, and seen the streets rucking up like a rug that’s been kicked! I tellya why it’s so high — the Metro-Center, it’s ’cause the pols in this town are so damn low, that’s why!’

Tom felt shaky and sat down abruptly on a low chair.

‘I would ask if my cigar bothered you,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ‘but why bother, I know the answer.’

Was it mere rudeness or sheer arrogance on the lawyer’s part? Tom shook his head, uncomprehending. The thick coils of smoke lay so heavily on the carpeted deck of the office that when Swai-Phillips’s secretary came in with a cup of coffee for Tom, she appeared tangled up in its bluey-grey hanks.

While the lawyer continued to puff on the monstrous stogie, it dawned on Tom that his own alternations between belligerence and passivity in the face of this whole grotesque situation could be entirely accounted for by the effects of nicotine withdrawal. That’s why he’d been so emotionally labile: whining, inveigling, then inveighing. That’s why his encounters — with Adams, Swai-Phillips, even the clerk in the cellphone store — had the vibrant, darkly hilarious character of hallucinations. That’s why his judgement had been so clouded: for, instead of the smoke venting from Tom at regular intervals, it was backing up inside his head, getting inside his eyes.

‘It wouldn’t matter a damn, right,’ Swai-Phillips hectored him, ‘if you were to take up smoking again, so far as the traditional people are concerned. Engwegge — that’s the native tobacco — is used so widely here. Shee-it, they don’t only smoke the stuff, they chew it, sniff it, rub it on their gums. They even mix it up into enemas and squirt it up their black arses, right. No, it isn’t the Intwennyfortee mob you need to worry about on that score.’

He took his feet off the desk and, dropping the cigar in an ashtray, adopted a more lawyerly air. ‘However, should we go to a full trial — which I hope won’t happen — we’ll more than likely be facing a majority Anglo jury; the defence has no rights to veto jurors here; and, as you’ve probably realized, the whole anti-smoking drive is, at root, racially motivated. The Anglos have a lot of things stuffed up their arses, but engwegge ain’t one of them, yeah.

‘So, if you don’t want to risk smoking, yeah, you can always chew a few engwegge leaf-tips. I’ve gotta batch of the finest here.’ The lawyer opened a desk drawer and slung a packet made from a banana leaf on to the blotter. It lay there: grossly organic on the workaday surface.

Tom grimaced. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Jethro,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll take a rain check.’

‘Please yourself.’ The lawyer sounded miffed. ‘This ain’t just a fiery little treat — it’s ritual stuff. My old feller sends them from over there. The tips are dew-picked, then fire-baked. The makkatas of my dad’s mob chew quids as big as tennis balls; then. . past, present, future’ — he dug his spade-like hands into the ineluctable modality of his own engwegge trance — ‘they can see ’em all at once. Still’ — the lawyer hunched forward and quit desert mysticism for the prosaic office — ‘none of that need concern you — not yet, yeah. I want you to come up to my place tomorrow; there’s a bloke you need to see, right.’

Tom grunted non-committally. He looked at the bland wall: a print of a nineteenth-century hunting scene hung beside a magnetic year planner. The red-jacketed huntsmen were on horseback, racing after a flock of moai, the giant indigenous flightless birds.

‘What’re you gonna do when you leave here?’ Swai-Phillips barked.

‘I–I hadn’t thought. .’

‘You should go over to the hospital and see Lincoln,’ the lawyer commanded. ‘You may not be able to after tomorrow, yeah.’

When Tom entered the room, he found Lincoln reading a golfing magazine. There was no sign of Atalaya or her desert sorority. An Anglo nurse squeaked hither and thither on the shiny floor, changing the old man’s saline drip with studious efficiency.

‘Lissen,’ Lincoln said, putting his reading material aside and taking Tom’s hand in his own. ‘You must’ve maxed out your credit card getting me in here — and there was no need — my insurance’ll cover it.’

‘I thought, I mean — given that you’re a Tayswengo, it’d be part of the payback.’

The old man laughed. He certainly looked frail, and there was a thick dressing taped to his now shorn head, but his hand continued to gently pressure Tom’s, and his eyes twinkled with amused affection. ‘I’m not Tayswengo,’ Lincoln said. ‘Don’t get me wrong — I love Atalaya, she and me. . well.’ He shook his head on the snowy pillow. ‘We’re soul mates. . I wish, I wish I’d met her twenty years ago. .’

Except for the fact that she’d then have been minus-two, Tom thought — then checked himself, for the old man was being so sweet, he felt craven for not having come to see him before.

He cleared his throat and indicated the supermarket bag he’d put on the bedside cabinet. ‘I brought some fruit, magazines and candy. I got a selection, ’cause I don’t know what you like.’

‘Thanks.’ Lincoln smiled but made no move to look in the bag. ‘Don’t get me off the point, young man, this is important. You probably think — or you’ve been told by that tight-ass Adams — if you lay out for my medical bills, it’ll play well with the Intwennyfortee mob, but it ain’t that way at all. .’ He tailed off, and Tom realized that even this short speech had exhausted Lincoln.

He made to disengage his hand from the old man’s, while muttering, ‘I don’t want to tire you out—’

But Lincoln gripped Tom’s hand tighter. ‘I’m inquivoo, see, nothing I say or do counts for any damn thing any more. Thing is’ — he looked at the door through which the nurse had exited, as if he suspected she might be eavesdropping — ‘you’re nothing until you’ve had the cut.’ His hand tightened still more, his voice grated up the scale. ‘The cut, Tommy boy, the cut — you gotta have it! Now, Tommy boy, now!’

Lincoln’s insistence on ‘the cut’ — whatever that might be — jarred Tom, as did his bad-mouthing Adams. On leaving the hospital, he finally followed Martha’s advice and called the embassy, which was in Capital City, 5,000 miles to the south, across the desert heart of the crumpled island-continent.

After holding and holding again, being transferred from this clerical assistant to that secretary, he finally spoke to a junior attaché. To begin with the woman’s chirpy tone was as redolent of home as a ball-game commentary. ‘Uh-huh, sure, I see,’ she interjected as Tom explained his predicament. He tried not to sound as if he had misgivings concerning the Honorary Consul, but the attaché still picked them up. ‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ she sighed. ‘I appreciate that you’re in a pretty lousy situation, but there’s not a lot we can do from way down here. Adams is the man on the spot, and he has the full support of the Ambassador. He’s sent us a report, and he’s confident it can be settled without any jail time.

‘If I were you, Mr Brodzinski, I’d go with him on this one. Should anything left-field emerge from the prelim’ hearing, either someone from my department will come up or, if the judge permits it, you can fly down here for a meeting.

‘One thing’s for sure, sir, and that’s our mission: we never, ever, leave our citizens out in the cold. Citizenship is a sacred bond for us — you should appreciate that. No matter what one of our own is accused of, he remains exactly that: one of our own.’

Out in the cold. What a ridiculous expression, Tom thought, as the cellphone slipped between his sweaty fingers.

But then, as Tom tried to convey the absurdity of a mere accident being treated as a crime, the attaché’s manner changed abruptly, her tone becoming clipped. ‘See here,’ she said. ‘I’m not in a position either to judge your intentions or even to know exactly what it is you did. One thing I do know is that Mr Lincoln is an elderly man, and a very sick one. Another thing I know for a fact is that cigarette smoking is both personally and publically injurious—’

‘I was giving up!’ Tom spat into the cell. ‘It was my last goddamn cigarette!’

‘I’m going to have to stop you right there, Mr Brodzin-ski.’ The attaché’s prissiness was shot through with menacing self-righteousness. ‘Embassy staff have the right to undertake our work free from the threat of physical violence or verbal intimidation. I’m going to have to terminate this call immediately, as a direct result of your speech acts. I suggest you cool off and pay a little more attention to your own responsibilities, rather than seeking more victims for your dangerous hostility.’

Later, sitting on his corpse of a bed at the Entreati, it occurred to to Tom that this conversation had been a sickening replay of the butt-flick itself: an unthinking ejaculation into the attaché’s ear, followed by a massive overreaction.

Musing in this way brought Tom Brodzinski closer to the essence of what had happened to him. Standing on the balcony of the Mimosa, convincing himself that this would be the last acrid dug he’d ever suck, Tom hadn’t been considering his, his family’s or indeed anyone else’s health; he hadn’t plotted the steeply rising curve of medical expenditure against the slowly declining one of chronic disease. No.

Tom now realized, with mounting horror, that his carelessly discarded cigarette butt had flown on its — perhaps fatal — trajectory powered by one fuel alone: a tank of combustible pride. He was Doing the Right Thing — and for that alone should be accorded the uttermost respect.

So the butt had described its parabola and hit its target, creating a minor entry wound, a tiny blister. But oh, the exit wound! The massive, gaping and bloody exit wound, through which the butt had sped on, fragmenting into scores of smaller butts, which were now hitting his children, his wife, and causing terrible collateral damage.

Tom ate at the café on the ’nade. It was empty, and they served him an underdone burger, still frozen at its core. Too cowed to complain, he nibbled its edges. The waiter stood at the sixteen-metre line smoking and looking out to sea: the last of the cruise ships was sinking into the horizon, and above its fo’c’sle reared a mile-high genie of gibbous thunder cloud, struggling to escape from the tropical night.

In that night, Tom dreamed he was staying in the roach motel. It was fully booked, and the other guests, who wore zooty batik T-shirts and tinted shades, tickled him mercilessly with their antennae. It was a relief when the warder of this plastic prison bent down to pick it up and empty them all into the sea. Tumbling end over end, Tom looked up to the quayside and saw the giant Swai-Phillips, his grey Afro coruscating like the corona of the eclipsed sun around his dark impassive face.

* * *

The lawyer’s house was further out of Vance than the Honorary Consul’s, at the top of the Great Dividing Range’s first foothills. As the cab laboured up the hairpin bends of the single-track road, Tom was confronted first by walls of impenetrable shrubbery, then by vistas of the city below growing smaller and smaller, reduced from its dirty, confused status as a place of human habitation to a mere scattering of pristine white cubes beside the aquamarine bay.

When the cab eventually stopped, so did the road. The blacktop looped through the scrub and petered out in deep ruts of reddish dust. Struggling to turn his vehicle, the cabbie, an obese Tugganarong, grunted, ‘This is it.’

And when Tom queried the location, saying, ‘Are you sure?’, the man laughed increduously. ‘’Caws I’m fuggin sure. Phillips ’ouse bin ’ere longest time. Longer than bloody Vance, yeah.’

Tom watched as the cab bounced back on to the road and disappeared down the hill. There was a mailbox nailed high up on a tree trunk, and beyond this a path led into the indecipherable bush — so many plants and trees Tom didn’t comprehend, their myriad leafy foreign tongues still further complicated by parasitic mosses and squiggling creepers.

Reluctantly, Tom summoned himself and began to pick his way into the jungle. It was oppressively still — not a breath of wind. The sun’s rays struck down through the foliage, spearing the back of his neck. His sandals slithered through leaf fall and caught on tree roots. He tried not to think about the seven species of venomous snake, or the three kinds of venomous spider.

Tom came upon a kennel. Two of the sharp-muzzled, brindled, native dogs lay asleep in it. He crept past. Next, the lawyer’s Landcruiser emerged from the greenery, parked on an apron at the end of a metalled drive.

The dogs must have been roused despite Tom’s wary tread, because there was an anguish of yelps and the crash of heavy paws through the undergrowth. Tom took flight along the path, staggering and tripping, until he was propelled into the full glare of noon.

He found himself by a fence of corrugated-iron sheets, beyond which spread a large compound that occupied the summit of the hill. He was on the point of throwing himself over this — for he could see no other means of access — when the yelps were throttled off. Turning, Tom saw the big dog, its muzzle dashed with saliva, dancing frantically on its hind legs: it had reached the end of its long chain.

Tom laughed callously, then took his time discovering the stile and mounting it, looking back with each step in order to taunt the watchdog still more.

On the far side he expected to meet the lawyer, or one of his retainers, but there was no one, only cracked earth, and scattered across it bits of scaffolding, a cement mixer, piles of cinder-blocks and mounds of hardened mortar. Towards the far side of the compound, projecting out where the hill fell away, there was a concrete platform upon which a few negligent courses of bricks had been laid. An indication, Tom thought, of where a house might be sited if anyone — in this stifling heat — could be bothered to build one.

Tom walked across and stood on the platform. He checked his cell. There was a signal — if Swai-Phillips didn’t appear, he’d call him. Then he heard a skittering noise, as of a lizard’s flit, and, peering over the edge of the platform, saw that he was not alone.

Ten feet below, in the thin wedge of shadow at the base of the platform, sat a very tall, matt-black man. Even at a glance, Tom could see that he was extremely thin, his long thighs no thicker than his calves. All the man’s limbs were tucked in, so that he resembled a collapsed umbrella.

Tom slithered down the friable earth of the hillside. Up close the man was still more outlandish. He sported only a dirty leather breechclout, which called to mind Adams’s gardening apron. Apart from three long tufts of hair above either pendulous ear, his head was shaven; it was like a fifth, etiolated limb, the face as dimpled as an elbow, the almond eyes glazed. A swelling in the man’s cheek was the only part of him which moved, revolving slowly. Tom could almost taste the bitter sloosh of the engwegge, and he understood that this must be the makkata.

Not wanting to disrupt the sorceror’s trance — it might be prejudicial — Tom turned away. Yet, reluctant to leave, he sat down a few feet away on a tree stump. Into the shimmering oppression of the tropical noon came the rhythmic slurping sound of the makkata’s mastication. Tom wondered if he was deep in a vision of the future and, if so, whether he could see Swai-Phillips’s new house, its terrace strewn with loungers tenanted by the lawyer’s influential friends? Was the makkata watching while topless party girls dove into the pool, their breasts swaying as they went off the springboard? But no — a springboard was out of the question. Tom hadn’t seen one in years, and here in Vance — of all places — such a dangerous pleasure would surely be illegal.

Swai-Phillips, as was his gift, popped up from nowhere. One instant he wasn’t there — the next he was, looking frowsty and unshaven, in dirty-white jeans hacked off at the knee and nothing else. There were small balls of greying hair on his chest, Tom noted, each one a mini-Afro. Had he forgotten to shave this as well?

Swai-Phillips was standing some yards down the hill, beckoning and calling to someone up on the platform. ‘C’mon, Prentice!’ he cried. ‘Get your sorry white arse down here, yeah!’

Earth and pebbles rattled. Swai-Phillips pushed up his sunglasses and winked at Tom with his bad eye. Tom got up from his stump and turned to see an Anglo of about his own age making his way, very unsteadily, down the slope.

The man had a preposterous coif: the top of his head was completely bald, while there was brown hair not only at the sides but also on his forehead. This fringe wasn’t a few straggly threads that he’d combed over; rather, it appeared to have been left behind when the rest of his hair retreated.

The Anglo came right up to Tom with a waddling gait — he walked like a fat man, even though he was not. He offered Tom a hand at once thin and yet fleshy. ‘Brian Prentice.’

‘Tom,’ Tom said, reluctantly taking the hand. ‘Tom Brodzinski.’

Prentice wore very new, very stiff blue jeans, cut narrow in the style favoured by the country’s cattlemen. On his feet were steel-toed, elastic-sided boots, on his back a khaki bush shirt. The whole authentic outfit was rounded off by a wide-brimmed hat with a neatly rolled fly net attached to its brim, which Prentice carried in his free hand. The gear pegged Prentice as a wannabe adventurer, determined to strike out for the lawless wastes of the interior — or at least to give that impression. Tom instantly despised him, for Prentice’s face belied any such resolve.

It was, like his damp hand, thin yet fleshy. The eyes were equally unresolved: pinkish lids, reddish lashes and wet pupils like those of an embryo. When he spoke — with his irritating, braying accent — his plump yet bloodless lips rolled back from his gums. Either the man had a bad shaving rash, or he’d picked up a fungal infection in one of Vance’s rank shower stalls, for his weak jaw and turkey neck were lumpy and corrupted. All in all, Tom couldn’t recall ever meeting a more distasteful individual.

Prentice’s handshake was predictably furtive: one finger bent back and caught in Tom’s palm, as if he were an accidental Mason. When Tom let go, the hand fell limply back to Prentice’s side.

Swai-Phillips observed this meeting with ill-concealed mirth. ‘Dr Livingstone,’ he quipped, ‘this is Mr Stanley. Stanley, this is the celebrated Dr Livingstone. I hope you’ll be very happy together!’ Then he turned his attention to the tranced-out makkata and spat a long stream of clipped consonants and palate clicks in his direction.

Tom wasn’t surprised that the lawyer spoke one of the native languages; never the less the vehement sound of the tongue struck him anew. The desert peoples didn’t use the same parts of their mouths to speak as Anglos; or, rather, they hardly used their mouths at all. Teeth, palate and larynx conspired together to produce this percussive noise.

The makkata came out of his reverie at once, ejected the chaw of engwegge into his palm, tucked it into his breechclout and, gathering his stick limbs under him, rose. His wide black eyes were limpid but showed no sign of intoxication. He pointed at Tom and Prentice while rapping away still more emphatically than Swai-Phillips.

The lawyer grinned. ‘He says that he’ll do the ceremonial test right away — you first, Brodzinski.’

Tom quailed; he was a skinny boy once more, being pushed towards the vaulting horse by a sadistic phys. ed. instructor. He wished he could deflect the makkata’s steady gaze.

‘What about Prentice, here? I mean — no offence, Prentice — but what the hell is he doing here? Is he a client of yours, Jethro? I think I have a right to know.’

‘Rights!’ Swai-Phillips guffawed. ‘Rights, rights, rights — it’s always your bloody rights with you people. Property rights, personal rights, human rights, animal-bloody-rights. Brodzinski, I’m your lawyer, for pity’s sake, and let me tellya, this has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s bloody rights at all, yeah. This is a very simple, very quick ritual procedure. This man has come thousands of clicks to perform it. He’s an extremely important man, and, strange as it may seem to you, yeah, he’s actually in a bloody hurry. So, if it’s all the same to you’ — Swai-Phillips paused, the better to impress on Tom that this was not negotiable — ‘I think my advice, as your lawyer, is that you do exactly what he wants, which is for you to drop your strides — now. Please.’

Swai-Phillips took Prentice by the arm, and they went down the hill towards the jungle wall. Even as he was unbuckling his belt and letting his pants slide down, Tom was wondering if such feeble compliance was still because of nicotine withdrawal. He had no idea what the makkata was going to do to him. The awful thought occurred to Tom, as he stood half naked in the glaring sun, that it was a show, put on for the lawyer’s perverse enjoyment. That he was bent on humiliating Tom, simply because he could. Maybe Prentice was really a crony of Swai-Phillips, brought along to witness this shaming.

The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips. Tom — although he couldn’t conceive of anything less likely — admonished himself not to become aroused. Yet this thought itself was arousing: he felt the familiar prickle on the backs of his thighs, his scrotum tightened. The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle. It was a spicy smell, mixed with the ferrous dust of the desert.

Tom let his head fall back on his sweaty neck. Heavy storm clouds were piled up above, their spongy masses saturated with rain-in-waiting. His fellow tourists — and the native Anglos when they’d had a drink — hymned the beauties of this mighty land. Yet, now that he was left behind here, Tom thought he might be looking at it with the more realistic eyes of the natives, seeing the scarred hillsides of the coastal ranges, smelling the faecal decay of the mangrove swamps. Certainly, there was nothing picturesque in the parts of the interior he had driven through with his family: the salt pans that flaked like eczema, the warty termite mounds, the endless charcoal strokes of the eucalyptus trees on the wrinkled vellum of the grasslands. Even here, on the coast, Tom sensed this alien landscape to his rear, an apprehension of a door ajar in reality itself, through which might be glanced seething horrors.

The makkata, grasping the flesh of Tom’s inner thigh firmly between his thumb and forefinger, said ‘I’ll protect you’ in accentless English. Tom felt a searing stab, jerked his head forward and, appalled, watched as the sorceror slowly withdrew the blade of a steel knife.

Blood coursed from Tom’s thigh. He felt dizzy, staggered and, hobbled by his pants, almost fell. Then Swai-Phillips was supporting him.

‘Be a man,’ the lawyer said. ‘It’s nothing, a flesh wound.’

He gave Tom a wad of Kleenex, which he clamped to his thigh. While Tom rearranged his clothing, the lawyer squatted down by the makkata, who was examining the patch of bloodstained earth, already lucent with feeding flies. The makkata stirred this into red mud with his knife blade while clicking an incantation.

‘B-but, he speaks perfect English,’ Tom said irrelevantly. He moved a few shaky paces off. Prentice was still fifty yards away, his kinked back resolutely turned.

Swai-Phillips came over. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you up to the house. My cousin’ll bandage that scratch, and I can tellya, mate, you’ll enjoy that, yeah.’

As Tom was led away, he asked, ‘What about Prentice?’

‘Prentice?’ For a moment the lawyer was confused — then he barked, ‘Oh, him! Right! It’s his turn now, isn’t it? Silly bastard’s got the same problem as you, needs a makkata to judge whether he’s astande.’

The lawyer half dragged Tom up the hill, then began marching him across the open ground. Tom shook himself free. ‘And am I?’ he spat. ‘Am I astande? Because if I’m not, I’m gonna sue you and that fucking witch doctor, you better believe it, man.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ The lawyer swept off his sunglasses, and his good eye twinkled. He was enjoying himself. ‘No worries, mate, you’re good.’

Through the living jalousie of the jungle, Swai-Phillips’s house came into view. Given its size, Tom was astonished that he hadn’t spotted it from the top of the hill. It was three storeys high, with a wide veranda at least a hundred feet long. The entire structure — including the covered walkways that connected the main house to a number of outbuildings — was riveted together out of corrugated iron. Great slabs of this material, streaked with rust, had been bent and bashed into copings, windowsills, pillars, roofs, chimneys and balustrades. There was even a corrugated-iron pool.

The effect was at once silly and magnificent: it was the dwelling of an idiot-savant bricoleur, who, having glimpsed a picture of an antebellum mansion, had then fashioned his own copy, using whatever came to hand.

Despite the electric throb in his wounded thigh, and the growing anxiety that the makkata’s knife might have had tetanus on it — or worse — Tom still felt like laughing at the lawyer’s absurd pile. Until, that is, it impinged on him what the house was still more reminiscent of: the model minivan Tommy Junior had wanted him to buy, the one the old Anglo had told Tom was a Gandaro spirit wagon. The deftly fashioned artefact that was taboo for an Anglo to even touch, let alone possess.

A few minutes later, sitting in one of the galvanized gazebos, on a galvanized bench, Tom’s breathing began to shudder into some regularity. Swai-Phillips, who was sitting opposite, clapped his hands loudly and cried out: ‘Gloria! Betsy! Drinks, goddamnit! Now!’

From deep within the metallic bowels of the hulk, there came the sound of women’s voices and the clanking noises of their bare footfalls.

Tom studied the house more: creepers thrust between the corrugated-iron sheets of the walkways, while saplings poked through their balustrades. Still larger trees punched through warped walls and rusty roofs, their limbs chafing and squeaking against the metal, as the onshore breeze rose in the gathering darkness.

‘Will he be — I mean, who will. .’ Tom couldn’t frame his question; he began again: ‘Prentice, will he be able to get up here after. .’

‘He’s been speared? Oh, yeah, the makkata’ll give him a hand — so long as he’s astande too, that is. ’Course, if he’s inquivoo, he’ll have to leave him where he lies, yeah. That’s the size of it.’

Tom was going to ask the lawyer what Prentice had been accused of, when footfalls sounded loud on the veranda and Martha Brodzinski came towards the two men, a tray held on her upturned hand, as if she were an insouciant waitress in a citified brasserie.

At the sight of Martha’s willowy figure, and her thick dirty-blonde hair swishing against her long neck, Tom gripped the arm of the iron bench. Despite the heat, cold drops of sweat fell from his eyebrows to his cheeks. As Martha advanced along the walkway Tom’s heart burgeoned. Was this why he hadn’t seen her go through the metal detector at the airport? Why she hadn’t come to the phone when he called during their lay-over?

Why had she stayed behind? For moments Tom allowed himself to believe it was because she had decided to be with him, to support him; and that she had hidden out at the lawyer’s house with a view to suprising him, as if they were playful young lovers once more.

The paper dart of this fancy flew true for milliseconds, then hit an iron stanchion, buckled and fell. That wasn’t it at all, Tom realized. On the contrary, Martha was here because she was in cahoots with Swai-Phillips — having an affair with him as well. She’d sent their children back, alone, halfway round the world, so that she could dally here with the moustachioed creep, the laughing cavalier!

He stood up to confront her. . and fell back, because when the woman came into the gazebo, Tom was presented not with Martha’s pale plate of Puritan features but a face parodic of them: the lips thicker, the nose more bulbous, the eyes smaller. The woman who handed him the tall glass jammed with fruit wasn’t exactly ugly, but she was coarser — grosser, even — than Martha.

Though Swai-Phillips was laughing, he still managed to make an introduction: ‘Brodzinski, this is my second cousin Gloria; she grew up in Liège, Belgium, but she’s been here with us for a while now.’

‘G’day,’ said Gloria.

‘Y — you could’ve warned me!’ Tom rounded on him.

‘Warned you? Warned you of what, exactly?’ The lawyer dipped a finger into the drink his cousin had given him and traced a circle of moisture on his bare chest. ‘Oh, by the way Brodzinski, I have a cousin who’s the spit of your wife. . You’d’ve thought I was crazy. Better you come up and see her for yourself, right. Still,’ — he paused, took a slug of his drink and placed it on the table — ‘it does explain one thing to you.’

‘What’s that?’ Tom hated himself for playing along with the cruel joke.

‘Why it was I was so taken with Mrs Brodzinski, yeah. Believe me, if she’s anything like as, um, accommodating as my cousin, then you must be — in ordinary circs — a very happy man indeed.’

Tom sat marooned in his own passivity. What was happening to him? Why were events barracking him with his own impotence? The makkata had mixed his blood with the earth and pronounced him astande, yet he sat inert, while Gloria knelt before him, encouraged him to raise his buttocks so she could pull down his pants, then swabbed and dressed the wound.

Sometime later darkness had fallen utterly. Flying foxes chattered in a mango tree at the front of the veranda. Tom could just make out their oilskin wings opening and closing, the shine of their feline eyes. He thought of the makkata — and so it was that he appeared in the circle of light thrown by a hissing gas lamp Gloria had lit before retiring. He was leading Prentice by the hand — the other man seemed devoid of volition as he staggered along the veranda. There was a brutal streak of red mud on Prentice’s cheek, and he’d mislaid his stupid affectation of a hat.