Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘They stole that from the house,’ she whispered.

Steam swirled around the black ink picture.

‘They broke into my house and stole it,’ she hissed. ‘Can you read it? They’re saying I hurt Vincent’s wife.’

‘How?’

‘Sssh. Talk into my ear too. They say I took Vincent from her.’

This was nothing more than she had already told me.

‘We think they have microphones in here, to listen to us.’

‘Who?’ I asked, looking up at the dripping yellow walls.

‘The water stops them hearing what I say to you.’ The steam was causing her make-up to run. ‘For Chrissakes, listen to me. Please. They are going to start now in earnest. Some of it is already with the newspapers. They are going to say things about your mother that are not true. You must never believe what they say about me.’

‘What … will … they … say?’

‘Whatever they think will hurt us the most. That I’m a thief, perhaps, that I tell lies, God knows what else. When we win, we close down their facilities. We send them home to Voorstand. The alliance is over, mo-chou. They thought it could never happen to them — that’s why it’s all happening so late, but what is happening now is like their play — they’ve written stories about me, Vincent too.’

‘About … me … too?’

‘No, sweets, not about you.’

Her arms were white, hard, stringy, her nose sharp, her skin hot and red with the steam.

‘The Voorstanders are very bad,’ she said. ‘This is what I’ve always tried to tell you. I know Wally tells you other things, but Wally doesn’t know some things, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said, but I held my mask tight in my lap, in case she tried to snatch it from me.

She wiped my face with Roxanna’s towel. ‘We are going to go upstairs now and we are going to hear people making plans we do not intend to follow. It’s a performance — do you understand?’

‘Like … a … play.’

‘Like a play, exactly. We think they listen to us, somehow. We don’t know what they can know or how they really do it. Maybe they can hear all this. We don’t know if they can hear or not. Tristan, darling, your maman doesn’t know how to fight them when they’re so unfair.’

All of this had its effect on me, of course, but not nearly as much as the news that she planned to trick her enemies by staying the night at the theatre. I hugged her and kissed her, and told her I would look after her.

She turned off the bath and the basin taps and mopped the condensation off the floor.

I wanted to put my mask on to face the crowd upstairs, but I could not wear it with my mother present. I went upstairs and faced them with a naked face, a rag mouth. Vincent came and brought me a sandwich and a glass of milk. He looked very old behind his beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his suit looked like it had been slept in.

‘There … was … a … crazy … woman … here,’ I said.

Gabe Manzini sat in a car in Gazette Street and watched the old Circus School. He had been awake all the night but his tanned skin was clean and taut. He felt light-footed, clear-headed, alive to the pleasures of the sunshine on his shoulders and the light salt breeze which ruffled the sleeve of his grey and white checked shirt.

The clarity of the Efican light was electric, dream-like. He enjoyed the bright, almost two-dimensional façade of the Feu Follet building, the extreme clarity of its rusting steel-framed windows, even the obvious warp and weft of the twelve tall Blue flags which floated gently in the cloudless sky, the bright, clean reflective surfaces of the red and silver taxi cabs parked in a chain along the street.

There was a way in which all of this was so much in keeping with his mood — clean, cool, ordered — so much in contrast to the murky, panicked mood presently prevailing in Saarlim where Analysis had once again misread the Efican political climate.

It was the historical mission of Analysis — this was what he’d told his own guys at one o’clock this morning — to screw things up and therefore make Operations look good. He said this to motivate them, but he also believed it. Analysis thought Efica was already lost to the Alliance.

Gabe had been grateful to be given this task, nineteen days before polling day, and he enjoyed this feeling now, with just nine days to go, that he could save Efica without a single shot being fired, keep the Red Party in power with the sheer force of his will.

On the seat beside him were the newspapers, not just those from Chemin Rouge but from all over La Perouse, from the other islands, too — Inkerman, Nez Noir, Baker, tiny islands like Shark that no one in Saarlim City ever heard of, all of them carrying the one story, his story, fresh, hand-made — the suicide of the wife of the candidate’s lover.

Before this happened, Smith had been ten points up in a vital seat. Now he sat in his car to watch her cop the bad tomatoes. The guys from Zinebleu were parked across the way, right in front of the steps. They were gutter hounds, pit-bull terriers. He had released her location to them, exclusive. You could rely on them. Their front-page photograph would make her look sleazy beyond belief.

Of course, Analysis would call this luck. What they never did appreciate was that things only fell together with a great deal of assistance. Operations had not induced the wife’s mental state, but only an amateur would call the action lucky. It was the result of detailed knowledge, of discipline, and the ability to act swiftly, cleanly, without hesitation. Natalie Theroux was unstable. She had a gun. The gun now bore her prints. The bullet in her brain was from this gun.

You could not have this sort of ‘luck’ without happy, well-motivated people on the ground. Gabe had these people, not by accident, but because he personally selected them, trained them, and flew thirteen-hour flights in order to visit them regularly. They were a particular type — active by nature, intelligent, but able to endure weeks of drudge work. They were more than this — they were like this driver who sat beside him now, a Uzi strapped inside his coat, a man who picked a bag of apples from his own tree before he came to work at four a.m.

Now, as he waited for Smith and her campaign manager to emerge from the front door of the building, Gabe bit into one of these small pale yellow Efican apples. The skin had the golden translucency of a yellow plum, the flesh was very white, slightly tart.

‘Good?’

‘Good.’

‘Best damn apples in the world.’

He was not wrong, Gabe thought, washing down the white sweet apple with hot sugarless Efican coffee. This was also good, heavy, characteristically fragrant, slightly furry on the tongue, and he thought how much he always enjoyed what was particular about every country he had ever worked in.

He smiled and contracted his thigh muscles, recalling his three-hour R&R with Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, her honey-salt taste, her adventurousness in bed, her soft baby tears and her easy need. He had thought about her all through the long night afterwards. She had lain there like a promise.

Indeed, he was thinking of Roxanna, gazing across at the building, listening to the flapping flags, admiring the way the sun seemed to glaze the chipped and flaking white wall of the Feu Follet, when he saw, framed perfectly in a window, a woman so exactly like her that he gasped.

He poked his close-cropped head a little out of the car, and squinted up towards her. The woman was rubbing her scalp and yawning. As she yawned, her eyes closed up, but as the yawn ended, the eyes opened. She saw him looking up at her. And he understood, not so much because of her appearance, which was clouded by the filthy window, but by the frozen guilty moment that came before she ducked her head, that it was Roxanna.