The Butt Read Online Free Page B

a lawyer.’
    Clearly, this was Adams’s way of saying that Tom would have to stay behind, while Martha and the kids flew home. As if to emphasize this, the Consul reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a card. ‘You can reach me on my cell at any time,’ he said, ‘or leave a message on the ansaphone. I pick them up regularly.’
    Tom took the card with one hand and stretched out the other. Once again, the Consul patted it. Adams got down into the little car. It was going to be an awkward parting. Adams wound down the window, but his gaze was fixed straight ahead, to where sprinkler jets played on the hurting, emerald green of the sports field, with its three anomalous goal posts like keep-fit gibbets. He started the car.
    Hating himself for doing it, Tom leaned down and, to prevent Adams from driving away, placed his hands on the car door.
    Where has my cool gone? I’m blabbing like a fucking wimp . . . Tom railed at himself, but to the Consul he said: ‘I – I didn’t realize any of this stuff, you know. About, um, customary law. I though this was, like, a developed country – it certainly sells itself that way so it can rake in the tourist bucks.’
    The Consul withered up at Tom. It would have been a relief if he’d given another of his bite-sized lectures, pointing out that ignorance of the law was no defence, or perhaps detailing a few more ethnographic facts. Instead, Adams only withered at him for a while longer, then resolutely put the car into shift.
    ‘Call me later,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll call you.’ Then he pulled away. The tin-pot Toyota halted at the cross street for a moment, then turned right along Dundas Boulevard, towards the ridiculous white marble pyramid of the casino on the seafront.
    Tom stood for a while looking after him, then peered down at the card in his hand. It had the usual heavy weave of government service stationery. Underneath the flag, and the mysteriously armed bird of prey – what could it possibly do with those spears and lightning bolts? – was embossed WINTHROP ADAMS, HONORARY CONSUL; then an address, which Tom, despite his ignorance of Vance, recognized as being residential.
    ‘Honorary Consul’? Tom mused. Presumably, this meant that Adams wasn’t a full-time government employee, or even that he came under the auspices of the embassy in the capital down south?
    Tom was pondering this when a large red SUV swerved into the parking lot and bounced to a halt beside him. He recoiled, then stepped forward, intent on giving the reckless driver a piece of his disordered mind. But before he could, the driver’s window was reeled down to disclose a truly striking visage, while the back door of the SUV burst open, and Tom’s younger children came galumphing out.
    The eight-year-old twins, Jeremy and Lucas, leaped at Tom, pummelling his chest, and both piping at once.
    ‘We saw crocodiles, Dad!’
    ‘And snakes! Big snakes!’
    ‘One had eaten, like, a goat!’
    ‘And you could see hoofs sticking out of its tummy!’
    Tom’s daughter, Dixie, put one long leg down from the vehicle, and her father noted, with annoyance, that she had had her blonde hair done up in the discoid coif of a desert tribeswoman. Tom had seen other female Anglo tourists affecting this look, and he’d remarked to Dixie and Martha how unbecoming it was: their hair scraped up and oiled, so that their pink scalps were exposed. He would have forcefully expressed his displeasure right away, were it not for the imposing oddity of the SUV’s driver.
    He must have been ten years or so younger than Tom – a man in the full rude vigour of his mid thirties. Certainly, the copper-skinned torso framed by the SUV’s window was highly toned: every pectoral and abdominal muscle clearly defined. That the man was naked from the waist up was not that remarkable, but his Afro of tight, almost white-grey curls was striking, as was the goatee-and-moustache combination he sported, which was beautifully