Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

The doctors (Dr Tu, Dr Fischer, Dr Wilson, Mr Picket-Heaps, Dr Ayisha Chaudry, Dr Brown etc.) were able to tell my mother exactly what operation they wanted to do next, but they could find no pigeonhole to shove me in, and the summation of all of their investigations was ‘Multiple Congenital Anomalies’.

They had wanted to give me lips, but my mother chanced to see their ‘similar case’ and was so distressed by this poor man’s goldfish pout, she would not let them touch my mouth. Either way, there was no chance I would ever have a smile you would recognize. Nor was there any hope that they might make me taller. But these ingenious Efican toubibs made me function better, stopped the green bile bubbling out of my mouth, stopped my heart walls leaking, repaired my faulty duodenum, and although this was not a pleasant way to begin a life, consider this — Tristan Smith had a loving mother, an entire company of actors who cooed and cosseted him and tickled his tummy and took him for rides on their shoulders. Plus I really had three fathers — Bill and Vincent, sometimes, and Wally every day. And if Wally did shout at me he was also the one who bought me chocolate and icecreams, the one who tried to sneak me into the Voorstand Sirkus when I was five years old. My mother nabbed us at the entrance way.

One minute we were standing in line outside the bulbous free-form ‘tent’, already inhaling the pervasive odours of spun sugar and ketchup, watching the projected twenty-foot high shadows of Bruder Dog chasing Bruder Duck around and around inside of the luminous pink shell; *the next we were trudging back along the river bank and my mother’s pretty face was spoiled by that disapproving expression which is described in Chemin Rouge as being ‘like the ass of a hen’.

After that, I did not get to the Sirkus for another another seven years. Wally went alone on Saturday afternoons and came back with beer on his breath and a perroquet in his hand.

‘For Bruder Rikiki,’ he would say as he set the sugary green drink before me, ‘with the compliments of Bruder Mouse.’

Later he would ‘tell’ me the whole Sirkus, describing the spectacles, the falls, the injuries, the songs. It was our secret, the thing that bonded us more than any other. I would fall asleep dreaming of the cheeky Bruder Mouse or the clever Bruder Duck, whose laser images I, probably alone of all the children in the eighteen islands, had never seen in life.

*

From the very beginning, the Voorstand Sirkuses in Efica had laser clowns. By the time the Sirkus came to Chemin Rouge the days when performers put on animal suits were gone. We never saw a ‘live’ Bruder Dog or Mouse. As for Simulacrums, we read about them, but there were none in the eighteen islands.

[TS]

I grew up preferring the dry season, and not just because it was in the Moosone that I always had my operations. In the dry season the company hired a little one-ring tent and went out into the countryside with the Haflinger bus, a horse float, a rented truck, and an ever-changing show my mother named The Sad Sack Sirkus. *

More circus than Sirkus, and more revue than either, The Sad Sack Sirkus was a patchwork of tumbling and posturing, skits, Shakespearean speeches, and — best of all — equestrian displays which country people always loved to see. The Sad Sack Sirkus made a little money; it got the company out of the city; and — thanks to the occasional egg-throwing of Ultra Rouge †fanatics — it gave a sense of urgency to the company’s political agenda.

My mother now scheduled these tours to coincide with the summer recess of the Saarlim Sirkus. Thus Bill was able to come back for every tour and he and Sparrow Glashan and my mother rode three-men high and Bill performed flip-flaps, round-offs, pirouettes and somersaults on the back of a cantering horse, just as he did under the big Dome in Saarlim where the tickets cost 100 Guilders each.

Vincent, of course, could not come on tour. He stayed in the city, running his business, dining with his wife, waiting for his life to start again. When he could not stand the separation any more, he would visit, stumbling out on to a southern beach from the belly of an ancient aluminium-bodied aircraft with one colossal engine and oil streaks on its wings. Vincent was an urban animal, never at home in the countryside. He was nervous around the horses, and obviously disconcerted to feel himself disadvantaged with ‘Young Bill’, who had quickly become an international star. *

I liked Vincent better in the dry season. He was less sure of himself, often melancholy.

What he was suffering from — I see now — was sexual jealousy. When we were on tour, Bill shared my mother’s bed. In the turmoil of his unhappiness, Vincent turned his tenderness on me. He gave me gifts, taught me to hold a crayon, to form my quivering big letter ‘S’. He sat next to me, his shampooed beard occasionally brushing my neck, and spoke to me in French, a language I did not understand.

‘Mon petit, mon pauvre petit,’ he would say.

But finally the dry season smelt, not of Vincent’s shampooed beard, but of sweet hot horse-shit, chaff, dust, tick drench. Each day dawned clear and painless, long sweet gravel roads, chalk-grey dust, singing actors packed into the old Haflinger bus, the horses and the rented truck bringing up the rear. Wally drove the bus. He liked to drive. If he could have done it, he would have driven the float and truck as well.

The tours were long, covering not only the (formerly English) main islands which were all to the north of Chemin Rouge, but back south through the whole ‘Granite Necklace’, and the old dye towns of Melcarth and King’s Coat. I knew the granite caves beneath our feet were often filled with your government’s navigation cable, but the truth is, I did not think about it.

When we were on tour, my mother devoted herself to me with an intensity few parents could have sustained for long. She listened to my every sound, brought to my taut malformed face the full focus of her curiosity and attention. Even though Bill was there, she brought me into the bed before she finally went to sleep, and I was in child-heaven. I woke to — no doctors — the sound of magpies carolling and the smell of warm sheets and my mother’s sweet musky skin-smell. Almost every day we woke up in a new place — rock-walled fields of brown grass thatched with rust like Harris tweed, ravines, dry rivers with stones like prehistoric eggs, a chalky coastal estuary where, even when I was ten years old, my mother would strap me on to her body and we would slowly, quietly, gather oysters and mussels at low tide.

The southernmost islands (the Madeleines) were like cake crumbs on the map, and on our way back up to Melcarth *we would spend almost as much time on ferries as on roads. The roads themselves were mostly dirt, bordered with century-old cairns commemorating famous deaths by starvation, ‘rot’, spearing, typhoid, pig-headedness and folly. †This was the country everybody felt was Efica — mostly wind, water, sky. There was an emptiness, a refusal to charm, an edge of terror in the air which cut us to the bone. The landscape was dotted with failed attempts at European enterprise — bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills. The skies were a huge and empty ultramarine.

Of course I often repulsed strangers in those isolated estuary towns, but when I say this did not affect me you have to see the crowd that I was travelling with: men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair, crushed velvet, aromatic oils, ornamental face scars. By the time I was two I had become their emblem, their mascot, and I shared with them their sense that we were an avant garde, not only artistically, but also morally. Thus I remained as swaddled and protected under the bright southern skies as I was inside the rank dusty womb of the Feu Follet.