Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Sweets, you must not make a meal of it,’ my mother said. ‘You have been cast in a show, that’s all. Now you have to decide if you want the part or not.’

My father rolled off my mother.

‘Croco cristi,’ he said. ‘I’m the first Efican actor to be cast in a Saarlim Sirkus!’ He stood up by the bed and looked down on us. There was a second clap of thunder. The rain intensified.

I went to sleep. When I woke — hours later — buttery sunshine was shining on the rain-splattered windows. My mother was wearing a large white T-shirt and Bill — bare-chested, dressed only in white canvas frippes — was sitting on the end of the bed. Their argument had not developed.

‘It’s only a fucking Sirkus,’ my mother said, ‘for God’s sake. You’re not about to invent penicillin. Do it or don’t do it.’

‘All right I will.’

‘Will what?’ my mother said, kneeling beside me, flipping me on to my back and removing my bandock.

‘Do it,’ Bill said.

‘Well, if you want to …’

‘No, I don’t want to, but the company can use the money.’

‘Hand me the wipes.’

‘Please?’

‘Please.’

‘It’s a lot of money,’ Bill said. ‘More than anyone in the Feu Follet was ever offered.’

My mother picked me up and pulled up her T-shirt. I was hungry, but I also knew that each time I fed on those hard white breasts it made my stomach hurt again. To make things worse, she was not concentrating, and although you would not detect it in her tone she was agitated.

‘Don’t be frightened of the company meeting,’ she said to my dab. ‘They’ll tell you what a hypocrite you are, but in the end they’ll agree that it’s a good thing to get thirty per cent of your salary. It’s never any different.’

‘You’re the one who hates the Saarlim Sirkus.’

‘Sweets, I hate it here, not there. In Saarlim, the Saarlim Sirkus is just the Saarlim Sirkus. I don’t hate it in Saarlim.’

‘It’s so tedious,’ Bill said, staring at us distractedly. ‘There’s always the same posturing, and then they accept.’

What he was talking about was the collective policy — those who got ‘straight’ jobs contributed 30 per cent of their salary or fees to the company. Each job offer had to be considered by the company as a whole. So when Sparrowgrass Glashan, for instance, was offered a part in an ice-cream commercial everybody gathered to weigh up the public benefit and the moral damage. You never heard such long and protracted deliberations.

Bill, it turned out, had called a company meeting for ten that morning. You need a certain sense of your own importance to call a theatre meeting at that hour. My mother, who might normally have advised him to have the meeting later, withheld her counsel. It was as if she had decided to let the dice fall as they would.

The dark theatre had a smell which was never present when a show was on. Perhaps the big casseroles burnt away the odours of damp and dust and poverty, but when Bill stood before us on the sawdust and frowned and rubbed his denim shirt against his pectorals, the casseroles were dark and a single 100-watt work light provided the illumination.

As he delivered the news, he made himself — in spite of the arrogance of the hour — small before us, belittled his talents (as he was expected to) and talked about the moral and artistic consequences of the role in terms that may strike you — someone for whom Efica is small and unimportant — as grandiose, if not comic.

What this poor theatre saw itself doing was inventing the culture of its people. So even while the rain leaked through the ancient roof and ran in a rippling wash down the back wall, the young man who paced back and forth on the sawdust stage presented himself as someone involved in a moral judgement which had the highest consequences. He was going to work in the interests of — please do not take this personally — the enemy. I do not mean your country, but your Sirkus. In its celebration of the individual, in its inequitable rewards for luck, in its invitation to have the audience be complicitous in the not infrequent death of performers, it ran counter to everything we Eficans held so dear. The Saarlim Sirkus was thrilling, spectacular, addictive, but also heartless. Was this all? No it was not, but it is enough for now.

My father was impressive. Despite his lack of education, his mind was the most classically inclined of all the actors. He had an almost Jesuitical sense of argument, and when he came to the conclusion of his formal statement, my mother squeezed me hard in her lap.

On that stage on that long ago Sunday morning, Bill Millefleur shone, a star already, and the members of our collective, sitting under that dark and distant canopy, were happy for him, jealous, relieved to hear that such substantial funds would be brought into the Feu Follet.

Just the same: when he concluded that the immense size of the salary meant that he was obliged, on moral grounds, to take the part — they smiled, some more cynically than others. When he said that he was frightened of the role, and, indeed, might still refuse it, his obvious excitement made him appear disingenuous and his colleagues’ laughter had a harder, less patient edge. Those who stood to speak afterwards were harsher than they might otherwise have been. They could not imagine he might really say no.

*

Solveig Mappin (271–336), the young wife of Henry Mappin, Red Prime Minister of Efica (240–307).

To reach your great capital, Bill would have to fly for three hours above the long island chain of Efica and then for five hours more across the landlocked web of lakes and inland seas, the great green and gold hinterland of Voorstand dotted with the mushroom shapes of Sirkus Domes — and what he said was true: he was frightened, not only that he would lose my maman, but also that he would somehow lose himself at the other end of this great maze.

We Eficans, generally speaking, were frightened of Saarlim. It may make you smile to think how much: how we rubbed and burnished our idea of its cruelty and ruthlessness.

My father was a colonist, an islander, an Efican. He was, by definition, not a Voorstander. When he spoke his lines in Saarlim, he would need to abandon his soft, self-doubting Efican patois — Shapoh, mo-ami, mo-chou, cambruce — learn to speak with a clip to his consonants, give up his Feu Follet habits of irony and self-mockery. To you he would be an exotic performer introducing live animals into the Sirkus. *But to himself (and to us) our circus boy would be acting out, with his own body, the surrender of our frail culture to your more powerful one. He would be singing your songs, telling your stories, and this went strongly against the grain, undercut the whole notion of who he thought he was. So even though the collective had told him, go , he could not let it be so easy.

Back in the tower, he said the same things he had said before.

My maman also: ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘It is your life.’

It was perhaps the twentieth time she had said it, but this time something different happened. Bill began to comb his thick black hair with both hands, rapidly. ‘What does that mean, Felicity?’ He used only a slice of his great booming actor’s voice, a whisper, thin and nasty as a piece of wire: ‘What exactly does that mean?’

It was now three in the afternoon. My maman lay down with me on her unmade bed, fully dressed. She pulled the blanket up over us, and looked up at my father with her green eyes.

‘What?’ he said.

She pulled her hair back from her forehead and held it at the nape of her neck. She was the mother of a scary child with special needs, the owner of a theatre whose existing debts would easily consume Bill’s 30 per cent.