by Peter Carey
‘If … my … mother … was … alive … you … wouldn’t … talk … to … me … like … that.’
Rox takes a breath before she answers. ‘Come on, Tristan.’
She turns and walks towards the foyer.
‘Where … are … you … going?’ This is not ROBERT BRUCE talking, not NAPOLEON. This is a crow, a gull, something on a city dump. My voice is high and scratchy with anxiety. I make ‘going’ sound like ‘gung’.
She says, ‘I’m taking the food out to the truck now.’
She descends the front steps with the picnic box. She sees two chopped and channelled custom cars drive along Gazette Street, taking the short cut on to the Boulevard des Indiennes. Two boys in the front, two girls in the back. You can see beach towels on their rear window ledges, and they double-declutch as they come past the taxi base, and Roxanna, as she crosses the tar-sticky street towards the truck, skips, once, across the broken white lines. It is, like, normal life occurring.
She unlocks the truck, places the cardboard box behind the bench seat, opens the driver’s side door, and sits behind the glove box, looking through the tapes for ‘Beach Music’.
She hears me coming before she sees me – arms flailing, spitting, howling, shrieking like a cat. Roxanna jumps down from the truck and opens the door. Wally releases YOUNG TRISTAN into the cabin and I scramble, fight, claw like a native cat, clambering over the bench seat and into the darkness of the back.
My captors climb into the truck, turn up the music, loud.
I find picnic things and throw them: cheese, bread, apples.
They are not even into the Boulevard des Indiennes when the beer bottle smashes. Roxanna sees me – on my back, my arms and legs up in the air, rolling on the broken glass like a dog in the dust. Even as the glass cuts my skin, I keep my eyes on hers.
War.
3
When they got me back from hospital, Rox was very nice to me. She spread the picnic rug on the stage, right at my feet. She put soft pillows on my chair so I could lean back without making my cuts hurt. She unwrapped each of the small pink-iced croix cakes and cut them and spread them with blackberry confit.
Whatever she did to Wally’s porpoise in the bed that night, it was more than she had ever done before. When he saw the angels, he made high, hard noises in the back of his throat. He went on and on. In the morning he whistled and drove all the way down to the port to buy some fresh bream for our breakfast.
The minute the truck’s engine started, Roxanna got out of her bed and came into my room, pulling Wally’s blue-checked dressing gown around her. She was still very nice to me, but her eyes were bloodshot and there was a hardness in her face I had not known before.
She took Without Consent from my hands and slid it under my pillow in a way that did not brook interference. ‘It’s a beautiful day out there, Rikiki.’
She cocked her head, as if waiting for an answer.
‘Not a beautiful day,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’
She kneeled at my feet and opened her handbag. At first I thought she was looking for a Caporal, but when she turned back to me she was holding something in her closed cupped hands. Then she smiled. For a moment it was the old Rox. She blew across her intertwined fingers, like Wally in his magic trick. I could smell the sour wine on her breath. Everything about her was so familiar, so much a part of me, that even this smell, which had initially been so alien, now signalled comfort and security – breakfast, warm sheets, buttery toast eaten in her arms.
‘Mo-chou,’ she said. ‘Did you hear me, Chocolat? You want to see my present?’
‘OK,’ I said. I sat up in my bed.
She opened her white hands – a small squish-mak frog, bright green with long yellow stripes, sat on her palm.
‘Was … it … in … your … purse … all … night?’
‘Look,’ she said.
‘I … know … a … squish … mak.’
‘The world is beautiful.’
‘I … know.’
‘It’s so easy to forget.’
‘You … don’t … understand … anything.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You be careful, mo-camarad.’ She held the frog up to my eyes. ‘Look,’ she said. She smiled again. The squishmak was wet and shining, a kind of lime green. It had big wide eyes and long thin fingers. ‘God made it, just like He made you.’
I did not answer.
‘Well?’
I could see how tired she was, her skin, her red and yellow eyes. She had a red wine crust around her lips.
‘Do you know what I’m saying to you?’
I did not know what I was meant to say. I shrugged.
‘Do you want to ruin my life?’ she said suddenly. ‘Do you?’
‘No,’ I said, and it was true. I loved her, her lipstick-sour-wine smell, her frowning forehead, the fine blonde down which only showed when the sunlight fell on her neck, along her chin line, her chipped and bitten cuticles when she removed her red stick-on nails, the way she bent her small thin fingers back to explain a point, the bruises on her knees which she rubbed at with her fingers now, as if she might erase them.
‘My life has been lousy up to now,’ she said. ‘Do you realize – I’m nearly twenty-six years old?’
‘Your … life?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Your life is fine. Nothing is going to hurt you now. It’s been two months, Tristan. Nothing has happened to you. Nothing will. You’re not political. No one thinks that you’re a threat to anything. If you’re a threat to anyone, it’s me. Do you realize what happened at the hospital?’
‘Six … stitches.’
‘They thought me and Wally cut you up. That fellow with the specs near-as-damn-it called the Gardiacivil. I’m the one who should be scared, not you.’
‘I’m … sorry.’
‘I already burnt a house down,’ she said. ‘It isn’t smart to make me tense. Please say you’ll let us go and live somewhere else. We could be happy, all of us.’
She opened her handbag and slid the frog back in. She snapped it shut, and caught the creature’s foot between two golden metal clips. She did not seem to notice what she had done.
‘You cannot do this to me,’ Roxanna said to me. ‘You can’t.’
‘Look …’ I pointed to the frog.
Roxanna followed my finger to her handbag but did not seem to notice anything. ‘I love that man, you understand? I know I didn’t used to, but I do.’ She looked up at me. ‘He’s a good man, and he understands me.’
‘I’m … sorry.’
‘I’m not going to lose him, Tristan. So I’m telling you, I’ll be nice as pie to you while he’s around, but either you suggest we go and live some place with light and air or …’
‘Or … what?’
‘Or I’ll go away and I’ll take him with me.’
‘I’m … just … a … kid.’
‘Listen, Mr Machin,* I’m a woman. He’s a man. I can make him do whatever I damn well want. ’
‘You … can’t.’
‘I don’t want to do this,’ Rox said. She slung her handbag over her shoulder. The frog’s fingers were not moving. ‘I want us all to be together, Rikiki, but you’ve got to understand – if you want to fight me, I’ll beat you.’
‘I’ll … tell … Wally.’
‘You don’t know who I am.’ She ruffled my hair, just like she did when she was nice. ‘I’ll kill you if I have to.’
*Literally, Mr Thing.
4
I never doubted Wally loved me, but I was up against blusher, eye-shadow, mascara, black lacy panties with a red slit in the crotch, suspender belts, little silver balls connected by a nylon thread. When I heard him whimper in their bed I believed she could make him do anything, including abandon me.
For me he would make frencn toast, but for her he would rise at five-thirty in the morning and go down to the port for those little fish she used to like deep fried on buttered toast. He bought full cream for her
coffee. He began to steal again. He did not need to. It was his excitement. It was the feeling of youth Roxanna gave him. He came back to the theatre with his forearms bleeding and unplucked poultry in a hessian bag – ducks, geese, turkey.
He was conjuring for her, making a rich person’s life from nothing. He made sauces with blood and raging blue brandy fire. He was like a crazy bird building a bower and stacking it with pearls and silver paper. New knives appeared, choppers, scalpel-sharp instruments with fat black handles. He produced them like a músico and dissected whole ducks in seconds, piled them on silver platters which still bore the imprint of the Excelsior Hotel.
He began to look different. He had his hair cut short and bristly, so his nose and chin seemed to grow bigger in his face. He ‘located’ more white shirts and came running into the theatre in his clean white sand-shoes bearing baked banana bread, his paternal vision fogged up by the steam of sex. He touched me and kissed me, but he really did not see me at that time.
When we were all together, Roxanna smiled and petted me exactly as before, but when he was away, she made it clear to me that she was going to move Wally out of the Feu Follet.
‘Within a week,’ she said. She held up a finger with a chipped and bitten red nail. ‘Seven days.’
Even I could see she was not well. Twice she tried to light fires in the night – I did not witness this, but saw Wally dealing with the debris in the morning. She did not want peacocks any more, but she wanted apple trees and a vegetable garden. This was what she dwelled on – the impossibility of happiness inside the old Circus School. She showed me her skin. She had a rash along her back she claimed was made by being there.
I was not so well myself. Now I was not prepared to move from my club chair inside the circus ring. I shat there, peed there, was washed while still within its overstuffed arms. I did not know what your agents looked like then. I imagined them in shadows, their features masked by wide-brimmed hats. I forced the new lovers to sleep beside me.
Rox was not continually unkind, even when we were alone together. She would arrive with little egg creams she made herself, but then – while I devoured them – she would walk around the wooden ring guard, circling me, talking to herself about me, or praying to God to put me in a home. She said things in Latin I did not understand. At other times she disappeared. I would hope she had gone, but then I would learn that she had been on the front steps, getting ‘clean air’.
I slept, I woke. I peed in the plastic bucket. Time began the grey, almost featureless continuum that was to be so much a characteristic of my future life. But always, at three o’clock in the afternoon, while Wally was preparing his evening ‘surprise’ in the kitchen, Roxanna would bring me a perroquet and then sit in Row B with a glass of ice-water and a zine.
At these times I tried to reach out and touch her heart. I had no idea how sick she was. I was a child, tried to arouse her sense of pity by making myself seem ill. I complained of aches and pains. I wept, hunched my shoulders, folded my arms across my chest. Sometimes she drew me to her breast and told me that she loved me.
And then a new stage arrived and it seemed that my organism had responded to my will. I became truly sweaty, really feverish. Roxanna held me and begged me to change my mind. Even when I began to vomit I imagined it was something I had willed myself.
Wally gave me dry toast and made me chicken soup, but nothing stopped me getting sicker and Roxanna crazier.
On the fifth or sixth afternoon, she stood herself up straight in front of the front row of seats, held her plump arms by her side, made her hands into fists, and began to scream at me. She told me she had been convicted of stabbing a man in the spanker. She said I was unwise to mess with her. She said she had Wally’s tringler in her pocket. But as she said these things she got redder and redder in the face and she began to gulp and burp. She collapsed into a Starbuck and put her head between her legs.
‘Please,’ she said when she regained her composure. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’
She began to frown. Then I saw that she was crying. The tears were very large. They made large round marks on the dusty duckboards.
‘Why do you want to destroy my life?’ she said to me. Her face was crushed by howling. Her eyes were running black. ‘You’re the one who’s going to lose,’ she said. ‘Can’t you feel what’s happening?’
By then I was desperately ill, racked by stomach cramps and diarrhoea. It was the first time I thought that I could beat her, but it was also as close as I came to witnessing my victory, for it was during this fracas that Wally, finally, realized how sick the little actor had become.
I never knew what happened until later, but when I was discharged from the Mater, Roxanna was gone from our life.
There is a mystery here, Madame, Meneer, which will all be settled in good time. But when I came back to the Feu Follet, nothing seemed mysterious.
Peace prevailed, long sweet unchallenged periods of silence, long dust-filled rays of light, the odour of sweet musty sawdust in the air. So happy was I with this resolution that it took some days to realize that Wally was now in pain himself. He had loved Roxanna. He had thought they were two sides of the same coin.
As the days passed this pain did not diminish. Sometimes he stole a little to cheer himself. Sometimes he cooked new and complicated recipes from gourmet magazines. Often he just sat at the kitchen table and watched the white train of his foaming bride as it spilled down the side of his glass.
As one week became a month and the month a year, his injury set hard. We were like two planets caught in mutual fields of gravity, each unable to break free. In this way my youth passed and he moved into old age.
And then, just when you would think that that was that – when we were, the two of us, like a pair of crippled eccentrics whose wasted lives would make you shudder, whose existence you might learn of only when one died and the other starved to death, I suggested that we take this trip to Voorstand together.
It was an unlikely thing for me to say, given that I would not go as far as the Levantine shop across the street, but when I saw how Wally responded, what life it gave him, I dimly realized that this might be our life-line and I began to inch my way timidly forwards, not towards the trip exactly, but into a more intimate proximity to its glow.
First we clipped the coupons in the advertisements in the zines, then we waited for the colour brochures. For a long time it was what we lived for – all those beautiful pictures of Voorstand in the mail. We were going on a Sirkus Tour of Saarlim.
All this was enough for me: the fantasy – but Wally was not going to let me get away with that. He set a date. He hired a new nurse. He bought the wheelchair. I watched him come alive, glowing in the reflected light of travel brochures.
I moved into a room with a window. I prepared.
5
My nurse on this journey was named Jacques Lorraine, and this individual, who turned out to be the most curious young man I ever met, had more to do with the course of events than any of us understood.
Jacques had distinguished himself, from the first interview, by insisting that he would do whatever it was we needed him to. This was an immediate relief to us. His two predecessors had had such strict descriptions of what the title nurse might mean: Phonella would not do the dishes or mop the floors; Jean-Claude would not make the beds. He would cook, but if there was no food in the house he would not go and buy it. Phonella was a Ph.D in Archaeology. Jean-Claude was a flautist, and was saving up to travel to the Old World.
In contrast to both of them, Jacques seemed to have no other ambition but to serve, not just me, but Wally too. He was a nurse. It was all he wanted to do. He was self-effacing, like a good waiter is self-effacing, but not meek, or subservient. Whatever misunderstandings we had about his true nature, we always knew, even while he cooked and washed and scrubbed and dealt with the intimate secrets of my body, that this was an attractive person with considerable reserves of self-esteem. He had an ‘edge’, and
although we did not know just how much edge he had, we never called him pissmarie or prick-buttock, not even behind his back.
He replaced broken zippers, darned socks, even typed my essays and manifestos for the January 20 Group. When it was necessary that he learn to drive a five-ton truck – our only vehicle – he did it. It was in this truck that he delivered me, as curtained from the public gaze as a lady in a mobile-amor, to the Group’s meetings. In this and other ways he made himself some sort of ideal figure in our lives.
He was below middle height, but handsome, with honey-coloured skin, large brown eyes and lashes that Roxanna would have died for. He was lightly built, but athletic. He squeaked around the dark rooms of the old Gazette Street building in fastidiously clean white running shoes.
Then he was merely our employee, but now let me make it clear – this next part of the story belongs to him as much as to me or to Wally, and not just to him, but to the extraordinary family that he came from – the father with his ludicrous passion for tropical snow, the mother with her martinis resting incredibly on the peeling front veranda of that lower-middle-class street.
However, on the spring morning we boarded the trawler John Kay in Chemin Rouge harbour, it did not occur to me that I might grant our recently employed nurse this importance in my own private history. I was so tense and frightened about everything ahead, and I felt – not incorrectly – that Jacques was secretly intolerant of my fear.
When he trundled my new wheelchair down past the skipjack boats on the No. 25 wharf, I was half dead with shame and self-consciousness. As we passed men filling their water tanks or loading gas cylinders, I pulled my panama hat low over my eyes. Though covered by clothes, by hat, I felt like a snail – de-shelled, slimy and naked in the vast and merciless light of day. We were setting out on a journey of 3000 miles and I was nervous, not just of ‘logical’ fears, like your agents, or storms at sea, but of the light, the air, the naked eyes of my fellow humans.