Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Then — for ten, twenty seconds — he was capable of anything. He wanted to hurt her, break her. He was a frightened soldier in a burning village.

For a moment, in front of one hundred and eighty people, he was mad. And then, slowly, a bit at a time, he turned his rage away from Felicity, and turned it back into his performance.

The wind was warm down in the port. It smelt of heavy oil and sea salt. He drove with the window rolled down, clattering past the bleak waterfront bars with their yellow tiled walls and used-car-yard bunting, heading towards the Zinebleu sign where the review of Macbeth was already rolling off the presses. It was the quaint habit of the Zinebleu to adopt what it imagined was the Voorstand practice — they would not send a reviewer to ‘press nights’, only opening night. So they held the theatre page till half past ten and the poor suck-arse reviewer either scribbled his review in the dark, or — as Veronique Marchant had obviously done tonight — wrote most of it before the show began.

He picked up the zines and headed back up the Boulevard des Indiennes. He could not run away. He had to go back. But he was not going to lose to Vincent Theroux.

When he arrived back in the tower he had not only the zines but a brown paper bag full of bottles, and as he entered the little room he was pleased to learn that Vincent had been called home to wifey.

Felicity looked up and smiled, but he saw, already, the distance he had lost. He did not know how he knew this — a flattening of the cheeks, a tightening of the upper lips, a lack of animation in the eyes.

He threw the zines on the bed. The normal praise-addicts — Moey, Heather, Claire — all leapt upon them, but Bill kicked off his moccasins and sat cross-legged on the quilt, going through his bag of bottles.

‘I have Rosemary oil,’ he announced, ‘Apricot Kernel, and Scented Olive. I think Rosemary is appropriate, don’t you?’

‘No, sweets,’ Felicity said. He could see her trying not to offend him while she was, at the same time, shocked by what she thought he was suggesting.

‘Come on, Flick, I’m not going to massage you.’

His own hands, when he held them out for the child, felt as dull and heavy as lead.

Felicity tucked the wrap around the child a little tighter. He was left with his hands held in the empty air.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Felicity’s reluctance hurt him like almost nothing he could remember. He felt his lip tremble, and when she gave him the child he actually wanted it, but could not bear to think she had given it to him because she saw this weakness.

His son was so light: a parcel of bad dreams.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said.

If she meant don’t do it , Bill did not get it.

‘He’ll like this,’ he said.

He laid the parcel down and unwrapped it. The child had woken and was looking at him with those disconcerting marble-white eyes.

‘Is it OK to massage him?’ Felicity asked.

The chest cage did not seem right somehow. The skin seemed to hang there like rag on wire. The legs and feet were all wrong too. He could not look, but it seemed as if the heel was missing. Bill felt sick. He poured the oil into his hands and blew on it. It was warm anyway. He had stolen the oil from Annie’s room. Annie had gone to visit Wally in the Emergency Room. She would not be happy if she knew he had done this.

‘Of course it’s OK,’ said Moey. ‘Look at him, he’s smiling. He sees me.’

‘He’s too young to smile,’ Bill said. ‘It’s not a smile.’

The little creature looked at him. It scared him shitless. Bill put his broad-palmed hand across the fragile chest, and spread the oil.

‘You have to take his bandock off,’ Felicity said.

He did not want to. He feared there would be something horrible there as well, but when Felicity had undone the bandock the penis looked quite normal. He began to massage. He could feel the little being inside his hands, some sort of life-form not your own. He was half repulsed, half attracted. He could feel Felicity beside him now, felt her red hair brush his neck.

He looked at her. She leaned across and kissed him. Now she was not withdrawn from him, he was really angry with her — she had forced him to play the musico, to out-Vincent Vincent in his admiration of this tragedy.

The more he massaged, the more the child cooed, and kicked his malformed limbs, the more angry Bill became. The company began to press around, and it made him sour and cynical to see how they now wanted to massage too, and he gave up to them, gave up gladly, listening to everything they had to say. It was an orgy of denial. It disgusted him.

He looked from this to see Annie standing at the door alone. She raised an eyebrow at him and held up a bottle of case-latrine. He looked at Felicity. He turned, before he could stop himself, and followed Annie down the stairs.

*

In the Efican circus, voltige describes a broad series of acrobat acts performed from and around horses — voltige infernale, voltige Tcherkesse, voltige à la Richard etc. etc.

†

Invented by Spencer Q. Stokes to aid in training bare-back riders. A central post supports an arm like the jib of a crane from which the student is suspended.

Wally claimed to have been born ‘on the sawdust’, to have grown up in a circus family, to have been the ‘Human Ball’ from ages one till three.

When he first arrived at reform school he had still been able, so he said, to fit himself, together with twenty-four green soda bottles, inside a box measuring 24″ × 12″ × 12″. It was this which bent his back the way it was.

Furthermore, his father had been a contortionist so extraordinary that he had been able, whilst still alive, to sell his skeleton to medical science. He had travelled around Efica with a coffin already addressed James Hazzard, MD, Boulevard Raspail, Chemin Rouge, Efica. *

‘My old dab was a dreadful gambler,’ Wally said. ‘If it had not been for the need for money, he would never have done it — it was a shocking inconvenience to be always toting that coffin about.’

All his life Wally had been around the circus and the theatre. He had been a roustabout, a tent-staker, a stablehand, a farrier, a driver, a turnboy, †a carpenter, a production manager, but the truth was — this leap into the safety net was his first performance ever.

Now he wished he had never made it. He wished he had died instead.

He sat in Casualty and held his throbbing arm while the flesh swelled like yeast dough around the fracture.

He waited for the visitors he knew would arrive after curtain time at the Feu Follet. He waited with trepidation, embarrassment, imagining Bill Millefleur impersonating him to the people in the tower, repeating his speech, mimicking his accent, revealing all his very private feelings about my mother.

On a different night it might have turned out as he feared (some cruel things sometimes went on in that little tower), but Bill had other matters on his mind and the whole question of Wally’s motivation was overshadowed by the Zinebleu , which had noted the leap (‘inverse levitation’) and had seen it as setting the tone of the production — ‘the Smith forte — the Efican vernacular’.

So the hospital visitors, all actors, came to celebrate the review as much as to commiserate about the injury.

‘I was just testing the rig,’ he said. ‘Jeez.’

He sat on the plastic bench with a forbidden cancerette cupped in his palm, his arm resting across his thigh, and listened while the review was, once again, read out to him. To have his performance admired by actors was worth anything to Wally.