Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

At the bed he looked into my mother’s eyes, and gave a melancholy kind of shrug which gave no indication of the wild, confused state of his emotions.

But then he held out his square, soft hands — their palms soft as the underbelly of an animal — and fitted them around Tristan’s chest cage, hooked under my arms, and lifted me out of Claire Chen’s sweating embrace, slowly, smoothly into the air.

When he had me held aloft, all he could think was that he was going to faint.

No one spoke, no one made a sound. They left him there, alone, teetering on the edge. He glanced around the room, his eyes weak with need, his mouth oddly shapeless. Only Moey Perelli gave him any sign — pushed his own mouth into the shape of a grin.

‘He has intelligent eyes,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s not beautiful, but he has intelligent eyes.’ And then he embraced me. He was harsh and awkward — pushed his beard into my eyes and ears, grazed my skin, held me too tight, nearly tripped as he tried to walk a little closer to Felicity. He landed heavily on the bed. Felicity stretched out her light, tense hand and grasped at his knee.

Moey began to talk, very loudly, about his security dossier (which he claimed to have seen), and somebody pulled a cork from a bottle of case-latrine.

‘He has extraordinary eyes,’ said Vincent. It was not easy for him. It took everything he had. He sat beside Felicity and made a little seat for me with his fat hairy arm. He supported my head with his fleshy pectorals.

Felicity held his knee and smiled and bit her lip.

Moey came — his head shining now he had removed his wig — and held out a long finger with wide tombstone fingernails.

Vincent took Felicity’s hand — not something he normally did in company. ‘He has a strong grip,’ he said.

Felicity nodded, and blew her nose.

‘Whose turn is it to pick up the reviews?’ she asked.

*

Voorstand Intelligence Agency and Department of Supply, the latter being the Efican secret service. The two services worked closely at all times, it sometimes being said that the DoS’s loyalty lay with the VIA, not with the elected government of Efica.

What Bill could not stand was: why must they deny there had been a tragedy? Why must they all smile and coo? When Felicity put out her hand and tried to hold Vincent’s old fat knee, he felt he was in an alien country where you could not even guess what might be going on. So while he believed he could feel the horror running through the room like a shiver, all he saw was smiling faces. All these actors — not one of them in touch with what they felt.

‘I’ll get the zines,’ he said.

‘No, mo-chou. You should be here with us.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ Bill said, his eyes full of poison. ‘I need the air.’

Felicity frowned at him. He saw the need in her eyes, but she was sitting next to Vincent and Vincent had his fat valsir where he was so clever at placing it — on the moral high ground.

Three minutes later, alone on the ramp in front of the theatre, Bill unscrewed his hip flask and took a long swig, spat the wine out on the bricks.

The Feu Follet bus, a three-ton Haflinger with big slab sides and small decal-spotted windows, was parked right in front of the theatre. He found Felicity’s sandals sitting on the dashboard. He picked up and flung them deep into the dark body of the van.

He let the clutch out so hard you could feel the prop shaft thunk and he accelerated out into Gazette Street in loud metallic first gear, shifting noisily into second as he passed the brightly illuminated taxi base. He pulled across the tram tracks and turned right, away from the Voorstand Sirkus and the Mater Hospital down towards the port.

He thought: that’s it, I’ll keep on driving and never come back, but the truth was, of all my maman’s admirers, he was the one who needed her the most. She had altered his life. She had taken him into the company when he was nineteen years old, a cambruce. He had fallen out with a travelling circus over his wages. Fearing a beating from the proprietor and his brothers, he had run away to Chemin Rouge and there he had wandered down Gazette Street and discovered a free Wednesday-night performance of Hamlet.

He was dirty, starved, down to 120 pounds when he saw my maman play Ophelia. He sat in the dark, Row P, and fell in love.

That night he slept in the lane behind the Feu Follet. Next day he walked out into the suburbs and stole roses, hollyhocks, snapdragons, whatever he could find, and next evening he brought them to my maman at the Feu Follet. It was the same the next night, and the night after that.

At first she joked about him, teased him, said she was too old for him. But she never seemed too old to him. He loved the language she used, the language she knew. He told my maman he was the best voltige *artist in the southern hemisphere. And although he had never been inside a theatre until he walked into the Feu Follet, he told her he was going to be the best actor in Chemin Rouge. He asked her for books about acting and she could not refuse him. She gave him her precious first-edition Stanislavsky with her neck tingling and her eyes feeling loose and unfocused. He read the whole three volumes of An Actor Prepares , one volume a day. He argued with it. He was very handsome. He had a long flexible back, and dancing passionate eyes that never left her face. He was nineteen, a baby, but she could not withstand it.

The first time they made love he told her he would die for her and she wept in his arms.

Later, she read him Paradise Lost in bed, her head resting on his smooth and luminous chest. She bought him two dictionaries, the big two-volume Oxford and the smaller Efican University edition with its creolized French and English prison slang.

He took her to a dressage ring in Goat Marshes and taught her voltige. She learned it too, without the benefit of a meccano. †She was twenty-eight, knew nothing about real circus, but she had such guts, such style. Within a week they were performing ‘two men high’, round and round, no one watching.

He took her out into the cantons to the petites tentes. She did not see the meanness of the circus, the lying proprietors, the stinking caravans, the brutal beatings Bill had suffered. She saw instead the discipline, the lack of affectation, the highly critical audiences who could compare a given performance with others from a hundred years before. Seeking to invent an Efican national style in drama, she began then to incorporate circus skills into her shows. Not too much later she bought this old Haflinger bus and began to take her circus-theatre back into the little towns.

It was the only vehicle the Feu Follet owned. There was nothing lighter or easier to use when they went shopping or, as now, to collect the zines. Bill bounced over the train tracks, and followed the old Ridge Line Road down into the port of Chemin Rouge. He drove past flour mills, catalytic converters as pretty as cruise ships decked with lights, oil terminals with their long pipes running out into the night. He drove, thinking of Vincent.

He never had liked Vincent. From the very beginning, even when he had thought he was usurping him, he had been threatened by his wealth, his educated accent, his confidence. Tonight in the tower, he had let Vincent win again. Bill had walked away. He always walked away. He didn’t know any other solution. He felt sour shame come to take his cooling skin. He was sorry at the injuries he caused, the toxic things that had passed between them, in their eyes.

He loved her. He could not bear to see her with Vincent, the fucking patapoof. He had been counting on the baby to change all that. It was his baby, necessarily. He was the father. He had built domestic pictures he dared not even name himself. But when he saw the real child — on stage, in the middle of his performance — his first feeling, in the middle of the horror, was outrage, the sense of theft, as if his happy life had been stolen from him.