Read The Butt for Free Online

and, more importantly, of what was being communicated: namely, certain standards of human decency and best business practice.
    As Tom stepped inside, the air con’ separated his damp shirt from his back. The workaday formalities of renting a phone were also comforting, yet Tom couldn’t stop himself from examining the sales clerks with new and warier eyes.
    Whereas, throughout his vacation, he’d been blithely blind to the racial differences of the country’s inhabitants – for, was it not, he asked of his flabby liberal conscience, exactly like home? – he now found the woman behind the counter disconcertingly alien. Even though she riffled her computer keyboard, exhibiting all the vapid efficiency of a First World employee, Tom couldn’t help fixating on her café-au-lait complexion. Her wrists were encircled with the same raised bands of whitened flesh as the limbs of the maid at the Mimosa. Cicratization, wasn’t that what it was called? And how did they do it? By inflicting a regular pattern of burns, then rubbing ash into them? But what kind of ash? Surely not cigarette?
    Cicratization. It wasn’t the kind of body-modification that Dixie and her friends snuck off to get at that stoners’ piercing joint behind the Milford Mall, now was it? Those alien wrists . . . this reeked of wood-smoked firelight, the jumble and thrash of naked limbs, the jabber of alien tongues . . .
    His homely fugue dispelled, Tom couldn’t wait to sign the papers and get back outside.
    As soon as he’d texted Adams with his new cellphone number, the silvery shell in his palm rattled into life. A loud percussive ring tone issued from its little speaker; the noise entirely drowned out the lazy ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the automated pedestrian crossing. One of the ubiquitous Vance meter maids was passing by: a faded Anglo in a militaristic orange uniform, toting a handheld computer and a digital camera. She looked over at Tom and grimaced.
    He answered the incoming call – it was Adams. ‘I’m glad you fixed yourself up with a cellphone,’ he said, without any preamble. ‘There have been, ah, developments. I need you to come right out to my place; the address is on the card I gave you.’
    ‘Developments?’ Tom was bemused.
    ‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,’ Adams came back at him. ‘Just get a cab and give the driver the address. He’ll know how to find it. Come right out. Right out.’
    The cabbie was languid to the point of inanition, and Tom could have sworn he drove half the way there steering with his knees. He dropped Tom on a suburban street that curled up into the foothills. Single-storey clapboard houses were set back from the road behind grassy verges. They stood upon stilts, surrounded by stands of palms and bamboo.
    At first glance, the lazy S of bluey-blacktop and the neat gardens could have belonged to any suburb in the subtropical developed world. But then Tom noticed the basement areas beneath the houses: there were heaps of old washing machines, discarded TVs and crazy hanks of chicken wire lying on the dirty concrete pans between the stilts. The odour of the place was more decayed than floral, and, sniffing this, Tom made his way between two thorny hedges, then over a rickety wooden walkway that linked the front yard of Adams’s house to its single upper storey.
    He opened the screen door and, finding the front door ajar with no sign of buzzer or knocker, called out: ‘Anyone about?’ In what he hoped was a strong assertive voice.
    There was no reply. Tom pushed the door open. The room that confronted him was unremarkable: there were woven rush mats on the highly polished floorboards; rattan easy-chairs with padded cushions; a couple of small bookcases, stacked vertically with books and piled horizontally with periodicals. There were native paintings on the plain white walls: jaggy swirls of bright pigments and finger daubs, applied to curved bark shields. With its slight air of bachelor’s