The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  But he, also, understood himself – he could not walk up the stairs. Nor could he leave the building, for if he left the building now, tonight, then that would be it, the end, and he would not permit it to be the end. He went to the open door and looked balefully at the last of the theatre patrons, a man and woman, standing in the middle of the street and talking in the sweet salty air.

  ‘Croco cristi,’ he said to himself, but more loudly than he intended. The man turned sharply to look at him, and Vincent thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and turned back to face the bleak little foyer with its ragged self – important notices.

  ‘Croco cristi,’ he whispered. He undid his wide leather belt in that elaborate way of his which always suggested a man about to undress for bed.

  ‘God damn.’

  He tightened the belt a notch.

  What happened next was not very much – his mouth tightened a little. But a second later he was crossing to the staircase in three strides.

  Next he was ascending the stairs. Next, revealing a more athletic frame than his bulk might have promised, he was striding along the deserted first-floor corridor. His squeaking crepe soles echoed in the empty couchettes, and then receded as he climbed the steep narrow stairs which led to the roar of conversation.

  The tower room was small, ten foot by ten foot six, and by the time the chief executive officer of Efica’s largest aspirin manufacturer had reached the top there were fifty people crammed inside. One step below the door sill, his courage failed him. He stopped, marooned it seemed, jiggling his keys.

  He could not see Felicity, but he could hear her. There was a stirring in the crowd – the tall, gaunt Sparrow Glashan stepped aside, and there she was, totally alone, exhausted, with the spooky white-eyed baby on her crumpled bed.

  How he loved her, loved her at that instant, beyond anything he had known before.

  Felicity saw him. She caught his eye. He did not know how to look at her. His own eyes wobbled, then dropped. He stepped into the room and busied himself at the drinks table. He took a paper cup and filled it brimful of dark red wine.

  When he next looked up, the crowd had blocked his view again, and he could hear Felicity asking someone to phone the hospital again to see when Wally’s arm would be attended to. Her Voorstand accent was clear and crisp. It cut through the humming, sighing Efican voices like a silver knife.

  He stepped back into the doorway and raised himself on his toes. Someone had, at last, taken pity on Felicity – Claire Chen. Vincent had always thought of Claire Chen as a limpet on Felicity’s life – low-life dramas, breakdowns, abortions, bail money. But now she was the one who sat on the bed and laid her ringed hand on the baby’s foot.

  When she did this, the room quietened.

  She began to stroke the baby’s twisted foot. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. You could hear her nerviness. ‘All the bones and skin,’ she said.

  Felicity asked Claire, ‘Would you like to hold him?’

  Sparrow Glashan moved sideways and blocked Vincent’s view again. Vincent left the doorway and pushed in past Annie McManus.

  ‘Sure,’ Claire said, ‘I’ll hold him.’

  As the baby passed from its mother its spindly arms sprang out like a spider and Claire flinched and screwed up her face. The actors watched. Vincent watched. He could see by the way she pulled her chin into her neck – everything in her wanted to thrust the child away.

  Claire did the thing Vincent knew he was expected to do himself – touched the lipless little tragedy, stroked its gaunt little praying mantis head. It was very quiet in the square, high-ceilinged little room.

  ‘See,’ Felicity said, speaking generally, smiling, fondly, like a mother.

  ‘Feel,’ Claire invited, her little brown eyes flicking about the room – she had done the brave thing, but she did not want to do it a second longer. ‘It’s so amazing.’

  Vincent felt the crowd stir and shift. He imagined eyes looking for him.

  ‘Feel,’ Claire repeated. Vincent looked down at the floor, avoiding her eyes.

  Annie McManus turned and looked at him. Her pretty face had no expression – she did not know he was Felicity’s lover, no one did – but Vincent was convinced the opposite was the case and he pushed forward, to escape her. He bumped into the critic for the Neufeine, who turned, and then, misunderstanding his intention, stepped to one side to let him through. A path then opened up before him, and he walked it – what else was he to do? – squeaking on his crepe-soled shoes.

  At the bed he looked into my mother’s eyes, and gave a melancholy kind of shrug which gave no indication of the wild, confused state of his emotions.

  But then he held out his square, soft hands – their palms soft as the underbelly of an animal – and fitted them around Tristan’s chest cage, hooked under my arms, and lifted me out of Claire Chen’s sweating embrace, slowly, smoothly into the air.

  When he had me held aloft, all he could think was that he was going to faint.

  No one spoke, no one made a sound. They left him there, alone, teetering on the edge. He glanced around the room, his eyes weak with need, his mouth oddly shapeless. Only Moey Perelli gave him any sign – pushed his own mouth into the shape of a grin.

  ‘He has intelligent eyes,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s not beautiful, but he has intelligent eyes.’ And then he embraced me. He was harsh and awkward – pushed his beard into my eyes and ears, grazed my skin, held me too tight, nearly tripped as he tried to walk a little closer to Felicity. He landed heavily on the bed. Felicity stretched out her light, tense hand and grasped at his knee.

  Moey began to talk, very loudly, about his security dossier (which he claimed to have seen), and somebody pulled a cork from a bottle of case-latrine.

  ‘He has extraordinary eyes,’ said Vincent. It was not easy for him. It took everything he had. He sat beside Felicity and made a little seat for me with his fat hairy arm. He supported my head with his fleshy pectorals.

  Felicity held his knee and smiled and bit her lip.

  Moey came – his head shining now he had removed his wig – and held out a long finger with wide tombstone fingernails.

  Vincent took Felicity’s hand – not something he normally did in company. ‘He has a strong grip,’ he said.

  Felicity nodded, and blew her nose.

  ‘Whose turn is it to pick up the reviews?’ she asked.

  *Voorstand Intelligence Agency and Department of Supply, the latter being the Efican secret service. The two services worked closely at all times, it sometimes being said that the DoS’s loyalty lay with the VIA, not with the elected government of Efica.

  11

  What Bill could not stand was: why must they deny there had been a tragedy? Why must they all smile and coo? When Felicity put out her hand and tried to hold Vincent’s old fat knee, he felt he was in an alien country where you could not even guess what might be going on. So while he believed he could feel the horror running through the room like a shiver, all he saw was smiling faces. All these actors – not one of them in touch with what they felt.

  ‘I’ll get the zines,’ he said.

  ‘No, mo-chou. You should be here with us.’

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ Bill said, his eyes full of poison. ‘I need the air.’

  Felicity frowned at him. He saw the need in her eyes, but she was sitting next to Vincent and Vincent had his fat valsir where he was so clever at placing it – on the moral high ground.

  Three minutes later, alone on the ramp in front of the theatre, Bill unscrewed his hip flask and took a long swig, spat the wine out on the bricks.

  The Feu Follet bus, a three-ton Haflinger with big slab sides and small decal-spotted windows, was parked right in front of the theatre. He found Felicity’s sandals sitting on the dashboard. He picked up and flung them deep into the dark body of the van.

  He let the clutch out so hard you could feel the prop shaft thunk and he accelerated out into Gazette Street in loud metallic first gear, shift
ing noisily into second as he passed the brightly illuminated taxi base. He pulled across the tram tracks and turned right, away from the Voorstand Sirkus and the Mater Hospital down towards the port.

  He thought: that’s it, I’ll keep on driving and never come back, but the truth was, of all my maman’s admirers, he was the one who needed her the most. She had altered his life. She had taken him into the company when he was nineteen years old, a cambruce. He had fallen out with a travelling circus over his wages. Fearing a beating from the proprietor and his brothers, he had run away to Chemin Rouge and there he had wandered down Gazette Street and discovered a free Wednesday-night performance of Hamlet.

  He was dirty, starved, down to 120 pounds when he saw my maman play Ophelia. He sat in the dark, Row P, and fell in love.

  That night he slept in the lane behind the Feu Follet. Next day he walked out into the suburbs and stole roses, hollyhocks, snapdragons, whatever he could find, and next evening he brought them to my maman at the Feu Follet. It was the same the next night, and the night after that.

  At first she joked about him, teased him, said she was too old for him. But she never seemed too old to him. He loved the language she used, the language she knew. He told my maman he was the best voltige* artist in the southern hemisphere. And although he had never been inside a theatre until he walked into the Feu Follet, he told her he was going to be the best actor in Chemin Rouge. He asked her for books about acting and she could not refuse him. She gave him her precious first-edition Stanislavsky with her neck tingling and her eyes feeling loose and unfocused. He read the whole three volumes of An Actor Prepares, one volume a day. He argued with it. He was very handsome. He had a long flexible back, and dancing passionate eyes that never left her face. He was nineteen, a baby, but she could not withstand it.

  The first time they made love he told her he would die for her and she wept in his arms.

  Later, she read him Paradise Lost in bed, her head resting on his smooth and luminous chest. She bought him two dictionaries, the big two-volume Oxford and the smaller Efican University edition with its creolized French and English prison slang.

  He took her to a dressage ring in Goat Marshes and taught her voltige. She learned it too, without the benefit of a meccano.† She was twenty-eight, knew nothing about real circus, but she had such guts, such style. Within a week they were performing ‘two men high’, round and round, no one watching.

  He took her out into the cantons to the petites tentes. She did not see the meanness of the circus, the lying proprietors, the stinking caravans, the brutal beatings Bill had suffered. She saw instead the discipline, the lack of affectation, the highly critical audiences who could compare a given performance with others from a hundred years before. Seeking to invent an Efican national style in drama, she began then to incorporate circus skills into her shows. Not too much later she bought this old Haflinger bus and began to take her circus-theatre back into the little towns.

  It was the only vehicle the Feu Follet owned. There was nothing lighter or easier to use when they went shopping or, as now, to collect the zines. Bill bounced over the train tracks, and followed the old Ridge Line Road down into the port of Chemin Rouge. He drove past flour mills, catalytic converters as pretty as cruise ships decked with lights, oil terminals with their long pipes running out into the night. He drove, thinking of Vincent.

  He never had liked Vincent. From the very beginning, even when he had thought he was usurping him, he had been threatened by his wealth, his educated accent, his confidence. Tonight in the tower, he had let Vincent win again. Bill had walked away. He always walked away. He didn’t know any other solution. He felt sour shame come to take his cooling skin. He was sorry at the injuries he caused, the toxic things that had passed between them, in their eyes.

  He loved her. He could not bear to see her with Vincent, the fucking patapoof. He had been counting on the baby to change all that. It was his baby, necessarily. He was the father. He had built domestic pictures he dared not even name himself. But when he saw the real child – on stage, in the middle of his performance – his first feeling, in the middle of the horror, was outrage, the sense of theft, as if his happy life had been stolen from him.

  Then – for ten, twenty seconds – he was capable of anything. He wanted to hurt her, break her. He was a frightened soldier in a burning village.

  For a moment, in front of one hundred and eighty people, he was mad. And then, slowly, a bit at a time, he turned his rage away from Felicity, and turned it back into his performance.

  The wind was warm down in the port. It smelt of heavy oil and sea salt. He drove with the window rolled down, clattering past the bleak waterfront bars with their yellow tiled walls and used-car-yard bunting, heading towards the Zinebleu sign where the review of Macbeth was already rolling off the presses. It was the quaint habit of the Zinebleu to adopt what it imagined was the Voorstand practice – they would not send a reviewer to ‘press nights’, only opening night. So they held the theatre page till half past ten and the poor suck-arse reviewer either scribbled his review in the dark, or – as Veronique Marchant had obviously done tonight – wrote most of it before the show began.

  He picked up the zines and headed back up the Boulevard des Indiennes. He could not run away. He had to go back. But he was not going to lose to Vincent Theroux.

  When he arrived back in the tower he had not only the zines but a brown paper bag full of bottles, and as he entered the little room he was pleased to learn that Vincent had been called home to wifey.

  Felicity looked up and smiled, but he saw, already, the distance he had lost. He did not know how he knew this – a flattening of the cheeks, a tightening of the upper lips, a lack of animation in the eyes.

  He threw the zines on the bed. The normal praise-addicts – Moey, Heather, Claire – all leapt upon them, but Bill kicked off his moccasins and sat cross-legged on the quilt, going through his bag of bottles.

  ‘I have Rosemary oil,’ he announced, ‘Apricot Kernel, and Scented Olive. I think Rosemary is appropriate, don’t you?’

  ‘No, sweets,’ Felicity said. He could see her trying not to offend him while she was, at the same time, shocked by what she thought he was suggesting.

  ‘Come on, Flick, I’m not going to massage you.’

  His own hands, when he held them out for the child, felt as dull and heavy as lead.

  Felicity tucked the wrap around the child a little tighter. He was left with his hands held in the empty air.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Felicity’s reluctance hurt him like almost nothing he could remember. He felt his lip tremble, and when she gave him the child he actually wanted it, but could not bear to think she had given it to him because she saw this weakness.

  His son was so light: a parcel of bad dreams.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ she said.

  If she meant don’t do it, Bill did not get it.

  ‘He’ll like this,’ he said.

  He laid the parcel down and unwrapped it. The child had woken and was looking at him with those disconcerting marble-white eyes.

  ‘Is it OK to massage him?’ Felicity asked.

  The chest cage did not seem right somehow. The skin seemed to hang there like rag on wire. The legs and feet were all wrong too. He could not look, but it seemed as if the heel was missing. Bill felt sick. He poured the oil into his hands and blew on it. It was warm anyway. He had stolen the oil from Annie’s room. Annie had gone to visit Wally in the Emergency Room. She would not be happy if she knew he had done this.

  ‘Of course it’s OK,’ said Moey. ‘Look at him, he’s smiling. He sees me.’

  ‘He’s too young to smile,’ Bill said. ‘It’s not a smile.’

  The little creature looked at him. It scared him shitless. Bill put his broad-palmed hand across the fragile chest, and spread the oil.

  ‘You have to take his bandock off,’ Felicity said.

  He did not want to. He feared there would be something
horrible there as well, but when Felicity had undone the bandock the penis looked quite normal. He began to massage. He could feel the little being inside his hands, some sort of life-form not your own. He was half repulsed, half attracted. He could feel Felicity beside him now, felt her red hair brush his neck.

  He looked at her. She leaned across and kissed him. Now she was not withdrawn from him, he was really angry with her – she had forced him to play the musico, to out-Vincent Vincent in his admiration of this tragedy.

  The more he massaged, the more the child cooed, and kicked his malformed limbs, the more angry Bill became. The company began to press around, and it made him sour and cynical to see how they now wanted to massage too, and he gave up to them, gave up gladly, listening to everything they had to say. It was an orgy of denial. It disgusted him.

  He looked from this to see Annie standing at the door alone. She raised an eyebrow at him and held up a bottle of case-latrine. He looked at Felicity. He turned, before he could stop himself, and followed Annie down the stairs.

  *In the Efican circus, voltige describes a broad series of acrobat acts performed from and around horses – voltige infernale, voltige Tcherkesse, voltige à la Richard etc. etc.

  †Invented by Spencer Q. Stokes to aid in training bare-back riders. A central post supports an arm like the jib of a crane from which the student is suspended.

  12

  Wally claimed to have been born ‘on the sawdust’, to have grown up in a circus family, to have been the ‘Human Ball’ from ages one till three.

  When he first arrived at reform school he had still been able, so he said, to fit himself, together with twenty-four green soda bottles, inside a box measuring 24″ × 12″ × 12″. It was this which bent his back the way it was.

  Furthermore, his father had been a contortionist so extraordinary that he had been able, whilst still alive, to sell his skeleton to medical science. He had travelled around Efica with a coffin already addressed James Hazzard, MD, Boulevard Raspail, Chemin Rouge, Efica.*