The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  ‘Peggy, please, not today. Let’s fight when it’s just us.’

  ‘When the Saints walked Voorstand, that is how it was, just like it is in the Ghostdorps. We were decent people then. The Sirkus was not just an entertainment. Bruder Mouse was not a clown. We knew him when we saw him. We did not argue about which was wild flesh and which was Bruder’s flesh. We did not have all these codicils and revisions to the old laws. We ate beans and rice and raagbol pudding. We did not rape and murder. We did not thieve. We were better then.’

  ‘You know that I don’t disagree.’

  ‘Bruder Mouse, the Saints, they walked amongst us.’

  ‘Oh Peggy …’

  ‘Fuck you,’ screamed Peggy Kram. ‘Don’t argue with me. Here he is. Solid as a miller’s wheel. He is looking at you and politely waiting to outline an idea that will have you planting bulbs and making toasts.’

  ‘This is not a mouse.’ Clive Baarder was shouting now, not at me, at Peggy Kram. He was standing up, gripping the long table like he wished to tip it over. ‘A mouse is four inches long.’

  ‘One mo nothing,’ Mrs Kram shouted back, ‘next mo there he was, in all his furry finery.’ She sat down. ‘Look out there,’ she said, nodding her head towards the grey and humid sky. ‘You are looking out on a corrupt and decaying city and you have lost the ability to believe in a future.’

  ‘This is not Bruder Mouse, Peg,’ Clive Baarder said between his teeth. ‘And you damn well know it isn’t. You don’t want to admit that it’s a man, but it is some kind of man, a dwarf.’

  Neither of them was looking at me now.

  ‘So what if you’re right,’ she said. ‘What does that do for you?’

  ‘For me?’ He shrugged.

  ‘It makes you right, that’s all,’ she said. ‘You see the stitching on his suit. Hooray. I see it too. Is that the point? We see the gold paint on the Saint’s crown. So what? The point is not the paint. The point is, we’ve lost our values. We’re eating Bruder’s flesh, we’re putting animals in Sirkuses. That Efican sitting in my garden, what’s his name, Millefleur – riding on horses, frightening lions. That would never have been permitted thirty years ago. He would have gone to jail for even suggesting it.’

  ‘Last week he was hearth folk. You said you liked him.’

  ‘I do like him. That’s why he’s sitting in my garden. I’ve been discussing his future with the Bruder and it will be my great pleasure to employ him in something decent for a change.’

  ‘All right, Meneer Mouse,’ Clive Baarder said sarcastically. ‘Please tell me what the pair of you have been cooking up.’

  ‘It all began,’ I said, ‘when Mrs Kram observed that the Mayor had sold many of the roads and parks to foreign corporations.’

  ‘Entities,’ he said. ‘We call them entities in Voorstand.’ He turned to Mrs Kram. ‘Are you paying attention to this, Peg? Only an Ootlander could call an “entity” a “corporation”.’

  ‘His idea,’ said Peggy Kram, ‘is that we buy them back.’

  ‘Oh Peggy, what is this?’

  ‘Shut up, Clive. I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘Peggy, not even you can buy Saarlim, if that’s what you have in mind.’

  ‘Yes I can. God damn, I am sick of being afraid,’ she said. ‘I am sick that something bad will happen after dark. I’m tired of being afraid of sicko men with knives and poisons.’

  ‘Peggy, you never go out.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  ‘You cannot run a city of ten million like a Ghostdorp. We cannot even run the Ghostdorps that we have. We cannot buy Saarlim.’

  ‘Oh I can. I can buy the roads and parks back from the foreigners. The city’s creditors will be happy. Everyone will be happy. It’s a very patriotic thing to do.’

  ‘Is this the Wishes of The People? Is this government by Each Family Before God?’

  ‘I’m going to give the citizens of Saarlim exactly what they need. Clean streets. Well-dressed people.’

  ‘Stop it, Peg. You’re frightening me. You can’t ask the bhurgers to be like actors in your Ghostdorp. No one will let you. I won’t let you.’

  ‘I’ll let all the decent folk go about their business. It’s quite legal, Clive. We talked to Frear Munroe.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Peggy, you are not well. You really must deal with your own past.’

  ‘When you say past …’

  ‘I mean past.’

  ‘No, no, you’re talking code. You mean I want to do this because I was raped? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Good. Because I can run a clean Ghostdorp and I can run this city. I can have the parks safe all night long. I can have the streets tidy and neat. The grass in the park will be cut. It is so very simple. People will come from all over the world once again. We will be a great nation once again.’

  ‘This is not your idea.’

  ‘This bit is mine,’ she said.

  ‘And how would you make the streets safe exactly?’

  ‘I wouldn’t let unsavoury types walk on them.’

  Clive Baarder nodded his head slowly. Then, for the first time since the meeting began, he turned and looked at me.

  ‘Do you hate Voorstand?’ he asked me.

  ‘He loves Voorstand. Leave him alone.’

  ‘He is an Ootlander,’ he said to Peggy Kram. ‘He uses Ootland words. Now he’s trying to deprive us of our freedom.’

  In answer to this charge, Bruder Mouse said not a word. He slipped out of his chrome and leather chair and walked in that rolling sailor’s walk towards the longest wall of windows. Despite the comic nature of this walk, despite the broken tooth and the spangled blue waistcoat with the button missing, anyone could see this was a powerful figure. He stood and faced Clive Baarder. Behind his back was all of Saarlim, all its territories and municipalities, roads, Steegs, platzes, freeways, overpasses, intersections, public bridges, all glowing pink and dusty in the late summer light.

  Such was the intensity of this moment for each of the three people in the trothaus boardroom that, when Wendell Deveau’s pistol fired twenty feet away, they barely noticed it. A sort of phhht, that’s all.

  54

  Jacqui recognized that sound. She had heard it at the DoS in that long thin basement room on the Boulevard des Indiennes – the sound of a silenced Glock, like a fart.

  ‘Tristan!’ She ran across the glossy blue tiles, through the glass door, into the trothaus foyer. There, in that gloomy chapel-like space with its Neu Zwolfe triptych and big gilt-framed mirrors, she heard a peculiar drumming noise which she later knew was her old lover’s heels doing their death dance on the tiles.

  They were lying together, the two men: Wendell on top, Wally Paccione underneath. The old man had his piano-wire garrotte around the agent’s throat.

  As Jacqui knelt, Wendell’s great fleshy legs twitched. One foot had lost its shoe. The sock still had a gold stick-on label on its sole. His arm flopped out sideways. She jumped back, her hand to her mouth, as his Glock clattered to the floor.

  ‘Help him,’ Bill said.

  But there was no one to help. Wendell had finally managed to shoot Wally Paccione through the rib cage – the bullet had passed upwards and sideways into his heart. Wally was dead. He was tied on to Wendell’s throat with a piece of grisly piano wire.

  In their struggle, a chair had broken. A 200-year-old plaster statue of the Dog-headed Saint lay on the floor, his plaster crown in fragments on the floor.

  I sat on the floor amongst the broken plaster. I looked at Wally’s dead, dead face, the hollow cheeks, the dried lips, the wide belligerent eyes, the arms that held the gory garrotte, all the tendons standing out like lines of cable underneath his skin.

  I could see the line of small round white scars along his arms. Those arms and hands had bathed me, swaddled me, taught birds to dance, gripped his knees while he was the Human Ball, perhaps not in life, but always, forever, in my mind.


  I whispered in the big old wattle of his ear. I was so close to him, the little white hairs, the freckles. I was full of my own poison. I told him that I had been wrong, that it was not his fault that we were robbed. I told him that I loved him. I could feel Peggy Kram pulling at my bulky suit. I felt so ill. My mask was full of my own foul air. I told him he had more love in his heart than any of us.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Peggy said, trying to help me up. ‘I own five Sirkuses. I can promise you, there’ll be no trouble.’

  ‘Peggy …’ said Clive Baarder. ‘Please watch what you say.’

  ‘God damn,’ shrieked Peggy Kram, ‘this is family. I said we’d fix it, Clive. We’ll fix it. You get the damn Mayor on the phone.’

  ‘He’s in court.’

  ‘Get him out of damn court.’

  ‘They’re Ootlanders.’

  I turned from Peggy Kram and caught sight of all our images in the great mirror. What a filthy frieze it was – that sweet old man and Bruder Mouse – a perverse Pietà. How I loathed the Bruder’s grinning face, those floppy ears. My stomach clenched and I knew I was going to be sick.

  ‘Bill, help me,’ but no one heard me.

  ‘This is murder, Peg,’ Clive Baarder said.

  Now I was retching inside my suit. The contents of my stomach rose up inside the mask, were sucked down my nose.

  Suffocating, I tried to pull the Binder’s head off, but Peggy Kram got her little hands around my wrists.

  ‘No,’ she cried, ‘no, please, I beg you.’

  It was Jacqui who saved me. She was smaller, finer, lighter than Peggy Kram, but she yanked the produkter by her mane of hair and pulled her free. Then she placed her hands on either side of my Bruder head and dug her nails into the slit she had so diligently sewn up. And then she ripped, ripped my Mouse-head apart like it was orange peel. She tore the head off like a prawn.

  In the mirror we all stood and stared at my true face. I turned, gagging, aching for breath.

  Spare me, please, the memory of Peggy Kram’s face when she saw my true nature.

  55

  ‘It’s OK,’ my father said. He was a well-dressed, handsome man, an actor. He was hearth folk. He came towards Peggy Kram, holding up his pale pink hands. ‘Peggy, please. It’s OK, really.’

  But Peggy could no longer see him. She could see only the horrid creature that had put its red prong between her legs. She saw blood, snot, some ill-defined horror like a piece of meat, wrapped in plastic, left too long in the refrigerator.

  ‘It’s It,’ she cried, crossing herself in front of me. ‘It’s Marchosias. God save us. It’s the Hairy Man. God save us.’

  If this was Efica we could have dismissed all this as ‘just religion’, but this was Voorstand and we were Ootlanders and my father therefore wrapped his strong body around mine. He lifted me into the air with his left arm. He held out his right hand to Jacqui Lorraine.

  ‘It’s Dagon,’ screamed Peggy Kram. ‘God save us.’

  ‘Goodbye old man,’ Bill said to Wally’s body.

  ‘It’s Red Saatanil,’ said Clive Baarder, and I swear he meant it. ‘God save us.’

  ‘God save us,’ hollered Peggy Kram, throwing herself on her knees before the triptych.

  We left the dear old Human Ball. We had no choice. We left him grinning, stretched out with his victim. The elevator was rising towards us, but Bill, fearing it contained more assassins, led us through the fire door to the stairs.

  Why did we flee? We had done nothing wrong. Why did we rush out the back way and abandon our belongings like criminals?

  Because, Madam, Meneer, my father had studied your Great Historical Past, and when Mrs Kram began to recite the Thirteen Names, he recognized the ritual from the Geloof Trials of a hundred years before. He saw the way Tristan Smith’s own history was moving.

  A bright red rail spiralled down twenty storeys to a chessboard floor.

  ‘Hoop,’ Bill said, and knelt so he could pick up Jacqui Lorraine around the waist.

  She was one hundred pounds. I was sixty-five. When he got astride the banister he had the hundred pounds over the stairs, the sixty-five above the abyss. There was no rehearsal, no net, and his balance was by no means perfect, but as Gabe Manzini rose inside the elevator, as Kram and Baarder screamed the Thirteenth Name down into the pit, we were speeding towards sanity at thirty miles an hour.

  On the fifteenth floor we wobbled.

  On the twelfth I thought we were dead.

  ‘Ooop-la,’ Bill cried, holding us both, spinning on his toes as we landed. He wore his grey silk suit with snakeskin patches. He wore his elastic-sided boots with diamonds in the heels.

  56

  If you registered motor cars, like any other country in the world, perhaps you would have tracked us as we ran from you.

  But you are who you are, and we who we are, and we drove five days across some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen. We travelled across the dairy belt, up higher and higher into the Gelt Plateau. In other words, we travelled in the opposite direction to the one you had expected, into the country where they still hang the Hairy Man to make the corn grow. We drove through the night, through lone pine forests with no other habitation but simple miners’ shacks with their kitsch folk figures in the barren front yards, with their neat stacks of yellow wood lined up along the high verandas, ready for the winter. As we went higher the cornfields were silver, gold, brown. And everywhere the flag, crimson in the morning, carmine in the shade.

  After we left Highway 270, we took roads so small they often had no names. Then we travelled through a lace-work of little lanes and plateau towns where you could see tin cut-outs of Bruder Mouse nailed to the barn doors.

  Each night we slept in the car, fogging the windows with our life stories – Jacqui and her drinking mother, Bill and I and all those long-lost performances at the Feu Follet.

  In the early mornings, before dawn, Jacqui left the car and went stealing. You know, by now, exactly what she stole: the three blankets, the raisin buns, the whole round of cheese, the red woollen shirt, all that drearily itemized account which is the substance of the charge against her. But I doubt you know, Meneer, Madam, that damn cheese weighed twenty pounds and she dumped it on the roof of the car at five a.m., scared us shitless, laughed herself silly to see Bill Millefleur dancing round the steering wheel trying to get his pants on.

  Jacqui had returned the long skirt and blue top to Malide. Now she had another black skirt, a loose grey sweater, and a white singlet. As we travelled higher, as the cornfields grew gold and silver, she also became burnished. Her eyes (perhaps they were always like this, but I only saw it now) became flecked with colour like an opal, beads of soft brown in the hazy blue light, and there was a calm about her, a passivity I had never seen in her in all the time I knew her.

  She, whose life had been marked by the sharp snapping of her fingers, her need for risk and action, now sat calmly for hours on end. I do not mean to suggest that she travelled silently. Indeed she talked rather a lot.

  The more I listened to her, the more exactly she painted the picture of her childhood, the less I felt I had known her, and the more attractive she became.

  She who had entrapped me, used me, was the same person who came through the high wet grass at six on a misty morning carrying three bottles of milk clinking in a canvas sack.

  Raw eggs we ate, by streams in sunlight, mung beans by the handful, hard corn intended for cattle.

  A twilight comradeship developed between the three of us, a friendship marked by great intimacy, small kindnesses. It was a tender plant that I, at that time, did not expect to live into whatever night might lie ahead. It was not equal, of course – there were three of us, and my father was a handsome man, Jacqui a good-looking woman.

  I think I said I was accustomed to pain, that it was, in my case, almost synonymous with pleasure. But now, it seemed, the pain was less, the pleasure greater. My experience with Peggy Kram was quite enough, in every se
nse, so although I had begun the journey in the front seat, I soon sought out the back.

  There, wrapped in a blanket which I was forever ready to pull around my face, in fear of my life, surrounded by animus, taunted by the dangling effigy of the Hairy Man at wayside shrines, I was more alive than ever in my life before.

  By now you know where we went. We drove right up into the Arctic Circle where the temperatures were low enough to give you frostbite in a second and in a hunting lodge on a lake three miles from Port Wilhelm I sat in a bathroom and watched Bill and Jacqui dye their hair blond.

  At the very hour Peggy Kram gave her deposition in the Bhurgercourt,* we sailed from Voorstand on the Nordic Trader bound for Bergen. Jacqui was dressed as a man. Bill carried me on board inside the Mouse suit, disguised as a souvenir. At that time, although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning.

  Chemin Rouge, 426

  Deposition given by Margaret Kram, Produkter, to the Bhurgercourt of Voorstand

  It came to me disguised as one of God’s Creatures. Its true nature was monstrous, like the Hairy Man, the thing with scales that Bruder Duck saw in the woods, the little black thing that swished its tail and stamped its foot with rage.

  It was charming, ingratiating, with numerous stories and songs. It walked upon the public street, moving without let or hindrance amongst the folk. It performed many tricks, some with eggs and spoons. I never saw it eat or heard it complain of hunger. It would never show its face.

  It said it had no wish to come to Voorstand, that it came only to see ‘My Father’. It lived inside the skin of the Mouse. It spoke with the voice of a man. It said it lived on air. It said it was born in ‘the Shadows of the Sirkus’. It said it had drunk ‘the Light of your Dreams’ and lived ‘in the Penumbra of your Lives’.

  For a brief time, to my great shame, I fell under its spell. When I saw its true nature, I asked it, what have we done to you that you should bear us such enmity?

  It had no reason.

  Glossary