The Butt

8

Have you rented from us before, sir?’

The clerk regarded Tom Brodzinski with professional detachment. Tom inferred from her routine eyes that, while the tourist season may have been over, one Anglo was still much the same to her as another. He took in the purple patches beneath those incurious eyes. Her nappy hair had been severely cut to conform to Western expectations, while her ample, café au lait flesh was scooped into the red A-line skirt and white blouse with red epaulettes that was the company uniform the world over.

Adams had told Tom that many of the hill people resident in Vance had diabetes. They lacked the enzymes necessary to break down the sugar and the other additives in the processed foods they consumed, either out of indolence or economic necessity, or both.

‘I–I have.’ Tom was flustered. Not only had he rented from the company before, he’d dealt with this very clerk when hiring the MPV the Brodzinski family had taken on their tour of the Highlands.

Tom had spoken with her — on both pick-up and drop-off — for at least twenty minutes. They’d chatted while they checked over the vehicle together. There had also been a couple of phone calls with her concerning the location of the spare tyre, and a dink in the fender. Tom knew her name — which was on her badge, anyway — yet she had forgotten he even existed.

‘My name’s Brodzinski,’ he stressed. ‘It’s gotta be in your system.’

She riffled her keyboard, eyes flicking from screen to paperwork. She made terse remarks without looking at him. ‘Collision-damage waiver? Unlimited mileage? Fuel-surcharge waiver? Personal indemnity? Tontine policy?’

Tom grunted affirmatively to all of these save the last. ‘I’m sorry,’ he asked. ‘Tontine policy, what’s that?’

‘Your personal indemnity won’t cover you in the Tontine Townships, sir. So we offer our own tontine policy, right.’

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

The clerk sighed deeply. ‘If either driver or passenger is rendered non-life-viable in the townships, the basic premium provides between $10,000 and $200,000 to the other party, depending on proximate cause. This is guaranteed by the Company in association with Premium Eagle Assurance. Full details of all tontines are set out in subsection A19 of the rental agreement, right.’

The clerk rattled all this off so fast that, although the oddity of the idea struck Tom, all he said was. ‘Is that why they’re called that? I mean, the Tontine Townships?’

She looked directly at him for the first time — and it was as if he were stupid. ‘Tontine policy?’ she pressed him.

Tom glanced behind him, to where Prentice sat on a low chair, his pretentious hat on one of his bony knees, his bald patch sheltered by the waxy leaf of an undistinguished shrub. Prentice nodded.

‘Uh, OK, I guess,’ Tom said to the clerk.

‘In that case’ — her chubby fingers flopped on to the keys and a printer chattered into life. She swivelled, ripped off the printout, swivelled back, slapped it down on the counter. ‘Sign here, here and here. Initial here, here, here, here, here and here. Mr Prentice will need to sign here for the tontine.’

Tom wanted to ask her why she knew Prentice’s name but not his; especially given that Prentice couldn’t drive. However, she was rattling on: ‘Here’s your driver’s licence and credit card. We’ve deducted a $2,000 deposit, standard for rentals heading over there. Here are the keys; if you’ll give me a few seconds to get my rain cape and checklist, I’ll meet you in the lot to inspect the vehicle, yeah.’

Tom’s and Prentice’s respective government envoys were waiting out there. Sir Colm Mulgrene drew Prentice to one side, while Tom asked Adams about the tontine. But the Consul didn’t seem to hear him; he was rummaging in a drugstore bag. Tom could imagine the medicaments the older man had been buying: corn plasters, fungicidal powders, pills to relieve the stringy fellow of the bloating engendered by too much rich Handrey cooking.

The cloud cover was very low this morning. So low that the top half of the Metro-Center disappeared in its draggled fringes. There were dashes of rain on the pitted, oily surface of the lot, although the day’s serious downpours were still some way off.

Tom prodded Adams: ‘C’mon, what is a goddamn tontine?’

But the Consul wouldn’t be drawn. ‘I daresay you’ll discover, ah, en route, Brodzinski. Think of it as adding a little excitement to the journey. Frankly, I envy you. Driving for day after day across that amazing landscape, towering mountains like mere ripples on the horizon. .

‘Y’know, Tom’ — the romantic image tilted Adams into intimacy — ‘the desert folks believe the land is always becoming — never, ah, finished. That every time a traveller visits a region it, ah, springs into being for him, taking on the characteristics of his own mind. .’

As he trailed off, Tom thought back to their first encounter in the breakfast room at the Mimosa Apartments. Then, Adams had seemed the very epitome of buttoned-down, diplomatic rectitude: the kind of Ivy League second-rater who reaches his peak when he makes the right fraternity, and who then finds a niche in the State Department where he can slowly decline. Now, Tom wasn’t so sure. Was Adams perhaps a little unhinged?

Perhaps to confirm this — as well as to display his mind-reading abilities — the Honorary Consul lifted his left hand high in the air, then brought it down to truffle in the hair at the back of his head. It was an action Tom had seen him perform before, yet it was too studied to be gestural.

The car-rental clerk rustled up. Drawing Tom’s attention to the unusual position of the spare wheel — which was housed beneath the front fender — she said, ‘It’s only an emergency tyre, yeah, so don’t do over forty on it, or go off the hardtop.’

‘Isn’t that a little dumb?’ Tom objected. ‘I mean, it’s an off-roader, and as I understand it mostly we’ll be driving on dirt, with big distances between road stops — hundreds of miles.’

She slapped this down with a hard fact: ‘Lissen, this here is the only rental car you’ll get for over there — I mean, blokes like you.’

Her eyes slid across to where Mulgrene was unloading plastic-wrapped bales of diapers from the back of his Land-cruiser. Prentice loitered near by, smoking as usual.

‘It’s not a bad car,’ she continued emolliently, as she slid into the front seat. ‘You can drive a stick-shift, yeah? Five front, one rear, then this switch here takes you into 4WD, right.’

The SUV looked too short in the wheelbase for rough terrain, and the roof was as high as Tom’s head. The front seats were cramped — the back one only a narrow bench, and the trunk was clearly inadequate. Tom began to fret.

‘Where am I gonna put my bag? Let alone all the stuff I’ve gotta take on to Ralladayo?’

Nor did he like the fact that the SUV was a bright white. He’d assumed they would be given one with desert colours — or even a camouflage job.

‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Prentice said jocularly. ‘There’s a roof-rack, y’know.’

Ever since Prentice had turned up at the Entreati Experience that morning, he had been the dead soul of bumptiousness. He seemed to think it a fine jaunt to be travelling thousands of miles to make reparation for the sick crimes he had committed. Either that — or his crimes had been so vile that the desert trip was judicial leniency.

Tom thrust his flight bag into the cavity behind the driver’s seat. There was hardly anything in it anyway: just toiletries, a few T-shirts and pairs of short pants, some underwear, and his copy of the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo. The rest of the pathetic flotsam left behind after the wreck of his family holiday, he had dumped in a cardboard box that the manager of the Experience said he would keep safe.

Then there was the parcel that Gloria Swai-Phillips had left at the hostel for Tom to take to the Tontines. Football-sized and shaped, it was wrapped in layers of newspaper and tied up with string; ready, apparently, for children’s hands to tear it apart when the music stopped.

Prentice pointed at his own bag — which was of the squashed, retro-Gladstone type — with the tip of his cigarette. ‘I say, Brodzinski, d’you mind?’

‘Mind?’ Tom snapped. ‘Mind what?’

‘Mind slinging it in the boot for me. My elbow’s playing up.’ He flexed it pathetically. ‘Beastly gyp — can’t seem to shake it.’

Adams came over. ‘Commander Squolloppoloppou’s men will meet you at the Goods Shed Store; it’s at Webley and Frangipani—’

‘I know,’ Prentice put in.

The Consul ignored him and continued: ‘You can get the rifles and such there. Prentice, I believe, needs to obtain his, ah, medications. You’ll have to give the police this copy of the Court Mandate, and this one of your original visa-rights waiver; in return they’ll give you your laissez-passer. I’m afraid I’ll have to take your passport now; you won’t, ah, be needing it.’

They exchanged the relevant documentation, Adams neatly tucking Tom’s passport away in his floppy briefcase. To Tom, it felt as if they had come full circle, back to the breakfast room of the Mimosa. Adams had retreated from him since the night they had eaten binturang together. The Consul had sealed himself inside the ziplock bag of his professional detachment.

Tom got into the car. Adams leaned down to the window and fixed him with his chilly blue eyes. ‘As I’ve had cause to remark before, the law here works in a roundabout way. Trust me, Brodzinski, deliver the goods to the Intwenny-fortee, come back here, and the situation will have changed — maybe not today or tomorrow, but some day soon, and then it will have changed for the rest of your life.’

By way of an answer, Tom turned the key in the ignition. The SUV spluttered into life. He glanced sideways to check out if Prentice had finished his deliberations with his own diplomat, then said: ‘Understood.’

‘OK?’ Adams probed.

‘OK,’ Tom reluctantly conceded.

The clerk shouldered Adams aside. ‘The law of the car is that it takes diesel, not petrol. Remember that,’ she laughed. ‘Or you’ll be in big shit.’

Tom revved the engine, and it clattered like that of an old prop plane.

‘It’s possible,’ Adams resumed, obviously reluctant to let Tom go, ‘that I may, ah, run into you in the Tontine Townships. I have consular business that takes me—’

But Adams’s valedictory words were blown away as Tom, tiring of the situation, banged his foot on the gas. The SUV shot across the lot and skidded into the roadway.

‘Whoa!’ Prentice cried. ‘Sir Colm had his hand on the window — you could’ve hurt him.’

Tom pulled up at a cross street and glared across at him. ‘I want one goddamn thing straight with you, Prentice, from the start.’

‘W-What’s that?’

‘No smoking in the fucking car. Got it? No smoking in the fucking car. Do that, and we just might make it through this without me wringing your goddamn neck.’

Tom drove on. The anger felt good — a deep-heat embro-cation rubbed into his irritation, which was — he thought — the psychic equivalent of Prentice’s increasingly disgusting fungal infection.

‘No need to play the giddy ox, old chap.’ Prentice said. ‘You had only to ask.’

He flipped his butt out the window, then inserted his flat fish hands between his denim thighs, muttering, ‘I have the feeling this isn’t the start of a wonderful relationship.’

An unmarked car was parked up in the lot at the Goods Shed Store. Even Tom, who knew little of such things, could see that it was armour plated, and that the whiplash aerial was too long for a civilian vehicle. In it, three cops were gollydollying to each other. Their coppery beach-ball faces were impassive, their complicated caps were jammed down on their heads. Beneath their see-through rain capes their side arms were obscenely lethal.

The senior cop — a sergeant — checked Tom’s and Prentice’s papers. The other two gave them a brusque, pat-down body search, before going to look over their car.

Inside, the Anglo clerks — a couple of nerds with long stringy hair and heavy-metal T-shirts — affected not to notice the police presence. When, eventually, Tom and Prentice approached the counter, the clerks treated them as they might any other customers.

‘How may I help you today, sir?’ said one to Tom. He looked along the cavernous aisles that stretched beyond the counter. Their racks were stacked with all manner of equipment required ‘over there’: bales of wire, canvas tarpaulins, water butts, pickaxes, waders, collapsible boats, enormous decoy moai, hanks of rope, stacks of spare tyres and capstans wound with chain.

Further back, the downlights picked out hessian sacks of foodstuffs, and plastic demijohns of chemicals, fuel and potable liquids.

‘Uh, well,’ Tom said, summoning himself. ‘I don’t need much.’ Involuntarily his hand went to the thick wad of bills he’d concealed in his crotch. ‘I need some cooking pots, and, well, a couple of hunting rifles.’

‘Okey-dokey, can do, mister, can do.’ The clerk wind-milled his skinny arms. ‘First things firsty: what kinduv mob are these for, hill? Desert?’

‘Desert.’

‘Righty-hoo. So, Aval, Inssessitti, Tayswengo, or. .’ He dropped his voice. ‘Entreati, maybe?’

‘Tayswengo. Look, does it really make a difference?’

‘Oh-ho, yes. Yes, indeedy,’ the clerk crowed. ‘Your Tayswengo are cooking big auraca out there, right, not much else, and that needs a special kinduv pot. It’s the same with the guns — they do a very special kinduv hunting way over there.’

His explanation completed, the clerk squeaked across the rubber floor, then swung himself on to a wheeled ladder that scooted off down an aisle.

He was gone for some time. So long, that Prentice’s clerk was able to fetch, from a locked pharmaceuticals box up near the rafters of the giant shed, the boxes of ribavirin and amoxycillin that his customer required.

Prentice stood tapping his hat against his leg and clicking the heels of his boots together. He engaged the clerk in knowledgeable banter concerning the drugs. ‘This here Apo-Amoxi stuff, is it in 200 or 500 milligram caps?’ And when the ribavirin appeared in boxes stencilled SANDOZ, Prentice said, ‘Hm, didn’t know the generics were available here.’

‘Why?’ Tom hissed. ‘Do your reparations consist of these drugs in particular?’

‘Dunno, old chap. I mean, I do know there are plenty of hepatitis cases in the Tontines, but there’s as much — if not more — HIV. The amoxycillin will deal with a whole host of infections — chest, ear, urinary. .’ He affected a ruminative expression. ‘Look, Brodzinski, I’m not sure how well up you are on the townships — or over there, generally — but don’t imagine for a second it’s anything like Vance. We’re talking Fourth World conditions for the bing. . for the native people.’

‘I know that, Prentice,’ Tom said. ‘What I don’t get is why you’ve gotta take drugs and I’ve gotta take guns.’

‘Something to do with the nature of our offences, I expect.’ Prentice answered blithely; then, turning back to the clerk, he asked him: ‘This Apo-Amoxi stuff, suitable for children, is it?’

Tom might have had it out with him there and then, under the very eyes of the cops, who had returned from searching the car and regrouped, gollyfollying by a water cooler. However, his own clerk came squeaking back, dragging behind him a shopping cart cluttered with rifles.

He lifted these out, one by one, and laid them on the counter while spieling: ‘This here is an H & K PSG-1. It’s a.308, see, five- or twenty-round detachable box. Takes a tripod — and that’s a Hendsoldt scope with reticle illumination. . And this baby is a Parker-Hale M-85.’ He nodded at Prentice. ‘Which your friend here might be more familiar with. It’s another.308, ten-shot detachable box, scope’s fine. It’s a cool, accurate, long-range firearm. Some say it’s a shade too long, shade too heavy — I wouldn’t know ’bout that, maybe your friend does?’

Prentice preened. ‘I’ve handled one, certainly,’ he said. ‘I didn’t find it too heavy.’

Tom didn’t believe him for a second, but the clerk nodded, hooking his hair behind his ears. Then he took the final weapon from the cart, saying, ‘We’ve got an offer on these, the Galil, er hunting rifle. $355 each, or a thousand bucks for five. It’s another.308, this time with a twenty-shot detachable box. This is a neat piece: twenty-inch barrel, and the stock folds down to eleven inches. There’s a Nimrod scope and an integrated bipod. At 6.4 kilos it’s weighty without being too hefty — a lot of bang for your buck.’

As the clerk detailed each feature of the gun, he ran his boy’s hands over it. Now he unfolded the stock and pulled out the two little legs attached to the barrel’s housing. He set up the rifle so that it was aiming through the open doors at the afternoon downpour. A barrage of thunder rolled across Vance Bay.

Tom had no interest in firearms. Friends back in Milford hunted, but he himself had only ever gone out for jackrabbits with a.22 when he was a kid. Apart from the ones on cops’ hips, he’d only ever seen a handgun, in the flesh, once in his life.

Despite this, as soon as he’d seen the rifles in the cart, Tom knew there was something wrong with them. The Galil was the wrongest of the lot. The barrel was perforated at the end, and its housing was olive-green metal. The stock was heavily grained wood, the long strap khaki canvas, and the magazine — or ‘box’ as the clerk dubbed it — curved like those on the paramilitary police’s assault rifles.

The cops now strolled over and began examining the merchandise. The sergeant — who’d introduced himself to Tom as Elldollopollollou — picked up the Galil and checked the safety. Then he aimed towards the far corner of the store and pulled the trigger.

‘Two-stage trigger system,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Don’t really cut it, so far as I’m told.’ He removed the magazine and placed the rifle back on the counter. ‘Tell me one time again,’ he said to Tom. ‘Where you blokes are headed, yeah?’

‘We’re both going to the Tontine Townships,’ Tom told him. ‘Then I’m going on into Tayswengo country — all the way down to Ralladayo.’

Elldollopollollou smiled at this, a long, lazy smile. He pointed at the Galil rifle. ‘That’s your baby, then,’ he said. ‘It’s more like an accurized assault rifle, yeah. The Israelis devised it for’ — he smirked — ‘suppression in urban contexts. Kinduv hunting the Tayswengo get up to. . well, pretty much the same damn thing, ain’t it.’ He turned to his comrades and his voice rose: ‘Now, ain’t it?’

They all laughed full-throatedly, while Prentice joined in with his snide little snicker.

The sergeant turned back to Tom. ‘You’ll be needing kecks, boots and such for over there. Thorn scrub’ll rip you to shreds. Flake rock an’ pummy-stuff’ll tear yer feet up ’n’ all. Your mate, here’ — he thumbed at Prentice — ‘he’s got the right idea.’

He turned to the clerk. ‘Get this bloke here down some desert kecks and the rest of the clobber he’ll need. Get some ammo for these rifles while you’re at it, yeah, and some eskis for this bloke’s pharmaceuticals. There’s no aircon’ to speak of in that clunker,’ he said to Tom and Prentice. ‘Drugs’ll be perished before you get through cane country.

‘And make it snappy!’ he called after the clerk. ‘We gotta get these two to city limits and make it back in time for the game.’

This manly admission of dereliction of duty was the most hilarious thing of all; so the cops, the clerks and Prentice began laughing all over again.

* * *

It was almost four by the time they reached the peculiar juncture where the four-lane blacktop of the City of Vance — complete with its colour-coded kerbs, bright red fire hydrants and fluorescent signage — came to a sudden finish, and was replaced by the single potholed track of Interprovince Route I.

The cops’ unmarked car scrunched to a halt on the shoulder, and Tom pulled up behind. They all got out, and Sergeant Elldollopollollou directed his colleagues to get the two Galil rifles, in their olive-green prophylactic sleeves, from the trunk of their car and attach them to the rack on the back of the SUV. The rest of the reparations were already loaded: boxes filled the narrow trunk of the SUV, while the bundles of diapers were strapped to the roof-rack.

‘Here are your permits for the Tontines,’ he said to the two Anglos. ‘And in your case, Brodzinski, for Tayswengo Tribal Land. Remember, you’re subject to Provincial Police jurisdiction — that’s why your passports are held back here in Vance. This means you have to get these laissez-passers, issued by the Ulterior Deployment Agency, stamped at every checkpoint you reach. If you don’t, you’ll end up in choky.’

He handed the plastic wallet containing the documents to Tom. ‘Now remember, boys,’ Elldollopollollou added, ‘there’s a big bowl of wrong over there.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘So check it’s cooled before you gulp it down.’

He lowered his oil drum of a torso down into the passenger seat of the car. The last bit of him that Tom saw was the deeply creased back of his shaved neck. There, looping down from the speckle of his hairline, were several raised white curlicues: all that was left, Tom assumed, of the Tugganarong’s tribal tattooing, lasered away by the police medics when he joined the force.

The cops’ car bumped over the hump of Route I, fishtailed back on to the rain-slick boulevard, then nosed through the rainy drapes towards downtown Vance.

Tom stood staring after them, until Prentice called from the car:

‘I say, you haven’t got a camera, have you? I feel we ought to mark the occasion.’

Through the viewfinder Tom saw the small miracle of three distinct weather systems in the sky simultaneously. The monsoon shaded the gap between the whitish cubes of the civic centre and the maroon cloudbank. A rainbow arced over the Metro-Center itself, the spectrum as neat as an educational diagram. Further north, towards the airport, thunder surged and banged, and as Tom watched a lightning fork plunged into the mudflats of Vance. Yet, in the foreground, Prentice stood, his face illumined by bright afternoon sunlight, the grassy verge at his feet faintly steaming. The shutter caught Prentice in this expansive setting and put him in the tiny aluminium box: another specimen.

A few hundred yards away a cement mixer began to rotate noisily. Observing the piles of cinder-blocks and the bare hilltop fringed by a stockade, Tom suddenly grasped where they were: close to Swai-Phillips’s compound.

Tom knew the lawyer had gone ‘over there’. The day after the prelim’ hearing Swai-Phillips had called Tom. He was sitting in Cap’n Bob’s, the kiddie café on the ’nade, eating a hotdog and drinking a Coke.

‘You better go and say goodbye,’ the lawyer had said without preamble.

‘Say goodbye to who?’

‘Lincoln, of course.’

‘But he’s in a coma, he won’t even know I’m there.’

The hotdog was ruined now — a bit of medical waste on a wad of of bloodstained sutures.

‘How many times have I gotta tellya, Brodzinski, you’re the righter of wrongs. .’

At the hospital Lincoln had been camping alone in an oxygen tent. There was no sign of Atalaya or any of the other Tayswengo. Tom had asked for Vishtar Loman, but the young doctor was on leave, and he too had gone over there.

In daylight Lincoln’s room was once again prosaic; terrifying in its anticipation of mundane extinction, human lives switched off like the electrical appliances used to keep it clean.

Tom had stood, together with a monitoring nurse, and observed the old man for a while; all his pep, his busy venality, exhausted. The comatose state, Tom thought, looked worse than death: a provisional finality, the equivalent — in terms of brain states — of one of Adams’s ‘ahs’.

Now, following Prentice back to the snub-nosed SUV, Tom realized that even at this late stage he had been hoping for a sign — or even a miraculous recovery: the old man sitting bolt upright in bed, laughing merrily, ‘Only fooling!’ Groping the nurse’s crotch, then calling for a beer and a cigarette.

At least Tom had shaken off Prentice that morning. He’d had to see a dentist to get a troubling abscess dealt with. Tom thought this dated dental problem suited Prentice. He hoped the treatment would be commensurately old-fashioned: an extraction, without anaesthetic.

‘Damn nuisance, but I suppose it has to be done.’ Prentice had held his swollen cheek in his hand as he explained, ‘I mean, we’re hardly likely to find a competent practitioner over there.’

He reminded Tom of the colonial civil servants that his country had sent out to the wilds, during their brief imperial era. Tom had read somewhere that these men had to undergo appendectomies before they left; pre-emptive strikes against their own redundant organs, lest their inflammation prevent them from putting down tribal risings.

Tom now took one final look at the vista. As the storm moved off to the north, the rain-washed buildings shone in the sunlight. The happy, clean, rational city of Vance, with its wide boulevards and its hedges of jacaranda, frangipani and mimosa, where jewel-bright hummingbirds hovered, then vanished.

The marble pyramid of the casino, the hypodermic spire of the Provincial State Assembly building, the bulk of the Central Criminal Court — these were the true actors occupying the proscenium arch of Vance Bay. Naked makkatas and judges in their underwear, kissing consuls and wifely doppelgängers — these were the creatures of mere fancy, with no more substance than the clouds that sailed over the city from the open sea, the lenticular vanguards of which bore a distinct resemblance to the lenses of enormous, wrap-around sunglasses.

Tom shook his head. Behind his own new sunglasses his eyes tiredly wobbled. He hadn’t slept well. He thought of the roach motel, which, after much deliberation, he had decided to bring; this, despite the fact that, even with an old chopstick he had found in the grease-spattered kitchen of his apartment at the Experience, he had been unable to remove the corpse of its latest resident.

Getting into the car, Tom scowled at his companion, who was halfway out of the passenger door, blowing smoke.

‘I am Astande,’ Tom said, mimicking the desert-dwellers’ clicks. ‘The Righter of Wrongs.’

Prentice discarded his cigarette and slammed the passenger door — another annoying habit. ‘And I am Astande Por Mio,’ he said. ‘The Shifter of Burdens.’ He spread over his knees the first of their sectional road maps. It made him look, more than ever, like someone’s senile mother.

‘Whaddya mean by that?’ Tom barked, putting the car into shift.

‘Just what I say, Brodzinski — that’s the grade of astande that old bing-bong fraud gave me.’

‘You’ve certainly been shifting your goddamn burdens on to me these past few days.’

Tom wanted to accelerate and eat up some road, but from nowhere a dinky hatchback with learner plates had materialized, so they were stuck behind it, bumping along at twenty-five.

‘Yes,’ Prentice mused. ‘Most peculiar, that. I mean, I don’t believe in any of that bally juju, yet I do find myself. . well, I don’t quite know how to put this, sort of compelled.’

Me too, Tom thought. Me too. And as the rain had started again, he put on the wipers.

They drove in silence for the next three hours. Route 1, after undulating over the outliers of the Great Dividing Range, settled down on to the lowlands plains. On each side of the road there were dense fields of spear-leafed sugarcane, the rows of which strobed by in a greenish blur. The rain petered out after an hour or so, leaving wraiths of mist clinging to the cane fields. The occasional clapboard shack, raised on stilts, that loomed up had the deathly aspect of a sudden apparition.

Narrow-gauge railtracks crossed the road at intervals, along which clattered locomotives pulling wagonloads of cut cane: so much sweetness, Tom though, in such a sour place. He had to stop for these trains, but when he saw a road-train, either ahead or in the rear-view, he had to pull right off the blacktop, so as to avoid being crushed as flat as roadkill when the three — or even four — semi-trailers came roaring past.

It was at once tedious and nerve-racking driving for Tom; while, as navigator, Prentice had nothing whatsoever to do. There was only one interprovince highway: this was it, they were on it; and would remain on it through a thousand kilometres of cane country, a thousand of hill country, and a further two thousand of desert before they reached the Tontine Townships. Here Tom would leave Prentice and make a left.

The SUV rollicked down into the broad creek bottoms, and rattled acrosss the bridges of railway ties with a reassuring hum of its tyres. Tom, despite the need for intermittent tricky manouevres, lapsed into that waking dream that is the virtuality of long-distance driving.

Besides, he had driven Route 1 before, with his family, up to the lodge in the cloud forest and then back to Vance. He tried to convince himself that this was merely another jaunt, and that Prentice was only another idiot child. A child Tom was taking white-water rafting or parascending — for the garish signs advertising these attractions reared up along the roadside, their metal tenderized by the shooting practice of passing drivers.

They drove on through rain-washed country towns where the only signs of life were the semicircles of smoking men standing along the sixteen-metre lines outside the bars, and the brightly lit plate-glass windows of agricultural equipment dealerships. Darkness fell on the land, sudden as a cloth dropped on a birdcage. The SUV’s headlights carried a runway of bashed bitumen before them, and so they took off into the void, over and over again.

The car had moai bars, but, even so, Tom knew that once they were into the hills, and then the desert, they would have to avoid night driving. He had been warned that the giant flightless birds zeroed in on the lights of moving vehicles; they were damned by their own unevolved psychology to bomb the human occupants with their feathery bulk, and in the process commit suicide.

It was ten thirty when Tom pulled into the forecourt of a lonely motel. The illuminated lozenge of its sign crawled with bugs, and, as he stepped from the car, Tom was perfused with the soupy night-time atmosphere.

Standing in the tacky lobby, while a surly Anglo girl laboriously copied the serial numbers from their laissez-passers into the register, Tom looked in a strip of full-length mirror fixed to the wall and saw the two of them, now dressed identically in elastic-sided boots, jeans and khaki shirts. Like his bête noire, Tom had even acquired a broad-brimmed bush hat, complete with a roll of nylon fly screen. He wanted to grab the girl’s skinny wrist and cry out: ‘I’m not like him! I’m only travelling with him because I have to.’ Instead he put this to her pale face: ‘Is there anywhere a guy can score some liquor hereabouts?’

By the time Tom got back, Prentice had retired to his cabin. But, as Tom was unclipping the two Galil rifles from the rack, he re-emerged to ask: ‘I say, Brodzinski, would you mind terribly. .’ The request was completed by the tube of ointment he held in his hand, and a tilt of his weak chin that exposed the gooey corruption.

‘You want me to put that stuff on your goddamn neck?’ Tom took an incredulous swig from the fifth of whisky.

‘It’s, um, it’s. . well, back in Vance Lady Mulgrene was doing the honours. .’

Prentice wasn’t ashamed; only hesitant, like the moths batting at their heads in the yellowy downlights.

‘Is this to do with our respective grades of astande?’ Tom said. The whisky was planing away his emotions with bold strokes.

‘Oh.’ Prentice smiled. ‘I hardly think so, old chap. It’s just awfully awkward to spread on an even coat. D’you mind?’

Tom took another swig. ‘Lissen, Prentice.’ He was slurring a bit. ‘If I’m gonna do this at all I’ll need rubber gloves — I don’t wanna get it.’

‘I hardly think that’s possible.’ Prentice’s clipped tone suggested Tom had committed a dreadful solecism. ‘You see, Brodzinski, it’s psoriasis — it only flares up like this when I’m bally stressed!’

Tom carefully set the bottle down on the concrete and took the tube. Prentice grunted softly as Tom smoothed on the ointment. His breath was sour. The flesh beneath Tom’s fingers felt deeply cracked — fissured, even. When he had finished he said: ‘I gotta wash my hands now.’

‘Of course, old chap, of course,’ Prentice said, yet made no move to thank him or even open the door to Tom’s cabin.

Sitting sideways on the bed, Tom sipped his whisky and flipped through the tourist brochures that had been left on the pillow. Should they be so inclined — this being cane country — he and Prentice could visit the Giant Sugar Sachet at Wilmington the following morning, then go on to a hobby ranch at Villeneuve where tame auraca could be ridden.

The lump in his crotch had been bothering Tom all day: $10,000 made a turgid wad of cash. He ungirded himself and got it out: it smelled of his genitals handled by bank tellers’ fingers. He would have to find a better hiding place. Casting round, Tom lighted on Songs of the Tayswengo. There was no way he was ever going to plough through all of it — even a few pages knocked him out cold. Tom got out nail scissors and spent the next twenty minutes neatly excising the central portion of each of the pages comprising the final chapter of the book; this, he idly noted, was entitled ‘Tayswengo Dawnings: A New Future’.

When he had created a big-enough compartment, he put Atalaya Intwennyfortee’s blood money in it and closed the book. With the artful application of a few strands of Sellotape, it was possible for anyone to pick up the heavy volume, and even read the front sections of it, without being aware of the small fortune it contained.

As the level in the bottle of whisky fell, so Tom’s head sank down on to the book: a moneyed pillow. Gazing woozily at the bedside table, he contemplated his cellphone and digital camera. Unsteadily, Tom aligned the two devices, hoping, blearily, that they might somehow work it out between them during the night.

In that night, Tom found himself with Sergeant Elldollopollollou. The massive Tugganarong cop wore a soiled diaper — he reached his brawny, reddy-brown arms out to Tom. ‘Cuddle me!’ he cried. ‘Cuddle me!’

Tom took it as an order.