A few minutes later, sitting in one of the galvanized gazebos, on a galvanized bench, Tom’s breathing began to shudder into some regularity. Swai-Phillips, who was sitting opposite, clapped his hands loudly and cried out: ‘Gloria! Betsy! Drinks, goddamnit! Now!’
From deep within the metallic bowels of the hulk, there came the sound of women’s voices and the clanking noises of their bare footfalls.
Tom studied the house more: creepers thrust between the corrugated-iron sheets of the walkways, while saplings poked through their balustrades. Still larger trees punched through warped walls and rusty roofs, their limbs chafing and squeaking against the metal, as the onshore breeze rose in the gathering darkness.
‘Will he be — I mean, who will. .’ Tom couldn’t frame his question; he began again: ‘Prentice, will he be able to get up here after. .’
‘He’s been speared? Oh, yeah, the makkata’ll give him a hand — so long as he’s astande too, that is. ’Course, if he’s inquivoo, he’ll have to leave him where he lies, yeah. That’s the size of it.’
Tom was going to ask the lawyer what Prentice had been accused of, when footfalls sounded loud on the veranda and Martha Brodzinski came towards the two men, a tray held on her upturned hand, as if she were an insouciant waitress in a citified brasserie.
At the sight of Martha’s willowy figure, and her thick dirty-blonde hair swishing against her long neck, Tom gripped the arm of the iron bench. Despite the heat, cold drops of sweat fell from his eyebrows to his cheeks. As Martha advanced along the walkway Tom’s heart burgeoned. Was this why he hadn’t seen her go through the metal detector at the airport? Why she hadn’t come to the phone when he called during their lay-over?
Why had she stayed behind? For moments Tom allowed himself to believe it was because she had decided to be with him, to support him; and that she had hidden out at the lawyer’s house with a view to suprising him, as if they were playful young lovers once more.
The paper dart of this fancy flew true for milliseconds, then hit an iron stanchion, buckled and fell. That wasn’t it at all, Tom realized. On the contrary, Martha was here because she was in cahoots with Swai-Phillips — having an affair with him as well. She’d sent their children back, alone, halfway round the world, so that she could dally here with the moustachioed creep, the laughing cavalier!
He stood up to confront her. . and fell back, because when the woman came into the gazebo, Tom was presented not with Martha’s pale plate of Puritan features but a face parodic of them: the lips thicker, the nose more bulbous, the eyes smaller. The woman who handed him the tall glass jammed with fruit wasn’t exactly ugly, but she was coarser — grosser, even — than Martha.
Though Swai-Phillips was laughing, he still managed to make an introduction: ‘Brodzinski, this is my second cousin Gloria; she grew up in Liège, Belgium, but she’s been here with us for a while now.’
‘G’day,’ said Gloria.
‘Y — you could’ve warned me!’ Tom rounded on him.
‘Warned you? Warned you of what, exactly?’ The lawyer dipped a finger into the drink his cousin had given him and traced a circle of moisture on his bare chest. ‘Oh, by the way Brodzinski, I have a cousin who’s the spit of your wife. . You’d’ve thought I was crazy. Better you come up and see her for yourself, right. Still,’ — he paused, took a slug of his drink and placed it on the table — ‘it does explain one thing to you.’
‘What’s that?’ Tom hated himself for playing along with the cruel joke.
‘Why it was I was so taken with Mrs Brodzinski, yeah. Believe me, if she’s anything like as, um, accommodating as my cousin, then you must be — in ordinary circs — a very happy man indeed.’
Tom sat marooned in his own passivity. What was happening to him? Why were events barracking him with his own impotence? The makkata had mixed his blood with the earth and pronounced him astande, yet he sat inert, while Gloria knelt before him, encouraged him to raise his buttocks so she could pull down his pants, then swabbed and dressed the wound.
Sometime later darkness had fallen utterly. Flying foxes chattered in a mango tree at the front of the veranda. Tom could just make out their oilskin wings opening and closing, the shine of their feline eyes. He thought of the makkata — and so it was that he appeared in the circle of light thrown by a hissing gas lamp Gloria had lit before retiring. He was leading Prentice by the hand — the other man seemed devoid of volition as he staggered along the veranda. There was a brutal streak of red mud on Prentice’s cheek, and he’d mislaid his stupid affectation of a hat.
5
Tom holed up at the Experience and waited for the wound in his thigh to heal. Bored, he ventured out to a book store he’d noticed in the nearby mall. When he let slip to the clerk that he might be going ‘over there’, she pressed upon him a fat volume called Songs of the Tayswengo by O. M. and E. F. von Sasser.
‘It’s the bizzo,’ the girl said. ‘The Von Sassers have been over there for decades — first the father, then the son. They know all there is to know. They’ve collected all the stories — they write beautifully as well.’
Her eyes were a little crazy; her words came in enthusiastic spurts.
Tom didn’t find Songs of the Tayswengo to be beautifully written at all. It was turgid, loaded with anthropological jargon, and the songs themselves seemed at once silly and incomprehensible: ‘Jabber up to me, flipper lizard / Let me rub sand on your sad gizzard’ was a representative couplet.
Every time he started reading the heavy hardback, Tom fell asleep — only to wake with a start, having dreamed that a malevolent child was sitting on his chest.
Fed up with the Von Sassers, Tom bought more books and scanned them on his sweat-damp bed at the Experience, a mosquito coil smouldering by his elbow. But these writers were just as bewildering. One would propose an outlandish psychological model of the hill tribes, while the next would say this was nonsense: the Handrey were as similar to the Anglos as any one individual is to the next.
There was dispute even about the fundamentals: some experts categorically stated that the desert people had been there for as long as 100,000 years; while others insisted that when the first Anglo explorers crossed the interior, they encountered Inssessitti makkatas, who told them that their people had only been in the region for the past decade, having themselves arrived by sea from the Felthams.
The very shifting sands of the deserts and the sliding rivers of mud in the tropical uplands served to obscure whatever material evidence there might be to support or deny these competing contentions. And so it was that the land itself was amnesiac, forgetful of its own history; and ignorant, even, of its own terrifying extent.
After a couple of days Swai-Phillips called.
‘I’ve no date yet for the prelim’ hearing, right,’ he said without any preamble.
‘Well, when will you?’
‘Hard to say.’
Tom pictured the lawyer in his offices at the top of the Metro-Center, puffing on a stinky engwegge cheroot and bullshitting from behind his mask of a face.
‘But so long as the court accepts the makkata’s evidence you can make the first reparation trip over there, right away, right.’
‘First?’
‘There may have to be several, but the good thing is you can head off while the criminal prosecution continues — which may take many weeks.’