The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Don’t be such a rucking Bruder. Take your damn suit off. Can’t you see he’s pleased to see you?’

  ‘Mr … Walk … Away.’

  ‘Relax, he’ll be back in a moment.’

  ‘Fuck … him.’

  But then Bill did come back, stooping under the low roof and seating himself beside me.

  ‘Now, Tristan, speak to me.’

  But he seemed so far from me, so far, far away.

  ‘You … don’t … know … what … I’ve … become.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, laying his hand gently on my shoulder.

  For a moment I imagined he was apologizing for something that had happened on the deck, but then I saw it was the same old thing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t catch that first bit. Maybe if you took the suit off. Maybe then you wouldn’t be so muffled.’ It was typical of him that he did not ask me why I wore the suit, or what I was doing with it.

  In any case – I did not wish to take my suit off, and suffer his misunderstanding, all the false pity in his eyes. I wanted to set it straight with him – I was a man. Thus I began to speak to him, slowly, very carefully.

  ‘We … have … not … seen … each … other … for … many … years.’

  ‘We have not seen your mother?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘All right,’ Wally stood. ‘Don’t shout. Mollo mollo. Just say it again. Your dab will get the hang of it.’

  But my father did not ‘get the hang’ of how I spoke, and thus I travelled towards the Baan, not deep in the intimate conversation Jacqui imagined, but in a misery of anger and misunderstanding.

  38

  My father, in returning from the Water Sirkus, was late for an important dinner party in his own apartment. He had planned this dinner party three months before, and once it was planned it could not be cancelled – this inflexibility being a reflection, not of his character, but of manners in Saarlim City.

  As you know, Saarlim has its etiquette. One does not, as in Chemin Rouge, drop over for a roteuse and stay all day. One does not arrive with a round of cheese and a baton and expect to be welcomed. There is this surprising strictness, this lack of ease, which is disturbing for an Efican, and it co-exists with what feels like exactly the opposite tendency: it is not in the least impolite for a host to be absent from the greater part of his or her own dinner party.

  If you are from Saarlim, you will find nothing unusual in all of this, but for the rest of us, let me tell you, Saarlim dinner parties at first appear anarchic – confusing empty chairs and inexplicably appearing and disappearing guests. It is not until somewhere around eleven at night, when the Sirkuses are finally dark, well after we Ootlanders have lost all patience, that the table finally unifies. The tablecloth is replaced. New silverware appears. Ornate candlesticks are brought from hiding, and the pudding is served with a formality that we in Efica reserve for a good pork bake.*

  You know this already, Meneer, Madam? Then skip ahead. There are other readers, however, to whom this may be surprising, Ootlanders who have until this moment expected your manners to be just like Bruder Mouse’s or Bruder Duck’s. You think this is preposterous? Then let me tell you: you have no idea how you are perceived.

  Elsewhere in the world, when they imagine your personal character, they expect to see you blowing bubbles in your soup. They have seen the Drool or Dog pee in the Sirkus. They have heard the Mouse fart and play the bagpipes. They draw the wrong conclusion, and not merely about your table manners.

  Having passed their lifetimes spending one eighth of their gross incomes on Sirkuses, it is hard for some Ootlanders to accept that they are not attuned to the soul of Saarlim. They may never have visited Voorstand but they know the names of the Steegs, the kanals, the parks, the bars, the Domes. They own programme notes from performances they have never seen. They can discuss tragic deaths you never heard of, minor performers you have long forgotten. But they do not live in Saarlim and therefore there is much that they do not understand. It might be difficult to convince someone from Ukrainia, for instance, that it requires a highly tuned sense of etiquette to live in a building like the Baan.

  So for the Ootland readers, let me make this thing clear: in the Sirkus, Bruder Mouse could say ‘gaaf-morning’ to any of God’s Creatures, whether they had met before or no, but in the Baan it took a whole necklace of introductions for Bill to engineer a meeting with his neighbour, Kram. It was a slow process – almost a year before he could put her, socially speaking, in check. And then another six months of toing and froing with the gold-toothed intermediary, Clive Baarder, before they could confirm a night which was suitable for both of them.

  They lived in the same building, used the same glass-walled elevators, walked into or out of the foyers next to each other, and although she was a Sirkus Produkter and he a Sirkus Star, they might as well have lived on different planets, and even after the invitation was issued and accepted they waited until the dinner when they would finally know each other. This is one aspect of karakter.

  You are always explaining karakter to us visitors, telling us it means politeness, manners, breeding – but even as you do so you let us know we can never hope to understand exactly what it is. It is in the blood more than in the language. It is a Saarlim thing and after twenty years in Saarlim City it was still a notion that made my father not quite easy.

  Bill had a six-room apartment. Peggy Kram occupied an entire floor, a real Bleskran trothaus with topiary and library. She dressed in long flowing garments in various earth tones which you could wear down to the Kakdorp among the throng without being remarked on as anyone wealthy but which, in the muted lights of a trothaus with the lights and the little lasers dancing on the ceiling fibre, was obviously a Van Kline with a price tag of 100,000 Guilders.

  Such was life in the society whose original Christian vegetarian heresies still reflected the character of the ‘Sirkus with no prisoners’.

  Bill’s whole dinner party (the one which had been irrevocably set for the night when he would finally have the chance to reunite with his lost son) centred on Peggy Kram, and not because Bill thought her charming or even interesting – he feared that she was neither – but because Bill’s contract with the Sirkus Brits had finally been terminated and Peggy Kram was a produkter who not only owned twenty Ghostdorps (where she had whole families of actors playing out the ‘The Great Historical Past’) but also four Sirkus Domes in Saarlim City.

  Bill needed work.

  And when he returned to his own dinner party at half past ten he hoped that the family obligation which had made his absence necessary might further elevate Kram’s idea of his karakter. And yet, as he had never been totally confident that he truly understood the nuances of karakter, he entered his own apartment with some trepidation.

  What he saw there did not encourage him.

  His lover of that year (Malide Van Kraligan, the posturer) was asleep on the sofa with her little rose-bud mouth open and her slender arm across her eyes. Peggy Kram, a little plump, but very glamorous with her mane of blonde curls, was loudly quarrelling with the English bottelier (hired for the occasion) about the temperature of her Mersault.

  The rented antique lace tablecloth was rumpled. The glassware and silver was in total disarray and Martel Difebaker, a legendary posturer, a man known for his fastidiousness, was sitting nodding his head in a stricken sort of way. Clive Baarder (who had been the intermediary for the meeting) was filing his nails.

  When Mrs Kram looked up and saw the enigmatic figure of Bruder Mouse, she stopped arguing about the wine.

  I barely noticed her. I knew nothing of karakter. Nor did I know that she was one of the most powerful women in Saarlim. I was hot, tired, thirsty, irritated to find my father entertaining strangers on what he had three times declared an Important Night. So when the gold-toothed Baarder rose from his ornate chair and took a mock karate position in relationship to me, I had had enough. I walked out of the room.

  In doing this, i
t was not my intention to damage my father economically. I did not understand his situation. And when he finally found me, dipping my snout into a basin of water in the bathroom, he still did not explain who Mrs Kram was.

  ‘Tristan!’

  I turned, with water pouring down my neck and wetting my chest, in search of something practical to help me drink.

  ‘Get … me … a … straw … please.’

  Bill knew he could keep his Big Shot Guest waiting a moment longer – two minutes, maybe three – while he finally established his meeting with me.

  ‘Please, please. Please take the head-bit off. We have to understand each other.’

  ‘Go … back … to … your … friends.’ I shrugged myself free of him.

  ‘They don’t have to see you,’ he said. ‘You can get back in your suit for them.’

  ‘Mo-dab … I’m … just … so … thirsty.’

  But he began to fiddle with the suit. Or that is what I imagined. Later, on the road to Wilhelm, he swore to me that he had done no such thing, that he was simply patting me, but the fluttering feeling of his theatrically ringed fingers awakened old feelings of anger and I pushed him, hard.

  He looked so hurt I thought he was going to cry.

  ‘Please … get … a … straw.’ I wrote s-t-r-a-w in the air, slowly.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘a straw.’

  He rushed out and came back with a whole damn box of straws. He had perhaps a minute before he had to go and be the host.

  Tristan, I have to work when I go in there,’ he said. ‘I just need to know that we’re OK.’

  At last I had a single straw. I began to syphon down the chlorinated water.

  ‘Tristan, I don’t know who you are in there.’

  He did not know, because he had not been there. He did not know that I had hidden in the darkness of the Feu Follet for eleven years, that I had worked each day on all the tricks he taught me and then lost interest in, that I could do things no doctor could ever have predicted, that I could juggle, tumble, stand on one hand.

  I wiped my wet synthetic fur with his dainty little guest towel.

  ‘You … want … to … know … who … I … am?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he frowned. ‘Mrs Kram is waiting.’

  ‘I’ll … show … you.’

  If he had told me who Mrs Kram was, I might have acted differently.

  *In Efica, unlike Voorstand, it is perfect manners to serve meat at a formal meal. [TS]

  39

  Jacqui was sitting beside Clive Baarder, wondering if it would be rude to lean across the table and take the bottle of wine from in front of Peggy Kram, when she heard behind her a light bumping sound, like a baby falling down the stairs. Turning sideways in her ornate high-backed chair, she saw the Mouse tumbling.

  I saw her see me.

  I saw her embarrassment, the slow motion of her hand coming to cover her eyes. As she turned in her chair, I completed my gymnastic entrance, twisting in mid-air. I landed, feet astride, my back to her.

  Chubby red-cheeked Clive Baarder – the gold-toothed gjent who had earlier faced me in karate pose – now retreated towards the sofa by the window.

  The tall hollow-cheeked athletic man, Difebaker the posturer, stood in order to see me better.

  But the queen-like Peggy Kram stayed seated at the head of the table – one jewelled hand across her pretty mouth, her other hand outstretched, grasping the slender neck of the Mersault bottle. This one, let me tell you, no matter what she hinted later in her deposition, was not embarrassed. She raised her glass and sipped the straw-coloured wine but her clear blue eyes never left me.

  Thus Mrs Kram became my audience. She was awake, alive to the moment. As for the host, he had followed me into the room and was now behind me out of sight. I confess that I forgot him.

  ‘Well,’ the lady said in a small breathy voice, which still carried the glottal stops of the desert regions near the eastern border. ‘Well, how about that thing?’

  She clapped her hands together softly.

  ‘Those things are dangerous,’ said Clive Baarder, blinking anxiously.

  He was now back on the sofa, his short legs crossed, an embroidered velvet cushion placed protectively across his pinstriped lap. ‘You know that, Peggy,’ he said. ‘You damn all know it well as I do.’

  But no one looked at Clive Baarder. They looked at me. What did they think I was? I did not know. I was kneeling, holding out my arms, looking straight at Peggy Kram’s clear wilful eyes.

  Clive Baarder felt himself compelled to stand, and, whilst obviously most reluctant to do it, walked behind Jacqui’s chair to be a little closer to me.

  ‘Last time I saw one of these things, Peggy … Peggy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peggy absently.

  My knees were sore, and yet I feared to break the spell by standing.

  ‘It caught on fire,’ Clive Baarder said, ‘in a gondel in the Kakdorp. I saw it. I was up on the Colonnade near St Oloff’s with Dirk Juta.’

  ‘Dirk will be there tomorrow,’ Mrs Kram said absently.

  ‘Yes, and it caught on fire. They pushed it off near the Dagloner Kanal and it floated down for miles, still burning.’

  ‘Peggy,’ said Martel Difebaker in the careful rounded tones of the professional Sirkus class. He was almost opposite me, next to Mrs Kram. ‘One really must conclude that it is not a Simi.’

  Mrs Kram broke her yellow egg-bread, and sipped her wine, still staring at me with such intensity that I began to blush inside my mask. Any moment, I felt, she would ask my father who I really was. But I did not know her history or her passions. She was from the Zeelung border where the Settlers Free first settled, where the Bruder stories are set, where we Eficans saw the sculpted feet of Bruder Dog rise from the desert floor. She was also a collector of artefacts, a connoisseur of folk art. She liked to show her expertise. ‘This is absolutely not a Simi,’ she declared.

  Bill sat himself down next to the place where I continued kneeling. He talked over my head to Mrs Kram.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘This is totally my fault.’

  What was he apologizing for? Peggy Kram frowned and pursed her lips.

  ‘On every side,’ Bill said.

  ‘This is not a Simulacrum?’ said Clive Baarder, now approaching the table, still holding the small black velvet cushion. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Easier to say what it is not,’ said Martel Difebaker, arranging his long and supple fingers so they rested on the tip of his pointed chin. ‘Not a Simulacrum. Not a child.’

  This was the place where Bill Millefleur might have performed the formal introduction of his son. But now he feared that he had acted in bad karakter by bringing me to table in my costume. He shut his mouth and held on tight, hoping it would work out for the best.

  ‘You’re not a dwarf?’ Peggy Kram said to me. Her hair was gorgeous, a wild tangle of a mane. As she spoke, she pushed it back from her eye.

  It was then I heard Wally sigh. For some time I had been aware of him in the corner of my eye, but now he was glowing with a sort of fury, blowing out his cheeks and wiping his bald head with his big freckled hands. ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself,’ he hissed.

  This comment created a strange little silence while all the Voorstanders, Mrs Kram included, looked briefly at the tablecloth.

  Then Martel Difebaker spoke. ‘This is absolutely not a dwarf. I work with dwarfs – Serango, all those gjents. Can you imagine Serango’s head inside that suit?’

  ‘Tristan!’ persisted Wally.

  Again the Voorstanders looked down at the tablecloth.

  ‘Who is Tristan?’ Clive Baarder asked when they looked up.

  I was on the brink. I saw it coming. I was the girl in the cake. Now I would be forced to unmask. It was then, before anyone could speak, that I leapt up into Peggy Kram’s lap. I knew I risked offence, but I was walking on the slack rope. I had to go forward.

  Peggy Kram squealed. And held her hands up. I would
not have planned it, but the hands went up, the hands came down, and when they did my head was nestled between her generous breasts.

  Jacqui closed her eyes. Wally held his bald head in his hands – everything I saw told me I had committed a faux pas, but neither Jacqui nor Wally could feel the heat of Peggy Kram. I could, right through my suit. I could smell her hair, her skin.

  ‘A humorist,’ she said.

  In the mirror I saw her take my mouse’s soft ear between her fingers and stroke it.

  ‘But what is it?’ said Clive Baarder. ‘I’d want to know, Peg, before I let it put its nose …’

  ‘Oh, that’s a joke,’ said Peggy Kram. ‘That is a joke, coming from you. Of all the people to …’

  ‘All right Peggy, that’s enough.’

  ‘Of all the people.’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘You know what the trouble is? We are all so knowledgeable. We know what makes rainbows refract light. Love is all to do with DNA.’

  ‘Not really DNA.’

  ‘Yes, DNA.’

  Bill sat down and began to eat his bread, tearing it apart and slathering it with butter.

  ‘DNA or not, this is obviously not the actual Bruder Mouse.’

  I peeked a look at Mrs Kram. I snuggled back down into her breast. She put her hand around my neck.

  ‘Peggy?’ said Clive Baarder, his lips wet and wobbly, his voice rising incredulously.

  Peggy Kram did not answer.

  Clive Baarder began to arrange his cutlery with great fastidiousness.

  ‘You believe in St Francis and Jesus Christ?’ Peggy Kram asked him. ‘You believe the birds talked to Jesus – that’s what you believe – am I right?’

  ‘Of course. Peg.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you this, Clive,’ said Kram, leaning across me to take her glass of wine and releasing with this gesture a giddy rush of jasmine. ‘We owned Simis. We owned two hundred of them. When they banned them in Saarlim, we bought them for the Ghostdorps. This is not a Simulacrum. It does not move like one, or feel like one. And all I am saying to you, why do you want to explain it …’