The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘What?’

  ‘You stupid little ballot,’ he said. ‘You can’t do this.’

  I tried to stand up, but he held me down with his palm flat on the small of my back, held me flapping like a fish on the wharf. ‘Didn’t you feel anything?’ he said.

  I had felt a lot of things. I had felt the crowd. I had felt her breast. I had felt the small solder points and amputated wires rubbing at my skin, but there is no analgesic like an audience, the way it comes out to you, envelops you, wraps you in its cocoon, is warm, alive, fits you like a glove, holds you like a fist, strokes you like a cat.

  When you look like I do, no one touches you.

  When you look like this, your whole body cries out for touch, like dry skin for moisture.

  The last stitch was cut. I wanted to stay inside the suit until I got into the bath, but I was lifted out before I could protest. Wally held me in the air, my naked body covered with a glaze of blood.

  Jacqui stood at the bathroom door, a big grey towel across her shoulder. I could have died, to be like that, in front of her.

  ‘He was amazing,’ she said.

  I turned my face away from her. I was so ashamed, so grateful, I could have wept. My face was a rag, my skin as slimy wet with blood as a new-born child, my limbs so sad it would make you cry if you had half a heart.

  ‘He performed,’ she said. ‘He juggled for them. He was astonishing.’

  ‘You’re meant to look after him,’ Wally said. ‘You’re his nurse. That’s why we pay you all that money. You’re meant to stop him getting hurt.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘He’s twenty-three years old.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a hundred.’

  ‘He was making money for you,’ she said, her face red. ‘You shouldn’t be shouting at him. Is he complaining? Are you complaining?’ she asked me.

  Wally kicked at the bloodied Mouse suit. His toe connected underneath the head and the suit lifted and flew and thwacked against the hotel wall. Then he carried me to the bath, holding me under my arms, out and away from him, so he would not put bloodstains on his clothes.

  When he lowered me into the water, delicate pink clouds rose from my lacerated skin. He ran his hands over me, searching out my injuries.

  ‘That’s the last time you’re wearing that thing,’ Wally said.

  ‘You … could … fix it … so it … doesn’t … scratch,’ I said.

  ‘You hate the Mouse.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Jacqui said to Wally. ‘He was a star.’

  ‘You don’t know shit,’ Wally said. ‘You don’t know what that rucking Mouse is in his life. You bring this crap into the car … I’m sorry I ever let you. I’m sorry I didn’t make you throw it out.’ He turned to me and patted at my face with a corner of a wet towel. ‘You won’t be needing to make money. I promise.’

  ‘I … did … a … show,’ I said. ‘I … showered … and … cascaded … with … six … balls.’

  Wally clicked his tongue and shook his head. ‘I know what you can do,’ he said.

  ‘I … never … did … six … balls … before.’

  ‘He tumbled,’ Jacqui said. ‘Did you know he could do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wally said, ‘I knew he could do that. Now will you please go and buy bandages and antiseptic’

  ‘He could be someone.’

  ‘Go. Go now.’

  Jacqui bought the bandages and antiseptic. She also bought sandwiches, a very large bottle of beer, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers which she did not reveal until Wally was well into the last quarter of his beer.

  Then she sat cross-legged on the floor with the Mouse suit open on her lap. Slowly, one at a time, she trimmed the wires flush against the rubber inner skin. She did not explain herself to Wally, and he watched her for a long time without saying anything.

  ‘I told you not to do this,’ Wally said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When you look back on this,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to know what a waste of effort it was.’

  When Jacqui had trimmed a wire she placed a small adhesive bandage over each connection, and felt each one with her finger. I watched her. Without knowing I was doing it, I began to sing. When I saw Wally watching me, I stopped immediately.

  31

  My life had been filled with sexual yearning, but yearning is not the same as hope. That is what Wally did not know when he saw me hold the flower in Zeelung. I was someone driven by impossible desire, someone whose very soul is shaped by the sure knowledge that his dreams will not come true. My mother could not have accepted this but it was so: I had learned to equate the pain of unrequited desire with pleasure. I had crawled into the same pigeonhole as those who get their satisfaction from sniffing women’s shoes or underwear, or learn to achieve secret bliss from having their hair cut or their back washed. She would have hated to think of me like this. She would have had me focus on the startling quality of my gold-flecked eyes, the baby softness of my skin. She would have believed that I could make myself attractive with sheer will, with breathing exercises, and such was my dear maman’s enduring power that I continued to hide certain thoughts from her.

  For instance, I kept all my excitements about the Simi hidden in the dark side of my brain, away from her. She would not have understood it. She would have felt it a betrayal.

  Likewise, if she should have seen see me shadowing Jacqui Lorraine, she would have imagined I had become a creep. Perhaps I had, for when my nurse left the hotel room the following afternoon, I was right behind her, filled with yearning.

  I told Wally I was going to the hotel lobby to buy a zine, yet once I was in the foyer I shot right through it, illico presto. My wheelchair was just two months old – light, fast, geared, the same model which Michelle Latour used in the paraplegic Olympics. The deskmajoor held wide the door and I went straight out on to the loud and stinking Colonnade, totally alone, completely unprotected, without so much as a hat to give me privacy. I sprang from the high board, hands together, toes straight – an arrow following a mystery.

  She had said I was amazing. She had said I was a star. My hands were lacerated from yesterday’s performance but my arms were strong and I gave the chair the full benefit of my strength. The crowds were close. I had no bell, no horn. I made myself a goose on wheels. I honked. I came through the hawkers and wheel-squirrels at twenty-five miles an hour and those Saarlim gjents and gjils with their wide trousers and their tattooed noses, they stepped aside.

  I could see Jacqui, half a block ahead. She was still ‘in character’, walking like a man with her chin thrust forward, her shoulders back, but once you knew, you knew. She was a woman, a rare reckless shining woman – she had a round female backside, a little apricot between her legs.

  I thumped across the missing cobblestones on the corner of Shutter Steeg, my maman’s street. I had been to Shutter Steeg three times already, sat in front of No. 35 and stared up at its tall arched windows. But today I had no time for Shutter Steeg. I swung around the tall glass water filtreeders,* crashed down hard across the kerbing. What did I think was going to happen? Nothing.

  Nothing?

  Nothing but a pain that you, Meneer, Madam, would never think was pleasure. Nothing but a hope so wild I allowed it to draw me further from the safety of my room than I had ever travelled alone, in all my life. Was I mad? Yes, I was mad. It is this madness makes salmon leap and crash on to the rocks of rivers.

  I summoned all my strength to follow her up the hard high ramp to an exceptionally tall building – a classic wolkekrabber with ornate gold and silver angels above the entrance-way. As I hurtled into the vast atrium I caused a pleasant-looking man with short blond hair and dark eyebrows to convulse – the very sight of me – like a victim of electrotherapy.

  The atrium was cavernous, filled with tall columns, reflections, echoes. Jacqui was walking into an elevator car.

  I sped across the shining granite floor, my wheels squea
king.

  ‘Wait,’ I called.

  But my voice was lost in the clatter of steel-tipped shoes and my heart’s desire was already inside the elevator.

  As the elevator doors shut, I heard a walkie-talkie crackling and saw, reflected in the doors’ shining surface, a burly man in uniform walking towards me. It was the deskmajoor. We can safely assume that he was driven by kindness, the desire to assist the lost and disabled, but I could not bear to see the effect of my monstrous self on one more normal face. So when the next empty elevator opened, I rolled inside. The doors closed swiftly, mercifully.

  This time yesterday I had been a little god performing for devotees. Now I was a solitary mutant, trembling, carried upwards.

  Then, damn it, the elevator’s walls revealed themselves as glass, and I found myself levitated into the Saarlim sky. I closed my eyes. I tried to breathe. But the old Feu Follet panic settled on my frame, clutched my heart. I thought I would die of dizziness.

  When the doors opened on the fifteenth floor, I rushed out.

  Only after the doors had shut behind me did I realize that the boarding passengers were carpenters and that I was on a building site, alone.

  And there I remained for a good half-hour, pressing the button, banging on the doors, until the same men returned with coffee mugs and paper bags.

  As I reboarded the elevator car, all amorous fantasies had left me. I had no other desire than to return to earth, to go to my room, but when I pressed the button for Floor 1 the damn car shot upwards, six storeys higher in the sky.

  I dared not face the abyss beyond the glass-walled car. When the elevator stopped again, I was equally afraid to face the boarding passenger.

  The boarding passenger was more afraid of me. She turned away.

  The doors closed. I pushed the button for Floor 1 but the damn thing kept on going up.

  It stopped on Floor 23 – men and women with labels on their sixteen-button suits. Seeking to avoid their eyes, I pivoted my wheelchair, barked a woman’s shin. I would have apologized, but I did not wish her to hear my speech. I created a bad feeling. I could feel it in their silence.

  Then I spied ‘Floor 31 – Consulate of the Republic of Efica’. Abandoning all thought of Jacqui, wishing nothing more than a refuge from foreigners, a respite from dizziness, I climbed up on my wheelchair and pressed the button for the thirty-first floor.

  As I rolled out of the elevator I was, technically speaking, home.

  On a still-luminous old Efican rag-rug, there were arranged three bronze and leather campaign settees of the type used by the French officers who accompanied the tin-tins to Efica at the beginning of settlement. It was, in some sense, home.

  Perched uncomfortably on these settees I saw various persons, the Eficans amongst them identifiable by their absorption in the pink and yellow zines from home, the Voorstanders by their irritation with the uncomfortable settees. No one seemed to have noticed me arrive.

  An electronic buzzer sounded. Then a door opened beside the receptionist’s desk, and three people walked out into the foyer. One of them was Jacqui. The second was extraordinarily like Leona the facilitator. She had different hair than the Leona I had met – this hair was black, sleek, long. She had different clothes: stockings, a slick sixteen-button suit. She turned and walked right past me, click-clacking on her shining synthetic shoes.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.

  I looked back at Jacqui. Her gaze settled on my agitated face.

  ‘Tristan,’ she said coolly, ‘what are you doing here?’

  What could I say? Now I imagined the whole room was looking at me. My face was hot. My monstrosity was vivid, slippery with sweat. My whole sense of myself came crashing, crushing down on me until I felt I could not breathe. I made myself wheel closer to the object of my affections.

  ‘This is Gabe,’ she said.

  I did not want to look at him. I looked at her troubled face.

  ‘An old friend,’ she insisted.

  An ‘old friend’ held out his hand. I had no choice but to take it. The hand was smooth and dry, not large, but square and strong.

  ‘Now living in Saarlim,’ she said.

  He shook the hand up and down. He smiled – a fiftyish man with a pleasant grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth.

  ‘Gabe was just telling me there is a new Sirkus we have to see.’

  I did not know he was a murderer. I thought he had been her lover. That is why I hated him so easily. I hated him for being normal, for being with her, for making dreck of all my fantasies.

  ‘Must see,’ he said.

  ‘I’m taking you and Wally,’ Jacqui said.

  Gabe stared at me, not a little to the left or right, but straight at my eyes. He went right into me, like a gimlet, a corkscrew.

  ‘The walls of the tent are made from water,’ said Jacqui.

  ‘The Water Sirkus,’ Gabe explained, but I hardly heard what he was saying. I was realizing just how close to her he was standing, seeing the casual way he brushed his hand against her arm.

  *The polluted water table of Saarlim is cleansed by filtering through these elegant glass towers, which stand, on average, twenty feet in height and measure one or two feet in diameter. There is a famous ‘forest’ of filtreeders in the entertainment district but, more commonly, there is one filtreeder for each city block.

  32

  In the old days, Gabe Manzini would have automatically requested hard copies of the faxes which Tristan Smith was reported to have sent to the terrorist group. He would therefore have discovered Jacqui Lorraine’s treason before she was permitted to depart from Chemin Rouge.

  Yet when the Efican DoS had requested these same hard copies he had told them no member of Zawba’a had been wire-tapped at the time of the transmission. This was not true. What was true was that my maman’s murderer had become a slightly pudgy man with a red-veined nose and a low-level clearance and this class of information was no longer available to him.

  You may remember the Scandale d’Orsay – the case of the alleged VIA officer who was driven to the Paris airport in handcuffs, the beginning of that long rift between Paris and Saarlim. That alleged VIA officer was Gabe Manzini.

  Once the French had uncovered him and deported him, the government of Voorstand, in attempting to mend fences with the French, found it diplomatically necessary to sentence their loyal servant to fifteen years in prison.

  They had promised him a release in six months, but as relations with France remained both important and difficult, he was kept a prisoner for almost six years.

  At the end of that time, they had made an angry and vengeful man of their loyal servant. He was difficult to place: too public a face ever to return to his old work, not academically or temperamentally suited to a senior post in the administration of the Agency.

  Finally he was shunted off to head the small and unimportant Efican Department of the VIA, a bureaucratic position that would have been beneath his notice at the time when he was fiddling with the Efican elections. His lack of gratitude won him no friends.

  The Efican Department was a sinecure. It came with a small tasteful office, a view of one of the better corners of the Bleskran, but no staff, no secretary – there was no need for them. For six years Gabe Manzini had had nothing much to do except quietly stoke his anger at those who had betrayed him. He played chess with his computer. He constructed complicated strategies of revenge. Twice a year he flew out to Chemin Rouge to meet with the DoS.

  In Efica, at least, he remained someone of importance, but in Saarlim he had the smell of anger about him and no one wished to talk to him. In Saarlim he put on weight, took to drinking a bottle of wine with his luncheon. He became chronically depressed.

  But then Jacqui Lorraine came into his life, linking Tristan Smith to the hottest target in the world of Voorstand Intelligence. Gabe Manzini latched on to the case as to a life raft.


  If he had alerted Internal Security (by requesting copies of the faxes, for instance) they would have thanked him very much – the bastards – and used the information to make themselves look good.

  No way was he going to tip off Internal Security. Indeed, so anxious was he that Internal Security should not discover Tristan Smith that he sequestered Leona Fastanyna from the Morean Department and sent her all the way to Neu Zwolfe to pick him up and bring him safely to Saarlim.

  He had stuff on the Morean Department. He could therefore trust Leona to keep her information about Tristan Smith out of the Mainframe.

  Such was his distrust of Internal Security that he met Jacqui at the Efican Consulate rather than the State Buro. And if she was unlike any DoS operative he had ever met or worked with, he did not have room to suspect her. He was more suspicious of Leona than of Jacqui. Jacqui was an Efican, a good guy. She was his link back into the game, the big game at the VIA, and he therefore desired her.

  She was going to be his – this woman dressed as a man. She was cute, he could not bear it. She had sweet little flat feet, no more than size five.

  ‘What you are going to do,’ he told her, ‘is wire him for sound. Have you ever wired anyone before?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He hesitated.

  ‘Ever been wired yourself?’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘This is an aA345 I am thinking of. A button transmitter. You would have to sew it with copper wire.’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘First I have to get the transmitter.’

  Fine.’

  ‘Could take a day or two,’ he said. ‘You have them in Efica?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Could they dispatch one to you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be faster to get it from here?’ she said.

  But for Gabe Manzini to get his hands on an aA345 was not an easy matter. The wire-men he had known were gone, or dead, or unfriendly. In spite of which, he would get an aA345 somehow. Then they would wire the rabbit. Then they would let him go right down the hole.