Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I was like an injured cat. I did not want to be held or touched. Rox and Wally circled me like a bandage, a blindfold, a blanket. They stayed with me all through the night. Other things happened — police, doctors, sedatives, statements — but they all happened after this. At five a.m., against my wishes, my maman’s body was removed on a stretcher.

I rocked back and forth, pounding the now hateful Meneer Mouse with the brick, turning the balsa wood into a feathery pulp.

Vincent sat behind me. Sometimes he put a hand on my shoulder. He was so frail and guilty, unwashed, matted, so wan and washed out in his crumpled lint-and snot-marked black suit — no one could have guessed he would be married again before two years were out.

Bill arrived late the next day, the Tuesday.

He was tall, tanned, gravure-handsome, with huge padded shoulders and pointed snakeskin shoes with silver tips on the laces. He looked like the embodiment of everything the Feu Follet had fought — your culture, your Sirkus. He opened his arms and, with tears streaming down his crumpled face, fell on his tightly trousered knees. He pressed the snotty rag of my face against the puffy shoulder of his black silk suit.

Wally remembers this.

He remembers also how he swallowed hard, how he felt grief and jealousy combine deep in the darkness of his throat. His hard freckled body woodenly resisted Bill’s embrace. Yet when he said, ‘I’m pleased you came, mo camarade,’ he meant it sincerely.

But on the following morning, when Wally walked into his kitchen and found Bill already there — holding me balanced on his shoulders while he dredged skipjack fillets, one-handed, in a plate of flour — he was no longer pleased at all.

He looked at how I clung to my father’s neck and felt usurped, injured, insulted. He stayed in the doorway, fiddling with his cigarette pack.

Bill was wearing a loose crumpled white shirt with ballooning sleeves and a big collar. ‘We’re going to do some acting exercises,’ he told Wally. ‘We’ll need the theatre for the morning.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘a great idea.’

After breakfast, he drank two small tumblers of brandy and cleaned up the mess Bill had left behind him.

Half an hour later he remembers looking into the theatre and finding Bill and me kneeling opposite each other on the sawdust, inside the ring. We were both weeping. Wally walked quietly through the darkened house and climbed up to the booth, and there, sitting alone and unobserved, not even smoking, he spied on us moving about the stage.

I was not his actual son, but he loved me like a son. He put me to bed each night. He checked my breathing, bathed me during my fevers, talked to me when I had bad dreams.

The big glass window of the booth framed the illuminated stage like a vid screen. He switched on the house mike.

Now Bill was asking me to ‘do’ different funerals. What I performed were more in the nature of revenges than funerals — stabbing and shooting. I moved around the stage like a wind-up toy, rolling, walking on my knees, spitting, shouting, crying in a high wild voice Wally never heard before.

I remember none of this. Wally saw it all. He saw Bill and me begin to move around the stage, pretending to pick things up and place them in the centre. It was some minutes before Wally understood: we were collecting Bruder Mouses for an imaginary bonfire.

After we had set the fire alight, I became a little calmer, and soon I was loudly imagining the four of us, me and the three fathers, wearing white make-up to the funeral. ‘Thick,’ I said, ‘that … zinc … stuff … thick … like … mud.’

‘That’s beautiful,’ Bill said. ‘She’d like that.’

‘Would … she … like … that?’

‘She’d like that very much.’

‘Could … we … do … that … in … real … life?’

‘We can do what we like,’ Bill said. ‘Anything we like.’

‘Horse-shit,’ Wally said, alone, to no one, inside the booth.

Vincent was standing outside the upstairs toilet when Bill found him. He had wet hands and did not immediately take the jar of Zinc 3001 when it was proffered.

‘It’s Hamlet ,’ he said, patting his trouser pockets in search of a handkerchief.

‘How Hamlet?’

‘Felicity had the mourners paint their faces for Ophelia’s funeral. Zinc 3001 — Hamlet.’

‘Then it is not inappropriate for us to do the same.’

Vincent finally located a wad of tissues in his breast pocket and used this slowly to wipe his square white hands. ‘The vid news will be there,’ he said at last. ‘They’ll have vans and cables. They’ll have it on the satellite.’

He threw the tissues through the open door of the toilet, lobbing them into the wastebin.

‘Catch!’

He turned to see the Zinc 3001 flying at him. He had no choice but to catch it.

‘I do not want this,’ Vincent said, pushing the heavy jar of make-up at the actor who made no move to take it. ‘It doesn’t help to treat this funeral like a Sirkus.’

Bill’s mouth tightened.

‘I didn’t mean that personally,’ Vincent said.

‘I know,’ Bill said, but he hooked his thumbs in his belt and did not take the jar.

‘They won’t tell the real story,’ Vincent said. ‘They’re not going to say anything about her production of Hamlet.’

‘Vincent, this is not about the media.’

‘It’s us they’ll show. The weirder you make us look, the more damage you’ll do.’

‘Vinny, please. Don’t make this part of your election campaign.’

Vincent had lost a lover and a wife and was now in the process of losing an election. ‘We’ll be on the goddamn news,’ he said, his pale blue eyes now full of tears.

‘This is mourning,’ Bill said.

‘Listen to me, fuck you,’ Vincent shouted, his face screwed up, the tears already flowing. His voice echoed through the stairwell, in the empty corridors. ‘You don’t know what’s going on here. You just fly in and start to meddle. An Efican citizen has just been murdered by a foreign power. You want to mourn something, mourn that.’

Bill frowned and nodded. He took the pot of make-up from Vincent.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Any reasonable person watching this would imagine that Bill was on his way to talk to me, to tell me that our ritual was not suitable. On the morning of the funeral, however, Vincent found Bill and me and Wally in the dressing room, painting our faces with Zinc 3001.

The funeral was as Vincent knew it would be — not to do with us at all. There were journalists, politicians, camera teams, demonstrators with placards accusing Voorstand of the murder.

Every soup-server and spear carrier who ever walked through the doors of the Feu Follet was there — Claire Chen, Moey Perelli, everyone you would expect — but also actors from the Efican National Theatre, soap-opera vedettes, news readers. There were known DoS spies, Gardiacivil, ambulances lined up between the narrow driveways of the old French cemetery.

Bill was the most famous mourner there, and he picked me up, his son, the white-faced beast, and carried me on the long walk through the cemetery to the Unitarian plot.

Vincent was beside himself. And even those who knew nothing of the conflict, who saw only Bill Millefleur weeping by the graveside, thought him theatrical and self-important in his grief.

Wally, however, was not amongst them. Even though he did not like Bill, even though he felt self-conscious with white make-up on his face, he also saw what I saw — that Bill Millefleur was finally determined publicly to own me.

My father had come home.