Seeking to deploy his new knowledge, Tom asked, ‘Am I, like, initiated now?’
Swai-Phillips was dismissive. ‘Don’t be under any illusions, Brodzinski,’ he said. ‘If you’d been foolish enough — and some Anglos are — to have gone through initiation to one of the desert mobs, you wouldn’t be idling your days away reading, while waiting for a fair trial. That makkata would’ve broken every bone in your body with a punishment stick — then Atalaya’s women would’ve pissed on you — by way of humiliation.
‘Anyway, when’re you gonna come up to the house again? Gloria’s been asking after you. Squolly’s coming up Sunday with his mob, gonna do a big barbie. There’ll be heaps of fish, heaps of beer, shitloads of kids in and out of the pool. Do you good, mate, have a slice of the old family life.’
Tom didn’t want to see Gloria again; he wasn’t certain he’d be able to cope with her travesty of his wife’s features in broad daylight. Nor was the idea of sinking a few beers with the policeman appealing.
Tom had to report to police HQ every other day. Squolly — or Commander Squoddoloppolollou, as he was properly called — was always laid-back and friendly. Even when the grandiose marble hallways filled with the clatter of steel-shod boots, and open-topped trucks full of paramilitaries screeched in and out of the parking lot, the barrel-shaped officer still found time to get Tom a soda, then sit with him while he sipped it in the pleasantly cool confines of the interview room.
Squolly disdained the Intwennyfortee mob’s ritual business. ‘See, Tom,’ he told him, ‘our belief is that it’s a man’s intentions that count, yeah. We don’t judge an offender for what he’s done, yeah, only for what he thought he was going to do.’
‘But I thought that’s what the native people believed too?’
Squolly laughed and exhaled a patch of condensation into being on the shiny peak of his cap, which he was holding. ‘No, no, the desert mobs — the Tayswengo, who you’re mixed up with; the Aval, Jethro’s dad’s people; the Inssessetti and the renegades, the Entreati — well, they’re harsh, man. Very fierce, yeah. Their line is that every single act a fellow makes is willed, right enough: a hiccup, or a murder.’
‘I knew that much. I’ve been reading the Von Sassers’ Songs of the Tayswengo.’
‘OK, sure, very. . authentic.’ The policeman grinned, revealing teeth as strong and squared off as his own torso. ‘The hill tribes, yeah, they’re different again. They believe in spirits big time. A spirit gets between a man and his wife, a man and his kiddies, a man’s hand and a can of bloody peaches! They’re praying all the time, making offerings — trying to get these bloody spirits to stop ’em spilling their grog.
‘If a Handrey or an Ibbolit does a big bad one — a rape, a murder — we have to get ’im down here, yeah, get his bloody makkata and get him to summon the right spirit, so he can tell the makkata why he made the fellow do it!’
Squolly shook his head at the very idea of such foolishness. He drew a handkerchief covered with brownish engwegge stains from his pocket and began polishing the peak of his cap. ‘Now, with us coastal peoples — Anglos, Tugganarong — we’re more rational, right. Man’s accused of doing something bad — like you, yeah — we don’t pull him in and ’terro-gate ’im. We don’t duff him up, right. No, we ob-serve him. We send our blokes out after him — quiet, yeah, no fuss — and check out how he conducts himself in the world. How he orders his morning coffee, buys his paper, deals with all the little irritations of his day. Then we compile a report on what kind of intentions the fellow has. There’s nothing high tech’, we don’t use no fancy psychologists or profilers, it’s just good old-fashioned police leg work.’
Oddly, the surveillance didn’t bother Tom — even though Squolly’s men were trying to read his mind in a way not usually attempted by anyone save for a mother or a lover.
On the contrary, as he splashed through the first storms of the monsoon to buy his newspaper, or sat beneath bulging awnings drinking his coffee, the sight of a cop, loitering by the doors to the mall, dumpy in his rain cape, was almost reassuring. Often his tails would come over to chat with him, mulling over the strength of the previous night’s wind, musing as to whether this year’s monsoon was heavier than the last.
In the afternoons, in the brief interval between one swishing curtain of rain and the next, Tom would put on his old sweat-pants and go for a run. Leaving the dock area, he jogged through the shopping district. At this time of the year the chilled malls were empty but for a few Anglos. The tourists were all gone, and the miners wouldn’t come in from the interior until shortly before Christmas. Nor was the business district buzzing; the occasional clerk or manager, dressed in their tropical version of a suit — jacket and pants both cut short to reveal pale arms and paler legs — would scamper along the sidewalk, leaping over puddles, their faces set, as if to say, ‘This business of leaping over puddles is bloody serious, right.’
Tom slopped by them. He glanced up at the Metro-Center to see if his lawyer was in his office; then, head down, took the wide Trangaden Boulevard, which ran through the outskirts of town, where glass barns sold agricultural equipment, then on between billboards that grew tattier, until it declined into a single strip of concrete, before eventually terminating in the long sable strand of the town beach.
Usually, there would be a couple of other afternoon exercisers out there with Tom, while sea fishermen whipped the slack waves with their lines. The gnarled shapes of the offshore atolls, which in fine weather were lovely ornaments cast down on the azure baize, now resembled crumpled refuse adrift on this oceanic puddle. The clouds shrouded the foothills, obscuring the more elevated suburbs of Vance. So Tom took his constitutional along a sable corridor, between vaporous walls.
To swim in the sea was, of course, out of the question. In the dry season there were sharks and box jellyfish, while the monsoon brought with it the Sangat, or bladder, clams. When the wind rose and the waves pounded, they drummed up these avid crustaceans from the sea bed. Anyone unlucky enough to have one fasten on his skin would soon become the host for a thriving population of necrotic bivalves. Tom had seen bladder-clam victims in Vance, clunking along the sidewalks with their bared arms or legs warty with nacre. They looked like medieval knights, unhorsed and stripped of their armour save for brassards or greaves.
Each afternoon Tom jogged the length of the beach, then back to the Experience. Overall he was covering six or seven miles. But while the first few runs left him heaving for breath, after a week he was managing it easily.
With every breath the humid air was discovering new tissue to invigorate. Tom had read somewhere that, if fully unfurled, the human lung would cover two football fields, and now he felt as if he were reoccupying this living turf, 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.