The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Why do you have to ruin everything by making it less than it is?’ She turned my head. As she did so I caught a glimpse of Wally and saw his old grey eyes looking at me sourly.

  ‘I could take him home,’ she said, kissing my nose. ‘I really could.’

  You can understand, I’m sure, why I was under the impression that I was a social success. I was elated, aroused, almost tipsy on her perfume, and so it took a little time for me to look beyond myself, to see my father’s pale and stricken face, Malide’s comforting hand on his thigh, and it was only then – when it was too late to change what I had done – that I began to fear I had done my dab some damage.

  40

  In Efica everyone imagined that Bill Millefleur was famous in Saarlim, whereas, as you know, he was just one of perhaps two thousand performers employed in the Sirkus, and that particular show-the Sirkus Brits – involving as it did both drama and animals, was as peripheral to Saarlim life as the gentlemen from India who played cricket on the outskirts of the city on Sunday afternoons.

  My father had worked hard to make a place for himself in his adopted city. He had worked as hard with history books in Saarlim as he had once, long ago, worked on politics in Chemin Rouge. And just as the scrawny circus boy had learned Rimbaud and Lukacs off by heart, so the handsome man with spangles on his suit soon knew Voorstandish history like a scholar. He knew the Bruder tales, the famous sites, the battlegrounds against the Dutch and British. He could recite ‘Pers Nozegard’ in Old Dutch, and yet, for all the passion he had expended, he was still an Ootlander, and no matter how much he pretended to the contrary, he found your etiquettes stiff and uncomfortable. He felt his own obedience to your customs a compromise, and when he watched me leap through the air and land in Mrs Kram’s lap, he believed himself shamefully exposed: he was a fraud, an ill-mannered barbarian, an Ootlander, a host with poor karakter. He watched Mrs Kram coo, argue, play with my ears, but he had long ago learned that Saarlimites could behave like this and still despise you. And despised was what he felt.

  When he shut the door on Mrs Kram and her friends at four a.m., he imagined his guests clustered together in the elevator, raising eyebrows, sighing, and what depressed him – and he was very depressed, you could see it in his slumped shoulders as he came back from the door – was not the loss of a possible employer but his own lack of authenticity, that he should have allowed himself to be placed in this position where their opinion of him would matter.

  He was not a Voorstander. He never had been. As he began to walk back to the cluttered dining table he began to talk to us about a strip of land out at Goat Marshes where he had often gone riding with my maman – a lonely windswept place where a muddy estuary met the sea. He hardly paused to dismiss the two helpers in the kitchen, and then he produced a large bottle of very rough red wine which he poured for everyone, remembering (even while he described the Arab stallion he had once owned) to fetch me a straw.

  His grief had the paradoxical effect of dignifying him. He still wore the slightly vulgar sparkling suit, the lizardskin boots, but when he brought me my wine in both hands, this shining actor’s garb took on a priestly, or even kingly, aspect.

  ‘To Efica,’ he said, still standing. ‘To us Eficans.’ He began to raise his glass in a toast, then lowered it.

  Malide reached out to him from her chair. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said.

  He swayed his body back, away from the reach of her long white fingers. ‘Don’t do what?’ he said, his eyes suddenly slit.

  ‘Everything’s all right, hunning,’ she said. ‘I think she was charmed.’

  ‘Speaking as an outsider,’ Jacqui began, but Bill cut right across her.

  ‘Bullshit she was charmed,’ he said to Malide, so roughly that I saw her wince. ‘Bullshit she was. I know you people. You’re so fucking Japanese.’

  Perversely, it was then, when he was unlovely, that I finally loved him freely. It was this sadness that made me trust him and I was ashamed of my childish jealousy earlier in the night.

  ‘I’m … sorry … I … behaved … stupidly.’

  My father turned towards my voice, frowning and rubbing his hands across his wan and uncomprehending face.

  I was ready, at this moment, to step out from behind my disguise, and probably would have had not Wally chosen to rise from his chair like an old vulture, all shining scalp and glowering brows.

  ‘Stupidly?’ the old man said to me in a voice as abrasive as the legs of his chair scraping across the floor. ‘You didn’t do anything stupidly. What you did was act as if your brain was in your baton.’ He stood at his place, his arms out from his side, his elbows bent, glaring at me.

  There was a silence. I looked at Bill. His skin had lost its shine. When he tried to smile at me, he succeeded in looking merely puffy. ‘For Chrissake, mo-ami,’ Wally said. ‘This is your father’s home. These were important people. Even I could see that. What you did was ugly and embarrassing.’

  ‘Did … I … screw … something … up?’ I asked my father.

  ‘I’m so very pleased to see Tristan,’ Bill said. ‘Nothing else is so important.’

  ‘Did … I … screw … something … up … for … you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wally said, so agitated that he began to pile knives and forks on to the delicate blue and white Dutch china.

  ‘Leave it, please,’ Malide said.

  But Wally was too upset to leave anything. He carried the dangerously stacked plates and cutlery into the kitchen, his head down, his elbows out, his shoes shuffling rapidly across the floor. ‘You screwed it up,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘It’s pretty obvious, even to an Efican.’

  ‘No, no,’ Bill whispered.

  Malide put her bare arm on Bill’s shoulder and drew him into the empty chair beside her. ‘Calm down,’ she said. ‘I don’t think this was simply karakter.’

  ‘It was totally karakter,’ Bill said. ‘She slummed it with us.’

  ‘I think you may be wrong,’ Malide said. ‘I think Mrs Kram enjoyed herself.’

  ‘Oh Malide,’ Bill said. ‘No, no, definitely not.’

  Malide took Bill’s head in her cool tapered hands and kissed him on the forehead. ‘The more uncertain you are,’ she said, ‘the more definite you become.’

  ‘Come on, liefling,’ Bill said, ‘don’t patronize me. I’ve lived here twenty years.’

  ‘I’m … very … sorry.’

  Bill turned towards me.

  ‘You … should … have … explained … to … me.’

  ‘Please,’ Malide said, standing. ‘Let me make tea.’

  ‘Was … it … for … your … work?… Did … I … screw … up … your … work?’

  In the end, I did not drink tea. I went, at Jacqui’s suggestion, to my bath. I had not meant to hurt my father. I had been more self-obsessed than ever he had been. I went in shame, and although I had only recently planned otherwise, I permitted my nurse to gaze once more on the unattractive truths of my pale and twisted body. We did not talk. We barely looked at each other. She swabbed me with disinfectant, bandaged me, hid me again inside the suit.

  ‘This is too intense,’ she said. ‘I’m getting out of here for a while. Are you going to follow me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want anything else?’

  ‘No.’ I did not look at her. I stayed sitting on the toilet, feeling foolish, waiting for the others to stop talking about me.

  41

  Malide had given Jacqui the famous addresses where she imagined a voice patch or gizmo might possibly be found.

  These stores (23 Lantern Steeg, 101 Sirkus Straat) were all very close to the Baan, in the maze of little lanes between the Marco Polo and the Grand Concourse. There were hundreds of Sirkus shops, opening their doors when the last show shut and closing again around ten each morning. They clung to the edges of the Tentdorp district like mussels on to a jetty, all cheek by jowl, tucked away in basements, in court
yards filled with lumber and the refuse from blacksmiths’ shops, on the tenth floor of decaying warehouses in which unglamorous locations you could find the latest laser circuits, French and German make-up, African feathers, Japanese buttons, and any of the craft and technical aids which the Sirkus industry required.

  As Jacqui left the Baan a little after five, the deskmajoor tipped his hat and wished her a polite, ‘Gaaf morning, ma’am.’

  Out on Demos Platz the rubber-booted yardveegs were already hosing down the pavements in front of their respective buildings and the air was as sweet as it ever got in Saarlim, considerably sweeter than the air down in Lantern Steeg which Jacqui, swinging her arms, jutting her little round chin, turning up the white collar of her third shirt, entered at a little before half past five.

  That the air here was malodorous, the pavements decaying, did not dismay her. Even the sight of a group of Misdaad Boys, with their bright red kerchiefs and their heavy boots, swaggering towards her, did not make her heart so much as skip a beat. She leaned into the air with her chest as if it were a shield, bone, muscle, and she felt, passing through their field of testosterone, invincible, free from fear, hiding the riches the Misdaad Boys could not have imagined she possessed: the Water Sirkus, the Baan, the dinner with Bill Millefleur, Peggy Kram, the doorman, the gondel, the champagne glass she had carried in the elevator; and she wished only that someone from home – she imagined Oliver Odettes in his demi-bottes – had been there to witness her entry into such glamorous society.

  As she entered 23 Lantern Steeg she had to stand astride a sleeping landloper in order to push the button for the elevator. She would have been wise to be nervous, but she thought what other small-town gens have thought since time began: Here I am.

  When the elevator came, wheezing and clanking, she pushed the button for the tenth floor, the showroom of Ny-ko Effects.

  When she emerged half an hour later, the landloper was awake. He lay on his back staring at her with bloodshot eyes. She dropped some coins into his tin, and hurried out into the Steeg, heading westwards towards Marco Polo where she intended to write the first of her daily reports for Gabe Manzini.

  She walked into the foyer of the Marco Polo with her hands in her pockets. She nodded familiarly to the deskmajoor who had, only a day before, pressed that money on to Tristan.

  Then, looking out across the foyer down by the stained old marble fountain, she saw a man sitting in a straight-backed chair who was so like Wendell Deveau – Wendell whom she had made walk round and round the Printemps Hotel naked, crossing his legs, standing, sitting, so she could see why it was men walked the way they did, where their penis and testes flopped and fell. This man, it was the same man, now stood and walked towards her, frowning and smiling at once.

  ‘Wendell?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, already irritated by the petulant, put-upon expression on his face. ‘So?’ she said. ‘You couldn’t live without me, right?’

  ‘Let’s see your room,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s get a coffee somewhere.’

  But he clamped his big white hand around her elbow and propelled her towards the elevator.

  42

  After the dinner party for Mrs Kram had ended, Bill and Malide made a fuss about their ‘Saarlim hospitality’, insisting that Wally and Tristan stay the night, but this, Wally soon learned, was a sham like everything else had been. The guests would have to sleep on the FUCKING DINING TABLE.

  When Wally had tasted the rough red wine – rot-gut, household jumbler, case-latrine, dog piss of the worst kind – the penny finally dropped. The suit and shoes were a costume. The gondel was a prop. The Mersault was a con. The so-called Sirkus Star was one more unemployed actor trying to find a part, to do an audition, someone waiting by the telephone for the call that would let them survive another month. Bill Millefleur was in no position to take back his son.

  And to return from the kitchen and discover Bill and Malide laying a mattress on the table where they had previously spread their ostentatious dinner sparked a powerful storm of outrage inside Wally’s shining skull.

  He squinted his eyes, pushed his fists into his kidneys, jutted his chin in the direction of his host, following all the sheet-spreading and smoothing with an increasingly agitated air which Bill and Malide stubbornly refused to notice.

  ‘I was the one who was meant to be the con,’ he cried at last. He tucked his dress shirt into his black trousers and tightened his belt. ‘All that stuff about the Baudelaire book you used to tell everyone. But here you are.’ He nodded at the mattress. ‘You always made us think you were the big baloohey, arriving in your limousines. The thing is, mo-ami, I believed you. I brought this son of yours across the world. The pathetic truth is, I thought you were a better man than me.’

  ‘He is successful,’ Malide said. ‘But he’s a Sirkus man. One show has finished. Soon he’ll have another.’

  ‘I know what the circus is, young lady. I grew up in the circus. I was the Human Ball.’

  ‘No,’ Bill said, ‘I was very young when I said those things to you.’

  But Wally had turned his back and was staring out across the park at the grey and allen dawn. ‘We lost our money coming here,’ he said. ‘We had money. We lost our money. I didn’t even care. I thought you had so much. When we were robbed, I thought, that’s perfect – now he’ll have to see Bill.’ He turned. ‘We’re down to lint and cake crumbs, just like you.’

  ‘It’s the Sirkus,’ Malide began.

  ‘He should have been with you all the time,’ Wally said to Bill. ‘You should never have left him behind. You could have taught him things I never could. All this behaviour tonight, it should never have happened. You don’t know how he pined for you. He did his exercises, the same ones you taught him, year after year. Even when he was making a stack on the Bourse, he would do his exercises in the afternoons. You were very important to him. You were the one who let him imagine he could be an actor.’

  He sat down on the sofa, looking up at Bill from under his nicotine-stained brows.

  ‘No,’ Bill said. ‘We never discussed acting. How could he ever be an actor?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was you. You had an idea for some character in the Sad Sack Sirkus.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Bill said, his face now very pale. ‘I wouldn’t have.’

  ‘These things are nothing to you. You forget them. But the things you forget, mo-frere – those things are the centre of his life. You can say, “I don’t think so,” but he did those exercises for ten rucking years.’

  ‘I wrote to him,’ Bill said. ‘I know what I wrote. Now he is here, we’ll be fine. Whatever has been wrong, we’ll fix it. It’s not too late.’

  ‘I always thought he would be better with you, but you’ve got no job, no bedroom. Do you have any idea of what we’ve risked to do this? I must tell you, mo-ami, I’m shocked.’

  Bill wiped his hands across his face. ‘He got my letters, though. You say he read my letters. How could he be surprised?’

  ‘You made him love you,’ Wally said. ‘You came and you got him eating out of your hand. He gave me up. He took up with you, and then you just dropped him. It was very cruel, mo-ami.’

  ‘Bill cares,’ Malide said. ‘He is tortured by it. He writes letters every week.’

  Wally did not comment. He wiped his face.

  ‘He got them?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, they arrived.’

  ‘But he didn’t get them?’

  ‘I didn’t say that I was perfect,’ Wally said.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I thought you were rich and famous,’ Wally said at last. ‘I thought you had everything. He was all I had. No matter what was wrong with me, I knew I would never let him down.

  ‘It was wrong of me.’ He picked white specks from the black trousers of his rumpled dress suit. ‘I admit it was very wrong.’

  Bill gave a small laugh, and then threw the pi
llow on the bed.

  ‘I was a prick,’ Wally said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  43

  The lift button was cracked and the light inside it flickered. Wendell pushed it without releasing his hold on Jacqui’s elbow.

  ‘What a dump,’ he said, and the mouth which Jacqui had once thought of as his best feature now looked spoiled and sulky.

  The DoS had sent Wendell here – obviously. They had approved the expenditure, signed the forms, issued the air tickets, which meant that the whole case had now moved three or four levels higher than Section Head.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

  ‘You stay here, what fucking choice have I got?’ His lower lip was droopy, almost pendulous.

  ‘What floor are you on?’

  ‘Come on, professor, you’re meant to be an operative.’ He slammed the button with his fist. ‘Use your head. What floor do you think?’

  The elevator arrived. They rode up together in silence, Jacqui looking earnestly at the numbers while Wendell stared at her malevolently.

  ‘Anybody thinks you’re an homme,’ he said, ‘must be blind.’

  She led the way to the room, very conscious of her walk.

  She opened the door, and Wendell, having hesitated a moment, went first. He was a big man and overweight, and inelegant in his clothes: and yet when he moved around the room now he did it with a certain dangerous grace: checking for people or bugs or bombs, who could guess. It gave Jacqui a small ambivalent chill at the back of her neck.

  When Wendell had finished with the bathroom, he took from his briefcase a small electronic device – a little black box with a series of tiny amber and red lights flashing on it. She knew what it was: a brand new bug-blocker. He placed this in the middle of the room, but the device would not arm itself. The lights, which should have switched to green, remained stubbornly on amber. Wendell stood over it, staring down at it like a golfer at a golfball. Then he kicked it.

  The device slid across the floor, fast as a hockey puck, and slammed into the skirting board.