Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

You have seen photographs, perhaps, of Peggy Kram’s trothaus. On the page it is what you’d expect. In life, in my Efican life anyway, it was simply unbelievable: the elevator opening on to the marble lobby with a little dog-headed Saint inside an illuminated niche, and thence to the succeeding parlours, with their Dutch and Flemish Masters, on to the so-called Great Room with its high windows opening out on to a garden with trimmed hedges — high, deep green topiary in the shape of ‘The Least of God’s Creatures’, the Dog, the Duck, the Mouse, their soft and leafy forms silhouetted against the pale blue sky above the fabled city.

Someone wanted to kill me?

Let them try.

We stood in the sunshine above Demos Platz while Kram’s ‘Man’ (an elderly Egyptian whose loose-fitting, dun-coloured clothing reinforced his status as a POW) emerged from the throng of earlier arrivals and offered drinks to those of us tall enough for him to notice. Peggy Kram excused herself.

‘Don’t hate me,’ Jacqui said as soon as she was gone. ‘I’m going to get you out of this.’

Her anxiety was delicious. I felt it, smelled it, a kind of aphrodisiac. She leaned out and touched my arm. I felt the contact in my neck, my toes.

‘Don’t hate me,’ she said.

Hate her? All I heard in her voice was her remorse, concern.

‘We’re safe up here for the moment,’ she said. ‘Please say something to me,’ she said. ‘Please.’

The two-pin voice patch had cost her every Guilder she possessed, as much as a Neu Zwolfe crucifix or a first-century Bruder mask. Now she needed to see the power of the gift: she wanted to see it unwrapped.

I would have said something, but you should have seen her in the skirt, the line of her back, the erotic grief in her eyes. I feared my voice would boom out of me, too loud, too hot, and we were not the only visitors gathered on the terracotta tiles of Peggy’s trothaus. Clive Baarder was there once more. Also Martel Difebaker. Dirk Juta, the Mayor of Saarlim, Frear Munroe the lawyer, the comedienne Elsbeth Trunk. You’d know the names, not personally perhaps, but from the zines. I heard the ascetic Martel Difebaker once again playing expert witness on my nature. But as it turned out, I was not the only curiosity.

The Mayor, Dirk Juta, being daily in the Bankruptcy Court, was also the subject of much attention, as was the celebrated lawyer, Frear Munroe.

This Frear Munroe was, as they liked to say in Saarlim, bigger than life. He had a broad chest, a deep voice, a slight Anglo accent, a ruddy complexion and fair hair which he parted to one side and which, with the daily application of pomade, had become slightly green in colour.

He stood over the Mayor who, unlike any Efican politician I had ever seen, was a dainty man with thin brown wrists showing from his crisp white shirtsleeves.

‘So, Dirk,’ Frear Munroe trumpeted.

The Mayor smiled sadly up at him.

‘So, is our dear old Saarlim to be declared bankrupt or not? Will we have a police force next week? Or should we make some new Simi-cops and put them back on the streets instead?’

‘I’m pleased this is amusing to you, Frear,’ the Mayor said.

‘You misunderstand me, Dirk — I was not joking.’ Frear smiled, pleased with himself. ‘Perhaps this is a mythic moment — don’t you know your Badberg? The barbarians are not without the gates. They are within. The God-fearing are being set upon by unimaginable odds. Rape and pillage is a daily occurrence. If we were true to the beliefs of our fathers …’

He gestured to the Mouse, the sort of hammy gestures certain Saarlim advocaats like to make.

‘One mo nothing,’ he said in a rough dialect. ‘Next mo, there was Bruder Mouse …’

‘In all his furry finery,’ said Martel Difebaker.

‘Solid as a miller’s wheel,’ said Frear Munroe.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Wally. ‘Do me the favour.’

‘Solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning,’ said Elsbeth Trunk, whose dialect was considerably better than Frear Munroe’s.

‘There are various similes,’ the lawyer said. ‘But perhaps this is, Elsbeth, don’t you think, the mythic moment? Your honour’ — the lawyer turned to me, placing his veined square face very close to my snout-’oh, little being,’ he declaimed.

The others laughed. Not Wally. He did up the button of his now rather rumpled dinner suit. His eyes were closed to jailyard slits.

‘Oh, small beast.’ Frear Munroe knelt before me, mockingly, so close that I could smell his herring breath.

Wally tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you speak to him like that.’

Frear Munroe blinked at the stooped bald-headed man, but he was already in full flight and did not have time to ponder his significance.

‘Oh Bruder Mouse,’ he cried. ‘Thebes is in such desperate plight that we have come to you, the least of all God’s Creatures, that you might tell us what to do, oh little club-footed thing.’ He stood, his face contorted with his own laughter. ‘Oh dear,’ Frear said, wiping his eyes and dusting off his striped black trousers. ‘I don’t know if those legs are mythic.’

As the offensive fellow turned his back Wally took two fast steps forward. ‘Enough’s enough,’ he said in broadest Efican. Then he kicked Frear Munroe up the arse.

The lawyer lurched. His glass flew from his hand and shattered.

Frear Munroe, although gone to fat on port and hunning cheese, was still a well-built fellow. Now, as Bill Millefleur hid his bowed head in his hands, the lawyer turned to raise his fist at Wally.

It was then that Wally lifted his stick to ward him off, then also that I made the twelve-word speech which, I discovered later, was to be quoted all over Saarlim for a week.

‘One mo’ step ,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘One mo’ step and I’ll tear your throat out.’

Jacqui had been waiting to protect me from the DoS. Now, as the lawyer raised his meaty fist above my head, it was no great stretch for her to pick one of Kram’s small lead figurines from a niche in the garden wall. It was a statue of a mole, and when she closed her hand around the chunky little weapon, she felt her soul rushing towards the extremes of action that had attracted her all her life.

She took two fast paces forward before she had time to consider what she would do next. Frear Munroe was solid and slab-sided, much taller than the nurse. As Jacqui came behind him, he turned. His eyes were pale blue, small and lonely in that big red face.

It was something of a shock to see that he was afraid of Tristan Smith.

‘Some Bruder,’ he said, but when he tried to smile his lips were wobbly and misshapen.

It was such a moment, a beautiful moment, but there was no time to relish it for Peggy Kram came rushing out and ran right through it and ruined everything. She entered, her servant at her tail, all that golden hair shaking, laughing, a peach cocktail splashing over her ringed hand. Jacqui felt a great shiver of dislike move through her slender frame.

Kram took the Mouse by its gloved hand. Jacqui watched her kiss it on the nose.

‘Ohmygod,’ Kram said, ‘you savage little thing.’

Her friends all laughed too loudly, but Jacqui could have slapped her face. She could not stand the proprietorial attitude towards something she did not understand. But Mrs Kram now drew yours truly to one side and squatted down before me. Jacqui watched me bow. She saw Frear Munroe grin and turn away to find a listener for a story about his threatened throat.

Then she watched me appear and disappear amongst the creatures of the topiary. As I was taken from guest to guest, she heard the voice she had given me. She saw me shake the hand of the Mayor and she imagined me, Tristan Smith, inside the sweaty suit, stinking like over-ripe apricots.