The euphemism sounded ridiculous, a kitten’s miaow in this terrible fastness.
‘It’s not only worth it financially,’ Daphne Hufferman said, ‘it’s worth it morally, right.’
‘Morally?’
The big woman, who had barbecued the meat and served up re-fried beans and thawed-out coleslaw with hardly a word, now grew animated. ‘Down south, in the cities, yeah, a little boy or girl loves their little darlin’ pussy or puppy. Loves it, yeah. I tellya, Tom, that’s what we’re fighting for — that love. That’s what we’re living for — and that’s what we’re shooting the bloody moai for, right.’
‘I–I didn’t mean to offend. .’
‘None taken, mate, none taken,’ Daphne said, then relapsed back into contemplative, beer-sucking silence.
Prentice had been silent throughout the meal, his scant hair plastered on his brow, his scrawny neck pale and flaky, his thin torso kinked. To Tom, he appeared more than ever to be at once weak — and dangerous. He found himself repeating his companion’s name over and over in his mind: Prentice, Prentice, Prentice. . Until consonants were ground down, and Tom was thinking: penis, penis, penis. .
Prentice chose this point to break his silence. ‘Look, er, Dave, you wouldn’t happen to know the score in the Test, would you, old chap?’
Dave Hufferman laughed. ‘Your lot got creamed, mate. All out for two-two-nine in their second innings — it’s done and bloody dusted.’
‘H-How did you know that?’ Prentice was outraged but managed to keep it in check. Tom, jerked out of his reverie, sat up.
‘There’s not a lot we don’t hear about over here,’ Daphne put in. ‘There’s the short-wave radio, and people like to use it.’
‘And the Tontines?’ Tom inquired. ‘What are people saying at the moment? Are they bad?’
Before answering, Dave Hufferman drained his beer, then crumpled the can in his ham fist and chucked it on the growing pile of empties.
‘For blokes with your grades of astande? Well, tricky I’d say.’
It was Tom’s turn to splutter: ‘How did you know that?’
‘Well,’ Hufferman drawled, ‘like Daphne said, in these parts a man’s deeds go before him.’ He looked significantly at Prentice. ‘But that can change, mate — your respective grades, that is. It’s all up for grabs in the Tontines. You signed the rider, yeah?’
‘The rider?’
‘The tontine rider on the car-rental agreement.’
Tom thought back to the rental company in Vance, the bored hillwoman rattling through the paperwork. The tontine policy she’d outlined, the oddity of which had stayed with Tom for a while, only to be supplanted by other oddities along the way.
‘Yeah,’ he conceded. ‘Yeah, I did sign for the policy, the woman said it was in place of personal cover.’
Hufferman laughed again. ‘Oh, yairs, they always say that — and overseas tourists always sign.
‘Thing is, mate, the tontine kinda loops you in, right. Yer tontine is a special kind of insurance policy, yeah — a collective one. It’s taken out by a group, yeah, a family, a mob, a bunch of work mates, whoever. Now, whenever one of yer tontine holders karks it — and it don’t matter if it’s natural causes or a machete — then the principal derives on to the remaining blokes, and so on, until there’s only one of ’em left and he gets the lot!’
It took a while for Tom to absorb this — because he was saturated with beer.
Prentice grasped it first: ‘B-But, if all the money goes to the last policy holder left, then there’s every motive for them to—’
‘Do fer each other,’ Hufferman laughed. ‘Bang-on, mate. You ain’t so dusty.’
He leaned forward and chucked a handful of dry bark on to the still smouldering barbecue. It flared up, licks of flame that illuminated the pet-food shooter’s babyish bulk. Huffer-man went on intoning: a witch doctor over a crucible.
‘ ’Course, guvvie banned tontines for Anglos down south ages ago — caused way too much agg. But over here. . well, some say the whole point of introducing them was to get the bing-bongs to think, er, constructively — invest for the future. Others — yer bleedin’ hearts — they figure the tontines were a cynical move, a way of finishing off the desert tribes altogether.
‘These mobs believe nothing happens by accident — but there’s plenty of accidents over here. Plenty — specially in the bauxite mines, where a lot of ’em work. Feller gets crushed by a slag heap, truck drives over him — his mob go after the other tontine holders — stands to reason, right. Then their mobs go after his mob, and so-bloody-on. The tontine’s like a virus — goes straight into their brains, drives ’em haywire. They can’t stop. They take out more tontines, do more killing, take out more. Round and bloody round it goes.’
‘And the Tontine Townships? How do they relate to it all?’
Tom couldn’t take his eyes from Daphne Hufferman’s bovine face, as, in answer to his question she uttered these dreadful moos: ‘The Tontines suck the bing-bongs in, yeah. Nothing there to begin with but a road stop and the guvvie sector. Now there’s a whole heap of brokers flogging tontines, and the killings are 24/7, yeah.’
‘Thing is,’ Dave Hufferman said, sounding almost sympathetic, ‘once you’ve gotta tontine yerself, well. . Like I say, it kinda loops you in, right. Even the best of mates can fall out in those circs’, and a bing-bong hitman’ll cost yer no more that a pack of bloody cigs.’
‘So what can we do?’ Tom hated the drunken, hysterical edge to his voice. ‘Can we cancel our tontine?’
‘Ha-ha, no way, mate. It’s a Catch-22 sitch, see. You can’t travel this way without one — it’s on your laissez-passer. No, your best shot is to head straight for the guvvie sector; you’ll be safe there. Then you’ll have to negotiate for a rabia.’
‘A rabia — what’s that?’
But this was one question too many for the pet-food shooters. Husband and wife both stood and stretched, quite unselfconsciously pulling at the sweat-soaked towelling of their crotches.
‘Reckon that’s enough jawing for one night,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll give you the rest of the gen come dawn. The missus’ll show you blokes where you can sack down. Dunny’s over by the container if you need it, right. Take a torch, though, there can be stingers at night.’
Tom’s head swam. He struggled to rise, his boots rattling the discarded cans. Then there were hands in his pulling him up, gently but firmly. Tom realized it was Prentice.
He led Tom to the latrine, then waited while Tom swayed and gushed. Prentice guided him to the demountable, then into the cubicle where Hufferman had said they could sleep. Narrow steel bunks were bolted to the curving wall; on them, flowery coverlets were stretched tight.
Tom was too drunk to protest that Prentice was helping him to undress, but, as he unbuckled his belt, Tom said: ‘Whassup? You wrong kinduv. . astande. .’
The aircon’ in the demountable was blissfully efficient. Lying stretched out in the cot, Tom was almost chilly. This sobered him up. Over the unit’s rhythmic clunking he could hear voices coming from the pet-food shooters’ cubicle. He tried to ignore them. Prentice was already asleep, his smoker’s snore sawing through the bunk above.
Then Daphne Hufferman lowed: ‘You’re a big bad baby boy.’
‘Ma-Ma. Goo-goo,’ her husband rumbled.
‘Mummy’s gonna have to change you before bye-byes,’ Daphen cooed, then came the loud ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the big man’s babygro.
‘Want bottle. Want powder,’ he whined.
‘You’ll get a good old wipe, right, before you have bottle, or powder, or cuddle, young man.’