Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘We’re like each other,’ he insisted.

She dropped his hand. ‘That’s not a plus.’

They began slowly to walk up the stairs together. ‘When you first met me,’ she said, ‘I was soaked in petrol.’

‘No, I smelled it …’

‘You smelled it? I’d just burnt our frigging house down.’

‘See — you can tell me,’ he said.

‘That’s not a plus. I’m telling you, I’m crazy. I burned down the convent.’

‘In Melcarth?’

‘No, not in Melcarth. Of course not in Melcarth. When I was a kid, here, in Chemin Rouge. I’m a pyromaniac,’ she said. ‘When I get stressed that’s what I do. I can’t get insurance.’

‘We don’t need insurance. We’ll make something with these pigeons.’

‘You want to make something,’ she said. ‘You can make a pigeon pie.’

She would have said more, but the telephone began to ring. There was a bell mounted at the bottom of stairs — an old-fashioned square black box with two rust-streaked metal hemispheres on top.

Wally let it ring. Perhaps he was making some point to her. If he was, she didn’t get it. She took her spare T-shirt and her handbag to the bathroom. She took off her skirt and dropped it in the bath. She turned on the cold water and swirled the skirt around to start it soaking. She sat on the toilet and opened her catalogue, trying to get some pictures in her head.

*

It is a little known curiosity of history that the French and English garrisons, technically at war with each other, mounted combined operations against the indigenous tribes of Efica from 35 to 39

EC

and again in 43

EC.

The tribes seem to have given as good as they got, and, had it not been for the Chinese influenza epidemic of 49

EC

,

might have survived long enough to witness their invaders recalled to headquarters. No indigenous records remain.

Unaccustomed to the sounds of the bush at night, the tree rats on the roof, the brush-hogs which came in at the beginning of the wet to forage around the undergrowth, the mother of Tristan Smith slept badly, dreaming angry dreams about Claire Chen.

Some time after the storm had passed, she came out to drink some water from the cistern and then, almost as an afterthought, walked up the steps to my bed to untangle me from my blankets.

When she did not see me immediately, she was not alarmed. I was a small boy in a big sea of bedclothes. She had felt that hard hit of panic too many times before to easily fall prey to it now. She expected, at any second, to touch my elbow, my bony backside, pushed high into the air. But when she had finally removed all of the sheets and blankets, and produced nothing more than the clatter of my second skateboard, she experienced that wild alarm familiar to every parent — that fast beating of the heart, that rising panic in the throat. She lay down on the anachronistically waxed floor and reached with her long pale arms under the bunk, as if I might somehow be squeezed in there, and all the time she was calling out my name, not loudly, but softly, like you call a cat.

She had talked to me like that, inside her womb, my beautiful baby, my beautiful baby boy , and would not have an ultrasound in case this sex was unsaid. She had wanted so much for her little boy, had put so much store by his splendid life, and then, when he was who he was, she had vowed to him, made extravagant promises she had not been able to keep.

‘Tristan, Rikiki, Tristan darling.’

Soon Vincent was beside her, naked except for his slippers, and the pair of them had all the lights on in the house and were running from closet to closet, and then, on a wild and fearful intuition, out of the house and down the slippery slope beneath. It was three in the morning and they were shining a weak yellow flashlight across the broken sticks and rocks, and then up the slippery trunks.

‘We’ll ring the police,’ he said when they were back inside the house.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet, please.’

She saw the look he gave her, silent, judgemental, but she could not bear anyone to know — her son had left her. She understood exactly. She knew she had betrayed him, not just in the incident around the fire that night, but in so many complex ways, not least by carelessly allowing him to fall in love with the theatre.

He could not be an actor. It was no more possible than that he be an athlete. First, his voice — it was not only that he could not project but that he could not be understood.

He did not have the instrument. No matter how he exercised, there was so little muscle tissue to develop, and although she was intensely, continually, moved by his courage — and she had had to stop herself weeping when he descended from climbing the fir tree with that egg in his open mouth — courage was not the same as ability.

His father had broad shoulders, a sweeping supple back, long, almost painfully beautiful legs. Bill Millefleur’s Coriolanus died in that stunning circus topple, falling forward from the platform so that he dangled, his feet hooked around a rust-streaked water pipe. That was acting. Her son could never do it.

Yet it was she who had allowed these foolish dreams to flourish, and who — when it was too late — had no better answer for him than picture books of birds and eggs.

‘He’s not in hospital,’ she said to Vincent, who sat at the Nagouchi table, the telephone in his hand. ‘I know he’s not.’

‘Flick, you don’t know where he is.’

‘Why would he be in hospital? We have no reason to think he’s hurt.’

‘Then let me phone the police.’

‘Why would we want the police?’

‘Mo-chou, he’s never been on his own before. If he’s run away, don’t make me say it … He could be hurt.’

‘OK.’ She sat down opposite him and pulled her wrap around her. ‘Phone the hospitals,’ she said. ‘But he won’t be there.’

‘Where will he be?’

‘He’s at the theatre,’ she said.

‘Flick, please, I know you’re upset.’

‘He’s back at the theatre,’ she said. ‘He frightens me.’

In the morning I woke in the Burns Unit of the Mater Hospital and there I found, not two feet from me, a harelipped man peering curiously into my face.

When my eyes met his, he started.

‘Oh,’ he said, standing up, and taking a pace backwards. ‘He’s awake.’ He clasped his hands together and looked towards the door.

‘Good morning,’ he said to me from near the window. He had such nervous, anxious eyes. His lip was split to his nose. His gum was exposed. When he spoke, his words sounded as strange as my own must have. That aside, he was good-looking. He had very white skin, a heavy beard-shadow, a strong jaw, a neatly combed head of black hair. ‘Actor-Manager,’ he said, inclining his upper body politely towards me. ‘What a splendid name!’ He looked towards the doorway again and I saw that my little room was full of visitors — five men and women, two standing, one leaning in the doorway, two sitting on chairs. They all wore hospital gowns and they all had missing faces, cleft palates, conditions where teeth penetrated lips, misfortunes so repelling it would have been difficult for me to quietly contemplate them even in the colour plates of a magazine. You may not like me saying it, but my visitors were gross.

Who was I to be repulsed by them? No one, obviously.

But who were they to stare at me with such jumpy, frightened eyes?

‘Can you speak to us?’ asked the man with the harelip.

I rolled my eyes in impatience. The effect was obviously repulsive.