The Butt Read Free

black hooded eyes were directed to the doorway, where his teenage mistress was standing. Despite his state of contrition, and his gratitude at being so speedily shriven, Tom still felt a stab of sexual jealousy, mingled with an unreasoning hatred, at the sight of the black-skinned sylph, her discoid hairstyle forming a fetching halo around her pretty head.
    Tom took a deep breath, and half smelled, half tasted Vaseline and coconut oil. Could it be, he wondered, that my sense of smell is already more acute?
    ‘You’re not going to believe this’ – Tom addressed them both – ‘but that was my last – my last cigarette. I’m giving up too. I guess that’s why I was . . . I was so, uh, preoccupied. Well,’ he laughed shortly, in what he hoped was a self-deprecating manner, ‘at least if I stick to my resolution, I’ll never be in any danger of doing such a dumb thing ever again.’
    ‘At my age,’ Lincoln said, levering himself up on one elbow, ‘young man, you learn not to make too many resolutions at all. You just take each day as it comes, and try to be grateful if you’ve hung in there.’
    Observing the keen expression on Lincoln’s dissipated face, Tom was thankful for the ‘young man’, which, for once, seemed genuine, not patronizing, and placed him in the same age group as the girl leaning in the doorway.
    He got up to depart. ‘If there’s anything, anything at all I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask?’ Tom said, turning questioningly to the girl.
    ‘Sure,’ Lincoln put in. ‘Atalaya will be here, she’ll let you know if there’s anything, but I doubt there will be. It’s a blister – that’s all. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning. Lemme tellya – they do a good one here.’
    When he got back upstairs, Tom found the eight- year-old twins already drooling in front of the riotous, colourful barbarism of the Cartoon Network. His daughter, Dixie, who was thirteen, was sitting at the round table in the dining area of the apartment, threading glass beads on to a leather thong. Tommy Junior was in the small back bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. With his T-shirt as capacious as a robe, his large long-lobed ears and his sagittal crest of greased part-bleached hair, the boy resembled at once the Buddha and an ape. He was fiddling with the toggles of a handheld-computer games console that was hidden in his big hands.
    Tom looked at his eldest son, smitten with the shame and rage that were so habitual as to have formed a callus, jibing his heart.
    Tommy Junior looked up, grunted, looked down again.
    Was he truly retarded – Tom pondered this automatically, as any other man might have yawned – or wilfully fucking stupid? The boy seemed stupid to his father, his obsessions and his obduracies determined by some inner-peasant, rather than visited upon him. It was as if Tommy Junior tried quite concertedly to do everything in his power to upset his father. He grunted his way through meals, he ignored the most fundamental social pleasantries. If Tommy Junior spoke voluntarily with anyone at all, it was only in order to regale them with interminable monologues concerning whichever computer game he was currently fixated on.
    Besides, it wasn’t like he was at some special school. He was in the same grade as other kids his age. He got a little extra help, sure, but he could read, he could write.
    Martha came into the vestibule where her husband was standing. She was abstracted, withdrawn into the glossy funnel of a magazine which she held beneath her dripping, freshly showered face. A face hosed of expression as well as make-up. Regarding her sharply, Tom had a bizarre insight: Martha had given up smoking five years before, and ever since then she had seemed increasingly exiguous to him. It was as if the smoke that had once wreathed her beautiful face had given it definition.
    ‘How’d it go?’ she asked.
    ‘OK, I guess. He’s got a big blister, he’s lying down. The native