Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I did not know it was a valuable antique. *Indeed, apart from the folk stories in the Badberg Edition I knew nothing about the history of Bruder Mouse, or even my mother’s personal relationship with it. †I was already feeding , guiltily, greedily, fiddling with its buckles, pulling it over my head. It felt heavy, shiny, and it smelt of pine needles and expensive leather. There was no elastic band to hold it on, but a series of complicated straps and fasteners like the back of roller-hockey pads.

When I had the mask on, I drew up a chair and sat alone in the slightly overheated kitchen watching my mother on the vid. We were in our new lives. I was the actor. She was the politician. I could see her frailty, a very slight tremor in her voice, a slight uncertainty in her hand gestures, but a stranger would not have picked it up — she would appear to be funny, charming and, with her new steel-framed spectacles, rather stern. She was presenting her paper on armed neutrality. She evoked the images of Oncle Dog, Phantome Drool, Bruder Mouse, the whole panoply of Sirkus characters. She painted the Phantome as a spy, the Dog as a soldier, the sharp-toothed blue-coated Mouse as a paranoid — its white-gloved finger hovering above a button which might destroy the planet.

No one who watched the speech would have believed that she had dressed her own son in the visage of the enemy, and that the son now sat, not listening to a word his mother said, dreaming his own flickering dreams, peering at her through the half-moon slits in the back of Bruder Mouse’s eyes.

*

In Voorstand, of course, you have a word for all these different degrees of public notoriety. In Saarlim you would say that my maman was experiencing

vid-glorie.

[TS]

*

This mask, dating from the first century of Voorstand, had the serrated forehead ridge which distinguishes the Sirkus masks from the Neu Zwolfe settlement. It was atypical in that it had two chipped teeth, not one.

[TS]

†

My mother’s childhood, more than thirty years before, was not so different from the life depicted in De Kok’s paintings of the previous century — the crowds in Demos Platz, the fat-arsed factory owners rubbing shoulders with the poor and middle class, the ex-prisoners of Voorstand’s wars, Egyptians, Germans, Ugandans in saris, the makers of Pow-pow music in their Sunday checks, the picnickers, the pretty skaters, the amiable figure of Bruder Mouse, say, extending a white-gloved hand to accept a dollar from a smiling pink-cheeked matron.

Roxanna gave herself to Wally, solemnly, gratefully, in his bleak little room where circus apprentices had once spent their nights, stacked three-high in bunk beds, their bodies bruised from falls and Ducrow’s English leather boot, young boys still dreaming of their mothers.

Her eyes were brimming, her lips plump and lingering, and all her swiftly naked body — for she shed her dress with a single zip — was baby-soft, newly born, not muscled like an actress, yet not obviously damaged by her life. At twenty-five years of age, she had no scars, no silver marks. She had a small plump stomach, not exactly fat, but with a round curve her lover could, and did, fit in the palm of his hand. When she brought her pale pretty lips to his, her eyes dropped and her small round chin dimpled.

Afterwards, she rested her coarse, tangled blonde hair on his foreign shoulder and rubbed at her kohl-black tears as they fell into the grey hair on his chest.

‘What is it?’ he asked her.

What could she tell him?

There was a long livid scar beside his lower rib. She ran her fingers over it, the slippery smooth skin, like freshly shaven skin, but silkier. It was a Mongrel Day in Chemin Rouge, yellow melancholy light, the window sashes rattling in their frames. Her tears kept falling, fat and dirty.

‘What is it?’ he insisted.

It was the pigeons, of course. It made her feel so pitiful to admit the low level of her life — no one had ever done such a thing for her before. She had sucked their cocks, put her tongue up their arse-holes, but no one ever did anything for her they did not want to do.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘I was sad about the birds,’ she said. Then, blowing her nose, ‘I know it’s silly.’

‘They got born. Someone sold them, someone bought them. Life’s very sad, don’t you think it is? Even for birds.’

She was crying. It was crazy. She was not even worried about the pigeons. She could have strangled them herself, personally.

‘I’m not blaming you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cry and ruin it.’

‘Life is a fucking miracle,’ he said. He kissed her ear. Why did hard men always have such baby-soft lips?

‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said.

For answer, he cupped his hand again on her straw-coloured mound of pubic hair. He held her. ‘You’re a miracle, Roxanna.’

‘You’re an old hog fart,’ she said. He lay back and she felt him smile.

‘You know I’m leaving. You know that well and truly. I never hid it from you.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m a big boy.’

But he was not, not really, he was quivering with need — such very soft lips, such grey, sad, freckled eyes with the pretty rusty wash flooding outwards from the island of pupil. She said, ‘Just remember what you knew first time you saw me …’

‘Which was?’

She grinned. ‘Your dick got hard.’

‘Don’t kid yourself.’

‘You saw a spin drier in high-heels.’ She smiled. ‘I know what you saw.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘I’m not a nice person, Wally,’ she said. ‘You knew it then, when you saw me first. Now you’re just making up some other story.’

‘What I know is, you’re just like me. Things have happened to us.’

‘Boo-hoo-hoo.’

‘I don’t need to know exactly what they are.’

‘Well, listen to me, please. I’m not sorry I had sex with you. It was really lovely. It was. But you’re not the man for me, OK?’

‘You can’t know that.’

‘It’s not to do with you. It’s to do with me. Honey, I am going to the Chemin Rouge antique fair tomorrow night. There are going to be rich men there from all over the world. I am going to get me one of them. Watch me. I told you what I was. You knew what I was.’

‘You want to be rich?’

‘Don’t say it like that. Say it how you like. I’m going to find someone there who thinks I am a treasure. And I’m not going to cheat them. I’m going to be that for them.’

‘You mightn’t.’

‘Find anyone? I will.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I decided. Because I planned. Because I have worked, and studied, and prepared. BECAUSE I CAN FUCKING WELL DO IT.’

‘But what if there is no one there you like?’

‘There will be.’

He smiled. It was exactly the same smile that Reade gave when he came home and saw her reading — could not believe a woman could understand a book he couldn’t.

‘Don’t smirk at me, you ass-hole.’

‘Hey.’

‘You listen to me,’ Roxanna said. ‘You kill a fucking pigeon, you think you own me. You try and make me eat it, well fuck you.’ She stood up. ‘You eat it.’

‘Rox,’ he said, ‘you make no sense.’

‘Don’t you fucking get it?’ she said. She was dressing now, stumbling into her dress, reaching for her red high-heels while he was still rising from the bed. ‘I’m crazy.’

She ran down the stairs to the foyer and out into the street. Then she stood there, at the steps, smoking a cigarette, tapping her foot, looking up and down the street, knowing already that she was going to go back inside because there was not yet anywhere else for her to go.