Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I heard the door, the soft slide of machined aluminium.

Madam, Meneer, she was so lovely. She wore a simple skirt, long and black, and a tight-fitting blue halter. But it was not the dress or her body, but some bright, high light in her perfectly boned olive-skinned face. She wore no make-up, her hair was ruffled, but she was electric.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a stupid person. If there was a hell, they’d have to send me there.’

I hardly heard her. I saw her. I was so happy. I knelt in front of her.

‘My speech ,’ I said.

‘There’s no time,’ she said.

I knelt beside her. I picked a little flower from out of Malide’s window box. Wally would have died to see it — a sappy thing with a stalk like a daffodil. She took it from me, and held it in both hands.

‘ I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow.’

I was Caliban, of course. You should have heard me, Meneer, Madam. I was funny, ironic, mocking, and so clear.

‘ And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts ,’ I said.

‘Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how to snare the nimble marmoset …’

She sat on the white plastic stool beside me. Only then did I notice her face, the tears welling in her eyes.

‘I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries. ’

‘Tristan,’ she said.

‘Yes. What?’

I felt her hands fondle my ears. I could smell the flower, the musty dust on its stamen. I saw her wet cheeks and was filled with joy.

‘We have to go,’ she said. ‘There’s someone out there wants to kill you.’

Wally woke to find Bill, Malide and Peggy Kram all camped on his dining-table bed and talking volubly as if the dinner party had never finished.

The old man had thought himself in a private place. He had gone to sleep with his trousers pressing underneath the mattress. His dentures were in public view. His dress shirt and bow tie were folded neatly on the bookcase at the head of the bed. Now, as he struggled to button up the crumpled shirt, he was mortified to find his bare and withered chest displayed for all to see.

How this could happen in etiquette-obsessed Saarlim was as much a mystery to him as was the warmth being displayed by the hosts and their powerful guest towards each other.

Yet the implications of the visit were so clear to the Saarlimites that they did not feel they had to explain it, not even to a foreigner. If Mrs Kram was clambering over Wally’s bed, it meant she had decided, for whatever reason, that Bill’s apartment was hearth and that Bill and Malide were hearth folk. In other words, Mrs Kram had derived value from the dinner party, and my father, to his barely concealed astonishment, found himself elevated, promoted, saved.

‘I thought about it all night,’ Mrs Kram said. ‘I was so aired-up, I could not sleep.’

‘We felt the same,’ Malide lied. ‘We went straight out for chocolate. We talked about you for hours and hours and then, coming back across the Platz, there you were.’

‘And there you were,’ said Mrs Kram, who had not, in the entire dinner party, said so much as half a dozen words to Malide.

‘We were talking about you,’ Bill said.

‘And there I was, my head full of you.’

‘We were saying, how could we live so close to you all that time and not hear that you were folk?’

They were, as you can see, in too much of a giddy state of insincerity to notice anything as ordinary as Wally’s chest or dentures. If they sat on the bed, it was because this is what you do in a situation like this. They were in such a rush, were so loud and pleased to kick their shoes off at the door, were so happy to show how thrilled they were with each other’s company. It took them nearly three minutes to realize that the nurse had changed sex in their absence.

‘Excuse me, young lady,’ said Mrs Kram when Jacqui brought Wally’s socks and shoes over to the bed. ‘Did I drink too much, or were you a gjent last time we met?’

Bill and Malide echoed her laughter, but their eyes registered their own separate but discreet emotions: amusement and admiration in the man’s case, serious alarm in the woman’s — that was her 1000-Guilder skirt swishing up and down the apartment.

Wally retrieved his trousers from beneath the mattress and drew them on beneath the covers. Then, as Kram wiped her eyes, he swung his legs out over the bed and smoothed down his wild eyebrows with his fingers.

‘What time is it?’ he said.

‘Ohmygod,’ said Mrs Kram. ‘Ohmygod, this apartment is better than a cabaret. I should move in here. It’s so amusing.’

If I had recited the speech which I was forming in my head it would have been a good deal more amusing, but Jacqui somehow intuited that I was about to show off my new voice.

‘Forget that now.’ To Wally she said, ‘We’ve got to go.’

Wally stared at her, open-mouthed.

‘Mr Paccione, we need to go.’

‘Then others want to use the bed?’

‘Ohmygod,’ said Mrs Kram. ‘This is Saarlim, hunning. No one sleeps in Saarlim.’

And straight away, without asking permission from Bill and Malide, the Kram began to phone up to her own apartment to tell her caterers that there would now be extra mouths to feed.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Jacqui said to me, ‘let’s go.’

‘Do you like berries, Oncle?’ Peggy Kram called to Wally. ‘Do you like wild rice and chestnuts? Will you eat today, cuteling?’ She beamed at me. ‘Will Bruder Mouse come upstairs to see my little trothaus?’

I turned to Jacqui.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Go with her. That’s perfect.’

And that, of course, is how we made our escape from Wendell Deveau without even leaving the building. We rode the big glass elevator up to Mrs Kram’s trothaus.

My threatened assassination was much less in my mind than I might have expected. I do not mean that I was brave. You know I am not brave — I hid from death for years on end inside the Feu Follet. I saw death, smelled it, let it invade me like a gas until it had occupied every corner of my empty soul.

But as I rose inside the glass elevator, I knew my life was about to change. I was about to become witty, sexy. I was about to speak clearly for the first time in my life.

My only hesitation was — what should I say? You try it — think of a sentence, now, that will express all your genius and charm.

Hurry, hurry. You are on the tenth floor. Time is rushing.

It is better — fourteenth floor — to keep it simple.

Fifteenth floor.

Sixteenth floor.

You can see the gondels clustered at the steps on Demos Platz. You can see the pigeons on St Francis fountain. You don’t know what floor Peggy Kram lives on and you are ready to settle on asking, ‘Which floor?’

At the seventeenth this seems stupid.

Eighteenth floor.

At the nineteenth you see a chance to link life and art, to comment on the view. But ‘Like a De Kok’ is not accurate, and you cannot think of the name of the Saarlim painter whom the view recalls.

‘Do it,’ Jacqui said to me on the nineteenth floor. ‘Just Caliban.’

‘What Caliban?’ said Kram, instantly alert, her blue eyes flicking between the pair of us. ‘What’s up?’

The doors slid open into a mirrored foyer. I saw myself reflected in a gilded frame — a myth, a legend, a beautiful woman on either side of me, my entourage behind.

‘What’s up?’ asked Kram.

There was nothing I could answer. Instead, I took the Kram’s little hand inside my own. Then, with Jacqui walking behind in long black skirt and bright blue blouse, I walked in stiff, bow-legged majesty, head high to Mrs Kram’s gold-belted waist. I left Wally and Malide and Bill to follow me into the splendour of our hostess’s Saarlim life.