Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘When he signed the A22 form, you should have seed the loop-deloop. Don’t Fuck With Me. That was what he wrote. Straight on the page.’

‘It’s me he’s loup with,’ Wally said.

‘Loop with?’

‘Loup — mad, angry.’

‘Oncle, I love the way you talk,’ she said. She left me then. She began to chew his bone. Soon she had Wally blushing about his accent. She made him happy, glowing. When she switched to Jacques, I saw it was her talent, her thing. She was facilitating our entry into Voorstand, calming us, flattering us. And, indeed, when our moods improved, she lapsed into silence. We travelled with our fairy lights still winking from our metal skin.

The earth was spooky white, clay yellow, dust brown — not like anything in Efica. It was the landscape of the stories Irma had recited, the landscape my ancestors, landing on the Pietr Groot from the Netherlands in 135 BE, *had travelled through. It was alien. It was in my blood, in my dreams. It appeared and reappeared at every bend and cutting — real, not real, familiar, foreign.

The distances were vast, far greater than anything we were accustomed to. So even the famous cactus forest at Neu Zwolfe, which we entered early in the journey, quickly became tedious to our eyes. Likewise in the Poorlands which followed after — the little blue churches, the stone roadside shrines with newspaper-wrapped offerings to the Hairy Man — were soon bleached of novelty.

We had no money. We were unprotected. My breathing became shallow. I began to dwell on the circumstances in which our security had been lost. It would never have happened if only Wally had been calm about the flower.

I do not mean to blame my guardian for everything that happened, but just the same — he lost me my money, my power, all because he panicked about some girl with a flower. That girl had nice strong calves, it is true. She was kind. She had large dark liquid eyes and she saw that I was a human underneath my horror. I would have chopped my hand off if it meant she might really care for me. I do not mean it poetically. I mean really chop — an axe, the danger. But chopping, cutting, mutilation — none of this would change the bitter truth. I was who I was. She was kind, that’s all. She gave me a flower with a thick pulpy stem like a Nez Noir thistle. I was not going to slash my wrists, for God’s sake.

If Wally had not panicked, we would have driven to the tunnel and arrived rested, cool, cucumbers. There would have been no conflict with Aziz, no robbery. We would have driven on to Saarlim in the expectation of security and comfort.

But Wally did not even seem to have noticed what he had done. Indeed, the moment my fortune disappeared, he began to shine, and neither travel nor sleeplessness seemed to diminish his good humour.

‘It’s the challenge, son,’ he said to me as dawn arrived — a streaky melancholy grey and yellow sky over wide valleys dotted with very high pillars of yellow rock. ‘And Oncle Wal is the right man for the job.’

‘Ask … her … what … they … do … with … thieves … in … Voorstand.’

‘Mollo-mollo,’ Wally said. ‘There won’t be any thieving.’ He smiled, sat back. He crossed his legs and began rolling a cigarette of rank Morean tobacco.

‘That’s a willow,’ Leona said. I could see her eyes, creased, tired, in the rear-view mirror. ‘See a willow, maybe there’s a stream.’

‘We have willows,’ Jacques said, stretching. ‘But not like that.’

‘That’s a spit-weed.’

‘We don’t have them.’

That’s a creosote bush. That’s a see-saw. Beside a dry creek bed a little below the road, she showed us a twenty-foot long shoe and a leg carved out of rock. The leg rose maybe forty feet into the air and then stopped. It was trousered, cuffed, had a neat pleat up its front, and careful wrinkles, all carved from the yellow rock.

‘It’s laser art?’ Jacques said. ‘What is it?’

‘Not laser. Real.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a shoe,’ Leona said.

It was a shoe, but, size apart, it was not normal. It had an excessively wide toe and a high lump on the toe cap — a clown’s shoe.

‘You know whose shoe that is?’

‘Bruder … Dog’s … shoe,’ I said.

‘That is the Dog’s shoe,’ Leona said. ‘Honey, it a mystery. How were they going to build the rest? It one of the mysteries of the desert. * Ain’t that something. Now you look over there you see it. The wire lead from the shoe to that there cabin with the machinery out its back. That was going to be an avocado farm. All those dead trees — them are what we call avocados. It a kind of vegetable. Why is that wire there? You tell me, Wink. The answer is to get the energy from the Dog and give it to the avocado trees. That is what I figure, but no one knows. Would have been an avocado farm if they’d ever found the water. They planted the trees, never found the water. Then they tried to get the energy from the Dog, but they couldn’t get the Bruder built up in time.’

‘We’re going to do fine here,’ Wally whispered. ‘Don’t you worry.’

‘What happened to him, Mr Avocado? Maybe he figured out how to do some other thing. Maybe he was the one went drove down the road and blasted the guts out of the cabin there. Now look at that.’

She pulled the car up. We wound our windows down. There was a cabin with its insides blown away by gunfire. Its insulation hung out of gaping wounds.

‘We’re going to do fine,’ Wally said, but when I looked at him he looked away. ‘Mollo mollo,’ he said. ‘We’re going to do fine.’

‘This is the land of Sirkus,’ the facilitator said. ‘No one will tell you not to try. Some countries, they have rules, regulations, government telling the people how to live their lives. Say you was Japanese, Chinese — put you in jail for making a statue of Bruder Dog. Here, you take the risk, you get the reward. You walk the high wire, you die or you get the silver cup.’

‘Can I ask you, sweets,’ said Wally. ‘How much money did you have when you arrived in Voorstand?’

Leona began a long story about her arrival. Wally leaned forward and rested his arms on the back of the driver’s seat. I looked out the window, behind his curving spine. There, on the right, on a cutting, a three-foot high Mouse was running beside the car.

I said nothing, but I could not take my eyes off the hateful thing. Its white scarf was gone. Its bright blue waistcoat was hanging from one shoulder. Its soft grey limbs were torn, covered in clay dust. Its eyes were fierce and wide, its teeth small and pointed. It was running badly, tripping itself on its own large white boots, stumbling, standing, falling. Its arms were loose and slightly boneless in appearance. I was reminded of a blow-fly dying.

The cutting led us to a view over a wide khaki-coloured plain. A single line of highway cut right across its centre, and one could see the thin chalk line of road, our road, leading into it. At any moment the car would begin its descent and we would leave these nightmare visions behind us.

‘Wink sees it,’ Leona said.

‘Meneer Mouse,’ whispered Jacques. ‘God damn.’

‘Where you folks from?’ Leona said.

‘Stop the car,’ Jacques said.

‘You ain’t never heard of Bruder Mouse.’

‘Let’s get it,’ Jacques said. I looked at him. He was so alert, so handsome. His colour was high, his eye-white a lustrous greyish white.

‘Bruder Mouse is something we have here,’ Leona said.

‘We know the Mouse,’ Jacques said. ‘“ One mo nothing. Next mo there he was, solid as a miller’s wheel.” We know it, really. It’s, like, it’s our Mouse too. “His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.”’