Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

What was revealed, of course, was the bandage. Inside the bandage you could see the fat wads of currency, sixteen different bundles each wrapped in oilskin.

Aziz cut the second leg.

‘OK,’ he said to me, ‘perhaps you do not want your shirt cut.’

I undid my own buttons.

‘We give you half,’ Wally said. ‘OK, fair is fair.’

But Aziz was already discovering the extent of the fortune hidden inside the bandages.

‘You lied to me,’ he said. ‘You said you were poor. I was sorry for you. I tried to help you.’

I pulled the bandage from around my chest. When Jacqui tried to assist me, I shoved her hand away and pulled the bandage roughly away from my raw red skin. I gave the prick our assets, dry-eyed, giving him my mutant’s smile.

When I spoke, I spoke slowly, carefully.

‘I’m … coming … back … to … kill you,’ I said to this man whom I would never see again. He had all my attention. All my animus. I did not notice Jacqui retreat into the darkness of the tunnel. We were like dogs fighting — she could have revealed her secret in front of us and we would not have seen her. She went two yards, three, ten. She lifted her jacket. She pulled her trousers to her knees. She rested her back against the rock wall, and balanced herself on her toes. As the steaming urine pooled amongst the cold blue gravel, we men continued making threats to each other. She could smell the testosterone, as strong as bacon cooking.

The tunnel had become a kind of open passageway or race, and from here I could see a flag, an exceptionally large Voorstand flag, hanging limply in the night sky above our heads. We were at our destination, but I was so angry I could not speak. We were in Voorstand, stone broke, unprotected.

‘Relax,’ Wally said. ‘Look — the Voorstand flag. ’

I heard a car door slam. My skin began to bump and shiver.

Then: a shout.

Then: bright white quartz lights. We were spotlit. I was blinded. My heart was beating hard enough to break. I was dizzy, blind, a rabbit in a hunter’s spotlight. I was the Mutant entering Voorstand.

That night, the night we entered Voorstand, Leona had waited with the other facilitators. It was like any night at Plasse’s Crossing — they had formed a semi-circle of trucks, cars, all-wheel drives around the exit from the tunnel. That was what normal life had become for her. You camped there with the other facilitators, waiting for the Fresh Meat to come out of the tunnel. That was what they called the travellers who came illegally into Voorstand. Good people used this disgusting term — artists, performers, brave people she admired, folk who could hang from their toes one hundred feet above a bed of nails. Leona used it too, in the end. Nine times out of ten the poor fresh meat was panicked half to death. It came out into the light, blinking, hardly able to see, and all around it were facilitators, tugging at its sleeves, grabbing at its shoulders, signing up the business with give-away motel pens.

In her native Morea, Leona had been a jahli, that is, someone who sings songs and complicated stories, the performance of which not only requires considerable musical ability, but also a memory capable of retaining as many as one hundred different family names.

In Voorstand she was, among other things, a facilitator. This was not a job she would ever have imagined taking, but it would have to do until she found a position as a Verteller in the Sirkus. *

A few facilitators liked to frighten the meat. Others were the soothing ones, talking in big deep voices and just being calm in the middle of all that confusion. Some achieved good results just by being good-looking — Kreigtown Jimmy, Marvin Tromp, little Oloff — all these guys had to do was stand there being gorgeous and work would come to them. Others, like those Vargas girls, focused on price, cutting their margins to the bone, trying to get the signature on that little bit of paper.

Once you had it signed, that meant you could relax: the meat was yours. Next: you got them into Saarlim, got them registered as pre-dated POWs with whoever was your contact in the military. You got their little pink and blue registration card. You shook their hand. You maybe introduced them to some housing, got yourself a little extra folding for the trouble. Some facilitators, allegedly , got a percentage of the rent money for the first year, but facilitators were such bullschtool. They would say anything.

There was a gate at the tunnel entrance. It must have worked, some long time ago, but it sure as hell did not work any more. It lay on the ground, rusting into the red dust. This was the gate that my wheelchair bounced across on the night I arrived in Voorstand.

No messenger arrived before me.

When the first set of spotlights illuminated the tunnel entrance, my reception committee readied itself — car doors opened, radios were turned off. Then, no one moved.

There was only Leona — she alone — spotlit like an actor on a stage, walking towards me, holding a clipboard. She ambled towards the runnel entrance where the earth was ground so fine and dry, like the earth in a cattle kraal. She was short, broad, rough-looking, in a battered brown leather jacket and baggy combat trousers with neck-ties knotted round the ankles to keep out the night chill.

I had just been robbed. My frippes were split. I saw her full lips, her sleepy eyes, her round coffee-coloured face, her orange-blonde hair cut close, in a fringe; I could not tell if it meant harm or safety for me.

She looked at me.

I saw her shiver. It ran in a ripple from her face down to her knees. ‘I’s OK, hunning,’ she said. ‘You’re not the only one is frighted.’

I thought she meant that she was feared of me, but she was referring to the other facilitators who, now they had seen me clearly, were placing their clipboards back on the dash and slamming their truck doors closed. These facilitators did not want to touch anything sick. Anything just the tiniest bit viral, they would not touch it. They stayed with their windows shut, the air-kool on, their hunters’ halogens shining on us.

Leona, for reasons I will tell you later, had to take this job. Even when she saw our remaining 39 Guilders, she had no choice. She pushed the crumpled notes quickly down into her pockets and signed us up, all three of us.

‘My name is Leona,’ the facilitator said to Jacques and Wally.

I signed my big and fancy signature — Tristan Smith — with special loops like on a bank note. When she saw my name she smiled.

‘Welcome,’ she said to me. ‘My name is Leona.’

And there and then, in the middle of the desert, in a sea of white light, she began what seemed to me, with my history, like an audition piece. She declaimed to us, in a rich round voice. She had no rhyti or bhalam to accompany her. She did not sing as she might have as a Verteiler, but she chanted thus:

‘What you are looking at here is a Pow-pow.

Lots of people don’t like that term.

They tell you, it demeaning.

They tell you, don’t insult me.

I tell you,

Be pleased.

I am going to make you a Pow — pow,

I going to get you that little medal,

the one with the pink and blue writing on it,

the one

with POW in big grey letters

right across your face.

I tell you — be happy. I am a Pow-pow.

It is the Pow-pows make this country great.

Not the Dutchies, they’re history.

Not the Anglos — they lost the war.

It is the Pow-wows who dance on the high wire with Bruder Skat.

Be pleased.

It is us Pow-pows who tell the story for Oncle Dog,