The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘So are you interested or what?’ She took the keys out of the ignition. She wiped her hands with her handkerchief. ‘I’ve got other people interested.’

  ‘I could be persuaded.’

  ‘What do you think I’m talking about, mister?’ she said.

  He opened the door for her and stepped back politely so she could get out of the car. ‘Not doves,’ he said, and grinned.

  ‘They’re expensive,’ she said, lowering her eyes as she locked the door. ‘That’s all I meant. It isn’t like an impulse buy.’

  As she walked back to the caravan, she sensed Wally Paccione’s freckled hand, imagined it half an inch away from her pleated red skirt, as insistent as thrip, a fruit fly hovering, but when she looked over her shoulder she saw he was not even looking at her, but back towards the chalky green motel doors.

  When she opened the van for him the smell came flooding out.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  That smell used to drive Reade crazy. He always asked her – every morning before he drove away – please clean the loft. When she was under the impression that pigeons made BIG MONEY she had cleaned – brooms, scrubbing brushes, disinfectant. She had been a fanatic in the cause. She laid out brown-eyed peas, ground millet, butcher’s seed. She checked each hen once every day – eyes, throat etc. But when she saw what Reade’s idea of BIG MONEY was, she gave up on the pigeons.

  If she had bought a gun and pushed him into a bank, Reade would have thought she was a genius. But when she wrote away for books, he laughed and farted and spilt his drink back in his glass.

  ‘Your lips move,’ he said. ‘Your fucking lips move, Roxanna.’

  She let him laugh. It made him look so pitiful.

  She sat in the kitchen in her dressing gown, toast crumbs embedded in her elbows. She read about things that bewildered him: the production of tin soldiers in nineteenth-century Europe, for instance. His lip curled, but his eyes looked frightened. He could not imagine the pay-off. He was not meant to. She read slowly with a wooden ruler held under each line.

  He came home with beer on his breath and snatched the ruler away. She knew he was hanging round with that Voorstandish widow up at the cashier’s office. He did not look beautiful any more. His sexy red lips had got all twisted and his eyes were bulging, like someone with a thyroid condition. He was her husband, but she looked at him from far, far away – one more bozo going to hit it big with greyhounds, pigeons, possum furs.

  Rich people did not mess with things that shit or made you ill. Only poor people did that. Reade already had bronchitis, fancier’s lung, all that bloom which came off the birds, white clouds of it, every time they settled.

  The weird thing was that when he split, he abandoned the pigeons too. Now they were her only asset.

  ‘Can I hold one?’ the punter asked her at the Melcarth Motor Inn.

  She folded her arms across her chest and watched him as he lifted out the cage and opened it without being shown the tricky latch. He took the bird – hands up and down its chest, down around its neck, like a fancier.

  What she could not know was that the only two truly happy years of Wally’s childhood had been spent with his maternal grandfather who was exactly that character that Roxanna now despised – the working-class man with a passion for pigeons, a man making twenty-five cent bets, upgrading his stock, crossing street-pecker with street-pecker, dreaming of the big bets, the famous birds.

  She watched him running his nicotine-stained finger down the back of the bird’s head and thought he was just like Reade looking at ties in an expensive shop. She was deep within herself. She did not hear the five members of the Feu Follet cross the yard and stand behind her. What she was thinking was: she was back at square one – if he did not buy these birds, she was going to have to have sexual intercourse for money.

  Then she heard the scrape of shoe behind her. The hair on her neck stood on end. She spun around and saw tattoos, face scars, ripped shirts and sweaters, a bald-headed man with bright blue eyes staring at her tits. Sweat pooled in the tight creases of her hands.

  There was a woman with an accent like a Sirkus star. She was striking, pale-faced, copper-haired, holding a blond-haired child who was hiding himself under a patchwork shawl.

  ‘We all wanted to see the clean bus, Wally.’

  ‘Here, Tristan,’ Wally said to the fair-haired boy. ‘Hold this.’

  A pair of surprisingly large hands emerged from the tatty shawl, and as the child took the bird she saw his face, my face.

  Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.

  It was hard to look, hard to not look – my triangular head, my dense blond hair, my frightening lipless mouth, my small regular white teeth, my striated marble eyes – terrible, beautiful – flecked with gold, like jewellery.

  ‘Feel its heart,’ the punter said. ‘You can feel its heart beating in your hand.’

  Everything was happening for Roxanna in slo-mo. She saw Tristan Smith hold her pigeon with his normal hands.

  ‘You feel that?’ Wally said. ‘That’s its heart.’

  The boy cupped his hand around her pigeon’s breast.

  He said, ‘Air … atter.’

  ‘OK, you’re an actor,’ the punter said. ‘I never said you wasn’t.’

  ‘Ah … don … hellet … ehh.’

  That’s right. You don’t collect anything yet,’ the punter said. ‘I’m not saying you’re not an actor. I’m asking you, would you like to breed pigeons, race them? Feel its heart, feel it on your face.’

  ‘Ah … don’t … hellet … ehh.’

  ‘You don’t collect their eggs. You let the yolk stay inside, then you get birds out of them.’

  The boy held the bird so tight Roxanna feared he was going to choke it.

  ‘You like the pigeon?’ the woman asked. ‘Would you like that?’

  The boy’s eyes were big, swimming, alive, all those fine gold stripes flashing in the artificial light. His legs were twisted, wasted, pipe cleaners inside his striped pyjamas. He nodded.

  ‘Is this OK?’ the punter asked the beautiful woman.

  The woman turned to the boy. She smiled and stroked his soft white neck. ‘Is this instead of climbing trees?’ she asked him.

  When the punter turned back to Roxanna his face was blazing red. His eyes had changed. They had been all sleepy and slitted but now they were bright, prickly, absolutely awake.

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  Roxanna did not know what it was, but she saw something was happening.

  ‘I don’t sell them individually,’ she said.

  ‘All of them,’ the punter said, his colour still high.

  He held the bird’s beak open and looked inside – checking the cleft.

  ‘That’s Apple Pie,’ she said. ‘He’s famous.’

  ‘How much is all I’m asking.’

  She thought 300. She thought 5000. ‘You couldn’t afford it,’ she said.

  ‘Wally,’ said the beautiful woman, swinging Tristan Smith on to her other hip, ‘where would we keep pigeons in Chemin Rouge?’

  ‘Chemin Rouge?’ Roxanna asked. (There was an antique toy exhibition in Chemin Rouge next week!) ‘Are you going back to Chemin Rouge?’

  ‘We get the right price, we’re going to buy it,’ the punter told the boy. ‘We’re going to have pigeons.’ To the woman he said, ‘Is this OK?’

  They’re educational,’ Roxanna said. ‘Maths, genetics, dot dot dot.’

  The punter could not hear her. He was looking straight into Tristan Smith’s wild unnatural eyes. He was like a man proposing marriage – still, intense, a coiled spring.

  ‘A thousand,’ Roxanna said.

  The minute she said it, she knew it was too much. She saw his Adam’s apple move. He grinned at her, a little foolishly.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said the beautiful woman.

  ‘I’d set you up,’ Roxanna said to Wally. ‘You know what I mean?’

  That was how sex got mixed up with it again
. She hadn’t needed to say this. It was habit, insecurity.

  ‘You know what I mean?’ she said. ‘For a thousand, I’d be prepared to come down to Chemin Rouge and set you up, get everything in nice working order.’

  ‘We’re actors,’ the woman said. ‘We haven’t got that kind of money.’

  ‘Three hundred,’ Wally said.

  In the end Wally paid 650 dollars and my mother was aghast, bewildered. ‘Was this about what I think it was about?’ she asked Bill Millefleur.

  25

  The last day of the tour found our party camped at Fiddler’s Creek, waiting for the next day’s car ferry to Chemin Rouge. Bill had spent the late morning in sleep, or pretended sleep, and now he lay in the back seat of the bus, reading and rereading the first page of Dead Souls, wishing nothing more than for the time to pass, the sultry day to go, for tomorrow to come so he could catch his flight back home to Saarlim City.

  My maman, however, had other plans for the last day.

  She appeared at the window by his head, tapping, beckoning.

  ‘What?’

  When she saw his face through the dusty window – the great ridged scar from mouth to chin, the anxious eyes – Felicity knew something was up, but she did not know how serious it was.

  Bill held up his book.

  She shook her head and beckoned.

  When he appeared at the bus door, he looked strangely shy, and she took him by his hand and led him past the dusty horse float, through the hash-sweet campsite, along a rather melancholy avenue lined with dead black mimosa trees and shoulder-high blackberries whose leaves were now grey from dust.

  ‘What is this?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she teased him.

  Around the bend Bill saw his best linen suit, clean and pressed, shrouded in plastic, hanging from a low mimosa just off the track. He felt a dull kind of dread.

  ‘Some fancy joint?’ he asked. ‘Out here?’

  ‘Sssh.’ My mother made her eyes go big, fluttered her lashes, began to undo the buttons of her khaki shorts.

  ‘Some joint with cha-cha?’ Bill whispered, rolled his eyes.

  ‘Ssh.’ My maman slipped out of her shorts and into the deliberately crumpled blue silk overall she had carried in her handbag. ‘They’ll hang us if they find us out.’

  There was nothing for my father to do but get into the suit.

  When they were both changed, my mother took him by the hand and set off, not along the road, but along a narrow path of the sort made by cattle. She had played this kind of game before – birthdays, anniversaries – and Bill guessed they would soon come to a village or at least a filling station where she would have arranged a rent-a-car.

  Their destination, however, turned out to be an unprepossessing building 200 yards away. It was larger than the little fishing shacks beside it, but just as rusty. It was only as they came to the steps of the wide veranda that he noticed the details, the crispness of finish, the spare teak-framed doorways cut into the thickly insulated corrugated skin.

  It was a small hotel, very Efican in its modesty – expensive, of course, but affecting, in its skin, the artful camouflage of rural decay.

  Bill’s hand went to his slashed face, feeling the raw, rough ridge.

  ‘You don’t like it.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Good heavens, no. The opposite.’

  And as they walked to their suite he gesticulated and congratulated, admired the view of the mudflats, the red and blue hangings of old Indienne, but he could not keep the shadow of depression out of his eyes.

  ‘It’s a lot of money, I know,’ she said when the concierge closed the door to the room and they were at last alone. ‘It’s very bourgeois.’

  ‘It’s wonderful.’ Bill held his arms wide. The room was white and spare, the floor teak. ‘It’s very tasteful.’

  ‘Tasteful?’ She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Wonderful. Truly wonderful. It’s such a treat.’

  ‘It’ll be our last night for eight months, mo-chou. I wanted it to be nice.’

  ‘It’s wonderful.’

  When Bill and Felicity lay in bed after their bath, she said, again, ‘I wanted you to remember Efica like this.’

  They could look down their long pink naked limbs and see, behind the rifle sights of their toes, the inky blue clouds of a thunderstorm, the low lines of brilliant green mangroves, the long flat mudflats glistening pink in the late sun and the spindle-legged birds gathering their evening meal.

  They had soaked in the hot tub and soaped each other, but now they lay naked, side by side, neither sought the other.

  ‘Are you OK, Billy-fleur?’ Felicity turned on her side and began to slowly rub his smooth wide chest with the flat of her hand.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Depressed?’

  ‘Nah …’ He held his hand over his eyes. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She peeled the hand back from the eyes, playfully.

  He pulled his hand away with a roughness that surprised even him. No sooner had he done it than he was stroking her hand and apologizing.

  Felicity stroked his neck but her hand came clumsily close to his face and he turned his head away from her.

  ‘Is it your face?’ she said suddenly. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. You’re upset about your face.’

  In his late thirties, interviewers, women particularly, would like to ask the question about the small pale line that ran from the corner of Bill’s mouth to the point of his chin. There would be something sexual about this mark whose story the Sirkus performer would never tell. They would extend a finger sometimes, as if they would have liked to touch it, and he would rest his own forefinger on the pale silky little path of tissue, and smile.

  But when Bill smiled at my mother, the scar was ridged, raw, purple, and destroyed the symmetry of his archer’s-bow lips.

  ‘Let’s have a good time,’ my mother said. ‘It’s our last night for a year.’

  Bill held up his glass, smiling. My mother filled it. Bill sipped the champagne and placed it carefully beside the bed, but once that was done, he was quiet and she could feel nothing had changed. She put her hand out to the scar and this time touched it deliberately.

  ‘You know how you’ve worked to convince me that this didn’t matter to you?’

  ‘So think: why would I act like that?’

  ‘Well, it’s not so crazy …’

  ‘… so you’d admire me.’

  She looked across at him. He turned his head towards her, his mouth loose, his chin a little soft.

  ‘So you’d admire me,’ he repeated.

  She shook her head. She could feel all his upset broiling and churning away beneath the surface.

  He lay on his back again, staring up at the carefully finished teak ceiling. She lay propped up on her elbow, watching him. He said, ‘Your whole life you are surrounded by people doing things so you’ll admire them. Moey does a high-wire act. Your son tries to kill himself in a pine tree. I pretend this doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You get yourself slashed … for me.’

  That isn’t what I said, but still: who put me on the poster?’

  ‘Bill, that’s not even logical. You’re so angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m not angry at all. This has been happening to you all your life,’ he said. ‘You should let yourself see it.’

  She sat up again and sipped her drink. ‘This is nothing to do with me. It’s all to do with you.’

  ‘What?’ He also sat up and raised his eyebrow at her.

  ‘You’re angry. You’re looking for something to let your anger out on.’

  ‘Of course I am fucking angry. You would be angry too. I got my face slashed for nothing.’

  ‘Hunning, it’s going to be fine. It looks horrible now, but you told me what the doctor said …’

  ‘A tour like this. What’s it for? If there’s an election tomorrow …’

  ‘There’s one on January 22 …
’

  ‘All right. If there’s an election next month, what have you affected?’

  My maman looked at him a long, long time, her forehead creasing, a shadow appearing in her eyes.

  ‘People come,’ she said at last. ‘They laugh, they cry, their minds are engaged.’

  ‘Why are you so wilful? Why are you so deliberately not understanding? You know who these people are that come. They’re converts. You come down out of the sky like some angel of fucking light. They love you before you get there. Nothing changes.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘I don’t see that it is worth it,’ Bill said. ‘I said a group of performers who feel they are beyond criticism, who elevate sloppiness to a style of acting.’

  ‘You think our work is poor?’

  ‘It’s perfectly fine.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me.’

  ‘I’m not patronizing. I’m saying: it is perfectly fine. It’s like this champagne …’

  ‘You don’t like the champagne … ’

  ‘Well, actually it is not champagne … You cheer up the lonely liberals, you annoy the fascists. It entertains. It educates.’

  ‘But you despise it.’

  ‘No, I don’t despise it. It’s just not worth getting myself slashed for. I feel a fool. I feel like I’ve been in a theme park, acting out some heroic role, and now it’s time to go home and …’

  ‘Have I become provincial?’

  ‘All art is provincial.’

  ‘That’s an evasion.’

  ‘Well, what do you mean?’

  ‘I always thought I’d know if I was becoming second-rate.’

  He shrugged. It took only a second. She did not ask him to explain it. She did not need to.

  ‘I always thought I’d know.’

  He took her hand and held it. ‘You know what you should do? Tartuffe. Costumes, the works. Have some fun. You might even make money. There’s a great French video of Bernstein’s Tartuffe. It’s a little campy, but very nicely done.’

  ‘You’ve thought this, all through the tour?’

  ‘You’re too smart to waste your time like this.’

  She looked at him, her brow furrowed.

  ‘You thought all this, when you were giving notes?’