Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Really?’

She was too tensed about everything — her impetuousness, the 450-dollar lump of dress she had left lying on the floor, this dizzy, unconnected feeling. She wept then. Once a whore, she thought.

‘Tell me what to do,’ he said, rubbing her neck. ‘Just tell me what to do.’

‘Hang up my dress,’ she said. ‘Please, would you do that for me?’

He looked at her incredulously. At first she thought he was going to laugh, and then his eyes narrowed and she thought he would tell her to hang it up herself.

‘Please.’

He shrugged his head down into his shoulders and splayed his hands. He hung up the dress. She did not look at him do it, because she would not have wanted him to look at her.

When he came back into bed he held her head between his hands and kissed her on her eyes and then softly, repeatedly, on her mouth. She felt herself open up to him.

She had done everything wrong. She had lost the plot completely but for this long at least she did not give a damn.

When Roxanna confessed to Gabe Manzini that she was a pyromaniac, he felt a give-away smile appear on the edges of his small, pretty mouth. He kissed her neck to hide it and felt the coarse tickle of her thick, strong hair. He inhaled her smell, whisky, barley. He rubbed his nose against her little rough tattoo and he was happy. God damn: she fit the specs. She had the look. He had known her when she came into the auction room — slightly bruised but golden, small-waisted, heavy in the legs, they were always similar, each time, and here was this thing — pyromania this time — it clicked into place like the keystone in an arch. Whatever it was he was repeating, he did not want to stop. He was going to have a perfect gig in Efica.

‘What is it?’ she said, snuggling up to him.

‘You’re my good-luck charm,’ he said.

All his girls had some kind of craziness — kleptomania, agoraphobia, always something that would later be a pain in the ass, but which would also be part of their sexual fizz. Sometimes he tried to think how their personal craziness matched the craziness of the country, but pyromania, no, please, not Efica. Pyromania was more applicable to Indo-China, South America, time-warp Marxists, Jesuits with blazing eyes.

Gabe Manzini liked Eficans. They were dry, ironic, uncomfortable with dogma, suspicious of high-sounding rhetoric. Their small population, their geographic isolation, their lack of natural riches, their tiny GNP, their historical military dependence on both the French and the English had helped forge a pragmatic people, not easily given to visions of bloody revolutions or even rosy futures. Yet, for all that, they were presently engaged upon a full-scale national misunderstanding — that they could renegotiate their alliance with Voorstand.

If this had been a major nation, one would be irritated, but this was not a major nation. This was Efica, for God’s sake, with neither military nor economic power. You would imagine that after three hundred years they would understand their position, but suddenly they did not get it — not just the intellectual minority, but an infuriating 51 per cent (October), 52 per cent (November), 50 per cent (December) were responding to the current Blue Party rhetoric. If the Blues won the upcoming elections, Voorstand would be directed to remove its devices from Efican soil and Efica would become ‘friendly but neutral’.

In the world of realpolitik, this was fantasy, not because Efican territorial waters supplied 25 per cent of Voorstand’s fish, or even because the northern islands provided a safe storage place for chemical waste. It was fantasy because Efica’s southern granite islands were now host to fifteen vital subterranean defence projects. Eficans would not be permitted to reject their twenty-five-year-old alliance with Voorstand.

And this, of course, was why Gabe Manzini was here. It was his job to make sure the status quo was maintained.

‘So,’ he grinned, ‘you’re a pyromaniac? You burn things, right?’

‘Oh, don’t be horrible.’ Roxanna lifted her face from his chest and showed him her wide, moist brown eyes. She was delicious.

‘Isn’t that what you were telling me?’

‘You tricked me into saying it. It isn’t fair.’

‘So I should I hide my matches from you,’ he teased. ‘No flambés.’

‘It isn’t like it sounds. It isn’t really that at all.’ She paused. ‘What’s flambé?’

‘We could have room service, right now.’

‘What is it?’

He loved the way she flushed and the way her lips parted. He placed his hands under her plump arms and pulled her further up his chest. She moved up with a soft grizzle like a puppy and kissed him with that huge soft open mouth. He checked the clock from the corner of his eye. ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he said. He kissed her on the nose. ‘Those other fellows in the bank will be out whoring and making themselves miserable.’

‘Mmmmm,’ she wriggled against him.

‘I just hate I’ve got to go to sleep.’

‘Me too,’ she yawned.

Gabe sat up. ‘Roxanna. I’m not permitted to do that. I can’t actually sleep with you.’

‘Oh listen …’

‘It’s not personal, Roxanna.’

‘Listen , I was just playing a game with you. You told me you were dangerous. I just said it to trump you. I don’t even know what a pyromaniac is, not really. Do I really look like a crazy person?’

‘This is policy …’

‘I wouldn’t do anything to you, honey. If you knew how much I loved being here, you wouldn’t send me away. Please let me sleep here, Gabey, please. All I want to do is sleep, and wake up, and then I’ll go away.’

‘If it was up to me …’

‘But it is up to you.’

‘If it was up to me you could stay a week.’

‘Who is it up to?’ she said, sitting up.

‘The bank.’

‘Some guys don’t like to fall asleep with women, I know that. Maybe they’re Catholic or something — they just want to call the girl a cab. If that’s what it is, just tell me. I can take it.’

‘We have a policy,’ he said. He pulled her reluctant body towards him and kissed that delicious little ink-blue dove under her hair. ‘We have a policy, in foreign countries, to protect our executives. Guys in my job get kidnapped, killed, colleagues of mine.’

‘This is Efica.’

‘So if you just give me your driver’s licence number or your ID, they’ll check you out and then we can sleep.’

‘I have to give you my ID?’

‘You don’t have to do anything.’

‘I guess this is a foreign country,’ Roxanna said. ‘I guess I seem as foreign to you as all this does to me.’ But she got out of bed and found her ID and gave it to him and watched while he wrote it down. ‘Now I take a cab, right?’

‘Now you take a cab.’

She took her ID back and opened her wallet.

‘Damn.’

‘What?’

‘I left my cash at home.’

For a moment it occurred to him that she was on the game. He felt a bitter disappointment, a kind of anger. It flushed into him like speed when it enters straight into the vein. It changed his face, slitted his eyes, thinned out the bow in his lips.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what do you need?’

She was looking at his face and her own was pale. ‘Five,’ she said. ‘If you don’t have it, it’s OK.’

He laughed then, and gave her the 5 dollars. At the door he kissed her again. He was in a good mood. He kicked off his shoes, poured himself another glass of red wine, and then he rang through to the Voorstand embassy to have them send over the latest communiqués.