The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (21 page)

I don’t know what make the car was. It was a small car, silver, no longer new. It screeched its brakes on so hard white smoke came flying out – I’d seen that sort of thing on vid – and came reversing back towards me at high speed.

The driver did not wait for me, but came right out to meet me, eagerly, it seemed. He was a big fellow, tall, broad-shouldered, sort of squeezed into that little motor car. He came holding a big black metal flashlight in his hand. He had long straight blond hair like mine, blowing in the wind.

‘You just stay there,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you move.’

He was scared, of course, but I did not figure that. I trusted his hair. He came towards me, crouched a little like a fighter. His high forehead was a sea of wrinkles, and his mouth was oddly pursed as if he had eaten something bad but had not yet spat it out.

He shone that damn light right on me.

‘Jes-us,’ he said, and coughed.

Well, I thought he coughed. But when he did it again, I realized
he was retching. It did not occur to me that it was my appearance that made him ill. When he had finished spitting, he scuffed up the dirt with his boot and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Just be cool,’ he said. He was just a boy, really, less than twenty. He looked so jumpy and nervous I began to be afraid of him.

‘Be cool,’ he said, looking up and down the freeway, which was, at that minute, empty.

‘I’m … cool,’ I said. I held out my goose-fleshed arms. I was just trying to calm him down, to stop him staring at my piss-stinky pants and my bloodied bright green knee-pads.

He squatted in front of me. I shuffled back a little. I started to take off Vincent’s big gloves. He tapped the torch against his palm but did not turn it on.

‘Well, hell,’ he said. He had blue eyes but they were an old man’s blue eyes, full of worry. ‘Well, hell and Christ, where did you come from?’

If I had known Belinda Burastin’s address I would have said it, but I could not. ‘Foo … Folll-ay.’

He was not listening properly. He kept looking at my face and then up and down the highway.

‘A … famous … theatre,’ I said.

He hit the torch against his hand.

‘Who left you here?’ he said.

‘No one …
left
… me …’ I was insulted. ‘I … came … here.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Mah-ter.’ I said, thinking that if I could get to the Mater Hospital I could find my way from there.

‘Mater? Mater Hospital?’

I nodded.

‘My grandpa died there.’ He started to walk toward the car, then stopped and looked back at me as I started to crawl after him.

‘Should I carry you or what?’

‘Open … the … door … please.’

He did not understand me, but I climbed through the driver’s door and across to the passenger seat. I did up my own seatbelt. Then we took off down the freeway and in a minute, inside his warm dusty car, with the high buildings of downtown ahead of us, my crazy optimism was back in force.

His name was Wendell. I knew right away he was from the
country – he had that dry sweet dusty accent that always made me see wide tin sheds, chaff floating in sunlit air. He was so shocked by me, he could hardly look at me. He drove, one-handed. Before we had been 0.1 miles on his odometer he had revealed that he had a cadetship with a security agency, although he would not say which one. ‘Security reasons.’

I laughed, but that could not have been clear to him.

‘Don’t you read the news in hospital?’

‘I’m …
near
… hospital.’

‘I guess you couldn’t join security,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t meet the height requirement. You know what I’m telling you? You know what security is for?’

I knew all about security. I knew about DoS, VIA, EJIO. I knew they had tapped our telephone, stopped performances, arrested my mother, burgled our tower.

‘You know what the alliance is?’

I shrugged.

‘The alliance between the parliamentary democracies of Voorstand and Efica,’ he said, ‘is built on three areas of joint cooperation – Defence, Navigation, Intelligence – DNI.’

I felt I should respond to him, but I could not think of anything to say. I was embarrassed by the smell of urine and would have apologized for that if he could have understood me.

‘DNI.’ He glanced sideways. ‘You should remember that. It’s a handy way to remember it.’

We came on to a highway interchange, and he missed his turn and had to go around again. I thought he had finished with the conversation, but he took it up again, a full two minutes later.

‘That’s what all those Muddies forget. The Big D. It’s quid pro quo. You look out for me. I’ll look out for you.’ He glanced sideways. ‘All those wheat farmers should remember that when they’re complaining about the price they get in Voorstand. We’re getting the benefit of a ten-battalion army, for nothing.’

‘Not … our … army,’ I said. ‘It’s … theirs.’

He frowned at me, then shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment. ‘I suppose you’re too young to be political. You like the Sirkus, right? You’re a fan?’

I nodded.

‘They say it’s a real buzz. I’m going this time. By golly I am. Who
do you like the best – the Dog, the Duck or the Mouse?’

Of course I was a child of the Feu Follet. I had never seen the Sirkus.

‘Irma,’ I said. It was how Wally would have answered. ‘Ir … mah …’

‘Irma? Well I’ll be damned.’ He slapped the wheel and laughed and at that moment he sounded like the Dog himself –
Ho, Ho
,
Hee, haw.
‘You’d like to do the pink Watutsi with Irma? You dirty little bugger. What’s your gazette?’ he asked.

‘Tristan … Smith.’

‘I’m Wendell Deveau,’ he said, ‘and I’d give my left ball to do it with Irma too.’

I remember that, clear as day. You would not forget a name like Wendell Deveau. It was the same man who crossed my path later in life when we were both in love with the same woman.

But on this night the woman was still only eleven years old and Wendell, with all his considerable, ill-informed good will, delivered me into the safe hands of the orderlies at the Mater Hospital and convinced them, no matter how I wept or hollered, that it was their duty to detain me for treatment.

Finally, I was held suspended like a bat or bird between the orderlies. The entire Casualty waiting room looked on. Wendell Deveau stood before me, red-faced, out of breath.

‘I hope you get better, ami,’ he said. ‘I really hope you do.’

In the Voorstand Sirkus, there is no pity. A man falls, he dies. This, you would say, is the point – the reason a Sirkus star is rich is because of the risk he takes.

But when we Eficans watch the Voorstand Sirkus we do not watch like you. We watch with our mouths open, oohing and aahing and applauding just as you do, but we watch like Eficans, identifying with the lost, the fallen, the abandoned. When a performer falls,
c’est moi, c’est moi.

Our heroes are the lost, the drowned, the injured, a habit of mind that makes our epic poetry emotionally repellent to you, but let me tell you, Meneer, Madam, if you are ever sick whilst visiting Efica you will quickly appreciate the point of view. If you come to the
Mater Hospital with no money, no insurance, even if you stink of piss and have no lips – you will not be sent away, not even if you beg to be.

They asked where my mother was.

I said I had no mother.

Wendell Deveau began to click his tongue. I tried to crawl away. Wendell Deveau tried to stop me. I bit him. The admissions clerk became alarmed for me. She called two nurses, wide fellows with close-cropped hair and big soft hands. I did not want them touching me. When I struggled, they restrained me. When they restrained me, I screamed and hollered and of course it made me look a fright – my hole of a mouth, my dribbling nose, the blood on my knee-pads, my flailing hands – there were people in the waiting room covering their faces, leaving the room, holding their hands over their sick children’s eyes. I saw this. I did not understand why it was happening. I pulled Vincent’s newspaper-stuffed driving gloves back on, ready to scamper for it. Scraps of torn paper fluttered all around me. It was two a.m. I did not give the impression of mental health.

Wendell Deveau fled into the night to begin his life as an operative with the DoS. The nurses were young, embarrassed. I smeared them with snot and blood. They must have feared hepatitis, TB, viral cancer, but they were calm and hardly bruised me.

It’s OK, they told me. It’s OK.

When people in a hospital tell you, ‘It’s OK,’ it’s the same as when they say you’re going to feel ‘some burning’ or ‘some pressure’. It means that they are going to do something that will hurt like hell. So when they told me, ‘It’s OK,’ I screamed. I was placed in a wheelchair, strapped in like a lunatic until I just sobbed, passive, pathetic, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, dirty. My big leather gloves stuck out in front of my strapped-down arms like Bruder Dog in the story we know in Efica as ‘The Prize-fight Purse’.
^*
I was wheeled along the yellow line, the course of which I knew better – I would bet you – than the people who were pushing me. I knew these departments of the Mater and the short cuts between the fifteen buildings. That blue line led to Digestive Diseases (my bowel). The red line to Cardiology (my septal defect). The yellow
line was to the Burns Unit which contained (Room 502) the Plastic Surgery Unit. I told them I was not from there, but I doubt they understood me.

My captors were polite, but firm.

I myself was not polite. I was in the habit of thinking of myself as – I have said this already – the avant garde, the elite. I associated with anarchists, populists, nationalists, but whatever position we had, we imagined ourselves better informed than anyone who walked outside the big door on Gazette Street.

I called them drool-brains, know-nothings, airheads.

‘What are we?’ they asked.

‘Drool … brains.’

‘Drool-brains?’

‘Yes.’

They started laughing.

I went into a frenzy.
(Cretins. No-bodies. Shit-rakers.)
My mouth flapped. My legs shooks. My nose ran a river. They delivered me to room 502 with tears of laughter down their faces.

In room 502 they did not know what to do with me. They let me keep my gloves on, but they shot me full of Valium, and took some Buccal scrapings from inside my cheek
(It’s OK)
to file-check my DNA. It was through this last procedure – once a two-week procedure, now a quick routine – that they located my hospital records.

A chubby young man in a shiny dark suit brought me a document, a facsimile of my birth certificate. He had a square pleasant face with a springy fringe across his mild green eyes.

‘Can you read?’ this young man asked me.

Of course I could read. I could read from the age of three. I held out my driver’s gloves to take the document. ‘I’m …
eleven.’

Reluctantly, he gave me my own birth certificate.

I read.

FATHER’S NAME:
n/a.

FATHER’S OCCUPATION:
n/a.

I knew what n/a meant, but why my mother wrote this, I could not guess. Perhaps she knew Bill would go away. Perhaps she wished Vincent to think he was my father. In any case: it did not shock me. It was like my mother, like my father too.

‘This is you, right?’ he asked. ‘You’re Tristan?’

MOTHER’S NAME:
Felicity Smith Actor-Manager.

‘Is this you?’ this angel asked me. ‘Are you Tristan Actor-Manager?’
^*

I turned to look at his watery benevolent eyes and believed my period of trial was over.

‘Are you he?’

‘Yes … I … am.’

‘Your name is Actor-Manager?’

I nodded.

He flicked his fringe back.

‘What is your address?’ he asked, and then scrunched up his face as he readied himself to understand me.

‘Thirty-four … Gazette … Street.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’

When Roxanna woke – at dawn – the first thing she saw was Wally Paccione’s freckled arm, bare above the sheets. For the third night in a row he had kept his word – he had not left his own bed – but she was still disturbed by the sense of intimacy, the skin, the smell of his warm sheets, the sound of his feathery breathing. It was one thing to go to sleep in the same room. It was another to wake. She had
slept
with him.

She had her skirt beside the bed, and in a minute she would sneak it underneath the sheets and dress, carefully, quietly.

His life lay all around her. He was a poor man and a neat man – probably a decent man – but apart from that, what sort of man he was she could not guess. A dozen small pine boxes were stacked along the wall beneath the window in such a way as to make a kind of dresser, the kind of depressing life you saw in fishing baches on the Isles Anglais. Inside the boxes he had placed grey plastic crates, each one labelled with its prosaic contents – socks, shirts, trousers. A chipped china jug, a shaving mug, a brush, a comb were laid out neatly on the top of a rough wooden bench. He owned so little. He was over fifty and this was all he had. It made his breath seem so
frail, so vulnerable, Roxanna could not bear to think about him any more.