Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘Look …’ I pointed to the frog.

Roxanna followed my finger to her handbag but did not seem to notice anything. ‘I love that man, you understand? I know I didn’t used to, but I do.’ She looked up at me. ‘He’s a good man, and he understands me.’

‘I’m … sorry.’

‘I’m not going to lose him, Tristan. So I’m telling you, I’ll be nice as pie to you while he’s around, but either you suggest we go and live some place with light and air or …’

‘Or … what?’

‘Or I’ll go away and I’ll take him with me.’

‘I’m … just … a … kid.’

‘Listen, Mr Machin, *I’m a woman. He’s a man. I can make him do whatever I damn well want. ’

‘You … can’t.’

‘I don’t want to do this,’ Rox said. She slung her handbag over her shoulder. The frog’s fingers were not moving. ‘I want us all to be together, Rikiki, but you’ve got to understand — if you want to fight me, I’ll beat you.’

‘I’ll … tell … Wally.’

‘You don’t know who I am.’ She ruffled my hair, just like she did when she was nice. ‘I’ll kill you if I have to.’

*

Literally, Mr Thing.

I never doubted Wally loved me, but I was up against blusher, eye-shadow, mascara, black lacy panties with a red slit in the crotch, suspender belts, little silver balls connected by a nylon thread. When I heard him whimper in their bed I believed she could make him do anything, including abandon me.

For me he would make frencn toast, but for her he would rise at five-thirty in the morning and go down to the port for those little fish she used to like deep fried on buttered toast. He bought full cream for her coffee. He began to steal again. He did not need to. It was his excitement. It was the feeling of youth Roxanna gave him. He came back to the theatre with his forearms bleeding and unplucked poultry in a hessian bag — ducks, geese, turkey.

He was conjuring for her, making a rich person’s life from nothing. He made sauces with blood and raging blue brandy fire. He was like a crazy bird building a bower and stacking it with pearls and silver paper. New knives appeared, choppers, scalpel-sharp instruments with fat black handles. He produced them like a músico and dissected whole ducks in seconds, piled them on silver platters which still bore the imprint of the Excelsior Hotel.

He began to look different. He had his hair cut short and bristly, so his nose and chin seemed to grow bigger in his face. He ‘located’ more white shirts and came running into the theatre in his clean white sand-shoes bearing baked banana bread, his paternal vision fogged up by the steam of sex. He touched me and kissed me, but he really did not see me at that time.

When we were all together, Roxanna smiled and petted me exactly as before, but when he was away, she made it clear to me that she was going to move Wally out of the Feu Follet.

‘Within a week,’ she said. She held up a finger with a chipped and bitten red nail. ‘Seven days.’

Even I could see she was not well. Twice she tried to light fires in the night — I did not witness this, but saw Wally dealing with the debris in the morning. She did not want peacocks any more, but she wanted apple trees and a vegetable garden. This was what she dwelled on — the impossibility of happiness inside the old Circus School. She showed me her skin. She had a rash along her back she claimed was made by being there.

I was not so well myself. Now I was not prepared to move from my club chair inside the circus ring. I shat there, peed there, was washed while still within its overstuffed arms. I did not know what your agents looked like then. I imagined them in shadows, their features masked by wide-brimmed hats. I forced the new lovers to sleep beside me.

Rox was not continually unkind, even when we were alone together. She would arrive with little egg creams she made herself, but then — while I devoured them — she would walk around the wooden ring guard, circling me, talking to herself about me, or praying to God to put me in a home. She said things in Latin I did not understand. At other times she disappeared. I would hope she had gone, but then I would learn that she had been on the front steps, getting ‘clean air’.

I slept, I woke. I peed in the plastic bucket. Time began the grey, almost featureless continuum that was to be so much a characteristic of my future life. But always, at three o’clock in the afternoon, while Wally was preparing his evening ‘surprise’ in the kitchen, Roxanna would bring me a perroquet and then sit in Row B with a glass of ice-water and a zine.

At these times I tried to reach out and touch her heart. I had no idea how sick she was. I was a child, tried to arouse her sense of pity by making myself seem ill. I complained of aches and pains. I wept, hunched my shoulders, folded my arms across my chest. Sometimes she drew me to her breast and told me that she loved me.

And then a new stage arrived and it seemed that my organism had responded to my will. I became truly sweaty, really feverish. Roxanna held me and begged me to change my mind. Even when I began to vomit I imagined it was something I had willed myself.

Wally gave me dry toast and made me chicken soup, but nothing stopped me getting sicker and Roxanna crazier.

On the fifth or sixth afternoon, she stood herself up straight in front of the front row of seats, held her plump arms by her side, made her hands into fists, and began to scream at me. She told me she had been convicted of stabbing a man in the spanker. She said I was unwise to mess with her. She said she had Wally’s tringler in her pocket. But as she said these things she got redder and redder in the face and she began to gulp and burp. She collapsed into a Starbuck and put her head between her legs.

‘Please,’ she said when she regained her composure. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’

She began to frown. Then I saw that she was crying. The tears were very large. They made large round marks on the dusty duckboards.

‘Why do you want to destroy my life?’ she said to me. Her face was crushed by howling. Her eyes were running black. ‘You’re the one who’s going to lose,’ she said. ‘Can’t you feel what’s happening?’

By then I was desperately ill, racked by stomach cramps and diarrhoea. It was the first time I thought that I could beat her, but it was also as close as I came to witnessing my victory, for it was during this fracas that Wally, finally, realized how sick the little actor had become.

I never knew what happened until later, but when I was discharged from the Mater, Roxanna was gone from our life.

There is a mystery here, Madame, Meneer, which will all be settled in good time. But when I came back to the Feu Follet, nothing seemed mysterious.

Peace prevailed, long sweet unchallenged periods of silence, long dust-filled rays of light, the odour of sweet musty sawdust in the air. So happy was I with this resolution that it took some days to realize that Wally was now in pain himself. He had loved Roxanna. He had thought they were two sides of the same coin.

As the days passed this pain did not diminish. Sometimes he stole a little to cheer himself. Sometimes he cooked new and complicated recipes from gourmet magazines. Often he just sat at the kitchen table and watched the white train of his foaming bride as it spilled down the side of his glass.

As one week became a month and the month a year, his injury set hard. We were like two planets caught in mutual fields of gravity, each unable to break free. In this way my youth passed and he moved into old age.

And then, just when you would think that that was that — when we were, the two of us, like a pair of crippled eccentrics whose wasted lives would make you shudder, whose existence you might learn of only when one died and the other starved to death, I suggested that we take this trip to Voorstand together.