Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I would live only where my mother had died. Within fifteen feet of the place. Will you laugh in my face if I tell you I felt safest there? In the deepest, darkest hole on earth.

I sat with my book, always the same book. I did not understand it, but I would not permit anyone to explain a word to me. I was eleven years old, ferocious, like an animal.

ROXANNA looks over WALLY’s sweet white cotton shoulder and there I am — her salvation, her nemesis, locked into my chair, my eyes blazing, my nose running, my loose maw dribbling thick saliva.

She has ironed Wally’s white cotton shirt. When they dance, she can smell that sexy mixture of man and cotton.

She whispers, her mouth close against Wally’s ear. Wally nods his nose against her neck.

‘I’m not staying here,’ she calls to TRISTAN SMITH. ‘I’m going out.’

‘Someone … has … to … be … with … me.’

‘Come on, Rikiki,’ Wally says. He breaks away from Roxanna, kneels at my feet. ‘Come on, fellah, you’re going to feel much better.’

‘It’s … my … theatre.’

‘Of course it’s your theatre,’ he says. ‘We’re going to swim, in the ocean.’

‘You … have … to … stay … here.’

‘Wally does not have to do shit,’ Roxanna says.

‘He … has … to … stay.’

Roxanna looks at me and sees Phantome Drool — wide mouth dribbling. ‘Wally’s entitled to have his life just like you.’

‘If … my … mother … was … alive … you … wouldn’t … talk … to … me … like … that.’

Rox takes a breath before she answers. ‘Come on , Tristan.’

She turns and walks towards the foyer.

‘Where … are … you … going?’ This is not ROBERT BRUCE talking, not NAPOLEON. This is a crow, a gull, something on a city dump. My voice is high and scratchy with anxiety. I make ‘going’ sound like ‘gung’.

She says, ‘I’m taking the food out to the truck now.’

She descends the front steps with the picnic box. She sees two chopped and channelled custom cars drive along Gazette Street, taking the short cut on to the Boulevard des Indiennes. Two boys in the front, two girls in the back. You can see beach towels on their rear window ledges, and they double-declutch as they come past the taxi base, and Roxanna, as she crosses the tar-sticky street towards the truck, skips, once, across the broken white lines. It is, like, normal life occurring.

She unlocks the truck, places the cardboard box behind the bench seat, opens the driver’s side door, and sits behind the glove box, looking through the tapes for ‘Beach Music’.

She hears me coming before she sees me — arms flailing, spitting, howling, shrieking like a cat. Roxanna jumps down from the truck and opens the door. Wally releases YOUNG TRISTAN into the cabin and I scramble, fight, claw like a native cat, clambering over the bench seat and into the darkness of the back.

My captors climb into the truck, turn up the music, loud.

I find picnic things and throw them: cheese, bread, apples.

They are not even into the Boulevard des Indiennes when the beer bottle smashes. Roxanna sees me — on my back, my arms and legs up in the air, rolling on the broken glass like a dog in the dust. Even as the glass cuts my skin, I keep my eyes on hers.

War.

When they got me back from hospital, Rox was very nice to me. She spread the picnic rug on the stage, right at my feet. She put soft pillows on my chair so I could lean back without making my cuts hurt. She unwrapped each of the small pink-iced croix cakes and cut them and spread them with blackberry confit.

Whatever she did to Wally’s porpoise in the bed that night, it was more than she had ever done before. When he saw the angels, he made high, hard noises in the back of his throat. He went on and on. In the morning he whistled and drove all the way down to the port to buy some fresh bream for our breakfast.

The minute the truck’s engine started, Roxanna got out of her bed and came into my room, pulling Wally’s blue-checked dressing gown around her. She was still very nice to me, but her eyes were bloodshot and there was a hardness in her face I had not known before.

She took Without Consent from my hands and slid it under my pillow in a way that did not brook interference. ‘It’s a beautiful day out there, Rikiki.’

She cocked her head, as if waiting for an answer.

‘Not a beautiful day,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’

She kneeled at my feet and opened her handbag. At first I thought she was looking for a Caporal, but when she turned back to me she was holding something in her closed cupped hands. Then she smiled. For a moment it was the old Rox. She blew across her intertwined fingers, like Wally in his magic trick. I could smell the sour wine on her breath. Everything about her was so familiar, so much a part of me, that even this smell, which had initially been so alien, now signalled comfort and security — breakfast, warm sheets, buttery toast eaten in her arms.

‘Mo-chou,’ she said. ‘Did you hear me, Chocolat? You want to see my present?’

‘OK,’ I said. I sat up in my bed.

She opened her white hands — a small squish-mak frog, bright green with long yellow stripes, sat on her palm.

‘Was … it … in … your … purse … all … night?’

‘Look,’ she said.

‘I … know … a … squish … mak.’

‘The world is beautiful.’

‘I … know.’

‘It’s so easy to forget.’

‘You … don’t … understand … anything.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You be careful, mo-camarad.’ She held the frog up to my eyes. ‘Look,’ she said. She smiled again. The squishmak was wet and shining, a kind of lime green. It had big wide eyes and long thin fingers. ‘God made it, just like He made you.’

I did not answer.

‘Well?’

I could see how tired she was, her skin, her red and yellow eyes. She had a red wine crust around her lips.

‘Do you know what I’m saying to you?’

I did not know what I was meant to say. I shrugged.

‘Do you want to ruin my life?’ she said suddenly. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ I said, and it was true. I loved her, her lipstick-sour-wine smell, her frowning forehead, the fine blonde down which only showed when the sunlight fell on her neck, along her chin line, her chipped and bitten cuticles when she removed her red stick-on nails, the way she bent her small thin fingers back to explain a point, the bruises on her knees which she rubbed at with her fingers now, as if she might erase them.

‘My life has been lousy up to now,’ she said. ‘Do you realize — I’m nearly twenty-six years old?’

‘Your … life?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Your life is fine. Nothing is going to hurt you now. It’s been two months, Tristan. Nothing has happened to you. Nothing will. You’re not political. No one thinks that you’re a threat to anything. If you’re a threat to anyone, it’s me. Do you realize what happened at the hospital?’

‘Six … stitches.’

‘They thought me and Wally cut you up. That fellow with the specs near-as-damn-it called the Gardiacivil. I’m the one who should be scared, not you.’

‘I’m … sorry.’

‘I already burnt a house down,’ she said. ‘It isn’t smart to make me tense. Please say you’ll let us go and live somewhere else. We could be happy, all of us.’

She opened her handbag and slid the frog back in. She snapped it shut, and caught the creature’s foot between two golden metal clips. She did not seem to notice what she had done.

‘You cannot do this to me,’ Roxanna said to me. ‘You can’t.’