The Butt (33 page)

Lincoln, Tom kicked himself. The old man was the only damn one of them who had told the truth. He tried to warn me – the rest of them were all in on it. And to Prentice, he croaked: ‘That makkata.’

‘What’s that, old chap? Speak up.’

‘That makkata, back in Vance, he was a fucking fraud, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Prentice laughed. ‘Pissed out of his brains, the ceremony was a total cock-up. You must’ve realized, Tom, you were inquivoo all along.’

They had reached the dispensary, and Prentice let go of Tom’s hand to withdraw an envelope from the back pocket of his jeans. It was identical to the one that Tom had left under his swag – the one that contained Tom’s copy of the tontine.

‘All tontines are, of course, fully reciprocal, Tom,’ Prentice said, waggling the envelope. ‘You may have thought you could convert it unilaterally, but I’m afraid you couldn’t. I’m surprised the man at Endeavour didn’t spell it out for you, but then insurance salesmen aren’t the most honest of chaps. The natives are easy to rook; however, it’s different with an Anglo – they couriered a copy round to me at the Hilton within an hour.’

Prentice smiled complicitly. ‘Our tontine covers – you’ll’ve noticed, if you’ve read the small print – severe mental impairment, as well as injury and death. In the absence of your having appointed someone to hold your power of attorney . . . Well, let’s just put it this way, since I can see you’re still a little groggy: it seems I’m on the verge of coming into a considerable sum of money.

‘But don’t think I’m going to be selfish,’ he continued, holding the dispensary door open for Tom. ‘By far the bulk of it will go to support my kids – and to help Erich’s work, naturally. So, best not to look on this, um, procedure as a punishment at all; rather it’s your way of giving a lot of people a much deserved reward.’

Erich von Sasser was waiting for them in the anteroom to the operating room, together with Vishtar Loman. The doctors were already in their gowns and masks, but a third shrouded figure – smaller, slimmer – was scrubbing up at a sink in the corner.

Prentice helped Tom on to the gurney, then went to take his turn at the sink. The other operating assistant was Atalaya Intwennyfortee, and it seemed she was playing the part of of anaesthetist, because she came over to where Tom lay bearing a kidney dish, and looked down at him. Her beautiful dark eyes were joined by Von Sasser’s hollow sockets.

‘I’m afraid, Tom,’ the neuro-anthropologist said breezily, ‘that a lack of funds means we aren’t able to give you a pre-med’, but Ms Intwennyfortee here has something that should help you relax.’

Atalaya took a quid of engwegge from the kidney dish and pushed it into Tom’s defenceless mouth. Biting down on it, feeling the nicotine immediately perfuse through his gums and into his bloodstream, Tom ruminated on what a pity it was that his last smells were so bitterly antiseptic.

However, Tom wasn’t casting his mind back anywhere; he was adrift in his engwegge trance, and faintly amused by the way things had turned out. After all, he was only doing what he had always done: passively conforming to an invented belief system.

Some years later . . .

Prentice, who had a good deal of ready cash, was known around Vance as something of a high-roller, and, although he only blew into town from time to time, he liked to cut loose and enjoy himself. Treating his mates to a few hundred bucks’ worth of chips, so they could fritter them away on blackjack or craps, gave him immense – and not altogether discreditable – pleasure.

The three men lingered, chatting on the white marble steps, under the white marble pyramid of the vulgarly grandiose building; then Prentice waved his arm, hoping to gain the attention of one of the cab drivers waiting in the shade of the ornamental palms on the far side of Dundas Boulevard.

‘Can’t I give you a ride, Brian?’ Swai-Phillips asked.

‘No, that’s all right, old chap,’ Prentice said. ‘I’ve got my Hummer to pick up from the garage, and I need to do a few errands in town before I head over–’ He stopped abruptly. Something – or, rather, someone – had caught his eye.

An old wino was shuffling along the arc of the sixteen-metre line, bending down to pick up cigarette butt after butt, then lifting each in turn up to the sky and scrutinizing it, before letting it fall. Every time he bent down he displayed the back of his cropped head to the three spectators, and the white trough of a scar that bisected it from nape to crown.

‘I say,’ Prentice exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that Tom Brodzinski?’

‘Yes,’ Adams said. ‘I believe it is.’

‘What’s he still doing here?’ Prentice demanded.

‘Well, Brian.’ The Consul couldn’t avoid sounding official, if not officious. ‘There have been numerous, ah, complications with his, ah, status. Seems his passport was, ah, mislaid and, given his record, it’s proving tricky to get him another one. He’s stuck in limbo, poor fellow.’

‘He looks like he’s getting a bellyful of grog in limbo,’ Swai-Phillips caustically observed.

‘Well,’ Adams said pedantically, ‘I shouldn’t imagine there’s a lot else he can do, given his, ah, mental-health problems.’

‘At least he’s doing now what he should’ve bloody done in the first place, yeah,’ the lawyer persisted.

‘Oh, and what’s that, old chap?’ Prentice was genuinely curious.

‘Picking up the bloody butts, of course!’

And, although this wasn’t a particularly adroit witticism – even by Swai-Phillips’s unexacting standards – his two friends still rewarded it with laughter: Prentice giving voice to manly guffaws, while the Consul emitted a dry ‘heh-heh-heh’.

Tom heard everything the three men were saying with perfect clarity, and he entirely understood its relevance to him. If he made no response, it was because Prentice and the others were so ridiculously tiny and insignificant: buzzing flies, settled for a split-second on the side of a termite heap, before some still smaller perturbation triggered them into flight.

Astande, who stood beside Tom, enormous and black and beautiful and proud, now pointed out another cigarette butt and said: ‘Pick it up, Tom, yeah.’ Tom did as he was told. ‘Now hold it up, mate.’ Tom held it up, turning the butt this way and that. ‘Yup,’ Astande boomed, ‘I reckon that’s the one, d’you see?’

Tom did see. The crumpled paper tube, with frayed tobacco at one end and its bung of synthetic cellulose acetate at the other, had been accidentally moulded by the sole that had ground it out. The butt was a mashed vee that, from the right angle, was exactly the same shape as the great island-continent itself.

Tom asked his spirit guide: ‘Can I smoke it?’ And Astande said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So Tom scurried into the thin passageway that had been left behind in the scar tissue lining his longitudinal fissure. He burrowed deep inside his own brain, to where Von Sasser’s scalpel had negligently created a small cavity while in the process of clumsily cutting through the tough cells of Tom’s corpus callosum.

Over the intervening years since this slight, Tom had worked away at the cavity with his bare hands and whatever tools he could find lying around, until he had managed to excavate a sizeable den.

The pulsing, pinky-grey walls of the brain-cave sparked with neurones – an unearthly display; but the furniture that Tom had dragged in from his memory was rather prosaic: a couple of plastic-backed chairs taken from Squolly’s interview room, Tom’s crap bed from the Entreati Experience and a gateleg table that he had carried away from Adams’s bedroom. There were plenty of ashtrays.

Tom straightened out the butt and lit it with a match from a book advertising SWAI-PHILLIPS ATTORNEYS, NO WIN-NO FEE. CALL: 1–800-LAW. He took a deep drag and handed it to Astande, who sat opposite him on the other plastic chair. The Swift One took a companionable pull, then passed the butt back.