The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  She looked at me.

  I saw her shiver. It ran in a ripple from her face down to her knees. ‘I’s OK, hunning,’ she said. ‘You’re not the only one is frighted.’

  I thought she meant that she was feared of me, but she was referring to the other facilitators who, now they had seen me clearly, were placing their clipboards back on the dash and slamming their truck doors closed. These facilitators did not want to touch anything sick. Anything just the tiniest bit viral, they would not touch it. They stayed with their windows shut, the air-kool on, their hunters’ halogens shining on us.

  Leona, for reasons I will tell you later, had to take this job. Even when she saw our remaining 39 Guilders, she had no choice. She pushed the crumpled notes quickly down into her pockets and signed us up, all three of us.

  ‘My name is Leona,’ the facilitator said to Jacques and Wally.

  I signed my big and fancy signature – Tristan Smith – with special loops like on a bank note. When she saw my name she smiled.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said to me. ‘My name is Leona.’

  And there and then, in the middle of the desert, in a sea of white light, she began what seemed to me, with my history, like an audition piece. She declaimed to us, in a rich round voice. She had no rhyti or bhalam to accompany her. She did not sing as she might have as a Verteiler, but she chanted thus:

  ‘What you are looking at here is a Pow-pow.

  Lots of people don’t like that term.

  They tell you, it demeaning.

  They tell you, don’t insult me.

  I tell you,

  Be pleased.

  I am going to make you a Pow – pow,

  I going to get you that little medal,

  the one with the pink and blue writing on it,

  the one

  with POW in big grey letters

  right across your face.

  I tell you – be happy. I am a Pow-pow.

  It is the Pow-pows make this country great.

  Not the Dutchies, they’re history.

  Not the Anglos – they lost the war.

  It is the Pow-wows who dance on the high wire with Bruder Skat.

  Be pleased.

  It is us Pow-pows who tell the story for Oncle Dog,

  who dive through the air with Meneer Mouse.

  We are the ones who keep the Hairy Man laughing.

  Not the Dutchies – they’re too fat.

  Not the Anglos – they lost the war.

  Alice de Stihl, Boddy Gross-Silva, James Featherfleur.

  Laser-Art, Spray-effect, Symphonic Clowns.

  Pow-pow Music,

  Tap, Joy-dancing,

  Sirkus Stomp.

  Pow! Pow!’

  We stood in the glare of the spotlights, like cambruces, hayseeds called up into the centre ring. Leona blew the smoke off the end of the barrel of her imaginary guns, twirled them, slipped them in her holster.

  ‘Welcome to Voorstand,’ she said. ‘Arts and Leisure capital of the world.’

  I pulled my big white canvas hat down over my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest, but my trousers were slit and my bone-thin legs were naked to the light.

  Jacques put his shoulders back, and poked his sunburnt nose at the heat as if he did not give a damn who looked at him or what they did to him.

  As for Wally, I do not exaggerate when I say that the dear old turtle transformed himself. He uncurled like a paper flower in water. He lifted his face towards the light. He raised his freckled liver-spotted arm and waved at the unseen Voorstanders. He turned his ruined face towards me, his thirst-white mouth loose, but smiling.

  ‘How about us!’ he said, so pleased that he made me laugh. We were broke, penniless, without a cash parole. ‘Hey,’ my dab said, blood running down his forehead, ‘how about us!’

  *The Voorstand reader will be aware of how unlikely this was, for although all Sirkuses originally had a Verteiler – whose epic songs formed the narrative backbone of the Sirkus – at the time Tristan Smith arrived in Saarlim only three Sirkuses still used Verteilers.

  15

  This was my maman’s country. This was her land, and in that sense it was my land too. It was most unfortunate that I should be forced to stand here as a pauper and an alien.

  It was four a.m., but the clay-pan at the tunnel mouth was like a fairground – all the facilitators’ cars and trucks with their different lights: headlights, quartz halogens, fairy lights flashing around their contours, the air smelling of diesel fuel, woodsmoke, ketchup, fatty food, sugar burning in the night.

  The Big Dipper, my maman’s stars, was overhead. There was liquor in the air, ganja stick. Life crackled around me like small-arms fire. We followed Leona as she hustled across the bare earth towards the headlights.

  As we went, the facilitators called to her, ‘Wear your mask, Leona.’ They made voices of disgust. Baark. Baarf. Urrrrk. That is how you greeted me, Madam, Meneer. ‘Hold your breath, Leona-honey.’

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ Leona said. ‘They just ignorant. Here my Blikk.’

  Blikk – it is your word, as familiar to you as your toothbrush. To me, it was a jewel from the crown of your songs and stories – alien, mysterious, far more than what we mean when we say ‘car’. Leona’s Blikk, although not new, was gleaming, studded with small flashing pinprick lights, not just on the bulbous fenders, or on the side doors, but right across its wide curving roof.

  Wally turned and looked at me, his face cracked open in a grin. This response, of course, was exactly what I wanted when I imagined the trip. It was imagining this that helped me overcome my phobia – the thought that my will could make him carefree, happy, not weighed down by history or loneliness.

  But when I had imagined this I had not expected to arrive a pauper in the desert, and now that was my lot, my breathing was shallow in my chest, and I felt light, faint. I could not be the joyous man I had expected.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Who else do you know who has ever come to Voorstand through a tunnel.’

  ‘We … lost … our … money.’

  For answer he gave me a very distinctive, mischievous grin.

  ‘NO … don’t … even … think … of … it.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘I … know … that … grin.’

  It was the same grin he wore when he arrived home with stolen watches and unnecessary toaster ovens.

  ‘This … is … not … Chemin … Rouge.’

  I hated him to steal. Twice he had been detained overnight in jail. As a result I feared the police, the courts, all those in uniform.

  ‘Don’t … even … think … of … it.’

  ‘Don’t think of what?’ he insisted, but then Leona interrupted.

  ‘You ever see Gyro’s Sirkus?’ she asked us.

  ‘Read about it,’ Wally said. Now all his attention was focused on Leona. He thrust his hands into his pockets and pushed his eyebrows forward.

  ‘Gyro’s Sirkus,’ Jacques said. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘What am I going to say, handsome?’

  ‘We don’t get the big Sirkuses in Efica,’ Jacques said. ‘But we get the Simulation Domes. I saw the Simulation. Three hundred and sixty degrees. Three-D. This is the car – right?’

  ‘This here Blikk,’ Leona said. ‘This the exact same one they drove across the high wire in Gyro’s Sirkus.’

  We had exactly three Guilders left between us, and my companions were staring at the Blikk, smiling, the pair of them rubbing their faces with their hands.

  ‘You want to take a photo,’ Leona said, ‘it’s OK.’

  Jacques had no camera, but Wally gleefully followed the facilitator’s suggestion. His flash flashed. The car blinked its lights back at him, like a giant dung beetle talking to its servant.

  Leona looked at me and winked. I tried to wink back, but all I was thinking about was how we were to get money.

  ‘You can’t wink,’ she said. She blew gum from between her teeth and p
opped it. ‘You done all tried,’ she said, ‘but you can’t do it. I seed you tried to do it. I know you, I knowed your type. ’

  I could not even think about her. But for Wally, of course, she was a woman and she was talking to me, and I might misunderstand her and fall in love.

  Suddenly he had no interest in photography. ‘OK,’ he said to me. He picked me up – my trousers were slit like rags, my legs were there for anyone to see. ‘Time to go,’ he said to Jacques and Leona as he struggled with me to the open seat of the Blikk.

  ‘What’s … your … problem?’ I asked him. ‘For … God’s … sake.’

  He said something to me, but it was drowned by the extraordinary roar of the Blikk’s V12 engine. Leona was ready. She slammed her door and fiddled with the choke. Jacques tumbled in beside me.

  ‘Bout dawn,’ Leona called, ‘you’re going to see some stuff.’

  Then, without warning, she drove, fast, bumpy, full gas.

  16

  Leona had smooth tan leather gloves. She loved to let that wheel spin through her broad little hands. ‘Wink, he ain’t pleased,’ she called. She slid the Blikk on sandy corners and bucked it high on rocky passages.

  ‘Look at him. He pissed as hell.’

  Why would I not be? I had ripped trousers, mutant legs. I was three foot six, powerless beneath the big empty sky of Voorstand.

  ‘I see him coming out the tunnel, ducking and diving, didn’t want to give a penny to no one.’

  She looked at me. Every time I looked up those eyes were on me in that wide rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Didn’t want to give no Guilder to me. So damned mad couldn’t even wink at me, ain’t that right, honey? You was mad as two fleas,’ she said.

  ‘Still … am,’ I said. I looked right back at her. I could see her in the wide-screen mirror: broad nose, handsome face, yellow desert eyes.

  ‘What’s he say?’

  ‘He still is,’ said Wally. ‘Not with you, with me.’

  ‘When he signed the A22 form, you should have seed the loop-deloop. Don’t Fuck With Me. That was what he wrote. Straight on the page.’

  ‘It’s me he’s loup with,’ Wally said.

  ‘Loop with?’

  ‘Loup – mad, angry.’

  ‘Oncle, I love the way you talk,’ she said. She left me then. She began to chew his bone. Soon she had Wally blushing about his accent. She made him happy, glowing. When she switched to Jacques, I saw it was her talent, her thing. She was facilitating our entry into Voorstand, calming us, flattering us. And, indeed, when our moods improved, she lapsed into silence. We travelled with our fairy lights still winking from our metal skin.

  The earth was spooky white, clay yellow, dust brown – not like anything in Efica. It was the landscape of the stories Irma had recited, the landscape my ancestors, landing on the Pietr Groot from the Netherlands in 135 BE,* had travelled through. It was alien. It was in my blood, in my dreams. It appeared and reappeared at every bend and cutting – real, not real, familiar, foreign.

  The distances were vast, far greater than anything we were accustomed to. So even the famous cactus forest at Neu Zwolfe, which we entered early in the journey, quickly became tedious to our eyes. Likewise in the Poorlands which followed after – the little blue churches, the stone roadside shrines with newspaper-wrapped offerings to the Hairy Man – were soon bleached of novelty.

  We had no money. We were unprotected. My breathing became shallow. I began to dwell on the circumstances in which our security had been lost. It would never have happened if only Wally had been calm about the flower.

  I do not mean to blame my guardian for everything that happened, but just the same – he lost me my money, my power, all because he panicked about some girl with a flower. That girl had nice strong calves, it is true. She was kind. She had large dark liquid eyes and she saw that I was a human underneath my horror. I would have chopped my hand off if it meant she might really care for me. I do not mean it poetically. I mean really chop – an axe, the danger. But chopping, cutting, mutilation – none of this would change the bitter truth. I was who I was. She was kind, that’s all. She gave me a flower with a thick pulpy stem like a Nez Noir thistle. I was not going to slash my wrists, for God’s sake.

  If Wally had not panicked, we would have driven to the tunnel and arrived rested, cool, cucumbers. There would have been no conflict with Aziz, no robbery. We would have driven on to Saarlim in the expectation of security and comfort.

  But Wally did not even seem to have noticed what he had done. Indeed, the moment my fortune disappeared, he began to shine, and neither travel nor sleeplessness seemed to diminish his good humour.

  ‘It’s the challenge, son,’ he said to me as dawn arrived – a streaky melancholy grey and yellow sky over wide valleys dotted with very high pillars of yellow rock. ‘And Oncle Wal is the right man for the job.’

  ‘Ask … her … what … they … do … with … thieves … in … Voorstand.’

  ‘Mollo-mollo,’ Wally said. ‘There won’t be any thieving.’ He smiled, sat back. He crossed his legs and began rolling a cigarette of rank Morean tobacco.

  ‘That’s a willow,’ Leona said. I could see her eyes, creased, tired, in the rear-view mirror. ‘See a willow, maybe there’s a stream.’

  ‘We have willows,’ Jacques said, stretching. ‘But not like that.’

  ‘That’s a spit-weed.’

  ‘We don’t have them.’

  That’s a creosote bush. That’s a see-saw. Beside a dry creek bed a little below the road, she showed us a twenty-foot long shoe and a leg carved out of rock. The leg rose maybe forty feet into the air and then stopped. It was trousered, cuffed, had a neat pleat up its front, and careful wrinkles, all carved from the yellow rock.

  ‘It’s laser art?’ Jacques said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Not laser. Real.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a shoe,’ Leona said.

  It was a shoe, but, size apart, it was not normal. It had an excessively wide toe and a high lump on the toe cap – a clown’s shoe.

  ‘You know whose shoe that is?’

  ‘Bruder … Dog’s … shoe,’ I said.

  ‘That is the Dog’s shoe,’ Leona said. ‘Honey, it a mystery. How were they going to build the rest? It one of the mysteries of the desert.* Ain’t that something. Now you look over there you see it. The wire lead from the shoe to that there cabin with the machinery out its back. That was going to be an avocado farm. All those dead trees – them are what we call avocados. It a kind of vegetable. Why is that wire there? You tell me, Wink. The answer is to get the energy from the Dog and give it to the avocado trees. That is what I figure, but no one knows. Would have been an avocado farm if they’d ever found the water. They planted the trees, never found the water. Then they tried to get the energy from the Dog, but they couldn’t get the Bruder built up in time.’

  ‘We’re going to do fine here,’ Wally whispered. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘What happened to him, Mr Avocado? Maybe he figured out how to do some other thing. Maybe he was the one went drove down the road and blasted the guts out of the cabin there. Now look at that.’

  She pulled the car up. We wound our windows down. There was a cabin with its insides blown away by gunfire. Its insulation hung out of gaping wounds.

  ‘We’re going to do fine,’ Wally said, but when I looked at him he looked away. ‘Mollo mollo,’ he said. ‘We’re going to do fine.’

  ‘This is the land of Sirkus,’ the facilitator said. ‘No one will tell you not to try. Some countries, they have rules, regulations, government telling the people how to live their lives. Say you was Japanese, Chinese – put you in jail for making a statue of Bruder Dog. Here, you take the risk, you get the reward. You walk the high wire, you die or you get the silver cup.’

  ‘Can I ask you, sweets,’ said Wally. ‘How much money did you have when you arrived in Voorstand?’

  Leona began a long story about her arrival. W
ally leaned forward and rested his arms on the back of the driver’s seat. I looked out the window, behind his curving spine. There, on the right, on a cutting, a three-foot high Mouse was running beside the car.

  I said nothing, but I could not take my eyes off the hateful thing. Its white scarf was gone. Its bright blue waistcoat was hanging from one shoulder. Its soft grey limbs were torn, covered in clay dust. Its eyes were fierce and wide, its teeth small and pointed. It was running badly, tripping itself on its own large white boots, stumbling, standing, falling. Its arms were loose and slightly boneless in appearance. I was reminded of a blow-fly dying.

  The cutting led us to a view over a wide khaki-coloured plain. A single line of highway cut right across its centre, and one could see the thin chalk line of road, our road, leading into it. At any moment the car would begin its descent and we would leave these nightmare visions behind us.

  ‘Wink sees it,’ Leona said.

  ‘Meneer Mouse,’ whispered Jacques. ‘God damn.’

  ‘Where you folks from?’ Leona said.

  ‘Stop the car,’ Jacques said.

  ‘You ain’t never heard of Bruder Mouse.’

  ‘Let’s get it,’ Jacques said. I looked at him. He was so alert, so handsome. His colour was high, his eye-white a lustrous greyish white.

  ‘Bruder Mouse is something we have here,’ Leona said.

  ‘We know the Mouse,’ Jacques said. ‘“One mo nothing. Next mo there he was, solid as a miller’s wheel.” We know it, really. It’s, like, it’s our Mouse too. “His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.”’

  ‘That’s the words of a song, right?’ Leona asked.

  ‘Tales of Bruder Mouse,’ said Jacques. ‘Badberg Edition.’

  But Leona, it was obvious, had not heard of the Badberg Edition. ‘The Mouse is something we have from the Sirkus,’ she said. ‘But not like this old fellow – this one is a machine, a Simulacrum. This old mouse, he’s older than me, believe it. He’s an old model.* Hey, Wink, you seeing this? Just watch that Simi go. This must be the last Simi left in Voorstand. You guys don’t appreciate how lucky you are.’