Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Felicity was abandoned to the hum of the lighting. She thought: this is not happening to me.

A long time later the two doctors returned, rolling a small perspex crib. Tristan was lying in the crib. She did not look at him directly, but saw that he did not take a lot of space. He was swaddled in a bright patterned cloth.

‘Unswaddle him.’ She heard herself say it. She was aware of removing herself from herself, of becoming a character whom she could watch. She closed her eyes, breathed a little — in — out, in — out.

The young men did not say when they had done unwrapping, but she could tell from the stillness in the room. She opened her eyes. She had no distance from herself, or not sufficient. When she saw the baby’s face again, she put her hand across her mouth. A noise came out, a noise so painful that Marc Laroche’s anxious face contorted in sympathy.

‘God damn,’ he said.

She thought: I am the mother.

But she did not want to touch Tristan. She made herself. Her character touched me. I was naked, defenceless, frightening.

‘Damn,’ said Marc Laroche.

‘Shut up,’ she said.

She held her finger out and touched my hand. I grasped the finger and held it with an intensity that surprised her. I was barely human. I was like some dream she might expect to stay forever hidden in the entrails of her consciousness. She tried to jerk her hand away. I would not let go.

The feeling — she had felt this before: it was when you held the worm in your fingers before you baited your hook, the way the life shrank from the hook, the way you responded to it, that strong demand within your fingers. It was not your personality or your character. It was something more basic than character. Now she held her hand against the little thing’s chest where you could see its beating heart. She did not know what she felt. It was like the bomb blast at the theatre when Suzi Jacques lost her leg — flesh, blood, screaming. I wailed and my awful face shrank up in fear as if I could smell the harm floating in the sterile air.

Felicity heard herself make mummy-noises.

When the hovering Marc Laroche came to her side, she saw his intention was to take Tristan away.

‘Show me how to wrap him,’ she said. And when he hesitated: ‘Please.’

She was aware of how she looked. She was an actress. She had been a model. People were always stirred by her beauty. It was the first thing anyone would write about her. She was ‘tall and willowy’, had ‘stunning cheekbones’, a ‘mass of curling coppery hair’ which framed her ‘slightly triangular face’. She could see the doctors being moved (Marc Laroche to tears) by her beauty, my lack of it, by what they would describe as ‘love’. But what she could not say to them was that it was not anything half so noble. It was not anything she could help or alter.

‘I think you should let us have him now,’ Marc Laroche said when he had swaddled me, not expertly.

‘I’m OK,’ she said. She took the bundle and sat with me on the straight-backed chair.

‘Just the same,’ he said.

She looked at his long bony fingers as they stretched towards her. She shook her head.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just take your time.’

But no one moved. They stayed like this, not speaking, for the best part of half an hour.

‘Well …’ Marc Laroche said at last. ‘I think we might put him in the nursery now. What do you think?’

My maman shook her head. ‘I want him in my room.’

‘Listen,’ Marc Laroche said, ‘you’ve got to face it, Felicity …’

‘In my room,’ my maman said.

‘It will be even harder for you later.’

‘In my room.’

My maman got her way. She kept the crib hard against her bed. In the night there were feeding difficulties because of deficiencies in my lips.

She tried to stay awake all through the night, but finally she could not keep her eyes open. She slept with an arm and a leg placed protectively across the top of the bassinet.

I was safe. Laroche and Eisner were home in their beds, relieved, you can bet, not to have jeopardized their careers with an illegal action, but at seven o’clock the next morning, just as the night staff were leaving, when the first floor-polishers and vacuum cleaners brought a level of confusion into previously calm corridors, a santamarie tried to move Tristan to the nursery. There was no evidence that the woman meant to kill me, but my maman was not taking any chances. She picked me up — I weighed only four pounds — and walked out of the hospital.

There had been no time to try to find her tote bag — she arrived on the street in her hospital wrap. But although she was nearly naked at the back, she held herself in such a way that you would never think the wrap was more than just a summer dress. And as, walking to the hospital, she had hidden the feeling of the pumpkin between her legs, she now hid the fact that she was aching and sore from labour and everything in her wanted to shuffle, not along a public street, but in some quiet protected environment with shiny floors and pink-faced women in white uniforms.

She barely noticed the alien Sirkus. The river bed existed like some bright white over-exposed photograph. She carried Tristan along the sandy path in a kind of daze, and when he vomited an acrid substance the colour of summer grass, she wiped the muck with her finger. There was not much of it — but it was bright and inexplicable and she was frightened.

The Boulevard des Indiennes was filled with large trucks loaded with reinforcing mesh. She got caught for a minute on the traffic island before limping across to Gazette Street which was, at this hour, dominated by dull corrugated walls of metal shutters and roller doors and lined by bright red and silver taxis, all double-parked, driverless, complacently illegal. Her destination was number 34 — the Feu Follet. The posters on the cracked concrete wall outside advertised the Scottish Play with previews beginning on this first Monday in January. In normal circumstances Felicity would have played Lady Macbeth, but she had taken the part of First Witch in respect of her condition.

Between the striking black and white posters was a rusty roller door. Above the roller door was a second floor with six high, gracefully arched windows. The building was topped by the tower in which I had been conceived (and in which, in the time of the Circus School, the great Ducrow was said to have seduced the contortionist Gabrielle Dubois). The rest of the company lived in little monks’ cells scattered through the building. There was no nursery ready. Everyone had been too busy getting ready for the Scottish play.

Felicity walked carefully up the brick ramp and let herself in through the small door inside the big rusty roller. Holding my soft head protectively, she edged through the dark dusty space which was called ‘the foyer’, and walked painfully — her inner thighs hurt, her vulva hurt, every step hurt — up the wide wooden stairs to the second floor where the air was scented with patchouli oil, dirty laundry, incense, cigarette smoke, musk, and the insidious but persistent odour of a blocked toilet which was the subject of dispute with both plumbers and debt badgers. The poky cells in which the great Ducrow had once housed his students were now covered with posters both political and theatrical, the brick walls with spray painting, the frosted glass with glass beads, cane blinds, folk prints.

When my maman arrived on the second floor she was already beyond exhaustion. She had no plan. She began the narrow splintered stairs up to the tower thinking only about the impossibility of the next step, and once she finally gained the safety of the tower, she did something she only did when making love — she locked the door.