The Butt

But then, it occurred to him, that’s something I’ve sworn a whole heap of times before. This time, though, it would be different.

For the three weeks of the Brodzinskis’ vacation, Tom had found the prohibitions on smoking, in this vast and sunbaked country, particularly intrusive. There were strident signs in – and on – every restaurant, bar and public building, threatening fines and imprisonment not only for smokers themselves but even for those who – whether wittingly or not – allowed smoking to take place.

Moreover, outside the public buildings, there were yellow lines painted on the sidewalks and roadways, indicating where smokers could legally congregate: sixteen metres from their entrance.

Such measures, of course, existed in Tom’s homeland; yet there they hardly seemed so egregious. Besides, the bulk of the population had long since kicked the habit. While here, the whole garish infrastructure of this public-health campaign appeared, even to Tom’s indolent ethical eye, to have been imposed on the country’s polyglot and heavy-puffing population, in place of any more commanding civic morality.

And so it all had grated on Tom, turning those little interludes of cloudy self-absorption into hurried and unsatisfying liaisons with La Divina Nicotina.

Yes, giving up would free him from such bondages, while, at the same time, he would find liberation in doing the right thing, facing up to his mortality, his responsibilities as a father, a husband and a citizen. No longer would he sustain his individualism with such puerile puffing.

Tom was no fool; he understood that smoking was really only of any interest to smokers – and that, increasingly, that was all that interested them. Once free of the habit, he would be in a new world, where he could see things clearly and understand their significance, rather than being hectored by signs and lines.

Thinking of stubbing his final cigarette out, Tom looked around the balcony for an ashtray, or any other receptacle which could receive the worm’s cast of ash. But there was none. Next, he peered over the balustrade, down on to the balcony below, which projected out from the façade of the apartment block that much further.

Tom tipped the ash into his own cupped hand, tamped it into dust and blew this into the heavy, humid air. From below there came the noise of metal scraping on tile. A young woman had emerged from the sliding doors that, Tom assumed, must separate the balcony from the old man’s own serviced apartment. A very young woman – a girl, in fact.

She wore only a sarong, which was wrapped around her slim, sinuous hips, and, from where Tom stood, he could appreciate the orchidaceous perfection of her breasts, the taut purity of her matt-black skin. She must, he thought, be a desert tribeswoman, but what the hell was she doing with this dried-up stick of a guy?

What she was doing was drawing up a small metal table and placing upon it a tall glass, frosted with condensation and choked with fruit. She removed the newspaper, tidied its pages and folded it. What she was doing was unaffectedly ministering to the old man’s needs, to the point that she seemed quite unconscious of the way one of her long, pinky-brown nipples pressed against his neck, as she smoothed the sweat-damp hair on his forehead.

‘Thanks, honey,’ the old man rasped, and the complacent tone of his voice summoned up Tom’s righteous indignation, reserves of which were generous to begin with, and always easily replenished by the follies of his countrymen.

Jesus Christ! Tom internally expostulated. That sick creep is one of those disgusting sex tourists. He’s come over here to get his gross old body fondled by one of these young girls! It’s revolting – he can’t be allowed to get away with it!

Tom’s grasp on the ethnic complexities of the country wasn’t strong, but he did know that the Tugganarong – the copper-skinned natives of the offshore Feltham Islands – came here as guest workers; and that many of the young women ended up prostituting themselves. But this girl was clearly a desert tribeswoman, and he hadn’t seen any like her hanging around outside the bars and strip clubs of Vance’s small – but savage – red-light district.

In truth, the whole bizarre palimpsest of race and culture in this vast land bamboozled Tom. In theory, the Anglo descendants of the former colonial power still constituted the elite. Yet, only the previous morning, in the highland township where they’d stopped to get gas and cash, Tom had found himself in line at an ATM behind a shambolic, shaking figure that was bent almost double and wearing a dirty-blue patterned native toga. But when his turn came at the brushed-steel keyboard, it transpired that the man hadn’t been waiting to make a withdrawal at all. Rather, he stooped to retrieve a half-smoked cigarette butt from the dusty ground.

Tom found himself fixated on the white trough of a scar that bisected the old wino’s grizzled head from nape to crown. Was this, Tom wondered, the most extreme of tribal markings? Or had the man stumbled, drunk, into a buzz-saw?

Then, as the figure straightened up, and the turtle head swung up and round, Tom was confronted by the sun-cracked features of an ancient Anglo, whose mouth was crusted with dried yellow goo.

Later on, as Tom struggled to pilot the preposterously large minivan – which he had hired in an excess of foolish grandiosity – through the maddening mêlée of the main street, he spotted the same old Anglo wino, in the shade of a fat-trunked tree set back from the road.

Now, recalling the unpleasant scene that had followed, Tom took a particularly deep draw on his cigarette, and it fizzed and popped in the humid atmosphere. He deposited another quarter-inch of ash into his hand, tamped and blew. Tommy Junior, who, as usual, had been right at the back of the car, had also seen the old wino. More importantly, he’d seen what the indigenes with whom the wino was sitting and drinking palm spirit were selling.

‘Dad! Dad!’ he had boomed out – why couldn’t he control his volume? ‘They’ve got one of those model things we saw back a ways. Can we stop and get this one? Can we? Can we, please?’

Tom was going to give this request no more attention than the previous score, but Tommy’s mother had decided to intercede. ‘Why don’t we stop and see if we can buy it, Tom?’ Martha suggested, gently enough. ‘Tommy’s been real good the last couple of days – and they haven’t been easy for him. The other kids have all gotten stuff they wanted; why not get him something too?’

‘I don’t think they’re for kids . . .’ Tom began, and then thought better of continuing, because his wife’s posture had altered in the way it always did when she was readying herself to bring him into line: her bare shoulders rising up, her elegant neck snaking down, her round golden eyes widening under her thick blonde fringe. Tom had looked for a gap in the throng – with its press of wagons drawn by lama-like auracas, its frenetic pedestrians and clashing rickshaws – aimed the car at it and pulled up by the tree in a cloud of ochreous dust.

Needless to say, the model Tommy had wanted wasn’t for sale. Or, rather, it wasn’t for sale to them. The native who had made it explained to Tom and Martha, through the slurred intermediary of the old Anglo wino, that it was a cult object, and, as such, could be bought only by a member of a different clan to his own; one that stood in a special – and obscure – relation to it.

‘As you can see,’ the wino croaked, ‘it is an absolute top piece of workmanship, yeah. A Gandaro spirit wagon – but then, you knew that.’

What was knowledge? God knows, Tom always tried to read up on the culture of the places the family visited, and this vacation had been no exception. Before the Brodzinskis left home, he had given himself kaleidoscopic migraines reading stuff on the web. Was it the surreptitious joints he smoked in front of the screen, or the way the luminous info-panels slid across it? Tom couldn’t be sure, but, instead of grasping the details, he found them slipping between his numb mental digits.

This much Tom did know: these upland tribes – the Gandaro, the Ibbolit and the Handrey – were less austere and mystical than the desert dwellers. Their magic was tempered, both by the warm rains of their cloud forests and the long history of contact with aliens. They believed in a kind of can-do, can-get approach to their spirits, importuning them through the agency of these talismans: finely wrought models, depicting those goods and attributes that they wished for themselves.

Hence, this particular model, which was a 1:10 scale version of the very four-wheel-drive minivan they were sitting in. Right down to the iridescent blue paint job, the ludicrous flying-vee spoiler, the bulbous wheel arches and tinted windows. It had been fashioned with exquisite cunning from tin cans, hammered flat, seamed and then soldered together. Now it lay in the lap of its Gandaro creator, and he stroked its metallic curves as if it were a much loved child.

The contrast between the primitivism of the model and the sophistication of its subject imbued it with a curious potency, even if you gave no credence whatsoever to its magical properties. Tom, himself, wanted to take it from the thickset hillman with the bone nose plugs. And Tommy Junior – who had extracted his broad rear end from the back of the car with his usual difficulty – stood in the dusty shade, screwing up his gross features, overcome by the loss of that thing that he had never possessed, and began to keen.

The cigarette was finished. All that remained was a fang of ash curling up from its speckled gum. The cigarette was finished – his last – and Tom also felt overwhelmed by the loss of that thing that he had never possessed: some deep and primordial sense of healing satiety, a patch on his ruptured heart. Vainly, he cast about once more for the ashtray that wasn’t there; and then, in a moment of utter unthinking, he flipped the butt into the sodden air.

It arced up, end over end, then, for an instant, hung at the zenith. Tom bade it a fond farewell, for, as it described its neat parabola, it was defining his own new moral compass. I’m a better man, he thought, a much better man. Then, as the butt fell towards the balcony below, the dream Tom had had the preceding night, as he fretted in their fetid bed in the Tree Top Lodge, high in the cloud forest of the Handrey, came back to him.

Martha, sitting on a rattan chair, staring down between her parted thighs, as the slick, oily pool of blood on the floor plipped and plopped.

‘I’m spotting again, Tom,’ she had said in a low, venomous tone. ‘I’m spotting again – and it’s your fault.’

There was a long, drawn-out howl from the balcony below, as of an animal caught in some fiendish trap. Confused at first, assuming that the kids were fighting in the apartment, and one of them had banged their head, Tom started towards the sliding doors. But Martha, having heard the howl as well, confronted him in the entrance, bulges of fresh-showered flesh cinched by her towel.

Together, they strode to the balustrade and looked over. The old man was balled up on the lounger. His hands and those of his young mistress both clawed at the mess of disarranged hair on his smoky scalp.

Realizing what had happened right away, Tom called down: ‘I’m sorry! So sorry – I wasn’t thinking.’

The old man was still twitching and howling. Martha looked at Tom with accusatory eyes. The native mistress had found what she was searching for, and brushed clear of the lounger the last smoking shreds of the butt, which scattered on the white tiles.

‘Why you fuggin do that?!’ she spat up at them. ‘Why you? You damn bloody fool, you!’

Later, when they had managed to calm the kids down, Martha took them all out for a walk, and a guilty, junk-food supper at Cap’n Bob’s, the open air café on the ’nade.

It took half an hour for Tom to summon up the courage of his contrition; then he tiptoed down the bare stairs, padded along the covered walkway and knocked on the door of the odd couple’s apartment. The native girl answered it, and, despite the fluster of his own disgrace, Tom was still disappointed to see that she had repositioned her sarong to cover her breasts.

‘Oh, you.’ She pointed a damning finger at him. ‘What you wan’? Wha’chew doin’ down ’ere, yeah? Wha’chew wan’ with me?’

‘I – I came to see how he’s doing.’ Tom felt juvenile under the girl’s knowing gaze; her brown eyes held the eternal powers of youth and sexual vitality.

And what did the girl see? Another Anglo tourist, the same as all the rest? He wasn’t in bad shape for a man of his age – he had all his own hair – but there was no disguising the fact that Tom Brodzinski had only ever had average looks to begin with. His was a face, he knew, that cried out to be ignored: his nose small and lumpy, his cheekbones ill defined, his chin irresolute. His eyes, like the girl’s, were brown, but they held nothing more than a certain mildness, together with the bafflement of middle age. Even Tom’s height and build were – if such a thing is possible – dull. Average.

Without more ado, the girl led Tom into the smaller of the two bedrooms in the apartment. He knew this was so, because the layout corresponded to that of his own. Here, on a low, narrow, single bed, lay the victim of his butt, apparently naked beneath a thin, floral-patterned sheet. There was a compress, or face cloth of some kind, over the old man’s face. He looked corpse-like, and Tom stuttered, ‘I – I don’t m-mean to . . .’