Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Here in the islands of Efica there were circus, theatre, horses, solitude, conflict, battles you could imagine might be won. Here, working for peanuts in a shitty little tent on the edge of the crumbling coast of Inkerman, playing to hatchet-faced oyster farmers, you could forget the franchised Sirkus Domes and the video satellites circling above the ozone layer, and you could imagine that theatre could still change the destiny of a country. In Efica you could have the illusion of being a warrior in a great battle, and when you toured you lived with others who shared the same illusion. When you toured, you performed as if art mattered. Doing agitprop under a petite tente you were inventing your nation’s culture.

And he was — although he was to forget this in a moment — pleased to see his face in the large blue Sad Sack Sirkus poster at the news stand, pleased to be important in his own country. And when the voice called out his name, ‘Bill Millefleur,’ he turned, as an actor turns towards the light.

He saw two youths in their teens, conservatively dressed in three-button suits.

‘Hi, fellahs,’ he said.

So convinced was he of the scenario that when the button-nosed one drew out a box cutter, Bill’s brain insisted that it was — against all the physical evidence to the contrary — a pen.

He smiled.

‘Muddy,’ the man said, and seemed to wave the ‘pen’ across Bill’s cheek.

Tapette,’ said the other, and spat.

There was no pain, and when he felt the wet on his cheek he thought it was the spittle. The two young men did not run. They turned and walked quietly in amongst the nylon underwear on sale in Lucky Plaza, and then Bill’s face began to sting and then to burn, and then he knew he had been slashed by members of the Ultra Rouge.

As he watched the blood drop in fat warm splats on the tiled floor of the mall, he thought what a fool he had been.

He was an actor, disfigured, for what? For what good reason? To play-act at politics? He walked through the mall, a rueful smile on his face, bent forward to keep the blood off his shirt, but by the time he reached Felicity on the street his face was shiny with it. She was sitting cross-legged on the fender of the company truck still eating the ice-cream from a cone, but when she saw him he thought he saw a flash of excitement in her bright green eyes.

Trust was always a fragile commodity with Bill, and when he saw, or imagined he saw, my mother’s excitement, he thought it was a Voorstandish response — the excitement over risk, danger, blood. It was the same look you saw in the lines in Saarlim every night. It was what made Voorstand Voorstand, kept it alien no matter how long he stayed.

He blamed her then. He blamed her, silently, secretly, for placing his face on the poster, for using his fame to sell tickets for something that was, to his taste, distinctly mediocre. And now this damn scar, this wound.

She staunched the blood with her silk scarf, cancelled the night’s show, flew him back to Chemin Rouge to see a good doctor, but somehow the cut changed things for Bill, and when he saw her blow the egg beneath the pine tree, he decided it was typical.

What he could not say to her was: wattle-eared old Wally had acted like an Efican, not timidly, but with respect for life. She was an alien, a foreigner, no matter what passionate speeches she made about culture or navigation cable, and he was surprised — lying beside her that afternoon, naked, squeezed in next to her on the twin bed in the Shark Harbour Motor Inn — to recognize the degree of hostility be felt towards the woman whom he had always thought of as his only love.

‘He was not bird-nesting,’ he said.

‘Sweets, he brought me eggs.’

‘It was the Hairy Man. It was his action.’ He turned on his side and raised himself on his elbow. ‘He was showing you his action. He was showing you he had the guts to perform his action. He did not plan the eggs. He made them the character’s aim.’

She smiled. ‘You’re turning this into a story about you.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re saying he climbed the tree because you wrote him one postcard.’

‘All I’m suggesting,’ he said, ‘is that it would not be peculiar if that was what it was. We gave him a role and then we took it away from him.’ But before he had finished speaking she was shaking her head, and he collapsed on to his back and stared up at the water-marked plaster.

In his mind’s eye he could see how she would be in ten years’ time, slightly hawkish, gaunt, her eyes still alight with that amazing life, and he knew he would certainly not love her then, not because of her looks, but because that force he saw there was distilling, intensifying, changing from something sexual into something cold and controlling.

‘This isn’t to do with you,’ she said. ‘Besides, it would be ludicrous for him to be an actor.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’m not nineteen any more.’

‘No,’ she said, and looked at him, and he wondered, was she thinking what he was thinking — that long-ago day when she had finally asked him to come in from the lane and eat with the collective? He had wanted to schtup her, he had such a hard-on — the way she carved the leg of lamb, the way she stood, her legs firmly apart, her fine-boned shoulders leaning in towards her work, the way her small hands grasped the implements, the thick slices of red meat, the blood pooled in the bottom of the dish. She scared him. He could not take his eyes off her.

He had imagined he was stealing flowers for a vegetarian, but she had heaped his plate with meat and looked so intently at him — it was always messed up with blood, from the beginning.

He was crazy about her, from Ophelia on. She slept with him, but she never said she loved him until she saw the voltige, and then she called him those names. Brave Billy-fleur etc. The insides of her thighs were glistening wet.

Thirteen years later, Bill lay beside her in the bed and realized that he wanted to be back in Saarlim. He stroked her side, caressed her in a gentle line from under her arm to her hip, and as he did so he allowed himself to know all the things he was angry about — that he had let himself be used in the publicity and poster, that he was identified with her cause, that he had been used, and disfigured, perhaps temporarily, perhaps not, that she was so committed to being right she could not even listen to a different point of view.

‘Please don’t be angry,’ she said, looking over her shoulder at his face which, he knew, had revealed that little fault line in his brow.

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Don’t you see — it would be ludicrous for him to be an actor.’

‘I wasn’t recommending it,’ he said, and kissed her.

‘You know how much I love him?’ she said. ‘You don’t think I don’t love him?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and made a small laugh — there was a sort of mania in the way she loved their son.

‘I know I lose my temper with him. I’ve said terrible things to him,’ she said, ‘but I do love him.’

For Tristan she would deny herself, thwart herself, go places that bored her, go without sex, eat food she loathed, touch and caress him as if he were exactly that perfect child everyone had expected her to have when she named him Tristan. Her expectations of herself were so high that, after six weeks on the road, the pressure always showed. Bill saw the way she dressed him, almost brutally sometimes, pulling the tight polo-necked sweater down even though he screamed inside it. She would bang his head with the prickly hairbrush and tug the knots with the comb.

She did not want to be like this, and the kid did not either. He watched them both trying. They both apologized to each other. It was moving to see the little creature with his pale wet eyes stroke his beautiful mother’s cheeks. It was also slightly pitiful to watch the way he tried to keep out of her way, to amuse himself, to ask for nothing, to curl his alarming limbs up into his body, to occupy a corner of the bed where he would not kick her in the night, but in the end they could — neither of them — stop it. He dropped a book, or broke a glass, or wet the bed. Bill, having drifted off, would wake to find Felicity screaming at Tristan, Tristan vomiting, Tristan crawling down the aisle to sleep in Wally’s tent.