Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

There was no warning that these pink and slippery friends were also to abandon me. One minute my world was centred on the soft spurt and trickle, the apple-scented skin against my nose, the next it was prosthesis: rubber, plastic, the chlorine-heavy smell of sterilizing solutions.

I did not take it lightly. Indeed it changed what was previously a pacific disposition. I became irritable, devious, needy, capable of blazing fits of rage. It was at this stage, an hour before curtain of the dress rehearsal, that my maman telephoned Vincent.

*

At this time we had, in our company, Ernest Gibbs, an Englishman, who could disjoint almost his whole body. He could produce at will, without aid of cotton wadding, forms as diverse as Quasimodo and the president of your great country. He was a political cartoon made flesh, and was with us until his death in a boating accident in 374

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[TS]

Vincent was a busy man. He was not merely the chief executive of a large company, he was also an important strategist for the Blue Party. He spent a great deal of his waking life plotting ways to expose the servility and cynicism of the Reds, to somehow, with one stroke, produce the kind of crisis that can unseat a corrupt and gerrymandered government. The week in which Felicity’s milk stopped was also the week before an important by-election to which he had personally contributed both money and time.

It was a dramatic Moosone. There was flooding and a cyclone which swept away the old sea wall and sank a ferry in the Madeleines. Vincent spent his days at his downtown office, his nights driving from meeting to meeting in his Bentley Corniche, negotiating flooded streets in Berthollet, fallen trees and power lines in Goat Marshes. He drove with his nose pressed up against the windscreen, with loud music blasting from the speakers.

He believed that the history of Efica was about to change direction. The weather intensified his passion. He drummed tom-tom beats on the steering wheel, and whooped when he saw the lightning strike the earth. He imagined Efica would soon be free of Voorstand influence — its spies, its cables, and of the Sirkus which was then threatening to wash across us like a tidal wave.

He wanted Efica to be free of Sirkus. But also — he loved the Sirkus. This was what the VIA never understood about him. He was a serious scholar of Voorstand culture, painting, music, literature. He was also, in a country whose people were not usually aware that the Sirkus had an ethical and religious history, something of an expert on the theology of the ‘Settlers Free’.

Vincent loved to read. It was the thing that bonded Vincent and Felicity — the belief that talk was not just talk, that what you said mattered, what you thought could change society, that a book in a foreign language, a meeting above a pizza parlour in Goat Marshes, a theatre production in a decaying circus school, could be the thing that made the river of history break its banks.

And, indeed, he was on his way to one of these meetings (above an oyster lease in Swiss Point) when my mother called him on his car phone in a state about the baby.

Vincent turned down the Pow-pow music, *spoke softly into the receiver. He was already late for a strategy meeting, but when my mother could not be calmed he detoured across the Narrows Bridge (which already had one foot of yellow water rushing over it) and drove the Corniche right up to the door of the Feu Follet. It was now six-thirty and he was late for his strategy meeting.

He put on his black hat, tightened his wide leather belt, smoothed his beard with his metal comb, and walked slowly up the ramp through the Moosone rain and into the foyer.

Here he was astounded to find a whole team — edgy electricians, sound techs, production managers, soup servers for the most part — seemingly all waiting for him. They had bags of bandocks, bottles, a carrycot, written instructions, which they all seemed to want to transmit the minute they saw him. Behind them, on a folding chair which wobbled on the cobblestones, sat my mother — pale, stretched, tense.

‘I cannot carry him on stage,’ she said, when Wally had finished explaining how to sterilize a teat. ‘I tried, but it can’t work.’

Now Vincent loved the theatre. He was, in some ways, the original stage-door Johnny (loved to be around actresses, loved to watch Felicity on stage, was moved by her courage, aroused by the sight of her long legs in the public gaze). But the Therouxes traced their lineage back to the first century of the Efican Calendar, and his great-great-great-grandfather had been forcibly shipped from Marseille by Louis Quatorze and sent to practise his foul-smelling craft in hell. Vincent had drunk politics from his mother’s breasts, and he was flabbergasted to realize that he was being asked to disrupt a major strategy meeting for … babysitting.

‘You know I’ve got a meeting,’ he began. He paused, imagining it. His brother * would be there. He could not do it.

‘Vincent.’ She smiled and held out her hand. ‘You don’t need to be ashamed of him.’

Vincent looked at my mother — the eyes sunken with weariness, the mouth small and down-turned, the arms thin and white — and knew she had pushed her idea of herself to a place where it would soon publicly collapse.

He took her wrist with his left hand, and with his right then silently handed over his car keys to Wally.

As Wally and the others hurried outside with the baby under their umbrellas, Vincent was a curious mixture of sympathy and anger. He drew my maman to him, kissed her.

‘Sleep,’ he said to her, ‘meditate.’

‘For God’s sake,’ she said, hearing what he imagined so well disguised, ‘he’s your son. Is it such an ordeal to look after him just one night?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not for one night.’

When he went out into the night he could hear me screaming through the loud drumming of the rain. He found me in his car, my face like a flapping crumpled rag, my pale eyes bulging, all my skin wet with snot and sour milk. I was strapped into a safety seat right next to the driver.

Vincent felt he could not endure the smell. He opened the windows, then shut them because the rain was blowing in on me. He set the car in gear and drove.

Before he had even arrived at the first meeting I had thrown up on his velour upholstery and left tell-tale white formula stains on his black collars, but Vincent was, again, a better man than he feared. He endured the smell, the noise, the slime coating on his collar. He walked on to his own stage with me in his arms. He did not introduce me, but he held me, and continued to hold me — partly because this was the only way I would be quiet.

No one commented on my appearance, but Vincent’s brother — a quiet, conservative man, five years older — showed him how to pin a bandock and then touched him with uncharacteristic gentleness upon the shoulder.

Vincent did not take this moment to say: this is my son, Tristan. Indeed, for Vincent, that moment never came. However, he established, silently, that his relationship with me was intimate, and as The Caucasian Chalk Circle continued its previews this relationship improved.

He was so happy that week, manic, exhausted. The prime minister had been accused of taking money from the VIA. There was a paper trail that led all the way from Saarlim via Berne and Amsterdam. Vincent had faxes, photocopies, statutory declarations.

‘We’ve got them, mo-poulet, we got them with their parsley showing.’ Vincent was high.

I began to enjoy the rides in his car, the green-glowing dials, the rented car phone which could talk to other countries.

I went to sleep to music, woke to music. I was lifted from the car, cried on cold stairways, interrupted meetings. Though I was never named in public, I was changed and powdered by famous names. I was touched, caressed, tickled.