The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  It is a mask.

  Then: It is an exercise.

  Then: It is someone else.

  Then: It’s Natalie.

  Only the smell. Forget it. It was a smell. I cannot go to the bathroom without remembering my maman’s death.

  The night my mother died, other things were happening to the Blue Party – land scandals,* money scandals,† they rose like mushrooms after rain. I did not know Gabe Manzini’s face or name, but he was an ace, the best. One scandal one day, a new one the next. He made the Blues appear both incompetent and corrupt.

  In the history of Efica my mother’s death is an adulterer’s death. She is remembered in the morass of shame that Eficans feel about this time.

  Me – I never doubted what had happened – not for a second. Even before I saw there was no stool, chair, ladder, I knew. I could not reach her but I cut my mask off my face with a box-cutter. I could not reach her but I smashed Bruder Mouse with a brick. Wally was there then. Vincent was there.

  It was Wally, goddamn, dear Wally who got the ladder.

  I ground the mask, pulped the wood, paint. My real face was snot, tears, drool. I brought it into the lights of the vid camera and screamed at them.

  I did not appear on vid. Edited out. Not part of the story.

  *Hélène Rivette, the Shadow Minister of Finance, was alleged to have been a beneficiary of an illegal subdivision in Berthollet. Documents ‘proving’ this were in all the zines on the day after my mother’s death. A week after the election it was shown that these damaging charges had no substance. [TS]

  †A series of faxes (first published by Zinebleu) which seemed to prove that Jack Mifflin and St John Theroux had received $100,000 each from French aircraft manufacturers. These documents, later shown to be false, did much to discredit the Blues’ platform on armed neutrality and, of course, helped further destroy the party’s credibility. [TS]

  BOOK 2

  Travels in Voorstand

  Great Voorstand

  Bruder Mouse saves Oncle Duck

  Meneer Van Kraligan, as everybody knows, was the name of the Saint before he was a Saint. When he was a sinner he used to follow the old ways, and he would keep a Bruder prisoner, and lock him in the cage.

  On this occasion he got old Oncle Duck and he was feeding him corn like nobody’s business, feeding him millet pollard mash, brown peas, even the leftover warm milk and miller’s bread his own children left on their plates.

  Oncle Duck was eating – he could not help himself – but he was weeping. He would eat and weep, eat and weep, and the more he ate the worse he felt for he knew he was going to be murdered by and by.

  The Saint was sitting by his fireside thinking of our Oncle’s flesh – his head chopped off and so on. He was thinking terrible thoughts with perfect happiness when Bruder Mouse appeared to him in all his furry finery.

  One mo nothing, next minute there he was, buttons gleaming, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

  One minute nothing. Next he was as solid as a miller’s wheel.

  ‘Hello, Meneer Van Kraligan,’ he said to the Saint who was not yet a Saint.

  ‘Hello, Bruder,’ said the Saint. ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘I’m going to make you let go that Oncle Duck,’ the Mouse said.

  ‘Oh, are you now?’ says the Saint. ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘It is a sin to keep a Bruder prisoner,’ said the Mouse.

  ‘What you’re talking is a heresy,’ the Saint said. ‘And I know it is heresy, for it was declared one by the Pope and it was why they exiled that whole monastery to Voorstand in the first place. I don’t suppose,’ the Saint said, ‘the Pope has told you something different?’

  ‘Not the Pope,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘But I was sent by the Archangel Gabriel to show you this.’

  Then Bruder Mouse rose off the ground. Then he spun himself five times, in acrobatic harmony. Then he bounced up and down on the table on his little head, and as he went up and down, farting as he went, fart, fart, fart, fart – he made the Saint start laughing.

  He looped and fell, on his stomach.

  The Saint thought this about the funniest thing he ever saw, a little mouse doing Sirkus on his kitchen table.

  ‘You wait there,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch the Kinder.’

  And off he went, laughing and sighing and scratching his big backside.

  And when the Saint came back, he saw his duck was gone. There was only the Mouse standing in his place.

  One mo there he was, buttons gleaming, cane tapping, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

  One mo there he was, as solid as a miller’s wheel.

  Next mo he was gone.

  Tales of Bruder Mouse, Badberg Edition

  Rat Man, Fat Man

  Rat man, fat man on his roost,

  Grabs the neck of the golden goose,

  Rat man, fat man, dust and dogs,

  Dirty snakes and licky frogs,

  Make a cake and have it iced,

  Pray to rats and Jesus Christ.

  Efican folk song circa 301 EC (Source: Doggerel and Jetsam: unheard voices in the Voorstand Imperium, Inchsmith Press, London)

  1

  I am not one of those Ootlanders who wish to blame you personally for everything your government has ever done, so let me say it clear: I know you are not responsible for my mother’s death. Indeed, I write this assuming your individual innocence, believing you unaware of Gabe Manzini or any of his criminal activities.

  If I will believe that of you, then please believe the following of me: that when, a whole twelve years after Voorstand agents murdered my maman, I made the dangerous voyage to your fatherland, it was not – as Mrs Kram would still have you believe – to do your nation harm.

  It is true that I entered Voorstand illegally, but the illegality was created by your government’s refusal to place the appropriate stempel in my passport, a situation produced in turn by my own actions – certain offensive tracts I had written, and published, many, many years before, in the period following my mother’s murder.

  I understand that no one wishes to have their country called a ‘poison gland’ or a ‘vile octopus’* but imagine, please: my world was shattered.

  Everything that had allowed me to sustain my problematic existence, the illusion of my talent, my safety, my power, all this died with my mother. One day I was Napoleon. Next day I was a coward.

  I was afraid that I also would be murdered. I was afraid of the street, afraid of uncurtained windows, unlocked doors, noises in the night. And yet I would not be a total coward. Through my teenage years I continued to write the political pamphlets and letters you still cannot forgive. I believed you were watching and listening, and I was not wrong. I kept the doors locked and my fear simmered and bubbled and I skulked and fretted like a cockroach inside the mouldy Feu Follet, and when no one came to kill me it did not matter because by then I was afraid of the air on my skin, of the sky itself.

  Is it grandiose to say I too feared assassination? Then let it be: I was grandiose.

  I still rehearsed my circus swings and tumbles, juggling, a whole illusionistic repertoire, but I did it with a shame that came from knowing that I lacked the courage to be the Great Figure I had previously imagined. I ate too much. I slept. My pale white stomach began to bulge while my legs remained as thin and twisted as they had ever been.

  It was Wally who stole the Axis 9iL computers from the University of Chemin Rouge. His motive was simple entertainment. He imagined I would play Cat & Mouse, Chessmaster and Battlefield, and I did play these games, and others, but my lethargy did not finally disappear until I discovered that I could use Axis 9iL to make money. Then my life changed overnight.

  While boys and girls of my age were kissing each other, twining their legs around each other in the ba
ck seats of their parents’ cars, I was sitting white-eyed at my terminal, plugged into Financial Data Services like ‘Voorstand-on-line’ and ‘Uptrend’. I was a teenage share-trader.

  I never did get any higher than level 5 on Cat & Mouse but the Bourse was another matter. I persuaded Vincent (the executor of my maman’s estate) to release a portion of my inheritance to establish an account. I had a shaky start, but two years later I was producing returns of between 5 and 10 per cent per month. This was from 386 to 393, years of the great Bull Market, and I was one of those so called pin-ball sorciers* who brought the market crashing down – a Momentum Investor. I played the game a kid can play so well – pure mathematics, trends, swings, surges in stock. Did I make money from toxic waste? Perhaps. Did I buy and sell in Sirkus stock? Who knows? I was interested only in the momentum of the equities.

  At first I used my profits to make the Feu Follet safer. I engaged a security guard. I put bars on the windows, installed an electronic security system. But then I began to seek safety in money itself. You might say that Mammon became my maman. I do not need to point out what a betrayal this entailed.

  Of course it was not just Tristan Smith who was scarred by the events of 20 January. All these years later Efican politicians have not forgotten what happens to those who oppose our great and powerful ally. Even the Blue Party has become, to say the least, pragmatic. Thread all the navigation cable you wish inside our caves. Leave your poison water wherever it suits you. Our government will give you no trouble.

  Following my maman’s death, I sought wealth in a way that would have upset her dreadfully, but life is never simple and I remained loyal to some of her ideals while I betrayed others. So even while I rode the powerful surges of the Bull Market I was active in the January 20 Group* and I wrote my pamphlets and letters to the editor.

  And this, I can only assume, is why, two days after my twenty-second birthday, you refused me a tourist Stempel. This is why you still suspect that a great political cause had me drag my blinking share-trader’s face out into the bright sun. You still want to know why, why really, did I abandon my safe house and trundle down the No. 25 wharf in my wheelchair. What is the real story? Why did I allow myself to be thrown from a heaving fishing trawler on to a Morean Beach at dawn?

  I, of course, would rather tell you how Wally, Jacques and I crossed what you like to call ‘the great historical sea’ and how we entered your Voorstand by tunnel, in the company of thieves, how we met Leona the facilitator, how we saw the altars to the Hairy Man beside the highway, how we crossed the great plains of Voorstand, across the mighty earthworks, dams, lakes, and saw the huge Sirkus Domes rising from the earth, everywhere, like mushrooms after rain.

  We had some high old times before the thing came unstuck in Peggy Kram’s trothaus, higher than Drs Laroche and Eisner ever thought when I was born. Love, joy, adventure – all these things are there ahead of me, and you too, but I know, I am avoiding your question.

  You want to know why I left the place where I was safe. Why I felt it necessary to smuggle Wally Paccione into Voorstand in the first place.

  To tell you this I must – I am sorry – walk you back into the dark closed world of the Feu Follet at a time when it smells not only of death but also of rotting sawdust, of stale orange peel, of spilled wine, of old ham sandwiches. I will seat you in a Starbuck. I will do the show – act out for you the parts of WALLY, ROXANNA, TRISTAN too.

  The year is 382. It is March, and the wet season has just finished. Felicity has been dead for nearly two months.

  The lights come up to reveal ROXANNA and WALLY dancing. TRISTAN watches them from his chair.

  *‘If we let ourselves imagine this is solely a question of military defence, we are deluding ourselves. Our greatest defence is our culture, and the brutal truth is – we have none. The terms of our alliance with Voorstand means we are prohibited (for instance) from placing a 2 per cent tariff on their Sirkus tickets to subsidize our theatre. They call this unfair trade, yet we know that every ticket we buy to the Sirkus weakens us, swamps us further, suffocates us. If we wish to escape the vile octopus, our escape must be total. For some time we will need to be poor, defenceless and, yes, bored.’ From ‘What will we do?’ by Tristan Smith.

  *Literally, Pin-ball Wizard, a derogatory term for the traders who were held responsible for the computer-driven selling frenzy which produced the crash of 7 May 393.

  *Radical nationalist group named in commemoration of Felicity Smith’s death. In 387 two of the group’s members were charged with possession of firearms and sentenced to jail for five years, in one case, and seven years, the other. From that time on the group was thought to be toothless.

  2

  It is eleven o’clock in the morning and the streets of Chemin Rouge are white and blinding, sticky with the smell of honeysuckle. The bougainvillaea is puce and purple on the sagging veranda roofs, and the papaya are once again orange enough to tempt the crows to strike their beaks deep into their seed-jewelled bellies.

  Inside the dusty, darkened Feu Follet, ROXANNA dances with WALLY. She wears a red dress which is tied around the neck and which shows the small black mole in the middle of her soft white back. She wears small gold heart-shaped earrings with little red stones in their centre. She has black high-heeled shoes with a complicated series of straps which secure them to her sturdy unstockinged ankles. She rests her crisp, permed hair against her partner’s white cotton shirt. They are now a couple. They have walked though a fire and each has been imprinted by the other just as you see the warp and weft of dress fabric scorched into the skin of people in intensive care.

  They dance while I, YOUNG TRISTAN, watch them. It is so long ago. I am another person, sitting in my club chair with my skinny arms held tight around my chest. My white gold-flecked irises never leave them as they dance. It is a foxtrot, no music, sawdust on the floor.

  Inside the ring is the crumpled pink tissue Roxanna has used to wipe my spittle from her face.

  Beyond the tissue, half lost in the folds of the black velvet curtain which separates the theatre from the foyer, is the reason I have spat at her – the picnic carton. In the carton is bright orange cheese, a loaf of fresh white walloper, apples, jelly beans, croix cakes, a bottle of very cold beer wrapped in sheets of newspaper, glasses. She has a folded blanket. She has altered my dead maman’s red sundress and imagines no one recognizes it. Wally has his nose against the skin behind her ear. She can feel him inhallng her, like he does when making love, breathing in the air out of her pores.

  I say nothing. I have stared at the dress when she walked in, but I say nothing. I sit in the middle of the ring on the club chair they have placed there for me. I hold a banned book in my lap. It is called Without Consent – Voorstand’s Secret Agencies in Action.

  Since my maman’s murder I will not sleep in a room with a window. That is one problem.

  Roxanna is going crazy, that is another. Also: she has promised God that she will do whatever is needed to diminish my pain. She is giving herself to my restoration.

  I have barely left the theatre since my maman died. If that is what I want, that is fine with Roxanna. After all – she is my nurse. In real life, however, the building presses on her, sits on her. It is like having a fat spanker pressing on your face. She has asked God to please give her air, but what can He do?

  She is twenty-five years old, had thought herself past saving, but on that night of the murder she felt herself turn into something shining. She took me, the other me – YOUNG TRISTAN – the whimpering child – she took me into her bed, rocked me in her arms, bathed me, towelled me, sang to me, oiled my dry, scaly skin, made up my terrible face with blue and gold and silver. She was a nurse, a nun, someone finally to look up to.

  Then the dry hot weather arrived, two weeks early. You could feel the warm, salty northerly on your skin and you could stand on the steps of the Feu Follet and see, across the tops of the high weeds in the vacant block across the street, the skipjack boats
heading out of the port three miles away.

  She prayed for my health, she packed me a picnic, with jelly beans and croix cakes. I agreed to go. I thought I could go. Then I stood on the steps and my breath stopped breathing. I thought I would faint. I could not go. When she tried to pick me up against my will, I spat right in her face.

  I would live only where my mother had died. Within fifteen feet of the place. Will you laugh in my face if I tell you I felt safest there? In the deepest, darkest hole on earth.

  I sat with my book, always the same book. I did not understand it, but I would not permit anyone to explain a word to me. I was eleven years old, ferocious, like an animal.

  ROXANNA looks over WALLY’s sweet white cotton shoulder and there I am – her salvation, her nemesis, locked into my chair, my eyes blazing, my nose running, my loose maw dribbling thick saliva.

  She has ironed Wally’s white cotton shirt. When they dance, she can smell that sexy mixture of man and cotton.

  She whispers, her mouth close against Wally’s ear. Wally nods his nose against her neck.

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ she calls to TRISTAN SMITH. ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Someone … has … to … be … with … me.’

  ‘Come on, Rikiki,’ Wally says. He breaks away from Roxanna, kneels at my feet. ‘Come on, fellah, you’re going to feel much better.’

  ‘It’s … my … theatre.’

  ‘Of course it’s your theatre,’ he says. ‘We’re going to swim, in the ocean.’

  ‘You … have … to … stay … here.’

  ‘Wally does not have to do shit,’ Roxanna says.

  ‘He … has … to … stay.’

  Roxanna looks at me and sees Phantome Drool – wide mouth dribbling. ‘Wally’s entitled to have his life just like you.’