Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I put my arms around her too, as far as I could reach. I was very frightened.

Roxanna had this flash — it came to her that night, marooned in the draughty tower in Chemin Rouge drinking warm champagne. She saw the blood, like in a horror film, a wall of it, wet, liquid, with a sheen of blue licking around its edges. She should kill the shitty pigeons now.

The moment passed, like a clear frame in a film, like the brief mad moments when you think you will throw yourself off the bridge or swing the wheel into the oncoming traffic — a tic, a shudder, not real life but something parallel, something that could only happen if the thin muscled walls between the worlds of thoughts and things got frayed or ruptured. She was not, Deo volante , the woman with the knife, chopper, axe. But she was the person who innocently carries the plague, like that woman Rebecca (whoever she was really) they named Rebecca’s Curse after — just a pretty red and yellow flower, and now it raged through the pasture of half of Efica and every schoolkid, even the little rag-mouth here, knew it was called Rebecca’s Curse.

The pigeons were like that: like dog-shit sticking to her name.

They had been in Chemin Rouge for only thirty-six hours but already the famous Apple Pie and his twenty-six fellow pigeons had brought down this theatre company. The pigeons were like some spore, some sexually transmitted disease, and when she thought of the night Reade brought them home she knew that her first sense about them (before her bending, obliging, smiling, head-nodding personality got in the way) had been the right one.

It was not just that he was mistaken about their money-making possibilities. She had not liked the way he touched them, with his big horny hands around their chest and neck. She damn well made herself think she liked it but it was bullshit. It made her jealous — that was her true feeling. She wanted him to act like that to her, not to a bird. She told herself how nice it was to see a man acting gentle, but that was shit, she knew it even then.

She did not like those pigeons’ eyes, not that pair, nor any other. She never did see a pigeon’s eye that did not frighten her a little. She told Reade that. He was patient with her at first — he said it was because they had an eye each side of the head which made them sort of stare, and she tried to buy that, except it wasn’t true. It was something in the eyes themselves she did not like — stupid, nervous, demanding — and it did not matter whether they were speckled or plain, the condition was the same. They scared her.

As for money — forget it. It was the pigeons caused the rift with Reade. It was the pigeons ipso facto lost her the joint bank account, the $105,023.56. They lost her shelter, protection. She should have killed them in Melcarth when she BBQ’d the house. Now she was in Chemin Rouge, they were still with her. She could chop their heads off with a tomahawk, have them run around Gazette Street with the blood squirting in the air like a poulet. She could see it, she really could. She could see the blood pooling in the bluestone gutters. It was most realistic.

She blinked and drank champagne. It was perfectly clear that Madame here would now lease or sell the building and then Wally would have lost his home, all thanks to pigeons. She did not care. She refused to care. She should BBQ them before they did the next thing.

Don’t even think it, Roxanna.

She held her breath but the lack of air made the flames burn brighter. They were carbon-hemmed, orange-skirted. There was soot, kerosene, a sweet hot singeing smell. She grinned at Wally. He smiled back at her. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face, then she turned and walked down into the street, hoping the air would make this feeling go away.

The air in the street smelt cold and damp. The wind was from the east and it carried, not the salt of the port, but a sweet mouldy smell, the smell of gullies and rotting leaves from twenty miles away. She stayed out there, just leaning against a car, looking up at the moon, listening to the sarcastic voice of the dispatcher coming out over the taxi radios. She saw Vincent Theroux open the door and stand at the top of the steps. He raised his arm. A car engine started and then a low expensive car — she did not know the make — pulled up in front, and Vincent, having checked his jacket and trouser pockets, carefully descended the stairs, got into the back seat, and was driven away. My God , she thought. It was as if she had splashed cold water on her face.

Around ten o’clock she saw Sparrow Glashan, made hunchbacked by the rucksack under his poncho, slip quietly out of the door, and walk down to the dark end of the street, away from the taxi base. A moment later Wally sauntered across the street with his hands in his pockets.

‘You OK?’

‘The patapoof, what’s his name?’

‘That’s Vincent … did you see his car?’

He stood in front of her grinning, as if he knew that she was excited by a wealthy man.

She shrugged. ‘What of it?’

She turned back towards the theatre. Now the actors were gone she would have, she hoped, a better place to sleep than a mattress in the corner of Claire Chen’s room.

The pigeons were no longer in the foyer although, imagining she could still see their bloom hanging in the air, she held her nose as she passed through. It was only eight more nights. She would buy a padlock for her door.

It was a rabbit warren, a flop-house. She went looking for a room she could make lockable. The doors were ply. Most of the locks and many of the knobs were missing. The rooms themselves were dead, curtainless, creepy. The floors were covered with litter created by the actors’ flight, the sort of things rag-pickers might have fought over and left behind when alcohol or thunderstorms changed what they thought important — empty vid cases, print-outs, T-shirts, bras, single socks.

In eight days’ time she would turn up at the Chemin Rouge Antiquities Fair, a butterfly emerging from a shit-heap — no one who looked at her would ever imagine the chain and padlock on the door, the ice-cream container for peeing in at night.

She went from room to room, looking at the doors. Wally accompanied her, but hung back, did not enter the rooms, occupied their doorways.

No way was she going to fuck him. No way at all. When she caught his eyes, he smiled at her.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked, but before he could answer she walked past him, out into the corridor. Her high heels were loud. She hated that sound. The rooms were all insecure. The windows opened on to verandas and roofs. There were no latches.

Wally leaned against the wall behind her and began to roll himself a cigarette. ‘You don’t want to worry about them pigeons,’ he said. ‘I’ll build them something.’

‘Better you than me.’ She turned to face him. ‘Pigeons are a mug’s game,’ she said. She took a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. You could hear the front door swinging open on its hinges — that was two chains, two padlocks she would have to buy.

‘My grandad had pigeons,’ he said, reproachfully.

‘So you told me.’

He pulled a comb out of his shirt pocket and dragged his long hair back from his high forehead. Then he leaned across and, without asking permission, lifted her dark glasses from her face. ‘I paid you six hundred bucks for them.’

‘It was a fair price,’ she said, but she slipped out of her shoes.

‘Seems to me you were offering a little more than pigeons.’

She bent down and picked up her shoes. She refused to be guilty.

‘It seems to me you were offering something tray specific.’