The frame rattled on the brick wall. Dixie’s hairstyle was now all mashed up, like a bird’s nest found lying by the roots of a tree. She bit her lip. Tears lay in her eye sockets — misery bifocals. She bit her knuckles and spluttered, ‘You. . you!’ Then she turned abruptly, mashing the halo still further, and bolted into the back bedroom, where, after a few more seconds, Tom heard her begin to wail, with all the mundane anguish of an ambulance siren.
Tommy Junior remained standing exactly where he was, gurning at his games console.
Later on, when the kids had cooled off in the Mimosa’s pool, the Brodzinskis walked across the stretch of park to the ’nade.
When they’d first arrived in Vance, three weeks before, the prospect had both charmed and reassured Tom: the neatly mown grass and the oval beds of tropical shrubbery, which spread smoothly down to the ’nade, the long boardwalk that ran clear around Vance Bay, its supporting piles sunk deep in the muddy foreshore.
Now, however, he was conscious only of what an alien imposition this all was: the flowers were too lurid and fleshy, the heavily irrigated grass too green. As for the ’nade, while the weathered wood used to build it was meant to make the serpentine structure harmonize with its surroundings, this effect was ruined by the regularly spaced ‘information points’ — each with its perspex rain hood, each blazoned with a stentorian NO SMOKING sign, complete with obligatory list of grave penalties.
Alongside the ’nade, there was a beautifully equipped playground. Bright, primary-coloured climbing frames, see-saws and swings stood in safety pits of fine white sand. There was even a water play area, where concealed jets created an artificial stream. Yet, the high-flown municipal pride in inclusiveness, which had even produced a swing for wheelchair-bound children, now seemed strange to Tom, set beside the brackish ooze of the bay, in which wallowed the occasional salt-water crocodile or prehistoric-looking bird.
As they ate their burgers and fries on one of the trestle tables by the café, Martha pointed out what Tom had known only too well — even as he’d wheedled the airline clerk — yet hadn’t dared to acknowledge to himself. ‘There are only two alternatives, Tom,’ she began.
And he, forlornly, tried to stop her, with a ‘Perhaps we should discuss this in private. .?’
Which she waved away with ‘The kids may as well hear it right now. It’s a valuable lesson for them’ — she turned to include all the children in the homily — ‘about how all our actions have consequences. Your daddy has signed a bond, see, and that bond is his word, because he’s an honest man; and because he’s given his word, he’ll have to stay here for a few more days, so he can sort out this business with Mr Lincoln, the man he injured.
‘OK. But if we want to get home in time for you guys to start school, and me to start work’ — here, Martha darted a particularly sharp look at Tom, who, she maintained, never accorded her career the same importance that he attached to his own — ‘then we’ll have to go without him. See’ — she turned to Tom again — ‘wasn’t that easy?’
Jeremy squeezed a French fry between his grubby fingers, until it ejaculated white pulp on to his ketchup-smeared paper plate.
‘What’s a bond?’ he said.
On leaving his family, Tom went straight to the CellPoint store that he’d spotted the day before. It was half a mile along Dundas Boulevard, the wide straight avenue that ran from the terracotta block of the Mimosa into the downtown area of Vance.
The CellPoint store, with its plate-glass window plastered with blue and orange decals, and its modular plastic stands that held the gleaming clam shells of the cellphones, was deeply comforting to Tom. There was an outlet exactly like it in the mall near their home town of Milford.
The CellPoint store spoke to him of efficient global communications and, more importantly, of what was being communicated: namely, certain standards of human decency and best business practice.
As Tom stepped inside, the air con’ separated his damp shirt from his back. The workaday formalities of renting a phone were also comforting, yet Tom couldn’t stop himself from examining the sales clerks with new and warier eyes.
Whereas, throughout his vacation, he’d been blithely blind to the racial differences of the country’s inhabitants — for, was it not, he asked of his flabby liberal conscience, exactly like home? — he now found the woman behind the counter disconcertingly alien. Even though she riffled her computer keyboard, exhibiting all the vapid efficiency of a First World employee, Tom couldn’t help fixating on her café-au-lait complexion. Her wrists were encircled with the same raised bands of whitened flesh as the limbs of the maid at the Mimosa. Cicratization, wasn’t that what it was called? And how did they do it? By inflicting a regular pattern of burns, then rubbing ash into them? But what kind of ash? Surely not cigarette?
Cicratization. It wasn’t the kind of body-modification that Dixie and her friends snuck off to get at that stoners’ piercing joint behind the Milford Mall, now was it? Those alien wrists. . this reeked of wood-smoked firelight, the jumble and thrash of naked limbs, the jabber of alien tongues. .
His homely fugue dispelled, Tom couldn’t wait to sign the papers and get back outside.
As soon as he’d texted Adams with his new cellphone number, the silvery shell in his palm rattled into life. A loud percussive ring tone issued from its little speaker; the noise entirely drowned out the lazy ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the automated pedestrian crossing. One of the ubiquitous Vance meter maids was passing by: a faded Anglo in a militaristic orange uniform, toting a handheld computer and a digital camera. She looked over at Tom and grimaced.
He answered the incoming call — it was Adams. ‘I’m glad you fixed yourself up with a cellphone,’ he said, without any preamble. ‘There have been, ah, developments. I need you to come right out to my place; the address is on the card I gave you.’
‘Developments?’ Tom was bemused.
‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,’ Adams came back at him. ‘Just get a cab and give the driver the address. He’ll know how to find it. Come right out. Right out.’
The cabbie was languid to the point of inanition, and Tom could have sworn he drove half the way there steering with his knees. He dropped Tom on a suburban street that curled up into the foothills. Single-storey clapboard houses were set back from the road behind grassy verges. They stood upon stilts, surrounded by stands of palms and bamboo.
At first glance, the lazy S of bluey-blacktop and the neat gardens could have belonged to any suburb in the subtropical developed world. But then Tom noticed the basement areas beneath the houses: there were heaps of old washing machines, discarded TVs and crazy hanks of chicken wire lying on the dirty concrete pans between the stilts. The odour of the place was more decayed than floral, and, sniffing this, Tom made his way between two thorny hedges, then over a rickety wooden walkway that linked the front yard of Adams’s house to its single upper storey.
He opened the screen door and, finding the front door ajar with no sign of buzzer or knocker, called out: ‘Anyone about?’ In what he hoped was a strong assertive voice.
There was no reply. Tom pushed the door open. The room that confronted him was unremarkable: there were woven rush mats on the highly polished floorboards; rattan easy-chairs with padded cushions; a couple of small bookcases, stacked vertically with books and piled horizontally with periodicals. There were native paintings on the plain white walls: jaggy swirls of bright pigments and finger daubs, applied to curved bark shields. With its slight air of bachelor’s asperity, and its fussy co-option of native artefacts, the interior was exactly what Tom had expected of the Consul.