The Butt by Will Self

which for so many years had been ploughed over with tar.
    Before the rains swished back in there was a small window of opportunity, and gratefully Tom thrust his head into it, breathing deeply with each pace. At these times he was almost glad of his protracted sojourn. He felt a stupefying pride at his own achievement: would I, he wondered, ever have cracked the smoking habit if all this shit hadn’t gone down?
    When he’d got back to the apartment, showered off and drunk a couple of bottles of mineral water, Tom ventured out once more. This was the most onerous part of his daily routine: the call home.
    There were several call stores in downtown Vance. In these strip-lit caves, the Tugganarong who did the city’s menial jobs paid over their wages for a few minutes’ chitchat with their families in the Feltham Islands.
    The call stores doubled in function, also offering money-transfer services. Tom often saw some downtrodden Tugga-narong pay over half his wages to Western Union, then half of the remainder to Bell Telephone. Squolly had told him that the Tugganarong were paid minimal wages, the justification being that their employers – whether domestic, municipal or business – provided accommodation and food. So, once they’d visited the call store, they had only a handful of change left; enough for a brown-bagged bottle to be drunk in the street, then they’d lurch back to their dormitories, festering sheds on the far side of town.
    The Tugganarong smelled of the lanolin they used to mould their thick hair into Anglo hairstyles. They were also loud, conducting their calls home with a mixture of frustration and anger. As they shouted in the flimsy booths, their language was impenetrable to Tom, and seemed to consist of sharp consonants, interspersed with syllables that all sounded like ‘olly’. Making his collect calls, which involved negotiating with up to three operators, all on the line simultaneously, Tom had to contend with this background roar: ‘Gollyrollyfollytollybolly!’
    When he heard the familiar tone of the wall-mounted phone in his own bright, open-plan kitchen, Tom’s frustration fell away, and he simply felt miserable. On answering, his children dutifully passed the handset, one to the next. He pictured them in a row of descending height on the red-tiled floor: Von Trapped.
    The twins prattled on about school and friends – the shiftless, shifting alliances of eight-year-olds – then passed Tom on to Tommy Junior, so the lumpen fourteen-year-old could drone on about his computer games and his trading card collection. ‘Gollyvollytolly . . .’ Tommy Junior seemed to be saying, while all around Tom the Tugganarong kept up the same incomprehensible jabber. Tom pictured Tommy Junior as a Tugganarong, his white skin darkened, his mousy crest greased. And wasn’t it true – Tom mused while the boy babbled – that Tommy Junior was his own guest worker? Foisted on Tom to perform the menial job of stabbing his conscience.
    The hardest exchanges were with Dixie. When she came on the line, Tom pressed the handset so hard against his ear that he could hear the cartilage crack. Dixie, who was charged with explaining to her father, half a world away, why it was that at this early hour – 8 a.m. by his reckoning – her mother was not in the kitchen cooking breakfast, cutting sandwiches or combing hair. Not, in short, doing any of the things that a now sole parent might be expected to.
    The first few times Tom called and got his daughter in lieu of his wife he was understanding. How could he be anything but? Yes, Martha was already at work, yes, he understood. Of course she had to leave early – he saw that. She was still asleep . . . ? Dixie would wake her if he insisted . . . But no, he didn’t insist, because he entirely understood, you see. Her mother must be tired after getting in so late.
    So it went on, for day after day; until Tom at last cracked and shouted at his wife’s proxy: ‘Dixie!