Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Bill, help me,’ but no one heard me.

‘This is murder, Peg,’ Clive Baarder said.

Now I was retching inside my suit. The contents of my stomach rose up inside the mask, were sucked down my nose.

Suffocating, I tried to pull the Binder’s head off, but Peggy Kram got her little hands around my wrists.

‘No,’ she cried, ‘no, please, I beg you.’

It was Jacqui who saved me. She was smaller, finer, lighter than Peggy Kram, but she yanked the produkter by her mane of hair and pulled her free. Then she placed her hands on either side of my Bruder head and dug her nails into the slit she had so diligently sewn up. And then she ripped, ripped my Mouse-head apart like it was orange peel. She tore the head off like a prawn.

In the mirror we all stood and stared at my true face. I turned, gagging, aching for breath.

Spare me, please, the memory of Peggy Kram’s face when she saw my true nature.

‘It’s OK,’ my father said. He was a well-dressed, handsome man, an actor. He was hearth folk. He came towards Peggy Kram, holding up his pale pink hands. ‘Peggy, please. It’s OK, really.’

But Peggy could no longer see him. She could see only the horrid creature that had put its red prong between her legs. She saw blood, snot, some ill-defined horror like a piece of meat, wrapped in plastic, left too long in the refrigerator.

‘It’s It,’ she cried, crossing herself in front of me. ‘It’s Marchosias. God save us. It’s the Hairy Man. God save us.’

If this was Efica we could have dismissed all this as ‘just religion’, but this was Voorstand and we were Ootlanders and my father therefore wrapped his strong body around mine. He lifted me into the air with his left arm. He held out his right hand to Jacqui Lorraine.

‘It’s Dagon,’ screamed Peggy Kram. ‘God save us.’

‘Goodbye old man,’ Bill said to Wally’s body.

‘It’s Red Saatanil,’ said Clive Baarder, and I swear he meant it. ‘God save us.’

‘God save us,’ hollered Peggy Kram, throwing herself on her knees before the triptych.

We left the dear old Human Ball. We had no choice. We left him grinning, stretched out with his victim. The elevator was rising towards us, but Bill, fearing it contained more assassins, led us through the fire door to the stairs.

Why did we flee? We had done nothing wrong. Why did we rush out the back way and abandon our belongings like criminals?

Because, Madam, Meneer, my father had studied your Great Historical Past, and when Mrs Kram began to recite the Thirteen Names, he recognized the ritual from the Geloof Trials of a hundred years before. He saw the way Tristan Smith’s own history was moving.

A bright red rail spiralled down twenty storeys to a chessboard floor.

‘Hoop,’ Bill said, and knelt so he could pick up Jacqui Lorraine around the waist.

She was one hundred pounds. I was sixty-five. When he got astride the banister he had the hundred pounds over the stairs, the sixty-five above the abyss. There was no rehearsal, no net, and his balance was by no means perfect, but as Gabe Manzini rose inside the elevator, as Kram and Baarder screamed the Thirteenth Name down into the pit, we were speeding towards sanity at thirty miles an hour.

On the fifteenth floor we wobbled.

On the twelfth I thought we were dead.

‘Ooop-la,’ Bill cried, holding us both, spinning on his toes as we landed. He wore his grey silk suit with snakeskin patches. He wore his elastic-sided boots with diamonds in the heels.

If you registered motor cars, like any other country in the world, perhaps you would have tracked us as we ran from you.

But you are who you are, and we who we are, and we drove five days across some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen. We travelled across the dairy belt, up higher and higher into the Gelt Plateau. In other words, we travelled in the opposite direction to the one you had expected, into the country where they still hang the Hairy Man to make the corn grow. We drove through the night, through lone pine forests with no other habitation but simple miners’ shacks with their kitsch folk figures in the barren front yards, with their neat stacks of yellow wood lined up along the high verandas, ready for the winter. As we went higher the cornfields were silver, gold, brown. And everywhere the flag, crimson in the morning, carmine in the shade.

After we left Highway 270, we took roads so small they often had no names. Then we travelled through a lace-work of little lanes and plateau towns where you could see tin cut-outs of Bruder Mouse nailed to the barn doors.

Each night we slept in the car, fogging the windows with our life stories — Jacqui and her drinking mother, Bill and I and all those long-lost performances at the Feu Follet.

In the early mornings, before dawn, Jacqui left the car and went stealing. You know, by now, exactly what she stole: the three blankets, the raisin buns, the whole round of cheese, the red woollen shirt, all that drearily itemized account which is the substance of the charge against her. But I doubt you know, Meneer, Madam, that damn cheese weighed twenty pounds and she dumped it on the roof of the car at five a.m., scared us shitless, laughed herself silly to see Bill Millefleur dancing round the steering wheel trying to get his pants on.

Jacqui had returned the long skirt and blue top to Malide. Now she had another black skirt, a loose grey sweater, and a white singlet. As we travelled higher, as the cornfields grew gold and silver, she also became burnished. Her eyes (perhaps they were always like this, but I only saw it now) became flecked with colour like an opal, beads of soft brown in the hazy blue light, and there was a calm about her, a passivity I had never seen in her in all the time I knew her.

She, whose life had been marked by the sharp snapping of her fingers, her need for risk and action, now sat calmly for hours on end. I do not mean to suggest that she travelled silently. Indeed she talked rather a lot.

The more I listened to her, the more exactly she painted the picture of her childhood, the less I felt I had known her, and the more attractive she became.

She who had entrapped me, used me, was the same person who came through the high wet grass at six on a misty morning carrying three bottles of milk clinking in a canvas sack.

Raw eggs we ate, by streams in sunlight, mung beans by the handful, hard corn intended for cattle.

A twilight comradeship developed between the three of us, a friendship marked by great intimacy, small kindnesses. It was a tender plant that I, at that time, did not expect to live into whatever night might lie ahead. It was not equal, of course — there were three of us, and my father was a handsome man, Jacqui a good-looking woman.

I think I said I was accustomed to pain, that it was, in my case, almost synonymous with pleasure. But now, it seemed, the pain was less, the pleasure greater. My experience with Peggy Kram was quite enough, in every sense, so although I had begun the journey in the front seat, I soon sought out the back.

There, wrapped in a blanket which I was forever ready to pull around my face, in fear of my life, surrounded by animus, taunted by the dangling effigy of the Hairy Man at wayside shrines, I was more alive than ever in my life before.

By now you know where we went. We drove right up into the Arctic Circle where the temperatures were low enough to give you frostbite in a second and in a hunting lodge on a lake three miles from Port Wilhelm I sat in a bathroom and watched Bill and Jacqui dye their hair blond.

At the very hour Peggy Kram gave her deposition in the Bhurgercourt,* we sailed from Voorstand on the Nordic Trader bound for Bergen. Jacqui was dressed as a man. Bill carried me on board inside the Mouse suit, disguised as a souvenir. At that time, although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning.