The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘Oh, I could handle you,’ she said.

  I knew her, knew her imperious, self – doubting little soul. I whacked her on the bum, not gently either.

  This made her face red, Bill’s ashen.

  ‘Is this how you act with Madam Mouse?’ she asked me. Her eyes were wet and bright.

  ‘Madam Mouse is dead,’ I said.

  ‘Dead?’ she said, colouring more. There was a way she spoke, with the tip of her tongue always forward in her mouth. It gave a slight cloudiness to her diction but made her mouth, always, wonderful to watch.

  ‘Quite dead,’ I said to Mrs Kram, playfully elbowing my anxious father in the thigh.

  ‘Mrs Kram,’ said Malide to Wally, ‘is asking, would Bruder Mouse here like to stay with her?’

  ‘How did she die?’ asked Peggy Kram.

  ‘She was assassinated,’ I said, ‘by agents of a foreign power.’

  There was a long, long silence on the roof. I saw Frear Munroe, standing by the parapet alone, turn his square head. ‘They came and hanged her by her neck,’ I said.

  ‘Stay,’ Wally said. ‘It’s too late to go.’

  ‘He should definitely stay,’ Jacqui said.

  ‘Meneers, Madams,’ I said, looking at them gathering around me, out to Frear Munroe and Elsbeth Trunk, ‘do I not have voice to speak? Can I not speak on my own account?’

  What I liked, what made me giddy, was the way not only my friends but six of the most powerful personages in Saarlim turned their heads, lifted their chins, parted their lips, how they listened, how they waited. I had no idea what I would say.

  *Cf. Item 3 of the charges against Tristan Smith: ‘[that he did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse … ’

  49

  I had fallen asleep on the bed Kram’s servant had, rather formally, introduced me to. I woke at two in the morning. I was stiff, hurting, hungry. I needed drugs: Sentaphene,* Butoxin,† Attenaprin,‡ but they were all in my bag in Bill’s apartment.

  The glowing thermostat beside my reading lamp was set at a cool 65 degrees, but it was stinking and steamy inside the suit.

  As I tried to stretch my painful hamstrings I knocked an envelope on to the floor. It fell with a heavy thwack. Later I would discover it to be a letter from my father, but at the time I was too stiff to think of bending for it. I was more interested in anti-inflammatory drugs, a bath, disinfectant, a bed where I could feel sheets against my skin. I left the large tan envelope on the bedroom floor and shuffled to the bathroom where I used the zip Jacqui had expediently sewn in the previous morning.

  That aside, I was imprisoned by the Mouse.

  I went looking for someone to release me, but the layout of the trothaus was more complex than the blockhouse exterior of the Baan suggested. The passageways were full of nooks, crannies, alcoves, reading rooms, small libraries of Sirkus art and so on. Twice I found dark rooms in which I heard the sound of breathing, but I did not know whose breathing it was. I retreated, and was soon lost again.

  Finally, in the lobby by the elevator, in an austere straight-backed chair, in a lighted alcove which had previously accommodated the Dog-headed Saint, I discovered Wally Paccione. There he sat, like a Folkghost in white pyjamas, his eyes bright, his mouth dark and toothless, a piece of looped wire held in his ancient liver-spotted hands.

  ‘Sssh.’

  He jerked his head in the direction of the elevator. I could hear the car moving in its shaft. Together we watched the numbers light up above the door. They stopped at the fourth floor.

  He held up the wire, grinning. The inside of his mouth was black, the sunken cheeks bright white. Now I know it was a garrotte which he had made from ivory chopsticks and piano wire. But at the time I misunderstood.

  ‘The DoS piano,’ he said. And I imagined it was a primitive musical instrument from Kram’s collection.

  The lift clunked and rose up to the fifth floor. ‘Don’t stand there. Get behind this screen.’

  I did what he said. I moved away from the lift doors and pressed myself between a Neu Zwolfe triptych and the wall. From behind these dark, worm-eaten panels I could peer out across the roof garden and into the softly illuminated kitchen.

  ‘Can you help me out of my suit?’

  ‘Turn that stupid thing off,’ Wally hissed. ‘I can’t bear you talking like that.’

  ‘I can’t turn it off.’

  I heard him spit. ‘You know what a mess she got us in, that spy?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know? You sound like a rucking Voorstander. If she told you that sound was glamorous, she’s working for the governor. I promise you, my son, we’re getting out of here. As soon as I deal with this fellow, we’re getting out. We’re leaving all these spies behind. We’re going home.’

  ‘Which fellow?’

  ‘Christ! Don’t you pay attention to anything except your dick? There is an Efican stooge coming to kill you. I’m going to kill him.’

  ‘No, Wally …’

  ‘You think I can’t? You don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I came out from behind the screen. ‘Please, Wally …’

  ‘Get back,’ He screwed up his face, and the lights in the alcove made the wrinkles deep and black.

  ‘I really hate that voice,’ he said when I’d retreated.

  The elevator clunked again. I was reduced to looking out through a crack between the triptych panels. I could watch the illuminated numbers as the elevator descended to the ground floor.

  ‘No one knows the things I’ve had to do,’ Wally said. ‘Not your maman, not anyone.’

  ‘You stole some stuff,’ I whispered. ‘You never killed anyone. I don’t want you hurt.’

  ‘Murder is much more common than you’d think.’

  The elevator made a whirring noise, then stopped on the fifteenth floor.

  ‘You don’t know much about me,’ Wally repeated. ‘For all the time we’ve spent together, you don’t know what I’ve done. When I’m dead, you won’t know,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll say good old Wally, but you won’t know who “Wally” was. You don’t even know where I was born.’

  ‘You were the Human Ball,’ I said.

  ‘I hate that voice,’ he said. ‘You’re like another person.’

  ‘You never wanted to talk about yourself,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame me. Who did you kill? Tell me now.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘It was the person who put the cigarette burns on your arms,’ I said.

  Wally said nothing.

  ‘It was your father, wasn’t it?’

  ‘This is not the first time someone tried to knock you off. It’s much more common than you think.’

  The elevator creaked and we both heard the doors in the distant lobby close. I could see the lights as it rose towards us: 16, 17.

  ‘There were two times in your life,’ Wally said as the elevator stopped. ‘The first time was when you were born. The doctors wanted to kill you then. They wanted to take you away, but your maman would never let them. They sent the Gardiacivil after you but that made no difference to her. So she saved you the first time. But you knew this.’

  ‘How did she save me?’

  ‘She never let you go,’ he said. ‘She never let anyone look after you except me and Vincent and Bill and her.’

  ‘When was the other time?’

  ‘You know the other time.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Roxanna tried to kill you.’

  ‘I cut myself with the glass,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘No, listen to me: Roxanna tried to kill you.’

  ‘I know you loved her, Wally. I’m so sorry about Roxanna.’

  ‘She tried to kill you with Thallium, you dope. You were so sick. I told you you had Cuban flu, remember? There was no fucking Cuban flu. There never was such a thing. You wouldn’
t leave the Feu Follet, so she began to poison you. She kept feeding you little sweets, chocolates. She was injecting them with Thallium. You were nearly damn well dead by the time I got you to the Mater.’

  ‘When I came back she was gone.’

  ‘Damn right, she was gone. She was gone to damn jail is where she was gone. Roxanna was insane, Tristan. She tried to kill you so I’d go away with her.’

  ‘Poor Rox,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice sounded old and cracked. ‘Poor Roxanna.’ A moment later he asked, ‘You wanted a bath? Is that what you were looking for?’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Mrs Kram to give you one?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  But then the elevator was travelling again. I watched the numbers, my mouth dry.

  ‘Listen,’ Wally said when it had stopped. ‘Please, don’t flirt with her. It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘I’m flirting with who? Mrs Kram? You’re embarrassed? Why would you be embarrassed? Don’t answer, because I know. I know what’s embarrassing.’

  ‘It’s not you,’ the old man said. ‘It’s her.’

  ‘It’s like in Zeelung. You got in a panic about the flower.’

  ‘She’s not a normal woman. What woman flirts with a Mouse?’

  ‘It was just a flower. You think I’m still fourteen years old. You got in a panic, and you rucked everything up. You ruined it. You know that, don’t you, Wally? The truth is: we lost our money because of you. You’re in a panic any time I like a woman.’

  ‘I’m standing here,’ he said, ‘protecting your life, and you’re blaming me for getting robbed.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. I was in a passion. It was not pretty, not nice. ‘If that’s your attitude towards me …’

  ‘You’re blaming me?’

  I stepped out, out from behind the screen. ‘It was just a fucking flower.’

  Wally threw his garrotte on the ground and walked out into the garden. I stood there for a moment, and then the elevator began to move and I went to my room. There was nowhere else to go.

  *Diazephene.

  †Anti-inflammatory of Efican manufacture.

  ‡Enteric-coated aspirin.

  50

  All my life I had waited for my father to need me, and now there was a letter from him, needing me.

  All I could think of, however, was Wally. I lay on the bed and read Bill’s letter, but all I could see was Wally, his anger, his self-righteous face, the elevator rising and falling in its dark and deadly shaft.

  Bill’s words ran before my eyes like ticker-tape.

  My dear son,

  So sorry for the SCRAWL but am sitting in the Kram’s krapper with pants around my knees. Apologies for crumpled paper, bad spelling, all the usual.

  Also: please disregard the attached until you have read this.

  I don’t think I have any right to ask you what I am going to ask you. I don’t know what you THINK of me. The things I project on to that Mouse mask … ‘THE POWER OF THE MASK’, eh? Remember when your maman did the Brecht with the Japanese masks?

  I feel like I have spent a lifetime apologizing to you and I was just so prikkeled that you never got the letters I sent to you. What circle of hell is that? Where you apologize for eternity?

  Should have stayed in Efica, that is my feeling now. It was certainly a better life in Efica. We are ‘creatures of our place’. Each night I dream of Efica. Those damn white trees, they really do break my heart. Again and again I walk through forests of them, touching their sticky bark with my hands and knowing I am not there.

  Here I am an Ootlander, a horse rider, a barbarian. I STILL DO NOT KNOW THE NAMES OF THE TREES IN DEMOS PARK. But ‘the train is on its rails’ as they say in Saarlim.

  Maybe I will end up playing the part of the Hairy Man in some shitty Ghostdorp.

  Someone is knocking on the door.

  Tristan, maybe it is news to you – my contract with the Sirkus Brits is finished. I have a back injury and a tin plate in my head. I can’t go back to performing, and as for acting – I never really was an actor after I left your mother.

  Begging for help. My only hope is to run my own show. Have been trying to get BIG WIGS to read attached business proposal. So this is it: my pants down: begging you: please can you use your influence with Mrs Kram?

  Is this too opportunistic for you? Have I become a total Voorstander? If so, just tear everything up, nothing matters so much as your good opinion of me.

  Oh Tristan, I really am so full of shit.

  I folded my father’s letter quietly, slowly, with extreme care. And I lay waiting on my bed, just as my mother must have waited. She must have felt her Voorstandish murderer inside the Ritz, the Feu Follet, must have heard him on nights when he was not yet arrived, must have listened to the rumbling of the building’s guts, just as I lay now listening to the distant elevator. She did not know they would tell her to stand on a chair. She saw the green rope and never did suspect the plan they had for her.

  This room Kram had given me was ornate in the extreme, with heavy drapes and old folk paintings with worm-riddled wooden frames. I had not been ready for this folk-art aspect of Saarlim life, the reverence for the uncompromised past with its Saints and Hairy Man and beans and Bruders.

  There were perhaps fifteen lamps inside that room, all of them with heavy shades and low-watt ratings, all with different types of Switches to the ones we have at home. I turned them on, every one of them. Then I lay down inside my sweaty suit upon the quilted bed.

  I picked up my father’s letter once again, and then it occurred to me that I was making myself vulnerable by leaving all the lights turned on. I put the letter and the document back inside their envelope and then set about turning off the switches: the ones with knobs, the ones like levers, the ones you pulled like toilet chains, the ones which could only be operated by crawling underneath the bed, the ones hidden on the rat tail of the power cord. When the room was pitch dark, I locked the door.

  But lying once more upon the bed, I began to worry that I would fall asleep, and not hear Wally if he came to save me.

  So I stood, one more stiff and painful time, and unlocked the door. Then I lay on top of the quilt, in the incense-rich dark, listening to the noises of my breathing inside the mask, my squittering heart, my acid-wash belly.

  I fell asleep. I woke. The door was opening, slowly.

  Inside my clammy body suit, my hair rose on its ends. My skin prickled. I could hear the tread of the intruder. God help me please, I was half scared to death. The assassin’s step. No one could have told me it would be so delicate – a rubber sole pressed against an antique carpet.

  In my terror, I dared not move.

  In my terror, I thought, I will cut off my suit, reveal myself in all my horror.

  My assassin moved towards me, as fluid as a ghost in the dark. I watched until I had no choice but to leap. I shrieked. I came up off the bed towards him, arms outstretched, and got him by the throat. And down we went.

  Too late I saw it was Peggy Kram. I fell upon her, elbows, breasts, her fragrant silk and cotton.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  But the crazy woman was laughing, untangling her hair from my ears and nose.

  ‘One mo nothing,’ she said, then broke out laughing once again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One mo nothing,’ she said, ‘next mo there he was, Bruder Mouse, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning.’

  She stood and wrapped her white gown around her. Then, without any explanation, she took me by my big gloved hand and led me out into the hallway and then into the room on the other side which was, I saw, her bedroom.

  I could have held on to my anger, but let me tell you, Madam, Meneer, I was very pleased to be changing my address. No one was going to come looking for me in Mrs Kram’s boudoir.

  Just the same, I took the precaution of returning to retrieve Bill’s letter and then locking Kram’s door
behind me. When I stepped behind her heavy drapes, ostensibly to admire the view, I checked the hardware on the windows and put Bill’s letter in a place where I could find it later.

  When I emerged from behind the drapes, I found the mistress of the house already in her bed, her embroidered white coverlet right up under her smooth little chin and her hair lying on her pillow like Madam Van Kraligan herself.

  ‘Bruder Mouse,’ she said, ‘would you please be kind enough to tuck me in?’

  She asked me so sweetly, I was pleased to perform the service for her.

  When I had done it, done it properly, the same way Wally taught me, the same way he had learned in the violin, I stood and waited, wondering what was to happen next.

  Peggy Kram then patted the coverlet beside her. I thought she wished to hold my hand, but no.

  ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘Sit up by me.’

  I climbed up on the bed which, let me tell you, was mighty soft.

  ‘Can you sleep?’ she asked me, a peculiar question you might think, given what had happened in my room. ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘I thought you were a burglar.’

  ‘When I cannot sleep,’ she said, arranging her fragrant hair on the pillow with both hands, ‘I always find a story useful.’

  Then she smiled at me. I was slow to understand her. Now I was there, now I felt safe, I wanted nothing more than to lay my head down on her pillow and go to sleep.

  ‘Peggy wants a story.’

  Then I understood.

  ‘Bruder Mouse,’ she said. ‘“Bruder Mouse’s Beans”.’

  You know the story. I knew it too. My dear maman read me the stories from the Badberg Edition with its beautiful pen drawings by Oloff Tromp. I knew the words by rote, but now I was being commanded to perform them for the most powerful produkter in Saarlim.

  ‘I’m not an actor,’ I said.

  ‘Sssh,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  So I did my best, reading in a country style that I hoped was appropriate for the material.