The Butt

9

They did visit the Giant Sugar Sachet at Wilmington. Prentice insisted on Tom photographing him standing on top of it, striking a pose at the railing, which was a steely simulacrum of crinkled paper.

Through the viewfinder, Tom saw Prentice’s head, and behind it clouds of white vapour gushing from the refinery’s cooling pipes. Prentice also wanted to do the tour, but Tom drew the line at this. The air smelled sweet and burned. Tom, who had a hangover, gagged on it, saying, ‘If we’re gonna make the Tree Top Lodge before nightfall, we gotta get a move on.’

As the day progressed, the country began to change. The steady beat of the cane rows faltered, became staccato. Smaller fields with arable crops began to appear. The clapboard shacks lost their stilts and grew corrugated-iron hides. Route I twisted, turned, shrugged its bitumen shoulders and began to mount the Great Dividing Range in a series of switchback bends. The rainforest, furry with ferns, woven with lianas, tumbled down to meet their puny SUV as it laboured up the inclines.

There were no more road-trains. They came upon trucks, with a single semi-trailer, inching through the hairpins, and forming temporary moving bridges across the churning streams in the upland gullies. The only other traffic consisted of open-topped five-ton police trucks. In the backs of these sat squads of impassive Tugganarong, their hands clenched on their rifles, their eyes vacant.

They stopped for a counter lunch at a bar in Hayden, the hill town where Tom had tried to buy the Gandaro spirit wagon for Tommy Junior. The native craftsmen and trinket sellers were gone from beneath the baobab tree. There were hardly any auraca wagons or rickshaws in the churned-up mud of the streets. Walking past the ATM where he had withdrawn money all those weeks before, Tom half expected to encounter the old wino, but he wasn’t around either. Indeed, there were few hill people in Hayden, and, of those that were splashing between the concrete boxes of the stores, a mere smattering were Anglos of any description.

Sitting at the bar, struggling with a burger engorged by eggs, tomatoes, pineapple chunks, cheese slices and bacon rashers, Tom observed: ‘I hadn’t exactly taken in how few Anglos there are actually living up here. The local people must depend an awful lot on the tourists — what do they do when they’re gone?’

‘Ah, now, Brodzinski.’ Prentice twisted his independent fringe with his nicotine fingers. ‘Your bing-bong never does any work, as such. Sits in his longhouse, chews his engwegge, chucks a few seeds out the door. Soil up here’s so bloody fertile he doesn’t need to even till it. When the taro comes up, he sends out the womenfolk to pull it and pound it.’

Tom yearned for the native barman to come over and slap Prentice, but he was glued to the TV above the bar, which displayed the spark and puff of automatic weapons, and a tanker turned on its side in the desert sand, like a whale stranded on a beach.

The sound was turned down, but in the coloured strip that ran along the bottom of the screen marched the thread: ‘Roadside ambush east of the Tontine Townships renders 22 lives non-viable. Insurgents blamed. .’

‘You know what they say, Brodzinski,’ Prentice continued. ‘The Tugganarong are the ethnics the Anglos wish they’d discovered when they got here, while this lot’ — he pointed flagrantly at the barman — ‘are the ones they actually did.’

‘I don’t give a shit about that,’ Tom said. Then, calling to the barman, he pleaded, ‘Hey, fella, you wouldn’t mind switching on that heater of yours, wouldya? I’m freezing here.’

They reached the top of the escarpment an hour or so after lunch. Tom regretted the shot he had taken to warm himself up. No matter how carefully he adjusted the car heater, he was either too warm and sleepy or too shivery to negotiate the potholes that now began to crater the blacktop.

Prentice didn’t notice any of this; he was rustling the capacious pages of one of his own national newspapers. Tom couldn’t conceive of how he had managed to buy it in Hayden. Prentice insisted on giving him terse, verbal updates on a sports game that was of consuming interest to him: ‘Addenley’s been bowled out, there’s no way we can avoid the follow on now.’ Even though back in Vance, Tom had told him that he knew nothing of the game and cared still less for it.

While Tom struggled with the steering wheel, peering through the misted-up windshield, his indolent companion reclined, feet up on the dash, as if he were on a motorized Barcalounger. And if Prentice valued his neck enough not to light up in the car, he never the less asked every few miles, when Tom thought they might stop. Then, in anticipation of his ‘fag break’, he withdrew a filter-tip from its box and toyed with the miniature white penis, until his chauffeur — gnawed at by attraction and repulsion — pulled over.

At least the landscape was worth stopping for. As Prentice turkey-cocked, gobbling smoke, Tom surveyed the cloud forest. The canopy fell away from the road, dipping into dells, then swirling up in frills and ruffs of greenery, from which surged the petrified waterspouts of volcanic plugs. Cloud snagged on these rocky nodules; while in the deep valleys, where the Handrey’s terracing created the contours of an actual-sized topographical map, the mists slowly roiled.

The overall impression was at once homely and fantastical, an effect heightened, once they resumed the drive, by the pasturage of Anglo farmsteads, with its drystone walls and too-green grass, upon which grazed Friesian cattle. Their chocolate and white jigsaw markings were utterly incongruous: kids’ stickers, crazily affixed to this alien environment.

Handrey longhouses were set high up on the vertiginous slopes. Some of these were, Tom guessed, enormous, their curved walls of smoothly adzed logs making them appear organic, not man-made.

Wild auraca huddled near the treeline, nuzzling their long necks together: the furry boughs of subsidiary copses. Once, a family group broke across the road in front of the SUV: bull, cow, three or four calves, leaping wall and ditch, their hooves slithering, their necks waggling. Tom braked hard, and Prentice, roused from his paper, said, ‘Magnificent beasts.’

Tom cursed, put the car back in shift, drove on.

Shortly before dusk they reached the Tree Top Lodge, where the Brodzinskis had spent the three happiest days of their vacation. Tom had hung on to the prospect of a relaxing break here all the way from Vance. He recalled giggling gaggles of naked brown kids leaping into the pool, and mingling easily with the tourists’ paler, pinker children.

Their parents had lain around on the teak decking of the teardrop-shaped pool, while the brown kids’ parents brought them chilled drinks and meaty tid-bits on bamboo skewers.

Up in the cloud forest, Tom, Martha and the kids had been at ease. There seemed none of the ethnic tension that otherwise marred this idyllic land. Tommy Junior had emerged from his virtual world, and, wearing skin-tight swiming trunks, he bombed the multiracial pool with his own murky-brown body. The kids had squealed with joy; the adults flinched indulgently.

That night, in their beautiful cabin — a small-scale replica of a Handrey longhouse — Tom and Martha had tenderly embraced. This was enough.

The Handrey mob had gone. Tom dredged up some names and put them to the wet-season manager, a mean-featured old Anglo man who sat behind the reception desk in the darkened lobby.

‘Hildegard,’ he inquired, ‘and is it Harry? I thought they ran the place. . on behalf of the Tribal Council.’

‘Tribal Council!’ The old man guffawed. ‘Don’t make me shit meself. The owner puts them bing-bongs in during high season for local colour.’ He was chewing engwegge, and Tom found it difficult to take his eyes off the long bristly hairs that crawled on the old man’s Adam’s apple.

He missed a spittoon with a stream of juice.

‘That mob,’ he said, smacking his stained lips. ‘They couldn’t run a piss-up in a bloody brewery.’

The old Anglo’s hands shook as Tom handed over his and Prentice’s documents. He glanced cursorily at the laissez-passers, then turned the register so Tom could sign it.

‘You can sign for him too,’ the old man rasped, and Tom wondered if he had been over here so long that he could tell their respective grades of astande simply by looking.

Prentice stood a way off, behind a rattan divan on which lay the other partner in this dubious enterprise: an obese Tugganarong, who, utterly drunk, was drooling in front of a TV screen that made the lobby surreally cosy, with its close-up picture of the crackling flames from another ambushed convoy of fuel trucks.

Besides this, the only light in the entire compound was shed by the storm lanterns that hung from nails in the walls and the tree trunks lancing up through the boardwalks that connected the cabins. As he limped ahead of them along one of these, the manager chuckled self-indulgently: ‘Generator’s on the fritz. Only got enough juice in the solar batteries for the telly. Gotta have the telly, yeah?’

He showed them to adjoining cabins; then, before leaving Tom, asked, ‘Have you got any firearms in the car?’

When Tom conceded that they had, the manager became obliging. ‘I’ll get Stephen to bring ’em in and lock ’em up in the gun cabinet. Pissed as he is,’ he chuckled, ‘he’s the same as any other Tuggy when it comes to handling a rifle, yeah.’

Left alone, Tom went straight to the bathroom for a shower. He couldn’t find soap or shampoo; instead of the basket packed with toiletries he remembered, it was empty except for a crumpled piece of paper, which, when he smoothed it out, proved to be an IOU for ‘sundry bathing requisites’, signed in a shaky hand by ‘W. F. Turpin, Manager’.

It was the same story with the minibar, only this time there were several IOUs, dated over a period of weeks and reading, ‘IOU one miniature gin, London Particular brand’, all of them signed with the same Dickensian signature.

Tom didn’t have long to think on this, because Prentice tapped on his door to complain: ‘How am I supposed to shower after a bally-hard day’s driving in a trickle of cold water?’

Taunting him with its own superfluity, the sky chose that moment to gush, and rain hissed into thatch above their heads. Tom pointed out that it was he who had done all the driving, but Prentice wheedled on: ‘I say, Brodzinski, you wouldn’t happen to have a pair of fresh underpants I could have the loan of?’

Dinner was a morose affair. They sat on the long veranda, looking down at the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. In the feeble light from the storm lanterns, the manager limped from the swing doors leading to the kitchens. Behind these, Stephen, the fat Tugganarong, was, he explained, ‘cooking up a storm’. A remark confirmed by the loud curses, crashes and bangs that did battle with the thunder rolling overhead.

The appetizer was a grub as pale as Prentice’s face slathered in pink, creamy dressing. Tom couldn’t even begin to contemplate this; his companion, however, slurped his own down and then, with a curt ‘D’you mind, old boy?’, took on Tom’s as well.

Then, a long wait.

A road-train with two semi-trailers sloshed into the muddy parking lot. In the gloom, the two identical grinning Mediterranean women painted on their sides were sinister: votive icons of ancient goddesses. Beneath their leering faces was inscribed the slogan MAMAS WITH FORESIGHT ALWAYS SERVE SIBYLLINE PIZZA.

The rig’s four powerful headlights were lidded with a mascara of bugs, and a still-twitching auraca calf was caught in the mandibles of its steel bars.

With a sharp hiss, the driver applied his air brakes. He cut the engine and leaped down from the cab; a bulky, hairy fellow in a soiled string undershirt. Tom, noting regular features and slanting eyes, as the man clambered stiffly up to the veranda, guessed that he had a dash of Tugganarong blood.

The driver haled the manager with ‘Oi! William! Beer!’, then sat down at a table as far removed from his fellow guests as possible. He drank his beer and ate his grub cocktail in silence. The auraca calf became still on the grille.

Tom shivered — he was hungry as well as cold. He fixated on the blood-spotted sphincter of an ancient Bandaid that lay on the decking. Beside the pool there was a mouldy pair of cut-off jeans, a perished rubber sandal, a cracked snorkelling mask.

Prentice, detecting a bulletin of interest to him, disappeared into the lobby to watch the TV. Eventually, the manager — or William, as Tom now thought of him — came scuttling from the kitchen, three large platters cradled in his arms. He presented one to Tom with a flourish, intoning, ‘Smoked moa collation, Stephen’s pièce de résistance, yeah.’ Then set the second platter down in Prentice’s place before scuttling across to the driver.

‘Tough drive, Mr McGowan?’ he said ingratiatingly.

The driver only grunted: ‘More beer, William.’ He burped, withdrew a handgun from the waist of his pants and placed it on the table.

The moa collation consisted of thin white slices of the giant flightless bird’s flesh laid over two hunks of buttered bread. On the margins of the platter, diced pineapple and star fruit glistened. The unappetizing spectacle was finished off by a slurry of the same pinkish sauce that had coated the appetizer.

Tom groaned and took a long pull on his own beer. William had sententiously informed him that there was no whisky available, and this despite the fact that Stephen had been flagrantly drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Prentice came back from the lobby. ‘They’ve followed on,’ he told Tom, then tucked into his moa.

Tom still didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He stared down miserably at his own meat-shrouded lumps. Already, the drive had begun to give him constipation, as with each bumpy mile the road impacted his fundament. Tom thought wistfully of the coconut-milk curries that the jolly Handrey women had served on this very veranda in the summer. He poked at his food with his fork, and one of the long chunks wobbled.

Sometime later Mr McGowan stamped over to their table and stood bearing down on them with a confused expression. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, then, without waiting for a reply, pulled a chair from an adjoining table and slumped down. ‘William!’ he cried. ‘Beers all round!’

Then, nothing.

The trio sat in unconvivial silence for a long while. Tom and McGowan drank; Prentice methodically worked his way through the mound of food. In the kitchen, Stephen was having some kind of mental breakdown. Tom could hear him sobbing, and the whispered imprecations of William, as he tried to shut the temperamental chef up.

Tom felt drunk enough — but unpleasantly so. The beer lay on top of his belly, a subcutaneous demijohn, cold and slopping. Eventually, McGowan gestured at the SUV, which was parked beside his own rig. ‘Yours?’

‘Yeah,’ Tom conceded, and then added, as if to imply that were he to possess such a vehicle, it would be a far better model, ‘It’s a rental.’

‘Figured that.’ McGowan shook his head. ‘Thing is’ — he hooked his thumbs into the straps of his undershirt — ‘You’ll be needing a bit more fuel capacity if you’re headed over there, right.’ A thumb jerked. ‘At least a ten-gallon can — maybe fifteen, right.’

‘I kind of understood’, Tom said, ‘that there were regular road stops all the way down Route 1 to the Tontines. .’ He paused, then for the first time ever, added the super-fluidity: ‘. . right.’

McGowan stared at him for about thirty seconds in silence, then burst into uncontrollable laughter. ‘Tee-hee! Ho-ho-ho! Oh, yeah.’ He gulped back his beery guffaws. ‘There’re regular road stops, all right. Just don’t be too fixed on stopping at them, my friend.’

Shortly after this exchange Tom made his excuses and headed for his cabin. When he swung his storm lantern inside the door, its bright whirl caught a shiny rill of roaches, which flowed up the trailing sheet on to the double bed, then snaked across to where a lapping pool of their conspecifics were seeking entry to the motel Tom had brought with him from Vance. Still more roaches flowed over the smooth contours of Gloria Swai-Phillips’s parcel, which Tom had also left on the bed.

Tom almost dropped the lantern. Then, hating himself for it, he circled back to the lobby, avoiding Prentice and McGowan, who were smoking studiously in the parking lot, sixteen paces from the veranda and five from each other.

William chuckled when he saw the roaches. ‘Kids drop food in these cabins,’ he said. ‘Their parents do all sorts. I tellya, mate, it’s a full, rich environment.’

He’d brought a squeezy bottle with sugared water in it. With this he laid a trail from the bed to the door.

‘Leave the door open and they’ll soon clear out,’ he instructed Tom, then he added, ‘Sleep well.’

Tom didn’t.

The woman in his convoluted dreamscape was Martha, was Gloria, was both. She sat in the chair in the corner of the cabin and complained of the way the rattan was biting into her bare buttocks. Her stretchmarks were exaggerated — red claw marks on her white belly. She held the parcel Gloria had entrusted to Tom in both hands and pounded her thighs. ‘Court is in session,’ she announced. ‘I am presiding — and I’m spotting, Tom, I’m spotting. .’

This was minimization, for the teak boards beneath the chair were awash with her blood, blood that fell from the slits in the woven seat as the monsoon fell from the fleshy clouds above the Great Dividing Range.

The nightmare woke him, and, after he had tottered to the bathroom to pee, Tom fell back to sleep and entered another.

He lay in bed smoking; or, rather, he himself was made of dry golden shreds, sheathed in the papery cylinder of his skin. He exhaled, amd his mouth burned terribly as the smoke jetted out.

‘You got fever,’ Atalaya said. ‘Lie still, I bathe your head.’

She leaned over him, pressing her breasts against his face.

‘D — Don’t,’ Tom tried to warn her — but too late. She yelped, jerked away from him.

‘Why you fuggin do that?’ she spat at him.

Tom’s mouth burned terribly; he exhaled another plume of smoke. .

And awoke with a start. He was lying on his back. Light beams flooded through the blinds, and in them he could see the smoke of his own condensing breath.

Tom climbed on to the veranda to find Prentice already hard at work on an elaborate fried breakfast. ‘Heart attack on a plate,’ he remarked jovially. ‘Best thing for a hangover.’ He conducted Tom to the seat opposite with a fork lurid with egg yolk.

There was no sign of McGowan or his rig. Their own mud-splattered SUV had several chickens roosting on the raised cowling of its hood. Lumps of their excrement clung to the windshield. Tom gloomily massaged his sandpapery muzzle, foreseeing that he would have to be the one who cleaned this off.

Stephen, the hysterical chef, deposited a platter in front of him and grunted, ‘Coffee?’

Tom sat, nauseated by the foody stench, and stared at the Day-Glo eggs, the rumble strips of bacon, the discs of blood sausage that glistened like oily bitumen.

Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Erumph. I hate to say it, but’ — he took out the pack of Reds from this breast pocket — ‘there’s no better way to round off a breakfast like that than with a fag.’

Tom hunched on the commode in the tiny bathroom. He kneaded the folds of his belly, while inventing spells to magic evacuation. It didn’t work. The cups of Nescafé with which he had sluiced his brain made him jittery. He might, he thought, do something truly dreadful today: load one of the Galil’s magazines with the long, evil-looking cartridges. Aim lazily at Prentice’s denim leg, then shatter it with a burst of fire.

‘I say,’ said Prentice, looking down at his stump, ‘what the devil did you do that for?’

Tom snickered, twirled the toilet paper holder, rasped at the sore skin.

He couldn’t find either William or Stephen, although the rifles in their olive-green sleeves had been clipped on the SUV’s rack, and the chicken shit was gone from the windshield. Finding a tariff list on reception, Tom counted out the requisite bills. It was high time he and Prentice had a reckoning: so far everything was either on Tom’s credit card or he had paid cash. Prentice hadn’t even offered to contribute, yet for some reason Tom found it difficult to ask him.

Tom called out, ‘Stephen? William?’

Parakeets chattered on the back veranda, but the Lodge was silent — ominously so. Even the TV was switched off. Tom pictured their hosts, loosely entwined on a mattress damp with come. William’s ratty brow nestled between the breasts of his Tugganarong friend. Tom tiptoed out of the lobby and down the wooden steps to the parking lot. He was conscious of leaving something irrevocably behind — and had an impulse to return to the cabin and check it again. Prentice was already waiting for him in the SUV, sitting sideways in the passenger seat, blowing cigarette smoke into the golden morning light.

They drove all morning, stopping only to fill up with gas and pick up the can McGowan had recommended.

The landscape was reaching a kind of crescendo: the road tying itself in knots as it worked its way through a maze of volcanic features. The cloud forest frothed up, so that they drove through dappled tunnels, long, mossy creepers fondling the windshield.

There was hardly any other motor traffic, but from time to time they rounded a bend to find the road ahead filled with a slowly plodding mob of Handrey, the women plump and swathed in brightly patterned togas, the men herding laden auracas, the children naked, skipping along and playing tag.

As the brown mass of humanity parted to allow them passage, Tom wound down his window and exchanged greetings, happy to be enfolded — albeit temporarily — by the jolly hill people.

Prentice was unmoved. He sat stock-still, eyes front, his young-old features twisted in disgust; and when Tom accelerated, he delivered a stream of invective: ‘Bloody lazy bing-bongs. The liberals say they’re closer to God — but they’re hand in paw with the bloody monkeys. I tell you, Brodzinski, the desert mobs are still worse, naked bloody savages. Only your Tugganarong is worth a damn, see, because he’s been subjected to a proper colonial power. Trained up, taught to be a servant to his masters. Without the work we put into the Tugganarong who’ve now come over here, these Anglos would be finished already. Kaput.’

Tom now knew better than to interrupt: to counter whatever Prentice came out with would only call forth still more of the same.

‘Down south I’ve a Tugganarong — well, obviously he’s not a friend, but I respect Jonas. .’

Prentice was wittering on when they entered a clearing, where, in the full glare of the noonday sun, two entire squads of paramilitary police were disporting themselves on the red rocks. Some were brewing up tea on portable stoves; others had stripped off their uniforms and were splashing in the crystal waters of a stream. One group were gathered by a large-calibre machine gun on a tripod. As the SUV caromed past, the Anglo officer who lay prone behind it tracked them with the weapon’s vicious muzzle.

This shut Prentice up for a while. They drove on in silence, Tom tormented by Prentice’s very proximity — his rotten, cloacal physicality — yet feeling utterly alone. Like a wife, Prentice encroached on Tom the entire time: borrowing nail clippers and shampoo; asking him to lift this, or tote that. And, equally wifely, the other man left Tom alone to be immolated by his own fiery feelings.

The country was changing. The tree cover became sparser, the road un-kinked itself, the volcanic extrusions retreated into the long grass. Up above, the cumulus clouds condensed — then evaporated, leaving behind only cirrus brush strokes on the cobalt-primed canvas. The heat began to build, and build. Then, at some definite — but, for all that, unnoticed — point, the little SUV tipped over the central fulcrum of the Great Dividing Range, and they were propelled down its far side into a new, old world.

‘This,’ Prentice cried. ‘This is the real over there, all right. Oh, yes, my friend. Oh, yes.’

Tom gritted his teeth, although he too was overwhelmed by the prospect that opened out before them: a country so wide and vast and old-seeming; a country of beige rock formations, smoothly streamlined like cetaceans, as if they had been beached by the retreat of ancient oceans.

A country of tinder-dry yellow grasses and tall spindly eucalyptus trees, their fire-blackened trunks bare for fifty, sixty feet up to the shimmer of the canopy. The trees were so evenly spaced that they gave the impression of a colossal plantation. Tom stared down avenues miles in length to either side of the road, searching for the habitations of the constant foresters.

The metalled road faltered, stuttered, then the blacktop gave out altogether. Route I was now a red dirt road, heavily corrugated, so that the car’s tyres whacked from trough to trough, filling the interior with an insistent thrumming. Tom changed up to prevent skidding, and they bucketed on.

An enormous road sign swam towards them out of the heat-haze — the first they had seen that day. The destinations it listed — TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, KELLIPPI BAUXITE MINES, AMHERST, TRANGADEN — sounded prosaic, while the distances were unthinkable: 2,134 KMS, 2,578 KMS, 5,067 KMS, 5,789 KMS. Tom added on the thousand further kilometres he would have to cover on shifting-desert tracks from Trangaden, to come up with a total that suggested a maritime circumnavigation of a hitherto unknown globe.

Prentice saw them first and barked: ‘Pull over!’

Slewing to a halt, Tom leaned across and followed the waxen wand of Prentice’s finger to where, a quarter of a mile off, the tightly massed giant birds were tramping through the bush. Tom could make out their pearlescent plumage, and the curious movement of their backwards-jointed legs. There must have been over a hundred moai, and even at this range the men could hear their monstrous gravelly burbling.

‘Wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open with that lot, old boy,’ said Prentice. ‘You know they’re incredibly aggressive. Down south—’

He was cut off by a black vortex of flies, which spun in through the open window and corkscrewed into his open mouth. Tom would have laughed — but within seconds the car was a maelstrom of buzzing flakes, shaken up by the two men flailing at them.

‘Oh, yes,’ Prentice spluttered. ‘This is the real over there, godforsaken, flyblown. . and. . and y’know who’s to blame for it?’

‘Who?’ Tom gagged.

‘The bing-bongs, of course. The bloody bing-bongs.’

Tom drove off as fast he could. With the aircon’ blasting and the windows wide open, the suction of the draught extracted most of the flies, but still, entire drifts remained on top of the dash. Prentice put on his hat and rolled down the fly screen, thus completing his transformation into a Victorian spinster missionary. When Tom tried on his own, he discovered that the screen was too opaque for him to see the road. He set his jaw and drove on, determined to become accustomed to the diffident tickling in his nostrils, and at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

The two remained like this — massively stoical in the face of many tiny irritants — for the next two hundred corrugated miles, until Bimple Hot Springs came into view, and Tom suggested they stop to get something to eat.

‘It’s true,’ said Mr Courtney, lazily flicking the flies away from his bulbous grey eyes. ‘What your friend says about the bloody flies. It was the bing-bongs — and worse, they’re still at it, right.’

‘At what?’ Tom queried. He too was flicking but irritably, and he wondered how long it would be before he could treat the flies with such disdain.

‘Oh, yairs.’ Mr Courtney tugged up a handful of hot sludge from the slough they were lying in and applied it to his broad, sun-reddened brow. ‘Y’see, yer bing-bong could kill only the odd moa or flipper with his primitive spears, right. Then we pitched up, and we brought rifles, right.

‘Well, yer bing-bong, he’s a happy little bloke, has no thought for the morrow. He thinks “meat” — now, don’t he, so he goes on one bloody almighty killing spree. Been on it for near on eighty years now. Wiped out most of the moai, wiped out the flippers, wiped out the auraca — bloody feral camels and horses in all, yeah. Now yer bing-bong, he only takes the choicest cuts — even his bloody dogs get sweetmeats! All that bloody meat lying around — all these damn flies.’

Mr Courtney allowed his considerable bulk to slide down still further, so that all that was left of him above the mud bath was the top half of his face; his outsized chipmunk teeth gnawed on the sludge.

Mrs Courtney — who was even bulkier than her husband — gave a hippo snort, shifted in her picnic chair and affirmed, ‘Bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’

Bloody, thought Tom. Bloody, bloody, bloody.

They had found the Courtneys already comfortably ensconsed at the Hot Springs. Their Winnebago was the only vehicle in the parking lot, and, despite the bullet holes that peppered its rusty sides, its candy-striped canopy, with the picnic chairs and table beneath it, gave their little encampment a gay holiday air. As did Mrs Courtney, who, draped in a tent of a dress patterned with hallucinogenic Van Gogh sunflowers, insisted on serving the new arrivals with tea.

‘You’ll be lucky if the fat slag in there will dish up for you, yeah,’ she had said as she pottered with kettle and tea bags. ‘Silly cow’s scared of her own shadow.’

To Tom, who was unknotting the muscles that the drive had tied up, this remark was doubly ridiculous: Mrs Courtney was fatter than any cow.

The scarred clearing in the gum trees, with the steaming wound of the hot springs burping sulphurous fumes, had a minatory atmosphere. As did the motel, a ramshackle corrugated-iron building with a warped veranda that was raised up on stubby stilts.

To test Mrs Courtney’s hypothesis, Tom walked over, unhooked the screen door and went in. A plump girl with carrot hair and cartoon make-up — a purple Cupid’s bow masked her own thin lips — was sitting on a high stool poring over a celebrity-gossip magazine.

Tom was taken aback: apart from a narrow walkway running from the door to the counter, the entire room was behind bars — solid, steel bars that extended from floor to ceiling. In front of the counter there was a slit through which keys or candy bars could be exchanged for money. There were plenty of candy bars on the warped wooden shelves, together with cans of soda and beans, and stacks of Bimple Hot Springs postcards. There was an automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the girl.

Tom remained silent; so did she. He looked first through a blurred windowpane, then at the floor, where between his booted feet flies clustered in neat buttons, each a mutated splash of spilt, sticky fluid.

The girl, very deliberately, licked first her finger and then her thumb. She didn’t appear scared of anything. She turned a page.

‘We’re full,’ she said dreamily. ‘And there’re no take-outs ’cept burgers — bloody bing-bongs hit the last convoy.’

* * *

Prentice now brought the burgers Tom had ordered across to the springs. When he had seen the name on the map, together with the symbol denoting a road stop, Tom had pictured sylvan glades and clear pools of invigorating, mineral-tangy water. The reality was this smelly mire fringed by ghost gums, the bark peeling from their emaciated trunks. The naiads were these obese Anglo retirees from down south, who were wandering the interior on a permanent vacation.

At least the mephitic stench kept most of the flies off. Tom struggled out of the morass. His torso and limbs were smoothly coated with coffee-coloured mud.

‘You look like a bloody bing-bong,’ Mrs Courtney laughed, and Prentice snickered through a mouthful of burger.

By the time Tom got back from dousing himself under an outside shower, Prentice had finished his own snack and was gingerly removing his clothes, a towel — which Tom recognized as one of his own — wrapped around his waist like a kilt.

Prentice shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other, struggling out of his jeans. He hunched over to hide his crotch from view. Tom grimaced. But, despite his effortful modesty, as Prentice pulled up his swimming trunks, the towel’s flaps parted, exposing white thighs and a pink hairless scrotum.

Tom felt the twinge of the scar the makkata’s knife had left in his own thigh. Yet it wasn’t until Prentice was on his back in the mud bath that Tom realized what had provoked this: Prentice’s own groin had been devoid of marks of any kind.

Once he had reached the mud bath, Prentice lowered himself in and began to flop about in the muck, pushing his whole head under and squirming. Coming up for air, he made arcs for his eyes with fingers-for-wipers, then said: ‘I say, Brodzinski. I expect I’m quite a funny sight covered in all this — you wouldn’t mind bagging a photo, would you? My lady wife will find this awfully jolly.’

The burger was inedible — burned at the edges, near frozen at its centre. The stale bun flaked away on to the beaten earth beneath the Courtneys’ picnic table; the sesame seeds pattered on to Tom’s damp lap. He recalled the advertising copy on the billboards; ‘The table’s set, the silver’s polished, we’ve checked under the table for flippers — so where the hell are you?’

The child molester wallowed in the springs, applying mud to the corruption on his neck.

‘That’ll help,’ Mr Courtney observed. ‘Bloody good for eczema and such things, yeah. These springs are the only decent spot left in these parts,’ he continued. ‘Bloody bing-bongs have done for all the good land ’tween here and the Tontines.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Tom asked.

‘Just what I say.’ Mr Courtney lifted another handful of mud and let it plop on to his occiput. ‘They’ve grubbed up all the trees. They get a length of chain, stretch it between two utes and drive through the bush. Once the tree cover’s gone, the first few downpours’ll wash away the topsoil. But if it ain’t turning to desert quick enough to satisfy their black hearts, then they salt it for good measure.

‘All this land’ — he gestured grandly — ‘was bloody bonzer for stock before the bing-bongs crawled in from over there. They did for the game; now they’re doing for the bush ’n’ all.’

‘But why?’ Tom interjected.

But Mr Courtney kept right on: ‘You wanna know the sickest thing?’

‘What?’

‘Those sicko liberal pols down south, they’re giving the bing-bongs bloody grants to do it, yeah.’

‘They are! They bloody are!’ chimed in Mrs Courtney, who had popped out of the Winnebago’s door and now came flapping towards them, a gaudy moa that had somehow managed to escape the natives’ hideous decimations.

They were an hour out of Bimple Hot Springs when the country began to change again — change in such a way as to confirm Mr Courtney’s description, if not necessarily his analysis.

The gaps between the gums grew greater, while the tinder-dry grasses straggled away, revealing jagged stumps, supine trunks and bone-white fallen boughs. Salt pans fingered their way between the remaining trees, their rims glinting in the burning sun, which beat down mercilessly on their little SUV.

The flies too were merciless. In desperation, Tom said Prentince could smoke in the car; he even asked him to blow smoke into his face. Prentice happily obliged. To Tom, the cigarette smoke smelled unbelievably piquant — as if a filet mignon were being griddled between his companion’s fingers. To counteract the dreadful hunger, Tom asked him: ‘You don’t believe that stuff about the natives getting deser-tification grants, do you?’

‘Of course I believe it, old chap,’ Prentice exhaled back. ‘Because it’s absolutely bloody true.’

‘But surely it’s the Anglos’ ranching that did for. .’ He waved at the moribund bush. ‘. . all this?’

‘So the bleeding hearts would have people think.’ Prentice self-satisfiedly crossed his arms. ‘But the truth is they want the bing-bongs to have more of their beloved desert. They hand out a thousand bucks for every hectare they clear — that’s what my wife’s cousin says.

‘Some elements’, he continued, ‘won’t rest until all the cultivated land is gone — the cane country up north, even the good pasturage and arable land round Amherst. Bloody all of it.’

Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Why was it, Tom wondered, that this was the entire nation’s favoured intensifier? Besides, with this much bloodying going on, there must be a lot of actual blood. This rumination clotted his flyblown mind, and a chant started up in his inner ear: ‘Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Bloody-this, bloody-that, bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh. .’ for mile after mile, as the fireball arced over them and Prentice puffed.

Tom was so mindless in this mantra that he scarcely noticed the first few burned-out vehicles to the side of the road, with bullet holes peppering their bodywork, their windshields smashed and tyres fire-flayed. Then, twin-rotored helicopters began to chatter overhead. These lurched in the hot air, as awkward in flight as roaches.

Then Tom saw the back of the line.

There were Winnebagos and saloons, road-trains with multiple semi-trailers and smaller trucks, pick-ups and SUVS — all crammed with native hunters, their kills lashed to the fenders.

The line was off to one side of the road, and there was room to drive by it. This Tom did for a mile or two, until, with no sign of an end to the procession of vehicles, he pulled up and turned to Prentice: ‘How long to the next road stop?’

Prentice examined the map. ‘Maybe another five klicks.’

Tom hailed a native, who sat erect behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pick-up. ‘What’re you guys in line for?’

The man turned red-veined engwegge eyes towards Tom; his face was masked with indifference. ‘Gas,’ he clicked. ‘Then road block. Only gas fer a thousan’ klicks — plenny road blocks.’

He snorted derisively, then spat a stream of brown juice through the window on to the rusty roadway.