Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘This is not Bruder Mouse, Peg,’ Clive Baarder said between his teeth. ‘And you damn well know it isn’t. You don’t want to admit that it’s a man, but it is some kind of man, a dwarf.’

Neither of them was looking at me now.

‘So what if you’re right,’ she said. ‘What does that do for you?’

‘For me?’ He shrugged.

‘It makes you right, that’s all,’ she said. ‘You see the stitching on his suit. Hooray. I see it too. Is that the point? We see the gold paint on the Saint’s crown. So what? The point is not the paint. The point is, we’ve lost our values. We’re eating Bruder’s flesh, we’re putting animals in Sirkuses. That Efican sitting in my garden, what’s his name, Millefleur — riding on horses, frightening lions. That would never have been permitted thirty years ago. He would have gone to jail for even suggesting it.’

‘Last week he was hearth folk. You said you liked him.’

‘I do like him. That’s why he’s sitting in my garden. I’ve been discussing his future with the Bruder and it will be my great pleasure to employ him in something decent for a change.’

‘All right, Meneer Mouse,’ Clive Baarder said sarcastically. ‘Please tell me what the pair of you have been cooking up.’

‘It all began,’ I said, ‘when Mrs Kram observed that the Mayor had sold many of the roads and parks to foreign corporations.’

‘Entities,’ he said. ‘We call them entities in Voorstand.’ He turned to Mrs Kram. ‘Are you paying attention to this, Peg? Only an Ootlander could call an “entity” a “corporation”.’

‘His idea,’ said Peggy Kram, ‘is that we buy them back.’

‘Oh Peggy, what is this?’

‘Shut up, Clive. I know exactly what I’m doing.’

‘Peggy, not even you can buy Saarlim, if that’s what you have in mind.’

‘Yes I can. God damn, I am sick of being afraid,’ she said. ‘I am sick that something bad will happen after dark. I’m tired of being afraid of sicko men with knives and poisons.’

‘Peggy, you never go out.’

‘But I want to.’

‘You cannot run a city of ten million like a Ghostdorp. We cannot even run the Ghostdorps that we have. We cannot buy Saarlim.’

‘Oh I can. I can buy the roads and parks back from the foreigners. The city’s creditors will be happy. Everyone will be happy. It’s a very patriotic thing to do.’

‘Is this the Wishes of The People? Is this government by Each Family Before God?’

‘I’m going to give the citizens of Saarlim exactly what they need. Clean streets. Well-dressed people.’

‘Stop it, Peg. You’re frightening me. You can’t ask the bhurgers to be like actors in your Ghostdorp. No one will let you. I won’t let you.’

‘I’ll let all the decent folk go about their business. It’s quite legal, Clive. We talked to Frear Munroe.’

‘Oh Christ,’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Peggy, you are not well. You really must deal with your own past.’

‘When you say past …’

‘I mean past.’

‘No, no, you’re talking code. You mean I want to do this because I was raped? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No.’

‘No? Good. Because I can run a clean Ghostdorp and I can run this city. I can have the parks safe all night long. I can have the streets tidy and neat. The grass in the park will be cut. It is so very simple. People will come from all over the world once again. We will be a great nation once again.’

‘This is not your idea.’

‘This bit is mine,’ she said.

‘And how would you make the streets safe exactly?’

‘I wouldn’t let unsavoury types walk on them.’

Clive Baarder nodded his head slowly. Then, for the first time since the meeting began, he turned and looked at me.

‘Do you hate Voorstand?’ he asked me.

‘He loves Voorstand. Leave him alone.’

‘He is an Ootlander,’ he said to Peggy Kram. ‘He uses Ootland words. Now he’s trying to deprive us of our freedom.’

In answer to this charge, Bruder Mouse said not a word. He slipped out of his chrome and leather chair and walked in that rolling sailor’s walk towards the longest wall of windows. Despite the comic nature of this walk, despite the broken tooth and the spangled blue waistcoat with the button missing, anyone could see this was a powerful figure. He stood and faced Clive Baarder. Behind his back was all of Saarlim, all its territories and municipalities, roads, Steegs, platzes, freeways, overpasses, intersections, public bridges, all glowing pink and dusty in the late summer light.

Such was the intensity of this moment for each of the three people in the trothaus boardroom that, when Wendell Deveau’s pistol fired twenty feet away, they barely noticed it. A sort of phhht, that’s all.

Jacqui recognized that sound. She had heard it at the DoS in that long thin basement room on the Boulevard des Indiennes — the sound of a silenced Glock, like a fart.

‘Tristan!’ She ran across the glossy blue tiles, through the glass door, into the trothaus foyer. There, in that gloomy chapel-like space with its Neu Zwolfe triptych and big gilt-framed mirrors, she heard a peculiar drumming noise which she later knew was her old lover’s heels doing their death dance on the tiles.

They were lying together, the two men: Wendell on top, Wally Paccione underneath. The old man had his piano-wire garrotte around the agent’s throat.

As Jacqui knelt, Wendell’s great fleshy legs twitched. One foot had lost its shoe. The sock still had a gold stick-on label on its sole. His arm flopped out sideways. She jumped back, her hand to her mouth, as his Glock clattered to the floor.

‘Help him,’ Bill said.

But there was no one to help. Wendell had finally managed to shoot Wally Paccione through the rib cage — the bullet had passed upwards and sideways into his heart. Wally was dead. He was tied on to Wendell’s throat with a piece of grisly piano wire.

In their struggle, a chair had broken. A 200-year-old plaster statue of the Dog-headed Saint lay on the floor, his plaster crown in fragments on the floor.

I sat on the floor amongst the broken plaster. I looked at Wally’s dead, dead face, the hollow cheeks, the dried lips, the wide belligerent eyes, the arms that held the gory garrotte, all the tendons standing out like lines of cable underneath his skin.

I could see the line of small round white scars along his arms. Those arms and hands had bathed me, swaddled me, taught birds to dance, gripped his knees while he was the Human Ball, perhaps not in life, but always, forever, in my mind.

I whispered in the big old wattle of his ear. I was so close to him, the little white hairs, the freckles. I was full of my own poison. I told him that I had been wrong, that it was not his fault that we were robbed. I told him that I loved him. I could feel Peggy Kram pulling at my bulky suit. I felt so ill. My mask was full of my own foul air. I told him he had more love in his heart than any of us.

‘Don’t worry,’ Peggy said, trying to help me up. ‘I own five Sirkuses. I can promise you, there’ll be no trouble.’

‘Peggy …’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Please watch what you say.’

‘God damn,’ shrieked Peggy Kram, ‘this is family. I said we’d fix it, Clive. We’ll fix it. You get the damn Mayor on the phone.’

‘He’s in court.’

‘Get him out of damn court.’

‘They’re Ootlanders.’

I turned from Peggy Kram and caught sight of all our images in the great mirror. What a filthy frieze it was — that sweet old man and Bruder Mouse — a perverse Pietà. How I loathed the Bruder’s grinning face, those floppy ears. My stomach clenched and I knew I was going to be sick.