The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  The Mouse, coming closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, had stumbled and fallen in front of the car. Now, like a rabbit that you’ve wounded but not killed, it picked itself up and began its wild, unco-ordinated run down the road which now, as Leona followed, began a steep descent towards the plain.

  ‘You want a souvenir?’ she said.

  Jacques smiled. He did not even speak. He sat back in his seat, and I could see his will, his alarming, shining will through the lashes of his slightly narrowed eyes.

  ‘No,’ I said. I hated that Mouse. I hated its face. I hated what it stood for in my life, my history, that I was ever fool enough to hide behind its face.

  ‘Twenty mile an hour,’ Leona said. ‘Look it go.’

  Black legs flying. A cloud of dust.

  ‘You want it?’ Wally asked me.

  ‘You … know … I … don’t.’

  There was a thump, a bump. The car stopped. ‘Got it,’ said Leona. ‘Got the little sucker.’

  She stopped, jumped out. A second later she held the back door open. She threw the Simulacrum on to the floor. It was still smoking. Cotton wadding grew like bloom from its elbow. It gave off the smell of burning rubber, like a dishwasher about to catch fire.

  * BE. Before Efica, dating from Captain Girard’s landfall at what is now Melcarth.

  *The Voorstand reader will be aware that Leona was misinformed, and that the abandoned statue of Bruder Dog, far from being the product of modern Sirkus-style capitalism, marks the site of a well-documented Free Dutch Church community dating from 65 BE. These remains are known as the Dry Creek Dog. For more information, see Heretical Christian Art in the New World (Thames & Hudson, London).

  *‘The original Sirkus Mouse was like six feet tall. You see these early Bruders in the paintings, Dogs, Ducks, Mice, all as big as football players. In the beginning, of course, it was very religious. All God’s creatures, all that sort ofthing. Maybe they was priests at one time but as long as I remember they were krakers, swartzers, thieves of one sort or another. Those Bruders did some awful stuff – murder, rape, terrible things. So now we have the Creature Control Act – no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches. And so there are none.’ For more details of these forgotten Simulacrum Mark 3S, see Chapter 28.

  17

  My nurse sat beside me like a woman newly pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach, her feet astride the stinking Bruder Mouse.

  I thought she was my employee, my man. It never occurred to me that I might be her man, her invention, but that was what the situation was – this slight, attractive woman with size five shoes had made me into a terrorist.

  She had found a timid wretch living in a dank, dark hole. He had skin like a baby and pearly inoffensive eyes, but while he slept she had transformed him into something potent – still ugly, yes, but venomous, a spider in the dark of the Voorstandish subconscious.

  She had not meant me harm. She had not meant me anything. She wanted something for herself and I was a member of a proscribed group. She therefore falsified three fax IDs to ‘prove’ that I, Tristan Smith, was a terrorist in touch with Mohammedan cells inside Voorstand. If it had not been for this, she would have been sent back to her grey metal desk in POLIT. She felt she had no choice but to go forward – she linked me with Zawba’a* and now she was an operative accompanying a terrorist to a possible meeting with other terrorists.

  She connected me with Zawba’a because she had translated their manifesto and knew they had connections inside Voorstand. She was a beginner, an ice-skater. She only had access to level 7 information, and therefore had no idea that Zawba’a were currently under intense scrutiny from the VIA.

  There were eight other cells she could have chosen, and all of them would have left her stranded back in the dusty tedium of POLIT. But she chose the one group which had all of Operations suddenly dedicating themselves to her.

  They had only one anxiety – not that she had faked some fax numbers, but that she was inexperienced and would therefore make them look bad with their opposite numbers in Voorstand. They took her to their bosoms. They coaxed her, cradled her, pushed her. They had her doing crunches and push-ups. They gave her intensive weapons training, then halted it when they found her attempting Sirkus tricks with her fifteen-shot semiautomatic Glock.

  ‘What happens if someone shoots at me?’

  ‘Believe me, Jacqui, you’re safer without a gun.’

  They took back the handsome Glock and spent the last week teaching her how to talk to the VIA. At this, she excelled. When she boarded the John Kay she was a candidate well-prepared for examination.

  I was the centre of her fiction. Yet as we travelled down the El 695 with Bruder Mouse, I was as unaware of all this as I was unaware of the honey-coloured breasts beneath her three poplin shirts. I was the baby, the mark, the monkey. I fretted about the stinking Simi, money, privacy, the revulsion I might occasion at a gas stop, the humiliation of eating in the public gaze. Panic flitted like a bat across the periphery of my consciousness as we journeyed deeper and deeper into Voorstand. I had no idea of the risk my sleeping nurse had taken to make this trip, the cynical lies she had told to get there, or the looming consequences she had successfully obliterated from her consciousness.

  *Arabic: lit., whirlwind.

  18

  When Jacqui woke it was evening and the shadows were long and the colours soft and the highway was sweeping around the edges of one more lake. When she opened her eyes she saw, in the mirror, Leona’s yellow bloodshot eyes looking straight at her.

  It was only then the possibility occurred to her.

  Could Leona be the operative she had expected to meet in Saarlim?

  Whatever Leona had said when she had emerged from the tunnel, Jacqui had not really paid attention. She had not expected the operative until Saarlim. Perhaps Leona said the ID line and Jacqui had not heard.

  Now, twelve hours later, Jacqui recited her ID tag: ‘It’s a nice night.’

  And Leona said her line: ‘Nice night to be in Saarlim City.’

  ‘How many miles is it?’ Jacqui said, feeling the blood rushing up her neck and flooding into her ears and cheeks.

  ‘Tsk,’ Leona said, and shook her head.

  A different person might have been embarrassed. Jacqui would not be. She learned that very early at the DoS. Never show weakness. The ‘meet’ was meant to be in Saarlim. She stared right back at Leona and crossed her hands in her lap. Fuck you, she thought. This is not my fault.

  I was sitting right beside her when this exchange took place. I saw the recklessness which was beginning to shine, to glow through the dull brown paint of our nurse’s dutifulness. It was powerful, palpable. I felt the need to stop it.

  ‘Throw … the … thing … out,’ I said, and nudged her leg with my foot.

  ‘Whatsit say?’ Leona asked.

  ‘He wants you to throw the Bruder out,’ said ‘Jacques’, and smiled at me, not insolently. It was the look you see on monks – a calm and luminous neutrality.

  ‘You want me to footsack Bruder Mouse, Wink?’ Leona brought the car round a large banked curve and came on to a high wide bridge, below which you could see one more ribbon of highway: transports carrying their spherical gases, cylindrical liquids, bright sanserif type on their shining silver surfaces.

  ‘I might footsack you first,’ she said. She flicked on her super-charger in accordance with a highway sign. ‘This here Bruder Mouse is like a Saint to us,’ she said. ‘He ain’t just the Sirkus. He means stuff to us.’

  ‘It … means … stuff … to … us … too … we … suffered … from … that stuff … already.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He’d rather not have the Bruder in the car.’

  ‘Fuck … the … Mouse … fuck … the … Voorstand … Hegemony.’

  ‘What’s he say?’

  ‘He … says … it … makes … him … sick.’

  I turned to Wally, who had his bent old spi
ne propped in the corner. ‘You … want … this … stinky … thing … in … the … car?’

  ‘It’s their country,’ Wally said, and closed his eyes, pretending that he was sleeping. ‘We should respect their customs.’

  Jacqui crossed the Simi’s arms across its chest, and gently pushed down on its snout and up on its chin, so just the faintest trace of white tooth was protruding.

  ‘“One mo nothing,’” she recited, “‘next mo – there he was, buttons gleaming, cane tapping, as solid as a yellow oak on a Tuesday morning.”’

  19

  To be driven across the El 695 gave me a feeling in my stomach that was almost unbearable.

  The thing was – the El 695 would not stop. It curved, looped, but it kept on rolling, now three lanes, now five, now one lane of congestion and construction, but it did not stop. In Efica, you could not drive far without coming to the sea. Even on a large island like Inkerman you lived with a constant sense of limitations, the thinness of soil, the hardness of the rock, the long sail-less expanse of the Mer de Lapenise.

  Voorstand, in comparison, was terrible, like being tickled relentlessly or plunging in an elevator. We were forever arriving at the this ‘zee’ and the that ‘zee’, not actual ‘seas’ but great lakes whose further shores were lost in summer haze – which signalled, to my Efican sensibilities, the end of the journey. Now there should be a ferry. Now a wharf. But this was Voorstand, 2000 miles from north to south, 865 lakes, 10,000 towns, 93 major cities.

  I watched the edges of the road slide past my ear, endlessly, limitlessly, and, indeed, it was in these very roadside verges that I would finally begin to learn the truth about Saarlim City.

  I saw the first signs of deterioration some hundred miles from our destination. At first I did not take it seriously, but soon there was no denying it – the condition of the roads got worse, consistently worse – and by the time we were embarked upon the elevated entrances to the great city the verges were cracked and weedy and littered with abandoned pieces of cars and trucks.

  For you, who imagine I came to cause you harm, it may be hard to believe that I found this decay so upsetting. Why would I, a member of the January 20 Group, give a rat’s fart about the state of roads in Saarlim City?

  Madam, Meneer, you are part of our hearts in a way you could not dream.

  It is as if you, at your mother’s breast, had imbibed the Koran, the Kabuki, and made them both your own. We grow up with your foreignness deep inside our souls, knowing the Bruder clowns, the Bruder tales, the stories of the Saints, the history (defeating the Dutch, tricking the British, humiliating the French, all this gets you big marks in the islands of Efica). We recite your epic poets for the same reason we study Molière or Shakespeare, listen to your Pow-pow music as we fall in love, fly your fragrant peaches halfway across the earth and sit at table with their perfect juices running down our foreign chins.

  We have danced to you, cried with you, and even when we write our manifestos against you, even when we beg you please to leave our lives alone, we admire you, not just because we have woven your music into our love affairs and wedding feasts, not just for what we imagine you are, but for what you once were – for the impossible idealism of your Settlers Free who would not eat God’s Creatures, who wanted to include even mice and sparrows in their Christianity.

  As we Ootlanders approached the legendary capital of Saarlim on the crumbling El 695, we each, silently, privately, recalled the story of the farmyard Bruders coming to the city, the Hymn of Pietr Groot, the suicides of the captains of the first great insurrection. Yet just as your history came to inspire me, I was depressed to see the cracks, the weeds, the litter of radiator hoses, broken glass and rusted mufflers.

  ‘They … should … sweep … up,’ I said.

  No one translated for Leona.

  The cars around us on the road were not like the ones I had seen with starburst reflections on their chrome work in the zines. They were old, rusting, crumpled, belching blue smoke, dropping black oil. I had imagined that my own country was backward, provincial, but we would not have tolerated this in Efica. Cars that would have been dragged off the highway by the Gardiacivil – cars with rusted body panels, broken headlights – were permitted to cruise beside us unmolested by the Saarlim Police who moved through the junk-heap traffic in cars bristling with computers and satellite dishes, their roof lights perpetually flashing.

  Yet the more extreme the neglect became, the more Jacques liked it. As we came closer to Saarlim, his colour rose, he began to beat his feet on the floor. He sat on the edge of his seat, one hand resting on the Simi’s shoulder. The Simi stank of smoke, of melting plastic, of damp fur, of old rags left too long in a bucket. Broken wires stuck out from its elbow – probably infectious. It made me ill to look at it, made me weak in the arms and legs – insufficient oxygen, the early-warning sign of phobia.

  Leona drove us into leaking tunnels, under rusting bridges. All around us were grim brick buildings, some with windows, some merely with broken glass, and where the glass was not broken it was dirty. In Chemin Rouge we like to keep things clean. In Chemin Rouge we do not throw our garbage out on the public highway. Saarlim City was littered with abandoned papers, cans, bottles, cars, mattresses, stuffed furniture.

  ‘We’re going to do just fine,’ Wally said. But the old bird had a tired, strained look. He ran his hand over his bony head. ‘This is going to be my kind of town.’

  But we had no money and the light was tired, yellow, poisonous. We crossed a long high rattling metal bridge across grassy marshlands in which one could make out the rainbow-slick of chemicals. Through the yellow mist we saw tall buildings clustering on the horizon. It was the fabled city, but I would have given anything to be back inside the mouldy safety of the Ducrow Circus School.

  Leona swung the wheel, hit the horn, braked, accelerated, cursed, and then, hitting the current as it were, accelerated along a long avenue, weaving in and out of the traffic, bicyclists, reversing rollerskaters, wheel-squirrels of every size and colour.

  We Ootlanders became quiet, like chickens squashed into a metal box for market. Finally it was Wally who asked, ‘Will we be near the Grand Concourse when we stop?’

  ‘Near it?’ Leona said. ‘Honey, you in it.’

  The Grand Concourse. The home of Sirkus. When we had planned our Sirkus Tour, I had expected a certain standard. I looked out at a grim and sweaty avenue backed by tall grey-brick apartment buildings, lined with street stalls, pawnbrokers, liquor stores, strip clubs, electronics stores. I did not know it would be like this. I knew your agents had murdered my maman, but I also knew, since always, that you Voorstanders were neat, professional. Even in the matter of that murder – it was not amateurs killed my mother.

  It was through your charm and your expertise that you conquered us, with your army, yes, and with the VIA, but you kept us conquered with jokes and dancers, death and beauty, holographs, lasers, vids, with perfectly engineered and orchestrated suspense.

  If the government of Voorstand now imagines that I came to threaten it, tell me, please – where is my Mouse, my Dog, my Duck? I came with nothing, not even courage. When we got to the Grand Concourse where we would have to stand in line to get our POW cards, I did not even want to leave the air-kooled Blikk.

  That’s the sort of threat I was. I was too ashamed to face the public gaze. It was Jacques (our polite, attentive, self-effacing nurse) who grabbed the Mouse by its clenched white hand and yanked it out the car, and stood in the fetid air, spookily, electrically triumphant.

  20

  I was on the sidewalk, my back against the rear fenders of Leona’s Blikk. Jacques – the person I thought of as Jacques – was three feet away, standing on top of a rusting grating.

  I ordered ‘him’ – for I did not know how to read his tusch, his peach, his insouciant dance-hall walk – I ordered this ‘him’ to return the Simi to the car. I had to shout, but he heard me.

  ‘No,’ he said, like that.
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  There he stood – my opposite – his eyes big, electric, his cheeks flushed, his limbs kind of agitated, drumming. How handsome he looked to me, how strong, well-formed. How I envied him, admired him, and – when he picked up this Cyborg, this Simi, this dead rat, and stood there holding it around its neck, tapping his foot – how I feared the consequences of his will.

  Ticket scalpers, smelling blood, milled round us with their stiff cardboard tickets – pink, green, silver – displayed like feathers on their long split sticks. I was defenceless: a snail without a shell.

  It was like the Zeelung border, but this time the whole food chain was alerted to our weakness – Burmese boys with fireworks to sell, beggars with rattling cups, pickpocket gangs with sheets of cardboard, and lice eggs under their nails – and there was all this damn press upon us, and whether I was not seen and trampled, or seen and reviled, one thing was as bad as the other.

  I turned to Wally for help, only to discover that he too was lost to me: standing there with his mouth open, staring up at a neon sign. ‘The Gyro Sirkus’, the sign said. ‘Who will die tonight?’

  Me. Me. I will die tonight. The air was rank, sweaty, so loud with the noises of sirens and klaxons that my bones vibrated.

  I said, ‘Make … him … stop.’

  Stop what? I did not say. Hardly knew.

  ‘Mollo mollo,’ Wally said. He was in a dream. He had his hands resting on his lower back, and he was leaning forward, staring at those stained and sweating Sirkus Domes – the subject of 10,000 Ph. Ds, the celebrated meeting of the Sacred and Profane, the High and Low, the New and Old, the Dutch and English. How tacky they looked, how tawdry.

  I turned from Wally back to Jacques. His upturned little nose was peeling, his small flat ears were red, his large brown eyes were alive, almost hyper-thyroid, with defiance and excitement. I did not know if he was male or female. He held that Simi. He clutched it, holding it like raw meat in shark waters.