Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

But then it stopped.

I woke up one afternoon — no tickle, no car, no green dials. The by-election had been lost. *Vincent had shrivelled, collapsed, disappeared. He had gone home to Natalie, depressed. This, everyone knew, was typical of him. But Tristan Smith did not know, and there was no way for them to tell me.

*

The peculiarly rhythmic music created by POWs — prisoners of war — in Voorstand.

*

St John Theroux

, b 332

EC

,

General Secretary Efican Postal Workers Congress.

*

In 371 the Red Party had a bare one-seat majority in the lower house, and this by-election (for the seat of Swiss Point) could have brought down the government.

Whatever evidence Theroux had of government corruption, there is no mention of it in the zines of the time.

It had not occurred to anyone that the violiniste with the small round burn scars on his arms might secretly wish to be a father. He was the production manager of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Right up until the dress rehearsal, he was trying to get a grandiose set built with a two hundred dollar budget, and on the stormy night I first went off with Vincent, he was still trying to ‘locate’ eighty yards of canvas. How he finally did this, at no cost, no one liked to ask, but as usual his ingenuity saved the show, and my maman said — as she had said a hundred times before — that the Feu Follet could not have existed without him.

When he was praised, Wally hid his feelings of pleasure. Likewise, he never hung around my crib, but hovered around the periphery of my life, watching everything. If he sometimes changed my bandock, my maman was grateful, yes — but it did not occur to her that he was practising.

On the night the by-election was lost, he seemed as depressed as anyone at the Feu Follet, but he was a poker player with a winning hand. He knew how Vincent would behave. So when, next day before the curtain, my maman was trying to locate a baby-sitter, Wally stepped forward.

While Felicity watched him, he expertly changed the sodden bandock. I was ten weeks old. He was already fifty, his flaming red hair gone mostly grey and nicotine brown, his skin marked by old cigarette burns and (two) knife slashes, his skeleton — if you could have seen it — showing the marks of three mended fractures, a man so damaged by life, so secretive and suspicious, that he had long ago stopped dreaming that he would find someone to love.

‘How do you know how to do this?’ my maman asked.

‘Rest,’ he told her, as he expertly pinned my bandock in place. ‘You have a show to do.’

‘Dear Wally,’ she said. ‘You really are amazing.’

‘Don’t you worry, ma’am.’ He picked me up and felt my soft skin against his prickly cheek. All his ears — those great fleshy wattles — suddenly red with blood. ‘You do your show,’ he said.

He already had my dinner in the fridge.

He took me down the stairs to the cavernous old brick — floored kitchen. He had a brand new bright red high chair, which he had ‘located’ that afternoon.

‘There,’ he said, turning the chair. ‘Look at the pretty tree.’ He faced me towards the courtyard under whose flowering oak, it was believed, Ducrow had tethered the ancient lion that finally caused his death.

Then, with his face shining, immobile, his mouth compressed under the weight of his pleasure, he took one of his very sharp knives and began to fillet the fish, a playing card he had bought for my dinner. It was precise work, and he was good at it, just as he was good at soldering and using a key-hole saw. He separated the delicate white flesh from the pink and pearly skeletons. He placed two delicate fillets on a pale blue plate — and I know, Madam, a ten-week-old child does not eat fish, but Wally did not know. I was his first.

When he had the fillets done, he wrapped the bones in paper, placed the fillets in the fridge, opened a beer, poured a bride. He flicked on the gas and quickly, deftly, cooked the delicate fish fillets in a little milk. Then he mashed it with a fork and, worrying it might be too hot, placed it in the freezer to cool.

I, of course, did not know what fish was. So when, at last, he offered me the meal he had so lovingly prepared, I rejected it. He called me Rikiki, but it made no difference: I wanted Vincent. I wanted my bottle. Wally gave me a cup. I had never seen a cup. I knocked it over. Wally yelled at me. I cried. And that is how it was always to be with us — Wally was the one who made the rules and was angry, the one who cooked breakfast and lunch and yelled at me when I didn’t eat it.

Amongst the actors, he was famous for his sentimentality, but in spite of all the ‘Rikikis’ he was not soft and conciliatory like Vincent, who had often, in his euphoric pre-election mood, stroked his baby’s cheek with the back of his pudgy hand. Wally brought no gifts, like Bill would. He was not full of compromise and sweet smells like Felicity. Indeed, he did not bathe enough. And when no one was around to see him do it, he would scream and yell like a maniac, particularly at the end of a long weekend.

Wally loved me, but he did not find this prayed-for state to be the blessing he had imagined. Love aged him, made his forehead taller, his shoulders a little more hunched, his brow increasingly hooded.

It was Wally who confiscated the toy laser gun which Bill sent — this was a year or so later — for my birthday. It was Wally who stopped me going to the country with Vincent because Vincent had been drinking and could not figure out my new safety seat. And it was Wally — later still, when I was just over ten — Wally who told the doctors about my penchant for climbing. He wanted it stopped, and hoped to invoke a greater authority than his own. He knew Tristan was their precious thing, their cracked and mended pot, and that they would not want it shattered, and it is true — from the moment I was born, the doctors had not been able to keep their hands off me.

Felicity, who had begun so independently and who was, any way, a great one for homeopaths, naturopaths and iridologists, unexpectedly capitulated to what she called ‘straight medicine’. She still, at bedtime, dropped sweet little grains of Silica (for mucus) into her son’s lipless maw, but once The Caucasian Chalk Circle was over it was ‘straight doctors’ who began to deal with Tristan Smith’s ‘anomalies’. They began with the duodenum, which had a partial blockage. At eleven months of age, they put me to sleep, cut me open, sewed me up, resuscitated me in sterile rooms where I found myself held down like a frog in a dissecting room, pinned at the legs and arms. They had catheters up my porpoise, tubes down my throat, drips in my arm, and when that was over and my temperature began to rise, they did not give me Panadol but took samples of my blood, spit, shit, urine, often by the most painful methods.

At eighteen months, they pinned me with their soap-smelling hands and took marrow from my bones. I shrieked and screamed and begged for them to let me be.

Vincent was squeamish around hospitals, but Bill — to his credit — came flying in to sit beside me on more than one occasion. He was nice to me. It would be years before he would be able to act as if he were responsible for my existence, but he could look me in the face and touch me. He was less than a father, more than an uncle. He arrived with tricks up his sleeves — wind-ups, frogs that blew bubbles, geese that farted, fake vomit, gross picture cards. He flew back to Saarlim. He sent postcards.

Wally was always there. He argued with the santamaries about his cancerettes. He held me down.

And this was my childhood: Dr Tu slid me into dark tunnels; Dr Fischer strapped me on steel platforms and tilted me upside down. They tortured me, not just in that first year, but on and off for the first ten years of life. They mended the hole in my heart, but took three goes to get it.