Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

The deskmajoor had a pencil-line moustache. He had big pouches beneath his tearful bloodshot eyes. Now he arranged the stained and dishevelled items of his dun-coloured costume and shuffled across towards us, plunging his hand into his trouser pocket.

Jacqui readied herself, slitted her eyes, made her face expressionless.

‘Here, Bruder,’ the deskmajoor said, holding out a piece of folded paper.

Jacqui reached to take the paper.

The deskmajoor tugged it away from her.

‘No,’ he said. He had a crumpled smile on his badly shaved face. He was a poor man, his collar frayed, his skin dry and powdering. ‘For Bruder Mouse.’

‘It’s a good day to go to Saarlim,’ Jacqui said.

The deskmajoor frowned.

‘It’s for me ,’ Jacqui insisted.

‘Bruder Mouse , bubsuck!’ the deskmajoor said, his eyes narrowing, his lip curling. ‘Meneer Mouse, OK?’ And he passed the message — for that is what she thought it was — into the Mouse’s open palm. She watched with alarm as the white-gloved hands unfolded … a violet 50-Guilder note.

So the deskmajoor was a fan. He bowed to the Mouse , in the middle of the foyer. It was ludicrous from an Efican perspective — the respect. No Efican would act like that to anyone.

Jacqui looked at me, but I was gone, submerged, consumed by Bruder Mouse, and she, who knew, intimately, what the Mouse was like beneath its nylon fur, suddenly could not see her wild white-eyed employer. She knew I was there, but it was like knowing that there is a colon, a lung, a brain beneath the human skin — you don’t respond to the squishy viscera but to the externals. Likewise, the appearance of alert intelligence, the silence, the mystery, the lack of communication, the absolute Mouse-ness of her companion was so convincing that it was impossible to remember that I wore toilet paper padding on my misshapen feet.

Now I spoke, not words, not my normal voice — a high-pitched squeak. I saw her pick it up, the flash in her bright eye. She was already off and away — high on the weirdness of it, the absolute foreignness of it.

‘He thanks you,’ Jacqui told the deskmajoor, straight-faced. ‘He is touched by your gift,’ she said. She was, typically, on the brink of taking it too far.

The deskmajoor opened the door for us, clicking his heels.

Jacqui clicked her heels in return. She would have done more, but I dragged her out on to the Jean Pitz and there we stood, each of us in our costume, together on the sidewalk.

In the midst of the noise, of the heat, the diesel, urine, construction dust, the roaring of the traffic on the Helmstraat down below, we were not immediately noticed.

Two minutes later there were people pressed against us so tight Jacqui could feel the buttons of their shirts digging into her arms and smell the garlic or asafoetida or cardamom on their skin. It was alien, like nothing she had ever seen — blue-black hands, café-au-lait, golden brown, fluorescent Pow-pow ID’s stamped across the wrists, reaching out to rub the Mouse’s nose with their own. These were not descendants of the Hollandse Maagd, the heretics of the Free Franciscan Church. They were not engineers, masters of earthworks, citizens with their ‘one good Bruder cow’. They were here, like Jacqui was here, by choice, by their will. They stretched their hands out towards the Mouse as if it would bless them with Sirkus jobs, parkside apartments, topsoil ten feet thick, and the Mouse — to Jacqui’s astonishment — struck poses, rolled, tumbled, held its hands across its mouth in a giggle.

Before this moment she did not know I was my father’s son. She never saw me roll. She never saw me tumble.

‘Stay by me,’ she shouted. She was worried that her voice was female, no one in the crowd was interested in her. They elbowed her in the throat, stood on her toes. It was Bruder Mouse they wanted.

They picked me up and held me in the air making a collective noise, a sort of sighing.

They were devotees, worshippers. They wanted to eat Bruder Mouse, to fuck him, smother him. ‘Keep back,’ she called. ‘Keep back from him.’

But I was not frightened. How could I be? The pathetic creature who had skulked inside the Feu Follet was now the object of these people’s love. I kicked my legs, a laser figure walking off a cliff.

While Jacqui had been prepared to use me, she was not prepared to have me killed. She got her arms around my neck and, in her efforts to save my life, damn near throttled me herself.

I squeaked, loudly.

‘Stop it,’ she shouted at me.

Stop what? She did not say, but such was the intensity of our ‘moment’ — theatre people will understand this — the crowd quietened. They watched: how I turned; her bright eyes. They felt our electricity.

I could have used that moment to walk away, but when I saw how my nurse had changed towards me, how all that energy, bravado, that life in her eyes was distilled, focused, now beamed at me, I walked toward it, sucked it into me.

There was a woman in the crowd with oranges in her blue string bag. I held out my hands for the oranges. I said nothing, but my admirers made a circle. I was the Oncle, the Bruder, the Meneer. As I received each orange I held it in the air.

This show I began for ‘Jacques’.

First: ‘showering’ — the simplest action for a juggler.

I switched to ‘cascading’, and soon I had all eight oranges crisscrossing in the air. This was a Sirkus town. They knew what I was doing. Guilders fell like leaves in autumn. The crowd was like rough water and she had no choice but to let herself be carried by it, bumping along the street like an aluminium canoe over a rocky stream, and when, twenty minutes after leaving the foyer of the Marco Polo, she found us pressed together, tumbling through the doorway of the Chop House, it was not through her own design or mine. One minute we were in the tumult of the colonnade, the next we were dumped inside the dark, stale-smelling room and a waiter, a Euro with pale skin, was clicking his tongue and shutting the door against the crowd.

Her first thought was: is he VIA?

*

There is no ‘death rope’ in either our circus or our vocabulary, although we are aware of the uses of the dramatic presentation of the slack rope in the Voorstand Sirkus.

[TS]

I tumbled into the restaurant with an orange still in my hand. My admirers were banging at the door. For you, maybe, this is normal. You are a Sirkus star, perhaps, or a death-walker. But imagine Tristan, Meneer, Madam — imagine his feelings as he witnessed the passion of his new admirers.

Jacqui had me by the hand. ‘Oh my God, mo-frere. You were amazing.’

She was alight. Her big brown eyes were wide, her lashes long. I should have seen it then: she was a woman. Sure, she walked that walk with the imaginary porpoise between her legs, but even as she did the walk, she unintentionally subverted it. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and patted the perspiration from her lip.

She was a woman.

But I was hot, tired, disoriented. The restaurant smelt of smoke and fat and stale liquor. There were red leather booths and caricatures of actors on the walls. My admirers began to tap with coins against the glass.

‘Where did you learn that stuff?’ she asked.

The booths were empty. The clock behind the bar said ten past five. It was 23 September in the year 394 by the Efican Calendar. If what had happened was all that would happen, it would have been a busy day. But more, I’m sorry, was about to come.

We followed the waiter’s fat round arse between the booths. I was in pain, naturally. My head could not turn easily. Also: my eye-holes were poorly placed and my vision was limited. At first I could only see that our rescuer had a white shirt, black trousers, that he was short, bustling, energetic. Then I climbed into the booth and I got my first good look at the guy’s fiz: very Hollandish — a white, downy kind of face, smooth and soapy, although, for all its softness, there was also a grittiness there, a big-city hardness in his small yellow-brown eyes.