The foody perfume of pipe smoke braided with the clean-smelling desert breeze; the sunset, as ever, was spectacular: a ruddy blush rushing up the face of the sky. Tom found his external voice. ‘B — but a little kid, a baby?’
‘Like I say, mate, there were some balls-ups, but b’lieve me, by far the majority of those early oppos were done on patients that already had some, y’know, neuroses — or even actual brain damage. It wasn’t like we were messing with something in working order, right.’
Tom, dodging dream fists, levering the weight off his chest, searched for the sympathy he knew he didn’t have. Yet if only he could find it, he was sure the appropriate outrage would be there too.
‘He — Tommy, my, uh, son. Y’know he isn’t. .’ He dredged up one of Martha’s weary pronouncements: ‘Adequately socialized.’
Von Sasser snorted. ‘Tell me about it, Tom. Those boys up in the north aren’t adequately-bloody-socialized either! Some of ’em can be pretty vicious — we aren’t talking clean-kills here, yeah. There’s rape — torture even. Lissen, I’m not saying I condone such behaviour, but you’ve gotta offset it against the positive impact the insurgency has on the left-brain hegemony: their infrastructure, mines, their financial-bloody-services, their drinks industry, and especially the Tuggy foot soldiers who do the Anglos’ dirty work for ’em.
‘Thing is’ — the neuro-anthropologist brought his sharp knees up under his sharper chin, a surprisingly adolescent posture for a middle-aged man — ‘say they don’t, I dunno, function that well, at the very least they can advance the desertification programme. I mean, y’don’t haveta be a makkata to string a length of chain between a couple of utes, now do you?’
Despite the impression that he and Von Sasser were speaking wildly at cross purposes, Tom persisted: ‘If — if you can’t be, uh, can’t know, definitely, what the results are gonna be, then how does this, like, operation, work to, y’know, modify behaviour? I mean, it seems to me that in this case, uh, castration might be, I dunno, more effective.’
Von Sasser sighed, a long exhalation of waste-compassion: ‘Ye-es, it’s true, the human brain is — viewed with the Western medicalized paradigm — a complex system; it seems always to be striving to reach homeostasis. Even with all connection between them severed, left-brain functions can be reestablished on the right, and vice versa. Still, these are only minor drawbacks, while the benefits can be astonishing, and anyway, when it comes to a case such as this, I don’t think castration is a good comparison at all, yeah. I mean, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? Whereas you can try thinking of the oppo — and I suggest you do — as a reward.’
‘A reward?’
‘You’ve got it: a reward, a reparation payment that I can help you to give, if you help me.’
‘Me? In the, uh, oppo?’ A cut — a nick even — the very image of scarlet pulsing from capillaries made Tom gag. ‘H — how? How the hell can I help?’
‘Lissen.’ Von Sasser smiled at him again. ‘What’s your idiom. .’ He thought for a second. ‘That’s it: “sucks”. Coercion, Tom, sucks in my view, right. I mean, I could make you, but I’m certain once you get to considering all the possible benefits — the goodwill of my brother, Hippolyte, Atalaya and the Intwennyfortee mob’s as well — you’ll come round to the idea of volunteering, yeah.’
And Tom, who no longer had any power to resist this outrageous proposition, understood that, by default, he had already come round and round again, and round once more, until he was all dried out, the last desiccated guest in the roach motel.
‘Schweinsaxe?’ Von Sasser asked Adams, holding up a pair of serving tongs with a whole pig’s trotter wedged in them.
‘Thanks, Erich,’ the Consul replied. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’
Von Sasser deposited the truncated foot on a plastic bowl, then ladled thick brown gravy on top. The Tayswengo waitresses in their starch-stiff dirndls were still loitering by the kitchen door, but this evening the neuro-anthropologist had elected to serve the food himself.
Tom supposed this was partly to promote an atmosphere of cosy domesticity, but also because — with some sensitivity — Von Sasser didn’t want to draw attention to Prentice. After all, if the Tayswengo had refused to serve him, he might have made a scene. At the very least, it would’ve looked as if a ‘Nil by mouth’ sign had been hung from his scrawny neck. In the event, when it was his turn, Von Sasser simply passed over Prentice in silence, and dished up for the next person at the table.
When Tom’s turn came, Von Sasser neglected him as well. For a moment, Tom thought to protest, but then his volunteer status came back to him, and he appreciated that a full stomach wasn’t something he wanted to have on his first outing to an operating room.
Prentice wasn’t remotely discomfited by his fast. He helped himself to the bottle of Hock, and sat smoking and chatting, more animated than he had been at any time since his arrival at Ralladayo. He discussed, quite openly, the two mixed-race children he had ‘fathered’: one in the Tontines, and one who had recently been transferred here, to the orphanage.
Was it only Tom who could see the parentheses around ‘fathered’? It can’t be, he thought, because without them Prentice’s remarks were psychopathically unabashed. ‘I’ve made a decision,’ he was now telling Gloria. ‘No matter what the consequences are for my marriage, I’m going to tell my lady wife the entire truth.’
Gloria nodded sympathetically, then said, ‘That’s good, Brian.’
‘I’ve made the first reparations to two of the ladies involved, so I’ve got to jolly well do right by the third as well.’
‘That’s excellent, Brian.’
‘Yes, honesty is the best policy and all that sort of thing. I–I’m not terribly articulate, you know, but it did something to me — seeing the kiddies. I’ve never thought of myself as a fatherly sort of chap, but it stirred me up, and I want to — if I’m allowed, that is — try and, sort of, look after them.’
It stretched the bounds of Tom’s credulity that Gloria Swai-Phillips — who had cared for the results of Prentice’s paedophilia — could sit there encouraging this grotesque fantasizing. Yet he found himself sitting and listening to it, and, perhaps by his very passivity alone, encouraging him as well.
Walking back to the settlement, Tom had been so unsteady on his feet that Von Sasser had to hold him up. Never the less, with his head already swimming, Tom still couldn’t prevent himself from taking shots of schnapps from the bottle that had thoughtfully been left beside his empty plate. The oily aftertaste of the spirit was curiously moreish.
With no food of his own to eat, Tom was at leisure to examine each of his dining companions in turn, and analyse what they were saying with the benefit of his new background knowledge. With his, ah. . harkening to his master’s inner voice, and his slavish espousal of Von Sasser’s made-up folkways, there was no doubt that Adams had had the ‘oppo’. Tom deduced that Vishtar Loman must have had it too. Gloria? No — she didn’t need it, she was one of life’s self-appointed Head Girl scouts, ever ready to boss a troop, whether of baboons or bankers. If her corpus callosum had been cut, Tom thought ruefully, the only spirit voices Gloria would hear would be those of sullen inner-children refusing to respond to her remorseless questioning.