The Butt Read Free Page A

chippy’s looking after him fine.’
    ‘Please, Tom–’
    ‘What? The kids? They can’t hear – they don’t care.’
    ‘No,’ she snapped back, ‘not the goddamn kids – me, Tom, me.’
    ‘Anyways,’ Tom continued, eager to put his wife’s sensibilities behind him, ‘it looks like he’s gonna be OK. I smoothed things over.’
    Padding away from him, leaving wet footprints on the white tiles, each one like a blister, Martha said over her bare shoulder: ‘Well, that’s something, but then you’re always good in a crisis.’
    Crisis. Crisis averted. A crisis that had happened not to one of his kids – which Tom always feared when they were overseas – but only to the old man, Lincoln.
    Well into the cicada-chafed, tropical darkness, when he and Martha had finally managed to get all the kids settled – the twins in the bunks, Dixie on a studio bed grudgingly supplied by the management, Tommy Junior in the back bedroom – Tom allowed himself this positive stroke: the old man was OK, he was safe. Martha and the kids were safe too. They had all survived the drive over the Great Dividing Range, the switchback roads, the slithery mud.
    They had survived their adventurous vacation, and the day after tomorrow they would fly home, triumphant, the memory cards of their cameras loaded with digital trophies.
    Tom rolled towards his wife. She sighed, and hunkered away from him. He took the rebuff in his self-satisfied stride, and soon enough managed to sleep.
    But in the deep of the night there came a hammering on the door of the apartment, and swarming through heavy, humid dreams and misapprehensions – which continent am I on? who am I? – Tom swung the door open to find Atalaya, her breasts swinging free in the warm, damp vee of her lacy nightie, while above this curls were plastered against her furrowed brow.
    ‘He – Reggie, he’s fallen,’ she said without preamble. ‘I can’t lift him. Can you? Can you lift him?’
    ‘What time is it?’ Tom asked, reaching out for the quotidian.
    However, she only reiterated: ‘Can you lift him?’
    It was worse than he could have imagined. Tom found the little old man crumpled up on the tiles between the narrow single bed and the closet. It was pathetic: the blister had burst, and the flap of skin had peeled away from his pate, on it a clutch of the shoe-polish-coloured hairs.
    Tom hesitated for a moment – perhaps moving Lincoln would be a mistake? – then Atalaya urged him on with a none too gentle shove.
    The body was as light as a child’s, the liver-spotted skin unpleasantly scaly to the touch. Holding the old man in his arms, Tom felt Lincoln’s heart fluttering against his hand. He set him down, gingerly, on the bed, as if to wake him would be to disrupt an innocent repose.
    Propped up against the pillows, Lincoln breathed in laboured squeaks and nasal squeals. Tom was reminded of a smoker, gasping for breath after an unaccustomed jog.
    Atalaya gripped Tom’s elbow. ‘We must get him to the hospital. Now.’
    The old man’s eyelids twitched, exposing yellow bloodshot whites. His twisted hands grabbed at the fitted sheet, pulling it back to reveal the mattress, which was garishly patterned with frangipani blossoms.

    Out of unusual consideration – or calculated disdain – Martha had let Tom sleep in. He awoke to find the apartment empty, and, staggering from room to room, his damp soles sucking on the tiles, he saw the abandoned chrysalises of sheets and counterpanes on the disordered beds. The fans on the ceiling lazily sculpted the claggy atmosphere. Tom went out on to the balcony, then recoiled from the fanfare of the tropical day: its brassy greens and reds, its hot jazz of sunlight.
    The previous few hours came winging in on him: the boxy ambulance, its flashing lights slashing the darkness; the glaring white cube of the hospital; the old man being wheeled in on the gurney; the receptionist – freaky, with coiled braids and projecting, ornamental