Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘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.’

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.