Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I will not say that some self-pity did not smear the glassy brightness of my earlier jubilation, but the thing is — listen to me — I kept on going. My mother was right — it was how she brought me up: I had no idea of how I looked.

I had no real conception of my effect on others. Had you told me this then, I would have argued fiercely. I would have described myself to you, unflatteringly, in more detail than you could possibly have observed, and I might have convinced you. But I had no idea. And although no one ever spelled it out to me, I was really led to believe that it was only BAD PEOPLE who found me repulsive — supporters of the Voorstand Alliance, racists, fascists, not ordinary decent folk.

And when, on that long-ago midnight, I came knee-walking down that moon-bright concrete gutter with my white hair fluttering and my torn-rag mouth loosened by the wind, I could not know how my wave would appear to the driver of the first oncoming car.

The car stopped. There was nothing in my education to make me fear it. It began to make that slow, whining noise so beloved of hitch-hikers — the sound of reverse gear, fully engaged. It came to a stop right next to me: high, mud-splattered, vaguely white.

There was a radio playing Pow-pow music — rough field-hand voices, long sad dissonances, violin, cello. *It switched off. I knelt beside the door, waiting to be let in. Then the passenger-side window came down a little, about an inch.

‘What you want?’ a man’s voice said.

‘The … Feu … Follet.’

‘Wha?’

‘Foo’ — I spoke slowly — ‘Folll-ay.’

The car backed some more and then drove directly at me, so slowly I could hear individual pieces of gravel crunching beneath its rolling tyres. Hot urine washed my thigh. The car’s headlights shone full on me, so brightly that, when I turned to face them, I had to hold my arm across my eyes. My left leg was wet and warm. I could also feel the heat of the car’s radiator. I could hear its tappets singing. I took my hand down and stared into the lights, but then the car backed off, swung out, and slowly drove past me. I watched its red lights slowly drop over the rise and descend to the freeway on the plain below. Soon my trousers were wet and cold, sticking to my legs.

I began to crawl back up towards Belinda Burastin’s house, but it was just too steep. That’s the truth — it was easier to go on down, towards the freeway. The skateboard was more a hindrance than a help. Finally I grasped it with my hands and crawled behind it, using my knees as brakes when it went too fast, skidding and scraping my way down to the bright ribbon of macadam whose carbon-rich emissions I could now smell, in brief bursts, upon the wind.

An hour later, my belly swollen with nervous gas, my fingers bloated, my knees red raw, I finally climbed down the side of the ramp and slipped down a rough grassy bank to the freeway verge. I lay there, in the shadow of the overpass, for perhaps an hour, feeling the buffeting of big wheat trucks coming down from the north, their sirens blasting as they exceeded the governed speed limit. *I would have gone back to my bed if I could, but I no longer had that option. I just lay there in my pee-wet trousers, shivering, lost in space until the cold became worse than the fear and I edged my way slowly out of the overpass shadow and into the bright stage-light of the freeway. There I managed to stand on my feet and hold out my thumb. I don’t know what I expected. No longer something good.

I don’t know what make the car was. It was a small car, silver, no longer new. It screeched its brakes on so hard white smoke came flying out — I’d seen that sort of thing on vid — and came reversing back towards me at high speed.

The driver did not wait for me, but came right out to meet me, eagerly, it seemed. He was a big fellow, tall, broad-shouldered, sort of squeezed into that little motor car. He came holding a big black metal flashlight in his hand. He had long straight blond hair like mine, blowing in the wind.

‘You just stay there,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you move.’

He was scared, of course, but I did not figure that. I trusted his hair. He came towards me, crouched a little like a fighter. His high forehead was a sea of wrinkles, and his mouth was oddly pursed as if he had eaten something bad but had not yet spat it out.

He shone that damn light right on me.

‘Jes-us,’ he said, and coughed.

Well, I thought he coughed. But when he did it again, I realized he was retching. It did not occur to me that it was my appearance that made him ill. When he had finished spitting, he scuffed up the dirt with his boot and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Just be cool,’ he said. He was just a boy, really, less than twenty. He looked so jumpy and nervous I began to be afraid of him.

‘Be cool,’ he said, looking up and down the freeway, which was, at that minute, empty.

‘I’m … cool,’ I said. I held out my goose-fleshed arms. I was just trying to calm him down, to stop him staring at my piss-stinky pants and my bloodied bright green knee-pads.

He squatted in front of me. I shuffled back a little. I started to take off Vincent’s big gloves. He tapped the torch against his palm but did not turn it on.

‘Well, hell,’ he said. He had blue eyes but they were an old man’s blue eyes, full of worry. ‘Well, hell and Christ, where did you come from?’

If I had known Belinda Burastin’s address I would have said it, but I could not. ‘Foo … Folll-ay.’

He was not listening properly. He kept looking at my face and then up and down the highway.

‘A … famous … theatre,’ I said.

He hit the torch against his hand.

‘Who left you here?’ he said.

‘No one … left … me …’ I was insulted. ‘I … came … here.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Mah-ter.’ I said, thinking that if I could get to the Mater Hospital I could find my way from there.

‘Mater? Mater Hospital?’

I nodded.

‘My grandpa died there.’ He started to walk toward the car, then stopped and looked back at me as I started to crawl after him.

‘Should I carry you or what?’

‘Open … the … door … please.’

He did not understand me, but I climbed through the driver’s door and across to the passenger seat. I did up my own seatbelt. Then we took off down the freeway and in a minute, inside his warm dusty car, with the high buildings of downtown ahead of us, my crazy optimism was back in force.

His name was Wendell. I knew right away he was from the country — he had that dry sweet dusty accent that always made me see wide tin sheds, chaff floating in sunlit air. He was so shocked by me, he could hardly look at me. He drove, one-handed. Before we had been 0.1 miles on his odometer he had revealed that he had a cadetship with a security agency, although he would not say which one. ‘Security reasons.’

I laughed, but that could not have been clear to him.

‘Don’t you read the news in hospital?’

‘I’m … near … hospital.’

‘I guess you couldn’t join security,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t meet the height requirement. You know what I’m telling you? You know what security is for?’

I knew all about security. I knew about DoS, VIA, EJIO. I knew they had tapped our telephone, stopped performances, arrested my mother, burgled our tower.

‘You know what the alliance is?’

I shrugged.

‘The alliance between the parliamentary democracies of Voorstand and Efica,’ he said, ‘is built on three areas of joint cooperation — Defence, Navigation, Intelligence — DNI.’

I felt I should respond to him, but I could not think of anything to say. I was embarrassed by the smell of urine and would have apologized for that if he could have understood me.