Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

The Grand Concourse. The home of Sirkus. When we had planned our Sirkus Tour, I had expected a certain standard. I looked out at a grim and sweaty avenue backed by tall grey-brick apartment buildings, lined with street stalls, pawnbrokers, liquor stores, strip clubs, electronics stores. I did not know it would be like this. I knew your agents had murdered my maman, but I also knew, since always, that you Voorstanders were neat, professional. Even in the matter of that murder — it was not amateurs killed my mother.

It was through your charm and your expertise that you conquered us, with your army, yes, and with the VIA, but you kept us conquered with jokes and dancers, death and beauty, holographs, lasers, vids, with perfectly engineered and orchestrated suspense.

If the government of Voorstand now imagines that I came to threaten it, tell me, please — where is my Mouse, my Dog, my Duck? I came with nothing, not even courage. When we got to the Grand Concourse where we would have to stand in line to get our POW cards, I did not even want to leave the air-kooled Blikk.

That’s the sort of threat I was. I was too ashamed to face the public gaze. It was Jacques (our polite, attentive, self-effacing nurse) who grabbed the Mouse by its clenched white hand and yanked it out the car, and stood in the fetid air, spookily, electrically triumphant.

I was on the sidewalk, my back against the rear fenders of Leona’s Blikk. Jacques — the person I thought of as Jacques — was three feet away, standing on top of a rusting grating.

I ordered ‘him’ — for I did not know how to read his tusch, his peach, his insouciant dance-hall walk — I ordered this ‘him’ to return the Simi to the car. I had to shout, but he heard me.

‘No,’ he said, like that.

There he stood — my opposite — his eyes big, electric, his cheeks flushed, his limbs kind of agitated, drumming. How handsome he looked to me, how strong, well-formed. How I envied him, admired him, and — when he picked up this Cyborg, this Simi, this dead rat, and stood there holding it around its neck, tapping his foot — how I feared the consequences of his will.

Ticket scalpers, smelling blood, milled round us with their stiff cardboard tickets — pink, green, silver — displayed like feathers on their long split sticks. I was defenceless: a snail without a shell.

It was like the Zeelung border, but this time the whole food chain was alerted to our weakness — Burmese boys with fireworks to sell, beggars with rattling cups, pickpocket gangs with sheets of cardboard, and lice eggs under their nails — and there was all this damn press upon us, and whether I was not seen and trampled, or seen and reviled, one thing was as bad as the other.

I turned to Wally for help, only to discover that he too was lost to me: standing there with his mouth open, staring up at a neon sign. ‘The Gyro Sirkus’ , the sign said. ‘Who will die tonight?’

Me. Me. I will die tonight. The air was rank, sweaty, so loud with the noises of sirens and klaxons that my bones vibrated.

I said, ‘Make … him … stop.’

Stop what? I did not say. Hardly knew.

‘Mollo mollo,’ Wally said. He was in a dream. He had his hands resting on his lower back, and he was leaning forward, staring at those stained and sweating Sirkus Domes — the subject of 10,000 Ph. Ds, the celebrated meeting of the Sacred and Profane, the High and Low, the New and Old, the Dutch and English. How tacky they looked, how tawdry.

I turned from Wally back to Jacques. His upturned little nose was peeling, his small flat ears were red, his large brown eyes were alive, almost hyper-thyroid, with defiance and excitement. I did not know if he was male or female. He held that Simi. He clutched it, holding it like raw meat in shark waters.

‘Put … the … rat … back … now.’

Jacques smiled at me and buttoned his jacket.

Above his head, tied to the balconies of a stained concrete apartment building, was a flapping canvas sign: ‘18th INFANTRY. PRISONERS OF WAR.’

Leona was trying to unfold my wheelchair. Jacques was now holding the Mouse underneath its arms and pretending to make it walk. You see the problem — our nurse was a Voorwacker, a fan, a follower of the Sirkus and all its trivia. This was why he was here. This was his trip and this was what he wanted — Sirkuses, ancient crucifixes, early editions from the Badberg Press. He loved your country. Madam, Meneer, he loved you half to death.

He looked my way, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, defiant in his public passion. Then he turned his back and made off through the crowd. He was going to stand on the line, the line we had come to stand in. BUT NO ONE HAD TOLD ME THAT. I knew only that I would not permit myself to be disobeyed by an employee. I walked, as I had previously only walked inside the long dark hallways of the Feu Follet, with my disabilities raw and undisguised. I rolled side to side like a comic-strip sailor. Anyone could see that I was three foot six inches tall, bandy-legged, club-footed, rag-faced, as I came across the grease-stained sidewalk towards Jacques, lacerating the skin on my ‘ankles’, feeling the pain only as you hear a telephone ringing in another room. I was not in control — I was already shouting.

I was like a machine, a thing with a light flashing on its roof. The crowds which had scared me now parted before me. And even the queue of would-be POWs — Chinese, Malays, Afghans, Indians (no one Flemish, no one white like the crowds in the vids and zines) — whilst remaining locked fearfully in its proper order, flexed and shifted like a tail threatened with a red-hot poker.

I came straight at Jacques and grabbed at the Cyborg. The Mouse — designed so no adult male could ever fit inside it — was my height. *I got its round black nose and tried to pull it from its captor. The nose was hard and black and dense and weirdly cold.

‘You … shit … snot … fucking … fool.’

Jacques held the Mouse with both his arms. I tugged at the nose, but it would not tear away.

‘I’ll … rip … your … throat … out.’

Jacques looked down at me. I saw a spark there. Something. I did not know what it meant.

‘Throw … that … thing … AWAY … NOW …’

‘You want to go to jail?’

It was Leona. You could never say her face was white, or even pale. But it had a still, shiny, immobile look. ‘You don’t ever,’ she hissed, pushing the wheelchair at me so I was forced to hold it, ‘make a fuss in this line. That the only rule there is. Look it. They all so quiet. They like chickens when the snake get in the roost. You stand like them. OK. How you think I going to get you captured if you make this fuss?’

That woman scared me. It was not what she said, but how she stood, the wild fire in her yellow eyes.

‘We got to get you captured ,’ Leona said. ‘But that a figure of speech, a way of speaking, you understand me? It paperwork. You in enough trouble I would say — no sense you push it any more.’

‘OK?’ Wally said.

I climbed into the chair.

The balconies of the apartment buildings above our heads were filled with white soldiers, smoking, playing cards, sitting precariously on the crumbling concrete balustrades. As I looked up I saw one of them point at us. I looked down.

‘You be quiet now, Wink. Just hush, OK?’

‘What … trouble … am … I … in?’

I asked the question twice but no one ever did answer it. Jacques patted at my face with a paper handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘If … you’re … sorry … ditch … the … Mouse.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, but then fitted the Simi beneath my wheelchair, under my legs, where I was spared the sight of it, if not its rancid smell.