The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (34 page)

‘Take responsibility for yourself.’

Roxanna held me tighter. ‘Why are you so horrible to me?’ she said. ‘I
am
taking responsibility. I’m saying it’s my fault. But what the maman says is true.’

‘We have to get on with our lives,’ Wally whispered. I twisted my neck to look at him. He was very close to me. I could see the fear swimming in his eyes.

‘We make our lives out of what we have, out of what’s possible.’

‘Out of
toucans?’

‘This is Efica. We’ve got to be reallstic.’

He reached behind his ear for another length of chalk.

‘We can make a decent life,’ he said. He knelt and began to draw a long yellow arc across the stage. All this was happening in the last
twenty-four hours of my mother’s life. No one told me it was so. I thought I would have her for ever.

If Natalie’s suicide had damaged Felicity more, she might have lived.

Her support dropped seven points – not quite enough for safety’s sake. They came and put a rope around her neck, and pushed her off. She hung and kicked above the sawdust ring, her own damn stage. She pissed, she shit, she bled, she died. Tristan’s mother, a young woman in a yellow dress, forty-three years old.

Vincent was in the car outside playing with his gun. Tristan, Wally, Roxanna, were on the floor above her. Friends all around her, seconds from her side.

The maman loved Efica but she was born in Voorstand. The Voorstanders did not hate her personally. They stole her life – Manzini, the VIA, someone. It was not personal. They took her life from Tristan, not personal. They did not think through the consequences. They did not even think that when the boy found his maman, at two a.m., they were presenting him with a horror he would carry all his life, the picture of his mother dead and ugly, hanging from a bright green rope.

Tristan came down the stairs because he heard a noise, thought his mother’s master class was about to start. His green rope was missing from the stairs. He came down a step at a time. Slowly. He heard the scuffling. Theatres are always full of scuffling, shouting, cries – it is the business of the theatre: life, death, catharsis.

Until this happens to you, you have no idea how the brain works, how it refuses to deliver the bad news, how it seeks anything but the truth, runs naturally away from it like water running down hill.

Tristan saw his mother hanging dead inside the Feu Follet theatre. Her handbag was on the floor. Her eyes bulging, her jaw slack. His brain lied to him.

It is a mask.

Then:
It is an exercise.

Then:
It is someone else.

Then:
It’s Natalie.

Only the smell. Forget it. It was a smell. I cannot go to the
bathroom without remembering my maman’s death.

The night my mother died, other things were happening to the Blue Party – land scandals,
^*
money scandals,
^†
they rose like mushrooms after rain. I did not know Gabe Manzini’s face or name, but he was an ace, the best. One scandal one day, a new one the next. He made the Blues appear both incompetent and corrupt.

In the history of Efica my mother’s death is an adulterer’s death. She is remembered in the morass of shame that Eficans feel about this time.

Me – I never doubted what had happened – not for a second. Even before I saw there was no stool, chair, ladder, I knew. I could not reach her but I cut my mask off my face with a box-cutter. I could not reach her but I smashed Bruder Mouse with a brick. Wally was there then. Vincent was there.

It was Wally, goddamn, dear Wally who got the ladder.

I ground the mask, pulped the wood, paint. My real face was snot, tears, drool. I brought it into the lights of the vid camera and screamed at them.

I did not appear on vid. Edited out. Not part of the story.

Great Voorstand

Bruder Mouse saves Oncle Duck

Meneer Van Kraligan, as everybody knows, was the name of the Saint before he was a Saint. When he was a sinner he used to follow the old ways, and he would keep a Bruder prisoner, and lock him in the cage.

On this occasion he got old Oncle Duck and he was feeding him corn like nobody’s business, feeding him millet pollard mash, brown peas, even the leftover warm milk and miller’s bread his own children left on their plates.

Oncle Duck was eating – he could not help himself – but he was weeping. He would eat and weep, eat and weep, and the more he ate the worse he felt for he knew he was going to be murdered by and by.

The Saint was sitting by his fireside thinking of our Oncle’s flesh – his head chopped off and so on. He was thinking terrible thoughts with perfect happiness when Bruder Mouse appeared to him in all his furry finery.

One mo nothing, next minute there he was, buttons gleaming, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

One minute nothing. Next he was as solid as a miller’s wheel.

‘Hello, Meneer Van Kraligan,’ he said to the Saint who was not yet a Saint.

‘Hello, Bruder,’ said the Saint. ‘What you doing here?’

‘I’m going to make you let go that Oncle Duck,’ the Mouse said.

‘Oh, are you now?’ says the Saint. ‘I do not think so.’

‘It is a sin to keep a Bruder prisoner,’ said the Mouse.

‘What you’re talking is a heresy,’ the Saint said. ‘And I know it is heresy, for it was declared one by the Pope and it was why they exiled that whole monastery to Voorstand in the first place. I don’t suppose,’ the Saint said, ‘the Pope has told you something different?’

‘Not the Pope,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘But I was sent by the Archangel Gabriel to show you this.’

Then Bruder Mouse rose off the ground. Then he spun himself five times, in acrobatic harmony. Then he bounced up and down on the table on his little head, and as he went up and down, farting as he went, fart, fart, fart, fart – he made the Saint start laughing.

He looped and fell, on his stomach.

The Saint thought this about the funniest thing he ever saw, a little mouse doing Sirkus on his kitchen table.

‘You wait there,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch the Kinder.’

And off he went, laughing and sighing and scratching his big backside.

And when the Saint came back, he saw his duck was gone. There was only the Mouse standing in his place.

One mo there he was, buttons gleaming, cane tapping, as solid as a yellow oak on a Monday morning. His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.

One mo there he was, as solid as a miller’s wheel.

Next mo he was gone.

Tales of Bruder Mouse
, Badberg Edition

I am not one of those Ootlanders who wish to blame you personally for everything your government has ever done, so let me say it clear: I know you are not responsible for my mother’s death. Indeed, I write this assuming your individual innocence, believing you unaware of Gabe Manzini or any of his criminal activities.

If I will believe that of you, then please believe the following of me: that when, a whole
twelve years
after Voorstand agents murdered my maman, I made the dangerous voyage to your fatherland, it was
not –
as Mrs Kram would still have you believe – to do your nation harm.

It is true that I entered Voorstand illegally, but the illegality was created by your government’s refusal to place the appropriate stempel in my passport, a situation produced in turn by my own actions – certain offensive tracts I had written, and published, many, many years before, in the period following my mother’s murder.

I understand that no one wishes to have their country called a ‘poison gland’ or a ‘vile octopus’
^*
but imagine, please: my world was shattered.

Everything that had allowed me to sustain my problematic existence, the illusion of my talent, my safety, my power, all this died with my mother. One day I was Napoleon. Next day I was a coward.

I was afraid that I also would be murdered. I was afraid of the street, afraid of uncurtained windows, unlocked doors, noises in
the night. And yet I would not be a
total
coward. Through my teenage years I continued to write the political pamphlets and letters you still cannot forgive. I believed you were watching and listening, and I was not wrong. I kept the doors locked and my fear simmered and bubbled and I skulked and fretted like a cockroach inside the mouldy Feu Follet, and when no one came to kill me it did not matter because by then I was afraid of the air on my skin, of the sky itself.

Is it grandiose to say I too feared assassination? Then let it be: I was grandiose.

I still rehearsed my circus swings and tumbles, juggling, a whole illusionistic repertoire, but I did it with a shame that came from knowing that I lacked the courage to be the Great Figure I had previously imagined. I ate too much. I slept. My pale white stomach began to bulge while my legs remained as thin and twisted as they had ever been.

It was Wally who stole the Axis 9iL computers from the University of Chemin Rouge. His motive was simple entertainment. He imagined I would play
Cat & Mouse, Chessmaster
and
Battlefield
, and I did play these games, and others, but my lethargy did not finally disappear until I discovered that I could use Axis 9iL to make money. Then my life changed overnight.

While boys and girls of my age were kissing each other, twining their legs around each other in the back seats of their parents’ cars, I was sitting white-eyed at my terminal, plugged into Financial Data Services like ‘Voorstand-on-line’ and ‘Uptrend’. I was a teenage share-trader.

I never did get any higher than level 5 on
Cat & Mouse
but the Bourse was another matter. I persuaded Vincent (the executor of my maman’s estate) to release a portion of my inheritance to establish an account. I had a shaky start, but two years later I was producing returns of between 5 and 10 per cent per month. This was from 386 to 393, years of the great Bull Market, and I was one of those so called pin-ball sorciers
^*
who brought the market crashing down – a Momentum Investor. I played the game a kid can play so
well – pure mathematics, trends, swings, surges in stock. Did I make money from toxic waste? Perhaps. Did I buy and sell in Sirkus stock? Who knows? I was interested only in the momentum of the equities.

At first I used my profits to make the Feu Follet safer. I engaged a security guard. I put bars on the windows, installed an electronic security system. But then I began to seek safety in money itself. You might say that Mammon became my maman. I do not need to point out what a betrayal this entailed.

Of course it was not just Tristan Smith who was scarred by the events of 20 January. All these years later Efican politicians have not forgotten what happens to those who oppose our great and powerful ally. Even the Blue Party has become, to say the least, pragmatic. Thread all the navigation cable you wish inside our caves. Leave your poison water wherever it suits you. Our government will give you no trouble.

Following my maman’s death, I sought wealth in a way that would have upset her dreadfully, but life is never simple and I remained loyal to some of her ideals while I betrayed others. So even while I rode the powerful surges of the Bull Market I was active in the January 20 Group
^*
and I wrote my pamphlets and letters to the editor.

And this, I can only assume, is why, two days after my twenty-second birthday, you refused me a tourist Stempel. This is why you still suspect that a great political
cause
had me drag my blinking share-trader’s face out into the bright sun. You still want to know why,
why really
, did I abandon my safe house and trundle down the No. 25 wharf in my wheelchair. What is the real story? Why did I allow myself to be thrown from a heaving fishing trawler on to a Morean Beach at dawn?