The Butt

6

The cabbie let Tom off in the hospital parking lot. Ambulances backed and filled, their revolving lights throwing spangles into the curtains of rain. Tom picked his way between gurneys, upon which lay all manner of drunk and wounded native people. All were soaked to the skin — none were stoical: their moans and groans were plangently theatrical. Each gurney also had its attendant posse of keening womenfolk who tried to push it forward. The paramedics and police in their glistening rain ponchos did battle with these recumbent jousters, forcing them back from the double doors to the Emergency Department.

Seeing the cop who’d tailed him to the ’nade the previous morning, Tom approached and was waved through. After the mêlée outside, the silence of the white-tiled corridors was eerie. There was no sign of any staff as he walked towards the central elevator lobby. Through head-height windows in the ward doors, Tom could see rows of beds, most of which were empty, although here and there was the outsized foetus of a sleeping patient.

As he waited for the elevator, Tom wondered why it was that so many casualties were being left out in the rain, while inside the hospital snoozed, dreaming its dreams of antiseptic purity.

There was more activity on the fifth floor. An orderly carrying a kidney dish full of foul-smelling fluid got into the elevator as Tom stepped out. An Anglo nurse stood by the nurses’ station chatting with an Anglo patient in a bathrobe. She left off and asked Tom what he wanted.

Without understanding why he did so, Tom pulled up the leg of his short pants and pointed to the three-inch scar left by the makkata’s blade.

‘A-Astande,’ he said. Both Anglos nodded vigorously, as if to say: that explains everything.

‘Go through, yeah,’ the nurse said to Tom. ‘I think the Intwennyfortee mob have finished their ritual now.’ He thanked her and moved on.

By night the corridor that led to Lincoln’s room seemed longer. It kinked and turned, passing bays in which stood mysterious machines, their coiled electrical flexes and rubber wheels suggesting they were deadly as well as silent. Then Tom heard the pitter-patter of water falling on to the tiled floor and the crackle of flames.

He rounded the next corner: someone had built a small fire in the corridor by piling twigs up against the wall, then setting them alight. The smoke curled up into the sucking mouth of a ventilation duct; a fire sprinkler had been activated and the spray from this was splattering the floor. Where the water splashed the fire, it hissed into steam, which diffused the harsh strip-lighting into its component colours, so that a small rainbow arced from wall to floor.

Tom was transfixed by this indoor weather system. Then, seeing an alarm button, he reached for it, only to have his hand detained.

‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, right.’

It was a doctor, wearing a white coat of military cut. A stethoscope was tucked beneath one epaulette.

‘Why not?’ Tom asked.

The man, who had the strained yet authoritative air of hospital doctors the world over, seemed flummoxed for a moment, then explained: ‘It’s the Intwennyfortee mob: they’re doing their business along here, yeah. The engwegge — it has to be seared.’

The doctor knelt and, picking up some greenish stalks that were lying by the fire, raised one to his lips and nibbled it. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, smiling up at Tom. He was very young, with a helmet of auburn hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. The doctor’s magnified eyes — at once jaded and quizzical — were trapped in these little tanks.

‘I’m, um, surprised,’ Tom said, choosing his words with tipsy circumspection. ‘That you allow the traditional people to hold such, um, ceremonies in the hospital.’

‘We’ve got no choice, right.’ The doctor rose and faced Tom. ‘Once they’re in — they’re bloody in. Besides, fires in hospital corridors, criminal charges for blokes disposing of cigarette ends — it’s all part of the same topsy-turvy sitch, right.’

‘You — you know who I am, then?’ Tom wasn’t that surprised.

‘Yeah, obviously. With the state the old man’s in and you astande, you’d be a fool not to pitch up. I’ll ask Atalaya’s spiritual manager if it’s OK now for you to see him, yeah.’

‘Manager?’ Tom was bemused.

The young doctor laughed. ‘Her spirit intercessor. No Tayswengo can talk directly to her makkata; ritual business is organized by a manager, right. ’Course, that’s not their own term; a literal translation is something like “informed explicator of the mind — world — body conundrum”.’

‘It’s incredible to me how much you guys—’

‘Know about the bing-bongs’ shit?’ The doctor grinned, while Tom searched his open face for irony. ‘It goes with the territory, yeah. You can’t doctor them if you don’t.

‘I’m Vishtar Loman by the way.’ He held out his hand and Tom took it.

They slopped along the corridor to the door of Lincoln’s room. Dr Loman opened it and slid inside. Tom waited. A smell of meat cooking tickled his nostrils. The little fire succumbed to the sprinklers and they cut out. The shreds of smoke and steam were inhaled by ventilation ducts. It fell silent, replete, and once more Tom could hear the natives in the parking lot baying for admission.

The doctor was back.

‘You can come in now.’ He leaned forward and whispered: ‘Lissen, mate, I’m not gonna bullshit you, yeah. Your man’s in a bloody bad way. No matter what antibiotics we pump into him, we can’t seem to get on top of the septicaemia. If it carries on like this, we’re gonna have to try to drain the core of the infection.

‘That’s why the Intwennyfortee mob’re here; Atalaya’s makkata’s gotta, like, purify me and Mr Bridges — that’s the house surgeon — before we do the op’.’

Peering into the darkened interior of the room, Tom could see that a battery of equipment had been installed since his last visit: metallic boxes with winking LCD readouts, a pump that kerchunked with machine vigour, a monitor upon which undulated eight real-time graphs. Yet, jibing with this high-tech were tiny oil lamps, each fashioned from half a tincan. They had been set upon every available flat surface, and the room was thick with their sooty smoke.

Still whispering, the doctor drew Tom inside. ‘I’ve given Reggie a shot of diamorphine so he can cope with the ritual, yeah. He’s a bit high.’

Growing accustomed to the gloom, Tom saw Reginald Lincoln’s etched features well up on the white pile of pillows. The old man’s eyes glittered feverishly as he lifted a claw from the snowy covers and beckoned. ‘Tommy.’ His voice was oddly strong and confident. ‘C’mere, kiddo, we need to have a pow-wow.’

As he made his way across, a body surged up and wiry arms bound him. Tom was drawn in to breasts so resolute their nipples felt like probing digits. Atalaya Intwennyfortee’s hair was arranged in the Tayswengo style, and the edge of the discoid coif brushing against Tom’s neck sent an erotic jolt from his nape to his base.

‘I knew you was coming down,’ she husked into his clavicle. ‘Now youse astande, any damn thing can go up rightways.’

Tom was rigid in her circling arms, but when she introduced her leg between his thighs, he enfolded her, his hands swarming over the dry matt of her beautiful black skin.

Reluctantly lifting his eyes from Atalaya’s hair, Tom saw that he could see — and be seen. The functional furnishings of the hospital room — its high bed, the Venetian blinds on the wide window, a brutal commode, an articulated electric light — were exposed in all their obscene prosaism.

In addition to Lincoln, Dr Loman, Atalaya and himself, there were five others in the room. A naked makkata sat beside the bed leafing through a golfing magazine. Side by side on the couch below the window were three Tayswengo women, all with discs of hair set at jaunty angles on their long, thin skulls. Standing by the glass door that opened on to the balcony was a fifth Tayswengo woman. Or was she a Tayswengo — or even a woman — at all?

She stood, cocksure, one skeletal leg advanced. She was naked and entirely hairless, with her eyebrows and pubis shaven as well as her head. A long time since, she’d had a radical double mastectomy, the scars of which marked her chest like two badly sewn darts in the back of a dress. In one hand she held a long-handled spoon, while between her scissor shins Tom could see a camping stove with a bubbling aluminium pot on top of it.

‘Intwakka-lakka-twakka-ka-ka-la!’

Tom half understood what the woman said. He somehow comprehended that she was an Entreati sorceress, from the wildest and least assimilated of the desert tribes; and, further, that she was Atalaya’s so-called manager.

Tom felt his scrotum tighten and one of his knees began waggling uncontrollably. There was no one in the hospital room save him and the sorceress: the night, the rain, the others had all receded. The sorceress was standing in the lumber room of Tom’s life, her feet like blades cutting into the poorly cherished memories of forgotten friends. She stooped to pick up a rusty ice skate, a mildewed college year book. Clearly, she was searching for anything she might use.

One of the Tayswengo women got up and opened the door to the balcony. It broke the spell. Rain and wind gushed in, the oil lamps guttered and went out. Dr Loman snapped on the overhead lights. Everyone started; their hands went to their eyes. Muttering, the sorceress retreated to the balcony.

The infection on the old man’s head had swelled massively. It rose to an angry red summit, and lava flows of sepsis wended into his sparse hair. The infection had a distinct and malignant psychic presence. Lincoln’s eyebrows and one of his cheeks were swollen and taut — yet still the eyes glittered, the arthritic finger beckoned. ‘C’mere, Tommy-lad,’ he said. ‘C’mere.’

‘Iss OK, you go fer ’im.’ Atalaya squeezed Tom’s arm. ‘You get smeared now — you astande.’

Another of the Tayswengo women rose from the couch and passed her a small pot. Atalaya poked a finger into this and withdrew it coated in a viscous substance. She reached up and anointed Tom on either cheek and on the bridge of his nose.

‘You go fer ’im,’ she reiterated. ‘Go.’

Tom approached the high bed warily, but Lincoln croaked, ‘C’mon, sit beside me.’

Careful not to disturb his tubes and wires, Tom propped himself on the mattress. Lincoln smelled meatier than the meat stewing on the sorceress’s stove. His decrepit body had been tenderized by thousands of carnal pummellings, cured by the smoke of sixty times that many cigarettes. Now it was putrid. He grabbed the neck of Tom’s shirt and pulled his face to his own. There was shit and mischief on the old man’s breath.

‘Get in there, boy,’ he grated.

‘I’m sorry?’ Tom queried.

‘Get in there, boy,’ Lincoln said again; and, following the pinpricks of the old man’s pupils, Tom noted first the preposterous engorgement tenting the bed covers, and then, beyond it, exposed by the wifely act of placing a urine bottle on a shelf, the gaping vulva of Atalaya Intwennyfortee.

‘Get in there, boy,’ Lincoln said, rasping the emphasis. ‘And when you’ve got out of there — get out of here! Don’t pack, don’t call anyone — just skedaddle. .’ Lincoln’s voice became croakier still, and ratcheted up until it sounded like a sheet of galvanized iron banging in a gale: ‘I’ve spoken to the Ambassador down south in Capital City — that pantywaist Winthrop Adams organized it.’ Dr Loman came over, but Lincoln waved him away. ‘You’ve got your pardon now, so get while the getting’s good, Tommy.’

Tom tried to pull away, but the old man’s grip on his shirt tightened. Gravy-coloured spittle spattered Tom’s chest. ‘Fix her up real good,’ he was almost shouting. ‘I need you to, boy — then get out. Get out!’

Lincoln spasmed, then collapsed back on the pillows. Atalaya came with a cardboard dish, and her husband coughed brown matter into it.

‘Engwegge,’ Dr Loman sighed. Then, turning to Tom, he said, ‘I think you’d better leave now.’

Atalaya smiled broadly at Tom as he followed the white coat out of the room.

The hospital had returned to some semblance of normality. There were medical and support staff in the main lobby. Drunken and damaged patients were slumped on moulded plastic seating.

‘What was going on earlier?’ Tom asked Loman. ‘They weren’t admitting anyone.’

‘It’s the engwegge,’ the doctor explained. ‘Look here.’

He led Tom out through Emergency, then pointed to the black gloss of the parking lot. ‘You see those little brown dollops?’

Tom could just make out the discarded engwegge chaws sixteen metres off, disintegrating in the rain.

‘Thing is,’ Loman continued, ‘engwegge isn’t allowed in the hospital, yeah. We have to get ’em to spit their plugs out before they can be seen to.’

‘No matter how hurt they are?’

‘They can be bloody dying, mate, but we won’t treat ’em while they’re damaging their health. Look,’ Loman said, shrugging, ‘I’ve gotta go back in. You can prob’ly get a cab down by the main gate — there’s usually a few loitering, even this late.’ He moved off.

‘What — I mean, the engwegge,’ Tom called after him. The doctor turned and eyed him quizzically. ‘They had it up in the room — they were giving it to Mr Lincoln.’

‘Oh, that,’ Loman laughed. ‘There are exceptions to the rules so far as the desert mobs are concerned — very important exceptions.’

The clerk in the convenience store where Tom got his groceries had a name badge on her lapel. It read HITLER. Tom asked Swai-Phillips about it, and the lawyer said. ‘Sure, that’ll be her name, right enough. What was she, Ibbolit? Gandaro p’raps?’

‘I–I guess so,’ said Tom, who, although he could now distinguish the hill from the desert tribes, still had difficulty with further subdivisions.

‘Bastard hill mobs.’ The lawyer took a swig of beer and beckoned over the barman, who brought a fresh thimble-sized glass and took twenty-five cents from the pile on the bar. Then he retreated to his own perch, a high stool next to a peanut dispenser shaped like a peanut. The chiller cabinets ranged along the back of the bar cast a forensic light on the barman’s shaven and cicatrized scalp. The raised white scars must, Tom thought, observing his ugly scowl, indicate the seats of his ill-will and bad character.

‘They don’t think anything much is what it damn well is, yeah,’ the lawyer continued enigmatically. ‘There’s that cargo-cult nonsense, and these damn-fool names they take. Think it’ll give ’em power, see, keep the bad spirits offa their backs, right.’ He snorted. ‘Nonsense! Total bloody superstition. Anyways, Brodzinski, what’re you doing shopping?’

Tom took a sip of his own beer before replying. They were both on beer — the weather demanded it. But Tom had also had a few shots before Swai-Phillips showed up. He was a little drunk and tried to conceal it by speaking deliberately. ‘I’ve taken to cooking for myself at the Experience. There’s a kitchenette, and it’s cheaper.’

‘Bullshit!’ the lawyer expostulated. ‘You can eat good for a few cents at the food court. What’s the real reason?’ He rounded on Tom, lifted his shades, gave him the bad eye.

‘Well, if you must know, it’s Prentice.’

‘He bothering you — or, what, interfering?’ As so often with Swai-Phillips, Tom had the uneasy feeling he was being laughed at.

‘No, not exactly bothering, it’s more that he kind of fastens on to me whenever I step outta the goddamn hostel. Where’s he staying, anyway?’

‘Prentice?’ Swai-Phillips seemed confused by the question. ‘I dunno — with Mulgrene, their attaché, I think. You’d have to ask him yourself — or Squolly. Prentice is on more restrictive bail conditions than you.’

Everything Swai-Phillips said concerning Prentice appeared to tease Tom with his ignorance of the other man’s crime. Not that he felt ignorant any longer, as he’d had enough hints: Prentice was a sex-offender of some kind, probably what the lawyer termed a ‘kiddie-fiddler’. He certainly looked the part, with his crazy fringe, his doughy face and his dude’s outfit.

Prentice must, Tom thought, be staking out the Experience, just like the cops. For the past week, whenever Tom left the hostel, Prentice was there, strolling towards him along the sidewalk, his dumb hat — or a dumb replacement — tucked under his poultry wing of an arm.

‘Mind if I take a turn with you?’ he’d say, and, even if Tom demurred, he’d insist: ‘Look, old chap, I haven’t a pal in Vance to speak of, so I’d be awfully grateful for a little company.’

Little company, eh. Tom nearly slapped him in the face, a face that was becoming increasingly corrupted by the rash spreading up from his jaw. Perhaps it was pity, but Tom always gave in, and together they would thread their way between the other, less culpable pedestrians.

In instalments that lasted the time it took to get to the mall or the call store, Tom heard Prentice’s story.

‘My lady wife’, he said, ‘is staying down south. Cousin of hers has a little spread a couple of hundred clicks from Capital City. He migrated here for the good life — you know how it is. My countrymen, well, we have strong links with this place, as you know. It’s not exactly a sense of ownership, more, well. . stewardship. We need to keep an eye on it, make sure the local Anglos aren’t too rash.’

‘You really believe that bullshit?’ Tom was incredulous; Prentice was coming on like some lordling, sent out to the colonies to tote the white man’s burden.

‘Oh, absolutely.’ Prentice was unfazed. ‘You take my wife’s cousin’s station. He’s got almost a whole section — but he can’t make it pay any more. You see’ — he leaned in conspiratorially — ‘those bing-bongs, they burnt off the scrub for bloody years. It’s completely messed up the water table, leached all the nutrients out of the soil and replaced them with salt. Gerard — that’s my wife’s cousin — he needs a square mile or more to raise a single head of cattle.’

And Prentice, bandy-legged, clumped on along the sidewalk, lost in his fantasy of stewardship.

Tom wondered what he made of his bing-bong-blooded lawyer. Prentice was beyond caricature; the lines that described him were too distorted. In every exchange Tom had with him, he was on the verge of blurting out: ‘What exactly is it that you’ve done? Tell me now — right now!’

Yet he never did. Moreover, as their desultory promenades continued, Tom found a curious respite in this mutual circumspection. It was as if their inability to talk of what held them here, in Vance, was a kind of stoicism — manliness, even.

Swai-Phillips had an alternative explanation, one he tossed out as he tossed back another beer: ‘The makkata, yeah. Well, he divines degrees of astande: astande por mio, astande vel dyav, astande hikkal. Some are for men, some for women, some only for the Tayswengo — others the Inssessitti. There are cross-over, or hybrid, mobs as well, and every degree of astande relates in a different way — both to all the degrees of inquivoo and to each other, yeah.’

‘It sounds bewildering,’ Tom observed idly. He’d read as much in Songs of the Tayswengo, but then — as now — he’d found it impossibly fiddly to link the hooks of this byzantine magical system to the eyes of his own numb understanding.

There was a flapping noise from outside the bar. One of Squolly’s men was shaking the water off his rain cape. He came in, sat down at the bar and nodded familiarly to Tom and Swai-Phillips. Then he unslung his automatic rifle and checked the safety, before placing it carefully on a towelling bar mat. The magazine curved up like a penis machined on a lathe. The cop began chatting to the barman, who, without needing to be asked, had brought him a beer.

Swai-Phillips continued in an undertone: ‘It is bewildering — even to me, and I grew up with it. But the strangest thing is that you find out which degree of astande you are in action, by the things you can do for other people — and they can do for you. You and Prentice, ’cause you’re both mixed up with the Tayswengo, you’ll discover, if you haven’t already, that there are things only you can do for him — as well as vice versa.’

‘Like buying his goddamn “fags”,’ Tom muttered derisively. For it had occurred to him that maybe this was why Prentice was dogging him. Every time they were on one of their forced promenandes, Prentice would slap the pocket of his khaki bush shirt and exclaim: ‘Bugger! I’ve forgotten them again. Look here, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t mind popping into the shop for me, would you? Thing is — I don’t know exactly why — but I can’t bring myself to buy a pack of fags. You wouldn’t mind, would you? Terribly grateful and all that. Thirty Reds’ll do the trick.’

Standing at the counter, Prentice’s $10 bill cocked in his hand, Tom wondered why it was that he agreed so readily to fetch the ‘fags’, an epithet he found at once risible and sinister — exactly like Prentice himself. Moreover, his asking Tom to buy them implied that the other Anglo, despite what their lawyer had claimed, knew full well what the charges against him were.

Watching Prentice scrabble with his quick-bitten fingers at the cellophane on the fat red pack of cigarettes, his fish-belly-white face haunted by cellular need, Tom felt, once again, a surge of righteous pride at his own sterling efforts to break the addiction. Efforts that had already been rewarded with this pay-off: not having to look at the medico-horror photos with which the health authorities disfigured the packets — lurid pictures of mouths eaten out from within and noses picked to a cancerous mush.

Swai-Phillips was staring intently at Tom, a smudge of beer foam on the fleece above his full top lip. ‘Yeah, well,’ said the lawyer. ‘After tomorrow’s prelim’ you may never see the bloke again. I dunno that I’ll be able to swing it for him, yeah.’

‘What d’you mean? Are you saying Prentice is in court tomorrow as well?’

‘That’s right,’ the lawyer drawled. ‘I managed to square it with the DA and the Tayswengo mob — guess you’d call it a block booking. Suits the court — the Tayswengo too. There are the makkatas, the managers, the witnesses. .’

‘Witnesses? What witnesses? D’you mean Atalaya?’

‘The witnesses,’ Swai-Phillips continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’ve all gotta come in from over there.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Besides,’ he continued, raising his fresh glass of beer to the cop, ‘Squolly’s blokes can’t go off patrol too long to testify, or who knows what hell might break out round here!’

The cop guffawed at this and downed his beer. The barman laughed too, and Swai-Phillips, naturally, was mightily amused by his own feeble joke. Unwilling to be left out, Tom laughed as well and, sinking his beer, slid further into the nauseating jacuzzi of drunkenness.

Later, Swai-Phillips drove Tom back to the Experience. Sitting outside in the Landcruiser he asked: ‘You’ve got your dress kit sorted out now, have you?’

‘Yeah.’ Who is this man? Tom wondered. My mother?

He’d been to the tailor Swai-Phillips recommended: a jaundiced Asian who ran his business out of his house, which was in among the dive shops by the jetties where, in the season, the boats set off for the Angry Reef. Prentice accompanied Tom, for he too needed to be outfitted.

Tom opted for a cotton fabric, but Prentice had picked up a swatch of woollen cloths and, flipping through them, selected a pinstripe that a bank president or a CEO would have worn back home.

Tom laughed at him. ‘You can’t wear a suit cut from that! It’ll be wringing wet with sweat before they’ve even sworn in the jury.’

Prentice’s face darkened, and with unaccustomed sharpness he snapped back: ‘There’s aircon’ in all the courts, Brodzinski, you’ll see. And no jury for a prelim’,’ he added as an after-barb.

Up in the crappy little apartment, Tom lit a mosquito coil and sat down on a chair covered with diarrhoea-coloured vinyl. Within minutes it was slippery with his own sweat. The aircon’ in the apartment sounded like a stick running along a picket fence — and it leaked brownish fluid. Most days Tom didn’t even bother to switch it on, preferring to suffer the soupy humidity.

He sat staring at the ludicrous truncated suit, which was hanging from the closet door. Perhaps, he mused, I should’ve gone for a darker fabric? The judge may be a bing. . the judge may have some blue taboo I know nothing about.

He sighed, then picked up a brown-paper bag, the mouth of which had been folded into a ruff. He set the fifth of whisky down again: it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a hangover.

Tom picked up his digital camera. He couldn’t recall having unpacked it when he moved over from the Mimosa. He certainly hadn’t used it these past three weeks — what would he have photographed? Prentice? The makkata making the cut?

He switched it on, selected the archive and began clicking his way through the photographs of the Brodzinskis’ family holiday. There they all were, Martha, Dixie and the twins, sporting in a swimming hole in the cloud forest, striking poses next to the car, eating at a road stop. The pictures were crisp and vivid — far more so than the sodden world he now trod water in. Despite his hefty bulk, Tommy Junior was hardly present in this album. There were one or two shots that showed the broad expanse of his back but none of his face.

Tom scrutinized that back — or, more exactly, the back of Tommy Junior’s neck. In one photo the vertical scar that ran from the base of the boy’s skull up to his crown was clearly visible, exposed by the way he’d gelled his hair. Tommy Junior had come to them with it — an ugly mark on a pretty baby. Martha, who handled all the particulars of the adoption, had implied to Tom that what lay behind the scar explained, in part, why an otherwise perfect — and more or less white — baby was available through this particular agency, which usually sourced children from poorer, browner regions of the world.

The scar. . Tom had seen one like it very recently — but where? Then it came to him: the old Anglo, bending to pick up the butt by the ATM in the hill town.

Tom sighed and switched off the camera. He unscrewed the whisky and took a slug. He gathered up his cash and the key to the apartment, then he set off for the call store to make his evening visit to his family.

In his tipsy state it seemed to Tom that the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ of the Tugganarong was even louder than usual. He had to stick a finger in one ear and press the handset hard against his other, so as to hear Dixie tell him: ‘I kind of stood. . like, next to. . not Stacey, but, uh, Brian, and he picked up one, like, medium and two supersize, yuh? So that was, like, it sucked.’

She halted and Tom, heedless of her feelings, asked her to put one of her brothers on.

‘They’re, like, out, Dad,’ she explained. ‘But Mom’s right here — d’you wanna speak with her?’

Since Adams had seen fit to notify Tom of his wife’s estrangement, Tom had stopped bothering even to ask if Martha was in the house. He was taken aback and could only mutter: ‘Uh, yeah, OK, I guess.’

There was a ‘clonk’ down the line, followed by a hiss of static so loud that Tom jerked the handset from his ear. When he replaced it, Martha was saying, ‘Are you there, Tom?’ And sounding concerned.

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m here, honey,’ he blurted. ‘I’m here, how’re you? I was getting worried.’

Again, there was a clonk, then a hiss.

‘I’m fine.’ Martha’s voice emerged from the sonic fog, poised, imperturbable. ‘But it must be nearly time for your court hearing. The kids have told me all about it.’

Tom waited, assuming she would add to this. She didn’t — the thousands of miles separating them twanged.

‘It’s tomorrow,’ Tom said eventually. ‘It’s only a prelim’ hearing. Swai-Phillips says I can then make, uh, reparations to the Intwennyfortee mob — to Mrs Lincoln’s people — then we can proceed on a, uh, better basis.’

Clonk-hiss.

‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer.’ Now Tom thought he could detect a peculiar flatness in Martha’s intonation. ‘I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

This wasn’t Martha’s way of speaking at all. Confused, Tom let the handset drop. It clonked on to the ledge the phone sat on, then there was another static hiss and, reedily, he heard Martha’s voice reiterate: ‘I’ve heard he’s a good lawyer. I’m sure if you put your full trust in him, then he’ll reward it.’

Slowly and carefully, Tom replaced the venomous snake of the handset on its cradle. He stood smearing the sweat from his brow into his hair. The ‘Gollymollydolly’ of the Tugganarong swelled up like the chafing of crickets. Tom went to pay the call store’s manager, who sat in a booth watching a TV show set among surfers and lifeguards, which was beamed from down south.

Late that night, when Tom was dreaming of a desert corroboree — hundreds of naked Entreati women, their breasts missing, howling at a bloody moon — his cellphone was taken with ague. It shook, then fell from the compartmentalized headboard on to his head. Dazed, he snatched it up and held it to his sleepy ear.

At first there were disordered noises, then they resolved into a rhythmic jingling trudge. Assuming that someone had left their cell unlocked and it had dialled him automatically, Tom was about to break the connection, when over the trudge came a tinkling laugh.

‘Ah! Tee-hee-hee!’ Followed by Martha’s voice: ‘Well, y’know how it is, you’ve gotta say these things to keep ’em happy, yeah? I mean, their pathetic little egos require it, yeah?’

Except, it couldn’t be Martha — unless, that is, she was deliberately impersonating the local Anglos’ accent, its raucous vowels and the useless affirmatives with which every other statement was concluded.