The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (36 page)

‘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.’

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.

It was an unlikely thing for me to say, given that I would not go as far as the Levantine shop across the street, but when I saw how Wally responded, what life it gave him, I dimly realized that this might be our life-line and I began to inch my way timidly forwards, not towards the trip exactly, but into a more intimate proximity to its glow.

First we clipped the coupons in the advertisements in the zines, then we waited for the colour brochures. For a long time it was what we lived for – all those beautiful pictures of Voorstand in the mail. We were going on a Sirkus Tour of Saarlim.

All this was enough for me: the fantasy – but Wally was not going to let me get away with that. He set a date. He hired a new nurse. He bought the wheelchair. I watched him come alive, glowing in the reflected light of travel brochures.

I moved into a room with a window. I prepared.

My nurse on this journey was named Jacques Lorraine, and this individual, who turned out to be the most curious young man I ever
met, had more to do with the course of events than any of us understood.

Jacques had distinguished himself, from the first interview, by insisting that he would do whatever it was we needed him to. This was an immediate relief to us. His two predecessors had had such strict descriptions of what the title
nurse
might mean: Phonella would not do the dishes or mop the floors; Jean-Claude would not make the beds. He would cook, but if there was no food in the house he would not go and buy it. Phonella was a Ph.D in Archaeology. Jean-Claude was a flautist, and was saving up to travel to the Old World.

In contrast to both of them, Jacques seemed to have no other ambition but to serve, not just me, but Wally too. He was a nurse. It was all he wanted to do. He was self-effacing, like a good waiter is self-effacing, but not meek, or subservient. Whatever misunderstandings we had about his true nature, we always knew, even while he cooked and washed and scrubbed and dealt with the intimate secrets of my body, that this was an attractive person with considerable reserves of self-esteem. He had an ‘edge’, and although we did not know just how much edge he had, we never called him pissmarie or prick-buttock, not even behind his back.

He replaced broken zippers, darned socks, even typed my essays and manifestos for the January 20 Group. When it was necessary that he learn to drive a five-ton truck – our only vehicle – he did it. It was in this truck that he delivered me, as curtained from the public gaze as a lady in a mobile-amor, to the Group’s meetings. In this and other ways he made himself some sort of ideal figure in our lives.

He was below middle height, but handsome, with honey-coloured skin, large brown eyes and lashes that Roxanna would have died for. He was lightly built, but athletic. He squeaked around the dark rooms of the old Gazette Street building in fastidiously clean white running shoes.

Then he was merely our employee, but now let me make it clear – this next part of the story belongs to him as much as to me or to Wally, and not just to him, but to the extraordinary family that he came from – the father with his ludicrous passion for tropical snow, the mother with her martinis resting incredibly on the peeling front veranda of that lower-middle-class street.

However, on the spring morning we boarded the trawler
John Kay
in Chemin Rouge harbour, it did not occur to me that I might grant our recently employed nurse this importance in my own private history. I was so tense and frightened about everything ahead, and I felt – not incorrectly – that Jacques was secretly intolerant of my fear.

When he trundled my new wheelchair down past the skipjack boats on the No. 25 wharf, I was half dead with shame and self-consciousness. As we passed men filling their water tanks or loading gas cylinders, I pulled my panama hat low over my eyes. Though covered by clothes, by hat, I felt like a snail – de-shelled, slimy and naked in the vast and merciless light of day. We were setting out on a journey of 3000 miles and I was nervous, not just of ‘logical’ fears, like your agents, or storms at sea, but of the light, the air, the naked eyes of my fellow humans.

And although you, Madam, Meneer, now know me at a time when I have strode across the world and even been, for a moment, famous, in September of 394 I was still a prisoner of Phobos – I stood on the deck of the
John Kay
and felt like fainting.

Jacques, in this situation, was a master, managing to accommodate himself not only to my phobia but also my pride. He helped me on to the trawler, introduced me to the skipper.

I now know he had talked to this fisherman beforehand, had shown him photographs which had appeared in medical histories when I was born. But I did not know it then. So imagine my gratitude when the Captain showed no shock, looked at me as if I were human, held my eye, nodded. He may not have understood
every
word I said, but he knew I was the shapoh – i.e. it was me, not Wally, who was going to pay his bill. He shook my hand politely.

Not once in our five-day journey did this man ever treat me with less than respect. All this was due to Jacques. Also: as a result of his expert care, I arrived in the little republic of Morea a great deal calmer than I had been in years. Whilst continually subject to fits of irrational panic, I was now able to calm myself with Dr Fensterheim’s breathing. I was well fed, freshly shaved, a little suntanned, with no more discomfort than that created by the 50,000 Voorstandish Guilders I had bound to my chest with adhesive tape.

We have fully automated credit systems in Efica. We use them daily, just like you do in Saarlim. When I entered Voorstand like
this, without a cash parole or any type of credit card, with only cash strapped to my chest, it was not because I was naïve or ill-informed, or rather – not in the way you might imagine.

Wally and I had, at that stage, a high opinion of your efficiency, your expertise. We imagined Voorstand to be a web of co-ax, optic fibre, little chips with brains the size of elephants. We travelled with cash because we were illegal and wished to keep our names out of the computers, and that is why I was lowered on to the dinghy in Morea with 50,000 Guilders strapped to my body with surgical tape. A saboteur, of course, would have known that this was stupid.

The morning we arrived at the Morean tourist resort of Club Hedoniste, the air smelled like overripe papaya. I was down to one layer of white cotton but Jacques was still wearing his three shirts and long black jacket. He placed the panama hat on my head and set it at an angle.

The dinghy was already heading back through the surf to the
John Kay.
I was on the beach – small, exposed, but I was
there
, under that velvety sky, and I was dizzy, a little, but not panicked.

It was seven in the morning, and the guests, if there were any guests, were not awake to see me. They missed an interesting procession.