Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

But when the heavy door shut fast behind him, he found himself intimidated by the enigmatic face of Bruder Mouse — the painted smile, the broken tooth, the whole withholding wall of character.

He seated me carefully on a humming grey steel box, a pump perhaps, thereby placing my eyes almost level with his own.

‘Would you prefer to walk?’ he asked. ‘It’s not so far to go.’

I began to answer but he interrupted.

‘Don’t get me wrong.’ He gestured with his two hands, smiled — these phoney movements being the by-products of his enormous tension — ’I’m happy to carry you, mo-frere, from here to the Bleskran if you want it.’

‘It’s … OK … go … on … carry … me.’

‘You can carry him,’ the nurse translated. ‘Mr Millefleur. I can’t believe it’s you. How do you know Tristan?’

Bill’s handsome face shivered with incredulity.

‘He’s my goddamn son,’ he said, turning to look at the nurse, ‘for Chrissakes!’

‘Where’s … Wally?’ I said.

My father swung back to me, all politeness. ‘Say again.’ He placed his hand tentatively on my shoulder. ‘Say slowly …’

‘You … left … Wally.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Bill said, his eyes glazing over with tears. ‘Are you saying I left you?’

‘YOU … LEFT … WALLY.’

‘Shit!’ said Jacqui.

‘What is he saying?’

‘We lost Mr Paccione.’

‘We?’ said Bill, his voice rising, his famous temper showing in his eyes. He turned on her. He raised his hands up to his temples. ‘ We ?’

‘I.’

‘For Chrissakes,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you the A-1 nurse they brought from Efica? Fifteen hundred Guilders a month? Is that you? The perfect Jacques? You’re the one who looks after Wally and Tristan?’

‘I’ll get him. I’ll get him now.’

‘No, no,’ Bill said.

‘Yes,’ Jacqui said, ‘I’ll get him now.’ But as she turned my father brought his large hand down on her padded shoulder and turned her in her tracks.

‘You stay right here,’ Bill said in that quiet and dangerous voice that I remembered. ‘And do not fucking move.’

He turned and left us, me and Jacqui. I folded my arms across my chest.

‘What?’ she said.

Jacqui knew my handsome father in a way that I did not. She had been to Dome Projections *of all his Saarlim horse shows. There she had seen him dance from back to back on Arab stallions, do Lucio Cristiani’s somersault across one horse and on to the back of a third as they cantered round the ring. She had heard him speak the great lines of Voorstand’s Epic Poet. She knew the pores of his skin, the scar on his chin, the sweet rise on his lip, the dimple on his chin which she thought almost unbearably beautiful.

In short, she was his fan, and as she travelled with him through the crush, pushed against his glistening suit, being careful not to stand on his snakeskin shoes, she was in shock, not merely to have met him, but to have met him in these most peculiar circumstances.

Now she was crushed against Bill Millefleur, was carried along in the same tumbling river of fluttering pink- and blue-paged autograph books. She tumbled down the ramp beside him, went through a grey metal door that said ‘Sirkus Staff Only’, was suddenly in a world of huge brightly coloured pipes, compressors, pumps, the smell of marine paint, the cold of concrete — backstage. Bill Millefleur put his hand behind her back and guided her into a link-wired alleyway. (You see , she wanted to say, to someone, to her mother most of all. You see?)

But then a minute later she was revealed as an amateur, a fuck-up, and she wished no one to see anything. Bill Millefleur was furious with her. He turned away from her, went walking, beautifully, athletically, impatiently over the metal floor, back into the cavernous Dome.

And Jacqui was left there — boneless, a lump, all her normal resourcefulness sucked from her.

The sharp-toothed Mouse sat on the water pump and stared at her, its grey furry arms folded across its spangled blue chest.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ it said. It stared at her impassively, and she was embarrassed to have her weakness so clearly exposed.

Yet when Bill Millefleur returned with his arm around the old man’s bent shoulders, she did not care who saw her apologize.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I was an amateur. I didn’t do my job.’

And the actor forgave her.

He held out his hand. It was soft and dry. As it closed around hers, she had a vision of her mother sitting in her kitchen wiping counter tops, the little plates of plastic-covered leftovers, some as small as a teaspoonful. (You see?)

‘I had no right to shout at you,’ Bill Millefleur said. ‘I was so excited to see my son, I didn’t even catch your full name?’

‘Jacques Lorraine.’

The touch of his hand made her numb in the neck, produced shame and gratitude in almost equal quantities, and as she followed his athletic body carrying my misshapen one back into the labyrinth beneath the stage of the Water Sirkus, her cheeks continued to burn.

She watched how he held yours truly in his arms, how he squeezed my arms, my legs. ‘Don’t … do … that.’

‘Tristan,’ he said, squeezing me again, grinding my sore feet in against his hip bone. ‘We have to sit down without our masks.’

And Jacqui, rather than being embarrassed by his tacky talk, was much moved by Bill’s love, his need, by his good looks, by my lack of the same.

She was a fan. She wished to be with him. Thinking her silence a mark of unworthiness, she walked beside him wondering what to say. Finally, she asked about the Water Sirkus, inquiring how the performers had been able to speak whilst underwater.

She saw even as he answered — ‘It’s a voice patch, Jacques, that’s all’ — that he did not want to talk to her. He wanted to talk only — this was so weird, so bizarre — to the snotty mutant that no one in the DoS could bear even to think about.

‘Did you enjoy the Sirkus, Tristan?’ he asked.

But Tristan Smith would not speak, and when his father turned to speak to Jacqui his eyes were weak with need, with shame.

‘It’s a voice patch, Jacques, that’s all, a new gizmo,’ he said. ‘Soon every shop in the Kakdorp will have one in its window. But I loved,’ he said, speaking loudly, as one of the performers walked past in a white bathrobe, his cheeks red, his eyes bulging a little with fatigue, ‘I absolutely loved that bit of business with old Spookganger.’

The performer opened a door and closed it behind him.

‘That was Dirk Labelaster,’ *he whispered to Tristan Smith. ‘Would you like to meet him? We could visit him at home. He lives just near us. Are you still interested in posturing? Tell me who you want to meet.’

For answer, Bruder Mouse presented his immobile cheeky grin.

We descended a steel staircase. At the bottom we arrived at a closed roller door, not unlike the one at the entrance of the Feu Follet. Bill pressed a button. The door rose noisily and we found ourselves outside the Sirkus, in the dank night air, by a small kanal.

The air was fetid. There was broken glass, a burned-out truck. A man in a leather jacket came out from behind the truck and pointed his finger at us.

‘It’s OK,’ Bill said. ‘Relax. He’s not a Misdaad Boy.’

This man was the wheelmajoor, the pilot of a boat, a gondel, which was sitting in the iridescent water with its motor purring. And now, as our party walked towards him, he held out his hand to help us aboard.

‘It’s a nice night to go to Saarlim?’ Jacqui said.