The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (43 page)

‘Meneer Mouse,’ whispered Jacques. ‘God damn.’

‘Where you folks from?’ Leona said.

‘Stop the car,’ Jacques said.

‘You ain’t never heard of Bruder Mouse.’

‘Let’s get it,’ Jacques said. I looked at him. He was so alert, so handsome. His colour was high, his eye-white a lustrous greyish white.

‘Bruder Mouse is something we have here,’ Leona said.

‘We know the Mouse,’ Jacques said. ‘“
One mo nothing. Next mo there he was, solid as a miller’s wheel.”
We know it, really. It’s, like, it’s our Mouse too.
“His black ears were sharp. His teeth were white. His eyes as bright as an angel of the lord.”’

‘That’s the words of a song, right?’ Leona asked.

‘Tales of Bruder Mouse,’ said Jacques. ‘Badberg Edition.’

But Leona, it was obvious, had not heard of the Badberg Edition. ‘The Mouse is something we have from the Sirkus,’ she said. ‘But not like this old fellow – this one is a machine, a Simulacrum. This old mouse, he’s older than me, believe it. He’s an
old
model.
^*
Hey, Wink, you
seeing
this? Just watch that Simi go. This must be the last Simi left in Voorstand. You guys don’t appreciate how lucky you are.’

The Mouse, coming closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, had stumbled and fallen in front of the car. Now, like a rabbit that you’ve wounded but not killed, it picked itself up and began its wild, unco-ordinated run down the road which now, as Leona followed, began a steep descent towards the plain.

‘You want a souvenir?’ she said.

Jacques smiled. He did not even speak. He sat back in his seat, and I could see his will, his alarming, shining will through the lashes of his slightly narrowed eyes.

‘No,’ I said. I hated that Mouse. I hated its face. I hated what it stood for in my life, my history, that I was ever fool enough to hide behind its face.

‘Twenty mile an hour,’ Leona said. ‘Look it
go.’

Black legs flying. A cloud of dust.

‘You want it?’ Wally asked me.

‘You … know … I … don’t.’

There was a thump, a bump. The car stopped. ‘Got it,’ said Leona. ‘Got the little sucker.’

She stopped, jumped out. A second later she held the back door open. She threw the Simulacrum on to the floor. It was still smoking. Cotton wadding grew like bloom from its elbow. It gave off the smell of burning rubber, like a dishwasher about to catch fire.

My nurse sat beside me like a woman newly pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach, her feet astride the stinking Bruder Mouse.

I thought she was my employee, my man. It never occurred to me that I might be
her
man,
her
invention, but that was what the situation was – this slight, attractive woman with size five shoes had made me into a terrorist.

She had found a timid wretch living in a dank, dark hole. He had skin like a baby and pearly inoffensive eyes, but while he slept she had transformed him into something potent – still ugly, yes, but venomous, a spider in the dark of the Voorstandish subconscious.

She had not meant me harm. She had not meant me anything. She wanted something for herself and I was a member of a proscribed group. She therefore falsified three fax IDs to ‘prove’ that I, Tristan Smith, was a terrorist in touch with Mohammedan cells inside Voorstand. If it had not been for this, she would have been sent back to her grey metal desk in POLIT. She felt she had no choice but to go forward – she linked me with Zawba’a
^*
and now she was an operative accompanying a terrorist to a possible meeting with other terrorists.

She connected me with Zawba’a because she had translated their
manifesto and knew they had connections inside Voorstand. She was a beginner, an ice-skater. She only had access to level 7 information, and therefore had no idea that Zawba’a were currently under intense scrutiny from the VIA.

There were eight other cells she could have chosen, and all of them would have left her stranded back in the dusty tedium of POLIT. But she chose the one group which had all of Operations suddenly dedicating themselves to her.

They had only one anxiety – not that she had faked some fax numbers, but that she was inexperienced and would therefore make them look bad with their opposite numbers in Voorstand. They took her to their bosoms. They coaxed her, cradled her, pushed her. They had her doing crunches and push-ups. They gave her intensive weapons training, then halted it when they found her attempting Sirkus tricks with her fifteen-shot semiautomatic Glock.

‘What happens if someone shoots at me?’

‘Believe me, Jacqui, you’re safer without a gun.’

They took back the handsome Glock and spent the last week teaching her how to talk to the VIA. At this, she excelled. When she boarded the
John Kay
she was a candidate well-prepared for examination.

I was the centre of her fiction. Yet as we travelled down the El 695 with Bruder Mouse, I was as unaware of all this as I was unaware of the honey-coloured breasts beneath her three poplin shirts. I was the baby, the mark, the monkey. I fretted about the stinking Simi, money, privacy, the revulsion I might occasion at a gas stop, the humiliation of eating in the public gaze. Panic flitted like a bat across the periphery of my consciousness as we journeyed deeper and deeper into Voorstand. I had no idea of the risk my sleeping nurse had taken to make this trip, the cynical lies she had told to get there, or the looming consequences she had successfully obliterated from her consciousness.

When Jacqui woke it was evening and the shadows were long and the colours soft and the highway was sweeping around the edges of one more lake. When she opened her eyes she saw, in the mirror,
Leona’s yellow bloodshot eyes looking straight at her.

It was only then the possibility occurred to her.

Could Leona be the operative she had expected to meet in Saarlim?

Whatever Leona had said when she had emerged from the tunnel, Jacqui had not really paid attention. She had not expected the operative until Saarlim. Perhaps Leona said the ID line and Jacqui had not heard.

Now, twelve hours later, Jacqui recited her ID tag: ‘It’s a nice night.’

And Leona said her line: ‘Nice night to be in Saarlim City.’

‘How many miles is it?’ Jacqui said, feeling the blood rushing up her neck and flooding into her ears and cheeks.

‘Tsk,’ Leona said, and shook her head.

A different person might have been embarrassed. Jacqui would not be. She learned that very early at the DoS. Never show weakness. The ‘meet’ was meant to be in Saarlim. She stared right back at Leona and crossed her hands in her lap.
Fuck you
, she thought. This is not my fault.

I was sitting right beside her when this exchange took place. I saw the recklessness which was beginning to shine, to glow through the dull brown paint of our nurse’s dutifulness. It was powerful, palpable. I felt the need to stop it.

‘Throw … the … thing … out,’ I said, and nudged her leg with my foot.

‘Whatsit say?’ Leona asked.

‘He wants you to throw the Bruder out,’ said ‘Jacques’, and smiled at me, not insolently. It was the look you see on monks – a calm and luminous neutrality.

‘You want me to footsack Bruder Mouse, Wink?’ Leona brought the car round a large banked curve and came on to a high wide bridge, below which you could see one more ribbon of highway: transports
carrying
their spherical gases, cylindrical liquids, bright sanserif type on their shining silver surfaces.

‘I might footsack you first,’ she said. She flicked on her super-charger in accordance with a highway sign. ‘This here Bruder Mouse is like a Saint to us,’ she said. ‘He ain’t just the Sirkus. He means stuff to us.’

‘It … means … stuff … to … us … too … we … suffered … from … that stuff … already.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He’d rather not have the Bruder in the car.’

‘Fuck … the … Mouse … fuck … the … Voorstand … Hegemony.’

‘What’s he say?’

‘He … says … it … makes … him … sick.’

I turned to Wally, who had his bent old spine propped in the corner. ‘You … want … this … stinky … thing … in … the … car?’

‘It’s their country,’ Wally said, and closed his eyes, pretending that he was sleeping. ‘We should respect their customs.’

Jacqui crossed the Simi’s arms across its chest, and gently pushed down on its snout and up on its chin, so just the faintest trace of white tooth was protruding.

‘“
One mo nothing
,’” she recited,
“‘next mo – there he was, buttons gleaming, cane tapping, as solid as a yellow oak on a Tuesday morning.”’

To be driven across the El 695 gave me a feeling in my stomach that was almost unbearable.

The thing was – the El 695 would not stop. It curved, looped, but it kept on rolling, now three lanes, now five, now one lane of congestion and construction, but it did not stop. In Efica, you could not drive far without coming to the sea. Even on a large island like Inkerman you lived with a constant sense of limitations, the thinness of soil, the hardness of the rock, the long sail-less expanse of the Mer de Lapenise.

Voorstand, in comparison, was terrible, like being tickled relentlessly or plunging in an elevator. We were forever arriving at the
this
‘zee’ and the
that
‘zee’, not actual ‘seas’ but great lakes whose further shores were lost in summer haze – which signalled, to my Efican sensibilities, the end of the journey. Now there should be a ferry. Now a wharf. But this was Voorstand, 2000 miles from north to south, 865 lakes, 10,000 towns, 93 major cities.

I watched the edges of the road slide past my ear, endlessly, limitlessly, and, indeed, it was in these very roadside verges that I would finally begin to learn the truth about Saarlim City.

I saw the first signs of deterioration some hundred miles from our
destination. At first I did not take it seriously, but soon there was no denying it – the condition of the roads got worse, consistently worse – and by the time we were embarked upon the elevated entrances to the great city the verges were cracked and weedy and littered with abandoned pieces of cars and trucks.

For you, who imagine I came to cause you harm, it may be hard to believe that I found this decay so upsetting. Why would I, a member of the January 20 Group, give a rat’s fart about the state of roads in Saarlim City?

Madam, Meneer, you are part of our hearts in a way you could not dream.

It is as if you, at your mother’s breast, had imbibed the Koran, the Kabuki, and made them both your own. We grow up with your foreignness deep inside our souls, knowing the Bruder clowns, the Bruder tales, the stories of the Saints, the history (defeating the Dutch, tricking the British, humiliating the French, all this gets you big marks in the islands of Efica). We recite your epic poets for the same reason we study Molière or Shakespeare, listen to your Pow-pow music as we fall in love, fly your fragrant peaches halfway across the earth and sit at table with their perfect juices running down our foreign chins.

We have danced to you, cried with you, and even when we write our manifestos against you, even when we beg you please to leave our lives alone, we admire you, not just because we have woven your music into our love affairs and wedding feasts, not just for what we imagine you are, but for what you once were – for the impossible idealism of your Settlers Free who would not eat God’s Creatures, who wanted to include even mice and sparrows in their Christianity.

As we Ootlanders approached the legendary capital of Saarlim on the crumbling El 695, we each, silently, privately, recalled the story of the farmyard Bruders coming to the city, the
Hymn of Pietr Groot
, the suicides of the captains of the first great insurrection. Yet just as your history came to inspire me, I was depressed to see the cracks, the weeds, the litter of radiator hoses, broken glass and rusted mufflers.

‘They … should … sweep … up,’ I said.

No one translated for Leona.

The cars around us on the road were not like the ones I had seen
with starburst reflections on their chrome work in the zines. They were old, rusting, crumpled, belching blue smoke, dropping black oil. I had imagined that my own country was backward, provincial, but we would not have tolerated this in Efica. Cars that would have been dragged off the highway by the Gardiacivil – cars with rusted body panels, broken headlights – were permitted to cruise beside us unmolested by the Saarlim Police who moved through the junk-heap traffic in cars bristling with computers and satellite dishes, their roof lights perpetually flashing.

Yet the more extreme the neglect became, the more Jacques liked it. As we came closer to Saarlim, his colour rose, he began to beat his feet on the floor. He sat on the edge of his seat, one hand resting on the Simi’s shoulder. The Simi stank of smoke, of melting plastic, of damp fur, of old rags left too long in a bucket. Broken wires stuck out from its elbow – probably infectious. It made me ill to look at it, made me weak in the arms and legs – insufficient oxygen, the early-warning sign of phobia.