Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

On the morning of the auction there was a fire at the Chemin Rouge Hilton (where the auction was to be held). I watched the fire brigade on the vid screen, but I watched this catastrophe just as I had begun to watch my mother’s interviews, or to listen to Rox and Wally as they moved hourly from rift to rapprochement and back again. That is, I watched from within the shell-like face of Bruder Mouse, through peep-holes.

Roxanna had wept when she heard about the fire. I told her I was sorry, and I felt I was sincere, but there was a way in which I was absent from the scene.

Wally made her tea and rubbed her neck. It seemed to work, because minutes later they were arguing about the Pigeon Patissy.

Rox, against all the evidence to the contrary, was insisting that men could not cook Pigeon Patissy. * She said she was going to have a female chef when she was rich, and that she was going to invite Wally to her home for dinner. Then she said she could not ask him because he was sure to kill her peacocks. Then she said he could be the plumber. Now they were laughing a lot, and fooling around, acting like they were stealing the pastry and doing things behind the other’s back, but it wasn’t totally joking either. They argued about the marinade and watched a lot of vid-news and drank a lot of beer. It was easy for me to slip away to examine that subject which now interested me the most — my new self.

This was not the first time that day when I had gone to check on my reflection in the actors’ dressing rooms, but each time I saw myself in the full-length mirror I was pleased. I did not have the proper Bruder waistcoat, but I had a metallic scarf which was almost the right colour and I taped cartridge paper in cylinders around my twisted legs in an uncomfortable approximation of the Bruder’s slick white boots.

The doctrinaire actors of the Feu Follet would have died to see wicked Bruder Mouse invade their sawdust ring and pull himself up the inspection ladders with his poisonous blue cloak tangled dangerously around his body. But they were not there. I was. It was my theatre, and when I left the dressing room that is exactly what I did.

I sat up in my own private dusty dark and recited bits of Shakespeare to the empty seats — Richard the Third — you would not have understood a word of what I said, but you were not there, Madam, Meneer, and your pity did not tarnish the glamour of my role.

I removed my mask to eat a hearty lunch of herring. After lunch I strapped it on again. Then for a little while I watched Wally and Roxanna as they brushed butter between the layers of store-bought filo pastry.

And when that was done, I waited patiently for the acting lessons my mother had promised — although if you have ever experienced an election from the inside, you may think my hope naïve. Certainly, an election is a difficult time for a candidate to think about her family. But I was the child of an actress, used to waiting for that time when the curtain was down and the last admirer gone home. I waited for my maman with an ease that came from years of practise.

Roxanna, also, was used to waiting, but on the day of the fire she could get no clear news about the future of her auction. She was agitated by her unexpected feelings for Wally. The pigeon pie made her guilty and anxious. Unable to wait calmly or gracefully for news about the auction, she tried to get me to come out into the air with her, tugging at my hand with an insistence that surprised me.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of this dump, Bruder.’

But I was already wedded to the private darkness of my theatre, the sweaty twilight inside the mask, the tight straps above my ears and around the back of my head. I was half drunk on the sweet fug of my own breath, and I absolutely would not accompany her out into the unfriendly light of day.

I remained alone in the kitchen dreaming vague dreams involving glittering cloaks and dazzling lights.

If there was anything to spoil my reverie, it was the knowledge that my mother had given me that mask against her own heartfelt principles. I believed that she loathed Bruder Mouse. And thus when she finally arrived, a good hour before the pie was ready, and I heard the sound of her heels cross the cobbles of the foyer, I lost my courage and removed the mask.

I did not reflect on the fact that my maman had been born in Saarlim. You are from Voorstand, so you know what this means: that as a child, on Harvest Sunday, she would have sat on a mouse’s knee; that the least of God’s creatures played their role in Easter and Christmas. They were illustrated in the Holy Cards — Ducks and Mice weeping at the Crucifixion of the Lord.

So no matter what her critique of Voorstandish hegemony, my maman obviously held more complex feelings for Bruder Mouse than she had ever admitted to the collective.

Indeed, it is obvious to me now, she was a creature of her culture. No matter that she denounced your country’s intrusion into Efican soil, she was a Voorstander. You can see it in the Feu Follet acting style, which has its roots in the laser technology of the Sirkus. My mother pushed her actors into shapes more suitable for laser stick-and-circle figures than human beings with rigid skeletons. She would do the same to herself, contort herself at the expense of ligaments, bloat or purge herself, shave her head, willingly distort her perfect features. She could easily make her eyes appear too close together, her lips pinched and mean, her chin weak, her nose long, her feet huge, her legs shapeless, her chest flat and so on.

Indeed, when she arrived, at the end of the first day of her campaign, I recognized what had been so familiar about her image on the vid — she was nothing less than the Kroon Princess. *She had the huge eyes, the long neck, the pale skin of the character whom Bruder Duck always sought to wed. There was such intelligence and sexiness about her. When she stepped into that kitchen and stood there, her male secretary behind her, her PR woman at her side, Roxanna and Wally stood and applauded, their eyes bright, their faces shining.

She came to me, where I sat, on my blue stool. She put her hands under my arms and lifted me — I was heavy, too — into the air. I, Tristan, was the one she loved.

‘We’re going to do some acting,’ she said. ‘Right now. We start our classes.’

‘What … about … Vincent?’

‘What about him?’

‘Isn’t … he … coming … in?’

‘He’s outside. In the car.’

I had known Vincent all my life and there had always been, in his relationship with me, this slight distance, this reserve. From time to time I suspected that his reserve was caused by a disgust with my person, but then he would do something — hug me, bathe me, touch me — in a way that made all these fears ridiculous. But for him to sit in the car on this night was most peculiar, and because I felt guilty about the mask I got it into my head that this was where the problem lay.

‘Is … he … angry … with … me?’

‘Vincent? Angry with you? Why would he be angry?’

‘Because … of … that … thing.’

‘You don’t have to whine, sweets. What thing?’

‘That … thing … you … gave … me.’

‘What thing I gave you?’

‘Wrapped … in … yellow … paper.’

‘The mask? It’s from his collection. Sweets, it’s a very special mask. It’s two hundred and eighty years old. It’s not a Sirkus mask. It’s not plastic. It’s made from pine resin like they did in the old days. He wanted you to have it.’

‘Then … why … won’t … he … talk … to … me?’

‘It’s made by the plain Volk. Do you know what I mean? It was made by good people who thought animals were Bruders to us all.’