The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  He moved his arm. It was the Mouse’s arm. Snot dripped from his nose, but out of sight. His cheeks were awash with tears, but no one could see that.

  ‘Happy?’ Wally said bitterly, wiping at his own bloodied cheeks. ‘I hope to Christ you’re happy.’

  *Efican name for the Voorstand Sirkus acrobatic character of Spookganger Drool. [TS]

  44

  I did not stop shaking straight away, but it was warm inside the mask and my own sweet breath enveloped me. I was Bruder Mouse. All around me were other children dressed just the same.

  I did not like children. I was jealous of them, frightened of them, dedicated to placing myself in a FAR SUPERIOR CATEGORY of life, but at the Sirkus I had this in common with them: they too preferred to stay inside their masks, to tolerate the tight elastic, the improperly placed eye-holes which impeded views of the great Sirkus sky above us. They, like me, had their heads forever in exaggerated motion.

  It was twilight inside the Dome and the ceiling was a deep cobalt blue, alive with stars, not randomly arrayed like a children’s fairy book, but in an exact facsimile of the Efican night sky. It was my first Sirkus. All my fears dissolved like cotton candy.

  As Roxanna led us down the steps of the centre aisle, her geld-band sparkling in the gloom, I watched Sparrow peering and squinting up into the high seats and I was momentarily fearful that his stern moral view would make the Sirkus tawdry in my own eyes. I was not unaware of how it could be seen. It was my own mother who had called it ‘a horror made of cardboard, plastic and appalling colours, a death-deallng construction of hardened chewing gum and degraded folklore, a loopy mix of Calvinism and cynical opportunism’.*

  But just as I felt my maman’s doctrine struggling to take control of my own perception, and as my initial rush of pleasure began to flutter, lose strength, to give way to guilt, Sparrow turned to me and winked. My maman’s doctrine instantly dissolved. I lifted my mask a little, just enough to inhale deeply the distinctive aroma of the Sirkus – a mixture of cordite and something like chemically perfumed face-wipes.

  But then Roxanna gave our tickets to the usher and my fragile happiness was threatened once again. I had never been to the Sirkus, but I could not believe Roxanna had allowed herself to be given these seats. There was only one column* in our local Sirkus and the usher was leading us straight towards it. This column was, in itself, one of the wonders of the Sirkus, but it also provided its notorious imperfection: an obstructed view.

  Looming high above our heads, halfway up its gleaming shaft, was a mixing booth, a glass-walled, air-conditioned cube which Wally described to me each time he ‘told’ me a Sirkus. I knew it housed the hologram projectors, the computer consoles, the mixing board. The obstructing column also contained a small cylindrical elevator whereby the sparkmajoors ascended to their station.

  So this was to be my first and maybe only visit to the Sirkus. I looked up forlornly at the VIP seats – twelve of them – suspended from the underside of the control booth like the basket on a dirigible. Everyone in Chemin Rouge knew exactly what they were like-the seats were red plush, the carpet was deep Efican wool pile. There was said to be a deluxe auto-bar which was operated by cash parole. This was something to dream about, but to those sentenced to sit behind it the column was something to be feared, and as dear Roxanna led us to a place hard against its base I felt my irritation mount to such a height that I wonder I did not actually convulse.

  ‘Calm down,’ Wally said, ‘or there’ll be no damn Sirkus at all.’

  I saw the usher push the code keys in the column itself and the elevator doors peeled silently back to reveal the golden walls inside the cylinder.

  ‘Any complaints?’ Wally whispered.

  And carried me inside.

  Was this the happiest moment of my childhood? Can the best and worst moments sit together like this? Was I so shallow in my emotions, so forgetful, that this ‘horror made of cardboard’ could erase the disgusted faces in which I had seen the effect of my own beastly face? Does it matter that it would not last, that it was a good feeling like the good feeling of ice-cream or those burning hot Voodoo Jubes to which both Wally and I were so addicted?

  In the glowing golden reflections in that elevator, Heroic Wally, Divine Roxana, Good Sparrowgrass, surrounded me – the Valiant Mouse. We rose silent as air itself towards the twelve plush red seats, only four of which we would personally require.

  We sat high above the crowd wherein we might reasonably have felt ourselves to be blessed. Sparrow produced a cash parole – thereby surprising me – and bought us all fresh perroquets, and then the show started.

  You are a settler culture, like ours, and all your Bruder tales reflect your church’s simple devotion to St Francis (with none of the legal and theological complications created by the Saarlim Codicils*). So you permitted no animals in captivity, but animals thrived everywhere in your imagination, laughing, singing, playing tricks, saving humans, doing good and evil.

  The Voorstandish aerialistes put on their squirrel costumes and flew through the air without a net. They could make a furry totem pole twenty feet high. They could produce the most amazing facsimiles of a horse, five men and women – dancers, posturers – working with thrilling co-ordination to gallop, to canter, to walk a slack wire. When these ‘horses’ fell, the casualties were always terrible.

  This first part of the Sirkus had the clowns – hoards of them in cast-off uniforms of conquered nations – preposterous, pretentious. When they emerged from the stage floor they were ragamuffin POWs set free in Great Voorstand. By the time intermission arrived, these buffoons would have become an orchestra playing wild, lonely, funny, Pow-pow music. It was propaganda, of course. The Pow-pows raced the bears, were frightened by the squirrels, awed, teased and pestered by the moving holographic images of the dancing Bruder Mouse or hayseed Bruder Duck.

  There was no slow build-up in this show. The pace, from the first drum beat, was extraordinary. It was like being accelerated into the stratosphere. The jokes and the tricks followed each other at a dizzying speed. It was like being tickled. You could not bear the thought that what you were laughing at would be intensified, although it surely would be, and would be again, as tumbling High-hogs flew across the stage chasing tumbling panicking holographic Bruders.

  Above us we could see, through the glass floor, the sparkmajoors in the mixing booth. These men and women barely moved all through the show. Once or twice I would see a hand move. For the most part they seemed to sit with crossed arms bathed in soft blue light.

  The performers pushed us, until we were breathless from laughter, and Sparrow’s great ‘Whoo Whoo Whoo’ was like the cry of some great goofy owl eager to take its place on stage.

  But we were waiting for Irma.

  When intermission came, we said nothing of her to Sparrow. We did not want to trigger the sort of political critique we could expect from any member of the Feu Follet collective. We protected Irma’s good name by leaving it unsaid.

  Sparrow, who had laughed so loudly, was quiet and thoughtful in the intermission, continually passing his big hands over his cleanshaven cheeks and bristly neck. I began to wonder if he felt himself compromised, or even ashamed, but when I looked towards him he took off his glasses and polished them. Once they were clean, he leaned across the rail and slowly surveyed the audience. I thought of Savonarola, a figure my mother liked to evoke whenever her work was attacked by censors.

  I turned to Wally, but he and Roxanna were involved in intense and private conversation. I waited for darkness, and made my breath into a warm wind which blew between my skin and the mask.

  The second half began, as always, with dancing, both live and holographic. There was the grey furry Bruder Mouse with his iridescent blue coat, his white silk scarf, his cane. Everyone cheered the minute he appeared. It was no good to say what Vincent said, that the modern Bruder Mouse had become nothing more than a logo-type, the symbol for an imperialist mercantile culture. Vincent knew the
old folk tales of Voorstand, collected the masks and clap-hands of the first-century Bruders, but he had never been to the Sirkus in his own home town. He did not know Bruder Mouse. He had never seen him move.

  The Mouse I met at the Sirkus was quick and cocky and as cruel as any animal who has to deal with survival on the farm. He had spark, guts, energy, can-do. We would have liked him, I thought, in the Feu Follet. He had one chipped tooth and one nipped ear. He was a good dancer, had charm, and when Irma, finally, entered the high cone of light that the sparkmajoors erected for her, she danced with him, a quick fast Pow-pow shimmy that had the audience smiling and laughing at once.

  The clowns of the first half were now assimilated Voorstanders – they became the orchestra, and as they assembled in their spiffy new eight-button uniforms we knew that we would have to tolerate, for a while, the chorus girls who followed them. Not that we did not think every each one of them to be beautiful, but because none of them was Irma, and by their very existence on the stage they distracted our attention from their queen.

  Our Irma’s figure was voluptuous, but you can see today from the old vids that she was not perfect. Her rose-bud lips were a little small, her neck, if you wished to consider this, a little short. It is obvious now – it was not really her figure, or her sinuous movements which entranced us. It was her voice.

  We waited for her to sing to us. Roxanna had her hand on Wally’s knee. Sparrow sat with his mouth a little open and repeatedly pushed his wire-framed glasses back on to his button nose. I took my Mouse mask off and waited for her to recite. In the darkness, I smiled.

  She alone, of foreign performers, dared recite our own stories on the stage. It was the mark of the skill of your Sirkus managers to everywhere adapt the show to what was local. We did not know there was no Irma in any of the Saarlim Sirkuses. I don’t know if we would have cared. We were flattered, and moved to hear our own tragedies and Pyrrhic victories celebrated in her exotic accent. She did ‘Farewell, Sweet Faith! Thy silver ray’ and also ‘The Story Teller from the Isles’. Her gestures, her movement at such times, were so minimal, her stillness, her small voice, a whisper. Our stories seemed bigger when she recited them, and it is easy enough to attribute all of this to politics and power, except that it takes no account of her enormous talent. You did not think about the individual words but rather the emotion that they generated, like they were so many drops of water, and yet each word was clear, and just as she could put flesh and blood on the bones of our drowned fishermen and make us weep for our abandoned dyers, she could also recite, to a mass audience, the great works of Voorstand literature, moving even that great Voorphobe, Sparrow Glashan, to tears.

  When the show finished Sparrow rose with us in our seats and clapped and hooted. As the lights came up, I pulled my Mouse mask back on.

  Roxanna and Wally were clapping shoulder to shoulder, and perhaps it was because he saw their preoccupation with each other that Sparrow, his cheeks still shiny, picked me up and held me high in the air. Irma extended a hand in my direction and blew a kiss to me.

  *‘Actress Miffed with Mouse’, Chemin Rouge Reformer, 4 April 371.

  *The Sirkus was almost never in the round. In Chemin Rouge, the space was shaped, spectacularly, like a slice of pie, with the stage at the apex.

  *I refer to those of the first years – Codicils XIV and XIX, with their very specific instructions for the care, containment and slaughter of cattle, sheep, ducks etc. By the time the famous Bear Codicil was written, and the hypocrisy of hunting and trapping permitted, the rules of the Sirkus were set. [TS]

  45

  We got in the cab, all of us squeezing in the back seat. Sparrow held me on his lap and bent his head over so as not to hit the roof. ‘They’re a great people,’ he continued doggedly. ‘That’s what we keep forgetting when we’re trying to get their hands out of our guts.* That’s what a show like this teaches you. Theirs was a country that was founded on a principle. What you can still see in this Sirkus is their decency. I’d forgotten it. I spend all my time thinking about their hypocrisy. You don’t see decency when their dirigibles are bombing some poor country who tried to renegotiate their Treaty.’

  ‘Why does it have to teach you?’ Roxanna said. ‘Why can’t you just enjoy it?’

  Sparrow opened his mouth, looked at Roxanna, closed it. Then he turned back to Wally. ‘Both countries have old-world parents,’ Sparrow said. ‘You would think we had so much in common, but we’re the little brother – we love them, but they don’t notice us. We’ve got the same colour skin, we speak more or less the same language. We know the words of all their songs. We know Phantome Drool and Oncle Duck. We love their heroes like they were our own, but we keep forgetting that we don’t count with them. It’s like seeing a Vedette in the supermarket. You know the Vedette like he’s your friend, but you’re nothing to him. What was unusual about this was … whatshername?’

  ‘Her name is Irma.’

  ‘Irma recited “The Story Teller from the Isles”. It was like, she’d noticed us, or that she knew us. Do you think that’s why I was moved?’

  ‘Relax, mo-frere,’ Wally said. ‘Just say: I enjoyed the show.’

  ‘It was not at all like what I expected. I did enjoy the show,’ Sparrow said. ‘What’s confusing is that I know really we’re beneath their notice unless they want to use us for something.’

  ‘Shut up, Sparrow.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to shut up, Wally.’

  ‘For Chrissakes,’ Wally said, ‘we just went to the Sirkus. Don’t bring us down. We went to cheer ourselves up.’

  ‘It was my treat,’ Roxanna said.

  ‘Quite right,’ Sparrow said. He peered down at me and adjusted my mask. ‘What do you say, nibs?’

  I was trying to cling on to that vision of Irma, the way she stood in the centre of the great stage, sheathed in her glittering white gown, her arm extended to me. She had smiled. All I wanted to do now was go to Wally’s room and find the photographs of Irma he had hidden in his drawer and to look, again, at that magical smile, the memory of which was now being eroded by the acid of one more Feu Follet conversation.

  ‘So what do you say?’ Sparrow insisted.

  ‘Give me the mask,’ Wally said.

  ‘Now who’s being a tight-arse?’ Roxanna said. ‘Let him keep the mask. It’s fine with me.’

  ‘For Chrissakes,’ Wally said. ‘Felicity is there.’

  We were already in Gazette Street. My mother was sitting on the theatre steps, standing, walking towards the cab.

  ‘Give me the fucking mask.’

  But I did not want to let go of the mask. I held it. ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Sparrow said. ‘Felicity can handle this.’

  But I knew better than any of them that she could not, and as I saw my mother peer into the far window of the cab, I tore the mask off my own face. It was only papier-mâché. It was sickeningly easy to destroy.

  *A reference to the navigation cable, an issue which divided Eficans. Supporters of the Blue Party, like Sparrowgrass, felt those unexplained cables to be a humiliating invasion, a reminder of our craven servility to another power. [TS]

  46

  Felicity clambered into the back seat, cut her knee on a broken ashtray, laddered her stocking, squashed Tristan Smith to her. She touched his face, felt his legs, pulled up his shirtsleeves to examine his chamois-soft skin.

  I, Tristan, was full of blame. It ran through my veins like bubbling sap, ruled my glands, my limbs, my actions. I pulled away. I crawled to the far side of the seat. My beautiful Mouse mask now littered the shining malodorous back seat like poor grey petals.

  ‘My baby. Are you burnt?’

  I thought she was using ‘burnt’ poetically. I did not know that she and Vincent had tracked me to the Burns Unit.

  ‘Sweets, I’m so sorry.’

  While she tried to pull up my shirt and look at my chest, I turned away. I picked up pieces of torn papier-mâché and stuffed them in
my pocket.

  ‘Is your mask broken?’ she said.

  As if it were not her fault.

  As if it had not been her cultural imperialism, her hegemony, her hatred of the Sirkus, which had guided my hands in its destruction.

  When I saw the famous cheekbones wet with tears I showed none of the compassion I feel for her now. She was suffering and I was bitterly, triumphantly, angrily, happy.

  My poor maman squeezed herself into that tight space between the front seat and the back and – deaf to the taxi driver’s abuse, insensitive to Wally’s hand on her shoulder – helped me gather the bits of Mouse and place them carefully in her open handbag.

  ‘You can be an actor,’ she said.

  My heart stopped. I turned to face her. She was wearing Vincent’s jacket over her dress. She pulled it tight across her chest. ‘OK?’ she said.

  I could feel my mouth shivering. I held my hand across it.

  ‘I’ll teach you, OK?’

  I nodded, and then turned away, not wanting her to see me cry.

  She gave me a handkerchief. I wiped my face. She wiped her own – even as she did this she was aware of Vincent sitting sideways in his car seat talking on the telephone. She knew she had a meeting with Giles Peterson who was important in her preselection as a candidate for Goat Marshes. This was her new life. She was serious about the elections. But she had her son back, alive.

  ‘Shall we fix up Meneer Mouse?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. She carried me into the Feu Follet, and left Vincent to untangle the mess she had made.

  Felicity rushed through the foyer, squinting, trying not to see the peeling paint, the flapping posters, the rusting drawing pins. She carried me into the theatre, crossed the sawdust ring and entered the workshop – a long brick-walled room divided by three high archways which made the workshop fall naturally into three areas. In the last of these, curtained by a sheet of paint-splattered clear plastic, was a long workshop bench where our designers had their studio.