Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘A humorist,’ she said.

In the mirror I saw her take my mouse’s soft ear between her fingers and stroke it.

‘But what is it?’ said Clive Baarder. ‘I’d want to know, Peg, before I let it put its nose …’

‘Oh, that’s a joke,’ said Peggy Kram. ‘That is a joke, coming from you. Of all the people to …’

‘All right Peggy, that’s enough.’

‘Of all the people.’

‘That’s enough.’

‘You know what the trouble is? We are all so knowledgeable. We know what makes rainbows refract light. Love is all to do with DNA.’

‘Not really DNA.’

‘Yes, DNA.’

Bill sat down and began to eat his bread, tearing it apart and slathering it with butter.

‘DNA or not, this is obviously not the actual Bruder Mouse.’

I peeked a look at Mrs Kram. I snuggled back down into her breast. She put her hand around my neck.

‘Peggy?’ said Clive Baarder, his lips wet and wobbly, his voice rising incredulously.

Peggy Kram did not answer.

Clive Baarder began to arrange his cutlery with great fastidiousness.

‘You believe in St Francis and Jesus Christ?’ Peggy Kram asked him. ‘You believe the birds talked to Jesus — that’s what you believe — am I right?’

‘Of course. Peg.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you this, Clive,’ said Kram, leaning across me to take her glass of wine and releasing with this gesture a giddy rush of jasmine. ‘We owned Simis. We owned two hundred of them. When they banned them in Saarlim, we bought them for the Ghostdorps. This is not a Simulacrum. It does not move like one, or feel like one. And all I am saying to you, why do you want to explain it …’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Why do you have to ruin everything by making it less than it is?’ She turned my head. As she did so I caught a glimpse of Wally and saw his old grey eyes looking at me sourly.

‘I could take him home,’ she said, kissing my nose. ‘I really could.’

You can understand, I’m sure, why I was under the impression that I was a social success. I was elated, aroused, almost tipsy on her perfume, and so it took a little time for me to look beyond myself, to see my father’s pale and stricken face, Malide’s comforting hand on his thigh, and it was only then — when it was too late to change what I had done — that I began to fear I had done my dab some damage.

In Efica everyone imagined that Bill Millefleur was famous in Saarlim, whereas, as you know, he was just one of perhaps two thousand performers employed in the Sirkus, and that particular show-the Sirkus Brits — involving as it did both drama and animals, was as peripheral to Saarlim life as the gentlemen from India who played cricket on the outskirts of the city on Sunday afternoons.

My father had worked hard to make a place for himself in his adopted city. He had worked as hard with history books in Saarlim as he had once, long ago, worked on politics in Chemin Rouge. And just as the scrawny circus boy had learned Rimbaud and Lukacs off by heart, so the handsome man with spangles on his suit soon knew Voorstandish history like a scholar. He knew the Bruder tales, the famous sites, the battlegrounds against the Dutch and British. He could recite ‘Pers Nozegard’ in Old Dutch, and yet, for all the passion he had expended, he was still an Ootlander, and no matter how much he pretended to the contrary, he found your etiquettes stiff and uncomfortable. He felt his own obedience to your customs a compromise, and when he watched me leap through the air and land in Mrs Kram’s lap, he believed himself shamefully exposed: he was a fraud, an ill-mannered barbarian, an Ootlander, a host with poor karakter. He watched Mrs Kram coo, argue, play with my ears, but he had long ago learned that Saarlimites could behave like this and still despise you. And despised was what he felt.

When he shut the door on Mrs Kram and her friends at four a.m., he imagined his guests clustered together in the elevator, raising eyebrows, sighing, and what depressed him — and he was very depressed, you could see it in his slumped shoulders as he came back from the door — was not the loss of a possible employer but his own lack of authenticity, that he should have allowed himself to be placed in this position where their opinion of him would matter.

He was not a Voorstander. He never had been. As he began to walk back to the cluttered dining table he began to talk to us about a strip of land out at Goat Marshes where he had often gone riding with my maman — a lonely windswept place where a muddy estuary met the sea. He hardly paused to dismiss the two helpers in the kitchen, and then he produced a large bottle of very rough red wine which he poured for everyone, remembering (even while he described the Arab stallion he had once owned) to fetch me a straw.

His grief had the paradoxical effect of dignifying him. He still wore the slightly vulgar sparkling suit, the lizardskin boots, but when he brought me my wine in both hands, this shining actor’s garb took on a priestly, or even kingly, aspect.

‘To Efica,’ he said, still standing. ‘To us Eficans.’ He began to raise his glass in a toast, then lowered it.

Malide reached out to him from her chair. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said.

He swayed his body back, away from the reach of her long white fingers. ‘Don’t do what?’ he said, his eyes suddenly slit.

‘Everything’s all right, hunning,’ she said. ‘I think she was charmed.’

‘Speaking as an outsider,’ Jacqui began, but Bill cut right across her.

‘Bullshit she was charmed,’ he said to Malide, so roughly that I saw her wince. ‘Bullshit she was. I know you people. You’re so fucking Japanese.’

Perversely, it was then, when he was unlovely, that I finally loved him freely. It was this sadness that made me trust him and I was ashamed of my childish jealousy earlier in the night.

‘I’m … sorry … I … behaved … stupidly.’

My father turned towards my voice, frowning and rubbing his hands across his wan and uncomprehending face.

I was ready, at this moment, to step out from behind my disguise, and probably would have had not Wally chosen to rise from his chair like an old vulture, all shining scalp and glowering brows.

‘Stupidly?’ the old man said to me in a voice as abrasive as the legs of his chair scraping across the floor. ‘You didn’t do anything stupidly. What you did was act as if your brain was in your baton.’ He stood at his place, his arms out from his side, his elbows bent, glaring at me.

There was a silence. I looked at Bill. His skin had lost its shine. When he tried to smile at me, he succeeded in looking merely puffy. ‘For Chrissake, mo-ami,’ Wally said. ‘This is your father’s home. These were important people. Even I could see that. What you did was ugly and embarrassing.’

‘Did … I … screw … something … up?’ I asked my father.

‘I’m so very pleased to see Tristan,’ Bill said. ‘Nothing else is so important.’

‘Did … I … screw … something … up … for … you?’

‘Yes,’ Wally said, so agitated that he began to pile knives and forks on to the delicate blue and white Dutch china.

‘Leave it, please,’ Malide said.

But Wally was too upset to leave anything. He carried the dangerously stacked plates and cutlery into the kitchen, his head down, his elbows out, his shoes shuffling rapidly across the floor. ‘You screwed it up,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘It’s pretty obvious, even to an Efican.’

‘No, no,’ Bill whispered.

Malide put her bare arm on Bill’s shoulder and drew him into the empty chair beside her. ‘Calm down,’ she said. ‘I don’t think this was simply karakter.’