The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  Five blocks later he was through the Kakdorp. He crossed the small gilt bridge into the Bleskran and here, where the walls of the buildings were clad in marble and granite, his style could be more civilized. Now he paused to look in shops whose bevelled glass windows held expensive items of gold and silk. He crossed the colonnade so he could look down on the long sleek-hulled boats of the Bleskran Kanal, and then he wandered up Shutter Steeg to look at No. 35, the narrow Gothic house my maman had lived in until her seventeenth year. Then he followed Shutter Steeg back up to the top of the Bleskran where, at the point where Bleskran ends and Demos Platz begins, he came to a tall wrought-iron screen stretching right across the colonnade like something in a Catholic church.

  Here he stood, running a white handkerchief over that slightly dented bony skull, wishing he had changed his clothes. Through the grille he could make out the long mosaic title of the building which he knew was his destination. ‘The letters ran in pink and gold from the top floor vertically to the canal: The Baan’. The ‘B’ was topped with a small gold crown. And after the ‘n’ were a pair of crossed sceptres.

  ‘Jo, Bruder!’

  Wally made no attempt to disguise the distaste he felt for the security guard who thus addressed him – the belly protruding above the belt, the rolled-up zine in the back pocket. ‘I’m looking for this number.’ He produced a crumpled postcard which he read with some little difficulty. ‘247 Demos Platz.’

  ‘OK, you looked.’

  Wally began to walk towards the gate. The guard then put a meaty hand on his stooped shoulder and, as he did so, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt.

  ‘Move, Bruder.’

  YOU move, mo-ami,’ Wally said, stepping forward, pushing his neck forward and scowling.

  The guard drew the night stick and held it in both hands, as if he intended to crush it into Wally’s windpipe.

  ‘For Christ’s sake’ – Wally held up his hands – ‘all I’m doing is visiting.’

  ‘Move.’

  ‘Read,’ Wally said, pushing the postcard at the guard. ‘His name is Bill Millefleur. He’s asking me to visit.’

  ‘Footsack,’ the guard said. ‘Scat. Shoo-fly.’

  ‘Footsack bullshit,’ Wally said, but he saw it would not matter what he said. He turned on his heels, humiliated.

  He came into the dingy hotel room with all his failure and embarrassment sheathed in anger. When he discovered that Jacques and I had progressed no further with our plan than to pick open the outer skin of the Simi, he exploded.

  ‘Can’t anyone do anything?’ he said. ‘Here. Give it to me.’

  ‘No, no,’ Jacques said. ‘Just lie down. I’ll run the bath.’

  All I could see was that he had no money and was angry. He snatched the Simi from our grasp and pulled his traveller’s jackknife from his pocket.

  ‘Please,’ I yelled. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Don’t hurt it,’ Jacques said. ‘Please, Mr Paccione. We haven’t cut it because it’s so easy to damage it. It’s valuable …’

  Wally ignored us both. First he used the big blade, cutting through the wire-reinforced rubber in a two-foot long slit. He put his hand inside and found the ‘core’ – a pink glutinous substance in a plastic sac.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Jacques.

  The core was joined to the rib frame by six or so small plastic tendons. He snipped these with the jackknife scissors and flipped the sac out on to the floor where it lay like an enlarged liver, quivering on the blue and green striped carpet. Next he began cutting away at the thin plastic connections between the computer cradle and the wire – reinforced body. Where the servo-motor made its connections with the web of wire embedded in its rubberized inner skin, he used his pliers, cutting each wire as close as possible, feeling with his big fat thumb.

  First his temper invigorated him, and then his pride in his expertise began to soothe him, and when it was finally done, and he had removed sacs of pink stuff from the head, and the articulated plastic rods from the legs, he tidied up the mess he had made, bundling everything into the trash can. He lay on the bed and let the pillows take the weight of his ruined spine.

  ‘There,’ he said. He felt better, more like himself. ‘That’s how you do it.’

  Jacques, having just witnessed the butchering of his precious souvenir, was pale and ill-looking. I did not notice. I was too busy strapping wads of toilet paper to the side of my ankles. When that was done I stripped down to my underpants and lay down on top of the Mouse so my privately devastated nurse could fit me inside it. Then I rolled on my stomach while Jacques fiddled around with a needle and thread.

  When I stood, I was already my new character.

  BRUDER MOUSE stepped forward, bowed, moved to one side. I was quirky, quick, bow-legged, a little too weird to be a legitimate descendant of the Free Franciscan Church, but I held out my arms to Jacques, silently asking if he might like to dance.

  27

  Jacqui’s precious Simi was now as boneless as a fish fillet, its insides reduced to pink gunk like the inside of an old-style golfball. In place of all this cyber-junk dwelt I, yours truly, Tristan Smith.

  Jacqui had valued that Simi like you yourself might value your Delft, your Doulton, and you might reasonably expect her to be devastated by its evisceration, but Jacqui was an artist on a slack rope* and she did not have time to stop to pick up broken pieces. She was in Saarlim, undercover, and the very thought of this extraordinary fact was enough to bring back the glow to her skin, the brightness to her long-lashed eyes. She did not know what would happen next.

  She grasped my hand – not mine exactly, but the gloved hand of the limping bow-legged Mouse, which looked like a creation of the laser board, twisted, exaggerated, but rolling, lurching, both comic and benign.

  We stepped out together, two actors, both did our respective walks down the hotel hallway, through the stained marble foyer, deep in our respective characters.

  Ahead of her she saw the deskmajoor. He was tall but pudgy, not like an operative, but Leona had not looked like an operative either, and the cops on the street did not look like Gardiacivil. Any moment she could be contacted, perhaps by this very man. He was coming her way, and if this was the guy she was ready for him. She inhaled the foreign air in the Marco Polo foyer as greedily as she had earlier inhaled the diesel and coal smoke of the Grand Concourse.

  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 exte
rnals. 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]

  28

  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.

  ‘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.’