Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

He shut his eyes and exhaled.

When he opened his eyes, a man and woman were walking out the front door of the theatre — the woman was in a yellow dress, the man was bearded, all in black; it was Smith & Theroux. The boys from Zinebleu came in from the flank. Their flash gun was popping from fifteen feet away, but Gabe could no longer enjoy it. He opened the car door.

‘Tell Cantrell advise the CRTV,’ he told the driver.

‘Who?’

‘Cantrell.’ He was already heading for the theatre door. ‘Hurry. There she goes.’

As he crossed the street, a terrible feeling took control of him. He had been set up by a woman. He could not believe something so humiliating was happening. He prayed, as he entered the rank foyer with its whining little notices pinned to the wall, as he ran three steps a time up the stairs, that he was somehow mistaken about what he had seen, that the woman at the window had just looked like Roxanna because he was thinking of her at that moment. But even while he prayed this he could see, in his mind’s eye, the results of the residence check he had run, but barely looked at — Gazette Street. God damn.

On the second floor he discovered a line of deserted offices. He was light on his feet and he moved down the corridor with the careful grace of an athlete, but he felt ill-prepared, clumsy, like someone drunk called into combat. He had been sloppy, complacent, second-rate — everything he despised. His only weapon was the box-cutter which he now transferred to the palm of his hand, still closed. He opened one door after the other — not following procedure, but with a deliberate carelessness — a challenge to fate to prove his fears unfounded.

The rooms whose doors he so casually opened all had that particular potent emptiness he equated with stake-outs, sniper posts. They were like sweaters with their labels torn out — they taunted him with their lack of information.

In the last room he found three mattresses on the floor, a fug of blankets, sheets, socks. The door banged back when he kicked it. Two of the mattresses were empty but on the third he could see a small white wrist showing from beneath a pile of blankets. He wrinkled his nose and passed his broad hand over his clipped hair.

‘Roxanna?’

The blankets stirred, and then her tousled blonde head appeared, caped in a tartan blanket.

‘Gabey?’

Even now, in extremis, a part of him was touched by her, moved by the white softness of her flesh. She was sleeping naked, and as she kneeled he could see the pronounced curve of her belly, and he could imagine the smell of her warmth, the feel of it against his face.

‘You stupid bitch,’ he said.

‘Gabey …’

‘What amateur trick is this?’

‘No, Gabey,’ she said. ‘No trick.’

She pulled the blankets around her shoulders like a shawl. She squatted, frowning up at him. He could see her little foot, her ankle, her chipped toenails.

‘I’m poor, that’s all.’

He went to the window and looked down. Everyone had gone.

‘I am respected, all over the world,’ he said. ‘Peru, Burma, China — they know me in these places. They know I am the best. I write their fucking history books, Roxanna. People stand in my way, Rox, I kill them.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Read the paper, bitch. Look at the front page of today’s paper.’

‘Gabey, don’t be angry. What’s in the zines, honey?’

‘You tell your people, Rox — they’re dead. They’re fucking history.’

‘What people, Gabe?’

‘So what did you get?’ he said. ‘Why would you risk it? What the fuck could you get anyway?’

Roxanna stood up and walked to her handbag which was sitting on a milk crate underneath the window. She opened her handbag. His neck bristled when he heard the sound of small objects, clinking. Then he saw what they were: small Ritz shampoo bottles, moisturizers. Oh my God, he thought, the bitch has wired me.

‘Put them there.’ He pointed to the window ledge.

When she had arranged all the items on the sill, she stepped back. He stepped forward, picked up the shampoo. It seemed heavier than normal to him. He opened the cap, poured the goops of shampoo on to the floor, peered inside, then stopped. He was being an amateur himself.

There was a plastic shopping bag amongst tangled dirty clothes on the floor. He picked it up and swept the little bottles into it.

‘We could never let them win the election,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that? Do you have anything else?’

‘You’re not a banker,’ she said. ‘What are you?’

‘Very funny. Do you have anything else?’

She stooped and lifted up the corner of her mattress. Turning, she held out a big menu from the Ritz dining room. He dropped it in the plastic bag.

‘I would never have picked you,’ he said.

‘I picked you.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I thought you were the answer to my prayers.’ He saw her smile collapse, and the tears begin to run. Resisting the desire to embrace her, he turned and went out the door.

I could feel suicide all around me, viscous, shameful, wrong. I could see the inside of Natalie’s mouth in my mind’s eye, the broken tooth. The odour of death lay in the hallways. It got mixed with pie, cinnamon, sugar, pigeons’ throats, vents opening, closing, was overlaid with a persistent vision of the dead woman’s bony chest — birds’ bones, white translucent skin.

Wally would not let it matter. He was a sergeant-major, stamping and stomping in his big suede boots. He brushed my teeth. He made me gargle salt and water. He combed my hair with his comb, digging its sharp tortoiseshell teeth into my scalp. He strapped on my mask and sent me down into the leafy courtyard where old Ducrow got eaten by his lion.

‘Do your warm-ups,’ he said.

‘Are we going to do a show?’

‘Just do what I say.’

He was hectoring and impatient with Roxanna too. He bullied her into going out for coloured chalk. I had not seen him treat her this way before. I did not understand it, why she let him, why he wanted to do it. I did not know why she was so upset — she had less connection with Natalie Theroux than any of us.

She had a little lambswool cardigan she had found in Props. It was a size too small. She buttoned it to the neck and folded her arms across her breasts. Her eyes were weepy, her nose red, her shoulders were rounded, but she went out to buy the chalk and came back to the courtyard where Wally, having swept the cobblestones fastidiously, was now running a long orange power-cord to one of the stolen vids he always had around the place.

Roxanna, in giving him the chalk, made a small noise, a sob.

‘Don’t dwell on it,’ was all he said.

As for me? I could not warm-up. I was too disturbed. Whenever I closed my eyes to begin my breathing I saw the crazy woman’s face-her throat, her tooth, blood, gore, ooze.

Then Wally turned on the vid.

Roxanna sat heavily on the garden bench. She held out her arms for me. I sat in her lap and pressed my body hard back into her.

The weather forecast was on the vid. Wally began to draw white and yellow chalk marks on cobblestones. The chalk did not always take well, but he was not prepared to wait. Following his blue-lined exercise book, he made a series of loops, arrows, arcs, all with the greatest urgency, but when my mother’s face appeared on the screen, he stopped. He tucked his chalk back behind his ears.

‘Shush,’ he said, but the only voices were crackling from the slightly damaged two-inch speakers. ‘This is it.’

What they were saying was — my maman as good as killed Natalle Theroux, and when I saw Felicity’s ghosted image on CRTV4 it seemed as if she really had. I watched her mouth, her eyes, the 625 lines across her face, at noon on 20 January, in Chemin Rouge in the year 382.