Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

who dive through the air with Meneer Mouse.

We are the ones who keep the Hairy Man laughing.

Not the Dutchies — they’re too fat.

Not the Anglos — they lost the war.

Alice de Stihl, Boddy Gross-Silva, James Featherfleur.

Laser-Art, Spray-effect, Symphonic Clowns.

Pow-pow Music,

Tap, Joy-dancing,

Sirkus Stomp.

Pow! Pow!’

We stood in the glare of the spotlights, like cambruces, hayseeds called up into the centre ring. Leona blew the smoke off the end of the barrel of her imaginary guns, twirled them, slipped them in her holster.

‘Welcome to Voorstand,’ she said. ‘Arts and Leisure capital of the world.’

I pulled my big white canvas hat down over my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest, but my trousers were slit and my bone-thin legs were naked to the light.

Jacques put his shoulders back, and poked his sunburnt nose at the heat as if he did not give a damn who looked at him or what they did to him.

As for Wally, I do not exaggerate when I say that the dear old turtle transformed himself. He uncurled like a paper flower in water. He lifted his face towards the light. He raised his freckled liver-spotted arm and waved at the unseen Voorstanders. He turned his ruined face towards me, his thirst-white mouth loose, but smiling.

‘How about us!’ he said, so pleased that he made me laugh. We were broke, penniless, without a cash parole. ‘Hey,’ my dab said, blood running down his forehead, ‘how about us!’

*

The Voorstand reader will be aware of how unlikely this was, for although all Sirkuses originally had a Verteiler — whose epic songs formed the narrative backbone of the Sirkus — at the time Tristan Smith arrived in Saarlim only three Sirkuses still used Verteilers.

This was my maman’s country. This was her land, and in that sense it was my land too. It was most unfortunate that I should be forced to stand here as a pauper and an alien.

It was four a.m., but the clay-pan at the tunnel mouth was like a fairground — all the facilitators’ cars and trucks with their different lights: headlights, quartz halogens, fairy lights flashing around their contours, the air smelling of diesel fuel, woodsmoke, ketchup, fatty food, sugar burning in the night.

The Big Dipper, my maman’s stars, was overhead. There was liquor in the air, ganja stick. Life crackled around me like small-arms fire. We followed Leona as she hustled across the bare earth towards the headlights.

As we went, the facilitators called to her, ‘Wear your mask, Leona.’ They made voices of disgust. Baark. Baarf. Urrrrk. That is how you greeted me, Madam, Meneer. ‘Hold your breath, Leona-honey.’

‘Don’t mind them,’ Leona said. ‘They just ignorant. Here my Blikk.’

Blikk — it is your word, as familiar to you as your toothbrush. To me, it was a jewel from the crown of your songs and stories — alien, mysterious, far more than what we mean when we say ‘car’. Leona’s Blikk, although not new, was gleaming, studded with small flashing pinprick lights, not just on the bulbous fenders, or on the side doors, but right across its wide curving roof.

Wally turned and looked at me, his face cracked open in a grin. This response, of course, was exactly what I wanted when I imagined the trip. It was imagining this that helped me overcome my phobia — the thought that my will could make him carefree, happy, not weighed down by history or loneliness.

But when I had imagined this I had not expected to arrive a pauper in the desert, and now that was my lot, my breathing was shallow in my chest, and I felt light, faint. I could not be the joyous man I had expected.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Who else do you know who has ever come to Voorstand through a tunnel.’

‘We … lost … our … money.’

For answer he gave me a very distinctive, mischievous grin.

‘NO … don’t … even … think … of … it.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘I … know … that … grin.’

It was the same grin he wore when he arrived home with stolen watches and unnecessary toaster ovens.

‘This … is … not … Chemin … Rouge.’

I hated him to steal. Twice he had been detained overnight in jail. As a result I feared the police, the courts, all those in uniform.

‘Don’t … even … think … of … it.’

‘Don’t think of what?’ he insisted, but then Leona interrupted.

‘You ever see Gyro’s Sirkus?’ she asked us.

‘Read about it,’ Wally said. Now all his attention was focused on Leona. He thrust his hands into his pockets and pushed his eyebrows forward.

‘Gyro’s Sirkus,’ Jacques said. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

‘What am I going to say, handsome?’

‘We don’t get the big Sirkuses in Efica,’ Jacques said. ‘But we get the Simulation Domes. I saw the Simulation. Three hundred and sixty degrees. Three-D. This is the car — right?’

‘This here Blikk,’ Leona said. ‘This the exact same one they drove across the high wire in Gyro’s Sirkus.’

We had exactly three Guilders left between us, and my companions were staring at the Blikk, smiling, the pair of them rubbing their faces with their hands.

‘You want to take a photo,’ Leona said, ‘it’s OK.’

Jacques had no camera, but Wally gleefully followed the facilitator’s suggestion. His flash flashed. The car blinked its lights back at him, like a giant dung beetle talking to its servant.

Leona looked at me and winked. I tried to wink back, but all I was thinking about was how we were to get money.

‘You can’t wink,’ she said. She blew gum from between her teeth and popped it. ‘You done all tried,’ she said, ‘but you can’t do it. I seed you tried to do it. I know you, I knowed your type. ’

I could not even think about her. But for Wally, of course, she was a woman and she was talking to me, and I might misunderstand her and fall in love.

Suddenly he had no interest in photography. ‘OK,’ he said to me. He picked me up — my trousers were slit like rags, my legs were there for anyone to see. ‘Time to go,’ he said to Jacques and Leona as he struggled with me to the open seat of the Blikk.

‘What’s … your … problem?’ I asked him. ‘For … God’s … sake.’

He said something to me, but it was drowned by the extraordinary roar of the Blikk’s V12 engine. Leona was ready. She slammed her door and fiddled with the choke. Jacques tumbled in beside me.

‘Bout dawn,’ Leona called, ‘you’re going to see some stuff.’

Then, without warning, she drove, fast, bumpy, full gas.

Leona had smooth tan leather gloves. She loved to let that wheel spin through her broad little hands. ‘Wink, he ain’t pleased,’ she called. She slid the Blikk on sandy corners and bucked it high on rocky passages.

‘Look at him. He pissed as hell.’

Why would I not be? I had ripped trousers, mutant legs. I was three foot six, powerless beneath the big empty sky of Voorstand.

‘I see him coming out the tunnel, ducking and diving, didn’t want to give a penny to no one.’

She looked at me. Every time I looked up those eyes were on me in that wide rear-vision mirror.

‘Didn’t want to give no Guilder to me. So damned mad couldn’t even wink at me, ain’t that right, honey? You was mad as two fleas,’ she said.

‘Still … am,’ I said. I looked right back at her. I could see her in the wide-screen mirror: broad nose, handsome face, yellow desert eyes.

‘What’s he say?’

‘He still is,’ said Wally. ‘Not with you, with me.’