Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

A child beside Roxanna spoke. ‘Yuk, Maman. A mutant.’ Roxanna looked down to see who had spoken — eight years old, Anglo features, brown coat, white gloves, little turned-up nose.

‘I beg your pardon … ’

‘Something bothering you?’ the mother said. She was so neat, so fucking Protestant — thin lips, straight white teeth.

‘Excuse me,’ Roxanna said, ‘but she shouldn’t call that little boy a mutant.’

The woman looked Roxanna up and down, lingering for an insulting moment on her scuffed red shoes and laddered stockings. Then she smiled and turned away.

‘Excuse me,’ Roxanna said. ‘Excuse me. I said she shouldn’t call the boy a mutant.’

The bitch did not even turn her head.

‘You don’t know who you’re screwing with,’ Roxanna said. She put her small white hand on the woman’s bony slippery shoulder and pulled her round. She did not seek violence, only due respect, but when the woman pushed her hand away, Roxanna knew she had to hurt her — she had no other option.

She pulled an eight-ounce vodka bottle from her purse. ‘I’ll cut that fucking smile right off your face,’ she said, looking for a brick to break the bottle on.

‘Shut up, Roxanna,’ said Wally. ‘Just shut up.’

He moved ahead of her, carrying Tristan. She followed behind, pointing her finger back at the woman. ‘You’re so stupid ,’ Roxanna said. ‘You’re so cowardly.’

She walked from the cul-de-sac behind Wally and the boy, almost in tears. She was so angry. It was hard walking so fast in her red high-heels. She wanted to touch the boy, hold him, tell him she loved him even though she didn’t. She circled. She shadowed. She wanted to tell him he was beautiful, that he had so much guts she could not believe him.

‘You’re so brave,’ she said.

She put the vodka back in her bag. She thought what she could give him, how she could let him know he was loved, how those morons were the ugly ones, not him.

‘They’re the mutants,’ she said.

‘Shut up,’ said Wally.

She took it too, from him, from them, burnished, welded together. She would take that sort of shit from no one else, but she took it then, from them. She saw that about Wally, that what he had claimed was actually true, he was not a single man at all.

At Gazette Street she took charge, slowly, insisting for no reason other than she just had to.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I was a nurse.’

She set Wally to work boiling water, found some bright red disinfectant, sterilized her eyebrow tweezers in the gas jet, laid a clean-looking towel on the kitchen table, and watched as Wally removed Tristan’s clothes and exposed his pale peculiar body, criss-crossed with surgeons’ scars. It was shocking, but not shocking, it was just, finally, how it was — bones, skin, scars, the heart beating like in a baby’s chest. She did not know what to do, had never been a nurse, but she just pushed in, because she had to do something, and she carefully washed his hands and legs with hot water — maybe the water was too hot, maybe she washed too many times — and picked out the rust with tweezers. She knew she was clumsy. He did not flinch or cry out, but all his forehead wrinkled each time she hurt him. His courage made her want to cry.

She had Wally make bandages with a floral sheet which she had found lying in the corridor. It was dusty but folded and therefore probably clean.

‘There,’ she said, at last, ‘he’s done.’

Wally dressed him and asked, ‘Do you want french toast?’

He shook his head. You could see his shame. It surrounded him like an aura, like Milly when she had been raped by that moron at the Shell station. This one was the same — he had been so brave, but he was ashamed and could not look anyone in the eye.

‘Do you want waffles?’ she asked. She somehow knew he could not bear to be looked at, that even the air now hurt his skin. She had Wally’s money in her purse. She would have gone and bought a waffle iron, but he shook his head.

‘You want to watch a Sirkus vid?’ she asked.

‘Let’s watch the storm,’ Wally said, and picked him up, and she followed downstairs and out of the dark foyer and into the storm-bright light — all the sky grey but the walls of the garages across the street shining white and yellow — and sat down to watch the high-piled black clouds as they began to bleed in long grey streaks on to the Cootreksea Mountains.

‘He likes storms,’ Wally told her. ‘Thunder, lightning. It’s his favourite thing.’

But Tristan crawled off Wally’s lap and crept back inside the doorway, and there he stayed, in the shadow, looking back into the gloom of the foyer.

Roxanna put her hand lightly on Wally’s wooden shoulder. ‘God damn those people,’ she whispered. ‘God damn their ignorant mouths.’

Wally shrugged. ‘What do you expect?’

Roxanna could not be so philosophical. She went back inside the foyer — the boy was further inside now, sitting, curled up, in the middle of the dirty cobbled floor — and telephoned his mother, but the phone rang and rang. She telephoned the Human Wheel, without telling him what happened, but when he arrived, in a minute or two, he was depressed. The famously optimistic Sparrow was gaunt and stooped and had begun to smoke again, holding his badly made cigarettes in the cup of his hand.

Roxanna squatted beside him on the steps.

‘Come on.’ She spoke loudly, so the boy in the foyer could hear. ‘I’m going to shout you all the Sirkus. Not a vid. The real thing.’

Sparrowgrass looked at her, and then away, grimacing goofily up at the black sky.

‘Come on,’ Roxanna said, standing up and fluffing her hair. ‘I’ve got heaps of jon-kay. Let’s hit the Sirkus.’

She did not know about this taboo on the Saarlim Sirkus. All she wanted to do was make the kid feel better.

‘Have you ever been?’ the Human Wheel asked her. He scratched the back of his bristling haircut, squinted up at her, creased his eyes, pulled lips right back up past the gum line.

‘Of course I’ve bloody been. Everybody’s been.’

‘I haven’t,’ the Wheel said. He screwed his body around to look back through the crack of door into the darkness of the foyer. ‘You haven’t, have you, Tristan?’

‘No,’ Wally said, ‘he hasn’t.’

‘Yes,’ the voice said in the darkness. ‘Nearly.’

‘Is it fun?’ Sparrow asked.

Wally stepped down on to the footpath so he could shake his head at Roxanna without Sparrow seeing.

Then the boy spoke. ‘I … understand … it … is … tray … commercial.’

‘Very unusual?’ the Human Wheel asked.

‘Comm-er-cial.’ Tristan crawled out into the light, squinting. His skin was so white.

‘Commercial? OK, but is it fun?’ the Wheel asked.

Tristan’s face tugged and twisted. He turned his big white eyes on Roxanna. He quietly put his hand across his heart. Yes, he wanted to go, of course he did.

‘I don’t doubt that it’s reactionary,’ Sparrow said, chewing on the syllables of this last word as if they might be made of very sticky sugar gum. ‘What I want to know is: will it cheer me up?’

The boy nodded vigorously.

‘Yes?’ Sparrow stood. ‘But I don’t think I’m dressed correctly.’ He brushed the cigarette ash from his baggy Army Disposals trousers and straightened the collar of his checked work shirt. ‘Should I dress up?’

‘No,’ Roxanna said, ‘it’s come-as-you-are.’

But she dressed up, as well as she was able. She tried to do it quickly, but by the time it was done the storm had come and gone and the streets were wet and had that sweet jasmine sewer smell, and when they stepped out into Gazette Street you could hear that low gurgle of water in the drains beneath your feet. She wore her same black skirt — she had nothing else — but she borrowed a white shirt of Wally’s and put on a geld-band which emphasized her slim waist and her broad hips. She wore her red high-heels and put a little chain around her ankle and a small stick-on beauty spot on her cheek. She did, in short, everything to make her resemblance to the legendary Irma as marked as possible, and she saw how Wally, who had been reserved and silent since their return from the hospital, looked at her, and when they walked around the river to the Sirkus Dome he began to warm up again and told her things she already knew about the rising river, and pointed out the Chinese on the far bank stretching out their big nets on the high poles.