Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘My … dad?’

‘They had a falling out, Rikiki. It’s not the pigeons. She’s gone right off your dad, the theatre too.’

‘No … no … they … did … not … fight.’

A car horn tooted — four short blasts.

Wally stood and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Are you finished eating?’

‘NOW?’

‘I’m sorry, Rikiki. I couldn’t tell you.’

‘TODAY?’

I was not ready. I had not expected this. I expected change to come gradually, in a long slow slide. I slipped from my chair. I was not going. I turned towards the door, my secret place.

But Wally lifted me up before I made it to the door.

‘Please,’ I whimpered.

I clung to his hard shoulders and pushed my face in against his rough bristly neck.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, his bloodshot eyes already rimmed with tears. ‘Don’t blubber.’

I did not even fight him. I let him carry me down the steps and into the harsh light. When I looked up from the shadow of his neck, I was not surprised to see Vincent in the driver’s seat of the Corniche, but I was very surprised to see that all my rebel’s armoury, the stolen Stanislavsky, the mutilated tartan rug, all the secret things I had hidden underneath the theatre seats were now packed in three cardboard boxes in the back seat.

Wally kissed Tristan Smith an unhygienic, tobacco-smelling kiss. And then put me on the seat next to the boxes. He clipped my seatbelt and tugged it extra tight. He depressed the door lock and slammed the door. He began to wave but then turned abruptly away.

Four o’clock that afternoon found me in the isolated Belinda Burastin *house my mother had decided was to be our home.

I sat on the highly polished floor looking out across a melancholy sea of khaki and olive forest to the dusty roads, palm trees and rust-streaked roofs of the distant port. Thirty feet below me: broken logs and small rocks with their sharp edges softened by thick green moss. Behind me: Vincent and my mother squeezed into a small black leather chair. She was half on his lap, half off. He had his wide square hand resting on her knee.

‘This will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you,’ he said. ‘For both of us. You’ll see: big things will come of this, for both of us. Bill should never have said what he said about your work, but when it’s all over we’ll print postage stamps with his face on them.’

‘I think he’d rather like it,’ my mother said wistfully. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I’d like it too,’ Vincent said. ‘I’d like him on a postage stamp.’

I listened to him, filled with animus. I did not like the way he talked about my father. He had a soft plump lower lip. He spoke softly, quietly, with much patting and stroking. ‘The Feu Follet will be like a chapter in your life,’ he said to my maman, ‘when you are a senator.’

My mother laughed but I thought she was too frail for the wild things he was saying — her veins too blue, her skin too white, her lipstick too red for her complexion.

‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t be a senator, a minister.’

For me, listening to him, he was a jackal, poking, prodding, moulding, demanding, preying on my mother’s weakness for political influence. But of course he knew what I did not believe: Bill had abandoned her, and my maman was unexpectedly adrift, drowning. This unseemly rush into politics was the only life raft Vincent could offer.

‘You know everybody,’ he told her. ‘You have a following. You’re prettier than the competition.’ He turned her face with the flat of his hand. ‘Even your accent might help you.’

I was three feet in front of her, costumed in a blue iridescent dress-up hat, a silver waistcoat, a sequined belt, a red cap. I wanted her back in the theatre, but I could not compete with Vincent who was already writing her future in his little notebook. They had already phoned this person. He had called in this favour, had lunch with that opponent. One was ‘flattered to know you’. Another had ‘his heart in the right place’. One more was an ‘amiable ditherer’.

My mother rested her head on his shoulder. Vincent talked to someone on the telephone about progress on the ‘one hundred thou’ for ‘the candidate’s slush fund’.

The house was built on delicate thin poles, bright yellow like an egret’s legs. The whole thing flexed and moved, and when the wind gusts started from the west you could feel the house rippling and shuddering under you like canvas. I hated it. It felt as if our lives would blow away.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

When I saw my mother look expectantly to Vincent, I thought this was his Achilles’ heel.

I closed the Stanislavsky and placed it carefully on the floor.

‘A … restaurant,’ I said, thinking that this, at least, would get my maman back closer to the theatre. ‘Let’s … go … back … to … town … and … eat.’

Crows rose from, and settled back into, the canopies of Enteralis. I listened to the crows and imagined them to be cold, goose-pimpled below their oilslick black feathers. I wrapped my sequined silver waistcoat around me.

‘What have we got to eat?’ my mother asked.

I looked at Vincent, his startled eyes. I thought I had him in check, but not checkmate.

‘First,’ he said, ‘we need wood for a fire.’

The hill on which the house sat was steep and slippery with stones, logs, fallen leaves and Enteralis seedpods. I lay flat on the cold hardwood and edged myself to the outer rim of the floor. I looked down and watched Vincent and my mother try to gather wood. They were not suited to this new life. My mother had sandals. Vincent had bright black slip-ons with a little gold chain across the top.

Vincent slipped and fell on his fat backside. He tried to break long sticks but his shiny little feet kept sliding off. Felicity dragged a big log half up the hill.

‘I can’t burn that,’ Vincent called. ‘I’ve got no axe.’

My mother dropped the log. It slipped then rolled. It hit a large projecting rock and then catapulted itself into the air, narrowly missing Vincent’s head. The log crashed into the woods below, without either of them knowing what had happened.

Vincent and Felicity came back to the house and tried to start the fire with bits of torn-up cardboard, toilet paper, dead leaves. I knew it was not the time to discuss my own future, that Vincent had dirty hands, that they both felt incompetent and angry with themselves. So I waited, a really long time, until there were smoky yellow flames licking around the brittle green sticks.

I thought they had no food. I did not mention food. I knelt next to my mother and dropped little bits of broken leaf in amongst the smouldering twigs.

‘I … need … the … theatre,’ I said.

My mother looked up from the fire. Her eyes were red. There was a streak of ash on her cheek. ‘Do you, sweets?’

She carefully lifted a charred and smoking stick and inserted it so it was against a feeble little yellow flame. Then she stretched out her arm to stroke my head. ‘There’s plenty of time for you to decide. Lots and lots of time.’

‘I’ve … decided,’ I said.

‘Sweets,’ my mother said, her eyes red from smoke, ‘I’ve made you imagine it’s a happy life.’

‘It’s … not … happy … here,’ I said. I looked back at Vincent when I said it. He stared straight back at me.

‘It’s a beautiful house.’ My mother stroked my hair. ‘It’s actually the most perfect house for bird-nesting. Did you think of that? Think how many birds must live here.’

She knew I did not care about birds or bird-nesting. I tugged myself away from her.