The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  So there you see it: her interest in me, at the beginning, was opportunistic, manipulative. I was so unattractive a job that others might just let her have me.

  ‘No way,’ Wendell said when she suggested she might apply for the post. ‘The mark won’t hire a woman. He falls in love.’

  Someone else would have been discouraged, but this was Jacqui. She wanted me. And two days later there was a furore at the third floor ‘man trap’ when the guard tried to deny her admittance to her own workplace. She had chopped her long black hair and swept it back with mousse. She was wearing a wide-shouldered black jacket which had once been her father’s. The layered look came later – on the first day, she wore just one shirt with a white tank-top beneath it.

  The thing was: she fooled them all, not just the guard but everyone who saw her. She had practised with Wendell, had him walk and sit whilst naked, watched what his cock and balls did to his walk. And she got the walk, without exaggerating it. She did not go in for ball-scratching or leg-spreading or any of the mistakes you see so often on the stage. She centred her maleness on her eyes, and in her jaw. She led with her chest. She hollowed her cheeks, made herself dangerous and slit-eyed like a snake, and her body followed the instruction.

  If the assignment had been politically hot, there is no way she would have got me. But although the January 20 Group had the publicly declared aim of attacking sites of Voorstand’s installations in Efica, no one really expected anything more terrorizing than an essay or a letter to the Chemin Rouge Reformer. Jacqui got me because I was low-status work – demeaning, disgusting, safe.

  Once she got me, she changed what I was. I was safe, she made me unsafe. I was inactive, she made me active. I was a thing to her, a maw, a streaming face, a line of gums, a pair of pale staring eyes. At the same time she was professional. She valued that quality almost as much as courage. And once she was my nurse she cared for me with almost fanatical dedication – washed my body, changed my sheets, fed me with a spoon when necessary. She was as discreet and complete as any butler, but at the same time this twenty-three-year-old young woman was fraudulently misrepresenting my activities to her computer.

  In DoS terminology, she made me Sexy, that is, she loaded my file with interesting specs and features, until her superiors had no choice but to send her on this trip halfway across the world. They had no other choice, because it was her choice that they should not.

  Likewise: it was her choice to speak to Aziz back at the Morean border, to accept the pistol when he offered it, to spin its six-pound weight on her single index finger.

  When he walked beside her in the tunnel, illuminating the uneven floor with his moon-yellow flashlight, it was her choice to keep going, to lean forward and put her full 102 pounds into the chair, to force it over the jags of rock. The blisters would heal. The pain would go. She could control her bladder, could carry this piss all the way to Saarlim City.

  12

  When she had spun the pistol on her finger it had been her choice, but it had not felt like it. She had walked towards Aziz on that gluey grey-skied day because … she was twenty-three years old … she had that jelly feeling in her legs, the warm soft heat behind her eyes. It had been a little madness, a frisson. But far from evaporating, as you might expect, this feeling had been distilled, condensed, intensified by almost everything she saw thereafter – even, for Chrissakes, the man’s domestic life. The sight of a wife, children – you would expect this to be a killer, but she carried her crush in deep disguise, right into his home. She slit her eyes, hollowed her cheeks, thrust her jaw, got a tingling at the nape of her neck watching how this cool, elegant man with the poker player’s eyes was also the dab, the patron. She got numb and icy in her sinuses watching how he exercised his power, how he listened to his brothers with his dark eyes never leaving their faces, how he nodded, gestured, settled a dispute about propane gas by placing a hand against another man’s cheek. Jacqui, who hated the ordinariness of the lower-middle class of Efica, found herself sympathetically imagining life inside that little grocery store. She liked how they lashed the bedding on to the rafters just before dawn, the way they scrubbed the cracked green concrete floor until it smelt like a ship at sea; and although the men did have Glock automatics stuck in their belts, there was also a definite edge to the place she found almost religious – hierarchical, ascetic, clean. She was not, herself, religious, but this slight foreign man with weird-looking sideburns was that rarity – not mediocre.

  When she rode with him in the truck, he talked to her man to man. It was almost unbearable, the intimacy. She twice had visions of resting her palm on his bristly olive-skinned neck. He told her frankly, in English, how they hi-jacked the big gasoline auto-lorries when they crossed the border out of Voorstand. He would die not knowing he had said these things to a woman. She did not want to tell him either. That was the paradox. It was her business to hold secrets, to retain them, to gain pleasure only from their tumescent pressure, never their release.

  Aziz made Wally Paccione appear more and more a spiv. He was rude about the blown-out tyre, bad-tempered on the road, and now, as they pushed on through the stale air of the tunnel, the old Efican seemed to Jacqui to look like a Grand Duke by Bertolt Brecht. Sometimes, when his wheelbarrow hit a bump, you could hear him cuss. But he never did direct a human remark to the man who pushed him. Jacqui had watched. She had not yet seen so much as a smile or a nod pass between them.

  In Chemin Rouge, Wally had been a reasonable employer, occasionally withholding, but mostly good-hearted. But neither he nor I – this was her opinion – made any concessions to the country we were passing through. We had* not learned a word of Old Dutch and this, to a linguist, seemed both lazy and offensive. To her it seemed ill-mannered and provincial to continue to call a tyre a ‘sock’, a truck a ‘Teuf-teuf’. In Zeelung our nurse began silently to judge us.

  ‘Shut-the-fuck-up,’ Wally had said, and Aziz, this so-called gangster, who could just as easily slit our throats, had sheltered us, fed us and abandoned his own truck just so he could fulfil his part of a bargain.

  Jacqui could not bear that he be treated like this.

  When he shone the torch for her, she thanked him in his own language: ‘Dankie voor die flits.’

  In the flickering yellow light she could see his mouth was compressed. His top lip was slightly swollen and this, with its intimations of both violence and grief, she found attractive.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said to him. ‘I know we have offended you.’

  She had not really imagined he would hold her responsible for Wally’s rudeness, so the darting hostility of his eyes, when he looked at her, shocked her.

  ‘Het spijt ons als wij jou kwaai gemaakt,’ she said, but he would not let himself be massaged by the language.

  ‘There is no offence,’ he said coldly.

  ‘You must be concerned about your truck?’ she said.

  ‘Wat?’

  ‘Ben jou worried oor jou auto-lorrie?’

  ‘The auto-lorrie,’ he said, shining the flashlight on a jagged tooth of rock which they both had to duck beneath, ‘is gone.’

  ‘Hey,’ Jacqui laughed, not knowing what to say, but meaning, please, mollo-mollo, I’m not your enemy.

  ‘Wat?’

  ‘Relax, the truck is fine.’

  ‘You are a boy. What can you know?’

  ‘I heard you ask the camarade with the gun,’ Jacqui said. ‘You asked him to care for the truck. He is your family?’

  ‘You listened?’

  ‘Aziz, you spoke in front of me. You know I speak your language.’

  ‘You are very rude boy,’ Aziz said.

  Jacqui felt her eyes burning.

  ‘He is thief,’ Aziz said. ‘He take too much money. This man will take my auto-lorrie The pumpkins, he sells them, then the auto-lorrie. Do you think I meet my family by the road?’

  ‘I’m sorry but …’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry,’ Aziz mocked, making his voi
ce so girlish that Jacqui, chilled with fright, felt she could not hold her bladder a second longer.

  ‘Please shut up,’ Wally Paccione said. ‘Push the chair.’

  ‘You shut up,’ Aziz said.

  ‘I was not talking to you, mug-wallop. I was talking to the nurse.’

  Jacqui saw the size of the offence. She saw the explosion coming like a bulge in a cartoon snake.

  ‘Mug-wallop?’ Aziz said, his voice rising incredulously. ‘Mug-wallop?’

  ‘It’s not this camarade’s business to talk to you,’ Wally said. ‘His business is to push the chair. It is my business to talk to you.’

  Aziz called to the farmer. ‘Jy mag nou wegdonder,’ he said. ‘Jy can die wheelbarrow vat. Hy kan die rest lopen.’

  The farmer immediately obeyed. He stopped pushing. He stood immobile, his closely barbered head bent so as not to hit the ceiling.

  Aziz was going to make the old spiv walk.

  ‘Ik heb mijn geld nodig,’ the farmer said, producing a blue cloth purse from his trouser pockets. ‘Ik moes blijven tot ik mijn geld krijg,’ the farmer said. He loosened the lips of the purse and waited.

  ‘He needs to go,’ Aziz said curtly. ‘Now you pay him. Geduld,’ he said to the farmer. ‘Hierdie heer sal jou nou betalen.’

  The farmer turned towards Wally, who began to struggle from the barrow which, being temporarily unsupported, tipped and sent him sprawling. He hit his head against the rock wall. When he stood up there was blood oozing down his temple and into his eye.

  ‘I am an old man,’ Wally said.

  ‘My truck is gone,’ Aziz said.

  ‘Petit con.’

  ‘Let me help you,’ Jacques said to Wally. ‘Let me interpret …’

  ‘Your truck is still there, you ballot,’ Wally told the glowering guide. Tell this man we will pay him when he pushes me to the end of the tunnel.’

  ‘I have been very stupid,’ Aziz said. ‘I have been too stupid for anything.’

  ‘Your truck is fine,’ Wally said.

  ‘The truck … is … fine,’ Tristan said.

  ‘This isn’t necessary,’ Jacqui said, but Aziz was already holding the slender flashlight with his teeth. Jacqui watched with a chilled sort of pleasure as he aimed the beam of the light at his revolver and fed small blunt-nosed cartridges into it. He took his time, as if he did not expect anyone to interfere with him. Indeed, no one did.

  When he had loaded eight shells, he removed the flashlight from his mouth and, having held it fastidiously between thumb and forefinger, dropped it into his shirt pocket.

  ‘Kom, staan agter mij,’ he told the farmer.

  Jacqui translated: ‘Come and stand behind me.’ No one seemed to hear her. The farmer scraped along the tunnel wall behind Aziz so that he was, of all the party, the one nearest to the exit.

  ‘You pay me,’ Aziz said to Wally. ‘You pay for my truck. Or I take the money for myself.’

  ‘Take it then,’ Wally said. He pulled a crumpled handful of Zeelung currency out of his trousers and held it up towards Aziz. ‘There is no more money.’

  It was obvious to Jacqui: you did not deal with a man like Aziz in this way.

  Wally let go of the money so it fell in a damp wad to the floor of the tunnel.

  It lay there, beneath Aziz’s consideration.

  ‘You,’ he said to Jacqui. ‘Go back with them.’

  She hesitated. He kneed her in the backside, pushing her into the wheelchair. ‘You are a girl,’ he said. ‘Go back with them.’

  Jacqui edged around Tristan’s chair.

  ‘Now you turn him around,’

  It was hard to swing the chair around. Jacqui did it.

  To the farmer, Aziz said, ‘Geef mij jou mes.’

  ‘He’s telling him to get a knife,’ Jacqui said.

  The farmer lifted his wide trousers, revealing a bright red cloth tied around his calf.

  ‘He’s asking for a knife!’

  From the red cloth, the farmer pulled out a long knife and gave it, handle first, to Aziz who, having moved his revolver into his left hand, accepted it with his right.

  ‘Schijn het licht aan die Veranderling.’

  The farmer took the flashlight from Wally and shone it on me, Tristan Smith.

  Aziz then knelt carefully in front of me. He put the tip of the knife inside the cuffed leg of the trousers which Jacqui had had made for me on the Boulevard des Indiennes. Then, with the confidence of a tailor, Aziz brought the knife upwards and parted the leg all the way to the hip in one clean straight rip.

  What was revealed, of course, was the bandage. Inside the bandage you could see the fat wads of currency, sixteen different bundles each wrapped in oilskin.

  Aziz cut the second leg.

  ‘OK,’ he said to me, ‘perhaps you do not want your shirt cut.’

  I undid my own buttons.

  ‘We give you half,’ Wally said. ‘OK, fair is fair.’

  But Aziz was already discovering the extent of the fortune hidden inside the bandages.

  ‘You lied to me,’ he said. ‘You said you were poor. I was sorry for you. I tried to help you.’

  I pulled the bandage from around my chest. When Jacqui tried to assist me, I shoved her hand away and pulled the bandage roughly away from my raw red skin. I gave the prick our assets, dry-eyed, giving him my mutant’s smile.

  When I spoke, I spoke slowly, carefully.

  ‘I’m … coming … back … to … kill you,’ I said to this man whom I would never see again. He had all my attention. All my animus. I did not notice Jacqui retreat into the darkness of the tunnel. We were like dogs fighting – she could have revealed her secret in front of us and we would not have seen her. She went two yards, three, ten. She lifted her jacket. She pulled her trousers to her knees. She rested her back against the rock wall, and balanced herself on her toes. As the steaming urine pooled amongst the cold blue gravel, we men continued making threats to each other. She could smell the testosterone, as strong as bacon cooking.

  13

  The tunnel had become a kind of open passageway or race, and from here I could see a flag, an exceptionally large Voorstand flag, hanging limply in the night sky above our heads. We were at our destination, but I was so angry I could not speak. We were in Voorstand, stone broke, unprotected.

  ‘Relax,’ Wally said. ‘Look – the Voorstand flag. ’

  I heard a car door slam. My skin began to bump and shiver.

  Then: a shout.

  Then: bright white quartz lights. We were spotlit. I was blinded. My heart was beating hard enough to break. I was dizzy, blind, a rabbit in a hunter’s spotlight. I was the Mutant entering Voorstand.

  14

  That night, the night we entered Voorstand, Leona had waited with the other facilitators. It was like any night at Plasse’s Crossing – they had formed a semi-circle of trucks, cars, all-wheel drives around the exit from the tunnel. That was what normal life had become for her. You camped there with the other facilitators, waiting for the Fresh Meat to come out of the tunnel. That was what they called the travellers who came illegally into Voorstand. Good people used this disgusting term – artists, performers, brave people she admired, folk who could hang from their toes one hundred feet above a bed of nails. Leona used it too, in the end. Nine times out of ten the poor fresh meat was panicked half to death. It came out into the light, blinking, hardly able to see, and all around it were facilitators, tugging at its sleeves, grabbing at its shoulders, signing up the business with give-away motel pens.

  In her native Morea, Leona had been a jahli, that is, someone who sings songs and complicated stories, the performance of which not only requires considerable musical ability, but also a memory capable of retaining as many as one hundred different family names.

  In Voorstand she was, among other things, a facilitator. This was not a job she would ever have imagined taking, but it would have to do until she found a position as a Verteller in the Sirkus.*

  A few fac
ilitators liked to frighten the meat. Others were the soothing ones, talking in big deep voices and just being calm in the middle of all that confusion. Some achieved good results just by being good-looking – Kreigtown Jimmy, Marvin Tromp, little Oloff – all these guys had to do was stand there being gorgeous and work would come to them. Others, like those Vargas girls, focused on price, cutting their margins to the bone, trying to get the signature on that little bit of paper.

  Once you had it signed, that meant you could relax: the meat was yours. Next: you got them into Saarlim, got them registered as pre-dated POWs with whoever was your contact in the military. You got their little pink and blue registration card. You shook their hand. You maybe introduced them to some housing, got yourself a little extra folding for the trouble. Some facilitators, allegedly, got a percentage of the rent money for the first year, but facilitators were such bullschtool. They would say anything.

  There was a gate at the tunnel entrance. It must have worked, some long time ago, but it sure as hell did not work any more. It lay on the ground, rusting into the red dust. This was the gate that my wheelchair bounced across on the night I arrived in Voorstand.

  No messenger arrived before me.

  When the first set of spotlights illuminated the tunnel entrance, my reception committee readied itself – car doors opened, radios were turned off. Then, no one moved.

  There was only Leona – she alone – spotlit like an actor on a stage, walking towards me, holding a clipboard. She ambled towards the runnel entrance where the earth was ground so fine and dry, like the earth in a cattle kraal. She was short, broad, rough-looking, in a battered brown leather jacket and baggy combat trousers with neck-ties knotted round the ankles to keep out the night chill.

  I had just been robbed. My frippes were split. I saw her full lips, her sleepy eyes, her round coffee-coloured face, her orange-blonde hair cut close, in a fringe; I could not tell if it meant harm or safety for me.