Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

[TS]

Eight weeks later, three hundred miles from Chemin Rouge, Bill came around the corner of Shark Harbour Parish Community Hall, and saw THE HAIRY MAN — already five feet off the ground.

At first he did not know it was the Hairy Man. All he saw was me, snotty, white-eyed Tristan, doing something dumb and dangerous. He started hollering my name.

This drew Wally out from under the half-erected tent, his head thrust forward like a turtle. He was followed by my maman, crawling on her knees, carrying a mug of coffee.

‘What is it?’ she called to Bill. ‘Are you OK?’

Wally tried to grab me by the leg, but I was the Hairy Man, and he was only human. I pulled away from him. He tried to follow, and you would think he was made to fit a tree — his legs were Louis Quinze, and his biceps prominent — but he scratched and scrabbled and could not hold.

‘No, wait,’ Bill said to Wally. I heard this. I heard it clearly. ‘Wait, I know what he is doing.’

Whatever joy this understanding unlocked in my heart, it produced the opposite effect in Wally’s. He had been polite to Bill until this moment, but now all the passions he had bottled up came rushing out, and he was so mad — at Bill, at me, my mother — he picked up pine cones and hurled them up the tree. ‘You’re never here,’ he said to Bill. ‘Don’t play the father now.’

A pine cone hit my ear.

‘Come down, you little prick.’

‘Wally,’ my maman said. ‘That’s enough.’

By then the Hairy Man was already fifteen feet above their heads. I dragged my running nose upwards, past lines of ants. I pressed my cheek hard against the corrugated bark as if skin alone might keep me stuck there, and watched, from an inch away, the ants congregate around the snot-smeared bark.

I now waited for my maman to understand my action. Not a word came up to me. Her silence went on and on, pushed me up and up. When I finally looked down, I was perhaps forty feet from the earth.

My audience was all spellbound — Wally pale, my father smiling, but my maman was so still, so intensely still. She held her windblown curls back from her eyes, squinting up at me. My arms were an agony. My legs hung like tails. But there was nothing I would not have done to maintain the private look of admiration that I found in her face. So although I dared not hang as I had planned, I turned and climbed.

I will not easily forget the boiling green ocean I found up that tree, or the blustering easterly which swept the sea spray up the cliff face and stung my broken skin as delicately as Vincent’s eau de Cologne, or the resinous sap, rich in pine or the mouettes, their wings white, their eyes orange, who came squalling around me as I, unknowingly, approached their rough-stick nest.

Everything smelt of salt and seaweed. It was as if I had finally ripped through the Glad wrap that had always separated me from my true history.

Far, far below me was my silent mother. She stood beside the grey weather-board hall, her eyes creased but still young and beautiful, her red anorak wrapped tight around her, her black skirt flapping like a flag against Wally’s bent grey flannel legs.

‘Watch him,’ I heard her say. And felt, even from that distance, that she and I were in communion.

Wally said, ‘For Christ’s sake.’

The wind blew her answer away.

All I heard Bill say was, ‘… kid.’

‘He knows,’ my mother answered.

What did I know? I knew nothing. I knew only that I was weak, in pain, delirious with fear and pleasure, that the branch I was edging out along was bending, that I might die a famous death, that the sky was a brilliant cobalt blue, that the birds were hitting me with their wings, that the wings did not hurt, that I did not know how to go backward. I froze. ‘Just watch him,’ my mother said. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

Just the same, I was very pleased to hear Bill say, ‘Maybe we should get a ladder.’

I began, obligingly, to shift into reverse. But my legs would not go backwards. The birds were coming back. I shut my eyes, opened them. I could see their nest ahead of me, a bundle of sticks with a toffee wrapper woven into it. If I were a Famous Actor, what would I do? I had no choice but to perform my action, to edge towards the nest. There were four eggs, pale blue with brown spots. I would stay in character, till the death.

‘What good is a fucking ladder now?’ Wally shrieked. ‘What would I do with a ladder?’

The branch was dipping and swaying. I leaned forward and pressed my face deep into the nest.

THE HAIRY MAN took one egg in its maw. He held it there, trying to breathe around it.

‘You should listen to me,’ Wally shrieked. ‘Not wait for this to happen.’

THE HAIRY MAN wanted to throw up. He could taste bird shit in his mouth.

I breathed through my nose and managed to make my arms go backwards. I knew I wasn’t going to die my famous death just yet. I began to experience the feeling of what I would later know when I did my first show in Saarlim — a feeling of intense well-being which was not contradicted, but rather amplified by the pulsing pain in my arms. I came down the tree, my arms feeling warm and sticky with blood, and shrugged myself free of my mother’s eager embrace.

“Ah,’ I said. ‘Uh-uh-UH.’ Finally she saw it: the egg in my mouth.

She held out her palm, her eyes bright, that bright, bright look, love-bright, nothing like it, and started laughing. Her coat was marked with my blood, her cheek pink from my blood.

‘You can start a collection,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you a book about birds.’

‘You’re insane,’ Wally was saying. I thought he meant my maman, naturally.

He grabbed me and held me so hard it hurt — chin, zipper, arms too tight around the chest — tobacco, stale sweat, rubber, liniment oil for his bad knee. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said as he released me and patted down my snotty hair.

‘Relax,’ Bill said. ‘It’s the circus in his blood.’

‘You keep out of this,’ Wally said to Bill, and then, to my maman, ‘I never want to see something like that again.’

‘I don’t think you’re going to have a choice,’ my mother said.

She put her hand on my head and stroked me. ‘Do you want to see how to keep the egg?’ she asked me. And she showed me there, beside the old rusting tank stand. She made a small hole in each end of the egg and blew its contents.

‘That is the mouette’s baby,’ Wally said. ‘Is that what you want to teach him?’

‘I want him to be strong and brave,’ Felicity said.

‘You can’t teach that,’ Wally said. ‘It’s how he is. He is, anyway.’

‘That’s right. He is.’ And she gave me back the egg, now light and as slippery with egg white as my own skin was with blood.

Two weeks before the Hairy Man climbed the tree, my father had gone to find a Saarlim newspaper in a provincial mall.

He had left my mother sitting on the bumper bar of the Haflinger, eating vanilla ice-cream. He had walked down into the shining wet-floored mall, dressed in rumpled faded dungarees and a plaid shirt, but he carried with him still, in spite of the ordinariness of his dress, his stardom — the softness of his skin, its sheen.

As he walked along the deserted early-morning mall he was very happy to be exactly where he was. There had been a full house the night before. There was another full house tonight. The day was clear-skied, eighty degrees. He planned to spend the morning fishing from a clinker boat.

Bill returned to Efica in the summers as other actors, his colleagues in Voorstand, went off to climb mountains in Nepal, to retain touch with something basic which his real life made impossible to know.