Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said.

‘Tell you what?’

‘Don’t tell me anything, OK?’

She came into the bed. I held her, this woman who had no lovers. She held me hard between her breasts. You might imagine me inside my suit, locked in, smelling my own breath, distant from this stranger, able only to feel her desire as she moaned and dragged me between her legs, and you may, never having been in my position, be thinking of the humiliation and discomfort and forgetting, entirely, that Jacqui had given me a zipper and that I could, there in the fragrant dark, slowly ease my porpoise into her, and feel her soft pink muscles grip me.

‘Ohmygod,’ said Peggy Kram, her fingers holding on to my back, ‘Bruder Mouse.’ Lots more she said. She talked and sighed and laughed and begged me keep my secrets to myself. She squirmed and slid and exclaimed and made little bird noises high in her white woman’s throat and, what with the conversation and all, we hardly heard the banging on the door and Jacqui’s distant voice crying, ‘Tristan, if you’re there…’

‘No Tristan here,’ murmured Peggy Kram.

‘Tristan, we’ve got to go, now.’

‘You can stay right on my pillow,’ said Peggy Kram. ‘This is better than a man. I’m going to keep you.’

She would not let me go, Madam, Meneer. I know now, she was not well. It is obvious to you, of course. It was obvious to Wally. But for me the case was different. She wished to dress in front of me. I am a man. I was more than pleased to watch. She wished to play games in the dirty dark and put her mouth around my porpoise and call it names in French. Why would I think that she was disturbed?

Outside the door my nurse called and hammered, but Jacqui — no matter how I admired her weird and dangerous spirit — was there to get me out, away from Peggy Kram, out of the country, over the border, down long roads with high poplar trees standing on each side. All right, all right — she wished to save my life, and I, the monster, was like a dog licking its dick in the middle of the road.

Mrs Kram had other plans for me, and she could not let me go. This is what she told Jacqui, shouted at her, through the door.

‘He’s mine,’ she said. I did not think this strange. It is not alarming to be found, at last, desirable.

She opened the bedroom curtains and showed me Saarlim. She talked passionately about its former greatness, its present troubles. She pointed out the five Sirkus Domes she owned. She pointed out the roads the Mayor had sold to foreign speculators. There were tears in her eyes. I did not doubt her concern.

Was I simple? Was I an opportunist? Both, I suppose, but to charge that ‘[Tristan Smith did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse and that all this was undertaken with the express purpose of defrauding the citizens of Saarlim and depriving them of liberties granted them by God’ — really, Madam, Meneer, you give me too much credit.

Yes, I came into your country with my secret rage. Yes, I lied to you and said I felt no rage. Yes, I acted as if my mother’s murder were not a personal matter between me and you. But is that not, in normal circumstances, polite?

Your own agent was the one who ran down the Simi, the so-called theft of which is the subject of charge three. *I could not have planned this. Yet if I had not met the Simi, I could never have so charmed Mrs Kram. So common sense will tell you that I could not have entered Voorstand planning to climb into Kram’s bed.

Almost a week I spent with her. During that time no one — not Wendell Deveau, not Gabe Manzini — could discover where I was. Metaphorically speaking, I was in another country.

We sat amongst her folk rugs (so many mice and ducks you never saw) with her photograph albums. So many black borders, so many dead people. So many terrible things had happened to her in her short life. She had witnessed her handsome husband’s brains splatter against the front-row celebrities on opening night. She lost two babies in the home that caught alight while she was at the theatre. Other things, you may or may not know about, more things than should have happened to anyone, had happened to this woman, whose wealth and power were envied everywhere.

She is thought to be ruthless, I know, and is, I know.

But Madam, Meneer, this misguided woman’s passion for the principles of your past, her vegetarianism, her prayerfulness, all this is genuine.

In each one of her Ghostdorps she had tried to create an ideal world — a model — where the actor inhabitants lived in accordance with the values of the Settlers Free. ‘They ploughed, they tilled, hulled, they shucked, they ground, etc.’

She promised me she would find work for my father, that she would keep me in comfort all my life. She told me she would employ my nurse.

She told me about the Saarlim Ghostdorp. It was not my idea. How could it be? Could it be anyone’s but hers? It was she who had assembled Frear Munroe, Dirk Juta, Clive Baarder, on her rooftop.

It was she who later took me into her trothaus boardroom and introduced me to Clive Baarder. Please wait, Madam, Meneer. In a moment I will tell you what happened in that room. But first a reminder of what you put my family through.

*

‘Unlawfully take into his own possession a Simulacrum Mark 3, model No. 234, the property of the Saarlim Cybernetic Corporation, and that he did, without proper permission, either orally or written, and contrary to the best interests of the aforesaid Simulacrum’s legal owners, damage the aforesaid machine to such a degree as to make it without value.’

‘You are asking me to betray my son,’ my father said to Gabe Manzini, who was drinking Orange Pekoe tea from Bill’s best art-deco china ware.

‘A little melodramatic,’ Gabe Manzini said, ‘even for the Sirkus Brits.’ He lifted the saucer to read the mark and then placed it on the table very gently. ‘All I asked you was, have you seen him or his nurse?’

Bill looked away from him towards Wendell Deveau. The big pasty Efican was looking out of the window, eating the ham sandwich he had brought with him.

‘I can’t do it,’ Bill said, at last.

‘Come on, mo-frere,’ Wendell Deveau said, crumpling up the green sandwich bag. ‘Don’t stuff us around.’

Bill took the greasy paper from the DoS man and carried it to the fastidiously tidy kitchen.

‘It is your privilege not to assist us,’ Gabe Manzini called. ‘Just as it is my privilege to ask if your immigration papers are in order.’

‘You’d kick me out of the country, for not answering a question?’

‘Again: I did not say that. But we are a rough lot, Meneer Millefleur. We get very impatient with details.’

‘I’ve lived here over twenty years,’ Bill said, seating himself at the table again. ‘I’ve paid my taxes.’

‘Come on, Bill,’ Wendell Deveau said. ‘Don’t stuff us around.’

‘Twenty years!’ Manzini smiled, and what was unnerving to Bill was that it was a nice smile, the smile of a civilized man. ‘You must like it here. This is a very nice apartment. I was admiring the De Kok.’

‘I like it a great deal,’ Bill said.

‘As for your papers, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t say if they were in order if you showed them to me,’ Gabe Manzini said. ‘We have a whole building full of lawyers who look at that sort of thing.’

‘And what do you want with my son?’

‘Well, as you can see, we have two parties with an interest,’ Gabe Manzini said. ‘And if I were a little less upset with my colleagues in your estimable DoS I might not say this to you — but if I were you, Meneer Millefleur, I would be working damn hard to let me have your son. I think Agent Deveau here has orders to eliminate him.’