The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (44 page)

Leona drove us into leaking tunnels, under rusting bridges. All around us were grim brick buildings, some with windows, some merely with broken glass, and where the glass was not broken it was dirty. In Chemin Rouge we like to keep things clean. In Chemin Rouge we do not throw our garbage out on the public highway. Saarlim City was littered with abandoned papers, cans, bottles, cars, mattresses, stuffed furniture.

‘We’re going to do just fine,’ Wally said. But the old bird had a tired, strained look. He ran his hand over his bony head. ‘This is going to be my kind of town.’

But we had no money and the light was tired, yellow, poisonous. We crossed a long high rattling metal bridge across grassy marshlands in which one could make out the rainbow-slick of chemicals. Through the yellow mist we saw tall buildings clustering on the horizon. It was the fabled city, but I would have given anything to be back inside the mouldy safety of the Ducrow Circus School.

Leona swung the wheel, hit the horn, braked, accelerated, cursed, and then, hitting the current as it were, accelerated along a long avenue, weaving in and out of the traffic, bicyclists, reversing rollerskaters, wheel-squirrels of every size and colour.

We Ootlanders became quiet, like chickens squashed into a metal
box for market. Finally it was Wally who asked, ‘Will we be near the Grand Concourse when we stop?’

‘Near it?’ Leona said. ‘Honey, you in it.’

The Grand Concourse. The home of Sirkus. When we had planned our Sirkus Tour, I had expected a certain standard. I looked out at a grim and sweaty avenue backed by tall grey-brick apartment buildings, lined with street stalls, pawnbrokers, liquor stores, strip clubs, electronics stores. I did not know it would be like this. I knew your agents had murdered my maman, but I also knew, since always, that you Voorstanders were neat, professional. Even in the matter of that murder – it was not amateurs killed my mother.

It was through your charm and your expertise that you conquered us, with your army, yes, and with the VIA, but you kept us conquered with jokes and dancers, death and beauty, holographs, lasers, vids, with perfectly engineered and orchestrated suspense.

If the government of Voorstand now imagines that I came to threaten it, tell me, please – where is my Mouse, my Dog, my Duck? I came with nothing, not even courage. When we got to the Grand Concourse where we would have to stand in line to get our POW cards, I did not even want to leave the air-kooled Blikk.

That’s the sort of threat I was. I was too ashamed to face the public gaze. It was Jacques (our polite, attentive, self-effacing nurse) who grabbed the Mouse by its clenched white hand and yanked it out the car, and stood in the fetid air, spookily, electrically triumphant.

I was on the sidewalk, my back against the rear fenders of Leona’s Blikk. Jacques – the person I thought of as Jacques – was three feet away, standing on top of a rusting grating.

I ordered ‘him’ – for I did not know how to read his tusch, his peach, his insouciant dance-hall walk – I ordered this ‘him’ to return the Simi to the car. I had to shout, but he heard me.

‘No,’ he said, like that.

There he stood – my opposite – his eyes big, electric, his cheeks flushed, his limbs kind of agitated, drumming. How handsome he looked to me, how strong, well-formed. How I envied him, admired him, and – when he picked up this Cyborg, this Simi, this
dead rat, and stood there holding it around its neck, tapping his foot – how I feared the consequences of his will.

Ticket scalpers, smelling blood, milled round us with their stiff cardboard tickets – pink, green, silver – displayed like feathers on their long split sticks. I was defenceless: a snail without a shell.

It was like the Zeelung border, but this time the whole food chain was alerted to our weakness – Burmese boys with fireworks to sell, beggars with rattling cups, pickpocket gangs with sheets of cardboard, and lice eggs under their nails – and there was all this damn press upon us, and whether I was not seen and trampled, or seen and reviled, one thing was as bad as the other.

I turned to Wally for help, only to discover that he too was lost to me: standing there with his mouth open, staring up at a neon sign.
‘The Gyro Sirkus’
, the sign said.
‘Who will die tonight?’

Me. Me. I will die tonight. The air was rank, sweaty, so loud with the noises of sirens and klaxons that my bones vibrated.

I said, ‘Make … him … stop.’

Stop what? I did not say. Hardly knew.

‘Mollo mollo,’ Wally said. He was in a dream. He had his hands resting on his lower back, and he was leaning forward, staring at those stained and sweating Sirkus Domes – the subject of 10,000 Ph. Ds, the celebrated meeting of the Sacred and Profane, the High and Low, the New and Old, the Dutch and English. How tacky they looked, how tawdry.

I turned from Wally back to Jacques. His upturned little nose was peeling, his small flat ears were red, his large brown eyes were alive, almost hyper-thyroid, with defiance and excitement. I did not know if he was male or female. He held that Simi. He clutched it, holding it like raw meat in shark waters.

‘Put … the … rat … back … now.’

Jacques smiled at me and buttoned his jacket.

Above his head, tied to the balconies of a stained concrete apartment building, was a flapping canvas sign: ‘18th INFANTRY. PRISONERS OF WAR.’

Leona was trying to unfold my wheelchair. Jacques was now holding the Mouse underneath its arms and pretending to make it walk. You see the problem – our nurse was a Voorwacker, a fan, a follower of the Sirkus and all its trivia. This was why he was here. This was his trip and this was what he wanted – Sirkuses, ancient
crucifixes, early editions from the Badberg Press. He loved your country. Madam, Meneer, he loved you half to death.

He looked my way, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, defiant in his public passion. Then he turned his back and made off through the crowd. He was going to stand on the line, the line we had come to stand in. BUT NO ONE HAD TOLD ME THAT. I knew only that I would not permit myself to be disobeyed by an employee. I walked, as I had previously only walked inside the long dark hallways of the Feu Follet, with my disabilities raw and undisguised. I rolled side to side like a comic-strip sailor. Anyone could see that I was three foot six inches tall, bandy-legged, club-footed, rag-faced, as I came across the grease-stained sidewalk towards Jacques, lacerating the skin on my ‘ankles’, feeling the pain only as you hear a telephone ringing in another room. I was not in control – I was already shouting.

I was like a machine, a thing with a light flashing on its roof. The crowds which had scared me now parted before me. And even the queue of would-be POWs – Chinese, Malays, Afghans, Indians (no one Flemish, no one white like the crowds in the vids and zines) – whilst remaining locked fearfully in its proper order, flexed and shifted like a tail threatened with a red-hot poker.

I came straight at Jacques and grabbed at the Cyborg. The Mouse – designed so no adult male could ever fit inside it – was my height.
^*
I got its round black nose and tried to pull it from its captor. The nose was hard and black and dense and weirdly cold.

‘You … shit … snot … fucking … fool.’

Jacques held the Mouse with both his arms. I tugged at the nose, but it would not tear away.

‘I’ll … rip … your … throat … out.’

Jacques looked down at me. I saw a spark there. Something. I did not know what it meant.

‘Throw … that … thing … AWAY … NOW …’

‘You want to go to jail?’

It was Leona. You could never say her face was white, or even pale. But it had a still, shiny, immobile look. ‘You don’t ever,’ she hissed, pushing the wheelchair at me so I was forced to hold it, ‘make a fuss in this line. That the only rule there is. Look it. They all so quiet. They like chickens when the snake get in the roost. You stand like them. OK. How you think I going to get you captured if you make this fuss?’

That woman scared me. It was not what she said, but how she stood, the wild fire in her yellow eyes.

‘We got to get you
captured
,’ Leona said. ‘But that a figure of speech, a way of speaking, you understand me? It paperwork. You in enough trouble I would say – no sense you push it any more.’

‘OK?’ Wally said.

I climbed into the chair.

The balconies of the apartment buildings above our heads were filled with white soldiers, smoking, playing cards, sitting precariously on the crumbling concrete balustrades. As I looked up I saw one of them point at us. I looked down.

‘You be quiet now, Wink. Just hush, OK?’

‘What … trouble … am … I … in?’

I asked the question twice but no one ever did answer it. Jacques patted at my face with a paper handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘If … you’re … sorry … ditch … the … Mouse.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, but then fitted the Simi beneath my wheelchair, under my legs, where I was spared the sight of it, if not its rancid smell.

It takes ten to fifteen hours to become a POW.
^*
Almost all of this time you spend in line. I had a wheelchair. I went straight to sleep.

When I woke at two in the morning, an hour when the kanal fog has already rolled out across the turbulent streets, I found Wally on a sheet of cardboard, wide awake and grinning. God damn – his eyes were all creased up – he was happy to be just where he was,
sitting on the banks of a river which was flowing with small-time crime.

Not five feet from where we sat there were three pretty little spin driers with tight skirts and fuck-me heels. By the news stand there were musicos, jugglers, riveters. Between the traffic lights, on the busy street crossings, there were young gypsy pick-pockets with dark brown blameful eyes and tatty sheets of corrugated board which they pressed against the bodies of their marks.

Everything that threatened me seemed to sustain my companions.

‘We’ll do just fine,’ the old turtle said to me. ‘You just breathe, the way the doctor said. Don’t worry about nothing.’

He rocked forward on his heels. He seemed to me to be like a retired footballer called down from the grandstand ready to thread fresh white laces through his dusty boots, to don the jersey with the old number sewn on the back, to climb the picket fence, to make that famous stab pass, low, spinning fast, down to the forward line.

‘Forget … it,’ I said.

‘We need money.’

‘Please … I … don’t … want … you … in … jail.’

Wally smiled. He retied his shoelace. He relit his soggy cigarette. He squinted through the acrid smoke. He had romanced so often about his days as a facheur that now it was easy for me to imagine what he was doing: studying the form, analysing how the money moved, locating the
runners
, the
soldiers
, the
post-boxes
, the whole secret mechanisms, social and structural, of the street.

A swarm of pick-pockets began working the crowd not three feet from the queue. They were ten, twelve years old.

I saw how he looked at them, the smile on his face. I could not do the things they did, not ever – I could not duplicate their normal faces, their bitter freedom, the light, careless way they split the scene, like a firework blasting apart – brown lithe legs flying through the alarm of horns and klaxons on the Grand Concourse.

‘You can’t … run … like … that … please … leave … it … be.’

‘Come on.’ He touched my hair. ‘Don’t fret.’

‘You’re … up … to … something.’

‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘Breathe proper.’

Finally I did sleep. When I woke up Leona, who was always
appearing and disappearing, had gone again. The Simi – this was Jacques’ idea of humour-was now sitting on the sidewalk on its own sheet of cardboard. He had arranged it so it sat cross-legged, had cupped its gloved hands open in its lap, pointed its bright blind eyes so they looked upwards at the passing crowd.

And as I watched a middle-aged man in one of those tight-fitting sixteen-button suits which marks the business-gjent in Saarlim City stooped and squatted right in front of Jacques. He folded a Guilder and tucked it in the Mouse’s paw.

‘Where you from, Bruder?’ he asked Jacques.

I looked to Wally but he was asleep with his chin on his chest.

When I looked back the business-gjent was holding the Simi’s hand, his slightly wet alcoholic eye looking directly at the Simi’s dysfunctional electronic one.

‘Where you from?’ he repeated.

‘Efica,’ said Jacques.

The man shook his head, squinched shut his eyes. That is the paradox: we are important enough for you to bring down our government, but you have never heard of us. You could see this gjent had no damn idea where Efica was. ‘You know how long it is since I saw this fellow on a Saarlim street?’ he said at last. ‘Ten, fifteen years. Do you know who he is?’

‘One mo nothing,’ Jacques said. ‘Next mo there he was.’

‘It was a different country then, a different country entirely,’ the man said. ‘Parks were safe. Streets were clean. You never saw a street like this.’ He nodded towards the POWs. ‘It was a different country then.’

‘My friends are culture-shocked,’ Jacques said. ‘They never saw anything like this before.’

‘And you … you’re unshockable, huh?’

‘This is a great city,’ Jacques said.

‘It feels a great city to you?’

‘Look at all these people in this line … they’re in love with Saarlim City. It’s why they’re here. They love you.’ Jacques clicked his tongue. ‘How about that?’

The man looked at Jacques and frowned. He dug in his pocket and dug out a fist of crumpled Guilders. He pressed them into Meneer Mouse’s lifeless hand and, as the coins dropped to the sidewalk and the notes fluttered in the air, he turned and walked away into the crowd.

Jacques gathered up the money, grinning. I did not grin back, but I saw then, straight away – it was very clear to me what had to happen now.