The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

‘Mo-frere,’ Bill said. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking. This is the hottest show in town.’

  ‘This will be perfect,’ Wally said. ‘No way could he believe we set him up.’

  ‘I’ve got a dinner party that night. I can’t get seats.’

  But of course he did get a seat. He was sitting there now, exactly as Wally had planned he would.

  Wally did not turn around. He looked up at the shimmering walls of the Water Sirkus, which changed colours constantly as the currents of dyed fluids rose and fell, plastic walls of a material which reflected or absorbed the light depending on no apparent process.

  ‘Are … you … happy?’ I asked him.

  ‘Tray bon,’ he said. Everything had this glow, this light – his secret. ‘You bet your dye-pot.’ And all through the show he held his secret to him.

  Yet when the moment finally came, when Bill Millefleur, unable to contain himself any more, lifted his son free of his seat, what Wally felt was worse than nothing.

  He saw the Mouse hold its arms wide, saw its cheeky Bruder grin.

  The job was done. Tristan Smith was safe. Wally’s life, he thought, was over.

  Only yesterday he came out of Goat Marshes Violin and found little Annie McManus with her curly blonde hair sitting in the Boite down at the port. He bought her a glass of roteuse and told her he was a poet and God loved him and put words of poetry in his mouth. She took him home and rucked him and he could have loved her if she would have let him.

  Only yesterday he saw the great Ducrow, his big lips marked with dry red wine, mount the slack wire and walk from the sawdust ring up to the box, his long silk gown flapping between his veined old legs.

  He stood in his seat and began to follow me. He mourned me, even while I was still there. He grieved for me, when I was not six feet from him. He tasted his own death, not just the steely fact of it or its imminence or its inevitability, but tasted it inside his mouth, the shittiness of it, the sour and bitter waste, the deep cold loneliness, the abandonment.

  He had no real energy to push through the crowd. He was overcome with the notion that he had not only wasted his own life, but that he had wasted mine. Bill would see, any moment, I had no education worth a damn. He had liked to sit, to just be, to drink beer with his arm around my shoulder, to pass the time.

  Now time had passed. He lacked the will to fight the crowds. He watched Bruder Mouse’s head as I moved towards the east side of the auditorium, and then down a ramp which led into the underworld beneath the stage.

  35

  Bill had been forewarned about the Mouse suit, but he had imagined that I carried a mask on a stick like Saarlim children do at Easter. He did not realize that he would not be able to see my eyes, my mouth, that even as the reunion finally took place he would still be in doubt as to whether he was forgiven or rejected. Even as he hefted me high above the crowd, his head was full of Wally’s warnings about my enmity. No matter what the easy smile might indicate, he was ill with anxiety.

  ‘Is this all right?’ he asked as we started off down between the seats.

  He meant: is it all right for me to carry you on my shoulder, is it demeaning? He did not express himself clearly, but I understood him.

  Had he lived with me in Chemin Rouge each gurgle of my subsequent answer, each muddy slide of vowel, each slur of consonant, would also have been clear to him. But he listened to my answer like a stranger, and the crowd, bumping, shoving, tugging at the Mouse’s dangling boots, only made it worse.

  A smooth-cheeked Efican in an eccentric suit – he knew it must be Jacques the nurse – was shooing the fans away, but he did not pay attention to the nurse, or to Wally either. He sought peace, clarity, a release from chaos. He headed for the door underneath the stage – down amongst the humming underworld of pipes and pumps where, he had imagined, he might have a chance finally to be reunited with his son in private.

  But when the heavy door shut fast behind him, he found himself intimidated by the enigmatic face of Bruder Mouse – the painted smile, the broken tooth, the whole withholding wall of character.

  He seated me carefully on a humming grey steel box, a pump perhaps, thereby placing my eyes almost level with his own.

  ‘Would you prefer to walk?’ he asked. ‘It’s not so far to go.’

  I began to answer but he interrupted.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong.’ He gestured with his two hands, smiled – these phoney movements being the by-products of his enormous tension – ’I’m happy to carry you, mo-frere, from here to the Bleskran if you want it.’

  ‘It’s … OK … go … on … carry … me.’

  ‘You can carry him,’ the nurse translated. ‘Mr Millefleur. I can’t believe it’s you. How do you know Tristan?’

  Bill’s handsome face shivered with incredulity.

  ‘He’s my goddamn son,’ he said, turning to look at the nurse, ‘for Chrissakes!’

  ‘Where’s … Wally?’ I said.

  My father swung back to me, all politeness. ‘Say again.’ He placed his hand tentatively on my shoulder. ‘Say slowly …’

  ‘You … left … Wally.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Bill said, his eyes glazing over with tears. ‘Are you saying I left you?’

  ‘YOU … LEFT … WALLY.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Jacqui.

  ‘What is he saying?’

  ‘We lost Mr Paccione.’

  ‘We?’ said Bill, his voice rising, his famous temper showing in his eyes. He turned on her. He raised his hands up to his temples. ‘We?’

  ‘I.’

  ‘For Chrissakes,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you the A-1 nurse they brought from Efica? Fifteen hundred Guilders a month? Is that you? The perfect Jacques? You’re the one who looks after Wally and Tristan?’

  ‘I’ll get him. I’ll get him now.’

  ‘No, no,’ Bill said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jacqui said, ‘I’ll get him now.’ But as she turned my father brought his large hand down on her padded shoulder and turned her in her tracks.

  ‘You stay right here,’ Bill said in that quiet and dangerous voice that I remembered. ‘And do not fucking move.’

  He turned and left us, me and Jacqui. I folded my arms across my chest.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  36

  Jacqui knew my handsome father in a way that I did not. She had been to Dome Projections* of all his Saarlim horse shows. There she had seen him dance from back to back on Arab stallions, do Lucio Cristiani’s somersault across one horse and on to the back of a third as they cantered round the ring. She had heard him speak the great lines of Voorstand’s Epic Poet. She knew the pores of his skin, the scar on his chin, the sweet rise on his lip, the dimple on his chin which she thought almost unbearably beautiful.

  In short, she was his fan, and as she travelled with him through the crush, pushed against his glistening suit, being careful not to stand on his snakeskin shoes, she was in shock, not merely to have met him, but to have met him in these most peculiar circumstances.

  Now she was crushed against Bill Millefleur, was carried along in the same tumbling river of fluttering pink- and blue-paged autograph books. She tumbled down the ramp beside him, went through a grey metal door that said ‘Sirkus Staff Only’, was suddenly in a world of huge brightly coloured pipes, compressors, pumps, the smell of marine paint, the cold of concrete – backstage. Bill Millefleur put his hand behind her back and guided her into a link-wired alleyway. (You see, she wanted to say, to someone, to her mother most of all. You see?)

  But then a minute later she was revealed as an amateur, a fuck-up, and she wished no one to see anything. Bill Millefleur was furious with her. He turned away from her, went walking, beautifully, athletically, impatiently over the metal floor, back into the cavernous Dome.

  And Jacqui was left there – boneless, a lump, all her normal resourcefulness sucked from her.

  The sharp-toothed Mouse sat on the water pump and stared at her, its grey furry arms folded across its spang
led blue chest.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ it said. It stared at her impassively, and she was embarrassed to have her weakness so clearly exposed.

  Yet when Bill Millefleur returned with his arm around the old man’s bent shoulders, she did not care who saw her apologize.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I was an amateur. I didn’t do my job.’

  And the actor forgave her.

  He held out his hand. It was soft and dry. As it closed around hers, she had a vision of her mother sitting in her kitchen wiping counter tops, the little plates of plastic-covered leftovers, some as small as a teaspoonful. (You see?)

  ‘I had no right to shout at you,’ Bill Millefleur said. ‘I was so excited to see my son, I didn’t even catch your full name?’

  ‘Jacques Lorraine.’

  The touch of his hand made her numb in the neck, produced shame and gratitude in almost equal quantities, and as she followed his athletic body carrying my misshapen one back into the labyrinth beneath the stage of the Water Sirkus, her cheeks continued to burn.

  She watched how he held yours truly in his arms, how he squeezed my arms, my legs. ‘Don’t … do … that.’

  ‘Tristan,’ he said, squeezing me again, grinding my sore feet in against his hip bone. ‘We have to sit down without our masks.’

  And Jacqui, rather than being embarrassed by his tacky talk, was much moved by Bill’s love, his need, by his good looks, by my lack of the same.

  She was a fan. She wished to be with him. Thinking her silence a mark of unworthiness, she walked beside him wondering what to say. Finally, she asked about the Water Sirkus, inquiring how the performers had been able to speak whilst underwater.

  She saw even as he answered – ‘It’s a voice patch, Jacques, that’s all’ – that he did not want to talk to her. He wanted to talk only – this was so weird, so bizarre – to the snotty mutant that no one in the DoS could bear even to think about.

  ‘Did you enjoy the Sirkus, Tristan?’ he asked.

  But Tristan Smith would not speak, and when his father turned to speak to Jacqui his eyes were weak with need, with shame.

  ‘It’s a voice patch, Jacques, that’s all, a new gizmo,’ he said. ‘Soon every shop in the Kakdorp will have one in its window. But I loved,’ he said, speaking loudly, as one of the performers walked past in a white bathrobe, his cheeks red, his eyes bulging a little with fatigue, ‘I absolutely loved that bit of business with old Spookganger.’

  The performer opened a door and closed it behind him.

  ‘That was Dirk Labelaster,’* he whispered to Tristan Smith. ‘Would you like to meet him? We could visit him at home. He lives just near us. Are you still interested in posturing? Tell me who you want to meet.’

  For answer, Bruder Mouse presented his immobile cheeky grin.

  We descended a steel staircase. At the bottom we arrived at a closed roller door, not unlike the one at the entrance of the Feu Follet. Bill pressed a button. The door rose noisily and we found ourselves outside the Sirkus, in the dank night air, by a small kanal.

  The air was fetid. There was broken glass, a burned-out truck. A man in a leather jacket came out from behind the truck and pointed his finger at us.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Bill said. ‘Relax. He’s not a Misdaad Boy.’

  This man was the wheelmajoor, the pilot of a boat, a gondel, which was sitting in the iridescent water with its motor purring. And now, as our party walked towards him, he held out his hand to help us aboard.

  ‘It’s a nice night to go to Saarlim?’ Jacqui said.

  ‘Yes, Meneer,’ he said, but she could see he was not VIA, and as the gondel nosed out of the back kanal, and into Bleskran Kanal, as the great spires and domes, the luminous filtreeders, rose high above her, Jacqui left the cabin and went to stand alone in the prow. Then Saarlim appeared above her, around her, like the fairy city of the vids. It was one of those rare moments when a city can suddenly, unexpectedly, appear to open its doors to a stranger, and take them from the dirt and heat of the streets into that other secret world it shows only its creators and intimates.

  Yet this experience, far from bringing our nurse a little peace, produced in her passionate heart a fierce agitation.

  You see, she told her mother, who could not see, was not here, could never know, even if she were told. You see – you do not need to live your life like a pinched-up piece of leftover in a saucer in the fridge.

  She sat in the prow, looking at the skyline, accepting the glass of champagne – from Bill Millefleur, who came out on to the deck to give it to her personally.

  She sipped champagne, and thought contradictory and agitated thoughts about that cautious street her mother still lived on, the genteel poverty, the suspicion, the habitual meanness which was thought of as caution, the damn leftovers, the frozen scraps with date labels three years old.

  I am going to wait in Saarlim for the snow.

  Through the glass she could see Bill and me and Wally in intimate conversation. And she was somehow persuaded about me in a way she had not been before.

  She sat out in the fog looking in at me.

  She sat in the prow as the gondel glided along the black silky waters of the kanal, beneath the golden gates of the Bleskran, under the great illuminated wharf of the Baan, where uniformed doormen waited to help us disembark.

  She arrived on the private wharf with the champagne glass still in her hand, and walked in through the foyer in her now slightly soiled male costume as if she too were already someone special.

  When she entered the carpeted elevator it was as if she did it every day. The elevator was, as appeared to be the Saarlim habit, glass-walled. As our little party rose into the night we were presented with this jewel-box view of the city, its water, its boats, the rippling glass towers of water filters, the glow of the Sirkus Domes, like so many Florentine cathedrals clustered densely around the Grand Concourse but then spreading away into the great dark night of Voorstand.

  *The Dome Projection is naturally little known in Voorstand, where no one would waste their time viewing a vid reproduction of a Sirkus. In the rest of the world, Meneer, Madam, this is often how we know you. Chemin Rouge, for instance, now supports two live Sirkuses, which change their show every three months or so. In contrast we have sixteen different Dome Projection theatres whose entertainment changes weekly. [TS]

  *You may be surprised to see that Bill Millefleur did not have to explain who Dirk Labelaster was. Labelaster is hardly a star, but he has a following among the Eficans. Dirk Labelaster? you ask. In Chemin Rouge? And I, in my turn, say to you: you have no idea of your effect on those of us who live outside the penumbra of your lives. [TS]

  37

  I had been pleased to see my father. I loved him, although I had spent many years insisting I did not. But each time he did not understand my speech, he emphasized our eleven years of separation. This was the father who could not do the time. He could do what was ‘brave’ and ‘dramatic’, go to the Mall and say, ‘This is my son, Tristan Smith,’ or paint his face with Zinc 3001, but he did not have the spine to be a father.

  When I saw the flashy gondel bobbing at the wharf, I saw one more of his dramatic gestures.

  Of course I now know that this was unfair, that a gondel is not ‘flashy’, that it is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary conveyance for a Saarlim bhurger. But when I was carried inside the cabin, I did not understand that gondels are hired by the hour by bank clerks and fishmongers, or that the liquors displayed so proudly in spotlit niches cost a very reasonable 3 Guilders a nip. Laugh if you like, but when I saw the black leather banquettes and small brass lamps, I thought he was trying to seduce me with his money, and by the time I sat on the banquette I was as depressed as Wally was, although for different reasons.

  Bill, meanwhile, plunged anxiously onwards. He was in full gallop, round and round, smiling, laughing, juggling tall-stemmed glasses in one hand while with the other he eased the cork from a dripp
ing wet bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

  I declined the glass in sign language, holding my Mouse head to show him why I could not drink.

  Then the damn fool began to fiddle with my suit.

  If he had only thought a moment more he would have realized I might not wish to undress myself in public, to show myself to him like this. I pulled away from him and turned, not towards Wally who was staring mournfully out into the night, but towards Jacqui who was seated on my left. In our days of tin-rattling my nurse and I had finally become allies. In the Water Sirkus she had been my friend and companion. Twice she had touched my knee, once my arm.

  ‘Stop … him,’ I said. ‘Please … get … him … off … me.’

  But when I touched her arm she gave a small, apologetic shrug and slipped off the banquette away from me.

  ‘Just … tell … him …’ I said, but I saw she had become my father’s friend. She walked out of the cabin and up towards the prow, and let me tell you – it was obvious to me then – as she walked up and down that little deck, she walked not like a man, but like a woman, and a damn frisky one at that.

  You may be thinking, Madam, Meneer, that Jacqui left the cabin from a sense of delicacy, a wish to leave me alone for my difficult reunion with my father. Equally you may imagine that Bill Millefleur, in carrying champagne to her on the deck, might have been performing his role as a gracious Saarlim host.

  I was in no state to imagine any such thing. I watched Bill and Jacqui, a man and a woman silhouetted against the lights of the filtreeders and wolkekrabbers.

  It made me half mad with jealousy – this whole world that I could never enter.

  I turned to Wally. ‘Let’s … go … back … to … the … hotel.’

  But Wally had found a bottle of whisky and was pouring himself a generous drink.

  ‘Take your suit off,’ he said. ‘Have a little drink. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘He’s … a … creep.’

  ‘Give him a chance.’

  ‘He’s … such … a … phoney.’