Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘This is you, right?’ he asked. ‘You’re Tristan?’

MOTHER’S NAME: Felicity Smith Actor-Manager.

‘Is this you?’ this angel asked me. ‘Are you Tristan Actor-Manager?’ *

I turned to look at his watery benevolent eyes and believed my period of trial was over.

‘Are you he?’

‘Yes … I … am.’

‘Your name is Actor-Manager?’

I nodded.

He flicked his fringe back.

‘What is your address?’ he asked, and then scrunched up his face as he readied himself to understand me.

‘Thirty-four … Gazette … Street.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’

*

‘Bruder Dog Kapow’, Badberg Edition.

*

Felicity Smith tuas not the only Efican mother to confront the official lack of curiosity about her profession by linking it in her surname. Witness, amongst contemporary Eficans, Anton Dietrich-Notaire and Billy Marchand.

When Roxanna woke — at dawn — the first thing she saw was Wally Paccione’s freckled arm, bare above the sheets. For the third night in a row he had kept his word — he had not left his own bed — but she was still disturbed by the sense of intimacy, the skin, the smell of his warm sheets, the sound of his feathery breathing. It was one thing to go to sleep in the same room. It was another to wake. She had slept with him.

She had her skirt beside the bed, and in a minute she would sneak it underneath the sheets and dress, carefully, quietly.

His life lay all around her. He was a poor man and a neat man — probably a decent man — but apart from that, what sort of man he was she could not guess. A dozen small pine boxes were stacked along the wall beneath the window in such a way as to make a kind of dresser, the kind of depressing life you saw in fishing baches on the Isles Anglais. Inside the boxes he had placed grey plastic crates, each one labelled with its prosaic contents — socks, shirts, trousers. A chipped china jug, a shaving mug, a brush, a comb were laid out neatly on the top of a rough wooden bench. He owned so little. He was over fifty and this was all he had. It made his breath seem so frail, so vulnerable, Roxanna could not bear to think about him any more.

She quietly withdrew her auction catalogue from her handbag.

The catalogue was her comfort. It was one inch thick. It cost $50 through the mail. Its glossy coloured pages had a slightly soapy smell which always produced in her a feeling of rather dreamy well-being.

She took out her pen. The pen joined her to the catalogue like a needle to a thread. She brought it back and forth across the pages, pausing here and there, at the seventeenth-century dragoon in the uniform of captain, which she estimated at $350, at the complete eighteenth-century regiment, all in the uniform of the Royal Scots Guards, which might reach anywhere up to $5000. These last pieces were crude and eccentric in design and, although they had ‘Made in England’ on their bases, they had probably been produced by French convicts in Chemin Rouge in the second century (EC).

It was now six days until the auction. She turned the glossy pages slowly, breathing the smell, thinking of a park with peacocks. She let her lashes down, got herself to the point where she could smell mown grass, hear water falling in a fountain. Then his voice slammed against her eardrum.

‘What’s the book?’

He was dressed — shirt, trousers — had been naked in the room beside her, was pulling on his socks. He had been watching her.

She turned to him, her hand to her breast.

‘Don’t you be so tense ,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to hurt you.’

She was wearing a T-shirt but she felt exposed, as if he could see, not her body, but what she had been imagining.

He smiled at her.

She tried to smile back but could not.

‘You were a million miles away,’ he said.

He held out his freckled hand and at first she thought he wanted to touch her, and then she saw that he expected her to show him what she had hitherto kept hidden from him — the catalogue. He had no idea what an intimate thing that was. She was embarrassed — she held the catalogue up, just enough so he could read the cover, but then he sort of tugged it from her and sat back down on his mattress and leafed through it.

‘This is worth three-fifty?’ he said, holding up the plate depicting the dragoon.

She just wanted to ask him: please give it back.

He kept turning the pages of the catalogue, not like the poor man he was, but like a rich man, someone with an education — gently, respectfully, sliding his big hands between the shiny surfaces. But whatever he really thought of it he did not say.

When he gave the catalogue back, she slipped it into her handbag and changed the subject to something less tender. ‘What you doing today?’

‘I don’t know. What are you doing?’

‘Sleep. Read. Same as yesterday. There’s not much I can do until you get your money.’

‘It’s just the sort of account,’ he said. ‘I told you that.’

‘I know.’

‘If I gave it to you now, I’d lose my interest.’

I know all that. So what are you doing?’

‘Well, first I’m going to clear the stuff out of the tower,’ he said, sitting down on his mattress and resting his long wrists on top of his knees. ‘And then I’m going to figure out how to build a pigeon loft. No,’ he said, although she had not done anything except fold her arms, ‘no, just imagine it from Tristan’s point of view,’ he said. ‘It’s like a schoolroom. He can learn about biology, genetics, mathematics.’

He was repeating bullshit things she had told him when she was selling him the birds. She felt herself blushing.

‘I know you don’t like the pigeons,’ he said. ‘No, that’s fine, but you just imagine, how a rikiki like Tristan … There’s all sorts of stuff he’ll learn … magnetism.’

‘Magnetism?’ She wondered if he was teasing her.

‘It’s how they navigate. You must know that.’ Was he sending her up? ‘Woman like you, surely you know that? That would be an advantage to owning pigeons.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

He smiled, but not much more than a creasing of the eyes.

‘Well, your big bazooley is tin soldiers,’ he said. ‘It’s more artistic than pigeons.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Nothing to thank.’

Tomorrow is my pigeon day,’ she said. ‘I’m going to help you set up the automatic watering.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘A promise is a promise,’ Roxanna said, pulling her skirt on underneath the blankets. ‘Ask anyone who knows me. I always keep my word. That’s one thing about me you couldn’t have known.’

‘Oh, I knew it.’

‘Well, tomorrow I’ll set you up. Soon as I’m finished, you’re going to the bank and I’m going to buy a little suit for Rox.’ She threw back the covers and dusted down her skirt. ‘Next week I’ve got serious business to attend to. But today,’ she stretched and yawned, ‘I’m still on holiday. I’m sleeping in.’

Yet as it turned out she helped him clear out the tower, not because he asked her to, but because she had already slept two days and could not sleep any more. There were still six days to go, time to fill without spending her money.

At first she enjoyed the work. All she did was lump wine cartons full of Madam’s personal effects down one floor to the next. They did it together. They carried the cartons down the steps and then stacked them in the corridor. At first it was companionable. But as the morning went on, something soured inside her, not toward Wally, whom she had, against her better judgement, begun to like, but — here she was again, a servant to some frigging pigeons.