The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

  He took off his suit jacket, folded it, and laid it on Wally’s bed. He went back to the bug-blocker, picked it up, turned it off, threw it on the bed. Then he opened the briefcase and removed the faked-up numbers (a photocopy, not the original) which Jacqui had printed out from Tristan’s fax machine.

  Jacqui sat on the edge of the other bed.

  Wendell held the photocopy in front of her.

  ‘You’re a fucking child,’ he whispered.

  She took the paper from his hand. She noted the small green stamp and date which showed it had already been through Analysis. There was also a small black key number which indicated it had been to CRYPT-IT. So, she thought, the game is up.

  Wendell took the photocopy back from her fingers and replaced it in his briefcase. She was surprised to see how carefully he handled it, how he slid the photocopy softly into its red plastic folder. He turned, his face frozen in anger.

  ‘Christ, Jacqui, what are you trying to do to us? Do you know what it takes to set up an action like this? The Efican Department sent someone to Neu Zwolfe to meet you. Not some rucking baby-sitter. A real Voorstandish operative. That’s VIP treatment, do you realize that?’

  He picked up his suit jacket. She felt alert, in danger, but then he turned to the closet and she realized he merely wished to place it on a hanger. Once he had done this he seemed a little calmer.

  ‘You’ve now got Gabe Manzini on your case. Aren’t you even smart enough to be afraid? You know who Manzini is?’

  ‘Wendell, I know who he is.’

  Wendell sat down beside his briefcase. ‘This fax printout links the mutant with the Zawba’a.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you know, you stupid bitch. You retrieved those numbers from your dedicated terminal and you fed them into Tristan Smith’s fax machine and then you printed out the call report. We know exactly what you did. But what you did not know is that the VIA has a major operation on to round up Zawba’a. Gabe Manzini is very interested in your case. Mr Manzini is a good friend of Efica’s. We’d really hate to have him as our enemy.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Their knees were almost touching. ‘Do you know how many years it took for us to persuade the VIA to take us seriously? They’re New World people like us, but you would never know it from their patronizing attitude. They’re worse than the English or even the French. Do you know what it took, the things we did for them so they would trust us? The shit we ate? Friends of mine got killed just so these fuckers would share information with us. So when some little spin drier …’

  ‘Don’t call me that …’

  ‘I thought you were smart. Doctor, right? Am I right? Doctor of fucking Philosophy?’

  She knew that she should not be so near him, but it was equally dangerous to move away.

  ‘We can’t trust you, Jacqui. You’re acting like the enemy.’

  He took her face in his hand. She tried to push the hand away, but he was too big, too strong. Her face was small, his hand large, and he held the jaw so hard, pressed his thumb so cruelly, she thought it would break through the skin, and she was frightened, not just of the pain now, but what the pain would grow to, of his size, his bulk, his pale, pale eyes, the level of resentment she saw there. But then his face softened, his hand loosened.

  ‘Jacqui, Jacqui,’ he said.

  He touched her cheek gently. She made herself very still.

  ‘Did you want to visit Saarlim?’

  She did not know how to answer him.

  ‘I hope it wasn’t that. It’s such a pile of shit.’ He looked at her petulantly. ‘Isn’t it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I never saw such shit,’ he said. ‘It stinks. It’s full of niggers. Why did you do it, Jacqui?’

  He had that sticky angry feeling about him. He gave off a smell – she had always thought it was sex, but it was anger.

  ‘You don’t involve the Voorstanders like this and not have a result. Now I’m here, we’re going to have a result.’

  Jacqui felt ill. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he mimicked her. ‘I’m going to have to kill Tristan fucking Smith before the Efican Department finds out the real story.’

  Jacqui began to cry.

  Wendell looked at her, shaking his head.

  ‘You silly bitch,’ he said. ‘You’re lucky they sent me.’

  He put his arm around her shoulders and she laid her head on his chest, listening to his heart, the passage of dry air through his moist and gluey lungs. ‘Your fax came true. You made the poor little fuck a terrorist.’

  44

  Jacqui was kneeling beside my bed. She was beside me, so close that I could smell mint toothpaste when she called my name.

  I knew she was there, but I stayed asleep. In my sleep I was lovable. In my sleep I had not disgraced myself at a dinner party. In my sleep she had different colours in her eyes, small islands of translucent brown, in a sea of coral blue.

  ‘Tristan, hurry!’

  Even as I rose regretfully towards her urgent voice, she remained a mystery of nature, beyond explanation and, because of that, someone who might, one day, mysteriously, love me.

  When I opened my eyes, I found her in a slightly dazed and dishevelled state, unwrapping a small parcel on the floor.

  ‘Tristan, please.’

  I had been asleep on Bill’s dining table with Wally’s feathery snore playing in my ear, the sheet up across my naked face. Now I allowed her to help me down on to the littered rug and out into the muggy air of the balcony, where I saw she had the Simi suit laid out upon the ground, its gloved hands pointing away into the potted plants and creepers. I pulled my nightshirt tight around me, looking at the Simi without enthusiasm.

  ‘Put it on,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve got to leave.’ She stamped her foot. ‘Quick, quick.’ Her very strong, straight hair was actually bristling, not just on her crown, but on the fringe as well.

  My muscles were still suffering from the exertions of the day before, but I laid my weary body down and soon felt the familiar tug and slide as I was sewn inside, snug as potatoes in a sweaty sack. Before she closed the parcel tight, she slipped her cool dry hand in around my neck. A second later I felt a small adhesive plaster applied in the region of my Adam’s apple. As she smoothed it down with her fingers there was a brief stinging pain, like the bite of a small black ant.

  ‘Don’t say a word, Tristan,’ she said, kneeling by my head. ‘Don’t even squeak. Just trust me while I finish sewing your suit together, and let me tell you where I was while you were sleeping.’

  I stared out through my eye-holes at the concrete floor, the blue glazed pots.

  ‘You’re not going to like me, Tristan, when you know who I am, but just the same, mo-frere, I wanted to do something nice for you.’

  She turned my head again. I imagined I knew what she was going to tell me, i.e. she was a woman.

  ‘It isn’t much,’ she said. ‘I hope you like it, but if you don’t like it, you can at least be comforted by the fact that it hurt like hell to pay for it.’

  I could imagine her frowning while she snipped with scissors at her untidy needlework.

  ‘I went to a shop called Ny-ko Effects,’ she continued. ‘Malide told me it was there, otherwise I would never have known – ten floors up in some crappy little alleyway, run by some little Greek man with hair on his knuckles. Be still …’

  She stood and shut the sliding door. I sat up.

  ‘Now, please … we haven’t got an awful lot of time.’

  ‘What’s … that … thing … on … my … neck?’

  My words were repeated by someone else. What’s that thing on my neck?

  Jacqui smiled at me. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘You’ve … got … a … tape … recorder?’ I asked.

  A light tenor voice repeated after me, You�
��ve got a tape recorder?

  ‘Do some Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘Quick. Do that bit from The Tempest that you like.’

  ‘What … have … you … done?’ I asked, sitting up. What have you done? The effect was seriously disconcerting.

  ‘You’re wearing a “Two-pin Vocal Patch” like the actors in the Water Sirkus. You have a one-inch speaker sewn inside the Bruder’s snout, and it is recommended that you change the patch every week. It’s what they call a “Mid-frame” voice. You should have seen it, the shop. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they have there.’

  ‘I … can … talk,’ I said.

  I can talk.

  ‘Recite something. My name is Ozymandias …’

  It’s … very … weird.’

  It’s very weird.

  ‘You sound like Piper McCall. Do the bit from Henry V, the speech before Agincourt.’

  ‘Piper … McCall … is … a … great … actor.’

  Piper McCall is a great actor.

  ‘So are you, mo-chou,’ she said, kneeling to pick up needle, thread, crumpled paper. ‘So now you can speak to Mr Millefleur. You can say all the things that are on your mind. Speak with your lips closed. I’ve stuffed a lot of paper in the snout to muffle it, but you don’t want the broadcast voice to compete with the lip voice. Come on, we’re going now.’

  ‘Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York.’

  ‘You could be in the Sirkus. You really could. You could be a star.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. It was disconcerting to have my voice booming around me inside the Mouse head. ‘Thank you.’ I had to work at keeping my mouth closed. Even then my perfectly enunciated speech had a muddy undercurrent.

  ‘Do I have an accent?’

  ‘Tristan, we can’t hang around here,’ she said, opening the door into the apartment. ‘I have things I have to tell you.’

  ‘Tell me how it works.’

  ‘It picks up on the resonance,’ she said, whispering, so as not to wake up Wally, ‘the vibration on the throat. It has a little chip which knows how to convert this to properly modulated speech. But listen, listen to me …’

  ‘I want you to wear women’s clothes.’ I said that. It was like a dream – I didn’t know where it had come from.

  ‘What?’ she said, looking at me, blinking, her lips apart.

  ‘Dress like a woman.’

  She tugged at the sleeves of her jacket and did up a button. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  A delicious bloom appeared on her cheeks and neck.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  I did not say anything. I was in a daze. The world was soft and out of focus.

  ‘I don’t have any girl clothes.’

  ‘Malide does.’

  She looked at me, hiding her expression with her hand.

  ‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘Go and wait out there.’

  I went back on to the balcony outside. I paced.

  I was Meneer Mouse waiting for Madam Mouse on a street corner. I was the beau with the bunch of flowers, the stage-door Johnny. I was not a target of assassination. Not as far as I knew. I was the inhabitant of a trothaus, on a balcony high above Demos Platz, a Sirkus star, waiting for a girl to come and join me. It was yearning, desire, the most exquisite kind of pain.

  I heard the door, the soft slide of machined aluminium.

  Madam, Meneer, she was so lovely. She wore a simple skirt, long and black, and a tight-fitting blue halter. But it was not the dress or her body, but some bright, high light in her perfectly boned olive-skinned face. She wore no make-up, her hair was ruffled, but she was electric.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a stupid person. If there was a hell, they’d have to send me there.’

  I hardly heard her. I saw her. I was so happy. I knelt in front of her.

  ‘My speech,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no time,’ she said.

  I knelt beside her. I picked a little flower from out of Malide’s window box. Wally would have died to see it – a sappy thing with a stalk like a daffodil. She took it from me, and held it in both hands.

  ‘I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow.’

  I was Caliban, of course. You should have heard me, Meneer, Madam. I was funny, ironic, mocking, and so clear.

  ‘And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,’ I said.

  ‘Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how to snare the nimble marmoset …’

  She sat on the white plastic stool beside me. Only then did I notice her face, the tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries.’

  ‘Tristan,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. What?’

  I felt her hands fondle my ears. I could smell the flower, the musty dust on its stamen. I saw her wet cheeks and was filled with joy.

  ‘We have to go,’ she said. ‘There’s someone out there wants to kill you.’

  45

  Wally woke to find Bill, Malide and Peggy Kram all camped on his dining-table bed and talking volubly as if the dinner party had never finished.

  The old man had thought himself in a private place. He had gone to sleep with his trousers pressing underneath the mattress. His dentures were in public view. His dress shirt and bow tie were folded neatly on the bookcase at the head of the bed. Now, as he struggled to button up the crumpled shirt, he was mortified to find his bare and withered chest displayed for all to see.

  How this could happen in etiquette-obsessed Saarlim was as much a mystery to him as was the warmth being displayed by the hosts and their powerful guest towards each other.

  Yet the implications of the visit were so clear to the Saarlimites that they did not feel they had to explain it, not even to a foreigner. If Mrs Kram was clambering over Wally’s bed, it meant she had decided, for whatever reason, that Bill’s apartment was hearth and that Bill and Malide were hearth folk. In other words, Mrs Kram had derived value from the dinner party, and my father, to his barely concealed astonishment, found himself elevated, promoted, saved.

  ‘I thought about it all night,’ Mrs Kram said. ‘I was so aired-up, I could not sleep.’

  ‘We felt the same,’ Malide lied. ‘We went straight out for chocolate. We talked about you for hours and hours and then, coming back across the Platz, there you were.’

  ‘And there you were,’ said Mrs Kram, who had not, in the entire dinner party, said so much as half a dozen words to Malide.

  ‘We were talking about you,’ Bill said.

  ‘And there I was, my head full of you.’

  ‘We were saying, how could we live so close to you all that time and not hear that you were folk?’

  They were, as you can see, in too much of a giddy state of insincerity to notice anything as ordinary as Wally’s chest or dentures. If they sat on the bed, it was because this is what you do in a situation like this. They were in such a rush, were so loud and pleased to kick their shoes off at the door, were so happy to show how thrilled they were with each other’s company. It took them nearly three minutes to realize that the nurse had changed sex in their absence.

  ‘Excuse me, young lady,’ said Mrs Kram when Jacqui brought Wally’s socks and shoes over to the bed. ‘Did I drink too much, or were you a gjent last time we met?’

  Bill and Malide echoed her laughter, but their eyes registered their own separate but discreet emotions: amusement and admiration in the man’s case, serious alarm in the woman’s – that was her 1000-Guilder skirt swishing up and down the apartment.

  Wally retrieved his trousers from beneath the mattress and drew them on beneath the covers. Then, as Kram wiped her eyes, he swung his legs out over the bed and smoothed down his wild eyebrows with his fingers.

  ‘What time is it?’ he said.

  ‘Ohmygod,’ said Mrs Kram. ‘Ohmygod, this apartment is better than a cabaret. I should move in here. It’s so amusing.’

  If I had recited th
e speech which I was forming in my head it would have been a good deal more amusing, but Jacqui somehow intuited that I was about to show off my new voice.

  ‘Forget that now.’ To Wally she said, ‘We’ve got to go.’

  Wally stared at her, open-mouthed.

  ‘Mr Paccione, we need to go.’

  ‘Then others want to use the bed?’

  ‘Ohmygod,’ said Mrs Kram. ‘This is Saarlim, hunning. No one sleeps in Saarlim.’

  And straight away, without asking permission from Bill and Malide, the Kram began to phone up to her own apartment to tell her caterers that there would now be extra mouths to feed.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Jacqui said to me, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Do you like berries, Oncle?’ Peggy Kram called to Wally. ‘Do you like wild rice and chestnuts? Will you eat today, cuteling?’ She beamed at me. ‘Will Bruder Mouse come upstairs to see my little trothaus?’

  I turned to Jacqui.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Go with her. That’s perfect.’

  And that, of course, is how we made our escape from Wendell Deveau without even leaving the building. We rode the big glass elevator up to Mrs Kram’s trothaus.

  46

  My threatened assassination was much less in my mind than I might have expected. I do not mean that I was brave. You know I am not brave – I hid from death for years on end inside the Feu Follet. I saw death, smelled it, let it invade me like a gas until it had occupied every corner of my empty soul.

  But as I rose inside the glass elevator, I knew my life was about to change. I was about to become witty, sexy. I was about to speak clearly for the first time in my life.

  My only hesitation was – what should I say? You try it – think of a sentence, now, that will express all your genius and charm.

  Hurry, hurry. You are on the tenth floor. Time is rushing.

  It is better – fourteenth floor – to keep it simple.

  Fifteenth floor.

  Sixteenth floor.

  You can see the gondels clustered at the steps on Demos Platz. You can see the pigeons on St Francis fountain. You don’t know what floor Peggy Kram lives on and you are ready to settle on asking, ‘Which floor?’