by Peter Carey
He smiled.
‘Muddy,’ the man said, and seemed to wave the ‘pen’ across Bill’s cheek.
Tapette,’ said the other, and spat.
There was no pain, and when he felt the wet on his cheek he thought it was the spittle. The two young men did not run. They turned and walked quietly in amongst the nylon underwear on sale in Lucky Plaza, and then Bill’s face began to sting and then to burn, and then he knew he had been slashed by members of the Ultra Rouge.
As he watched the blood drop in fat warm splats on the tiled floor of the mall, he thought what a fool he had been.
He was an actor, disfigured, for what? For what good reason? To play-act at politics? He walked through the mall, a rueful smile on his face, bent forward to keep the blood off his shirt, but by the time he reached Felicity on the street his face was shiny with it. She was sitting cross-legged on the fender of the company truck still eating the ice-cream from a cone, but when she saw him he thought he saw a flash of excitement in her bright green eyes.
Trust was always a fragile commodity with Bill, and when he saw, or imagined he saw, my mother’s excitement, he thought it was a Voorstandish response – the excitement over risk, danger, blood. It was the same look you saw in the lines in Saarlim every night. It was what made Voorstand Voorstand, kept it alien no matter how long he stayed.
He blamed her then. He blamed her, silently, secretly, for placing his face on the poster, for using his fame to sell tickets for something that was, to his taste, distinctly mediocre. And now this damn scar, this wound.
She staunched the blood with her silk scarf, cancelled the night’s show, flew him back to Chemin Rouge to see a good doctor, but somehow the cut changed things for Bill, and when he saw her blow the egg beneath the pine tree, he decided it was typical.
What he could not say to her was: wattle-eared old Wally had acted like an Efican, not timidly, but with respect for life. She was an alien, a foreigner, no matter what passionate speeches she made about culture or navigation cable, and he was surprised – lying beside her that afternoon, naked, squeezed in next to her on the twin bed in the Shark Harbour Motor Inn – to recognize the degree of hostility be felt towards the woman whom he had always thought of as his only love.
‘He was not bird-nesting,’ he said.
‘Sweets, he brought me eggs.’
‘It was the Hairy Man. It was his action.’ He turned on his side and raised himself on his elbow. ‘He was showing you his action. He was showing you he had the guts to perform his action. He did not plan the eggs. He made them the character’s aim.’
She smiled. ‘You’re turning this into a story about you.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You’re saying he climbed the tree because you wrote him one postcard.’
‘All I’m suggesting,’ he said, ‘is that it would not be peculiar if that was what it was. We gave him a role and then we took it away from him.’ But before he had finished speaking she was shaking her head, and he collapsed on to his back and stared up at the water-marked plaster.
In his mind’s eye he could see how she would be in ten years’ time, slightly hawkish, gaunt, her eyes still alight with that amazing life, and he knew he would certainly not love her then, not because of her looks, but because that force he saw there was distilling, intensifying, changing from something sexual into something cold and controlling.
‘This isn’t to do with you,’ she said. ‘Besides, it would be ludicrous for him to be an actor.’
‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’m not nineteen any more.’
‘No,’ she said, and looked at him, and he wondered, was she thinking what he was thinking – that long-ago day when she had finally asked him to come in from the lane and eat with the collective? He had wanted to schtup her, he had such a hard-on – the way she carved the leg of lamb, the way she stood, her legs firmly apart, her fine-boned shoulders leaning in towards her work, the way her small hands grasped the implements, the thick slices of red meat, the blood pooled in the bottom of the dish. She scared him. He could not take his eyes off her.
He had imagined he was stealing flowers for a vegetarian, but she had heaped his plate with meat and looked so intently at him – it was always messed up with blood, from the beginning.
He was crazy about her, from Ophelia on. She slept with him, but she never said she loved him until she saw the voltige, and then she called him those names. Brave Billy-fleur etc. The insides of her thighs were glistening wet.
Thirteen years later, Bill lay beside her in the bed and realized that he wanted to be back in Saarlim. He stroked her side, caressed her in a gentle line from under her arm to her hip, and as he did so he allowed himself to know all the things he was angry about – that he had let himself be used in the publicity and poster, that he was identified with her cause, that he had been used, and disfigured, perhaps temporarily, perhaps not, that she was so committed to being right she could not even listen to a different point of view.
‘Please don’t be angry,’ she said, looking over her shoulder at his face which, he knew, had revealed that little fault line in his brow.
‘I’m not angry.’
‘Don’t you see – it would be ludicrous for him to be an actor.’
‘I wasn’t recommending it,’ he said, and kissed her.
‘You know how much I love him?’ she said. ‘You don’t think I don’t love him?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and made a small laugh – there was a sort of mania in the way she loved their son.
‘I know I lose my temper with him. I’ve said terrible things to him,’ she said, ‘but I do love him.’
For Tristan she would deny herself, thwart herself, go places that bored her, go without sex, eat food she loathed, touch and caress him as if he were exactly that perfect child everyone had expected her to have when she named him Tristan. Her expectations of herself were so high that, after six weeks on the road, the pressure always showed. Bill saw the way she dressed him, almost brutally sometimes, pulling the tight polo-necked sweater down even though he screamed inside it. She would bang his head with the prickly hairbrush and tug the knots with the comb.
She did not want to be like this, and the kid did not either. He watched them both trying. They both apologized to each other. It was moving to see the little creature with his pale wet eyes stroke his beautiful mother’s cheeks. It was also slightly pitiful to watch the way he tried to keep out of her way, to amuse himself, to ask for nothing, to curl his alarming limbs up into his body, to occupy a corner of the bed where he would not kick her in the night, but in the end they could – neither of them – stop it. He dropped a book, or broke a glass, or wet the bed. Bill, having drifted off, would wake to find Felicity screaming at Tristan, Tristan vomiting, Tristan crawling down the aisle to sleep in Wally’s tent.
‘Do you really think he was being an actor?’ She shivered. ‘Oh God.’
‘How could I know?’ Bill said. ‘Like you say – I hardly know him.’
The northern summer was nearly over. Soon Saarlim City would be habitable again.
‘You’re very important to him,’ my maman said.
Bill disentangled his legs from hers. ‘Kids bird-nest,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s what they do.’
23
As he drove the Haflinger towards the old dye town of Melcarth, Wally spied on my mother in the vibrating mirror above his head. He watched the shuddering reflection of her lips as she read to me from The Birds of Efica.
He knew the book – all those speckled eggs and out-of-register colour plates. He imagined Tristan Smith seduced by it, could not know that I was bored, worse than bored. I was DEPRESSED. I was an ACTOR not an egg-sucker. I had performed my ACTION and not a thing I could say would make this clear to either my mother or my father. They did not want to know.
Wally watched us from the driver’s seat. He imagined me embarking on a dangerous career of bird-nesting and his mind whirred as he tried to find an antidote
. As he drove, his eyes flicked from the road to the water-temperature gauge and his face appeared blunt, hollow-cheeked, vacant. It was, in fact, all sucked in around his feelings, and those feelings, although diffused and transferred out across the landscape, were centred on the back seat of the crowded bus – Tristan Smith, Felicity Smith, Bill Millefleur, the latter with a rich red scab running upwards from his chin.
Wally stared out through his dirty windscreen at the grey dusty road, a lumpy cigarette adhering to his bottom lip. From time to time he had a vision of my injured body, snapped bones, closed eyes. It came out of nowhere, like a tear in the film of life. He flinched from the sight, squinting shut his bloodshot eyes. Meanwhile my mother turned another page. She could not see the broken bones, but then she would not be the one to find my lifeless body amongst a bed of pine cones. It would be him. It would be him, because he would be there.
He had spent more hours, more minutes, with me than my mother or my father, than anyone on that bus. He was the one who fought with me, who forced the medicine down my gagging throat, put me to bed at nine o’clock on opening night. He was the one who had to scream and threaten me. He was my baby-sitter, my nanny, my paid companion. When we were in the street alone, the pair of us, he moved within the aura of my mighty stinks. He held me against his palm-treed rayon shirt and pushed the supermarket trolley and my life burned into his. My calloused ankles were imprinted on his chest. He understood my language without its being repeated. He imagined he understood my soul. That was his belief. He could never be one of those who said how beautiful I was. Indeed, he carried, in his speckled light grey eyes, a silent contempt for all of those who did.
This was a shy, fierce man with his passions all burning underground. The only way you might intuit his emotions was by the ferocity of his temper, by the way he had shouted at my mother about the ladder. She understood him well enough to pat his shoulder and then, when she boarded the bus at Shark Harbour with that brand new book, to kiss him lightly on his cheek. God damn, she pulled his strings, pressed his buttons. But still she was the same person who blew the mouette’s egg yolk. She left it where it landed, like snot or come, like a poor spent life clinging to the grass and thistles by the tank stand of the Shark Harbour Mechanics Institute.
He had tried to talk to Bill about it, but Bill – he saw it happening – was already distancing himself from the child he had spent so much energy seducing.
‘Kids bird-nest,’ he said. ‘It’s what they do.’
He thought Bill had no right to call himself a father. They had no right to a child, either of them. But he had no power over them, only their frigging lives in his hands as he drove them. He thought about that: the road. He sought peace there, in the soft grey sand.
Wally enjoyed driving, and particularly enjoyed driving across the islands of the French Necklace where Captain Girard had found the Cactus Ottomania plants to grow the thickest. Wally liked the road itself – the real Efica, he thought – a soft grey unmade road with long straight stretches broken by rutted unbridged sandy-bottomed streams. He liked the rippling passage of the big old-fashioned steering wheel through his dry hands. He liked the way the sand softened the feel of the big-cleated tyres. But he liked most of all the idea that a foreigner could pass through this landscape of countless dreary little cactus plants and see nothing – that you, Meneer, Madam, might dismiss them, belittle them – think them dull, impoverished, stupid – and not know that there was a second parallel chemical landscape in which the tinctures of the plants blazed crimson.*
None of us, sitting in the back seat, none of the actors and soup-servers playing cards and sleeping in the middle, guessed that the uneducated driver was travelling through the mirror of his soul.
Melcarth itself was no one’s mirror, pace Captain Girard who had proclaimed it the capital of Neufasie.†
The caves, as usual, were illustrated on the drink coasters at the Melcarth Motor Inn, but Wally did not have drink coasters that night. When he had the bus parked between the tight ugly concrete columns which held the motel above the dun-coloured river, he washed the truck. It was Happy Hour, a time he normally spent in the bar, adopting life stories that might provide him with ‘a little company’, but he wanted to be alone and he spent Happy Hour finding a garden hose and a pair of demi-bottes and then he washed, not the float or the rented truck – he did not think these his responsibility – but his beloved Haflinger, slowly, carefully, thinking all the time about ways to thwart my mother.
In the first century (EC) Melcarth had been a famous dyeing town, and even though the works had long ago closed down, the river still had the poisoned look for which the dye works had originally been responsible. Its banks were lined with chemical storage tanks, and old warehouses which had once hoarded red cloth like Persian carpets but which were now half derelict, carrying silvery ghosts of signs for Hellas Aspirin. At sunset, Wally removed the tent poles and guy ropes which were stashed along the aisle of the bus. He took them out one by one, and laid them in the next parking bay. He laid them all neatly parallel, the six-inch aluminium poles, the one-inch thick ropes.
He swept the bus, emptied the ashtrays, folded the blankets, shook out the ganja butts and biscuit crumbs and chocolate-bar wrappers and swept them all neatly into a dark corner of the car park. Then he squatted with his back against the stained concrete wall of the car park, adding the smell of Dutch tobacco to the riverside odours of cold mud and flying foxes.
The river caught the sun and shone a bright bilious copper colour before sliding into ash-purple and – as the neon lights flickered on above Wally’s head – a deep and definite black.
It was at this point, when all the poles and ropes were still lying on the floor, that Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson came bouncing into the car park, broke, abandoned, stinking of spilt kerosene. She bottomed-out on the culvert, squealed her tyres across the shiny concrete floor and squeaked to a stop almost in front of him.
She was just like Irma.* That was the first thing that struck him – the spitting image. She had the blonde hair, the red dress. She was plump, buxom. She had the peaches and cream complexion, the pert nose.
She was trying to park the car and little caravan behind it. He watched her swing the wheel from lock to lock. He was no longer thinking about eggs. The tyre rubber screeched unpleasantly against the concrete. She edged forward, she edged back. Wally shifted on his haunches, and flicked away his cigarette.
He stood. He wiped his hands carefully with his handkerchief. He combed his hair, two flicks. He dropped his comb in his shirt pocket and walked across the neon-bright concrete forecourt, shading his pale eyes with a freckled hand which would, within ten minutes, be cupped around Roxanna’s pigeon.
*The cactus plants of Efica – Cactus Tinctorum, Nez Rouge, Poor-man’s Back – once dyed the tunics of Italian soldiers, the robes of French choirboys, the ceremonial cloaks of the kings and queens of England. On the first Monday of every month, you can go to the museum in Chemin Rouge and see the ancient red clothes stacked high – crimson, madder, rose, carmine, ruby, vermilion. There are also two skeins of red thread, once the property of the last of the IPs in Nez Noir, but little is known about the provenance of this exhibit.
†‘Here there is a high mountain, out of which the finest blue is mined. There are veins in the earth whence silver is mined. The little cactus plant is everywhere so abundant that one might, had one the cloth, provide red tunics for all the king’s men from now until the end of the world. The fowl is abundant and the fishing good. Once again we chose a splendid little house in a cave and gave thanks to God for leading us, after so many misadventures, to this Eden.’ Girard, Journals, vol. xv.
*The role of the little blonde ingénue who recites the ‘Great Works’ in the Saarlim Sirkus has always been known as ‘Irma’ in Efica. Why it should be Irma here and Heidi there, no one can tell me. [TS]
24
‘Can I be of assistance?’ Wally said.
He put his freckle
d hands on the edge of the car door and Roxanna considered them thoughtfully: the stranger’s wide pink nails hooked over her wound-down window.
She turned off the ignition, leaving the car stuck where it was, its wheels askew, poking out into the entrance lane. ‘Got a light?’ she asked. This time yesterday she had been a married woman.
Wally’s lighter was silver, with a windshield. When it flamed it was red and smoky, and Roxanna – fresh from her own adventures with kerosene – held back her fringe to stop it getting burnt.
‘It’s the Happy Hour,’ he said when she had exhaled. He just said it as a fact. As if it were the Happy Hour and therefore dot dot dot.
Until this moment Roxanna’s only plan had been to check into the motel, eat on room service, and leave without paying. Now she looked at this man and considered him. She had done worse things in the old days, but the truth was – yuk – she no longer had the stomach for the life.
‘Could you tell me what day the local zine comes out?’ she said, and hid from his insistent eyes in her handkerchief, blowing her nose wetly, unattractively, deliberately. She found her dark glasses in her bag and put them on. ‘I need to put an avvert in.’
‘What are you selling?’ he said. He had a high forehead like a clown, and sad grey freckled eyes.
‘Pigeons,’ she said, very level.
‘What sort of pigeons?’ Wally said. ‘I got a young fellah might be interested.’
‘Racing pigeons,’ she said.
‘Start him off with a couple of street-peckers.’
‘These aren’t street-peckers,’ she said. ‘They’re racing pigeons. They have pedigrees.’
‘I had a grandpa who raced pigeons,’ the punter said. ‘He won a lot of races, but he never had any pedigrees. I had a dog once.’ He smiled: he had wide pale lips. ‘Now that fellow had a pedigree.’