The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘This is one.’

  ‘This is a Cyborg, I told you. They made it three foot six so no adult male could fit inside.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a small person.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bruder,’ the waiter said, his tone now more gentle. ‘I’m sorry you spent your money, but I recognize this little fuck. It’s an Opus 3a Cyborg. They made a thousand of them.’

  ‘A thousand.’ Jacques winked at me. ‘Good heavens.’

  ‘I don’t know the numbers,’ he said irritably. ‘They made a lot. They made hundreds of them, and everything was fine, for about a week, and then they started to catch on fire. There were Cyborgs running around Kakdorp, in flames. Or they got run over in the traffic. You’d see them on the news at night, some dumb crazy Dog walking out along some ditch, lost in space. So this here creature, Bruder, no matter what you paid for it – take it, sell it to a museum, someone off the plane from Chemin Rouge. And don’t go hanging round the streets with Pow-pows. These are primitive people. They don’t know how to take a kak in a bathroom. They steal. They carry firearms. They have diseases.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  The waiter’s face was very red and angry by now.

  ‘Listen, I know so, Bruder. I know who you are.’

  Jacqui began to blush. She looked at me, and looked quickly away.

  ‘I’m watching out for you,’ the waiter said.

  ‘OK, I get it.’ Jacques was scarlet.

  I was thinking: What is going on here?

  ‘You don’t get anything,’ the waiter said. ‘You’re taking all sorts of risks you don’t even know about. I cannot let you continue. If you weren’t a trannie I would not care, but I am. I live here. I know how ugly it can be.’

  I did not know what a trannie was. Jacqui did not either. The fact was obviously showing on her face for our host now reached across and took my nurse’s hand and placed it inside his own white waiter’s jacket.

  ‘Be careful,’ the waiter said. ‘This is a big city. Women like us get raped and murdered every day.’

  Jacqui was looking at me, her mouth open.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She picked me up. She took my weight, all sixty-five pounds, and hefted me over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ve been kind.’

  I put my hand over her shoulder. I was wearing my gloves, but I brushed it ‘accidentally’ – her breast, no question – 23 September 394 by the Efican Calendar.

  *A reference to the Republic of Morea.

  †‘It being hereby stated, in amendment to Codicil CXVIII, that it is an offence against the laws of the state of Voorstand and the Free Franciscan Church, for any adult male or female to assume the costume or to impersonate in any way God’s Creatures as defined in Codicil III and further this amendment shall apply to those Creatures of the Saarlim Sirkus Corporation including Bruder Mouse, Phantome Drool ©, Busker Bear ©, in which case Manufacture shall be deemed to be, for the purpose of this law, an act of Impersonation EXCEPTING those Simulacrum or Cyborg facsimiles of the aforesaid God’s Creatures whose maximum height is less than forty-two inches.’

  29

  Do children decide how they are going to grow? Jacqui always believed she had decided, that she had stood on the veranda of her home and made the choice.

  She had watched her mother (standing with her arms folded across her chest, making small disapproving exhalations – Phhh, sssht) and decided – against all the strong physical evidence to the contrary – that she would rather die than be like her.

  It was Christmas Day in the year 380 and Jacqui Lorraine was nine years old. Her mother was on the veranda with the tape recorder, watching her husband and his friend Oliver Odettes, a science teacher with a red face and a large black moustache, shovelling snow across the small front lawn. The tattered leaves of the banana trees flapped in the warm wind. The trunk of the twenty-foot high papaya rubbed against the water tank. Beyond the small privet hedge, the neighbours watched – not just adults, but babies with spilled snow melting in their puckered mouths, squirming boys with snow down their shirts, silent teenagers with their hurt and hostile eyes.

  In a moment Oliver Odettes would put down his shovel and walk under the veranda to fetch Jesse Lorraine’s chair. He would place his chair in the middle of the snow. This would not be the first time this had happened.

  ‘Incredible,’ Rene Lorraine said, as her husband leaned his shovel against the privet hedge. ‘Ssst.’ As if it were all new, as if it were not like this every Christmas, always exactly the same, starting on Christmas Eve when Jacqui’s father would borrow a refrigerated truck and then, with a loaf of bread, a blood sausage, and two bottles of roteuse sitting in a cardboard box on the seat between them, drive with Oliver Odettes to the peak of Mount Cootreksea, 10,000 feet and 200 miles from the palm trees of Chemin Rouge, and there they would spend two hours sipping wine, admiring the light, and shovelling snow into the truck.

  They always left at eleven o’clock at night and they always turned the corner of the street at exactly eight in the morning. Then they would open the wire chain gates and back the refrigerated van up the twin concrete tracks and – with all the neighbourhood children crowding the street – shovel the snow over the pocket-handkerchief size lawn at the front of Jacqui’s house.

  The two friends had done it so often – from the year Jacqui was three – and they took (perhaps excessive) pride in knowing exactly how much snow it took to cover the grass, right down to the ‘glace’, those last six shovelfuls of snow which Oliver Odettes would fastidiously heap along the privet hedge while Jacqui’s father went to fetch his books.

  Rene Lorraine did not like Oliver Odettes, whom she referred to, in her daughter’s hearing, as a riveter and a chochotte. Oliver Odettes wore very short shorts and fur-lined boots, always the same pair, for the snow. Every year it was the same. Rene would stand with her tanned arms folded across her breasts and an expression, always the same expression, a mixture of incredulity and outrage, on her broad handsome face, and watch the science teacher tiptoe across the white lawn, as ugly as a drag queen. Each time she shook her head as if she would have nothing to do with so ridiculous a spectacle, and each time she played her part: she pushed the play button on the tape player and turned up the volume so that the kids back on the other side of the hedge could hear the sleigh bells.

  When the sleigh bell introduction had played for thirty seconds, she stood and pushed the ‘stop’ button.

  Then her elderly, shambling, increasingly bear-like husband – he was seventy-six the year Jacqui turned nine – would shuffle out from his tiny ‘library’ beneath the veranda steps and sit on the ridiculously small chrome and vinyl chair which Oliver Odettes had placed in the middle of the lawn; and each year the corrugations on Rene’s forehead would deepen and complicate a little more.

  Each year Jesse Lorraine would sit on the chair and acknowledge his wife and daughter and the neighbours. He would push his freshly opened bottle of roteuse down into the already melting snow, tuck the tartan rug around his shining shapely brown legs, and open the first of the books in his lap.

  Then in an educated voice that did not belong in that street full of liver-brick bungalows, back-yard hen houses, and wheel-less Peugeots quietly rusting underneath the bougainvillaea, a voice which the tense woman on the veranda had fallen in love with, he would read the neighbours stories about snow, different ones each year.

  The year Jacqui was nine, Jesse Lorraine sat in the middle of his sixty-four square feet of snow and, wetting his dry throat with a little roteuse, began in the middle of Chapter 43 of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: ‘There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player.’

  ‘Schhoot,’ Rene said. ‘Phhhhh.’

  Then he read Anna Karenina on her train, about to meet Count Vronsky. (‘With delight she filled her lungs with deep breaths of snowy, frosty air …’) And he read how – thi
s time Charlotte Brontë – ‘I had closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to prevent the snow blowing in under it.’

  He sat on his wooden chair, his tartan rug around his legs, his woollen beanie pulled down over his lion’s mane of grey hair, his beetling brows pressing down upon his light blue eyes, and the neighbours listened to him. They were not religious people. They did not miss God in their lives, but they were Eficans, and their history had given them another kind of nagging loss which the cold white snow temporarily eased.

  The snow eased nothing for Rene. It made it worse, each year worse than the year before – the effort, the expense, the very fact that it melted, was useless, helped nothing. By the time Jacqui was nine years old, her mother’s impatient foot-tapping on the veranda had turned into an angry tattoo. It was unbearable.

  The mythology of the family said Jacqui was already like her mother. She had the same honey-coloured skin, the dark brown eyes, the neat arched brow, the strong straight hair that sprang up from the crown, the small well-shaped mouth, the raging chemicals which made the little girl prone to insomnia from the age of six. That was as may be, but on Christmas Day she decided she would be like her father. She looked like her mother, but she would be like the big man, the bear with his tobacco smell – not a man, she never wanted to be a man – but not fearful or mean or angry or small-minded.

  Jesse was a handsome man with fine grey hair, broad-shouldered, a little stooped, but with the intense, undamaged blue eyes of a child, which incorrectly suggested a life of moderation. He listened to everyone. When you spoke to him he turned those clear eyes on you and you knew he liked you. He liked everyone. He had had many wives, and many children. He had eaten fabulous meals at great restaurants. He had photographs of himself, a young good-looking man in a red shirt standing on a road in China, in a blizzard in Voorstand, in a restaurant in Paris, on the wharf in Marseille where his great-great-grandfather, a tin-tin who had previously imagined himself a fortunate man, had been forcibly shipped to that country which Louis XIV called Neufasie.

  Perhaps these photographs had once been interesting to Rene, but the first time Jacqui saw them they were already taboo – Jesse produced the old manila envelope when Rene was at the supermarket. He had photographs of houses he had once owned, interiors, exteriors, one with a famous actor holding a tennis racket in a funny pose.

  What had happened to the money?

  Jacqui never asked. Jesse never said.

  By the time her mother had fallen for him, he was living in a one-bedroom cook-sit in Goat Marshes and they were both working in the kitchen of the Restaurant Quatorze. Jesse had been the one person in that chaotic kitchen who had the guts to stand up to the patapoof who owned it. He had been the troublemaker and she had fallen for him, and when he asked her to ‘appear in the Gazette’ she said yes although he was already sixty-five. He was handsome, gracious, and he let her finish her sentences.

  Two months after the wedding the Restaurant Quatorze closed down. There was a recession, and the only work Rene could find was peeling prawns at a cannery at the port. As for Jesse – no one wanted him, not anywhere. He had a doctorate from the Sorbonne but he was unemployable. And although his bride never thought this was his fault she was, just the same, irritated by his lack of guilt.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said. ‘I will enjoy my life. I have always enjoyed my life.’

  And he did. While she peeled prawns at the port, he read Liberation on the veranda. He made it wrong for her to resent this: what did she want him to do? Rub ashes in his hair?

  When she became pregnant he did not act like any man she had ever known.

  ‘Have it,’ he said. ‘It’s what you want.’

  It was what she wanted, but when Jacqui was three months old it became obvious – if Rene did not go back to work, they would starve.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ he said.

  And he did. What was wrong with that? he asked her. What could she say? That she felt her child had been stolen from her?

  The father cooked the food, played with the baby, read her stories in French and English. The mother came home tense, jealous, angry about the floor not swept, sheets not washed, a shitty bandock sitting on the changing table.

  All this Jacqui only learned when her father was dying and her mother shocked her by confessing that for most of her marriage she had prayed to God each night for Him to take her husband from her.

  Jacqui found that hard to stomach.

  Even then, when her mother’s prayers had finally been answered, when her papa’s lips were purple, when his breath smelled sweet and rancid, like sour milk, when his lungs were gurgling with the mucus which would finally drown him, he had more life in him than her. Her mother knew it too. She was frightened of his death. She would not come into the bedroom. She stayed in her rocking chair in the next room, sipping sweet vermouth and ice while the Moosone rain fell like glass beads from the overflowing gutters.

  It was the daughter who sat up with the dying man, who told him she loved him, who talked him through the panic of his gurgling drowning breath. It was the wife who sat in the next room, crying, drinking vermouth.

  When the refrigerated truck arrived at her father’s graveside and the ageing Oliver Odettes stepped out in his short shorts and his red demi-bottes, Jacqui Lorraine produced her copy of Master and Man and began to read out loud.

  ‘He twisted his head, dug a hole through the snow in front of him with his hand and opened his eyes.’

  ‘Oh God, please Jacqui,’ her mother said. She clutched her daughter’s arm. ‘Please, don’t do this.’

  A different daughter might have found room in her heart to pity her, but Jacqui was not that daughter.

  30

  I touched her left breast, that’s all, by ‘accident’. Nothing had happened between us, but even though she carried me, on her shoulder, like a souvenir, out of the restaurant and into the lunch-time crowds of Saarlim, even though I was enclosed in sweaty fur and rubber, even though I could not smell her skin or feel her hair, I was – please do not be embarrassed for me – in love with her.

  All the powerful irritation I had felt when I had seen her, bright-eyed, wilful, dragging the Simi from the car, all this passion now roared through the bottleneck of love and I wanted her with an ache and want so powerful, so exquisite, that I could never have wished to be spared the pain.

  I had been raised to love a woman like this – her guts, her humour, the luminous power of her life which I had observed slowly shine through the heavy glaze of her professionalism.

  But how could I have fallen for so demonstrably devious a character?

  It was not deviousness I saw, Madam, Meneer. It was mystery, and I loved her for that mystery. I sucked it in and forced it into the mould of my own desires, and you are right to fear for me.

  We returned to the Marco Polo from the restaurant, where we found Wally sitting on the grubby flock velvet settee in our room. When I saw his face I knew something important had happened in our absence: he now had a secret, too.

  His skin was tight, he had a pleased look, a stillness, a sort of deadness which was how he was when withholding his joy. He had showered and shaved. He had a clean white shirt and trousers. I was certain he’d been stealing.

  I looked around the room as well as the eye-holes would permit me. I expected to see factory-sealed cardboard boxes, vids, electronics, wrist-watches, but there was nothing in sight. The old turtle had a stillness, a foxy shine. He lifted his chin and tilted his head. When he lit a cigarette there was a fastidiousness in his smoking, his thumb and forefinger around the weed like tweezers.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Not much.’

  I never kept a secret from him before and the pleasure, the pressure, was incredible. I could not keep in my skin. I had touched her lolo, that is what I could not say to him.

  My extraordinary nurse now sat down at Wa
lly’s feet. He barely glanced at her. He did not notice the perspiration on her exquisite upper lip. He did not see he was a she, that all those shirts were there to cover her, that the long jacket must disguise her waist, her hips, her peach.

  Jacqui had had no time to count or arrange the money neatly, but now she spread it out and sorted it by denomination. I admired her hands as I never had before – their shape, their suppleness, the lovely olive skin, the delicate pink shell fingernails. She ordered the Guilders. The maroon, the yellow, the violet. She had a beautiful neck, slender, downy.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-three Guilders,’ she said.

  ‘Tray bon,’ Wally said. He was pleased, but like you might be pleased with a child who has brought home too many shells from the beach.

  Then Jacqui went to run my bath. But she could no longer bathe me.

  ‘What?’ Wally said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I looked at him, not knowing what to say. He winked at me.

  ‘Give … me … my … bath … please.’

  He jerked his bony head towards the bathroom, meaning it was the nurse’s job.

  ‘No … please … you … must.’

  He shrugged. ‘Come on then, get your suit off.’

  I lay down on my face on the carpet with relief. Wally sighed and grumbled as he kneeled beside me, but I realized he was pleased to do it. He always like to be the shapoh, to make the lunch, to run the bath. It was only age and weakness made him hire the nurse in the first place. Now he was happy to open his knife and cut me free.

  I felt each stitch give way, and then the air on my wet skin.

  ‘You silly fucker,’ he said. ‘What have you been doing?’