They stood together watching me. I was alight, aflame, drunk on celebrity and the smell of Peggy Kram’s hair as it brushed the surface of my Simi-shell.
*
Actually, Sinning Willie.
48
Jacqui and Wally were ready, on that night, to risk their lives to get me out of Voorstand. I should have listened to them, but I was like a drunk around a bottle. My death hung over me, and I would not see it.
Wendell Deveau, his belly sticking out in front, his shirt hanging down at the back, was prowling round the Demos Platz. Leona the facilitator was bugging Wendell’s room in the Marco Polo. And Gabe Manzini was sitting in a gondel off the Demos Platz tracing Wendell’s progress on an electronic monitor.
Meneer, Madam — my death did not disturb me. I barely noticed it. It was no more than the distant flutter of moths’ wings before the roaring of my need. I was twenty-three years old, crazy for life, the smell of a woman’s skin, the great bursting view through the topiary and down into the long shadows of Demos Park with its looping flights of red-winged pigeons.
I was standing in the place where Sirkuses are born, where the fabled city itself was either saved or damned. I was impressed. I was excited. Will the judges at the Guildcourt consider this when they attempt to determine my motive?
It is true I never revealed my true identity to those I met at Mrs Kram’s trothaus. But Kram herself never wished to name me. She said, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, and gave their names to me, never mine to them. This was not my deception. It was her respect.* This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars of only the most dangerous types of Sirkus.
And they liked me, Kram’s friends. I listened to them. They listened to me. I quoted Seneca. I told them jokes in my two-pin voice, jokes I made up on the spot, and delivered with a physical technique the opposite of anything Stanislavsky would ever have thought possible.
I was Meneer, or Oncle, or Bruder, the last of these to Frear Munroe, who gave me his card and asked me to come and see him perform in court where — he whispered this into the great dead prosthetic he imagined was my ear — he would be called in to represent special interests in the case against the hapless Mayor, accused of many things, including selling public streets and parks to French and English corporations.
Did I like Frear Munroe? No. I did not like his smell, his bad-tempered face, the violence I saw brewing behind his eyes. But he had currency — he told me things, in such a way, that I felt I had been beamed into the white-hot centre of existence.
So even though my bones were aching and my ligaments torn, even though I was faint with hunger and my skin was itching and aspirin was singing in my ears, I was — with the Kram’s long hair brushing across the wall of my face each time she leaned down to tell me something — in some kind of wild heaven where I did not give a damn for anything except how to get more of whatever it was I had.
I did not think the next move. I took it as it came. I spoke the words and learned to trust the patch. It strained my face most terribly. It is no easy business talking solely from the throat, but the result: the bliss of eloquence. Meneer, Madam, did you ever have dreams of flying?
Peggy Kram smelled of herbs and wild honey. It was her golden Dutch hair, her French shampoo, waving through the air in front of me. She had good skin, slightly golden, and clear blue eyes that stood in total contradiction to her Mersault.
Her hands were small, not perfect, indeed a little plump, but who am I to speak to you about perfection? She touched my ‘ears’, held my ‘hand’. ‘I’m going to keep him,’ the Kram said to beaming Bill, repeatedly.
Of course she knew I was not a mythic beast. On two occasions she clearly communicated her wish to not know who I was. Why was this? She did not tell me. She is what is called in Efica a stoppered bottle, a private person. She lived alone, so Frear Munroe told me, had no lovers, had her corporation boardroom in this trothaus, and the only thing he knew about her was that she had been a Sirkus widow who made her money, like so many, when her husband fell from the St Catherine’s Loop and crushed his head in front of a house of two thousand.
‘I want him,’ she said to Bill Millefleur, and thus produced a peculiar expression on my father’s handsome face.
It was not unnatural that my father should feel uneasy. He needed her approval as much as anything, and yet I was his son. He was galloping forward while reining himself in. He was on the slack wire, eighty feet above the ring.
‘Well, Peggy,’ he said. ‘This is not for me. I really think you have to discuss this with the Bruder himself.’
‘I want you here,’ Peggy Kram said to me, directly, frowning, and pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘I won’t permit you to go home.’
You see my porpoise rise, you think you see where this is leading. That is your history, perhaps, not mine. In my history there can be no climax, no conclusion, no cry in the dark, no whispers on the pillow.
‘My dear,’ I said, and my voice was so intelligent, so clear, so damn sophisticated. ‘My dear Mrs Kram, you couldn’t deal with me.’
‘Oh, I could handle you,’ she said.
I knew her, knew her imperious, self — doubting little soul. I whacked her on the bum, not gently either.
This made her face red, Bill’s ashen.
‘Is this how you act with Madam Mouse?’ she asked me. Her eyes were wet and bright.
‘Madam Mouse is dead,’ I said.
‘Dead?’ she said, colouring more. There was a way she spoke, with the tip of her tongue always forward in her mouth. It gave a slight cloudiness to her diction but made her mouth, always, wonderful to watch.
‘Quite dead,’ I said to Mrs Kram, playfully elbowing my anxious father in the thigh.
‘Mrs Kram,’ said Malide to Wally, ‘is asking, would Bruder Mouse here like to stay with her?’
‘How did she die?’ asked Peggy Kram.
‘She was assassinated,’ I said, ‘by agents of a foreign power.’
There was a long, long silence on the roof. I saw Frear Munroe, standing by the parapet alone, turn his square head. ‘They came and hanged her by her neck,’ I said.
‘Stay,’ Wally said. ‘It’s too late to go.’
‘He should definitely stay,’ Jacqui said.
‘Meneers, Madams,’ I said, looking at them gathering around me, out to Frear Munroe and Elsbeth Trunk, ‘do I not have voice to speak? Can I not speak on my own account?’
What I liked, what made me giddy, was the way not only my friends but six of the most powerful personages in Saarlim turned their heads, lifted their chins, parted their lips, how they listened, how they waited. I had no idea what I would say.
*
Cf. Item 3 of the charges against Tristan Smith: ‘[that he did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse … ’
49
I had fallen asleep on the bed Kram’s servant had, rather formally, introduced me to. I woke at two in the morning. I was stiff, hurting, hungry. I needed drugs: Sentaphene,* Butoxin,† Attenaprin,‡ but they were all in my bag in Bill’s apartment.
The glowing thermostat beside my reading lamp was set at a cool 65 degrees, but it was stinking and steamy inside the suit.
As I tried to stretch my painful hamstrings I knocked an envelope on to the floor. It fell with a heavy thwack. Later I would discover it to be a letter from my father, but at the time I was too stiff to think of bending for it. I was more interested in anti-inflammatory drugs, a bath, disinfectant, a bed where I could feel sheets against my skin. I left the large tan envelope on the bedroom floor and shuffled to the bathroom where I used the zip Jacqui had expediently sewn in the previous morning.