Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘This is political ,’ she said.

It did not seem the right thing to say. They wanted to talk about her and Vincent. I pushed further back into Roxanna’s breasts. I tightened the buckles on my mask and stared at my mother through the slits. She was scared. She laid her hand briefly against her throat. She tried to smile. It did not seem the right thing to do.

My mother swallowed. She touched her hair. I could feel her shame behind my own eyes, a cold, cold pain like ice.

The camera showed the interviewer with his head on one side, stern, judicial.

My maman was irritated, angry.

‘This was a political assassination.’

‘No,’ said Wally, ‘she doesn’t need to say that. She shouldn’t say that.’

Then she started to talk about ‘military and security elements in Voorstand’.

‘No one wants to hear this,’ Wally said. ‘She makes herself look bad …’

‘Shush,’ said Roxanna.

‘She should not be saying this,’ Wally said. ‘She looks as if she doesn’t care about Natalie.’

‘Shut up,’ Roxanna said.

‘This was a political assassination ,’ my maman said. ‘Natalie Theroux did not break the laundry window of her own house in order to kill herself from one foot away … ’

‘OK,’ Wally said. ‘That’s that.’ He turned off the television.

‘Gabe did this,’ Roxanna said. ‘This is what he did.’

‘That’s history,’ Wally told her. ‘It happened in the past. Now we’ve got to deal with the future. Whatever happened between this Voorstand jerk and you, that’s one thing. What happened with Vincent’s missus, that’s another. It’s all in the past.’

‘What are you so scared of?’ Roxanna said. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘You’ve got to keep it clear in your head,’ he said. He was back at work, drawing on the cobblestones with chalk. He moved across the courtyard like a monkey, on his haunches. He had sticks of chalk behind his big lobed ears. He looked only at his exercise book and at the floor, never up at us. He made a dotted line.

Roxanna pushed her eye into my hair and rubbed against my skull. ‘Wally, you can’t see yourself?’

‘I’m drawing lines for toucans …’

‘You are drawing lines for toucans. What the fuck is that?’

‘I can train them,’ Wally said. ‘You know what I do. You’ve seen my birds.’

‘I am sure that what the mother says is true. I slept with this little creep, do you understand? He was the one at the Ritz. Why won’t you listen to me?’

When Wally turned he looked as if his face had been slapped.

‘Don’t you see what’s happened to me?’ Roxanna said. ‘I know him. His name is Gabe Manzini. I was going to marry him. He’s the one I picked. He as-good-as told me he did exactly what the maman says.’

‘He as-good-as told you?’

‘He said, Tell your people that they’re dead.’

‘That could mean anything.’

‘No, no. It was very clear. He’s not a banker. He said, we could never let them win the election. Can’t you even imagine how I’m feeling?’ Roxanna said. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened to me? Can’t you imagine how bad I feel, how stupid I’ve been?’

I looked at Wally. I had known him all my life, known the freckles and hair on his arms, the mole on his neck, the pouches under his grey eyes, but when I looked at him across that spray-wet sawdust I saw, for the first time, what his life had been like, how he had been in prison. He squatted on the floor, cold, cruel, like a dog, face drawn, hatchet-shaped.

‘Just shut the fuck up,’ he said. ‘All you’re doing is getting yourself in a panic.’

‘All I want is a cuddle, Wally,’ Roxanna whimpered. ‘Is that so much to ask? Do I deserve to have you tell me shut up?’

Wally laid his chalk down on the cobbles. He put it down so slowly you could feel all his fear in the action. He laid the chalk as if it were precious crystal that might fracture, a bomb that might explode. He came and knelt beside us. He was stiff, contained. He put his hand towards Roxanna’s shoulder. She flinched from him. He lifted his hands up, away, flat-palmed.

‘Take responsibility for yourself.’

Roxanna held me tighter. ‘Why are you so horrible to me?’ she said. ‘I am taking responsibility. I’m saying it’s my fault. But what the maman says is true.’

‘We have to get on with our lives,’ Wally whispered. I twisted my neck to look at him. He was very close to me. I could see the fear swimming in his eyes.

‘We make our lives out of what we have, out of what’s possible.’

‘Out of toucans?’

‘This is Efica. We’ve got to be reallstic.’

He reached behind his ear for another length of chalk.

‘We can make a decent life,’ he said. He knelt and began to draw a long yellow arc across the stage. All this was happening in the last twenty-four hours of my mother’s life. No one told me it was so. I thought I would have her for ever.

If Natalie’s suicide had damaged Felicity more, she might have lived.

Her support dropped seven points — not quite enough for safety’s sake. They came and put a rope around her neck, and pushed her off. She hung and kicked above the sawdust ring, her own damn stage. She pissed, she shit, she bled, she died. Tristan’s mother, a young woman in a yellow dress, forty-three years old.

Vincent was in the car outside playing with his gun. Tristan, Wally, Roxanna, were on the floor above her. Friends all around her, seconds from her side.

The maman loved Efica but she was born in Voorstand. The Voorstanders did not hate her personally. They stole her life — Manzini, the VIA, someone. It was not personal. They took her life from Tristan, not personal. They did not think through the consequences. They did not even think that when the boy found his maman, at two a.m., they were presenting him with a horror he would carry all his life, the picture of his mother dead and ugly, hanging from a bright green rope.

Tristan came down the stairs because he heard a noise, thought his mother’s master class was about to start. His green rope was missing from the stairs. He came down a step at a time. Slowly. He heard the scuffling. Theatres are always full of scuffling, shouting, cries — it is the business of the theatre: life, death, catharsis.

Until this happens to you, you have no idea how the brain works, how it refuses to deliver the bad news, how it seeks anything but the truth, runs naturally away from it like water running down hill.

Tristan saw his mother hanging dead inside the Feu Follet theatre. Her handbag was on the floor. Her eyes bulging, her jaw slack. His brain lied to him.

It is a mask.

Then: It is an exercise.

Then: It is someone else.

Then: It’s Natalie.

Only the smell. Forget it. It was a smell. I cannot go to the bathroom without remembering my maman’s death.

The night my mother died, other things were happening to the Blue Party — land scandals, *money scandals, †they rose like mushrooms after rain. I did not know Gabe Manzini’s face or name, but he was an ace, the best. One scandal one day, a new one the next. He made the Blues appear both incompetent and corrupt.

In the history of Efica my mother’s death is an adulterer’s death. She is remembered in the morass of shame that Eficans feel about this time.

Me — I never doubted what had happened — not for a second. Even before I saw there was no stool, chair, ladder, I knew. I could not reach her but I cut my mask off my face with a box-cutter. I could not reach her but I smashed Bruder Mouse with a brick. Wally was there then. Vincent was there.