Read Online The Butt by Will Self - Free Book Online

same with the twins . . .’
    Now she was under way, Martha could have kept going indefinitely, had not Tommy Junior discovered them in their toxic bower. He stared at his quarelling parents, his brown eyes shiny and indifferent, then he forcibly turned his mother by her shoulders to face the departures board.
    Martha said, ‘Oh, my God!’ Snatched up her carry-on bag and started towards the line that snaked into the roped-off pens which directed passengers towards security.
    Tom stood sulking for a few moments, then tagged along behind, his arm across his son’s shoulder, which was higher and more solid than his own.
    At the barrier there was a confusion of goodbyes and kisses that missed their mark – bouncing off cheekbones, lost in hair. Martha was contrite. She leaned into Tom and whispered: ‘I’m scared, honey, that’s all.’
    ‘Me too,’ Tom replied, and he would have sealed the rapprochement with a longer embrace had the twins not grabbed his hands and attempted to swing on them. By the time he disengaged, his wife had disappeared, and Dixie was standing on the far side of the metal detector, calling to her father to propel her little brothers through.

    Two days later, waking in the deathly monochrome of a tropical dawn, Tom lay listening to the clickety agitation of the roaches in their motel. He thought back to those last few minutes at the airport. Even though Dixie had called him during the family’s lay-over at Agania, Tom couldn’t rid himself of the unsettling notion that Martha hadn’t left the country at all. He hadn’t seen his wife go, and now he felt her presence acutely in the seedy, overheated bedroom of the minute apartment.
    The Entreati Experience had turned out to be a backpackers’ hostel, with a few short-let apartments on the top storey. The backpackers’ cubicles were ranged round a grimy courtyard, across which were strung clotheslines festooned with their garish T-shirts and brightly patterned sarongs and Bermudas, which flapped in the bilge-laden breeze from the nearby container port.
    Down here, at the rougher end of Vance, there were few Anglo faces to be seen on the streets. Across the road from the Experience, there was a bar frequented by natives, where surly drunks squatted all day and evening, before, in the small hours, beginning noisily incompetent fights.
    Swai-Phillips had been right, though: the monthly rate for Tom’s apartment was nugatory; a fact explained by the manager, who reminded him that the tourist season was ending. Soon, all the tanned kids would shoulder their packs and flip-flop halfway across the world back to college.
    Tom felt ambivalent about this. The college kids were infuriating, revving the engines of their Campervans at all hours of the night, touristic vehicles that were incongruously pitted with bullet holes.
    Beardless blond giants cornered Tom in the dank corridors of the hostel and spun him yarns of their adventures in the interior. Their girlfriends loitered near by, snickering, chewing gum, rearranging the straps of their bikinis to expose more of themselves.
    Still, once the kids had finally gone, Tom would be all alone. He felt an aching nostalgia for the very idea of air travel, as if the computer-targeted silvery fuselages belonged to a bygone era. Here he was grounded: that most pitiful of things, a left-behind tourist. In his pitiful suitcase were his pitiful effects: half-squeezed tubes of sun cream, trunks with a big word written across them, airport novels that would never go through an airport again, a digital camera loaded with pin-prick-sharp images of ghostly happiness.
    The sheet of paper listing his lawyer’s impositions was stuck to the scabrous door of the fridge by a magnet in the squashed L-shape of the great desertified island-continent itself.
    Each day now the humidity was building and building towards the monsoon. Most days, it took Tom until noon to rouse himself, pull on some clothes and venture out into the