The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘Who … pays … Wally? How … will … Wally … pay … rent?’

  ‘Your mother can afford whatever she wants,’ Vincent said. ‘She can fill the tower with ping-pong balls if that’s what she wants to do. Just let her rest.’

  ‘YOU … LET … HER … REST,’ I said. I looked at my mother. She was grinning at me, but there was a wildness, a real craziness about her. ‘YOU’RE … CRAZY,’ I said.

  She slapped my hand, hard, so it stung.

  I looked at Vincent, who just nodded his head, as if to say, you had it coming.

  ‘I’m … an … actor,’ Tristan Smith said. I was crying, but my mother did not comfort me. She broke a stick across her knees like a woman in a fable and then put the two pieces on the fire.

  *Belinda Burastin (341–90), the celebrated Efican architect, whose domestic dwellings perfectly reflect the liberal post-colonial conundrum. Every Burastin house carries an obvious sub-text – that it would be better for everyone if the house were not really there. Burastin’s houses barely penetrate the soil. They tiptoe on their sites. They are as light as thoughts, prayers, wishes that history had been otherwise, that cloven-footed animals had never been brought across the sea in ships, and that those who live there now should disturb the place as little – to quote – ‘as those early colonizers who inhabited the dry cool granite caves’.

  36

  I was betrayed, abandoned, slapped, broken like a stick, smouldering, oozing bubbling sap.

  My maman fiddled with the smoking fire, thinking what a problem she had with me. She never guessed how serious it was. She did not imagine that I was planning to run away. But why would she? I had never walked further than a hundred yards. My legs were twisted like old pipe cleaners. My only wheels were on my skateboard. I was ten years old, knew nothing, had no money. But once I saw her break that stick and throw it on the fire, I had to confront the fact that I would have to fight to earn my right to occupy a higher category of life.

  I had, of course, been wrong about the food. They had plenty. It was tasty, but I ate the moist grilled skipjack thinking of the tower being filled with ping-pong balls, and later, as my mother read me the Voorstand folk tale of the duck riding the dog to market,* I did not listen to the words in case I softened. I lay on my mattress and held my anger tight to me. I was the son of two actors.

  Not long after my maman turned out my light, a wild wind-storm arrived, slapping the canvas walls beside my bunk. I lay on my back with my eyes open and listened to Vincent and my mother running round pulling ropes, closing hatches and shutters. When the rain eased I realized they had moved to the bedroom. I could hear my mother crying and Vincent murmuring. I imagined she was remorseful. My heart softened.

  But then, just as I was about to go to her, the weeping turned to moaning and all my anger was alive in an instant. She had broken the stick. He had filled the tower with ping-pong balls. I hated her cold green eyes, her little mouth, the tired line at each of its edges, and I hated Vincent most of all, and I curled my lip in the dark as I thought of his talcum-dusted flab, his bearded mouth between my mother’s legs.

  I got out of bed. The rain had stopped. The moon was out, projecting images of trees weaving and waving like thick grass stalks across the walls and floors.

  I crept down into the living room and looked out across the wild shaking tops of sclerophyll scrub to the glowing buildings of Chemin Rouge and the golden light of the forbidden Sirkus Dome which was less than a mile from the abandoned Feu Follet.

  The idea – the vision – of my journey to reclaim my theatre now burst from the tight little place I had been keeping it and gushed, bubbling like lava, towards my destiny. At that moment, I should have been afraid, but what I had instead was a feeling so intense you could almost call it ecstasy. I lapped at the cold spring water from Belinda Burastin’s terracotta pipe. I strapped on my knee pads and tucked folded newspaper underneath for extra protection. As I stuffed Vincent’s treasured driving gloves with newspaper and then pulled them on to my own hands, I did not know what roles I would play, but I imagined them as great ones, not the parts written for Fools or Jugglers, but those for Kings to whose own loves and tragedies, misfortunes, weaknesses of spirit, I would lend my own peculiarly expressive form. I could be their spirit, manifest, their pain made three dimensional, their tragedy got up to walk around.

  To be inside the house, to feel it shudder and shake in the wind, was unnerving, but to pursue this action, to crawl and walk up the path to the road, to feel the wind envelop my body, swallow it, hold it, was thrilling. The resistance of my body, the immediate and early declaration of its limitations, was nothing – the stretch of my abbreviated hamstrings was, not quite pleasure, but certainly not pain.

  Tall dry grasses brushed my face. I thought: I can do this.

  The moon was bright, and everything was very clear. (I can do this.) I had imagined myself stumbling and falling and I was ready to accept that, but there was a tamped dirt path which more or less followed the tree-lined driveway up to the road. Yes, sticks scratched my face, and my breath, so early in the journey, was rough in my lungs, but I did not fall and I carried my skateboard under my arms and walked uphill on my knees, like a pilgrim, and all above my head the great tree canopies whipped and waved, tossed like hair, like showgirls’ feathers.

  Now, recounting this, I know more. I have travelled through dangerous tunnels in foreign countries, climbed steel ladders where bats are used to roosting, and my imagination, thinking of my younger self, is filled with the possibility of rats, brush-hogs, tree-adders, but that liquid silver night was free of them. No tree-adder jumped on me, no brush-hog collided with me. I dealt with my life one knee-step at a time.

  Every ten yards or so I stopped, caught my breath. I looked back down at the shining roof of the house between the wild tossing umbrellas of foliage.

  After the driveway there was a street. It was wide, and hard. It was here I confronted, in that broad shining black macadam strip, the size of my decision, and yes, sure, I was frightened there. Yes, I wanted my maman and my bed a moment, but then I remembered my maman and the twisted anger of my bed, and I had to proceed, one knee-step, then another, along the pebble-littered concrete gutter – it was too steep for a skateboard – down towards the rumble of the freeway, towards the theatre. The forest roared like a river in flood on either side of me.

  I will not say that some self-pity did not smear the glassy brightness of my earlier jubilation, but the thing is – listen to me – I kept on going. My mother was right – it was how she brought me up: I had no idea of how I looked.

  I had no real conception of my effect on others. Had you told me this then, I would have argued fiercely. I would have described myself to you, unflatteringly, in more detail than you could possibly have observed, and I might have convinced you. But I had no idea. And although no one ever spelled it out to me, I was really led to believe that it was only BAD PEOPLE who found me repulsive – supporters of the Voorstand Alliance, racists, fascists, not ordinary decent folk.

  And when, on that long-ago midnight, I came knee-walking down that moon-bright concrete gutter with my white hair fluttering and my torn-rag mouth loosened by the wind, I could not know how my wave would appear to the driver of the first oncoming car.

  The car stopped. There was nothing in my education to make me fear it. It began to make that slow, whining noise so beloved of hitch-hikers – the sound of reverse gear, fully engaged. It came to a stop right next to me: high, mud-splattered, vaguely white.

  There was a radio playing Pow-pow music – rough field-hand voices, long sad dissonances, violin, cello.* It switched off. I knelt beside the door, waiting to be let in. Then the passenger-side window came down a little, about an inch.

  ‘What you want?’ a man’s voice said.

  ‘The … Feu … Follet.’

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘Foo’ – I spoke slowly – ‘Folll-ay.’

  The car backed some more and then
drove directly at me, so slowly I could hear individual pieces of gravel crunching beneath its rolling tyres. Hot urine washed my thigh. The car’s headlights shone full on me, so brightly that, when I turned to face them, I had to hold my arm across my eyes. My left leg was wet and warm. I could also feel the heat of the car’s radiator. I could hear its tappets singing. I took my hand down and stared into the lights, but then the car backed off, swung out, and slowly drove past me. I watched its red lights slowly drop over the rise and descend to the freeway on the plain below. Soon my trousers were wet and cold, sticking to my legs.

  I began to crawl back up towards Belinda Burastin’s house, but it was just too steep. That’s the truth – it was easier to go on down, towards the freeway. The skateboard was more a hindrance than a help. Finally I grasped it with my hands and crawled behind it, using my knees as brakes when it went too fast, skidding and scraping my way down to the bright ribbon of macadam whose carbon-rich emissions I could now smell, in brief bursts, upon the wind.

  An hour later, my belly swollen with nervous gas, my fingers bloated, my knees red raw, I finally climbed down the side of the ramp and slipped down a rough grassy bank to the freeway verge. I lay there, in the shadow of the overpass, for perhaps an hour, feeling the buffeting of big wheat trucks coming down from the north, their sirens blasting as they exceeded the governed speed limit.* I would have gone back to my bed if I could, but I no longer had that option. I just lay there in my pee-wet trousers, shivering, lost in space until the cold became worse than the fear and I edged my way slowly out of the overpass shadow and into the bright stage-light of the freeway. There I managed to stand on my feet and hold out my thumb. I don’t know what I expected. No longer something good.

  I don’t know what make the car was. It was a small car, silver, no longer new. It screeched its brakes on so hard white smoke came flying out – I’d seen that sort of thing on vid – and came reversing back towards me at high speed.

  The driver did not wait for me, but came right out to meet me, eagerly, it seemed. He was a big fellow, tall, broad-shouldered, sort of squeezed into that little motor car. He came holding a big black metal flashlight in his hand. He had long straight blond hair like mine, blowing in the wind.

  ‘You just stay there,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you move.’

  He was scared, of course, but I did not figure that. I trusted his hair. He came towards me, crouched a little like a fighter. His high forehead was a sea of wrinkles, and his mouth was oddly pursed as if he had eaten something bad but had not yet spat it out.

  He shone that damn light right on me.

  ‘Jes-us,’ he said, and coughed.

  Well, I thought he coughed. But when he did it again, I realized he was retching. It did not occur to me that it was my appearance that made him ill. When he had finished spitting, he scuffed up the dirt with his boot and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Just be cool,’ he said. He was just a boy, really, less than twenty. He looked so jumpy and nervous I began to be afraid of him.

  ‘Be cool,’ he said, looking up and down the freeway, which was, at that minute, empty.

  ‘I’m … cool,’ I said. I held out my goose-fleshed arms. I was just trying to calm him down, to stop him staring at my piss-stinky pants and my bloodied bright green knee-pads.

  He squatted in front of me. I shuffled back a little. I started to take off Vincent’s big gloves. He tapped the torch against his palm but did not turn it on.

  ‘Well, hell,’ he said. He had blue eyes but they were an old man’s blue eyes, full of worry. ‘Well, hell and Christ, where did you come from?’

  If I had known Belinda Burastin’s address I would have said it, but I could not. ‘Foo … Folll-ay.’

  He was not listening properly. He kept looking at my face and then up and down the highway.

  ‘A … famous … theatre,’ I said.

  He hit the torch against his hand.

  ‘Who left you here?’ he said.

  ‘No one … left … me …’ I was insulted. ‘I … came … here.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Mah-ter.’ I said, thinking that if I could get to the Mater Hospital I could find my way from there.

  ‘Mater? Mater Hospital?’

  I nodded.

  ‘My grandpa died there.’ He started to walk toward the car, then stopped and looked back at me as I started to crawl after him.

  ‘Should I carry you or what?’

  ‘Open … the … door … please.’

  He did not understand me, but I climbed through the driver’s door and across to the passenger seat. I did up my own seatbelt. Then we took off down the freeway and in a minute, inside his warm dusty car, with the high buildings of downtown ahead of us, my crazy optimism was back in force.

  His name was Wendell. I knew right away he was from the country – he had that dry sweet dusty accent that always made me see wide tin sheds, chaff floating in sunlit air. He was so shocked by me, he could hardly look at me. He drove, one-handed. Before we had been 0.1 miles on his odometer he had revealed that he had a cadetship with a security agency, although he would not say which one. ‘Security reasons.’

  I laughed, but that could not have been clear to him.

  ‘Don’t you read the news in hospital?’

  ‘I’m … near … hospital.’

  ‘I guess you couldn’t join security,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t meet the height requirement. You know what I’m telling you? You know what security is for?’

  I knew all about security. I knew about DoS, VIA, EJIO. I knew they had tapped our telephone, stopped performances, arrested my mother, burgled our tower.

  ‘You know what the alliance is?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘The alliance between the parliamentary democracies of Voorstand and Efica,’ he said, ‘is built on three areas of joint cooperation – Defence, Navigation, Intelligence – DNI.’

  I felt I should respond to him, but I could not think of anything to say. I was embarrassed by the smell of urine and would have apologized for that if he could have understood me.

  ‘DNI.’ He glanced sideways. ‘You should remember that. It’s a handy way to remember it.’

  We came on to a highway interchange, and he missed his turn and had to go around again. I thought he had finished with the conversation, but he took it up again, a full two minutes later.

  ‘That’s what all those Muddies forget. The Big D. It’s quid pro quo. You look out for me. I’ll look out for you.’ He glanced sideways. ‘All those wheat farmers should remember that when they’re complaining about the price they get in Voorstand. We’re getting the benefit of a ten-battalion army, for nothing.’

  ‘Not … our … army,’ I said. ‘It’s … theirs.’

  He frowned at me, then shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment. ‘I suppose you’re too young to be political. You like the Sirkus, right? You’re a fan?’

  I nodded.

  ‘They say it’s a real buzz. I’m going this time. By golly I am. Who do you like the best – the Dog, the Duck or the Mouse?’

  Of course I was a child of the Feu Follet. I had never seen the Sirkus.

  ‘Irma,’ I said. It was how Wally would have answered. ‘Ir … mah …’

  ‘Irma? Well I’ll be damned.’ He slapped the wheel and laughed and at that moment he sounded like the Dog himself – Ho, Ho, Hee, haw. ‘You’d like to do the pink Watutsi with Irma? You dirty little bugger. What’s your gazette?’ he asked.

  ‘Tristan … Smith.’

  ‘I’m Wendell Deveau,’ he said, ‘and I’d give my left ball to do it with Irma too.’

  I remember that, clear as day. You would not forget a name like Wendell Deveau. It was the same man who crossed my path later in life when we were both in love with the same woman.

  But on this night the woman was still only eleven years old and Wendell, with all his considerable, ill-informed good will, delivere
d me into the safe hands of the orderlies at the Mater Hospital and convinced them, no matter how I wept or hollered, that it was their duty to detain me for treatment.

  Finally, I was held suspended like a bat or bird between the orderlies. The entire Casualty waiting room looked on. Wendell Deveau stood before me, red-faced, out of breath.

  ‘I hope you get better, ami,’ he said. ‘I really hope you do.’

  *‘Bruder Duck Rides to Kakdorp’, from the Badberg Edition.

  *Visiting Voorstanders are always surprised to find Pow-pow music so popular in a foreign country. If you are a child of the Hollandse Maagd it is possible that you find Anglo-French Eficans more enamoured of the music than you are. And it is true, we do not always appreciate the nuances of race and class, but we know the words, can hum the melodies. [TS]

  *Efican trucks are fitted with a siren which sounds when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit. [TS]

  37

  In the Voorstand Sirkus, there is no pity. A man falls, he dies. This, you would say, is the point – the reason a Sirkus star is rich is because of the risk he takes.

  But when we Eficans watch the Voorstand Sirkus we do not watch like you. We watch with our mouths open, oohing and aahing and applauding just as you do, but we watch like Eficans, identifying with the lost, the fallen, the abandoned. When a performer falls, c’est moi, c’est moi.

  Our heroes are the lost, the drowned, the injured, a habit of mind that makes our epic poetry emotionally repellent to you, but let me tell you, Meneer, Madam, if you are ever sick whilst visiting Efica you will quickly appreciate the point of view. If you come to the Mater Hospital with no money, no insurance, even if you stink of piss and have no lips – you will not be sent away, not even if you beg to be.

  They asked where my mother was.

  I said I had no mother.

  Wendell Deveau began to click his tongue. I tried to crawl away. Wendell Deveau tried to stop me. I bit him. The admissions clerk became alarmed for me. She called two nurses, wide fellows with close-cropped hair and big soft hands. I did not want them touching me. When I struggled, they restrained me. When they restrained me, I screamed and hollered and of course it made me look a fright – my hole of a mouth, my dribbling nose, the blood on my knee-pads, my flailing hands – there were people in the waiting room covering their faces, leaving the room, holding their hands over their sick children’s eyes. I saw this. I did not understand why it was happening. I pulled Vincent’s newspaper-stuffed driving gloves back on, ready to scamper for it. Scraps of torn paper fluttered all around me. It was two a.m. I did not give the impression of mental health.