Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

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.

As for the produkter, she was a perfect lady. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap, a slight frown on her face while I narrated the tale in which Bruder Mouse arrived (‘One mo nothing. Next mo there he was, solid as a miller’s wheel’) to fight off the Hairy Man with no other armaments but black beans and rice. Like so many of the Badberg stories this one derived its terror from drowning and its humour from flatulence, although in this case, of course, there is flatulence and fire, combined.

I was not auditioning, but I was, as I said, indebted to Mrs Kram, and I felt obliged to give everything to the task at hand. This was only prevented by my exhaustion, and from time to time the produkter found it necessary to wake me with a sharp little push in the ribs.

Even as she drifted into sleep herself, the Kram would not let me stop, but held me with her hand so she could jerk me if she found me sleeping. In this way we got through three or four of the longer fables — including the one where the Mouse persuaded Oncle Dog and his friends to save the city of Saarlim by walking on their hind legs with rifles on their shoulders and masks on their heads. The one that ends, ‘And so it was, the Bruders were free and Meneer Mouse sat down to eat cheese pudding.’

When I woke, it was morning. I knew straight away, even before I opened my eyes, that it was very late. The heavy drapes were partly drawn, and so the curtains which locked light out of the apartment like water from a bottle now permitted a thin slice of white sunlight to stream into the room. A yellow, artificial light also entered the room, this coming from an open bathroom door from which clouds of steam billowed, flowing prettily across the hard edges of bright light.

As I slowly woke I began to be aware that my hostess was walking back and forwards between bathroom and closet wearing no other clothes than those her God had given her. I never saw a naked woman before and I cannot imagine a more wonderful introduction to the phenomenon — set off by fragrant steam and morning sunshine.

I moved and yawned, to let her know I was awake.

She looked across at me.

‘Good morning, Bruder Mouse,’ she said.

I did not say anything.

‘One mo, there she was,’ she said.

She continued to parade up and down, to enter the bathroom, to come back to the closet. I could not, for the life of me, see what she was doing in any of these places. She did not take clothing from the closet. She did not perform any toilette in the bathroom. She walked before me as if I were nothing but a dog, and I watched her.

Was this exciting? Yes, damn it, yes it was. She was an attractive thirty-year-old woman with her clothes off. She was not tall, and she was a little thick in the waist, but she had big well-shaped breasts and a firm backside. She had a soft bush of blonde hair.

From the bathroom she called to me.

‘Bruder.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have thoughts?’

‘Thoughts about what?’ I said.

‘Do you have anything to have thoughts with?’

‘I have as good a brain as you,’ I said.

She came out from the bathroom, her hand holding her hair up, smiling. ‘It was not brain I meant,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

‘Does my hair look better up or down?’

‘Come here,’ I said, ‘so I can see.’

‘What about Madam Mouse?’ she said.

But she came a little closer. She had not dried herself quite properly. I could see beads of water on her little nest of hair.

‘Come here.’

She shook her head. She walked away. She walked to the window and pulled those drapes closed. She went to the bathroom and turned off the light.

The room was now pitch black: darkest, deepest, velvet night. Yet I could feel her come towards me. I could feel her warmth. I could smell her perfume, shampoo, soap, steam. I heard her small white feet upon her knotted folk rugs.