Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘What?’ he insisted.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said.

‘What you thought.’

She turned her head aside, exhausted.

‘You thought …’ Bill insisted.

‘You have to go,’ she said. She felt sick in her stomach, but she was an actor, too — she smiled. ‘Take the part.’

‘Take it?’

‘You have to go , mo-chou,’ she said, sitting up. It was not so hard as you would think — this moment. ‘You’ll see the best theatre in the world, every night. You’ll do voice with Fischer and movement with Hals or Miriam Parker. You’ll be a great actor. You’ll never be a great actor here.’

‘Flick, you know this isn’t acting. It’s a fucking Sirkus.’

‘The Sirkus won’t last for ever,’ she said. ‘You won’t be seduced by Sirkus. The Sirkus is mechanical and manipulative. I wouldn’t love a man who could be seduced by Sirkus.’

If her eyes now slid away from his, it was because she was not telling the truth and she was ashamed. She could not stop thinking about the money he would earn. She coveted it almost as much as she feared losing him.

She was a woman who owned only three dresses, two pairs of shoes, who was always scratching around for extra in order to pay her mortgage, or her actors, or build the sets, or repair the ancient lead plumbing. If you had asked the actors, still gathered in the theatre downstairs, they would have said my maman was rich. And it was true that she owned the crumbling bricks and powdery mortar of the Feu Follet and she had capital invested which returned her a small income, but not enough, not nearly enough, and the future of the theatre was always in doubt. The thought of all that Sirkus money drove her crazy with guilt and longing.

‘You want me to go,’ Bill said.

‘ No ,’ she said. ‘How could you say that? I don’t want you to go, sweets. I want you to stay.’

‘It is a lot of jon-kay …’

‘Never do anything for money,’ my maman said. ‘Never, ever.’

‘That isn’t what you said before.’

‘It’s what I’m saying now,’ she said. ‘It’s your life, but if you want to know what I think — you’re an Efican actor. You belong here, with us. We have important work to do. We have a whole damn country to invent.’

The light was behind Bill when she said this. She did not see him start to cry, and it was a moment before she caught the sheen of the tears on his beautiful high cheeks. She left the bed and put her long pale arms around his neck.

‘Don’t cry, Billy-fleur.’

‘Just let me go,’ he said. ‘Please, just let me go.’

‘Darling, darling,’ she said softly, standing on tip-toes. ‘Do whatever it is you want.’ She kissed him with her mouth soft and open, kissed his big rough salty face.

‘You’re right.’ He withdrew from her to carefully blow his nose. ‘If I stay, I’ll always regret it.’

She took his handkerchief from him and threw it on the bed. She stretched up to kiss his lower lip. ‘If you stay, you stay. Baby,’ she said, smiling, but retreated to the bed, to the other baby. ‘Your son has thrown up on the blanket,’ she said, but neither of them did anything to remedy it. They sat, and waited, as if something would happen.

And, indeed, something did eventually happen.

As the yellow street lights flicked on and the rain began again, my father appeared to choose. My maman saw him do it. She watched him as she might have watched an image form on a sheet of photographic paper. She saw how he tried to hide his decision from her. He ran his hand through his hair and then across his face. He got himself engaged in a bit of business with a handkerchief which occupied his whole attention from the window, where he had been standing at that moment, to the bed, beside which he now knelt.

He placed his big hands flat on the white linen cover and looked at my ugly wrinkled face. His eyes were glistening, and there was a small smile on his archer’s-bow lips which my maman was familiar with from more intimate circumstances and which now made her believe that he had decided to stay.

She felt dull, anti-climactic.

‘Goodbye little boy,’ he said.

Then she saw — he was going.

As my maman’s head bowed, as her beautiful face began to crumple, he kissed the crown of her head and walked away, out the door, down the stairs. When she looked up towards the door, he was already passing through the foyer. She stood in the gloom and watched him run through the Moosone rain with a small black rucksack he must have had already packed and waiting since the day before.

She rested her face against the glass. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

The drains were overflowing. A plastic rubbish bin was blowing down the street. My father ran gracefully away, his head back, his white shirt already black with rain.

*

One hundred years before, this act of Bill Millefleur’s — an historical enactment which involved performing with horses and monkeys — would have been regarded as blasphemy in Voorstand. As recently as 255

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one Piers Kraan was sent to prison for lion taming and the lions transported, at the expense of the state, to ‘that place where God intended that they dwell’.

When Bill left us, it was as if he had died, and life in the tower became tearful and depressed.

My red-eyed mother read the foreign bank advices — pale yellow slips with her name misspelt ‘Smit’. She entered the amounts into her ledgers, but could not bring herself to spend the money as she had planned. Instead, the company went out to play agitprop at fish cannery gates, at street fairs, in the streets around the mudflat suburbs like Goat Marshes where no one had money to spend on such luxury as a theatre ticket.

There was no Efican playwright, none of any talent, who shared our passions or our politics, so the company devised its own material. These little plays were crude and funny. There was juggling and feats of strength and acrobatics, but everywhere with both a story and a purpose. We mocked our snivelling ‘alliance’ with Voorstand, publicly libelled the silk-shirted facheurs who ran the Red Party. We dressed one actor as an obese Bruder Rat, another as randy Oncle Duck. We had our audience write down the phone numbers of top DoS agents and sometimes had a little fun telephoning them from the stage. We broke the obscenity laws, the alliance laws, the secrecy laws, all in one act with two posturers. *

Life in the Feu Follet was passionate, paranoid, sometimes dangerous. I did not understand it was not normal. I was picked up, put down, rushed into cars and trucks and up the stairs of net lofts, down alleyways to rooms behind hamburger restaurants, back to Gazette Street where, by the time I had survived another eight weeks, the Feu Follet was in rehearsal for a very athletic production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

I was to play THE BABY. There are not a lot of roles for babies in the theatre, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle is not really one of them, but it was my mother’s way of keeping me with her while she performed. Of course, it didn’t work. I was often in pain, I cried and grizzled and distressed my fellow actors. Felicity, already guilty and depressed about my father’s absence, became so stressed that her milk refused to flow.

It was not a good time for me — by the night of the first dress rehearsal I had lost not only my first father, but also my first role to a straw dummy, and, worst of all: lost my mother’s breasts.

I know I complained about them — hard, white, made my stomach hurt etc. — and I spoke truly. Also, you might as well know, they spurted too much, hit the peristaltic button at the back of my throat so I gagged and vomited. But finally these breasts and I had reached an understanding, and I was (just as you were, Meneer, Madam, in your own time) happy there.