Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘It’s a nice night to go to Saarlim,’ Jacqui said.

‘What?’

‘A nice night,’ Jacqui said, ‘to go to Saarlim.’

‘Don’t turn crazy on me,’ the waiter said. ‘Pray God don’t do that.’ And he stared at my nurse, like you stare at something unstable that might yet topple over.

Jacqui blushed and buttoned up her jacket.

‘Just don’t,’ the waiter said. And then he turned his back and walked through a swinging door to the kitchen.

‘Christ, mo-ami,’ my nurse said. ‘Who taught you to juggle? You were amazing.’

I tilted my head, cocked my Mouse’s ear — comic, tray amusant — she smiled at me.

‘It was your mother? Felicity Smith, right?’

I was surprised to hear my nurse say Mother’s name, but before I could think about this the kitchen door swung open and the waiter was walking quickly towards us on the heels of his dainty pointy-toed black shoes.

‘Cyborgs and Pow-pows in the one day.’ With one hand he mopped the wooden table top, in the other he held a big bowl of Beanbredie which he now placed on the table, but not in front of me.

‘You want to eat?’ my nurse asked me. ‘You want me to unstitch you?’

I shook my head.

‘You want to go back to the hotel?’

I shook my head.

‘Very cute,’ the waiter said to Jacqui. ‘You’re some gjent. Some damn gjent.’ The waiter rolled his intense little eyes and folded his arms. ‘That’s some accent … you know that?’

‘I’m from Efica.’ Jacqui looked up, her lips shiny from the Beanbredie. ‘Everyone talks like this in Chemin Rouge.’

‘But why in the name of God’ — the waiter jerked his small blond head towards me — ‘are you messing with this fire risk? Christ save me, Bruder. You were talking to a Cyborg, a Simi.’

I scratched my head, which is, as you know, a standard comic gesture for Bruder Mouse. The waiter could not see me, but I made my nurse smile.

‘It’s not so funny.’ The waiter was so close to me I could smell his odeklonje and see the pores in his soft and sexless skin as he leant across the table towards my nurse. ‘You buy this old Cyborg, maybe someone took advantage of what you did not know. You’re an Ootlander.’

‘Actually, Bruder, this one is not a machine,’ my nurse said. ‘I think we should let him get a drink. He’s just done an incredible performance.’

‘Hey,’ the waiter said. ‘It’s me. I’m not some Pow-pow you’re scamming in the street. I’m not some nigger from Nigeria.’

‘This is not a scam. Hell, Bruder,’ Jacqui coughed deep in the back of her throat, ‘there’s really someone inside.’

‘Is that what they told you?’

Jacqui coughed again. ‘No one told me, Bruder. This is no shit. There’s a little person in this suit.’

‘Bruder,’ said the waiter, ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but what they sold you is a Cyborg. It is not a person, it is a machine. You may not have them in Chemin rucking Rouge, but we have them here.’

The waiter was looking away from me. I could therefore put my nose close to his ear without him noticing. This made my nurse smile.

‘Listen, bubsuck,’ the waiter said. ‘It does not behove you to smirk at me. This is not some little sticksville country with a picture of a rucking fish on its flag. *This is Voorstand. I am from Voorstand. I am telling you something you want to know, minebroo. This Mouse you have presumably purchased is what we call a klootsac, a balls-up. The original Sirkus Mouse was like six foot 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 of thing. 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 Creature Control Act †— no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches. And so there are none.’

‘This is one.’

‘This is a Cyborg, I told you. They made it three foot six so no adult male could fit inside.’

‘Maybe it’s a small person.’

‘I’m sorry, Bruder,’ the waiter said, his tone now more gentle. ‘I’m sorry you spent your money, but I recognize this little fuck. It’s an Opus 3a Cyborg. They made a thousand of them.’

‘A thousand.’ Jacques winked at me. ‘Good heavens.’

‘I don’t know the numbers,’ he said irritably. ‘They made a lot. They made hundreds of them, and everything was fine, for about a week, and then they started to catch on fire. There were Cyborgs running around Kakdorp, in flames. Or they got run over in the traffic. You’d see them on the news at night, some dumb crazy Dog walking out along some ditch, lost in space. So this here creature, Bruder, no matter what you paid for it — take it, sell it to a museum, someone off the plane from Chemin Rouge. And don’t go hanging round the streets with Pow-pows. These are primitive people. They don’t know how to take a kak in a bathroom. They steal. They carry firearms. They have diseases.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

The waiter’s face was very red and angry by now.

‘Listen, I know so, Bruder. I know who you are.’

Jacqui began to blush. She looked at me, and looked quickly away.

‘I’m watching out for you,’ the waiter said.

‘OK, I get it.’ Jacques was scarlet.

I was thinking: What is going on here?

‘You don’t get anything,’ the waiter said. ‘You’re taking all sorts of risks you don’t even know about. I cannot let you continue. If you weren’t a trannie I would not care, but I am. I live here. I know how ugly it can be.’

I did not know what a trannie was. Jacqui did not either. The fact was obviously showing on her face for our host now reached across and took my nurse’s hand and placed it inside his own white waiter’s jacket.

‘Be careful,’ the waiter said. ‘This is a big city. Women like us get raped and murdered every day.’

Jacqui was looking at me, her mouth open.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She picked me up. She took my weight, all sixty-five pounds, and hefted me over her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ve been kind.’

I put my hand over her shoulder. I was wearing my gloves, but I brushed it ‘accidentally’ — her breast, no question — 23 September 394 by the Efican Calendar.

*

A reference to the Republic of Morea.

†

‘It being hereby stated, in amendment to Codicil CXVIII, that it is an offence against the laws of the state of Voorstand and the Free Franciscan Church, for any adult male or female to assume the costume or to impersonate in any way God’s Creatures as defined in Codicil III and further this amendment shall apply to those Creatures of the Saarlim Sirkus Corporation including Bruder Mouse, Phantome Drool ©, Busker Bear ©, in which case Manufacture shall be deemed to be, for the purpose of this law, an act of Impersonation EXCEPTING those Simulacrum or Cyborg facsimiles of the aforesaid God’s Creatures whose maximum height is less than forty-two inches.’

Do children decide how they are going to grow? Jacqui always believed she had decided, that she had stood on the veranda of her home and made the choice.

She had watched her mother (standing with her arms folded across her chest, making small disapproving exhalations — Phhh, sssht) and decided — against all the strong physical evidence to the contrary — that she would rather die than be like her.

It was Christmas Day in the year 380 and Jacqui Lorraine was nine years old. Her mother was on the veranda with the tape recorder, watching her husband and his friend Oliver Odettes, a science teacher with a red face and a large black moustache, shovelling snow across the small front lawn. The tattered leaves of the banana trees flapped in the warm wind. The trunk of the twenty-foot high papaya rubbed against the water tank. Beyond the small privet hedge, the neighbours watched — not just adults, but babies with spilled snow melting in their puckered mouths, squirming boys with snow down their shirts, silent teenagers with their hurt and hostile eyes.