‘This,’ Prentice cried. ‘This is the real over there, all right. Oh, yes, my friend. Oh, yes.’
Tom gritted his teeth, although he too was overwhelmed by the prospect that opened out before them: a country so wide and vast and old-seeming; a country of beige rock formations, smoothly streamlined like cetaceans, as if they had been beached by the retreat of ancient oceans.
A country of tinder-dry yellow grasses and tall spindly eucalyptus trees, their fire-blackened trunks bare for fifty, sixty feet up to the shimmer of the canopy. The trees were so evenly spaced that they gave the impression of a colossal plantation. Tom stared down avenues miles in length to either side of the road, searching for the habitations of the constant foresters.
The metalled road faltered, stuttered, then the blacktop gave out altogether. Route I was now a red dirt road, heavily corrugated, so that the car’s tyres whacked from trough to trough, filling the interior with an insistent thrumming. Tom changed up to prevent skidding, and they bucketed on.
An enormous road sign swam towards them out of the heat-haze — the first they had seen that day. The destinations it listed — TONTINE TOWNSHIPS, KELLIPPI BAUXITE MINES, AMHERST, TRANGADEN — sounded prosaic, while the distances were unthinkable: 2,134 KMS, 2,578 KMS, 5,067 KMS, 5,789 KMS. Tom added on the thousand further kilometres he would have to cover on shifting-desert tracks from Trangaden, to come up with a total that suggested a maritime circumnavigation of a hitherto unknown globe.
Prentice saw them first and barked: ‘Pull over!’
Slewing to a halt, Tom leaned across and followed the waxen wand of Prentice’s finger to where, a quarter of a mile off, the tightly massed giant birds were tramping through the bush. Tom could make out their pearlescent plumage, and the curious movement of their backwards-jointed legs. There must have been over a hundred moai, and even at this range the men could hear their monstrous gravelly burbling.
‘Wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open with that lot, old boy,’ said Prentice. ‘You know they’re incredibly aggressive. Down south—’
He was cut off by a black vortex of flies, which spun in through the open window and corkscrewed into his open mouth. Tom would have laughed — but within seconds the car was a maelstrom of buzzing flakes, shaken up by the two men flailing at them.
‘Oh, yes,’ Prentice spluttered. ‘This is the real over there, godforsaken, flyblown. . and. . and y’know who’s to blame for it?’
‘Who?’ Tom gagged.
‘The bing-bongs, of course. The bloody bing-bongs.’
Tom drove off as fast he could. With the aircon’ blasting and the windows wide open, the suction of the draught extracted most of the flies, but still, entire drifts remained on top of the dash. Prentice put on his hat and rolled down the fly screen, thus completing his transformation into a Victorian spinster missionary. When Tom tried on his own, he discovered that the screen was too opaque for him to see the road. He set his jaw and drove on, determined to become accustomed to the diffident tickling in his nostrils, and at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
The two remained like this — massively stoical in the face of many tiny irritants — for the next two hundred corrugated miles, until Bimple Hot Springs came into view, and Tom suggested they stop to get something to eat.
‘It’s true,’ said Mr Courtney, lazily flicking the flies away from his bulbous grey eyes. ‘What your friend says about the bloody flies. It was the bing-bongs — and worse, they’re still at it, right.’
‘At what?’ Tom queried. He too was flicking but irritably, and he wondered how long it would be before he could treat the flies with such disdain.
‘Oh, yairs.’ Mr Courtney tugged up a handful of hot sludge from the slough they were lying in and applied it to his broad, sun-reddened brow. ‘Y’see, yer bing-bong could kill only the odd moa or flipper with his primitive spears, right. Then we pitched up, and we brought rifles, right.
‘Well, yer bing-bong, he’s a happy little bloke, has no thought for the morrow. He thinks “meat” — now, don’t he, so he goes on one bloody almighty killing spree. Been on it for near on eighty years now. Wiped out most of the moai, wiped out the flippers, wiped out the auraca — bloody feral camels and horses in all, yeah. Now yer bing-bong, he only takes the choicest cuts — even his bloody dogs get sweetmeats! All that bloody meat lying around — all these damn flies.’
Mr Courtney allowed his considerable bulk to slide down still further, so that all that was left of him above the mud bath was the top half of his face; his outsized chipmunk teeth gnawed on the sludge.
Mrs Courtney — who was even bulkier than her husband — gave a hippo snort, shifted in her picnic chair and affirmed, ‘Bloody bing-bongs, yeah.’
Bloody, thought Tom. Bloody, bloody, bloody.
They had found the Courtneys already comfortably ensconsed at the Hot Springs. Their Winnebago was the only vehicle in the parking lot, and, despite the bullet holes that peppered its rusty sides, its candy-striped canopy, with the picnic chairs and table beneath it, gave their little encampment a gay holiday air. As did Mrs Courtney, who, draped in a tent of a dress patterned with hallucinogenic Van Gogh sunflowers, insisted on serving the new arrivals with tea.
‘You’ll be lucky if the fat slag in there will dish up for you, yeah,’ she had said as she pottered with kettle and tea bags. ‘Silly cow’s scared of her own shadow.’
To Tom, who was unknotting the muscles that the drive had tied up, this remark was doubly ridiculous: Mrs Courtney was fatter than any cow.
The scarred clearing in the gum trees, with the steaming wound of the hot springs burping sulphurous fumes, had a minatory atmosphere. As did the motel, a ramshackle corrugated-iron building with a warped veranda that was raised up on stubby stilts.
To test Mrs Courtney’s hypothesis, Tom walked over, unhooked the screen door and went in. A plump girl with carrot hair and cartoon make-up — a purple Cupid’s bow masked her own thin lips — was sitting on a high stool poring over a celebrity-gossip magazine.
Tom was taken aback: apart from a narrow walkway running from the door to the counter, the entire room was behind bars — solid, steel bars that extended from floor to ceiling. In front of the counter there was a slit through which keys or candy bars could be exchanged for money. There were plenty of candy bars on the warped wooden shelves, together with cans of soda and beans, and stacks of Bimple Hot Springs postcards. There was an automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the girl.
Tom remained silent; so did she. He looked first through a blurred windowpane, then at the floor, where between his booted feet flies clustered in neat buttons, each a mutated splash of spilt, sticky fluid.
The girl, very deliberately, licked first her finger and then her thumb. She didn’t appear scared of anything. She turned a page.
‘We’re full,’ she said dreamily. ‘And there’re no take-outs ’cept burgers — bloody bing-bongs hit the last convoy.’
* * *
Prentice now brought the burgers Tom had ordered across to the springs. When he had seen the name on the map, together with the symbol denoting a road stop, Tom had pictured sylvan glades and clear pools of invigorating, mineral-tangy water. The reality was this smelly mire fringed by ghost gums, the bark peeling from their emaciated trunks. The naiads were these obese Anglo retirees from down south, who were wandering the interior on a permanent vacation.
At least the mephitic stench kept most of the flies off. Tom struggled out of the morass. His torso and limbs were smoothly coated with coffee-coloured mud.
‘You look like a bloody bing-bong,’ Mrs Courtney laughed, and Prentice snickered through a mouthful of burger.
By the time Tom got back from dousing himself under an outside shower, Prentice had finished his own snack and was gingerly removing his clothes, a towel — which Tom recognized as one of his own — wrapped around his waist like a kilt.
Prentice shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other, struggling out of his jeans. He hunched over to hide his crotch from view. Tom grimaced. But, despite his effortful modesty, as Prentice pulled up his swimming trunks, the towel’s flaps parted, exposing white thighs and a pink hairless scrotum.
Tom felt the twinge of the scar the makkata’s knife had left in his own thigh. Yet it wasn’t until Prentice was on his back in the mud bath that Tom realized what had provoked this: Prentice’s own groin had been devoid of marks of any kind.
Once he had reached the mud bath, Prentice lowered himself in and began to flop about in the muck, pushing his whole head under and squirming. Coming up for air, he made arcs for his eyes with fingers-for-wipers, then said: ‘I say, Brodzinski. I expect I’m quite a funny sight covered in all this — you wouldn’t mind bagging a photo, would you? My lady wife will find this awfully jolly.’
The burger was inedible — burned at the edges, near frozen at its centre. The stale bun flaked away on to the beaten earth beneath the Courtneys’ picnic table; the sesame seeds pattered on to Tom’s damp lap. He recalled the advertising copy on the billboards; ‘The table’s set, the silver’s polished, we’ve checked under the table for flippers — so where the hell are you?’
The child molester wallowed in the springs, applying mud to the corruption on his neck.
‘That’ll help,’ Mr Courtney observed. ‘Bloody good for eczema and such things, yeah. These springs are the only decent spot left in these parts,’ he continued. ‘Bloody bing-bongs have done for all the good land ’tween here and the Tontines.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Tom asked.
‘Just what I say.’ Mr Courtney lifted another handful of mud and let it plop on to his occiput. ‘They’ve grubbed up all the trees. They get a length of chain, stretch it between two utes and drive through the bush. Once the tree cover’s gone, the first few downpours’ll wash away the topsoil. But if it ain’t turning to desert quick enough to satisfy their black hearts, then they salt it for good measure.
‘All this land’ — he gestured grandly — ‘was bloody bonzer for stock before the bing-bongs crawled in from over there. They did for the game; now they’re doing for the bush ’n’ all.’
‘But why?’ Tom interjected.
But Mr Courtney kept right on: ‘You wanna know the sickest thing?’
‘What?’
‘Those sicko liberal pols down south, they’re giving the bing-bongs bloody grants to do it, yeah.’
‘They are! They bloody are!’ chimed in Mrs Courtney, who had popped out of the Winnebago’s door and now came flapping towards them, a gaudy moa that had somehow managed to escape the natives’ hideous decimations.
They were an hour out of Bimple Hot Springs when the country began to change again — change in such a way as to confirm Mr Courtney’s description, if not necessarily his analysis.
The gaps between the gums grew greater, while the tinder-dry grasses straggled away, revealing jagged stumps, supine trunks and bone-white fallen boughs. Salt pans fingered their way between the remaining trees, their rims glinting in the burning sun, which beat down mercilessly on their little SUV.
The flies too were merciless. In desperation, Tom said Prentince could smoke in the car; he even asked him to blow smoke into his face. Prentice happily obliged. To Tom, the cigarette smoke smelled unbelievably piquant — as if a filet mignon were being griddled between his companion’s fingers. To counteract the dreadful hunger, Tom asked him: ‘You don’t believe that stuff about the natives getting deser-tification grants, do you?’
‘Of course I believe it, old chap,’ Prentice exhaled back. ‘Because it’s absolutely bloody true.’
‘But surely it’s the Anglos’ ranching that did for. .’ He waved at the moribund bush. ‘. . all this?’
‘So the bleeding hearts would have people think.’ Prentice self-satisfiedly crossed his arms. ‘But the truth is they want the bing-bongs to have more of their beloved desert. They hand out a thousand bucks for every hectare they clear — that’s what my wife’s cousin says.
‘Some elements’, he continued, ‘won’t rest until all the cultivated land is gone — the cane country up north, even the good pasturage and arable land round Amherst. Bloody all of it.’
Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Why was it, Tom wondered, that this was the entire nation’s favoured intensifier? Besides, with this much bloodying going on, there must be a lot of actual blood. This rumination clotted his flyblown mind, and a chant started up in his inner ear: ‘Bloody-this, bloody-that, bloody-all-of-it. Bloody-this, bloody-that, bahn-bahn-bahn-bahn-boosh. .’ for mile after mile, as the fireball arced over them and Prentice puffed.
Tom was so mindless in this mantra that he scarcely noticed the first few burned-out vehicles to the side of the road, with bullet holes peppering their bodywork, their windshields smashed and tyres fire-flayed. Then, twin-rotored helicopters began to chatter overhead. These lurched in the hot air, as awkward in flight as roaches.
Then Tom saw the back of the line.
There were Winnebagos and saloons, road-trains with multiple semi-trailers and smaller trucks, pick-ups and SUVS — all crammed with native hunters, their kills lashed to the fenders.
The line was off to one side of the road, and there was room to drive by it. This Tom did for a mile or two, until, with no sign of an end to the procession of vehicles, he pulled up and turned to Prentice: ‘How long to the next road stop?’
Prentice examined the map. ‘Maybe another five klicks.’
Tom hailed a native, who sat erect behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pick-up. ‘What’re you guys in line for?’
The man turned red-veined engwegge eyes towards Tom; his face was masked with indifference. ‘Gas,’ he clicked. ‘Then road block. Only gas fer a thousan’ klicks — plenny road blocks.’
He snorted derisively, then spat a stream of brown juice through the window on to the rusty roadway.