The Unusual Life Of Tristan Smith Part 38

19.

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 Lap.e.n.i.se.

Voorstand, in comparison, was terrible, like being tickled relentlessly or plunging in an elevator. We were forever arriving at the this this 'zee' and the 'zee' and the that that 'zee', not actual 'seas' but great lakes whose further sh.o.r.es 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. 'zee', not actual 'seas' but great lakes whose further sh.o.r.es 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 Moliere 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 G.o.d'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 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 gla.s.s and rusted m.u.f.flers.

'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 flas.h.i.+ng.

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.

Leona drove us into leaking tunnels, under rusting bridges. All around us were grim brick buildings, some with windows, some merely with broken gla.s.s, and where the gla.s.s 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 gra.s.sy marshlands in which one could make out the rainbow-slick of chemicals. Through the yellow mist we saw tall buildings cl.u.s.tering 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, p.a.w.nbrokers, 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.

20.

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 sh.e.l.l.

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 d.a.m.n 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 Gyro Sirkus', the sign said. 'Who will die tonight?' '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 b.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.sion. 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fted 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. 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 ... s.h.i.+t ... snot ... f.u.c.king ... 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, s.h.i.+ny, immobile look. 'You don't ever,' she hissed, pus.h.i.+ng 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 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 bal.u.s.trades. 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. 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 ka.n.a.l fog has already rolled out across the turbulent streets, I found Wally on a sheet of cardboard, wide awake and grinning. G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 f.u.c.k-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 pa.s.s, 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, a.n.a.lysing how the money moved, locating the runners runners, the soldiers soldiers, the post-boxes 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 pa.s.sing crowd.

And as I watched a middle-aged man in one of those tight-fitting sixteen-b.u.t.ton 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 d.a.m.n 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.

*'The aforesaid Simulacrum design is approved for manufacture as a free agent WITH THE PROVISO that no model, whether working model, prototype or branded product, shall exceed the height limitations contained in Codicil CXVIII, amendment 6, to-wit no variant shall exceed forty-two inches in height. Infringement of these restrictions will incur automatic suspension of Manufacturer's Licence and a fine of 10,000 Guilders.' Approval Certificate of the Opus 3a Simulacrum.*The official paperwork indicates that a much longer delay was once the rule: 'Please wait at least 90 days after application before inquiring. If this form is folded at the lines in the margins, the address of the POW facility, or the address of the applicant, will show through a standard letter size (Type C1) envelope. All information should be typed or clearly printed in the English language, using ballpoint pen.' Inquiry about Status of POW 531 Form.