Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘That’s the words of a song, right?’ Leona asked.

‘Tales of Bruder Mouse,’ said Jacques. ‘Badberg Edition.’

But Leona, it was obvious, had not heard of the Badberg Edition. ‘The Mouse is something we have from the Sirkus,’ she said. ‘But not like this old fellow — this one is a machine, a Simulacrum. This old mouse, he’s older than me, believe it. He’s an old model. *Hey, Wink, you seeing this? Just watch that Simi go. This must be the last Simi left in Voorstand. You guys don’t appreciate how lucky you are.’

The Mouse, coming closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, had stumbled and fallen in front of the car. Now, like a rabbit that you’ve wounded but not killed, it picked itself up and began its wild, unco-ordinated run down the road which now, as Leona followed, began a steep descent towards the plain.

‘You want a souvenir?’ she said.

Jacques smiled. He did not even speak. He sat back in his seat, and I could see his will, his alarming, shining will through the lashes of his slightly narrowed eyes.

‘No,’ I said. I hated that Mouse. I hated its face. I hated what it stood for in my life, my history, that I was ever fool enough to hide behind its face.

‘Twenty mile an hour,’ Leona said. ‘Look it go.’

Black legs flying. A cloud of dust.

‘You want it?’ Wally asked me.

‘You … know … I … don’t.’

There was a thump, a bump. The car stopped. ‘Got it,’ said Leona. ‘Got the little sucker.’

She stopped, jumped out. A second later she held the back door open. She threw the Simulacrum on to the floor. It was still smoking. Cotton wadding grew like bloom from its elbow. It gave off the smell of burning rubber, like a dishwasher about to catch fire.

*

BE.

Before Efica, dating from Captain Girard’s landfall at what is now Melcarth.

*

The Voorstand reader will be aware that Leona was misinformed, and that the abandoned statue of Bruder Dog, far from being the product of modern Sirkus-style capitalism, marks the site of a well-documented Free Dutch Church community dating from 65

BE.

These remains are known as the Dry Creek Dog. For more information, see

Heretical Christian Art in the New World

(Thames & Hudson, London).

*

‘The original Sirkus Mouse was like six feet tall. You see these early Bruders in the paintings, Dogs, Ducks, Mice, all as big as football players. In the beginning, of course, it was very religious. All God’s creatures, all that sort ofthing. Maybe they was priests at one time but as long as I remember they were krakers, swartzers, thieves of one sort or another. Those Bruders did some awful stuff — murder, rape, terrible things. So now we have the Creature Control Act — no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches. And so there are none.’ For more details of these forgotten Simulacrum Mark 3S

,

see

Chapter 28

.

My nurse sat beside me like a woman newly pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach, her feet astride the stinking Bruder Mouse.

I thought she was my employee, my man. It never occurred to me that I might be her man, her invention, but that was what the situation was — this slight, attractive woman with size five shoes had made me into a terrorist.

She had found a timid wretch living in a dank, dark hole. He had skin like a baby and pearly inoffensive eyes, but while he slept she had transformed him into something potent — still ugly, yes, but venomous, a spider in the dark of the Voorstandish subconscious.

She had not meant me harm. She had not meant me anything. She wanted something for herself and I was a member of a proscribed group. She therefore falsified three fax IDs to ‘prove’ that I, Tristan Smith, was a terrorist in touch with Mohammedan cells inside Voorstand. If it had not been for this, she would have been sent back to her grey metal desk in POLIT. She felt she had no choice but to go forward — she linked me with Zawba’a *and now she was an operative accompanying a terrorist to a possible meeting with other terrorists.

She connected me with Zawba’a because she had translated their manifesto and knew they had connections inside Voorstand. She was a beginner, an ice-skater. She only had access to level 7 information, and therefore had no idea that Zawba’a were currently under intense scrutiny from the VIA.

There were eight other cells she could have chosen, and all of them would have left her stranded back in the dusty tedium of POLIT. But she chose the one group which had all of Operations suddenly dedicating themselves to her.

They had only one anxiety — not that she had faked some fax numbers, but that she was inexperienced and would therefore make them look bad with their opposite numbers in Voorstand. They took her to their bosoms. They coaxed her, cradled her, pushed her. They had her doing crunches and push-ups. They gave her intensive weapons training, then halted it when they found her attempting Sirkus tricks with her fifteen-shot semiautomatic Glock.

‘What happens if someone shoots at me?’

‘Believe me, Jacqui, you’re safer without a gun.’

They took back the handsome Glock and spent the last week teaching her how to talk to the VIA. At this, she excelled. When she boarded the John Kay she was a candidate well-prepared for examination.

I was the centre of her fiction. Yet as we travelled down the El 695 with Bruder Mouse, I was as unaware of all this as I was unaware of the honey-coloured breasts beneath her three poplin shirts. I was the baby, the mark, the monkey. I fretted about the stinking Simi, money, privacy, the revulsion I might occasion at a gas stop, the humiliation of eating in the public gaze. Panic flitted like a bat across the periphery of my consciousness as we journeyed deeper and deeper into Voorstand. I had no idea of the risk my sleeping nurse had taken to make this trip, the cynical lies she had told to get there, or the looming consequences she had successfully obliterated from her consciousness.

*

Arabic: lit., whirlwind.

When Jacqui woke it was evening and the shadows were long and the colours soft and the highway was sweeping around the edges of one more lake. When she opened her eyes she saw, in the mirror, Leona’s yellow bloodshot eyes looking straight at her.

It was only then the possibility occurred to her.

Could Leona be the operative she had expected to meet in Saarlim?

Whatever Leona had said when she had emerged from the tunnel, Jacqui had not really paid attention. She had not expected the operative until Saarlim. Perhaps Leona said the ID line and Jacqui had not heard.

Now, twelve hours later, Jacqui recited her ID tag: ‘It’s a nice night.’

And Leona said her line: ‘Nice night to be in Saarlim City.’

‘How many miles is it?’ Jacqui said, feeling the blood rushing up her neck and flooding into her ears and cheeks.

‘Tsk,’ Leona said, and shook her head.

A different person might have been embarrassed. Jacqui would not be. She learned that very early at the DoS. Never show weakness. The ‘meet’ was meant to be in Saarlim. She stared right back at Leona and crossed her hands in her lap. Fuck you , she thought. This is not my fault.

I was sitting right beside her when this exchange took place. I saw the recklessness which was beginning to shine, to glow through the dull brown paint of our nurse’s dutifulness. It was powerful, palpable. I felt the need to stop it.

‘Throw … the … thing … out,’ I said, and nudged her leg with my foot.