Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 104
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
It was the first time Tom had heard the Lord referred to since the courtroom had lustily sung the National Anthem, back in Vance.
There was no time to dwell on this. Daphne Hufferman’s hand was on Tom’s shoulder, tending him this way and that, along driveways as smooth and dark as chocolate cake. Miniature office blocks with mirrored-glass walls were set in pocket-sized lawns upon which sprinklers played. Apart from the swishing caress of these, and the tired grumble of the SUV’s engine, the Sector was unnaturally silent: a man-made oasis, where interloping blossoms skulked in the moist beds at the foot of the buildings.
A perfect little Hilton emerged from the orangey gloom. It was exact in every way, from its pseudo-Hellenic portico to its ornamental ponds dappled with water lilies, but maybe one fifth the size of any other Hilton Tom had ever seen.
And there, standing by the main doors, apparently forewarned of their arrival, a swirl of black-winged moths fluttering round his fastidious form, stood Adams, the Honorary Consul. While beside him was the morphed version of Tom’s own wife: Gloria Swai-Phillips, wearing a floral-print cotton dress.
Chapter 12
The following morning, Tom had just returned from the concession stand and was at the sink in the bathroom, applying arnica ointment to his cheek – which had been badly bruised by the rifle’s recoil – when there was a knock on the door.
He admitted Adams, who walked past him and crossed at once to the far side of the room. Tom moved his discarded clothes from the easy-chair to the floor and invited the Consul to sit.
‘Good trip?’ Adams asked, crossing one thin shank over the other. He wore his habitual tan seersucker suit, and Tom was underwhelmed by the clocks on his red socks.
‘Don’t be facetious,’ Tom replied, and, heading back to the bathroom, called over his shoulder, ‘How the hell did you get here?’
Adams took a while answering. Then Tom heard the flat chink of hotel china and the bubbling of the dwarf kettle. Adams was making himself a cup of Nescafé. Tom concentrated on flossing his teeth, then pulling the hairs from his nostrils with a pair of tweezers. The sharp little twinges were reminders: You’re here! You’re here!
Eventually, he heard a slurping intake, followed by: ‘Don’t get snippy with me.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Tom went back into the bedroom. Adams was bent over the three-panelled mirror on the vanity table, examining the back of his head. He looked round. ‘I said, don’t get snippy with me. I’ve had a, ah, hard-enough morning already.’
The Consul set his coffee cup down on the carpet and peered at Tom through his increasingly pellucid spectacles. Clearly, like a batty old hypochondriac, he was soliciting sympathy.
Tom obliged. ‘Oh, why’s that?’
‘Fellow countryman of ours called Weiss – he was caught smoking in the john of a flight coming into Amherst–’
‘My, my. That does sound serious.’
‘Serious enough.’ Adams glared at him with eyes now entirely visible. ‘He’s doing ninety days at Kellippi, and even after a month he’s not in very good, ah, shape.
‘Have you ever seen a bauxite mine, Brodzinski? The convicts get the worst jobs. It’s very brutal, ah, extraction – huge machines, a lot of highly toxic dust. The Belgian outfit that operates the mine isn’t overly concerned with safety, given that the workforce consists of convict labour, native, desperate, or all three.’
‘What’re you trying to say, Adams? That I’ve gotten off lightly? And anyway’ – Tom sat down opposite him on the end of the bed – ‘how did you get here?’
The Consul took another slurp of his Nescafé before answering. ‘Miss Swai-Phillips and I flew to Amherst, then drove along Route 2. The mine people did offer us a light aircraft, but, as I’m sure you, ah, appreciate, I have to keep my distance . . .’
He fell silent. He was staring past Tom’s shoulder – not at the Andrew Wyeth reproduction that hung above the bed, but the fifth of whisky that stood, half empty, on the beside table.
‘I kinduv assumed your, uh, jurisdiction wouldn’t extend this far,’ Tom said. He was trying deliberately to nettle the Consul. ‘I mean, isn’t this the Western Province?’
Adams was unperturbed. ‘Yes, but I’m a servant not of the national government, Brodzinski, but of our own. It’s in that capacity that I’ve driven another thousand kilometres through the Tontines to come and, ah, liaise with you.’
‘I’m not sure who it is you goddam serve, Adams,’ Tom said bemusedly. ‘But tell me this much: if you could fly clear across to Amherst, then drive only a thousand klicks – why the hell did I have to come overland for three and a half, nearly getting my goddamn ass shot to pieces in the process?’
‘I can see you’re upset,’ Adams said, and Tom had the gnawing insight that this was all diplomacy ever consisted of: the understatement of the obvious. ‘Have you spoken to your family yet? You’ll find that you can dial them direct from here without the country code – a little, ah, quirk of the Tontine Governmental Sector.’
He stood up and set his stained cup down on the vanity table. ‘Paradoxically,’ he added, ‘if you want to phone someone in the actual Tontines, it’s an international call.’
‘What about Gloria?’ Tom had meant to say ‘Martha’ – the two women were, once again, confused in his mind.
‘I’m sorry?’ Adams fastidiously detached Tom’s hand from his arm – a hand Tom hadn’t been aware of laying on him.
‘W-What’s she doing here?’
‘I thought Miss Swai-Phillips explained that to you back in Vance? She’s responsible for running orphanages here in the Tontines; she’s a well-respected charity worker and philanthropist. I believe her charity is holding a function this evening, here in the hotel. No doubt you can be invited if you’d like to find out more.’
Adams was making for the door when Tom had a sudden intuition: ‘That’s bullshit, Winnie.’ He hadn’t used this intimacy since the night they had eaten the binturang together at Adams’s house. It pulled the Consul up short, and, when he turned, Tom saw he had lost some of his aloofness. ‘It’s to do with Prentice, isn’t it? It’s to do with . . . his . . . With what he did. I mean, she looks after kids – and he . . .’ Tom left the insinuation hanging there: an ugly odour that the hotel’s aircon’ could never dispel.
Adams’s voice softened. ‘You know perfectly well that I can’t discuss that with you, Tom.’
‘But you’re not denying it, are you? Those drugs – the baby stuff, it’s for her orphanages, isn’t it? Jesus! I dunno what’s worse, carrying the can for my own dumb mistakes or chauffeuring that sicko.’
‘As I understand it, Tom, you have every reason to be grateful to Brian Prentice. Mrs Hufferman told me that whole story yesterday evening. I believe the technical term for what he did’ – the Consul’s long face warped into sarcasm – ‘is saving your life.’
Tom stood, cowed, as Adams reached for the door handle. Then the Consul detonated one of his deadpan devices: ‘Incidentally, Brodzinski, I think you should know this. Shortly before I left Vance I had a call from the DA’s office. Mrs Lincoln has instructed the medical staff at Vance Hospital not to resuscitate her husband if he should have a, ah, crisis. Bluntly, this means you probably haven’t got long to get down to Ralladayo and make your reparations. As I’m sure Jethro Swai-Phillips explained, all bets are off if this becomes a capital offence.’
With that, he quit the room.
Tom found Prentice smoking behind the Hilton parking lot. The sixth sense by which the local smokers always knew exactly where the sixteen-metre demarcation line ran never failed to amaze Tom. There were so many public buildings clustered in the TGS that the intersection of several lines allowed smokers only a small curvilinear plot, within which to stand, sucking and blowing.
Clustered with Prentice were seven other Anglos. Their short-pants suits, pressed shirts and flamboyant ties gave them the look of insurance salesmen – which is precisely what they were. It was tragicomic the way these men were compelled to stand, shoulder to shoulder, steeped in their own fumes, while on all sides there was the cool play of sprinkler systems on beautifully manicured lawns.
Tom stood off to one side, grinning and swinging his free hands. One after another the insurance men finished their cigarettes. They carefully extinguished them on the ground, then picked up the butts. Pocketing these, they walked over to a couple of beaten-up Japanese hatchbacks, which they piled into.
‘They’re going into the townships to work,’ Prentice explained. ‘That’s why they don’t drive anything flashy.’
‘Selling tontines to poor bastards who’re gonna kill each other for the pay-out,’ Tom spat back. ‘You call that work?’
‘Really, Tom,’ Prentice replied equably, ‘everyone’s got to make a living.’
Tom gulped. ‘And you, uh, Brian, what’s your occupation nowadays – still the Swift One, the Righter of Wrongs?’
Prentice shifted uncomfortably from one boot to the other. ‘Ah, well . . . I don’t know, old chap,’ he muttered.
‘Don’t you?’ Try as he might, Tom’s voice crept up the register. ‘What exactly went on back there in the desert, Prentice? D’you understand it? Because I sure as hell don’t. And what’s it got to do with this?’ He waved the tissuey paper of the car-rental agreement that he had dug out from his document wallet. ‘I’ve read through all this goddamn corporate legalese. Turns out, that if either one of us gets killed, the other guy’s his legal heir and comes into’ – he examined the small print again – ‘a cool two hundred Gs.
‘I never figured you for such an altruist, Prentice. I mean, you could’ve hesitated for one tiny second back there and you’d’ve come outta that ambush one very wealthy man.’
Prentice puffed up his sunken chest. ‘I don’t know what you’re implying, Tom,’ ‘he blustered. ‘Whatever you may believe about me, old chap, I hope you wouldn’t think for a moment that I’d let a fellow Anglo be shot in cold blood by one of those black bastards.’
‘Black bastards – black bastards. Sheeeooo!’ Tom shook his head in disbelief. ‘You certainly do know how to coin a phrase, my friend. Oh, yes.’ Then he decided to change tack: ‘Your wife’s cousin come through for you, did he?’
‘Come through?’
‘I mean, did he wire you your funds? Seems to me a man with your high moral standards would be anxious to pay his debts.’
Suddenly, Tom felt drained by the effort of it all. The Sector may have been well irrigated, yet the air still crumpled with the desert heat. He sank down into a squat, his head spinning.
The previous night’s dream came to him. Some kind of cookout or camping trip. His daughter, Dixie, still sporting the ridiculous disc of greased hair that he had last seen heading through security at Vance Airport, but otherwise completely naked and lying in the long grass.
Tom had looked wonderingly at her. She was supporting herself on one slim arm, her long legs bent sideways. It was the same posture – he had realized on waking – as that of the girl in the Wyeth reproduction over the bed. But, unlike Wyeth’s Appalachian waif, flopping on to Dixie’s lower thigh – resting there justly and weightily – was a large, perfectly formed penis.
I better not tell her, Tom had reasoned in his swoon. I better not tell her she’s gotta dick – it’ll be upsetting for a teenage girl.
‘Are you all right, Tom?’ Prentice was bending over him blowing smoke into his face.
Tom coughed. ‘Eugh – yeah, yeah, sure. It’s . . .’ He pulled himself together and rose. ‘It’s just I feel so goddamn weak. It started back at the Huffermans’ camp – that’s when you started to, like, do stuff. You unloaded the car – then there was the ambush. Come to think of it, you even put your own psoriasis stuff on the night before, didn’t you?’
Tom sank back down into his squat. Grit pricked his palms. He looked up: the dark halo of Prentice’s hat eclipsed the hurtful sun. Tom said, ‘D’you believe what Hufferman said: that it’s changing between us? And what about the tontine – do the two things kind of gear into each other?’
Prentice shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Tom, but I’m keeping an open mind.’
He stubbed out his cigarette and pocketed the butt. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet with Ms Swai-Phillips. After that’ – he adopted a pained expression – ‘I shall visit the bank.
‘Incidentally, Tom,’ Prentice said, hurrying on – the mention of the bank had been an indelicacy – ‘Gloria told me you’re got a package for her; perhaps you should give it to me?’
This reanimated Tom. He stood. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘She entrusted that package to me, alone.’
He stalked towards the doors of the Hilton: their photoelectric cells acknowledged, then admitted him to a shushed lobby, where silk scarves, long unsold, were creatively pinned to velvet cushions. Rubbing the edge of his key card with his callused thumb, Tom rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and the peace of his room.
Which was no peace at all. The key card when he swiped it in the lock; the debris left by Adams when he had made his coffee; Tom’s own paisley-patterned washbag – all of it struck him as horribly grotesque: the corpses of objects rather than the objects themselves. Was it that the TGS was real, while he had become robotic? Or were its pocket office blocks and neat lawns only a zone of reality imposed on the ruggedly anarchic Tontines? Then again, perhaps it was the Tontines that were the mirage, and only the desert truly existed at all?
Concentric rings of mind-bending illusion rippled out from where Tom lay, stretched out like a water boatman on the surface tension of the bed. His legs weakly spasmed, his cordite-coarsened fingers felt gross against the smooth nap of the coverlet. He could hear his own breathing, the ceaseless shushing of the aircon’, the intwakka-lakka-twakka of a helicopter landing in the military base beyond the parking lot.
He was very close now to the hysteria that had courted him, politely opening door after door as he ventured further into his ordained nightmare. He was saved – by the red eye of the message light, blinking on the phone.
Tom picked up the handset and pressed it to his ear. ‘One. New. Message . . . Hi, yeah . . . It’s Gloria Swai-Phillips here, Mr Brod – Tom. Lissen, that package of mine. Thing is, I’ve had a frantic day, so we’ll have to meet up later, right? I’m hosting a little reception thing – soirée I s’pose you’d say . . .’ She giggled girlishly. Soirée, Tom thought. No one says that, not even Adams. ‘Anyway, maybe you could drop by, yeah? It’s downstairs at around six. It’ll be full of dull charity and guvvie types, but there’ll be a raw bar.’
Tom replaced the handset, then roused himself. Now she had called, now that he had a liaison with Gloria, he could entertain the thought of further intimacy. After all, why not? He was a free man.
He looked over at her parcel, which was sitting on the easy-chair. Caught in the beams that shone through the blinds, the columns of the newsprint it was wrapped in seemed to form the contours of a face. A desert tribesman’s face. Tom broke from its hollow stare and called the concierge. ‘I, uh, wondered . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘I’d like to go out – out of the Sector, that is, and have a look round. Is this possible?’
‘There’s a walking tour at three this afternoon, sir. Shall I put your name down for it?’
‘Walking? You mean, like, a hike?’
‘Oh, no,’ the concierge laughed. ‘It’s more of a stroll – even our elderly guests manage it, so no worries there.’
*
Promptly at three, Tom went down to the lobby, only to discover that he was the sole taker for the excursion. A massive Tugganarong man, wearing a bullet-proof vest and holding a sign with BRODZINSKI written on it, was standing by the concierge’s desk. His name, he informed Tom with great solemnity, was Valldolloppollou – although he was happy to be addressed as Val.
Val went with Tom to get one of his rifles from the hotel armoury. Here, Tom was also issued with his own vest and a helmet with the Hilton logo on it.
‘Is all this strictly necessary?’ he asked.
‘Not really, sir,’ Val replied. ‘There’s no real action, yeah, until the end of the week, when the miners, yeah, come in from Kellippi. Then all kinds of shit happens.
‘Besides,’ he continued, snapping a magazine into his own rifle as they strolled towards the first of the checkpoints, ‘when you checked in, you signed a tontine transfer.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That if some pissed bing-bong drops you while we’re out, the balance of your tontine is assigned to Hilton International. So the flak jacket and helmet are only a courtesy, yeah.’
Tom reflected on this as the cop at the barrier stamped his laissez-passer, then waved them through. Perhaps this was why, with each step he took out of the TGS, Tom felt his strength returning: he was no longer in thrall to Prentice.
By the time they had negotiated the third checkpoint the fresh greens of the TGS had been filmed over: the atmosphere was saturated with gritty particles, and Tom could taste the ferrous crud. Then there were the flies. How could he, even for a few short hours, have abandoned them? They made straight for the corners of his mouth and clustered there to engage in interspecific French kissing.
Outside the final blast wall, Val quartered the empty, dusty maidan with his rifle. Tom, not wanting to appear a wuss, did the same.
‘Sir, yeah, I’d keep your safety on – if you shoot someone, the paperwork’s a nightmare, yeah,’ the tour guide gently advised him.
Tom was digesting this when they were mobbed by a crowd of native women who materialized from nowhere. They wore dirty shift dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them: Hello Kitty. They crowded round Tom and Val – yet didn’t touch them. The women’s hands jerked up and down in front of their faces, while their cheeks bulged spasmodically. It took a few moments, then Tom realized: they were miming fellatio.
