Tom almost dropped the lantern. Then, hating himself for it, he circled back to the lobby, avoiding Prentice and McGowan, who were smoking studiously in the parking lot, sixteen paces from the veranda and five from each other.
William chuckled when he saw the roaches. ‘Kids drop food in these cabins,’ he said. ‘Their parents do all sorts. I tellya, mate, it’s a full, rich environment.’
He’d brought a squeezy bottle with sugared water in it. With this he laid a trail from the bed to the door.
‘Leave the door open and they’ll soon clear out,’ he instructed Tom, then he added, ‘Sleep well.’
Tom didn’t.
The woman in his convoluted dreamscape was Martha, was Gloria, was both. She sat in the chair in the corner of the cabin and complained of the way the rattan was biting into her bare buttocks. Her stretchmarks were exaggerated — red claw marks on her white belly. She held the parcel Gloria had entrusted to Tom in both hands and pounded her thighs. ‘Court is in session,’ she announced. ‘I am presiding — and I’m spotting, Tom, I’m spotting. .’
This was minimization, for the teak boards beneath the chair were awash with her blood, blood that fell from the slits in the woven seat as the monsoon fell from the fleshy clouds above the Great Dividing Range.
The nightmare woke him, and, after he had tottered to the bathroom to pee, Tom fell back to sleep and entered another.
He lay in bed smoking; or, rather, he himself was made of dry golden shreds, sheathed in the papery cylinder of his skin. He exhaled, amd his mouth burned terribly as the smoke jetted out.
‘You got fever,’ Atalaya said. ‘Lie still, I bathe your head.’
She leaned over him, pressing her breasts against his face.
‘D — Don’t,’ Tom tried to warn her — but too late. She yelped, jerked away from him.
‘Why you fuggin do that?’ she spat at him.
Tom’s mouth burned terribly; he exhaled another plume of smoke. .
And awoke with a start. He was lying on his back. Light beams flooded through the blinds, and in them he could see the smoke of his own condensing breath.
Tom climbed on to the veranda to find Prentice already hard at work on an elaborate fried breakfast. ‘Heart attack on a plate,’ he remarked jovially. ‘Best thing for a hangover.’ He conducted Tom to the seat opposite with a fork lurid with egg yolk.
There was no sign of McGowan or his rig. Their own mud-splattered SUV had several chickens roosting on the raised cowling of its hood. Lumps of their excrement clung to the windshield. Tom gloomily massaged his sandpapery muzzle, foreseeing that he would have to be the one who cleaned this off.
Stephen, the hysterical chef, deposited a platter in front of him and grunted, ‘Coffee?’
Tom sat, nauseated by the foody stench, and stared at the Day-Glo eggs, the rumble strips of bacon, the discs of blood sausage that glistened like oily bitumen.
Prentice cleared his throat. ‘Erumph. I hate to say it, but’ — he took out the pack of Reds from this breast pocket — ‘there’s no better way to round off a breakfast like that than with a fag.’
Tom hunched on the commode in the tiny bathroom. He kneaded the folds of his belly, while inventing spells to magic evacuation. It didn’t work. The cups of Nescafé with which he had sluiced his brain made him jittery. He might, he thought, do something truly dreadful today: load one of the Galil’s magazines with the long, evil-looking cartridges. Aim lazily at Prentice’s denim leg, then shatter it with a burst of fire.
‘I say,’ said Prentice, looking down at his stump, ‘what the devil did you do that for?’
Tom snickered, twirled the toilet paper holder, rasped at the sore skin.
He couldn’t find either William or Stephen, although the rifles in their olive-green sleeves had been clipped on the SUV’s rack, and the chicken shit was gone from the windshield. Finding a tariff list on reception, Tom counted out the requisite bills. It was high time he and Prentice had a reckoning: so far everything was either on Tom’s credit card or he had paid cash. Prentice hadn’t even offered to contribute, yet for some reason Tom found it difficult to ask him.
Tom called out, ‘Stephen? William?’
Parakeets chattered on the back veranda, but the Lodge was silent — ominously so. Even the TV was switched off. Tom pictured their hosts, loosely entwined on a mattress damp with come. William’s ratty brow nestled between the breasts of his Tugganarong friend. Tom tiptoed out of the lobby and down the wooden steps to the parking lot. He was conscious of leaving something irrevocably behind — and had an impulse to return to the cabin and check it again. Prentice was already waiting for him in the SUV, sitting sideways in the passenger seat, blowing cigarette smoke into the golden morning light.
They drove all morning, stopping only to fill up with gas and pick up the can McGowan had recommended.
The landscape was reaching a kind of crescendo: the road tying itself in knots as it worked its way through a maze of volcanic features. The cloud forest frothed up, so that they drove through dappled tunnels, long, mossy creepers fondling the windshield.
There was hardly any other motor traffic, but from time to time they rounded a bend to find the road ahead filled with a slowly plodding mob of Handrey, the women plump and swathed in brightly patterned togas, the men herding laden auracas, the children naked, skipping along and playing tag.
As the brown mass of humanity parted to allow them passage, Tom wound down his window and exchanged greetings, happy to be enfolded — albeit temporarily — by the jolly hill people.
Prentice was unmoved. He sat stock-still, eyes front, his young-old features twisted in disgust; and when Tom accelerated, he delivered a stream of invective: ‘Bloody lazy bing-bongs. The liberals say they’re closer to God — but they’re hand in paw with the bloody monkeys. I tell you, Brodzinski, the desert mobs are still worse, naked bloody savages. Only your Tugganarong is worth a damn, see, because he’s been subjected to a proper colonial power. Trained up, taught to be a servant to his masters. Without the work we put into the Tugganarong who’ve now come over here, these Anglos would be finished already. Kaput.’
Tom now knew better than to interrupt: to counter whatever Prentice came out with would only call forth still more of the same.
‘Down south I’ve a Tugganarong — well, obviously he’s not a friend, but I respect Jonas. .’
Prentice was wittering on when they entered a clearing, where, in the full glare of the noonday sun, two entire squads of paramilitary police were disporting themselves on the red rocks. Some were brewing up tea on portable stoves; others had stripped off their uniforms and were splashing in the crystal waters of a stream. One group were gathered by a large-calibre machine gun on a tripod. As the SUV caromed past, the Anglo officer who lay prone behind it tracked them with the weapon’s vicious muzzle.
This shut Prentice up for a while. They drove on in silence, Tom tormented by Prentice’s very proximity — his rotten, cloacal physicality — yet feeling utterly alone. Like a wife, Prentice encroached on Tom the entire time: borrowing nail clippers and shampoo; asking him to lift this, or tote that. And, equally wifely, the other man left Tom alone to be immolated by his own fiery feelings.
The country was changing. The tree cover became sparser, the road un-kinked itself, the volcanic extrusions retreated into the long grass. Up above, the cumulus clouds condensed — then evaporated, leaving behind only cirrus brush strokes on the cobalt-primed canvas. The heat began to build, and build. Then, at some definite — but, for all that, unnoticed — point, the little SUV tipped over the central fulcrum of the Great Dividing Range, and they were propelled down its far side into a new, old world.