Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

It was Wally, goddamn, dear Wally who got the ladder.

I ground the mask, pulped the wood, paint. My real face was snot, tears, drool. I brought it into the lights of the vid camera and screamed at them.

I did not appear on vid. Edited out. Not part of the story.

*

Hélène Rivette, the Shadow Minister of Finance, was alleged to have been a beneficiary of an illegal subdivision in Berthollet. Documents ‘proving’ this were in all the zines on the day after my mother’s death. A week after the election it was shown that these damaging charges had no substance.

[TS]

†

A series of faxes (first published by

Zinebleu)

which seemed to prove that Jack Mifflin and St John Theroux had received $100,000 each from French aircraft manufacturers. These documents, later shown to be false, did much to discredit the Blues’ platform on armed neutrality and, of course, helped further destroy the party’s credibility.

[TS]

Great Voorstand

Meneer Van Kraligan, as everybody knows, was the name of the Saint before he was a Saint. When he was a sinner he used to follow the old ways, and he would keep a Bruder prisoner, and lock him in the cage.

On this occasion he got old Oncle Duck and he was feeding him corn like nobody’s business, feeding him millet pollard mash, brown peas, even the leftover warm milk and miller’s bread his own children left on their plates.

Oncle Duck was eating — he could not help himself — but he was weeping. He would eat and weep, eat and weep, and the more he ate the worse he felt for he knew he was going to be murdered by and by.

The Saint was sitting by his fireside thinking of our Oncle’s flesh — his head chopped off and so on. He was thinking terrible thoughts with perfect happiness when Bruder Mouse appeared to him in all his furry finery.

One mo nothing, next minute there he was, buttons gleaming, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

One minute nothing. Next he was as solid as a miller’s wheel.

‘Hello, Meneer Van Kraligan,’ he said to the Saint who was not yet a Saint.

‘Hello, Bruder,’ said the Saint. ‘What you doing here?’

‘I’m going to make you let go that Oncle Duck,’ the Mouse said.

‘Oh, are you now?’ says the Saint. ‘I do not think so.’

‘It is a sin to keep a Bruder prisoner,’ said the Mouse.

‘What you’re talking is a heresy,’ the Saint said. ‘And I know it is heresy, for it was declared one by the Pope and it was why they exiled that whole monastery to Voorstand in the first place. I don’t suppose,’ the Saint said, ‘the Pope has told you something different?’

‘Not the Pope,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘But I was sent by the Archangel Gabriel to show you this.’

Then Bruder Mouse rose off the ground. Then he spun himself five times, in acrobatic harmony. Then he bounced up and down on the table on his little head, and as he went up and down, farting as he went, fart, fart, fart, fart — he made the Saint start laughing.

He looped and fell, on his stomach.

The Saint thought this about the funniest thing he ever saw, a little mouse doing Sirkus on his kitchen table.

‘You wait there,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch the Kinder.’

And off he went, laughing and sighing and scratching his big backside.

And when the Saint came back, he saw his duck was gone. There was only the Mouse standing in his place.

One mo there he was, buttons gleaming, cane tapping, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

One mo there he was, as solid as a miller’s wheel.

Next mo he was gone.

Tales of Bruder Mouse , Badberg Edition

Rat Man, Fat Man

Rat man, fat man on his roost,

Grabs the neck of the golden goose,

Rat man, fat man, dust and dogs,

Dirty snakes and licky frogs,

Make a cake and have it iced,

Pray to rats and Jesus Christ.

Efican folk song

circa

301

EC

(Source:

Doggerel and Jetsam: unheard voices in the Voorstand Imperium

, Inchsmith Press, London)

I am not one of those Ootlanders who wish to blame you personally for everything your government has ever done, so let me say it clear: I know you are not responsible for my mother’s death. Indeed, I write this assuming your individual innocence, believing you unaware of Gabe Manzini or any of his criminal activities.

If I will believe that of you, then please believe the following of me: that when, a whole twelve years after Voorstand agents murdered my maman, I made the dangerous voyage to your fatherland, it was not — as Mrs Kram would still have you believe — to do your nation harm.

It is true that I entered Voorstand illegally, but the illegality was created by your government’s refusal to place the appropriate stempel in my passport, a situation produced in turn by my own actions — certain offensive tracts I had written, and published, many, many years before, in the period following my mother’s murder.

I understand that no one wishes to have their country called a ‘poison gland’ or a ‘vile octopus’ *but imagine, please: my world was shattered.

Everything that had allowed me to sustain my problematic existence, the illusion of my talent, my safety, my power, all this died with my mother. One day I was Napoleon. Next day I was a coward.

I was afraid that I also would be murdered. I was afraid of the street, afraid of uncurtained windows, unlocked doors, noises in the night. And yet I would not be a total coward. Through my teenage years I continued to write the political pamphlets and letters you still cannot forgive. I believed you were watching and listening, and I was not wrong. I kept the doors locked and my fear simmered and bubbled and I skulked and fretted like a cockroach inside the mouldy Feu Follet, and when no one came to kill me it did not matter because by then I was afraid of the air on my skin, of the sky itself.

Is it grandiose to say I too feared assassination? Then let it be: I was grandiose.

I still rehearsed my circus swings and tumbles, juggling, a whole illusionistic repertoire, but I did it with a shame that came from knowing that I lacked the courage to be the Great Figure I had previously imagined. I ate too much. I slept. My pale white stomach began to bulge while my legs remained as thin and twisted as they had ever been.

It was Wally who stole the Axis 9iL computers from the University of Chemin Rouge. His motive was simple entertainment. He imagined I would play Cat & Mouse, Chessmaster and Battlefield , and I did play these games, and others, but my lethargy did not finally disappear until I discovered that I could use Axis 9iL to make money. Then my life changed overnight.

While boys and girls of my age were kissing each other, twining their legs around each other in the back seats of their parents’ cars, I was sitting white-eyed at my terminal, plugged into Financial Data Services like ‘Voorstand-on-line’ and ‘Uptrend’. I was a teenage share-trader.

I never did get any higher than level 5 on Cat & Mouse but the Bourse was another matter. I persuaded Vincent (the executor of my maman’s estate) to release a portion of my inheritance to establish an account. I had a shaky start, but two years later I was producing returns of between 5 and 10 per cent per month. This was from 386 to 393, years of the great Bull Market, and I was one of those so called pin-ball sorciers *who brought the market crashing down — a Momentum Investor. I played the game a kid can play so well — pure mathematics, trends, swings, surges in stock. Did I make money from toxic waste? Perhaps. Did I buy and sell in Sirkus stock? Who knows? I was interested only in the momentum of the equities.