The Butt Read Online Free PDF

financially costly, yeah?’
    Tom let go of the eight-year-olds – who were already protesting at their frogmarch – and whirled about. ‘What is this?’ he cried. ‘Are you some fucking ambulance-chaser? Is that your thing, man?’
    Martha made as if to admonish her husband, but Swai-Phillips seemed not in the least put out. ‘I mean it,’ he said coolly. ‘Not just financially costly, although good representation can be expensive.’ He extended the strange hand again, a white oblong aligned with its blocky digits. Martha took the card. ‘I don’t do no win-no fee personal-injury cases,’ he remarked perfunctorily. ‘In fact, few lawyers here in Vance will, and certainly not if the plaintiff has any connection to traditional people. But then, the Consul probably told you that already, right?’
    Swai-Phillips inclined his neat globe of a head towards Martha, as if he were tipping his hat to her. Then he repositioned his sunglasses.
    ‘Good day, madam,’ he said. ‘It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and, of course, that of your children.’ Then the mirror-tinted window of the SUV whined upwards, replacing Swai-Phillips’s clownish mask with a reflection of the Brodzinskis’ own stunned faces, and the big car pulled away.
    They stared after its tail lights as it bounced up on to the roadway. Martha was almost exploding with rage, but Tom felt utterly disconnected.
    How could he have known? he uselessly interrogated himself. How the hell did he know that I’d seen the Consul?

3
     
    A fter a full – obscenely costly – hour on the phone in the apartment, Tom managed to secure three days’ postponement on their flights home. First he blustered, then he wheedled, and finally he begged the airline clerk. In the end, he was charged only $500 extra, but the changed bookings meant they would have to depart Vance at 4 a.m., then make two stopovers: the first at Faikwong, and the second at Tippurliah, which Tom had never heard of before, but which turned out to be a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific.
    ‘How can, like, international flights stop there?’ Dixie asked him when he’d come off the call, and was consulting his pocket atlas. ‘I mean, it’s like the size of a, like, fingernail or something.’
    ‘I dunno,’ her father groaned. ‘It must be ’cause there’s a military installation in that neck of the woods. At the end of World War II, they laid out strips for Superfortresses on some of these flyspecks. Anyway, we’re gonna be there for seventeen hours, so we’ll have plenty of time to find out.’
    ‘I’ve gotta, like, jones for Faikwong,’ Dixie said, changing tack; ‘everyone says the malls there are, like, totally out of this world. I wanna get some cool stuff.’
    ‘Me too.’
    Tommy Junior had lumbered into the main room of the apartment and stood gurning up at his games console, which he held in an outstretched hand. ‘This thing is way obsolete – they’ll have the latest VX90 in Faikwong. It’ll be way cheap too.’
    ‘I don’t know where you guys think the money for all this is going to come from . . .’ Tom began reasonably enough, but as he spoke his voice began to rise and rise, with little aggrieved yelps. ‘Neither of you seems to’ve sicked on to the fact that your father – that’s me, guys – is in some serious trouble, here.
    ‘Changing the flights has already cost five hundred bucks; there isn’t any money left over for your toys. I may need a lot more money than we’ve got to deal with this situation at all. I don’t even expect Tommy to understand any of this, but you, Dixie, are you as goddamn stupid as him, or are you just INCREDIBLY FUCKING SELFISH!’
    The blood drained from the teenage girl’s tanned face, leaving bone-white patches underneath her eyes. Her long neck jerked back, and the absurd disc of greased blonde hair, which sat on her head like an ugly halo, knocked against a hotel-chain abstract in an aluminium frame.
    The