Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘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.

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 courtyards 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.

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.’