The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  She had sex with him (and champagne and chocolate mousse). With me, she studied acting. Ostensibly she did this as a favour to my maman, to pay her rent, but when you saw her kneel upon the sawdust to play Exits and Entrances the light shone out of her. She did not ‘act’, which is what amateurs usually do. She had the capacity to ‘be’ which is a gift, not something you can learn in drama school or acting workshops. She was great at exits, at being about to kiss, about to die, about to stab her enemy. Sometimes she seemed paralysed by her own intense feelings, and when she moved it was as if she had to tug herself free of them. She was sometimes obvious in her choices, but there was always something eccentric in her enactment of these choices, a quirkiness which made her interesting to watch. She was technically ignorant, and occasionally sentimental in her tastes, but she had it – the thing that makes you watch an actor on the stage. No one told her she had it. No one said anything to her. But I saw my mother, who had begun by thinking of Roxanna as a whore, soon begin to treat her very differently. As for me, she quickly became my intimate friend and fellow student.

  Who knows how our lives would have been if there had been no Gabe Manzini. There is no reason, for instance, why Roxanna might not have become the actress my eleven-year-old heart imagined. We might have reopened the Feu Follet – why not? There is no doubting her raw talent or her enjoyment of the exercises she did with me on the stage.

  Roxanna, however, wanted very specific things for her new life: a country house with a park, peacocks, a fountain. She wanted a white carpet, a brass bed with lace-covered pillows of different sizes, and she had persuaded herself that Gabe Manzini could provide these items.

  I do not need to point out how naïve she was, on every level, but she had no previous experience of even moderate wealth and she trusted the appearance of his hotel room, the cost of the restaurants he took her to.

  She would arrive back at the Feu Follet just after midnight, no ring on her finger, still muggy and musky and happy from love-making. Then she would join me in my mother’s master class – do her entrances and exits, pass through her circles of concentration, frighten and amaze herself, earn herself my maman’s warm embrace.

  At two o’clock my maman had to leave. I never knew where she slept, only that it was a different place each night and that she was afraid. I did not know the person she was afraid of was Gabe Manzini. No one knew his name in those days, but I could always feel him – I did not know it was the same thing, the same person – the one who was there in the night, the one who gave Roxanna her puffy eyes, Wally his morning melancholy.

  After breakfast Roxanna came with us to the fish markets.

  Then we would come back to Gazette Street and Wally would fillet the fish. At around noon he and Roxanna would begin to drink beer. They would argue about food or sing folk songs in rough harmony.

  Sometimes Sparrow sang with them. He had a good baritone which he liked to use and he would have come more often, but he found a job in a music-hall restaurant. His employer was a Mr Ho, an Efican-Chinese who, whilst undemanding about many things – he was sloppy in dress and careless about hygiene – had such reverence for the text of his Victorian melodramas that he twice dismissed actors for departing from the written word.

  ‘You would think it would be easy,’ Sparrow said, ‘but it is just exhausting. The guy is a maniac. He sits in the restaurant following the script with a flashlight.’

  The city had election fever. The light poles were wreathed in red or blue streamers made of crepe paper which bled in the rain each afternoon. Ice-cream vans with loudspeakers on their roofs prowled the suburbs. As the day of the election drew closer, more actors began to visit us. It was incorrect, they said, for the Feu Follet to be dark at this moment in history. They offered their services. They wanted to do something for the election – a review, a fundraiser, street theatre. They sat in our kitchen and judged us. They looked at Wally’s depressed demeanour, Roxanna with her Irma hair-do, me in my Mouse mask. They saw only surfaces. They did not see history lurking in the dark.

  55

  It was half past eleven at night. Roxanna was with Gabe Manzini, having her ankles kissed. I was lying on my mattress. Wally was sitting on his bed, a blue-lined notebook resting on his knees, his upper body contorted around the pivot of his pencil. He erased constantly, seemingly more words than he wrote. The wattles of his pendulous ears glowed pink.

  ‘What … are … you … rubbing … out?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘A … letter?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  There was a time when Wally would not have risked being seen writing in a notebook. It would have been too much like his early days at the Feu Follet when he had fraudulently represented himself to Annie McManus as a ‘prison-poet’. But now there was no other witness but me and I had no memory of the prison-poet. I imagined him composing a love letter to Roxanna. I napped, dreaming about Roxanna and Wally getting married.

  When I felt hands on the buckles of my mask, I was not alarmed – I imagined Roxanna had come in and was doing what she often did before our acting class. I felt the buckles undone, the straps loosened, the mask removed, and my sweaty face meet the coolness of the draught from the open window.

  And then: this shriek.

  I awoke, my hair on end. The lights were blazing. Beside my mattress, kneeling on the floor – a pale-skinned, slim woman with short hair. My eyes met hers. She shuddered, hid her own eyes, shrieked again.

  Maybe I screamed too – how do I know? The woman by my bed was so thin I could see the bones in her chest above her breasts. Once she had finished one scream, she began another. She put her hands across her eyes, but I could see her chipped front tooth, her pink epiglottis. I watched her as she gulped, screamed, gulped, screamed.

  You would imagine all this fuss would bring Wally leaping from his bed, but he continued sleeping. He lay on his back with his exercise book on his chest, his mouth open, his arms flung sideways.

  A taxi began to toot its horn outside. Still he did not stir. When the woman finally stopped screaming, he turned on to his side, his back toward me.

  ‘You’re it?’ the woman said. She lowered her white, red-nailed hands to her lap. She looked at me as if I were a source of light so bright that I might cause damage to her sight. ‘You’re his son?’

  She scared me. Everything about her scared me. She had her handbag open. I could see a gun inside. It was quite clear, undisguised, lying amongst crumpled tissues and a rent-a-car agreement.

  ‘Are you Vincent Theroux’s son?’ she quavered.

  I was too afraid to answer.

  She put her hand into the bag. I thought she was reaching for the gun. I screamed. I threw my mask at Wally and it smashed into the bridge of his nose and brought him leaping out of his sheets, white-legged, outraged, his hand clutching his injured tarboof. The woman dropped her handbag.

  Wally was in no state to understand anything quickly. He stared at the woman as she picked up her handbag and ran out the door. I could hear her on the stairs, laughing.

  The front door banged shut – Wally flung up the window but she was already driving away.

  ‘A crazy woman,’ he said, patting my hair. ‘That’s all, just some old crazy woman.’

  He helped me back on with my mask, making the buckles as tight as I liked them, biting hard against my skin. He wrapped some blankets around my shoulders, tucked his exercise book into his back pocket.

  ‘Some old crazy woman, that’s all.’

  ‘She … was … going … to … murder … me.’

  ‘No.’ Wally’s hair was standing skew-whiff on his head. His face was pale, drawn. His nose was turning purple around the small cut the mask had made. ‘She wasn’t going to shoot you, son.’ He hugged me into his cigarette-smoke shoulder. ‘You scared her, that was all. You frightened her.’

  ‘She … came … to … kill … me.’

  ‘You both scared each other, that’s all.’


  But he began to busy himself around the room, gathering blankets, a kettle, the vid, and when he was completely loaded up with all these things he stooped, grunted, and brought me into the tangle of hard and soft things in his arms. ‘We’ll have a little kip up in the tower.’

  The tower was now empty. Everything that had marked it as my home was now gone and it had, instead, a rather depressing dusty appearance, but it still had the same heavy bolt my mother had always slid across when making love, and when Wally had set me on the dusty floor, the first thing he did was drive that old bolt home.

  I stood on my ugly stick-thin trembling legs, shivering. I tugged my mask straps one notch tighter.

  Wally plugged in the kettle and the vid and arranged them beside each other on the floor. He inserted a pirate recording of Irma. While the show began he wrapped me in two blankets and made a hood for my head.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s cheerier.’

  He squatted beside me for a moment but when I looked across at him I saw he was writing in his exercise book again.

  ‘Aren’t … you … calling … the … Gardiacivil?’

  But Wally did not feel free to call the Gardiacivil about Vincent’s wife. He held his handkerchief to his injured nose and turned his bleak grey eyes on me.

  ‘You’re … writing … her … description?’

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘The door is locked, OK? We don’t have to tell the Gardiacivil about her.’

  ‘What … are … you … writing?’

  ‘I’m staying awake with you, OK? I’m writing because I’m staying awake.’

  ‘But … what … is … it?’

  ‘NOTHING,’ he said. ‘Just watch the vid.’

  ‘You’re … writing … a … play.’

  Wally looked up at me, his eyes accusing, his mouth uncertain.

  ‘Watch the vid,’ he said, but I knew I had got it right. He was writing a play for me. I was at once excited, but incredulous. My legs became itchy and kicky. Could he write a good play? I watched Irma on the vid. She splayed her small white fingers, bent her wrists backwards.

  ‘Never, ever tell anyone, right? Not till I say it’s OK.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, but I could not stop my legs drumming on the floor.

  ‘What I can do,’ Wally said, ‘is write parts for them.’

  Actors?’

  ‘Animals,’ he said.

  I looked at him sharply.

  ‘I know about animals,’ he said. His eyes were bright, aggressive. ‘You can’t have a circus without animals.’

  ‘Wally …’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You don’t know shit. We can open this theatre without your mother. You don’t know shit about all this stuff, so just listen to me. We’ve got to make a living. You can be in it, and Rox. We can have a good life here,’ Wally said. ‘That’s what you’ve both got to reallze. We can make it out of what we have. She doesn’t have to go outside. She doesn’t need peacocks.’

  ‘What … peacocks?’

  ‘Parks, peacocks, all that crap,’ he said. ‘She’s going to see it’s totally unnecessary.’

  But someone opened the big door down on the street. It let in a draught which came all the way up the stairs, under the door, and shifted the dust around.

  ‘What’s that?’ I was afraid.

  ‘Mollo mollo.’ Wally went to the door and unsnibbed the lock. He stood there for a moment with his head out.

  ‘Your maman,’ he said.

  I began fiddling with my straps, unbuckling my Mouse mask. Wally ejected the vid of Irma and slipped it into his back pocket. I could hear the footsteps on the stair – not one person, a crowd – fast and purposeful, hard leather soles.

  I rocketed towards the door, through a crowd of trousers and stockings and high-heeled shoes, my mask held in my hands.

  ‘There … was … a … crazy … woman … here,’ I said, but my maman was anxious, did not hear me.

  ‘Why are you up here?’ she said, disentangling me. ‘What happened?’

  I tried to answer but Mother’s team were pushing in around us, men in suits, women smelling of perfume and instant coffee. They had tiny computers, miniature telephones, French battery chargers with complicated adapters. Vincent was there too, pasty-skinned, pouchy-eyed, talking to someone on his telephone.

  When he had finished he came and kissed me.

  ‘A … crazy …’ I began.

  ‘Shush,’ my mother said. ‘Be quiet. Be calm.’ She squatted on the floor beside me. ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘your maman has to tell you something quite upsetting.’

  I looked into her face and saw how the make-up sat on the surface of her skin and how the skin beneath was tired, how there were lines beside her eyes, beside her mouth, and how the eyes themselves seemed clouded.

  ‘Roxanna?’

  My mother shook her head. She opened her purse and took out a folded front page of Zinebleu. On the front page there was a photograph of Vincent and my mother kissing. I had seen this photograph before, beside my mother’s bed, pinned on to the moulding beside the very window where I now sat. It did not seem ‘upsetting’.

  ‘Darling, there are things I must tell you. I can’t tell you here.’

  She held out her arms to me and I clung to her again. I buried my face in her neck, ashamed that everyone could see my ugly legs sticking out of my pyjamas. Then she carried me downstairs to the bathroom and sat me on the toilet. Then she carefully wiped my nose and turned on the taps, in the basin, in the bath.

  Then she squatted beside me and put her mouth against my ear. I thought she was going to kiss me, but instead she spoke.

  ‘You saw that picture in the paper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at me and blinked. She put her mouth back against my ear and started whispering fast. ‘We are about to win this election, and now there are all these stories which are going to hurt your maman.’

  She took the crumpled paper out from her purse again and held it up to me.

  ‘They stole that from the house,’ she whispered.

  Steam swirled around the black ink picture.

  ‘They broke into my house and stole it,’ she hissed. ‘Can you read it? They’re saying I hurt Vincent’s wife.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sssh. Talk into my ear too. They say I took Vincent from her.’

  This was nothing more than she had already told me.

  ‘We think they have microphones in here, to listen to us.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, looking up at the dripping yellow walls.

  ‘The water stops them hearing what I say to you.’ The steam was causing her make-up to run. ‘For Chrissakes, listen to me. Please. They are going to start now in earnest. Some of it is already with the newspapers. They are going to say things about your mother that are not true. You must never believe what they say about me.’

  ‘What … will … they … say?’

  ‘Whatever they think will hurt us the most. That I’m a thief, perhaps, that I tell lies, God knows what else. When we win, we close down their facilities. We send them home to Voorstand. The alliance is over, mo-chou. They thought it could never happen to them – that’s why it’s all happening so late, but what is happening now is like their play – they’ve written stories about me, Vincent too.’

  ‘About … me … too?’

  ‘No, sweets, not about you.’

  Her arms were white, hard, stringy, her nose sharp, her skin hot and red with the steam.

  ‘The Voorstanders are very bad,’ she said. ‘This is what I’ve always tried to tell you. I know Wally tells you other things, but Wally doesn’t know some things, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, but I held my mask tight in my lap, in case she tried to snatch it from me.

  She wiped my face with Roxanna’s towel. ‘We are going to go upstairs now and we are going to hear people making plans we do not intend to follow. It’s a performance – do you understand?’

  ‘
Like … a … play.’

  ‘Like a play, exactly. We think they listen to us, somehow. We don’t know what they can know or how they really do it. Maybe they can hear all this. We don’t know if they can hear or not. Tristan, darling, your maman doesn’t know how to fight them when they’re so unfair.’

  All of this had its effect on me, of course, but not nearly as much as the news that she planned to trick her enemies by staying the night at the theatre. I hugged her and kissed her, and told her I would look after her.

  She turned off the bath and the basin taps and mopped the condensation off the floor.

  I wanted to put my mask on to face the crowd upstairs, but I could not wear it with my mother present. I went upstairs and faced them with a naked face, a rag mouth. Vincent came and brought me a sandwich and a glass of milk. He looked very old behind his beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his suit looked like it had been slept in.

  ‘There … was … a … crazy … woman … here,’ I said.

  56

  Gabe Manzini sat in a car in Gazette Street and watched the old Circus School. He had been awake all the night but his tanned skin was clean and taut. He felt light-footed, clear-headed, alive to the pleasures of the sunshine on his shoulders and the light salt breeze which ruffled the sleeve of his grey and white checked shirt.

  The clarity of the Efican light was electric, dream-like. He enjoyed the bright, almost two-dimensional façade of the Feu Follet building, the extreme clarity of its rusting steel-framed windows, even the obvious warp and weft of the twelve tall Blue flags which floated gently in the cloudless sky, the bright, clean reflective surfaces of the red and silver taxi cabs parked in a chain along the street.

  There was a way in which all of this was so much in keeping with his mood – clean, cool, ordered – so much in contrast to the murky, panicked mood presently prevailing in Saarlim where Analysis had once again misread the Efican political climate.

  It was the historical mission of Analysis – this was what he’d told his own guys at one o’clock this morning – to screw things up and therefore make Operations look good. He said this to motivate them, but he also believed it. Analysis thought Efica was already lost to the Alliance.