The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (14 page)

‘Could you tell me what day the local zine comes out?’ she said, and hid from his insistent eyes in her handkerchief, blowing her nose wetly, unattractively, deliberately. She found her dark glasses in her bag and put them on. ‘I need to put an avvert in.’

‘What are you selling?’ he said. He had a high forehead like a clown, and sad grey freckled eyes.

‘Pigeons,’ she said, very level.

‘What sort of pigeons?’ Wally said. ‘I got a young fellah might be interested.’

‘Racing pigeons,’ she said.

‘Start him off with a couple of street-peckers.’

‘These aren’t street-peckers,’ she said. ‘They’re racing pigeons. They have
pedigrees.’

‘I had a grandpa who raced pigeons,’ the punter said. ‘He won a lot of races, but he never had any pedigrees. I had a
dog
once.’ He smiled: he had wide pale lips. ‘Now that fellow had a pedigree.’

‘So are you interested or what?’ She took the keys out of the ignition. She wiped her hands with her handkerchief. ‘I’ve got other people interested.’

‘I could be
persuaded.’

‘What do you think I’m talking about, mister?’ she said.

He opened the door for her and stepped back politely so she could get out of the car. ‘Not doves,’ he said, and grinned.

‘They’re expensive,’ she said, lowering her eyes as she locked the door. ‘That’s all I meant. It isn’t like an impulse buy.’

As she walked back to the caravan, she sensed Wally Paccione’s freckled hand, imagined it half an inch away from her pleated red skirt, as insistent as thrip, a fruit fly hovering, but when she looked over her shoulder she saw he was not even looking at her, but back towards the chalky green motel doors.

When she opened the van for him the smell came flooding out.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

That smell used to drive Reade crazy. He always asked her – every morning before he drove away – please clean the loft. When she was under the impression that pigeons made BIG MONEY she had cleaned – brooms, scrubbing brushes, disinfectant. She had been a fanatic in the cause. She laid out brown-eyed peas, ground millet, butcher’s seed. She checked each hen once every day – eyes, throat etc. But when she saw what Reade’s idea of BIG MONEY was, she gave up on the pigeons.

If she had bought a gun and pushed him into a bank, Reade would have thought she was a genius. But when she wrote away for books, he laughed and farted and spilt his drink back in his glass.

‘Your lips move,’ he said. ‘Your fucking lips move, Roxanna.’

She let him laugh. It made him look so pitiful.

She sat in the kitchen in her dressing gown, toast crumbs embedded in her elbows. She read about things that bewildered him: the production of tin soldiers in nineteenth-century Europe, for instance. His lip curled, but his eyes looked frightened. He could not imagine the pay-off. He was not meant to. She read slowly with a wooden ruler held under each line.

He came home with beer on his breath and snatched the ruler away. She knew he was hanging round with that Voorstandish widow up at the cashier’s office. He did not look beautiful any
more. His sexy red lips had got all twisted and his eyes were bulging, like someone with a thyroid condition. He was her husband, but she looked at him from far, far away – one more bozo going to hit it big with greyhounds, pigeons, possum furs.

Rich people did not mess with things that shit or made you ill. Only poor people did that. Reade already had bronchitis, fancier’s lung, all that bloom which came off the birds, white clouds of it, every time they settled.

The weird thing was that when he split, he abandoned the pigeons too. Now they were her only asset.

‘Can I hold one?’ the punter asked her at the Melcarth Motor Inn.

She folded her arms across her chest and watched him as he lifted out the cage and opened it without being shown the tricky latch. He took the bird – hands up and down its chest, down around its neck, like a fancier.

What she could not know was that the only two truly happy years of Wally’s childhood had been spent with his maternal grandfather who was exactly that character that Roxanna now despised – the working-class man with a passion for pigeons, a man making twenty-five cent bets, upgrading his stock, crossing street-pecker with street-pecker, dreaming of the big bets, the famous birds.

She watched him running his nicotine-stained finger down the back of the bird’s head and thought he was just like Reade looking at ties in an expensive shop. She was deep within herself. She did not hear the five members of the Feu Follet cross the yard and stand behind her. What she was thinking was: she was back at square one – if he did not buy these birds, she was going to have to have sexual intercourse for money.

Then she heard the scrape of shoe behind her. The hair on her neck stood on end. She spun around and saw tattoos, face scars, ripped shirts and sweaters, a bald-headed man with bright blue eyes staring at her tits. Sweat pooled in the tight creases of her hands.

There was a woman with an accent like a Sirkus star. She was striking, pale-faced, copper-haired, holding a blond-haired child who was hiding himself under a patchwork shawl.

‘We all wanted to see the clean bus, Wally.’

‘Here, Tristan,’ Wally said to the fair-haired boy. ‘Hold this.’

A pair of surprisingly large hands emerged from the tatty shawl,
and as the child took the bird she saw his face, my face.

Jesus fucking Christ Almighty.

It was hard to look, hard to not look – my triangular head, my dense blond hair, my frightening lipless mouth, my small regular white teeth, my striated marble eyes – terrible, beautiful – flecked with gold, like jewellery.

‘Feel its heart,’ the punter said. ‘You can feel its heart beating in your hand.’

Everything was happening for Roxanna in slo-mo. She saw Tristan Smith hold her pigeon with his normal hands.

‘You feel that?’ Wally said. ‘That’s its heart.’

The boy cupped his hand around her pigeon’s breast.

He said, ‘Air … atter.’

‘OK, you’re an actor,’ the punter said. ‘I never said you wasn’t.’

‘Ah … don … hellet … ehh.’

That’s right. You don’t collect anything yet,’ the punter said. ‘I’m not saying you’re not an actor. I’m asking you, would you like to breed pigeons, race them? Feel its heart, feel it on your face.’

‘Ah … don’t … hellet … ehh.’

‘You don’t collect their eggs. You let the yolk stay inside, then you get birds out of them.’

The boy held the bird so tight Roxanna feared he was going to choke it.

‘You like the pigeon?’ the woman asked. ‘Would you like that?’

The boy’s eyes were big, swimming, alive, all those fine gold stripes flashing in the artificial light. His legs were twisted, wasted, pipe cleaners inside his striped pyjamas. He nodded.

‘Is this OK?’ the punter asked the beautiful woman.

The woman turned to the boy. She smiled and stroked his soft white neck. ‘Is this instead of climbing trees?’ she asked him.

When the punter turned back to Roxanna his face was blazing red. His eyes had changed. They had been all sleepy and slitted but now they were bright, prickly, absolutely awake.

‘How much?’ he said.

Roxanna did not know what it was, but she saw something was happening.

‘I don’t sell them individually,’ she said.

‘All of them,’ the punter said, his colour still high.

He held the bird’s beak open and looked inside – checking the cleft.

‘That’s Apple Pie,’ she said. ‘He’s famous.’

‘How much is all I’m asking.’

She thought 300. She thought 5000. ‘You couldn’t afford it,’ she said.

‘Wally,’ said the beautiful woman, swinging Tristan Smith on to her other hip, ‘where would we keep pigeons in Chemin Rouge?’

‘Chemin Rouge?’ Roxanna asked. (There was an antique toy exhibition in Chemin Rouge next week!) ‘Are you going back to Chemin Rouge?’

‘We get the right price, we’re going to buy it,’ the punter told the boy. ‘We’re going to have pigeons.’ To the woman he said, ‘Is this OK?’

They’re educational,’ Roxanna said. ‘Maths, genetics, dot dot dot.’

The punter could not hear her. He was looking straight into Tristan Smith’s wild unnatural eyes. He was like a man proposing marriage – still, intense, a coiled spring.

‘A thousand,’ Roxanna said.

The minute she said it, she knew it was too much. She saw his Adam’s apple move. He grinned at her, a little foolishly.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said the beautiful woman.

‘I’d set you up,’ Roxanna said to Wally. ‘You know what I mean?’

That was how sex got mixed up with it again. She hadn’t needed to say this. It was habit, insecurity.

‘You know what I mean?’ she said. ‘For a thousand, I’d be prepared to come down to Chemin Rouge and set you up, get everything in nice working order.’

‘We’re actors,’ the woman said. ‘We haven’t got that kind of money.’

‘Three hundred,’ Wally said.

In the end Wally paid 650 dollars and my mother was aghast, bewildered. ‘Was this about what I think it was about?’ she asked Bill Millefleur.

The last day of the tour found our party camped at Fiddler’s Creek, waiting for the next day’s car ferry to Chemin Rouge. Bill had spent
the late morning in sleep, or pretended sleep, and now he lay in the back seat of the bus, reading and rereading the first page of
Dead Souls
, wishing nothing more than for the time to pass, the sultry day to go, for tomorrow to come so he could catch his flight back home to Saarlim City.

My maman, however, had other plans for the last day.

She appeared at the window by his head, tapping, beckoning.

‘What?’

When she saw his face through the dusty window – the great ridged scar from mouth to chin, the anxious eyes – Felicity knew something was up, but she did not know how serious it was.

Bill held up his book.

She shook her head and beckoned.

When he appeared at the bus door, he looked strangely shy, and she took him by his hand and led him past the dusty horse float, through the hash-sweet campsite, along a rather melancholy avenue lined with dead black mimosa trees and shoulder-high blackberries whose leaves were now grey from dust.

‘What is this?’ he said.

‘You’ll see,’ she teased him.

Around the bend Bill saw his best linen suit, clean and pressed, shrouded in plastic, hanging from a low mimosa just off the track. He felt a dull kind of dread.

‘Some fancy joint?’ he asked. ‘Out here?’

‘Sssh.’ My mother made her eyes go big, fluttered her lashes, began to undo the buttons of her khaki shorts.

‘Some joint with cha-cha?’ Bill whispered, rolled his eyes.

‘Ssh.’ My maman slipped out of her shorts and into the deliberately crumpled blue silk overall she had carried in her handbag. ‘They’ll hang us if they find us out.’

There was nothing for my father to do but get into the suit.

When they were both changed, my mother took him by the hand and set off, not along the road, but along a narrow path of the sort made by cattle. She had played this kind of game before – birthdays, anniversaries – and Bill guessed they would soon come to a village or at least a filling station where she would have arranged a rent-a-car.

Their destination, however, turned out to be an unprepossessing building 200 yards away. It was larger than the little fishing shacks
beside it, but just as rusty. It was only as they came to the steps of the wide veranda that he noticed the details, the crispness of finish, the spare teak-framed doorways cut into the thickly insulated corrugated skin.

It was a small hotel, very Efican in its modesty – expensive, of course, but affecting, in its skin, the artful camouflage of rural decay.

Bill’s hand went to his slashed face, feeling the raw, rough ridge.

‘You don’t like it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Good heavens, no. The opposite.’

And as they walked to their suite he gesticulated and congratulated, admired the view of the mudflats, the red and blue hangings of old Indienne, but he could not keep the shadow of depression out of his eyes.

‘It’s a lot of money, I know,’ she said when the concierge closed the door to the room and they were at last alone. ‘It’s very bourgeois.’

‘It’s wonderful.’ Bill held his arms wide. The room was white and spare, the floor teak. ‘It’s very tasteful.’

‘Tasteful?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Wonderful. Truly wonderful. It’s such a treat.’

‘It’ll be our last night for eight months, mo-chou. I wanted it to be nice.’

‘It’s wonderful.’

When Bill and Felicity lay in bed after their bath, she said, again, ‘I wanted you to remember Efica like this.’

They could look down their long pink naked limbs and see, behind the rifle sights of their toes, the inky blue clouds of a thunderstorm, the low lines of brilliant green mangroves, the long flat mudflats glistening pink in the late sun and the spindle-legged birds gathering their evening meal.

They had soaked in the hot tub and soaped each other, but now they lay naked, side by side, neither sought the other.

‘Are you OK, Billy-fleur?’ Felicity turned on her side and began to slowly rub his smooth wide chest with the flat of her hand.

‘I guess.’

‘Depressed?’

‘Nah …’ He held his hand over his eyes. ‘I’m OK.’

‘What’s the matter?’

She peeled the hand back from the eyes, playfully.

He pulled his hand away with a roughness that surprised even him. No sooner had he done it than he was stroking her hand and apologizing.

Felicity stroked his neck but her hand came clumsily close to his face and he turned his head away from her.

‘Is it your face?’ she said suddenly. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. You’re upset about your face.’

In his late thirties, interviewers, women particularly, would like to ask the question about the small pale line that ran from the corner of Bill’s mouth to the point of his chin. There would be something sexual about this mark whose story the Sirkus performer would never tell. They would extend a finger sometimes, as if they would have liked to touch it, and he would rest his own forefinger on the pale silky little path of tissue, and smile.