The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘I’ve fooled myself,’ he said. ‘It’s like some kids’ game. I got too excited and let myself believe it was real.’

  ‘You little snot,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You little snot. You shallow, vain, posturing little snot. Don’t you dare act out your vulgar Sirkuses and come and tell me that what we do here does not matter. ’

  ‘I don’t think you should talk to me like that.’

  ‘Why? What will happen to me?’

  ‘I might not be interested in coming back.’

  ‘Why would I want you back?’

  ‘To fill the seats,’ he said. ‘You had me on the fucking poster, so don’t you curl your lip and say “Oh dear” to me, and never, not ever do I want you to use that word about me again.’

  And so on.

  Some time before dawn Bill and my mother stumbled back along the narrow cattle path, dehydrated from the wine, heavy with sleep, trying to avoid blackberry tangles in the dark. At the camp site, they felt their way carefully through the tethered horses and crawled into the bus.

  ‘Are you OK, Billy-fleur?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘Did you kiss your little boy goodnight? He’s been so happy to have his father home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he said. ‘The work is really wonderful.’

  26

  I boarded the Haflinger next morning ignorant of my future. I sat next to Bill Millefleur and put my hand in his. I had no idea, as I fiddled with the ornate silver ring on his left hand, that he was breaking up with my mother and therefore ipso facto was breaking up with me.

  His eyes were puffy, his mouth disconsolate.

  ‘Are … you … tired?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Then my mother came on to the bus.

  I knew she had woken with lank dirty hair and a headache, but now as she came down the aisle of the Haflinger she had changed herself into a bride in a satire – beautiful, golden, funny, drunk on oxygen. She wore the long white loose-fitting dress and sandals she always wore in Hamlet. This item was now thirteen years old. It was patched, threaded, had yellowed patches round the hems.

  I did not know what it meant. I simply clapped her. She looked so beautiful. She kissed me very sweetly and smiled at Bill. Her fury was odourless, invisible. She sat herself between us, tucking her legs girlishly under her.

  ‘We’re going to do Tartuffe,’ she told the bus of actors as the Haflinger lumbered out of our camp site. ‘It’s the new season. Just Molière.’

  None of these actors had ever played Molière, and not one asked her what she meant, but her delivery was so fast, funny, and everybody picked up on Tartuffe, and as we headed for the ferry along the Road of Broken Bridges the bus was filled with Tartuffe jokes.*

  ‘Will … I … have … a … part?’ I asked her.

  ‘We’ll all have parts,’ my maman said carelessly.

  I clapped again.

  ‘Especially Bill.’

  But when I wished to talk about my part, she would not hear me.

  ‘What … about … my … part? … What … about … my … part?’

  Finally she hissed in my ear, ‘It’s a joke, there’s no Tartuffe.’

  It was, you can see, complicated weather in that bus, and no one could have guessed that Tartuffe, this word she continued to throw around so lightly, was a knife, and that my maman was using it to saw at the bonds that tied her to my father.

  I watched my maman laugh and felt unhappy. I did not know why I should. All I could see was that Claire Chen was now the driver of the Haflinger and I had lost Wally to Roxanna and her pigeons. I doubt that this would have mattered to me if the air had been less poisonous, if my maman had not been so agitated about Tartuffe, but in the course of a few hours the pigeons became the basin into which I poured all the bilious liquid of my distress. I came to dislike them like you come to dislike the last meal before an illness. I was repulsed by the memory of their nervous fibrillating hearts, the way they squirmed and made my fingers oily. On the bus I became nauseous. On the ferry I threw up – raisins and apple juice all down my front.

  ‘Would you?’ my maman asked my dab.

  Bill took me to the bathroom and cleaned me up, roughly, impatiently.

  He felt he had outgrown his relationship with us. He had come out on the flight, eager to be with us, to be a proper father. Now he had decided we were hicks, cambruces. He brought me back on to the deck with raisins still sticking to my shirt.

  ‘Oh look,’ my Maman beamed at me. ‘Don’t you have a lovely father.’

  All the way up, across the Straits of Shanor, up Highway 1, Bill lived in a morass of sub-text. Nothing, even my mother’s hand on his thigh, meant what it seemed to mean. And this white dress, the same one he had seen her wear as Ophelia thirteen years before, was a bitter reproach whose meaning, being unable to be discussed, could never be exactly clear and was, in all its ambiguity, all its possible meanings, like one of those barbarous bullets which fragment inside the body.

  Bill wanted to be out of there. He could not wait. He thought of women he knew in Saarlim, young, sophisticated, very pretty. He thought of shops he might visit. Restaurants where he was known.

  On the outskirts of Chemin Rouge, he announced that he would not travel all the way back to Gazette Street but catch the airport bus at the Ritz. My maman did not argue with him.

  When the Haflinger stopped, my father shook my hand. He wished me well. I had no idea of the damage that had been done. None of the actors watching Felicity kiss Bill goodbye outside the Chemin Rouge Ritz guessed how urgently he wished to leave or how badly they had hurt each other. She kissed him lusciously, softly, sensuously, but carelessly too, like you might eat a peach in the middle of the season.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said, gripping her shoulders.

  ‘Tartuffe,’ she told him, and slipped away, laughing. From her seat in the bus she blew kisses and waved and the bad feeling did not break through the sea wall until she was inside the tower again and the actors were running in and out of the building, shaking the floor joists as they unloaded the remnants of The Sad Sack Sirkus.

  *Felicity later told me that she thought Tartuffe a very political and ‘appropriate’ play, and one which she could have quite happily adapted for the Feu Follet, but that she was using the title in the way that Bill, in ‘all his splendid ignorance’, intended. [TS]

  27

  Gabe Manzini arrived at the Chemin Rouge Ritz at the same time as Bill Millefleur got down from the Feu Follet bus, and if it took him a moment to recognize him, it was not just the fresh scar, which was certainly disconcerting, but the fact that Manzini was just off the flight from Saarlim.

  It was not exactly culture shock that the short athletic man with the trimmed grey-flecked hair was suffering from. He came here too often for shock. It was something softer, more diffuse that he felt, a sort of mosquito net between himself and life, a dulling of some senses, a heightening of others, an almost sexual response, not unconnected to women, but also related to the place itself, the wide sleepy straight streets, the fragrant mangoes, the dried biche-la-mar hanging in racks in the old godowns by the river, the river itself which would, with luck, soon be filled with thunder-borne water, raging, turbulent, clay-yellow.

  Gabe Manzini loved the taste of the air at this time of year. He was alive to the taste of mould spore amongst the fresh-mown grass. It was all so far from the great Sirkus Domes of Saarlim City and when a tall dark-haired man in a crushed light suit brushed past him, it took a moment to place him properly.

  ‘Mr Millefleur,’ he said.

  The Sirkus performer turned, blinked.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ Gabe said. ‘I just love the way you handle horses.’

  The young man frowned, nodded, and something in the way he did it, his embarrassment, made Gabe remember that he was indeed an Efican and, rather than being annoyed by his gracelessness, as he once
would have been, he privately celebrated it. He liked Eficans, their lack of slickness, their sense of privacy, even their disconcerting habit of calling their superiors by their first name. He liked their lack of bullshit, their pragmatism, their sense of realpolitik. And as he walked across the soft grey carpet to check in, he began to think how he might use this Efican actor with strong ties in Voorstand. It occupied him as he signed in, as he went up to his room, and when he was finally alone he dictated a short note which would sit in the computer casebook all through the exercise.

  In the end he would not try to recruit Bill Millefleur – he would not need to – but the actor’s name would sit in the secret action book of Voorstand’s chief undercover ‘vote-dokter’* for the following six weeks, and when the elections were finally over he would look back at this moment, when he crossed paths with Bill Millefleur, and marvel at the symmetry.

  *The author is aware that your PM claims that no such position exists in the VIA. [TS]

  28

  It was the smells that got my mother, I was sure of it. She had forgotten the way they pile up – dampness, mould, the leaking gas, rodents in the walls, rotting wood in the sills, the rust-and-grease odour from damaged plumbing. These are things she had lived with, shaped herself to, but when she re-entered her old life, which was, in the afternoon sun, as unlovingly lit as a stage under work lights, overly warm, bright, malodorous – it reminded her of everything that was unsatisfactory about her existence.

  The tower had become smaller than her memory of it. It smelt of mouse and mouldy paper. Yellow sun entered through a screen of rain-spotted dust. It made her whole life seem second-rate.

  ‘I’m sick of this,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ I said, but I was already shot through with panic.

  ‘Yes,’ she shouted, rugging at the sleeves of her Ophelia dress. ‘Really. Totally, completely sick of it.’

  I unrolled my mattress and lay down on it and folded my arms behind my head.

  ‘I’m … not.’

  My maman walked to the window where she looked down at Wally and Roxanna, who was unloading pigeon cages on to the vert-walk.

  ‘Funny old Wally,’ she said.

  ‘It … always … smells … like … this … when … we … get … back … Open … the … window … the … smell … goes.’

  ‘Tristan, your maman is too old to live like this any more.’

  I pulled my knees up to my stomach. She sat down on the mattress beside me. She stroked my head, but there was something actorly in the way she did it and I flinched from her.

  ‘Don’t!’ she cried.

  I took her hand and kissed it.

  ‘We could live in a proper house,’ she said. She touched my hair, again not hard, and even though it still felt false, I let her do it. ‘You could have a yard,’ she said. ‘With trees. We could be in a proper house tomorrow.’

  ‘Hate … trees.’

  ‘Oh,’ she tried to tease me. ‘It must be another boy who liked to climb them.’

  I opened my stony-white eyes and stared into hers. ‘I … need … a … theatre,’ I said softly. ‘Maman … I … have … a … destiny …’

  My poor mother. She put her hand up against the place on her chest where you could see the bones beneath the skin. ‘Tristan, listen to me.’

  I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘I … know … I … am … not … handsome.’

  ‘Don’t kick.’

  I shut my eyes, squinched up my face.

  ‘I … will … play … Richard … the … Third.’

  Felicity put her hand across her mouth. ‘You know who Richard the Third is?’

  ‘A … mighty … king.’

  ‘Who set you up to this?’

  ‘Now … is … the … Winter … of … our … discontent.’

  ‘You cannot be an actor,’ she said. ‘You would not want to be.’

  ‘You’re … an … actor.’

  ‘Not any more,’ she said.

  ‘The … smell … will … go … you’ll … get … used … to … it.’

  ‘I don’t want to get used to it,’ she said.

  She leaned out the window to where Wally was unloading the pigeons and stacking them along the street.

  She called, ‘Wally.’ Then, ‘Come up.’

  ‘He … knows … what … I … want,’ I said. ‘He … loves … actors … when … he … is … reincarnated … he is going … to … be … an … actor.’

  ‘Re-what?’

  ‘When … he … lives … after … he … has … been … dead.’

  ‘Do you really think I’d ask Wally’s advice about acting?’

  ‘Why … you … asking … him … up?’

  ‘We could let him keep his pigeons here,’ she said brightly. ‘This could be a perfect pigeon loft.’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘Tristan, what have we ever done for Wally and what has Wally done for us? He loves you so much, I think he would die if anything happened to you. He only bought those pigeons because you liked them.’

  ‘Birds … in … our … HOME? … No … one … will … let … you … do … it.’

  ‘No one will let me?’

  ‘The … collective … won’t … let … you … REALLY.’

  She came and sat down beside me on the mattress. ‘You want to know what’s bad about being an actor?’

  Her skin looked white and tired, but her eyes were dangerously active – angry and demanding.

  ‘When you are an actor, you are so dependent. You’re a baby. You stand in line. The director and the producer look at you (look at me if I let them) like you’re a worm. They know less about the play than you do. They have the most superficial understanding of the material, but they turn you into a lump of nervous jelly, even the most pathetic specimens, just with their power. They talk about the character you will play as if it is nothing to do with you. They talk about your body like it was a thing. They give someone else the role. When you are an actor your normal state is unemployed. It is so hard to even have a reason to get up in the morning.’

  ‘You … are … an … actor,’ I insisted.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m an actor-manager, and if I want to put pigeons in my tower, then that is going to be my pleasure.’

  29

  All my mother’s misery was now focused, not on Bill or his comments about the company’s work, but on the tower. My father had left us, but it was the tower that was the demon. Once she had decided this, she could not stay still. Even though it was a Sunday, she had to act.

  She rushed out to the cavernous old Levantine shop on the Boulevard des Indiennes and came back with Zinebleu, the Argus, the Herald, the News, Chemin Rouge Zine, L’Observateur, Le Petit Zine, and took to them with a big pair of dress-maker’s scissors. She covered the slippery floor with sheets of expensive cartridge paper and on each sheet she wrote the name of a street or an area she imagined might be pleasant to live in. Then she cut out the little avverts and glued them to the paper.

  Wally arrived twice to invite me to come and feed the pigeons, but I would have nothing to do with pigeons. I stayed on my mattress ostentatiously reading Theatre Through the Ages.

  I wished Vincent would come and look after my maman. But Sunday was Natalie’s time and my mother could not even call him at his home. The only thing she could do is what she did – stay up all night cutting up the sheets of paper and arranging them in different ways. When I took her Voorstand first-edition Stanislavsky from her shelf, she did not try to stop me. I read it, pointedly, waiting for her to take it back.

  Some time in the night she woke me to give me a chocolate bar. She touched my hair, tenderly. I was very hungry, but I knew that eating chocolate would somehow weaken my hold on the tower. I picked up the Stanislavsky and left the chocolate, unopened, on the coverlet.

  The next thing it was six-thirty a.m. The Stanislavsky was sitting on my maman’s desk. She was talking to Vincent on the telephone. Sh
e was bright, alert, positive, but her bed had not been slept in and she was still wearing the same long grey dress with the white collar. While she talked I tried to find the chocolate bar but could not see it anywhere.

  At half past nine we left the theatre, walking past the pigeons which were piled up in the gloomy foyer in their wicker cages. Vincent tried to persuade me to fondle one but I drew my fingers back into a fist and wrinkled up my nose. Then he took us for breakfast in a booth at the Patisserie Jean Claude where I ate two plates of scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three hot chocolates. By half past ten I had a stomach ache and we were touring property in Vincent’s Corniche. These were not the properties advertised in the papers, but properties owned by Vincent and his brother.

  I had no intention of leaving Gazette Street, I told my mother. She listened to me carefully, nodding her head and seeming to give weight to my objections, but I knew she thought she could bring anyone round to her point of view.

  Each new property made her more animated, talkative, ‘girlish’, and Vincent spent the day with his neck glowing pink above his collar, a sure sign of what was happening below his belt. Yet when we returned to Gazette Street she did not, incredibly, ask him in.

  She kissed him on the street, in public, and carried me inside.

  The minute we were inside the Feu Follet, everybody wanted Felicity Smith – they set upon her in such a hungry way that I barely had space to notice the pigeons were gone from the foyer – but we stopped for none of the supplicants. We went up to the tower, shut the door, and locked it.

  There my mother walked up and down, loudly noticing how small the tower was, talking about the big house we had seen on Cockaigne Place, the two bathrooms on Hellot Road, but mostly about the little house Vincent had had Belinda Burastin build for him in the bushland fifteen miles away. She said I would be more cheerful when I was not constricted by ‘this wretched place’.

  ‘What … wretched … place?’

  ‘Oh darling, you’ll see – there’s so much more to life than theatre.’