Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘You were the Human Ball,’ I said.

‘I hate that voice,’ he said. ‘You’re like another person.’

‘You never wanted to talk about yourself,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame me. Who did you kill? Tell me now.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘It was the person who put the cigarette burns on your arms,’ I said.

Wally said nothing.

‘It was your father, wasn’t it?’

‘This is not the first time someone tried to knock you off. It’s much more common than you think.’

The elevator creaked and we both heard the doors in the distant lobby close. I could see the lights as it rose towards us: 16, 17 .

‘There were two times in your life,’ Wally said as the elevator stopped. ‘The first time was when you were born. The doctors wanted to kill you then. They wanted to take you away, but your maman would never let them. They sent the Gardiacivil after you but that made no difference to her. So she saved you the first time. But you knew this.’

‘How did she save me?’

‘She never let you go,’ he said. ‘She never let anyone look after you except me and Vincent and Bill and her.’

‘When was the other time?’

‘You know the other time.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Roxanna tried to kill you.’

‘I cut myself with the glass,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘No, listen to me: Roxanna tried to kill you.’

‘I know you loved her, Wally. I’m so sorry about Roxanna.’

‘She tried to kill you with Thallium, you dope. You were so sick. I told you you had Cuban flu, remember? There was no fucking Cuban flu. There never was such a thing. You wouldn’t leave the Feu Follet, so she began to poison you. She kept feeding you little sweets, chocolates. She was injecting them with Thallium. You were nearly damn well dead by the time I got you to the Mater.’

‘When I came back she was gone.’

‘Damn right, she was gone. She was gone to damn jail is where she was gone. Roxanna was insane, Tristan. She tried to kill you so I’d go away with her.’

‘Poor Rox,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and his voice sounded old and cracked. ‘Poor Roxanna.’ A moment later he asked, ‘You wanted a bath? Is that what you were looking for?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Why don’t you ask Mrs Kram to give you one?’

‘Very funny.’

But then the elevator was travelling again. I watched the numbers, my mouth dry.

‘Listen,’ Wally said when it had stopped. ‘Please, don’t flirt with her. It’s embarrassing.’

‘I’m flirting with who? Mrs Kram? You’re embarrassed? Why would you be embarrassed? Don’t answer, because I know. I know what’s embarrassing.’

‘It’s not you,’ the old man said. ‘It’s her.’

‘It’s like in Zeelung. You got in a panic about the flower.’

‘She’s not a normal woman. What woman flirts with a Mouse?’

‘It was just a flower. You think I’m still fourteen years old. You got in a panic, and you rucked everything up. You ruined it. You know that, don’t you, Wally? The truth is: we lost our money because of you. You’re in a panic any time I like a woman.’

‘I’m standing here,’ he said, ‘protecting your life, and you’re blaming me for getting robbed.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. I was in a passion. It was not pretty, not nice. ‘If that’s your attitude towards me …’

‘You’re blaming me?’

I stepped out, out from behind the screen. ‘It was just a fucking flower.’

Wally threw his garrotte on the ground and walked out into the garden. I stood there for a moment, and then the elevator began to move and I went to my room. There was nowhere else to go.

*

Diazephene.

†

Anti-inflammatory of Efican manufacture.

‡

Enteric-coated aspirin.

All my life I had waited for my father to need me, and now there was a letter from him, needing me.

All I could think of, however, was Wally. I lay on the bed and read Bill’s letter, but all I could see was Wally, his anger, his self-righteous face, the elevator rising and falling in its dark and deadly shaft.

Bill’s words ran before my eyes like ticker-tape.

My dear son,

So sorry for the SCRAWL but am sitting in the Kram’s krapper with pants around my knees. Apologies for crumpled paper, bad spelling, all the usual.

Also: please disregard the attached until you have read this.

I don’t think I have any right to ask you what I am going to ask you. I don’t know what you THINK of me. The things I project on to that Mouse mask … ‘THE POWER OF THE MASK’, eh? Remember when your maman did the Brecht with the Japanese masks?

I feel like I have spent a lifetime apologizing to you and I was just so prikkeled that you never got the letters I sent to you. What circle of hell is that? Where you apologize for eternity?

Should have stayed in Efica, that is my feeling now. It was certainly a better life in Efica. We are ‘creatures of our place’. Each night I dream of Efica. Those damn white trees, they really do break my heart. Again and again I walk through forests of them, touching their sticky bark with my hands and knowing I am not there.

Here I am an Ootlander, a horse rider, a barbarian. I STILL DO NOT KNOW THE NAMES OF THE TREES IN DEMOS PARK. But ‘the train is on its rails’ as they say in Saarlim.

Maybe I will end up playing the part of the Hairy Man in some shitty Ghostdorp.

Someone is knocking on the door.

Tristan, maybe it is news to you — my contract with the Sirkus Brits is finished. I have a back injury and a tin plate in my head. I can’t go back to performing, and as for acting — I never really was an actor after I left your mother.

Begging for help. My only hope is to run my own show. Have been trying to get BIG WIGS to read attached business proposal. So this is it: my pants down: begging you: please can you use your influence with Mrs Kram?

Is this too opportunistic for you? Have I become a total Voorstander? If so, just tear everything up, nothing matters so much as your good opinion of me.

Oh Tristan, I really am so full of shit.

I folded my father’s letter quietly, slowly, with extreme care. And I lay waiting on my bed, just as my mother must have waited. She must have felt her Voorstandish murderer inside the Ritz, the Feu Follet, must have heard him on nights when he was not yet arrived, must have listened to the rumbling of the building’s guts, just as I lay now listening to the distant elevator. She did not know they would tell her to stand on a chair. She saw the green rope and never did suspect the plan they had for her.

This room Kram had given me was ornate in the extreme, with heavy drapes and old folk paintings with worm-riddled wooden frames. I had not been ready for this folk-art aspect of Saarlim life, the reverence for the uncompromised past with its Saints and Hairy Man and beans and Bruders.

There were perhaps fifteen lamps inside that room, all of them with heavy shades and low-watt ratings, all with different types of Switches to the ones we have at home. I turned them on, every one of them. Then I lay down inside my sweaty suit upon the quilted bed.

I picked up my father’s letter once again, and then it occurred to me that I was making myself vulnerable by leaving all the lights turned on. I put the letter and the document back inside their envelope and then set about turning off the switches: the ones with knobs, the ones like levers, the ones you pulled like toilet chains, the ones which could only be operated by crawling underneath the bed, the ones hidden on the rat tail of the power cord. When the room was pitch dark, I locked the door.