The Butt by Will Self Page A

Dixie! Where is your goddamn mother? I haven’t spoken to her since you guys got home, and that was more than two weeks ago! Get her for me now. Now! D’you hear me?’
    Dixie chose not to hear this outburst.
    ‘Dad? Dad? What is it, Dad?’ Came echoing under the sea, or through the stratosphere. ‘Dad? Dad?’
    Then the line went dead, and the ‘Gollybollyfolly’ swelled up, engulfing Tom Brodzinski with the Tugganarong’s own exile on this fatal shore.
    That night, lying in the sweat box of his apartment, the monsoon pouring through the night outside, Tom began thinking about the butt again. He was back on the balcony, looking down on Atalaya Intwennyfortee. Had he examined her breasts too intently? To glance – surely that was only natural; but had he perhaps ogled her lasciviously? He couldn’t recall her seeing him, yet that wasn’t the point – it was his intentions that mattered.
    Then there was the butt itself. Lying in bed, the heavy volume of the Von Sassers tented over his belly, Tom pressed the nail of his index finger against the pad of his thumb. How much tension had there been? How much pressure had he exerted? This much – or this? Gloria’s cool fingers had moved expertly, swabbing at the crescent-shaped incision the makkata’s blade had made in Tom’s thigh. Tom had felt no arousal – only relief.
    Now he was aroused. The natives who drank in the bar opposite were being herded away by the low squawk of a squad car’s siren. The rains drummed. The first roaches to check into the motel were fretting in their chambers, already regretting their choice of accommodation. Tom sought to yank the handle that delivered repose. Under the sheet it was not his hand but Gloria’s. It went lower, seeking out the raised scar tissue on his thigh . . . Gloria’s fingers probed it – or were they . . . Martha’s?
    He shot upright and squeezed on the light that tore into sharp being the nasty walls, the nylon curtains and the late check-ins to the roach motel, skittering and whirring for cover.
    ‘I was in shock.’ Tom said aloud. ‘I was in shock and she was wearing make-up – perhaps even a prosthesis.’
    His wife of nearly twenty years was conniving with that lawyer. Her performance at the Mimosa Apartments had been just that, put on to throw Tom off the scent. He’d never seen her go through security, because she never had; and there Martha was, up at Swai-Phillips’s creepy tin mansion, pretending to be someone else altogether.
    ‘And for why?’ he implored the night and the roaches.
    Too shaky for sleep now, Tom got up and pulled on his clothes. Outside in the street, he gathered the folds of his rain poncho around him and splashed towards the ’nade. He welcomed the company of his tail, although he was surprised to see the cop putting in such late hours. When they reached the boardwalk, they sheltered in the adjacent perspex hoods of two information points. The audio recording in Tom’s was a history of the first colonists, but he didn’t want to hear it again. Instead he waited for the grey dawn, and for the green tide to ebb across the mudflats, exposing the ugly crocodiles.
    Once or twice he considered taxing the policeman with the hypocrisy – and possibly even illegality – of his smoking while on assignment; but then he thought better of it, and went back to cursing his own folly and stupidity, his wife’s perfidy and treachery.

    The following evening Tom had dinner with Adams, at the Honorary Consul’s house. He took with him a decent bottle of Côte du Rhone that he’d managed to search out from the dusty shelves of a liquor store. Tom presented it to Adams, when his host came bounding along the walkway from his front door and opened the passenger door of Tom’s cab.
    ‘Excellent, excellent,’ the Consul muttered to himself, while Tom paid off the driver. Then, when Adams turned to face him, he said: ‘This will go very well with the main course. My, ah, friends have