No one who watched the speech would have believed that she had dressed her own son in the visage of the enemy, and that the son now sat, not listening to a word his mother said, dreaming his own flickering dreams, peering at her through the half-moon slits in the back of Bruder Mouse’s eyes.
*In Voorstand, of course, you have a word for all these different degrees of public notoriety. In Saarlim you would say that my maman was experiencing vid-glorie. [TS]
*This mask, dating from the first century of Voorstand, had the serrated forehead ridge which distinguishes the Sirkus masks from the Neu Zwolfe settlement. It was atypical in that it had two chipped teeth, not one. [TS]
† My mother’s childhood, more than thirty years before, was not so different from the life depicted in De Kok’s paintings of the previous century – the crowds in Demos Platz, the fat-arsed factory owners rubbing shoulders with the poor and middle class, the ex-prisoners of Voorstand’s wars, Egyptians, Germans, Ugandans in saris, the makers of Pow-pow music in their Sunday checks, the picnickers, the pretty skaters, the amiable figure of Bruder Mouse, say, extending a white-gloved hand to accept a dollar from a smiling pink-cheeked matron.
48
Roxanna gave herself to Wally, solemnly, gratefully, in his bleak little room where circus apprentices had once spent their nights, stacked three-high in bunk beds, their bodies bruised from falls and Ducrow’s English leather boot, young boys still dreaming of their mothers.
Her eyes were brimming, her lips plump and lingering, and all her swiftly naked body – for she shed her dress with a single zip – was baby-soft, newly born, not muscled like an actress, yet not obviously damaged by her life. At twenty-five years of age, she had no scars, no silver marks. She had a small plump stomach, not exactly fat, but with a round curve her lover could, and did, fit in the palm of his hand. When she brought her pale pretty lips to his, her eyes dropped and her small round chin dimpled.
Afterwards, she rested her coarse, tangled blonde hair on his foreign shoulder and rubbed at her kohl-black tears as they fell into the grey hair on his chest.
‘What is it?’ he asked her.
What could she tell him?
There was a long livid scar beside his lower rib. She ran her fingers over it, the slippery smooth skin, like freshly shaven skin, but silkier. It was a Mongrel Day in Chemin Rouge, yellow melancholy light, the window sashes rattling in their frames. Her tears kept falling, fat and dirty.
‘What is it?’ he insisted.
It was the pigeons, of course. It made her feel so pitiful to admit the low level of her life – no one had ever done such a thing for her before. She had sucked their cocks, put her tongue up their arse-holes, but no one ever did anything for her they did not want to do.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I was sad about the birds,’ she said. Then, blowing her nose, ‘I know it’s silly.’
‘They got born. Someone sold them, someone bought them. Life’s very sad, don’t you think it is? Even for birds.’
She was crying. It was crazy. She was not even worried about the pigeons. She could have strangled them herself, personally.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cry and ruin it.’
‘Life is a fucking miracle,’ he said. He kissed her ear. Why did hard men always have such baby-soft lips?
‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said.
For answer, he cupped his hand again on her straw-coloured mound of pubic hair. He held her. ‘You’re a miracle, Roxanna.’
‘You’re an old hog fart,’ she said. He lay back and she felt him smile.
‘You know I’m leaving. You know that well and truly. I never hid it from you.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’m a big boy.’
But he was not, not really, he was quivering with need – such very soft lips, such grey, sad, freckled eyes with the pretty rusty wash flooding outwards from the island of pupil. She said, ‘Just remember what you knew first time you saw me …’
‘Which was?’
She grinned. ‘Your dick got hard.’
‘Don’t kid yourself.’
‘You saw a spin drier in high-heels.’ She smiled. ‘I know what you saw.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘I’m not a nice person, Wally,’ she said. ‘You knew it then, when you saw me first. Now you’re just making up some other story.’
‘What I know is, you’re just like me. Things have happened to us.’
‘Boo-hoo-hoo.’
‘I don’t need to know exactly what they are.’
‘Well, listen to me, please. I’m not sorry I had sex with you. It was really lovely. It was. But you’re not the man for me, OK?’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘It’s not to do with you. It’s to do with me. Honey, I am going to the Chemin Rouge antique fair tomorrow night. There are going to be rich men there from all over the world. I am going to get me one of them. Watch me. I told you what I was. You knew what I was.’
‘You want to be rich?’
‘Don’t say it like that. Say it how you like. I’m going to find someone there who thinks I am a treasure. And I’m not going to cheat them. I’m going to be that for them.’
‘You mightn’t.’
‘Find anyone? I will.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I decided. Because I planned. Because I have worked, and studied, and prepared. BECAUSE I CAN FUCKING WELL DO IT.’
‘But what if there is no one there you like?’
‘There will be.’
He smiled. It was exactly the same smile that Reade gave when he came home and saw her reading – could not believe a woman could understand a book he couldn’t.
‘Don’t smirk at me, you ass-hole.’
‘Hey.’
‘You listen to me,’ Roxanna said. ‘You kill a fucking pigeon, you think you own me. You try and make me eat it, well fuck you.’ She stood up. ‘You eat it.’
‘Rox,’ he said, ‘you make no sense.’
‘Don’t you fucking get it?’ she said. She was dressing now, stumbling into her dress, reaching for her red high-heels while he was still rising from the bed. ‘I’m crazy.’
She ran down the stairs to the foyer and out into the street. Then she stood there, at the steps, smoking a cigarette, tapping her foot, looking up and down the street, knowing already that she was going to go back inside because there was not yet anywhere else for her to go.
49
On the morning of the auction there was a fire at the Chemin Rouge Hilton (where the auction was to be held). I watched the fire brigade on the vid screen, but I watched this catastrophe just as I had begun to watch my mother’s interviews, or to listen to Rox and Wally as they moved hourly from rift to rapprochement and back again. That is, I watched from within the shell-like face of Bruder Mouse, through peep-holes.
Roxanna had wept when she heard about the fire. I told her I was sorry, and I felt I was sincere, but there was a way in which I was absent from the scene.
Wally made her tea and rubbed her neck. It seemed to work, because minutes later they were arguing about the Pigeon Patissy.
Rox, against all the evidence to the contrary, was insisting that men could not cook Pigeon Patissy.* She said she was going to have a female chef when she was rich, and that she was going to invite Wally to her home for dinner. Then she said she could not ask him because he was sure to kill her peacocks. Then she said he could be the plumber. Now they were laughing a lot, and fooling around, acting like they were stealing the pastry and doing things behind the other’s back, but it wasn’t totally joking either. They argued about the marinade and watched a lot of vid-news and drank a lot of beer. It was easy for me to slip away to examine that subject which now interested me the most – my new self.
This was not the first time that day when I had gone to check on my reflection in the actors’ dressing rooms, but each time I saw myself i
n the full-length mirror I was pleased. I did not have the proper Bruder waistcoat, but I had a metallic scarf which was almost the right colour and I taped cartridge paper in cylinders around my twisted legs in an uncomfortable approximation of the Bruder’s slick white boots.
The doctrinaire actors of the Feu Follet would have died to see wicked Bruder Mouse invade their sawdust ring and pull himself up the inspection ladders with his poisonous blue cloak tangled dangerously around his body. But they were not there. I was. It was my theatre, and when I left the dressing room that is exactly what I did.
I sat up in my own private dusty dark and recited bits of Shakespeare to the empty seats – Richard the Third – you would not have understood a word of what I said, but you were not there, Madam, Meneer, and your pity did not tarnish the glamour of my role.
I removed my mask to eat a hearty lunch of herring. After lunch I strapped it on again. Then for a little while I watched Wally and Roxanna as they brushed butter between the layers of store-bought filo pastry.
And when that was done, I waited patiently for the acting lessons my mother had promised – although if you have ever experienced an election from the inside, you may think my hope naïve. Certainly, an election is a difficult time for a candidate to think about her family. But I was the child of an actress, used to waiting for that time when the curtain was down and the last admirer gone home. I waited for my maman with an ease that came from years of practise.
Roxanna, also, was used to waiting, but on the day of the fire she could get no clear news about the future of her auction. She was agitated by her unexpected feelings for Wally. The pigeon pie made her guilty and anxious. Unable to wait calmly or gracefully for news about the auction, she tried to get me to come out into the air with her, tugging at my hand with an insistence that surprised me.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of this dump, Bruder.’
But I was already wedded to the private darkness of my theatre, the sweaty twilight inside the mask, the tight straps above my ears and around the back of my head. I was half drunk on the sweet fug of my own breath, and I absolutely would not accompany her out into the unfriendly light of day.
I remained alone in the kitchen dreaming vague dreams involving glittering cloaks and dazzling lights.
If there was anything to spoil my reverie, it was the knowledge that my mother had given me that mask against her own heartfelt principles. I believed that she loathed Bruder Mouse. And thus when she finally arrived, a good hour before the pie was ready, and I heard the sound of her heels cross the cobbles of the foyer, I lost my courage and removed the mask.
I did not reflect on the fact that my maman had been born in Saarlim. You are from Voorstand, so you know what this means: that as a child, on Harvest Sunday, she would have sat on a mouse’s knee; that the least of God’s creatures played their role in Easter and Christmas. They were illustrated in the Holy Cards – Ducks and Mice weeping at the Crucifixion of the Lord.
So no matter what her critique of Voorstandish hegemony, my maman obviously held more complex feelings for Bruder Mouse than she had ever admitted to the collective.
Indeed, it is obvious to me now, she was a creature of her culture. No matter that she denounced your country’s intrusion into Efican soil, she was a Voorstander. You can see it in the Feu Follet acting style, which has its roots in the laser technology of the Sirkus. My mother pushed her actors into shapes more suitable for laser stick-and-circle figures than human beings with rigid skeletons. She would do the same to herself, contort herself at the expense of ligaments, bloat or purge herself, shave her head, willingly distort her perfect features. She could easily make her eyes appear too close together, her lips pinched and mean, her chin weak, her nose long, her feet huge, her legs shapeless, her chest flat and so on.
Indeed, when she arrived, at the end of the first day of her campaign, I recognized what had been so familiar about her image on the vid – she was nothing less than the Kroon Princess.* She had the huge eyes, the long neck, the pale skin of the character whom Bruder Duck always sought to wed. There was such intelligence and sexiness about her. When she stepped into that kitchen and stood there, her male secretary behind her, her PR woman at her side, Roxanna and Wally stood and applauded, their eyes bright, their faces shining.
She came to me, where I sat, on my blue stool. She put her hands under my arms and lifted me – I was heavy, too – into the air. I, Tristan, was the one she loved.
‘We’re going to do some acting,’ she said. ‘Right now. We start our classes.’
‘What … about … Vincent?’
‘What about him?’
‘Isn’t … he … coming … in?’
‘He’s outside. In the car.’
I had known Vincent all my life and there had always been, in his relationship with me, this slight distance, this reserve. From time to time I suspected that his reserve was caused by a disgust with my person, but then he would do something – hug me, bathe me, touch me – in a way that made all these fears ridiculous. But for him to sit in the car on this night was most peculiar, and because I felt guilty about the mask I got it into my head that this was where the problem lay.
‘Is … he … angry … with … me?’
‘Vincent? Angry with you? Why would he be angry?’
‘Because … of … that … thing.’
‘You don’t have to whine, sweets. What thing?’
‘That … thing … you … gave … me.’
‘What thing I gave you?’
‘Wrapped … in … yellow … paper.’
‘The mask? It’s from his collection. Sweets, it’s a very special mask. It’s two hundred and eighty years old. It’s not a Sirkus mask. It’s not plastic. It’s made from pine resin like they did in the old days. He wanted you to have it.’
‘Then … why … won’t … he … talk … to … me?’
‘It’s made by the plain Volk. Do you know what I mean? It was made by good people who thought animals were Bruders to us all.’
‘Why … won’t … he … talk … to … me?’
‘Please don’t whine. He can’t come up.’
‘It’s … because … I … ran … away … from … that … house.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Tristan, he is not angry. It’s nothing to do with you. Not everything is to do with you. There are all sorts of things happening that are nothing to do with you. There is a whole country out there. Eighteen islands.’
‘It’s … the … mask.’
‘Oh merde,’ my mother said. She picked me up roughly.
‘I’m … sorry … I’m … SORRY.’
But she was already carrying me and as we came into the gloomy foyer I could hear the rain spilling from the rusted down-pipes in the street. If my mother heard this, it did not slow her. She pushed on out into the rain, shouting Vincent’s name.
‘Talk to him,’ she called. ‘For God’s sake talk to him.’
Vincent’s car was nowhere in sight. She banged on the wet window of a station wagon.
‘Talk to him,’ she said.
There, through the rain-beaded window, by the light of the street lamp, I saw Vincent’s pale beard, his bulging eyes. He was pointing a gun at me.
* Pigeon Patissy is a famous Efican dish, something that is bound to arouse strong opinions. Catholics tend to cook it one way, Protestants another. Wally’s version tended towards the Catholic: half a teaspoon of cinnamon blended with the sugar which is sprinkled across the top layer of the filo pastry. [TS]
*In truth, I did not know the Kroon Princess at that time. In Chemin Rouge the character was named after the European fairy-tale character of Snow White who, as you know, does finally become a Kroon Princess. [TS]
50
What bound Vincent to my mother was the shared belief that what you said could matter, might change the course of history itself, but when he had – two nights before – faced his trembling wife, it seemed as if his very life depended on
what words he chose.
Natalie was pale, pretty, weak-mouthed. Her arms were thin, perfectly un-muscled. She had big eyes and short hair like a child. She stood in her husband’s untidy book-lined study and folded her arms across her chest and clutched a white lace shawl which she more normally wore across her shoulders when dining in the garden. It was not cold, but her perfect little teeth were chattering. She pushed the base of her spine against the bookshelves.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ she said.
It was four in the morning. Vincent, who had crept home to pick up his cash parole, was sitting at his desk with his hand in his top drawer.
He found the cash card, slipped it in his jacket pocket. He began to stand, and then his wife dropped the shawl and revealed the long-finned barrel of a 9-mm Globlaster.
‘I’m going to kill her too,’ she said.
‘Natalie, don’t be silly.’
‘I can do this,’ she said. ‘It’s called a spurt-and-splatter. It just kills everything.’ Her small bare feet were poking out from under the long white nightdress he had bought for her in Egypt.
‘So I went away,’ Vincent said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m back now.’
Natalie’s hair stood up on end. Vincent saw it lift, on her neck and the crest of her head. ‘You think I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Just put the gun down,’ he said. ‘Your hands are shaking.’
‘I told you – it’s spurt-and-splatter. You think I am a moron. You think I lie here every night and don’t know you are living with her.’
He had to get himself standing, but it felt too dangerous a thing to do.
‘Natalie …’
‘Aren’t you surprised your flighty little wife managed to actually buy a gun? Aren’t you going to ask me how I did it?’