Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

My mother squeezed her eyes shut. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘you are ten years old. You have serious problems you are going to have to cope with in your life.’

‘I … know,’ I said.

‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault. I protected you too much.’

‘I … know,’ I screamed. ‘I … know … I’m … ugly.’

‘Darling …’

I pushed her away. She sucked in her breath. ‘Sweets-ki, I’m doing my best to help you, but, please, help me too — just accept that I can’t go back to the theatre.’

‘Why?’

‘Shush,’ said Vincent.

‘Why?’

‘Come on,’ Vincent said. ‘Cool it.’

I glared at him. ‘I … want … Wally.’

My mother opened her eyes. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, speaking very quietly and slowly, ‘Wally has a job. His job is to build a pigeonloft.’

‘You … can’t … afford … that,’ I said.

Vincent stood behind my mother and began waving his finger and shaking his head at me vehemently.

‘It’s Wally’s job,’ she said. ‘That’s all. It is his job to do that.’

‘Who … pays … Wally? How … will … Wally … pay … rent?’

‘Your mother can afford whatever she wants,’ Vincent said. ‘She can fill the tower with ping-pong balls if that’s what she wants to do. Just let her rest.’

‘YOU … LET … HER … REST,’ I said. I looked at my mother. She was grinning at me, but there was a wildness, a real craziness about her. ‘YOU’RE … CRAZY,’ I said.

She slapped my hand, hard, so it stung.

I looked at Vincent, who just nodded his head, as if to say, you had it coming.

‘I’m … an … actor,’ Tristan Smith said. I was crying, but my mother did not comfort me. She broke a stick across her knees like a woman in a fable and then put the two pieces on the fire.

*

Belinda Burastin (341–90), the celebrated Efican architect, whose domestic dwellings perfectly reflect the liberal post-colonial conundrum. Every Burastin house carries an obvious sub-text — that it would be better for everyone if the house were not really there. Burastin’s houses barely penetrate the soil. They tiptoe on their sites. They are as light as thoughts, prayers, wishes that history had been otherwise, that cloven-footed animals had never been brought across the sea in ships, and that those who live there now should disturb the place as little — to quote — ‘as those early colonizers who inhabited the dry cool granite caves’.

I was betrayed, abandoned, slapped, broken like a stick, smouldering, oozing bubbling sap.

My maman fiddled with the smoking fire, thinking what a problem she had with me. She never guessed how serious it was. She did not imagine that I was planning to run away. But why would she? I had never walked further than a hundred yards. My legs were twisted like old pipe cleaners. My only wheels were on my skateboard. I was ten years old, knew nothing, had no money. But once I saw her break that stick and throw it on the fire, I had to confront the fact that I would have to fight to earn my right to occupy a higher category of life.

I had, of course, been wrong about the food. They had plenty. It was tasty, but I ate the moist grilled skipjack thinking of the tower being filled with ping-pong balls, and later, as my mother read me the Voorstand folk tale of the duck riding the dog to market, *I did not listen to the words in case I softened. I lay on my mattress and held my anger tight to me. I was the son of two actors.

Not long after my maman turned out my light, a wild wind-storm arrived, slapping the canvas walls beside my bunk. I lay on my back with my eyes open and listened to Vincent and my mother running round pulling ropes, closing hatches and shutters. When the rain eased I realized they had moved to the bedroom. I could hear my mother crying and Vincent murmuring. I imagined she was remorseful. My heart softened.

But then, just as I was about to go to her, the weeping turned to moaning and all my anger was alive in an instant. She had broken the stick. He had filled the tower with ping-pong balls. I hated her cold green eyes, her little mouth, the tired line at each of its edges, and I hated Vincent most of all, and I curled my lip in the dark as I thought of his talcum-dusted flab, his bearded mouth between my mother’s legs.

I got out of bed. The rain had stopped. The moon was out, projecting images of trees weaving and waving like thick grass stalks across the walls and floors.

I crept down into the living room and looked out across the wild shaking tops of sclerophyll scrub to the glowing buildings of Chemin Rouge and the golden light of the forbidden Sirkus Dome which was less than a mile from the abandoned Feu Follet.

The idea — the vision — of my journey to reclaim my theatre now burst from the tight little place I had been keeping it and gushed, bubbling like lava, towards my destiny. At that moment, I should have been afraid, but what I had instead was a feeling so intense you could almost call it ecstasy. I lapped at the cold spring water from Belinda Burastin’s terracotta pipe. I strapped on my knee pads and tucked folded newspaper underneath for extra protection. As I stuffed Vincent’s treasured driving gloves with newspaper and then pulled them on to my own hands, I did not know what roles I would play, but I imagined them as great ones, not the parts written for Fools or Jugglers, but those for Kings to whose own loves and tragedies, misfortunes, weaknesses of spirit, I would lend my own peculiarly expressive form. I could be their spirit, manifest, their pain made three dimensional, their tragedy got up to walk around.

To be inside the house, to feel it shudder and shake in the wind, was unnerving, but to pursue this action, to crawl and walk up the path to the road, to feel the wind envelop my body, swallow it, hold it, was thrilling. The resistance of my body, the immediate and early declaration of its limitations, was nothing — the stretch of my abbreviated hamstrings was, not quite pleasure, but certainly not pain.

Tall dry grasses brushed my face. I thought: I can do this.

The moon was bright, and everything was very clear. (I can do this.) I had imagined myself stumbling and falling and I was ready to accept that, but there was a tamped dirt path which more or less followed the tree-lined driveway up to the road. Yes, sticks scratched my face, and my breath, so early in the journey, was rough in my lungs, but I did not fall and I carried my skateboard under my arms and walked uphill on my knees, like a pilgrim, and all above my head the great tree canopies whipped and waved, tossed like hair, like showgirls’ feathers.

Now, recounting this, I know more. I have travelled through dangerous tunnels in foreign countries, climbed steel ladders where bats are used to roosting, and my imagination, thinking of my younger self, is filled with the possibility of rats, brush-hogs, tree-adders, but that liquid silver night was free of them. No tree-adder jumped on me, no brush-hog collided with me. I dealt with my life one knee-step at a time.

Every ten yards or so I stopped, caught my breath. I looked back down at the shining roof of the house between the wild tossing umbrellas of foliage.

After the driveway there was a street. It was wide, and hard. It was here I confronted, in that broad shining black macadam strip, the size of my decision, and yes, sure, I was frightened there. Yes, I wanted my maman and my bed a moment, but then I remembered my maman and the twisted anger of my bed, and I had to proceed, one knee-step, then another, along the pebble-littered concrete gutter — it was too steep for a skateboard — down towards the rumble of the freeway, towards the theatre. The forest roared like a river in flood on either side of me.