The Butt Read Online Free

towards a maid who was clearing away the cereal-crusted bowls.
    The maid, whose heavily scarred arms and legs gave her the sinister appearance of having been sewn together out of several other people, barked with laughter, then went to the hot plate and poured out a cup of coffee. This she brought straight over to the Consul.
    Tom smelled the bitter odour of the five-times-reheated brown gloop. Adams took a slug – unmitigated by milk or sugar – and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a gesture at odds with his fastidious manner.
    He burbled at the maid once more, and she crossed the room and snapped off the TV. A TV that, until then, Tom hadn’t even been aware was on. Although, now he considered it, at least some of his gloominess was attributable to the news footage he had been subliminally absorbing. Footage of a dirty firefight: half-tracks scuttling like scorpions over stony, nameless bled, their machine guns spitting death venom.
    ‘Look, Mr Brodzinski,’ Adams resumed, ‘ordinarily, what you say would be the case: two guys overseas, one of them assaults the other . . .’
    ‘Assaults?’ Tom expostulated, and then heard, issuing from his own lips, the pathetic excuse he had heard so often from those of his children: ‘But it was an accident.’
    ‘That’s just it.’ Adams remained reasonable. ‘Or, rather, the two things are interrelated. You see, Mr Lincoln is, in point of fact, a dual-citizen.’
    ‘A dual-citizen?’ Tom feared these repetitions made him seem moronic, exactly the kind of dumb hick, confounded by the exotic, who he himself despised.
    ‘Not, you understand’ – a little moue flitted across Adams’s mouth – ‘that he has taken on this status voluntarily; such a thing is incompatible with our own laws. It’s simply that by marrying Atalaya Intwennyfortee he automatically assumed her nationality.’
    ‘But . . . Well . . . I mean, I assumed . . . that he – that she was . . .’
    Adams put a stop to Tom’s floundering: ‘No matter what you assumed, they are indeed man and wife. Moreover, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a complex, ah, relationship here between the established and codified system of civil and criminal law, and the customary laws of the indigenous peoples. To get to the, ah, point, Mr Brodzinski, Mrs Lincoln is Tayswengo, and, in common with the other desert tribes, the Tayswengo don’t believe in, ah, accidents.’
    Adams placed undue emphasis on the word ‘accidents’; and to Tom, who was beginning to feel as if he was descending into a delirium, it seemed for a moment as if the Consul, himself, obtained to the same view.
    ‘They don’t believe in accidents,’ Tom murmured.
    ‘That’s right.’ Adams gestured to the unsigned papers that lay beside Tom’s untouched bowl of fruit. ‘Mrs Lincoln, therefore, considers your, ah, flipping of the butt on to her husband’s head to have been, ipso facto, evidence of malicious intent. And, I’m afraid to say, the law backs her up on this. If she were a third-, or even a second-generation Anglo, the situation would’ve been different. If she were an Ibbolit or, even better, a Tugganarong, the legal status of your action would’ve been different again. However, Mrs Lincoln is none of these things; she is Tayswengo, and therefore you will, almost certainly, face a charge of assault and, potentially, one for attempted murder.’
    For some time after the Consul had vouchsafed this terrible information, the two men sat in silence. Tom stared at the milk carton on the table in front of him, which bore a state-funded advertisement for a suicide helpline. Away down the walkway that led to the pool area, Tom could hear more of the liquid burbling, interspersed with bursts of laughter. The breakfast room was empty save for the two of them. A rivulet of ants came snaking across the tiled floor – black ones, this time. Peering down closely at them, Tom saw that every third or fourth worker carried on its