Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

In a short while the entire company would come up the stairs and enter the tower. It was what happened after each production. Unless she was to be a total coward, she would have to unlock the door.

*

The Voorstandish Navy’s ELF-FOLK (ELF for Extra Low Frequency) PROJECT has remained a mystery to the Efican people until 427, as we go to print. We now know that 2,400 miles of insulated cable was threaded through our nation’s belly. The cable was grounded at each end in the dry bed-rock of Inkerman, thus turning our most populous island into a giant antenna. The low conductivity of Efican granite allowed for the more efficient generation of extra low frequency waves and enabled the Voorstandish Navy to communicate with its

SNEEK

77 submarines at depths of 400 feet.

*

The Blue Party is formally known as the Efican Democratic Party, or EDP. Its supporters are more familiarly referred to as Blueys or Muddies, the latter term providing a direct link back to the men and women who gathered those ‘briques bleus’ in the mangrove mudflats in the early days of settlement.

Vincent skulked around the windy little cobbled courtyard, while all the cast and half the audience pushed up the noisy staircase to the tower to see exactly who I was. It was the tradition at the Feu Follet that anybody could come up to the tower on opening night — audience members, critics, visiting actors, spies from the VIA and DoS *— and anybody could give notes — Moey Perelli’s dad, for instance. Vincent too, and this was a privilege that he relished. He was the theatre’s biggest single patron, but on opening night he always sat on the dusty floor in his good black suit. He drank wretched wine from paper cups without ever puckering his fastidious lips. He seemed so confident, so worldly, wealthy but hip. He had such a detailed knowledge of theatre history, an excellent eye, a real feeling for the moment when a scene lost energy or focus. No one but my mother knew that each opening night he had to steel himself to face ‘them’, to win the respect of actors of half his age, wit or taste.

And because of these windmills he felt he must dispense with, the sessions in the tower had always been the high points of his life — first the discussion, the exercise of his considerably theatrical education and sensitivity, and then, some time before dawn, his secret love-making with the leading lady beneath the turning ceiling fan. He was addicted to the whole process, and no matter how he anguished over the deceitful phone calls to his wife, he could not bring himself to give up either my mother or the theatre.

On the press night for Macbeth , however, he stayed down in the foyer. He pretended to read the tattered hand-written notices on the walls. He jiggled his car keys in the big pockets of his fashionably baggy black trousers.

He could not love his child — he was clear on that. It was not that he would not like to, but that he could not. It was his flaw, his weakness, not admirable, but beyond him. And if he could not love the baby — one step led to the next — Felicity would not love him. He had seen it in her eyes on stage when she pasted that vile green muck on to her cheeks and pointed at him. It was not to do with text or character, but to do with him and her — he understood her perfectly.

But he, also, understood himself — he could not walk up the stairs. Nor could he leave the building, for if he left the building now, tonight, then that would be it, the end, and he would not permit it to be the end. He went to the open door and looked balefully at the last of the theatre patrons, a man and woman, standing in the middle of the street and talking in the sweet salty air.

‘Croco cristi,’ he said to himself, but more loudly than he intended. The man turned sharply to look at him, and Vincent thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and turned back to face the bleak little foyer with its ragged self — important notices.

‘Croco cristi,’ he whispered. He undid his wide leather belt in that elaborate way of his which always suggested a man about to undress for bed.

‘God damn.’

He tightened the belt a notch.

What happened next was not very much — his mouth tightened a little. But a second later he was crossing to the staircase in three strides.

Next he was ascending the stairs. Next, revealing a more athletic frame than his bulk might have promised, he was striding along the deserted first-floor corridor. His squeaking crepe soles echoed in the empty couchettes, and then receded as he climbed the steep narrow stairs which led to the roar of conversation.

The tower room was small, ten foot by ten foot six, and by the time the chief executive officer of Efica’s largest aspirin manufacturer had reached the top there were fifty people crammed inside. One step below the door sill, his courage failed him. He stopped, marooned it seemed, jiggling his keys.

He could not see Felicity, but he could hear her. There was a stirring in the crowd — the tall, gaunt Sparrow Glashan stepped aside, and there she was, totally alone, exhausted, with the spooky white-eyed baby on her crumpled bed.

How he loved her, loved her at that instant, beyond anything he had known before.

Felicity saw him. She caught his eye. He did not know how to look at her. His own eyes wobbled, then dropped. He stepped into the room and busied himself at the drinks table. He took a paper cup and filled it brimful of dark red wine.

When he next looked up, the crowd had blocked his view again, and he could hear Felicity asking someone to phone the hospital again to see when Wally’s arm would be attended to. Her Voorstand accent was clear and crisp. It cut through the humming, sighing Efican voices like a silver knife.

He stepped back into the doorway and raised himself on his toes. Someone had, at last, taken pity on Felicity — Claire Chen. Vincent had always thought of Claire Chen as a limpet on Felicity’s life — low-life dramas, breakdowns, abortions, bail money. But now she was the one who sat on the bed and laid her ringed hand on the baby’s foot.

When she did this, the room quietened.

She began to stroke the baby’s twisted foot. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. You could hear her nerviness. ‘All the bones and skin,’ she said.

Felicity asked Claire, ‘Would you like to hold him?’

Sparrow Glashan moved sideways and blocked Vincent’s view again. Vincent left the doorway and pushed in past Annie McManus.

‘Sure,’ Claire said, ‘I’ll hold him.’

As the baby passed from its mother its spindly arms sprang out like a spider and Claire flinched and screwed up her face. The actors watched. Vincent watched. He could see by the way she pulled her chin into her neck — everything in her wanted to thrust the child away.

Claire did the thing Vincent knew he was expected to do himself — touched the lipless little tragedy, stroked its gaunt little praying mantis head. It was very quiet in the square, high-ceilinged little room.

‘See,’ Felicity said, speaking generally, smiling, fondly, like a mother.

‘Feel,’ Claire invited, her little brown eyes flicking about the room — she had done the brave thing, but she did not want to do it a second longer. ‘It’s so amazing.’

Vincent felt the crowd stir and shift. He imagined eyes looking for him.

‘Feel,’ Claire repeated. Vincent looked down at the floor, avoiding her eyes.

Annie McManus turned and looked at him. Her pretty face had no expression — she did not know he was Felicity’s lover, no one did — but Vincent was convinced the opposite was the case and he pushed forward, to escape her. He bumped into the critic for the Neufeine , who turned, and then, misunderstanding his intention, stepped to one side to let him through. A path then opened up before him, and he walked it — what else was he to do? — squeaking on his crepe-soled shoes.