The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  No way was she going to fuck him. No way at all. When she caught his eyes, he smiled at her.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked, but before he could answer she walked past him, out into the corridor. Her high heels were loud. She hated that sound. The rooms were all insecure. The windows opened on to verandas and roofs. There were no latches.

  Wally leaned against the wall behind her and began to roll himself a cigarette. ‘You don’t want to worry about them pigeons,’ he said. ‘I’ll build them something.’

  ‘Better you than me.’ She turned to face him. ‘Pigeons are a mug’s game,’ she said. She took a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. You could hear the front door swinging open on its hinges – that was two chains, two padlocks she would have to buy.

  ‘My grandad had pigeons,’ he said, reproachfully.

  ‘So you told me.’

  He pulled a comb out of his shirt pocket and dragged his long hair back from his high forehead. Then he leaned across and, without asking permission, lifted her dark glasses from her face. ‘I paid you six hundred bucks for them.’

  ‘It was a fair price,’ she said, but she slipped out of her shoes.

  ‘Seems to me you were offering a little more than pigeons.’

  She bent down and picked up her shoes. She refused to be guilty.

  ‘It seems to me you were offering something tray specific.’

  She held out her hand for her dark glasses. He hesitated a moment, but then he gave them back to her.

  ‘What I said was I’d set you up, OK?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know you think that’s a double meaning, but it isn’t. I meant I’d get you the seed for them to eat, show you how to set up the automatic watering.’

  He shook his head. His eyes had that hurt look men got – she didn’t know whether to pity him or fear him.

  ‘I’m sorry if I gave the wrong impression,’ she said carefully. ‘I’m also really sorry I put the hex on you.’

  ‘You didn’t hex me. I like you being here.’

  ‘I hexed the theatre. The pigeons did. I wrecked her theatre for her.’

  ‘You don’t know Felicity,’ he said.

  She snorted.

  He cocked his head. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Laugh.’ He folded his heavy freckled arms across his chest.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Why did you laugh?’ he demanded. He tightened his mouth. She did not want to look at all that dangerous hurt dancing in his speckled eyes.

  ‘I was thinking you don’t know her,’ she said. ‘That’s all. I’m probably wrong. It was my impression.’

  ‘How would you know if I knew her or not? How could you even have an opinion on the subject?’

  ‘You’re a man.’ She smiled and touched his forearm with her hand. ‘That’s all.’ And she turned and headed up the corridor, before it got any more intense. She hurried into what had been Annie McManus’s room. It was the room she had planned to commandeer, but now she saw it had a door opening on to that spooky little courtyard.

  ‘You’re saying I don’t understand women?’

  ‘Look at you,’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘You’re hanging round me like a dog. You want to fuck me, you don’t do it like that. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. You’ve paid a fair price for the pigeons, but that’s all you did. You bought some pedigree pigeons, OK? Enjoy them.’

  He leaned across and held her arm. The maman and the boy were up in the tower. They were all alone on this floor. He was hurting her.

  ‘You think you know who I am, Roxanna. You think I am some sort of creep, but you don’t know shit. You want to know about me, go upstairs and ask her. Do you think she’d have me here if I was a creep? I’m a good man, Rox. You’re too scared to see that. You’re so jumpy you think you have to rip me off. You’re so nervous you don’t know what to do. But I’ll promise you this and you can trust it – you can sleep in my room, in your own bed. You’ll be safe. No one’s going to bother you in any way at all.’

  She looked at his face – the velvet grey eyes – and believed him.

  ‘OK?’ he said.

  ‘You want to go to the bathroom first?’ She put out a hand to touch his forearm but he moved away a little as if by accident.

  ‘I went,’ he said.

  When she came back from the bathroom, he was lying beneath a quilt on an old mattress which he dragged in from somewhere, one of those mattresses with off-putting brown stains on their black and white ticking. He lay beneath the quilt so still, on his side, his back to her. She did not completely trust the integrity of his stillness. He was a good man, maybe, but he was a man and this was a standard male act – to get to fuck you by pretending they did not want to fuck you.

  She looked at Wally like she might have looked at an alarm clock, something ticking quietly which would, sooner or later, no matter how quietly it ticked, start ringing in her ear.

  34

  French toast was a treat in our house, something I was permitted to have only once a week. Yet in the days following the actors’ departure, I had it three days in a row. Twice was a treat. But when, on the third morning, I found Wally beating up the eggs and milk, I knew all my fears were well-founded – something seriously bad was going to happen to me.

  I climbed up on to the kitchen chair and watched him apprehensively as he pulled a yellow seed-sprinkled semolina loaf from its bag and cut three slices, each one a good inch thick.

  ‘Did … I … have … french … toast … yesterday?’

  He turned to look at me, hollow-cheeked, poker-faced. He took a pack of Caporals from the pocket of his black and white checked cotton trousers and lit one on the gas jet, jabbing his nose and lips towards the neat blue flames.

  ‘Who knows?’ he said.

  This was not like him.

  He now dipped the bread into the beaten egg, one slice at a time, and dropped three slices of delicious slimy yellow into the sizzling pan. He picked up a dishcloth and wiped a little spilt egg from the blue iridescent surface of the kitchen table.

  ‘I … had … it … yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘I thought it was your favourite food?’

  ‘You … said … it’s … bad … for … me.’

  Wally lobbed the dishcloth on to the draining board and winked.

  Then he placed the jug of sugar syrup right next to my elbow. Now I was really afraid – he had never let me control the syrup jug before.

  ‘Is … Sparrow … coming … today?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s looking for a job,’ he said. He turned the slices in the pan, watching them intently while he smoked. ‘You know that.’

  ‘She’ll … change … her … mind.’

  ‘She’s going to stand in this election,’ Wally said. ‘You heard her. You saw those gens in their suits. You know who they are.’

  ‘She’ll … change … her … mind.’

  ‘Eat,’ he said, flopping the first slice on my plate.

  I flooded the plate with syrup. He did not criticize me. All he said was, ‘You clean your teeth afterwards, you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My … teeth … won’t … look … like … yours.’

  He stubbed out his cancerette. ‘That’s right.’

  He cooked the next two slices until they were mottled brown and yellow like the melted tiger in the story. When he had served them, he washed the pan, dried it, and stacked it neatly inside his wooden crate. Then he wiped down the counter top. Finally, he brought me my blue mug full of hot cocoa and sat opposite me at the table to watch me eat.

  He placed a box of tissues on the table beside his ashtray. He lit a second cancerette and I looked up from my plate to watch the way the smoke rose up past the grey tips of his ginger eyebrows.

  ‘Taste good?’

  ‘Very … good,’ but the truth was, I was ill with apprehension. Everything my maman had done for
two days had made me nervous. She had said no more to me about the new house, but on the other hand she had ‘tidied up’, stacking all her belongings in wine cartons.

  ‘I’m … not … leaving … here.’

  Wally shrugged. ‘I yell at you a lot, don’t I?’ he said, not looking at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know it’s because I love you, don’t you?’

  I don’t think he ever used that word to me before. Now I nodded my head, unable to look at him.

  ‘Sometimes I laugh, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but in truth I could not, at this moment, remember him laughing. All I could feel was his sadness.

  ‘What would you say was the most memorable thing about me?’ he asked me.

  ‘I … don’t … know.’

  ‘You’re a smart kid,’ he said. ‘You’re going to do fine.’

  ‘I’m … staying … here,’ I said. ‘Not … leaving.’

  ‘You maman’s worn out with theatre. Don’t make it hard for her. This election is just what she needs.’

  ‘I’m … not … going … to … that … house.’

  ‘You maman needs a change.’

  ‘Please … sell … the … pigeons.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. The pigeons are not the point, Rikiki. From what Vincent tells me – it’s not the pigeons – it’s your dad.’

  ‘My … dad?’

  ‘They had a falling out, Rikiki. It’s not the pigeons. She’s gone right off your dad, the theatre too.’

  ‘No … no … they … did … not … fight.’

  A car horn tooted – four short blasts.

  Wally stood and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Are you finished eating?’

  ‘NOW?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rikiki. I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘TODAY?’

  I was not ready. I had not expected this. I expected change to come gradually, in a long slow slide. I slipped from my chair. I was not going. I turned towards the door, my secret place.

  But Wally lifted me up before I made it to the door.

  ‘Please,’ I whimpered.

  I clung to his hard shoulders and pushed my face in against his rough bristly neck.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, his bloodshot eyes already rimmed with tears. ‘Don’t blubber.’

  I did not even fight him. I let him carry me down the steps and into the harsh light. When I looked up from the shadow of his neck, I was not surprised to see Vincent in the driver’s seat of the Corniche, but I was very surprised to see that all my rebel’s armoury, the stolen Stanislavsky, the mutilated tartan rug, all the secret things I had hidden underneath the theatre seats were now packed in three cardboard boxes in the back seat.

  Wally kissed Tristan Smith an unhygienic, tobacco-smelling kiss. And then put me on the seat next to the boxes. He clipped my seatbelt and tugged it extra tight. He depressed the door lock and slammed the door. He began to wave but then turned abruptly away.

  35

  Four o’clock that afternoon found me in the isolated Belinda Burastin* house my mother had decided was to be our home.

  I sat on the highly polished floor looking out across a melancholy sea of khaki and olive forest to the dusty roads, palm trees and rust-streaked roofs of the distant port. Thirty feet below me: broken logs and small rocks with their sharp edges softened by thick green moss. Behind me: Vincent and my mother squeezed into a small black leather chair. She was half on his lap, half off. He had his wide square hand resting on her knee.

  ‘This will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you,’ he said. ‘For both of us. You’ll see: big things will come of this, for both of us. Bill should never have said what he said about your work, but when it’s all over we’ll print postage stamps with his face on them.’

  ‘I think he’d rather like it,’ my mother said wistfully. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I’d like it too,’ Vincent said. ‘I’d like him on a postage stamp.’

  I listened to him, filled with animus. I did not like the way he talked about my father. He had a soft plump lower lip. He spoke softly, quietly, with much patting and stroking. ‘The Feu Follet will be like a chapter in your life,’ he said to my maman, ‘when you are a senator.’

  My mother laughed but I thought she was too frail for the wild things he was saying – her veins too blue, her skin too white, her lipstick too red for her complexion.

  ‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t be a senator, a minister.’

  For me, listening to him, he was a jackal, poking, prodding, moulding, demanding, preying on my mother’s weakness for political influence. But of course he knew what I did not believe: Bill had abandoned her, and my maman was unexpectedly adrift, drowning. This unseemly rush into politics was the only life raft Vincent could offer.

  ‘You know everybody,’ he told her. ‘You have a following. You’re prettier than the competition.’ He turned her face with the flat of his hand. ‘Even your accent might help you.’

  I was three feet in front of her, costumed in a blue iridescent dress-up hat, a silver waistcoat, a sequined belt, a red cap. I wanted her back in the theatre, but I could not compete with Vincent who was already writing her future in his little notebook. They had already phoned this person. He had called in this favour, had lunch with that opponent. One was ‘flattered to know you’. Another had ‘his heart in the right place’. One more was an ‘amiable ditherer’.

  My mother rested her head on his shoulder. Vincent talked to someone on the telephone about progress on the ‘one hundred thou’ for ‘the candidate’s slush fund’.

  The house was built on delicate thin poles, bright yellow like an egret’s legs. The whole thing flexed and moved, and when the wind gusts started from the west you could feel the house rippling and shuddering under you like canvas. I hated it. It felt as if our lives would blow away.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  When I saw my mother look expectantly to Vincent, I thought this was his Achilles’ heel.

  I closed the Stanislavsky and placed it carefully on the floor.

  ‘A … restaurant,’ I said, thinking that this, at least, would get my maman back closer to the theatre. ‘Let’s … go … back … to … town … and … eat.’

  Crows rose from, and settled back into, the canopies of Enteralis. I listened to the crows and imagined them to be cold, goose-pimpled below their oilslick black feathers. I wrapped my sequined silver waistcoat around me.

  ‘What have we got to eat?’ my mother asked.

  I looked at Vincent, his startled eyes. I thought I had him in check, but not checkmate.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘we need wood for a fire.’

  The hill on which the house sat was steep and slippery with stones, logs, fallen leaves and Enteralis seedpods. I lay flat on the cold hardwood and edged myself to the outer rim of the floor. I looked down and watched Vincent and my mother try to gather wood. They were not suited to this new life. My mother had sandals. Vincent had bright black slip-ons with a little gold chain across the top.

  Vincent slipped and fell on his fat backside. He tried to break long sticks but his shiny little feet kept sliding off. Felicity dragged a big log half up the hill.

  ‘I can’t burn that,’ Vincent called. ‘I’ve got no axe.’

  My mother dropped the log. It slipped then rolled. It hit a large projecting rock and then catapulted itself into the air, narrowly missing Vincent’s head. The log crashed into the woods below, without either of them knowing what had happened.

  Vincent and Felicity came back to the house and tried to start the fire with bits of torn-up cardboard, toilet paper, dead leaves. I knew it was not the time to discuss my own future, that Vincent had dirty hands, that they both felt incompetent and angry with themselves. So I waited, a really long time, until there were smoky yellow flames licking around the brittle green sticks.

  I thought they had no food. I did not mention food. I knelt next to my m
other and dropped little bits of broken leaf in amongst the smouldering twigs.

  ‘I … need … the … theatre,’ I said.

  My mother looked up from the fire. Her eyes were red. There was a streak of ash on her cheek. ‘Do you, sweets?’

  She carefully lifted a charred and smoking stick and inserted it so it was against a feeble little yellow flame. Then she stretched out her arm to stroke my head. ‘There’s plenty of time for you to decide. Lots and lots of time.’

  ‘I’ve … decided,’ I said.

  ‘Sweets,’ my mother said, her eyes red from smoke, ‘I’ve made you imagine it’s a happy life.’

  ‘It’s … not … happy … here,’ I said. I looked back at Vincent when I said it. He stared straight back at me.

  ‘It’s a beautiful house.’ My mother stroked my hair. ‘It’s actually the most perfect house for bird-nesting. Did you think of that? Think how many birds must live here.’

  She knew I did not care about birds or bird-nesting. I tugged myself away from her.

  My mother squeezed her eyes shut. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘you are ten years old. You have serious problems you are going to have to cope with in your life.’

  ‘I … know,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault. I protected you too much.’

  ‘I … know,’ I screamed. ‘I … know … I’m … ugly.’

  ‘Darling …’

  I pushed her away. She sucked in her breath. ‘Sweets-ki, I’m doing my best to help you, but, please, help me too – just accept that I can’t go back to the theatre.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Shush,’ said Vincent.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on,’ Vincent said. ‘Cool it.’

  I glared at him. ‘I … want … Wally.’

  My mother opened her eyes. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, speaking very quietly and slowly, ‘Wally has a job. His job is to build a pigeonloft.’

  ‘You … can’t … afford … that,’ I said.

  Vincent stood behind my mother and began waving his finger and shaking his head at me vehemently.

  ‘It’s Wally’s job,’ she said. ‘That’s all. It is his job to do that.’