The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, but he was oblivious. He picked up the bird and whispered to it, kissed it, for Jesus Christ’s sake, on its bony beak. He looked it in its one mad eye, eye to eye.

  It was like something in a crappy cambruce circus. Something the Voorstand Sirkus had long ago driven out of business.

  Then he started to fold the bird up in his hand. She could not believe what he was doing. He folded it in half, like origami. He was killing it, for her, on stage. He was not killing it, but he was folding it. She watched the way he did it – how he held it up and, with his other finger, pointed out into the air above her head.

  He threw the pigeon towards her. It was like a yo-yo on a string, except no string. It flew out, up, it rose, tumbled, spread its wings to show bright red undersides. Good Christ almighty, it was like a dream. The bird returned into his hand. He held it, and took out another. He folded it like the other, and did the same. This one looped, arced, tumbled, fell, revealing blue under the wings.

  And then he bowed.

  She sat with her mouth open.

  ‘No applause?’ he said. He stepped forward and, with his toe, brought the house lights up.

  She really could not speak to him. She could not believe the stupidity of men.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘say something.’

  She shrugged. ‘They’re your pigeons,’ she said with great restraint. ‘They’re none of my business.’

  ‘No, no.’ He held his hand up. ‘These are not the pigeons.’

  These are not the pigeons?’ She felt her voice rising.

  He stepped out of the ring. ‘Not your pigeons. I got rid of your pigeons. I traded. These are tumbling pigeons,’ Wally said.

  ‘You don’t know who I am,’ Roxanna said.

  ‘I think you’re a businesswoman. You can say I don’t know you, but I see it in you. You think about money. You’re smart about it, so you’ll see what we have here. It’s the beginning of a bird show, like the one you saw with the toucan. A real old-time petite tente. We’ll get another toucan.’

  ‘Stop. Stop right there.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t stop. I know who you are.’

  ‘You don’t know who I am.’

  ‘Roxanna,’ Wally said, ‘we already have a venue.’

  She stood up, she started backing away from him, the box of chocolates still held in her hand. ‘You don’t know who I am,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what you’re fucking with.’

  ‘Roxanna.’ He reached out his arms towards her. ‘I like you.’

  She did not punch his nose. She slapped it, with the heel of her hand. She sort of half pushed half thumped it. Blood came out, on to her hand, arm. He came in at her, dripping, in a cloud of tobacco, toothpaste. He held her, hard. She tried to squirm away, to stay clear of the blood. She could smell it, feel it dripping down her neck, fat warm drops of it.

  ‘You’re ruining my dress.’ She still had the box of chocolates in her hand.

  ‘I’ll buy a new one,’ he said.

  She could not move. She knew that feeling, from her history. His rough skin was against her forehead. He smelled of ash and peppermint.

  40

  Roxanna and Wally sat on the empty stairs while the last Feu Follet posters flapped on the foyer noticeboard, pulling themselves free from their drawing pins. Wally held a deep red tissue against his injured nose.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he said.

  She shrugged and gave him a new tissue. ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  She was too. She watched him dab at his lip but in her mind’s eye she saw the wooden crates in his bedroom, the plastic tubs with their little labels – ’Socks’, ‘Shirts’. She let him pay top dollar for the pigeons. She couldn’t have done it if she had seen his room – ’Wool’ns’, ‘Letters’.

  She patted his bare knee. ‘We’ve got to be realistic – we don’t even know each other …’

  ‘I know I look stupid in these shorts.’

  ‘It’s not your appearance, mo-cheri. It’s your type. I knew what you were like when I met you in the car park in Melcarth. Believe me.’ She poked him in the ribs. ‘I know your type.’

  ‘What type?’

  ‘Fifty plus years old, single …’

  ‘No, no. Let me speak.’

  ‘No, no – you’re an individualist,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, Roxanna.’

  ‘I’m not criticizing you.’

  ‘No, you’ve seen me – I’ve got a family. I’ve got the little boy. Let me finish. You ask the company. I stick by people. I was married to a woman fifteen years, a dog trainer. She left me. I didn’t leave her. You can rely on me. I’m not some young fellow who’s going to run away and leave you. I’ve got a proven record.’

  She raised an eyebrow at him, trying to joke him out of all that dangerous sensitivity. ‘Dog trainer?’ She grinned and combed her thick straw-yellow hair back with her fingers.

  He started fishing in his pocket, and for a moment she thought he was going to produce a marriage certificate, but all he brought out was a second wadded lump of tissue which he patted on his injured nose.

  ‘I know your type,’ she said. ‘It’s just not the type I’m shopping for.’

  ‘Do we have a roof, food, cash … a way to make more?’

  ‘Wally, I’m sorry. I’m grateful for the free accommodation …’

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I knew you from the beginning.’

  ‘Some shitty birds,’ she said. (They were all the same. Lunatics dreaming of getting rich off pigeons.) ‘I want peacocks, and fountains. See – you’re smirking. You don’t know me. You do not have a fucking clue. If we lived together for five years, you’d still be smirking.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘Yes you would.’

  ‘We can make a decent life. I trained that parrot you liked. You know I can do it.’

  ‘I was never decent, mo-cheri. You wouldn’t have hit on me if I was decent. You thought I was a shooting star, admit it.’

  ‘I thought you were beautiful.’

  She looked at him, and saw a saline lens building up across his eyes.

  ‘Well thank you,’ she said. She put her hand on his wrist. ‘That’s very sweet of you.’

  ‘I thought you were Irma, that’s the truth.’

  Did you, mo-chou?’

  He nodded.

  ‘That’s sweet of you,’ she said. She opened his hand and touched it with her fingertips. It was papery dry, with deep, worried lines across the palm. ‘You’ll find someone if you want someone,’ she said. ‘You’re actually a very charming man.’

  ‘The pigeons are not the point,’ he said. ‘The pigeons are what we have available.’

  She closed his hand. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Let me finish … the pigeons are just what we have.’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, not looking up at him, her lips compressed. ‘I’ll cut their heads off with a pocket knife.’

  But when she looked up the fucking musico was grinning at her. ‘It’s the Efican tradition,’ he said.

  She sighed, then laughed in spite of herself.

  ‘We make do with what we have.’ He smiled.

  ‘So I should make do with you?’

  ‘Our great-grandparents fought fifteen years of wars* with the poor bastards whose land this really was, and then all the captains and generals sailed away and abandoned them, left them with the ghosts and bones.’

  ‘You’re such a bullshit merchant.’ She removed his cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.

  ‘The French, the English – they thought the land was worthless, but we changed it.’

  ‘Don’t you ever give up?’ She accepted the light.

  ‘If you have to be poor, better be poor here than England. You have to be sick, better pray it’s not in France. You’re a woman, you’ll get equal pay.’

  Roxanna began laughing. She could not help it. ‘L
ook at you. You’ve got arms covered with cigarette burns. You sleep on a mattress on the floor. You tell me, so confident, this is the best country on earth, and we’re about to have the best life imaginable. Wally, what have you got? You’ve been robbed. You tell me you’re in paradise.’

  ‘Look at me.’ Wally held her firm little jaw between his thumb and finger.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘If you could see my past, you’d know that my life is a fucking miracle.’

  ‘Let go, you prick. You’re at least sixty years old. You’ve got nicotine stains on your fingers.’

  He released her jaw. ‘You want me to stop smoking? I’ll stop smoking.’

  She stood up. ‘Why me? What have I done to you?’

  Wally stood also. He held out his hand. ‘I know you like me,’ he said.

  ‘You know I like you?’

  He grinned at her.

  ‘I know you like me. You’ve just got to admit it.’

  She shook her head, but she was laughing too. She took the big dry hand and held it a moment.

  ‘We’re like each other,’ he insisted.

  She dropped his hand. ‘That’s not a plus.’

  They began slowly to walk up the stairs together. ‘When you first met me,’ she said, ‘I was soaked in petrol.’

  ‘No, I smelled it …’

  ‘You smelled it? I’d just burnt our frigging house down.’

  ‘See – you can tell me,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not a plus. I’m telling you, I’m crazy. I burned down the convent.’

  ‘In Melcarth?’

  ‘No, not in Melcarth. Of course not in Melcarth. When I was a kid, here, in Chemin Rouge. I’m a pyromaniac,’ she said. ‘When I get stressed that’s what I do. I can’t get insurance.’

  ‘We don’t need insurance. We’ll make something with these pigeons.’

  ‘You want to make something,’ she said. ‘You can make a pigeon pie.’

  She would have said more, but the telephone began to ring. There was a bell mounted at the bottom of stairs – an old-fashioned square black box with two rust-streaked metal hemispheres on top.

  Wally let it ring. Perhaps he was making some point to her. If he was, she didn’t get it. She took her spare T-shirt and her handbag to the bathroom. She took off her skirt and dropped it in the bath. She turned on the cold water and swirled the skirt around to start it soaking. She sat on the toilet and opened her catalogue, trying to get some pictures in her head.

  *It is a little known curiosity of history that the French and English garrisons, technically at war with each other, mounted combined operations against the indigenous tribes of Efica from 35 to 39 EC and again in 43 EC. The tribes seem to have given as good as they got, and, had it not been for the Chinese influenza epidemic of 49 EC, might have survived long enough to witness their invaders recalled to headquarters. No indigenous records remain.

  41

  Unaccustomed to the sounds of the bush at night, the tree rats on the roof, the brush-hogs which came in at the beginning of the wet to forage around the undergrowth, the mother of Tristan Smith slept badly, dreaming angry dreams about Claire Chen.

  Some time after the storm had passed, she came out to drink some water from the cistern and then, almost as an afterthought, walked up the steps to my bed to untangle me from my blankets.

  When she did not see me immediately, she was not alarmed. I was a small boy in a big sea of bedclothes. She had felt that hard hit of panic too many times before to easily fall prey to it now. She expected, at any second, to touch my elbow, my bony backside, pushed high into the air. But when she had finally removed all of the sheets and blankets, and produced nothing more than the clatter of my second skateboard, she experienced that wild alarm familiar to every parent – that fast beating of the heart, that rising panic in the throat. She lay down on the anachronistically waxed floor and reached with her long pale arms under the bunk, as if I might somehow be squeezed in there, and all the time she was calling out my name, not loudly, but softly, like you call a cat.

  She had talked to me like that, inside her womb, my beautiful baby, my beautiful baby boy, and would not have an ultrasound in case this sex was unsaid. She had wanted so much for her little boy, had put so much store by his splendid life, and then, when he was who he was, she had vowed to him, made extravagant promises she had not been able to keep.

  ‘Tristan, Rikiki, Tristan darling.’

  Soon Vincent was beside her, naked except for his slippers, and the pair of them had all the lights on in the house and were running from closet to closet, and then, on a wild and fearful intuition, out of the house and down the slippery slope beneath. It was three in the morning and they were shining a weak yellow flashlight across the broken sticks and rocks, and then up the slippery trunks.

  ‘We’ll ring the police,’ he said when they were back inside the house.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet, please.’

  She saw the look he gave her, silent, judgemental, but she could not bear anyone to know – her son had left her. She understood exactly. She knew she had betrayed him, not just in the incident around the fire that night, but in so many complex ways, not least by carelessly allowing him to fall in love with the theatre.

  He could not be an actor. It was no more possible than that he be an athlete. First, his voice – it was not only that he could not project but that he could not be understood.

  He did not have the instrument. No matter how he exercised, there was so little muscle tissue to develop, and although she was intensely, continually, moved by his courage – and she had had to stop herself weeping when he descended from climbing the fir tree with that egg in his open mouth – courage was not the same as ability.

  His father had broad shoulders, a sweeping supple back, long, almost painfully beautiful legs. Bill Millefleur’s Coriolanus died in that stunning circus topple, falling forward from the platform so that he dangled, his feet hooked around a rust-streaked water pipe. That was acting. Her son could never do it.

  Yet it was she who had allowed these foolish dreams to flourish, and who – when it was too late – had no better answer for him than picture books of birds and eggs.

  ‘He’s not in hospital,’ she said to Vincent, who sat at the Nagouchi table, the telephone in his hand. ‘I know he’s not.’

  ‘Flick, you don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Why would he be in hospital? We have no reason to think he’s hurt.’

  ‘Then let me phone the police.’

  ‘Why would we want the police?’

  ‘Mo-chou, he’s never been on his own before. If he’s run away, don’t make me say it … He could be hurt.’

  ‘OK.’ She sat down opposite him and pulled her wrap around her. ‘Phone the hospitals,’ she said. ‘But he won’t be there.’

  ‘Where will he be?’

  ‘He’s at the theatre,’ she said.

  ‘Flick, please, I know you’re upset.’

  ‘He’s back at the theatre,’ she said. ‘He frightens me.’

  42

  In the morning I woke in the Burns Unit of the Mater Hospital and there I found, not two feet from me, a harelipped man peering curiously into my face.

  When my eyes met his, he started.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, standing up, and taking a pace backwards. ‘He’s awake.’ He clasped his hands together and looked towards the door.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said to me from near the window. He had such nervous, anxious eyes. His lip was split to his nose. His gum was exposed. When he spoke, his words sounded as strange as my own must have. That aside, he was good-looking. He had very white skin, a heavy beard-shadow, a strong jaw, a neatly combed head of black hair. ‘Actor-Manager,’ he said, inclining his upper body politely towards me. ‘What a splendid name!’ He looked towards the doorway again and I saw that my little room was full of visitors – five men and women, two standing, one leaning in the doorway, two sitting on chairs. They all wore hospi
tal gowns and they all had missing faces, cleft palates, conditions where teeth penetrated lips, misfortunes so repelling it would have been difficult for me to quietly contemplate them even in the colour plates of a magazine. You may not like me saying it, but my visitors were gross.

  Who was I to be repulsed by them? No one, obviously.

  But who were they to stare at me with such jumpy, frightened eyes?

  ‘Can you speak to us?’ asked the man with the harelip.

  I rolled my eyes in impatience. The effect was obviously repulsive.

  ‘Your maman’s on her way,’ the harelip said. He was a good enough man, I guess. He was here to have himself made normal. I assume he wanted marriage, children, decent things. He found me disgusting but he was trying to calm me, telling me lies about my mother who was still, at that hour, conducting her own search of the freeway verges.

  ‘So, you can’t go home just yet,’ he said.

  ‘No … I’m … going … to … my … daddy’s … house,’ I said.

  ‘He said daddy. Did you say daddy?’

  ‘His daddy’s out.’

  ‘His daddy’s house.’

  ‘You’re going to your daddy’s house?’

  I nodded. I was going to the Feu Follet.

  ‘I don’t think you’re going anywhere just yet.’

  ‘I … am.’

  ‘Not until you’ve had your little op.’

  They were adults, I was a kid. When they told me there was an operation planned it was difficult, in spite of all the circumstances that had led me there, not to believe them.

  ‘I’m … going,’ I said.

  ‘Going? Not until you’re better,’ said a woman who was sitting on the visitor’s chair. She had a bright red burn scar down one side of her face. Half her grey curling hair was shaved clean off her head.

  ‘Have you had your pre-op?’

  ‘Mistake,’ I said. And again, very slowly, ‘Mis … take.’

  They did not bother to hide their smiles.

  ‘He’s here by mistake.’

  I tried to explain how Wendell Deveau had found me, but they could not understand me. Even as I gurgled and babbled about mistakes I knew it was not true. I was meant to be here. I belonged here. Their faces defined the territory.