Part 42 (1/2)

'You want to go back to the hotel?'

I shook my head.

'Very cute,' the waiter said to Jacqui. 'You're some gjent. Some d.a.m.n gjent.' The waiter rolled his intense little eyes and folded his arms. 'That's some accent ... you know that?'

'I'm from Efica.' Jacqui looked up, her lips s.h.i.+ny from the Beanbredie. 'Everyone talks like this in Chemin Rouge.'

'But why in the name of G.o.d' the waiter jerked his small blond head towards me 'are you messing with this fire risk? Christ save me, Bruder. You were talking to a Cyborg, a Simi.'

I scratched my head, which is, as you know, a standard comic gesture for Bruder Mouse. The waiter could not see me, but I made my nurse smile.

'It's not so funny.' The waiter was so close to me I could smell his odeklonje and see the pores in his soft and s.e.xless skin as he leant across the table towards my nurse. 'You buy this old Cyborg, maybe someone took advantage of what you did not know. You're an Ootlander.'

'Actually, Bruder, this one is not a machine,' my nurse said. 'I think we should let him get a drink. He's just done an incredible performance.'

'Hey,' the waiter said. 'It's me. I'm not some Pow-pow you're scamming in the street. I'm not some n.i.g.g.e.r from Nigeria.'

'This is not a scam. h.e.l.l, Bruder,' Jacqui coughed deep in the back of her throat, 'there's really someone inside.'

'Is that what they told you?'

Jacqui coughed again. 'No one told me, Bruder. This is no s.h.i.+t. There's a little person in this suit.'

'Bruder,' said the waiter, 'I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but what they sold you is a Cyborg. It is not a person, it is a machine. You may not have them in Chemin rucking Rouge, but we have them here.'

The waiter was looking away from me. I could therefore put my nose close to his ear without him noticing. This made my nurse smile.

'Listen, bubsuck,' the waiter said. 'It does not behove you to smirk at me. This is not some little sticksville country with a picture of a rucking fish on its flag.* This is Voorstand. I am This is Voorstand. I am from from Voorstand. I am telling you something you want to know, minebroo. This Mouse you have presumably purchased is what we call a klootsac, a b.a.l.l.s-up. The original Sirkus Mouse was like six foot tall. You see these early Bruders in the paintings. Dogs, Ducks, Mice, all as big as football players. In the beginning, of course, it was very religious. All G.o.d's creatures, all that sort of thing. Maybe they was priests at one time but as long as I remember they were krakers, swartzers, thieves of one sort or another. Those Bruders did some awful stuff murder, rape, terrible things. So now we have Creature Control Act Voorstand. I am telling you something you want to know, minebroo. This Mouse you have presumably purchased is what we call a klootsac, a b.a.l.l.s-up. The original Sirkus Mouse was like six foot tall. You see these early Bruders in the paintings. Dogs, Ducks, Mice, all as big as football players. In the beginning, of course, it was very religious. All G.o.d's creatures, all that sort of thing. Maybe they was priests at one time but as long as I remember they were krakers, swartzers, thieves of one sort or another. Those Bruders did some awful stuff murder, rape, terrible things. So now we have Creature Control Act no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches. And so there are none.' no Bruder in a public place can be over three foot six inches. And so there are none.'

'This is one.'

'This is a Cyborg, I told you. They made it three foot six so no adult male could fit inside.'

'Maybe it's a small person.'

'I'm sorry, Bruder,' the waiter said, his tone now more gentle. 'I'm sorry you spent your money, but I recognize this little f.u.c.k. It's an Opus 3a Cyborg. They made a thousand of them.'

'A thousand.' Jacques winked at me. 'Good heavens.'

'I don't know the numbers,' he said irritably. 'They made a lot. They made hundreds of them, and everything was fine, for about a week, and then they started to catch on fire. There were Cyborgs running around Kakdorp, in flames. Or they got run over in the traffic. You'd see them on the news at night, some dumb crazy Dog walking out along some ditch, lost in s.p.a.ce. So this here creature, Bruder, no matter what you paid for it take it, sell it to a museum, someone off the plane from Chemin Rouge. And don't go hanging round the streets with Pow-pows. These are primitive people. They don't know how to take a kak in a bathroom. They steal. They carry firearms. They have diseases.'

'Oh, I don't think so.'

The waiter's face was very red and angry by now.

'Listen, I know so, Bruder. I know who you are.'

Jacqui began to blush. She looked at me, and looked quickly away.

'I'm watching out for you,' the waiter said.

'OK, I get it.' Jacques was scarlet. scarlet.

I was thinking: What is going on here? What is going on here?

'You don't get anything,' the waiter said. 'You're taking all sorts of risks you don't even know about. I cannot let you continue. If you weren't a trannie I would not care, but I am. I live here. I know how ugly it can be.'

I did not know what a trannie was. Jacqui did not either. The fact was obviously showing on her face for our host now reached across and took my nurse's hand and placed it inside his own white waiter's jacket.

'Be careful,' the waiter said. 'This is a big city. Women like us get raped and murdered every day.'

Jacqui was looking at me, her mouth open.

'I'm sorry,' she said. She picked me up. She took my weight, all sixty-five pounds, and hefted me over her shoulder.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You've been kind.'

I put my hand over her shoulder. I was wearing my gloves, but I brushed it 'accidentally' her breast, no question 23 September 394 by the Efican Calendar.

*A reference to the Republic of Morea.'It being hereby stated, in amendment to Codicil CXVIII, that it is an offence against the laws of the state of Voorstand and the Free Franciscan Church, for any adult male or female to a.s.sume the costume or to impersonate in any way G.o.d's Creatures as defined in Codicil III and further this amendment shall apply to those Creatures of the Saarlim Sirkus Corporation including Bruder Mouse, Phantome Drool , Busker Bear , in which case Manufacture shall be deemed to be, for the purpose of this law, an act of Impersonation EXCEPTING those Simulacrum or Cyborg facsimiles of the aforesaid G.o.d's Creatures whose maximum height is less than forty-two inches.'

29.

Do children decide how they are going to grow? Jacqui always believed she had decided, that she had stood on the veranda of her home and made the choice.

She had watched her mother (standing with her arms folded across her chest, making small disapproving exhalations Phhh, sssht) Phhh, sssht) and decided against all the strong physical evidence to the contrary that she would rather die than be like her. and decided against all the strong physical evidence to the contrary that she would rather die than be like her.

It was Christmas Day in the year 380 and Jacqui Lorraine was nine years old. Her mother was on the veranda with the tape recorder, watching her husband and his friend Oliver Odettes, a science teacher with a red face and a large black moustache, shovelling snow across the small front lawn. The tattered leaves of the banana trees flapped in the warm wind. The trunk of the twenty-foot high papaya rubbed against the water tank. Beyond the small privet hedge, the neighbours watched not just adults, but babies with spilled snow melting in their puckered mouths, squirming boys with snow down their s.h.i.+rts, silent teenagers with their hurt and hostile eyes.

In a moment Oliver Odettes would put down his shovel and walk under the veranda to fetch Jesse Lorraine's chair. He would place his chair in the middle of the snow. This would not be the first time this had happened.

'Incredible,' Rene Lorraine said, as her husband leaned his shovel against the privet hedge. 'Ssst.' As if it were all new, as if it were not like this every Christmas, always exactly the same, starting on Christmas Eve when Jacqui's father would borrow a refrigerated truck and then, with a loaf of bread, a blood sausage, and two bottles of roteuse sitting in a cardboard box on the seat between them, drive with Oliver Odettes to the peak of Mount Cootreksea, 10,000 feet and 200 miles from the palm trees of Chemin Rouge, and there they would spend two hours sipping wine, admiring the light, and shovelling snow into the truck.

They always left at eleven o'clock at night and they always turned the corner of the street at exactly eight in the morning. Then they would open the wire chain gates and back the refrigerated van up the twin concrete tracks and with all the neighbourhood children crowding the street shovel the snow over the pocket-handkerchief size lawn at the front of Jacqui's house.

The two friends had done it so often from the year Jacqui was three and they took (perhaps excessive) pride in knowing exactly how much snow it took to cover the gra.s.s, right down to the 'glace', those last six shovelfuls of snow which Oliver Odettes would fastidiously heap along the privet hedge while Jacqui's father went to fetch his books.

Rene Lorraine did not like Oliver Odettes, whom she referred to, in her daughter's hearing, as a riveter and a chochotte. Oliver Odettes wore very short shorts and fur-lined boots, always the same pair, for the snow. Every year it was the same. Rene would stand with her tanned arms folded across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and an expression, always the same expression, a mixture of incredulity and outrage, on her broad handsome face, and watch the science teacher tiptoe across the white lawn, as ugly as a drag queen. Each time she shook her head as if she would have nothing to do with so ridiculous a spectacle, and each time she played her part: she pushed the play b.u.t.ton on the tape player and turned up the volume so that the kids back on the other side of the hedge could hear the sleigh bells.

When the sleigh bell introduction had played for thirty seconds, she stood and pushed the 'stop' b.u.t.ton.

Then her elderly, shambling, increasingly bear-like husband he was seventy-six the year Jacqui turned nine would shuffle out from his tiny 'library' beneath the veranda steps and sit on the ridiculously small chrome and vinyl chair which Oliver Odettes had placed in the middle of the lawn; and each year the corrugations on Rene's forehead would deepen and complicate a little more.

Each year Jesse Lorraine would sit on the chair and acknowledge his wife and daughter and the neighbours. He would push his freshly opened bottle of roteuse down into the already melting snow, tuck the tartan rug around his s.h.i.+ning shapely brown legs, and open the first of the books in his lap.