The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (25 page)

‘I don’t doubt that it’s reactionary,’ Sparrow said, chewing on the syllables of this last word as if they might be made of very sticky sugar gum. ‘What I want to know is: will it cheer me up?’

The boy nodded vigorously.

‘Yes?’ Sparrow stood. ‘But I don’t think I’m dressed correctly.’ He brushed the cigarette ash from his baggy Army Disposals trousers and straightened the collar of his checked work shirt. ‘Should I dress up?’

‘No,’ Roxanna said, ‘it’s come-as-you-are.’

But
she
dressed up, as well as she was able. She tried to do it quickly, but by the time it was done the storm had come and gone and the streets were wet and had that sweet jasmine sewer smell, and when they stepped out into Gazette Street you could hear that low gurgle of water in the drains beneath your feet. She wore her
same black skirt – she had nothing else – but she borrowed a white shirt of Wally’s and put on a geld-band which emphasized her slim waist and her broad hips. She wore her red high-heels and put a little chain around her ankle and a small stick-on beauty spot on her cheek. She did, in short, everything to make her resemblance to the legendary Irma as marked as possible, and she saw how Wally, who had been reserved and silent since their return from the hospital, looked at her, and when they walked around the river to the Sirkus Dome he began to warm up again and told her things she already knew about the rising river, and pointed out the Chinese on the far bank stretching out their big nets on the high poles.

At the entrance to the Sirkus, she took great pleasure in going to buy the seats, by herself, in opening her purse and laying out the big purple notes in front of the casser.

Roxanna loved the Sirkus. The air was sexy and dangerous, smelled like freedom – fried food, gunpowder, ketchup, and the distinctive honeyed perfume of the wet season which emanated from the little bell-shaped flowers of the
Enteralis Robusta.
Of course she was not the only woman wearing a gold belt or an ankle chain. There were dozens of them, but most of them did not look at all like Irma.

When she came back with the tickets she found the boy was in pain. Wally was pressing and pulling at his bandaged knees, trying to locate the injury.

‘Does that hurt? Where does it hurt?’ He was trying to look at the boy’s hands, but Tristan would not unclench them. They were shut as tight as briques bleus and the man had to use his strength to open them.

‘What
is
it?’ he asked, staring belligerently at the open unmarked palms.

For anwer, Tristan threw himself upon the grass and hid his face.

‘OK,’ Wally said. ‘I’m going to buy you a perroquet.’

Tristan didn’t move. Wally turned and walked away.

When Roxanna saw how he lay there, all rolled up and hidden, she knew exactly where it hurt. She knelt on the grass beside him. She laid her hand on his poor twisted leg. He jerked back. She knew how he was – the merest brush of a stranger’s eyes would hurt him.

‘You know it’s nice and dark inside that Sirkus.’

‘I … WANT … MY … MAMAN.’

‘I know what you need,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to get it.’ She turned to the Human Wheel, who was squatting beside her, rolling one more lumpy cigarette.

‘Cover him,’ she said. ‘Don’t let no one stare at him.’ She headed straight to the souvenir stall. But Tristan did not even see the embarrassed Sparrow. He saw only her and came after her on his hands and knees, wailing.

‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Stay with Sparrow.’

‘You,’ he said. ‘You.’ He came on across the bitumen, hard on her, scurrying between polished shoes, jumpy legs, retreating strollers, followed her into a souvenir stand – tea towels, ashtrays, caps, papier-mâché masks of Bruder Duck, Phantome Drool, Oncle Dog. He grabbed her ankles. She kicked at him – she could not help it – she hated people messing with her ankles. He was strong as a scrub rat. He scaled her leg, her trunk, clung to her neck. He smelt of snot and disinfectant. She got the item she wanted and went to stand in line at the cash register as if the bellowing child around her neck was nothing to do with her.

‘I … WANNA … GO … HOME.’

‘Shut up,’ she hissed.

‘I … HATE … YOU.’

The queue melted before her. She struggled with her purse, the great fat roll of pigeon money. She gave over one more purple 10-dollar note.

Then he would not accept the Bruder Mouse mask she had purchased for him. She dragged him by his arm over to the grass triangle and tried to wrestle him. ‘You gotta have this,’ she said. ‘It’ll cover your face.’

But even this he did not hear, and it was Wally, finally, who came and held the shrieking boy still, while the three adults forced the papier-mâché mask on to his face.

Tristan tried to rip it off. ‘I … HATE … YOU,’ he screamed.

Then Wally picked him up and, holding him under his arm, ran to the toilet block. There, he held the kicking, scratching beast up to the mirror.

‘Just look. Listen, just look.’

Tristan twisted his head, pressed against Wally, denting the
papier-mâché into his face. But, finally, as he struggled to pull the thing off him, he somehow caught a glimpse of himself.
Bruder Mouse.

He moved his arm. It was the Mouse’s arm. Snot dripped from his nose, but out of sight. His cheeks were awash with tears, but no one could see that.

‘Happy?’ Wally said bitterly, wiping at his own bloodied cheeks. ‘I hope to Christ you’re happy.’

I did not stop shaking straight away, but it was warm inside the mask and my own sweet breath enveloped me. I was Bruder Mouse. All around me were other children dressed just the same.

I did not like children. I was jealous of them, frightened of them, dedicated to placing myself in a FAR SUPERIOR CATEGORY of life, but at the Sirkus I had this in common with them: they too preferred to stay inside their masks, to tolerate the tight elastic, the improperly placed eye-holes which impeded views of the great Sirkus sky above us. They, like me, had their heads forever in exaggerated motion.

It was twilight inside the Dome and the ceiling was a deep cobalt blue, alive with stars, not randomly arrayed like a children’s fairy book, but in an exact facsimile of the Efican night sky. It was my first Sirkus. All my fears dissolved like cotton candy.

As Roxanna led us down the steps of the centre aisle, her geld-band sparkling in the gloom, I watched Sparrow peering and squinting up into the high seats and I was momentarily fearful that his stern moral view would make the Sirkus tawdry in my own eyes. I was not unaware of how it could be seen. It was my own mother who had called it ‘a horror made of cardboard, plastic and appalling colours, a death-deallng construction of hardened chewing gum and degraded folklore, a loopy mix of Calvinism and cynical opportunism’.
^*

But just as I felt my maman’s doctrine struggling to take control of my own perception, and as my initial rush of pleasure began to
flutter, lose strength, to give way to guilt, Sparrow turned to me and winked. My maman’s doctrine instantly dissolved. I lifted my mask a little, just enough to inhale deeply the distinctive aroma of the Sirkus – a mixture of cordite and something like chemically perfumed face-wipes.

But then Roxanna gave our tickets to the usher and my fragile happiness was threatened once again. I had never been to the Sirkus, but I could not believe Roxanna had allowed herself to be given these seats. There was only one column
^*
in our local Sirkus and the usher was leading us straight towards it. This column was, in itself, one of the wonders of the Sirkus, but it also provided its notorious imperfection: an obstructed view.

Looming high above our heads, halfway up its gleaming shaft, was a mixing booth, a glass-walled, air-conditioned cube which Wally described to me each time he ‘told’ me a Sirkus. I knew it housed the hologram projectors, the computer consoles, the mixing board. The obstructing column also contained a small cylindrical elevator whereby the sparkmajoors ascended to their station.

So this was to be my first and maybe only visit to the Sirkus. I looked up forlornly at the VIP seats – twelve of them – suspended from the underside of the control booth like the basket on a dirigible. Everyone in Chemin Rouge knew exactly what they were like-the seats were red plush, the carpet was deep Efican wool pile. There was said to be a deluxe auto-bar which was operated by cash parole. This was something to dream about, but to those sentenced to sit behind it the column was something to be feared, and as dear Roxanna led us to a place hard against its base I felt my irritation mount to such a height that I wonder I did not actually convulse.

‘Calm down,’ Wally said, ‘or there’ll be no damn Sirkus at all.’

I saw the usher push the code keys in the column itself and the elevator doors peeled silently back to reveal the golden walls inside the cylinder.

‘Any complaints?’ Wally whispered.

And carried me inside.

Was this the happiest moment of my childhood? Can the best
and worst moments sit together like this? Was I so shallow in my emotions, so forgetful, that this ‘horror made of cardboard’ could erase the disgusted faces in which I had seen the effect of my own beastly face? Does it matter that it would not last, that it was a good feeling like the good feeling of ice-cream or those burning hot Voodoo Jubes to which both Wally and I were so addicted?

In the glowing golden reflections in that elevator, Heroic Wally, Divine Roxana, Good Sparrowgrass, surrounded me – the Valiant Mouse. We rose silent as air itself towards the twelve plush red seats, only four of which we would personally require.

We sat high above the crowd wherein we might reasonably have felt ourselves to be blessed. Sparrow produced a cash parole – thereby surprising me – and bought us all fresh perroquets, and then the show started.

You are a settler culture, like ours, and all your Bruder tales reflect your church’s simple devotion to St Francis (with none of the legal and theological complications created by the Saarlim Codicils
^*
). So you permitted no animals in captivity, but animals thrived everywhere in your imagination, laughing, singing, playing tricks, saving humans, doing good and evil.

The Voorstandish aerialistes put on their squirrel costumes and flew through the air without a net. They could make a furry totem pole twenty feet high. They could produce the most amazing facsimiles of a horse, five men and women – dancers, posturers – working with thrilling co-ordination to gallop, to canter, to walk a slack wire. When these ‘horses’ fell, the casualties were always terrible.

This first part of the Sirkus had the clowns – hoards of them in cast-off uniforms of conquered nations – preposterous, pretentious. When they emerged from the stage floor they were ragamuffin POWs set free in Great Voorstand. By the time intermission arrived, these buffoons would have become an orchestra playing wild, lonely, funny, Pow-pow music. It was propaganda, of course. The Pow-pows raced the bears, were frightened
by the squirrels, awed, teased and pestered by the moving holographic images of the dancing Bruder Mouse or hayseed Bruder Duck.

There was no slow build-up in this show. The pace, from the first drum beat, was extraordinary. It was like being accelerated into the stratosphere. The jokes and the tricks followed each other at a dizzying speed. It was like being tickled. You could not bear the thought that what you were laughing at would be intensified, although it surely would be, and would be again, as tumbling High-hogs flew across the stage chasing tumbling panicking holographic Bruders.

Above us we could see, through the glass floor, the sparkmajoors in the mixing booth. These men and women barely moved all through the show. Once or twice I would see a hand move. For the most part they seemed to sit with crossed arms bathed in soft blue light.

The performers pushed us, until we were breathless from laughter, and Sparrow’s great ‘Whoo Whoo Whoo’ was like the cry of some great goofy owl eager to take its place on stage.

But we were waiting for Irma.

When intermission came, we said nothing of her to Sparrow. We did not want to trigger the sort of political critique we could expect from any member of the Feu Follet collective. We protected Irma’s good name by leaving it unsaid.

Sparrow, who had laughed so loudly, was quiet and thoughtful in the intermission, continually passing his big hands over his cleanshaven cheeks and bristly neck. I began to wonder if he felt himself compromised, or even ashamed, but when I looked towards him he took off his glasses and polished them. Once they were clean, he leaned across the rail and slowly surveyed the audience. I thought of Savonarola, a figure my mother liked to evoke whenever her work was attacked by censors.

I turned to Wally, but he and Roxanna were involved in intense and private conversation. I waited for darkness, and made my breath into a warm wind which blew between my skin and the mask.

The second half began, as always, with dancing, both live and holographic. There was the grey furry Bruder Mouse with his iridescent blue coat, his white silk scarf, his cane. Everyone cheered
the minute he appeared. It was no good to say what Vincent said, that the modern Bruder Mouse had become nothing more than a logo-type, the symbol for an imperialist mercantile culture. Vincent knew the old folk tales of Voorstand, collected the masks and clap-hands of the first-century Bruders, but he had never been to the Sirkus in his own home town. He did not know Bruder Mouse. He had never seen him
move.

The Mouse I met at the Sirkus was quick and cocky and as cruel as any animal who has to deal with survival on the farm. He had spark, guts, energy, can-do. We would have liked him, I thought, in the Feu Follet. He had one chipped tooth and one nipped ear. He was a good dancer, had charm, and when Irma, finally, entered the high cone of light that the sparkmajoors erected for her, she danced with him, a quick fast Pow-pow shimmy that had the audience smiling and laughing at once.