Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘He’s twenty-three years old.’

‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a hundred.’

‘He was making money for you,’ she said, her face red. ‘You shouldn’t be shouting at him. Is he complaining? Are you complaining?’ she asked me.

Wally kicked at the bloodied Mouse suit. His toe connected underneath the head and the suit lifted and flew and thwacked against the hotel wall. Then he carried me to the bath, holding me under my arms, out and away from him, so he would not put bloodstains on his clothes.

When he lowered me into the water, delicate pink clouds rose from my lacerated skin. He ran his hands over me, searching out my injuries.

‘That’s the last time you’re wearing that thing,’ Wally said.

‘You … could … fix it … so it … doesn’t … scratch,’ I said.

‘You hate the Mouse.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Jacqui said to Wally. ‘He was a star.’

‘You don’t know shit,’ Wally said. ‘You don’t know what that rucking Mouse is in his life. You bring this crap into the car … I’m sorry I ever let you. I’m sorry I didn’t make you throw it out.’ He turned to me and patted at my face with a corner of a wet towel. ‘You won’t be needing to make money. I promise.’

‘I … did … a … show,’ I said. ‘I … showered … and … cascaded … with … six … balls.’

Wally clicked his tongue and shook his head. ‘I know what you can do,’ he said.

‘I … never … did … six … balls … before.’

‘He tumbled,’ Jacqui said. ‘Did you know he could do that?’

‘Yes,’ Wally said, ‘I knew he could do that. Now will you please go and buy bandages and antiseptic’

‘He could be someone.’

‘Go. Go now.’

Jacqui bought the bandages and antiseptic. She also bought sandwiches, a very large bottle of beer, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers which she did not reveal until Wally was well into the last quarter of his beer.

Then she sat cross-legged on the floor with the Mouse suit open on her lap. Slowly, one at a time, she trimmed the wires flush against the rubber inner skin. She did not explain herself to Wally, and he watched her for a long time without saying anything.

‘I told you not to do this,’ Wally said.

‘I know.’

‘When you look back on this,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to know what a waste of effort it was.’

When Jacqui had trimmed a wire she placed a small adhesive bandage over each connection, and felt each one with her finger. I watched her. Without knowing I was doing it, I began to sing. When I saw Wally watching me, I stopped immediately.

My life had been filled with sexual yearning, but yearning is not the same as hope. That is what Wally did not know when he saw me hold the flower in Zeelung. I was someone driven by impossible desire, someone whose very soul is shaped by the sure knowledge that his dreams will not come true. My mother could not have accepted this but it was so: I had learned to equate the pain of unrequited desire with pleasure. I had crawled into the same pigeonhole as those who get their satisfaction from sniffing women’s shoes or underwear, or learn to achieve secret bliss from having their hair cut or their back washed. She would have hated to think of me like this. She would have had me focus on the startling quality of my gold-flecked eyes, the baby softness of my skin. She would have believed that I could make myself attractive with sheer will, with breathing exercises, and such was my dear maman’s enduring power that I continued to hide certain thoughts from her.

For instance, I kept all my excitements about the Simi hidden in the dark side of my brain, away from her. She would not have understood it. She would have felt it a betrayal.

Likewise, if she should have seen see me shadowing Jacqui Lorraine, she would have imagined I had become a creep. Perhaps I had, for when my nurse left the hotel room the following afternoon, I was right behind her, filled with yearning.

I told Wally I was going to the hotel lobby to buy a zine, yet once I was in the foyer I shot right through it, illico presto. My wheelchair was just two months old — light, fast, geared, the same model which Michelle Latour used in the paraplegic Olympics. The deskmajoor held wide the door and I went straight out on to the loud and stinking Colonnade, totally alone, completely unprotected, without so much as a hat to give me privacy. I sprang from the high board, hands together, toes straight — an arrow following a mystery.

She had said I was amazing. She had said I was a star. My hands were lacerated from yesterday’s performance but my arms were strong and I gave the chair the full benefit of my strength. The crowds were close. I had no bell, no horn. I made myself a goose on wheels. I honked. I came through the hawkers and wheel-squirrels at twenty-five miles an hour and those Saarlim gjents and gjils with their wide trousers and their tattooed noses, they stepped aside.

I could see Jacqui, half a block ahead. She was still ‘in character’, walking like a man with her chin thrust forward, her shoulders back, but once you knew, you knew. She was a woman, a rare reckless shining woman — she had a round female backside, a little apricot between her legs.

I thumped across the missing cobblestones on the corner of Shutter Steeg, my maman’s street. I had been to Shutter Steeg three times already, sat in front of No. 35 and stared up at its tall arched windows. But today I had no time for Shutter Steeg. I swung around the tall glass water filtreeders, *crashed down hard across the kerbing. What did I think was going to happen? Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing but a pain that you, Meneer, Madam, would never think was pleasure. Nothing but a hope so wild I allowed it to draw me further from the safety of my room than I had ever travelled alone , in all my life. Was I mad? Yes, I was mad. It is this madness makes salmon leap and crash on to the rocks of rivers.

I summoned all my strength to follow her up the hard high ramp to an exceptionally tall building — a classic wolkekrabber with ornate gold and silver angels above the entrance-way. As I hurtled into the vast atrium I caused a pleasant-looking man with short blond hair and dark eyebrows to convulse — the very sight of me — like a victim of electrotherapy.

The atrium was cavernous, filled with tall columns, reflections, echoes. Jacqui was walking into an elevator car.

I sped across the shining granite floor, my wheels squeaking.

‘Wait,’ I called.

But my voice was lost in the clatter of steel-tipped shoes and my heart’s desire was already inside the elevator.

As the elevator doors shut, I heard a walkie-talkie crackling and saw, reflected in the doors’ shining surface, a burly man in uniform walking towards me. It was the deskmajoor. We can safely assume that he was driven by kindness, the desire to assist the lost and disabled, but I could not bear to see the effect of my monstrous self on one more normal face. So when the next empty elevator opened, I rolled inside. The doors closed swiftly, mercifully.

This time yesterday I had been a little god performing for devotees. Now I was a solitary mutant, trembling, carried upwards.

Then, damn it, the elevator’s walls revealed themselves as glass, and I found myself levitated into the Saarlim sky. I closed my eyes. I tried to breathe. But the old Feu Follet panic settled on my frame, clutched my heart. I thought I would die of dizziness.

When the doors opened on the fifteenth floor, I rushed out.

Only after the doors had shut behind me did I realize that the boarding passengers were carpenters and that I was on a building site, alone.