Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

There was a woman with an accent like a Sirkus star. She was striking, pale-faced, copper-haired, holding a blond-haired child who was hiding himself under a patchwork shawl.

‘We all wanted to see the clean bus, Wally.’

‘Here, Tristan,’ Wally said to the fair-haired boy. ‘Hold this.’

A pair of surprisingly large hands emerged from the tatty shawl, and as the child took the bird she saw his face, my face.

Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.

It was hard to look, hard to not look — my triangular head, my dense blond hair, my frightening lipless mouth, my small regular white teeth, my striated marble eyes — terrible, beautiful — flecked with gold, like jewellery.

‘Feel its heart,’ the punter said. ‘You can feel its heart beating in your hand.’

Everything was happening for Roxanna in slo-mo. She saw Tristan Smith hold her pigeon with his normal hands.

‘You feel that?’ Wally said. ‘That’s its heart.’

The boy cupped his hand around her pigeon’s breast.

He said, ‘Air … atter.’

‘OK, you’re an actor,’ the punter said. ‘I never said you wasn’t.’

‘Ah … don … hellet … ehh.’

That’s right. You don’t collect anything yet,’ the punter said. ‘I’m not saying you’re not an actor. I’m asking you, would you like to breed pigeons, race them? Feel its heart, feel it on your face.’

‘Ah … don’t … hellet … ehh.’

‘You don’t collect their eggs. You let the yolk stay inside, then you get birds out of them.’

The boy held the bird so tight Roxanna feared he was going to choke it.

‘You like the pigeon?’ the woman asked. ‘Would you like that?’

The boy’s eyes were big, swimming, alive, all those fine gold stripes flashing in the artificial light. His legs were twisted, wasted, pipe cleaners inside his striped pyjamas. He nodded.

‘Is this OK?’ the punter asked the beautiful woman.

The woman turned to the boy. She smiled and stroked his soft white neck. ‘Is this instead of climbing trees?’ she asked him.

When the punter turned back to Roxanna his face was blazing red. His eyes had changed. They had been all sleepy and slitted but now they were bright, prickly, absolutely awake.

‘How much?’ he said.

Roxanna did not know what it was, but she saw something was happening.

‘I don’t sell them individually,’ she said.

‘All of them,’ the punter said, his colour still high.

He held the bird’s beak open and looked inside — checking the cleft.

‘That’s Apple Pie,’ she said. ‘He’s famous.’

‘How much is all I’m asking.’

She thought 300. She thought 5000. ‘You couldn’t afford it,’ she said.

‘Wally,’ said the beautiful woman, swinging Tristan Smith on to her other hip, ‘where would we keep pigeons in Chemin Rouge?’

‘Chemin Rouge?’ Roxanna asked. (There was an antique toy exhibition in Chemin Rouge next week!) ‘Are you going back to Chemin Rouge?’

‘We get the right price, we’re going to buy it,’ the punter told the boy. ‘We’re going to have pigeons.’ To the woman he said, ‘Is this OK?’

They’re educational,’ Roxanna said. ‘Maths, genetics, dot dot dot.’

The punter could not hear her. He was looking straight into Tristan Smith’s wild unnatural eyes. He was like a man proposing marriage — still, intense, a coiled spring.

‘A thousand,’ Roxanna said.

The minute she said it, she knew it was too much. She saw his Adam’s apple move. He grinned at her, a little foolishly.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said the beautiful woman.

‘I’d set you up,’ Roxanna said to Wally. ‘You know what I mean?’

That was how sex got mixed up with it again. She hadn’t needed to say this. It was habit, insecurity.

‘You know what I mean?’ she said. ‘For a thousand, I’d be prepared to come down to Chemin Rouge and set you up, get everything in nice working order.’

‘We’re actors,’ the woman said. ‘We haven’t got that kind of money.’

‘Three hundred,’ Wally said.

In the end Wally paid 650 dollars and my mother was aghast, bewildered. ‘Was this about what I think it was about?’ she asked Bill Millefleur.

The last day of the tour found our party camped at Fiddler’s Creek, waiting for the next day’s car ferry to Chemin Rouge. Bill had spent the late morning in sleep, or pretended sleep, and now he lay in the back seat of the bus, reading and rereading the first page of Dead Souls , wishing nothing more than for the time to pass, the sultry day to go, for tomorrow to come so he could catch his flight back home to Saarlim City.

My maman, however, had other plans for the last day.

She appeared at the window by his head, tapping, beckoning.

‘What?’

When she saw his face through the dusty window — the great ridged scar from mouth to chin, the anxious eyes — Felicity knew something was up, but she did not know how serious it was.

Bill held up his book.

She shook her head and beckoned.

When he appeared at the bus door, he looked strangely shy, and she took him by his hand and led him past the dusty horse float, through the hash-sweet campsite, along a rather melancholy avenue lined with dead black mimosa trees and shoulder-high blackberries whose leaves were now grey from dust.

‘What is this?’ he said.

‘You’ll see,’ she teased him.

Around the bend Bill saw his best linen suit, clean and pressed, shrouded in plastic, hanging from a low mimosa just off the track. He felt a dull kind of dread.

‘Some fancy joint?’ he asked. ‘Out here?’

‘Sssh.’ My mother made her eyes go big, fluttered her lashes, began to undo the buttons of her khaki shorts.

‘Some joint with cha-cha?’ Bill whispered, rolled his eyes.

‘Ssh.’ My maman slipped out of her shorts and into the deliberately crumpled blue silk overall she had carried in her handbag. ‘They’ll hang us if they find us out.’

There was nothing for my father to do but get into the suit.

When they were both changed, my mother took him by the hand and set off, not along the road, but along a narrow path of the sort made by cattle. She had played this kind of game before — birthdays, anniversaries — and Bill guessed they would soon come to a village or at least a filling station where she would have arranged a rent-a-car.

Their destination, however, turned out to be an unprepossessing building 200 yards away. It was larger than the little fishing shacks beside it, but just as rusty. It was only as they came to the steps of the wide veranda that he noticed the details, the crispness of finish, the spare teak-framed doorways cut into the thickly insulated corrugated skin.

It was a small hotel, very Efican in its modesty — expensive, of course, but affecting, in its skin, the artful camouflage of rural decay.

Bill’s hand went to his slashed face, feeling the raw, rough ridge.

‘You don’t like it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Good heavens, no. The opposite.’

And as they walked to their suite he gesticulated and congratulated, admired the view of the mudflats, the red and blue hangings of old Indienne, but he could not keep the shadow of depression out of his eyes.

‘It’s a lot of money, I know,’ she said when the concierge closed the door to the room and they were at last alone. ‘It’s very bourgeois.’

‘It’s wonderful.’ Bill held his arms wide. The room was white and spare, the floor teak. ‘It’s very tasteful.’

‘Tasteful?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Wonderful. Truly wonderful. It’s such a treat.’

‘It’ll be our last night for eight months, mo-chou. I wanted it to be nice.’