The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  Across Natalie’s shoulder Vincent could see through the window to the driveway. He could see the Corniche and my mother’s face illuminated by the instrument lights. ‘Natalie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve really been a shit.’

  ‘Oh Lord, I am a louse,’ she mimicked, curling her mouth in an ugly way that shocked him, not just for its ugliness, but for its heedlessness. ‘Oh Lord, I am a worm. Forget it. All that Catholic bullshit doesn’t cut with me any more.’

  As she spoke, her trembling increased, but the curl of her mouth warped itself into a small half-grin and Vincent saw, with fascination, that his wife had chipped a front tooth.

  ‘I’ll always look after you,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t look after me if you’re dead.’

  ‘Natalie! Don’t say that.’

  ‘Dead,’ she said. ‘D-e-a-d.’

  ‘If you kill me, Natalie, you’ll go to jail.’

  She shrugged her little shoulders.

  ‘You stole my life,’ she said. ‘It’s gone. You pissed on it. You stopped me working. You wouldn’t let me have children.’

  ‘Natalie, you know that isn’t true.’

  ‘You didn’t want stretch marks on your china doll.’

  Natalie did not have a chipped tooth. Did not speak like this.

  ‘I let you lock me up here with all this crap, then you run away and live in your “house of few possessions”.’ She turned the gun towards his Lalique angel. He thought she was going to shoot it, but she merely used the barrel to tip it on to the tiled floor. It did not fall in slow motion. It hardly made a noise. It just changed itself into pale sharp pieces which rushed across the terracotta floor. Vincent rose and stooped towards the fragments but as Natalie turned the long barrel towards the angel’s twin he swooped up and grabbed her, pinned her round the forearms, as she began to laugh.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I guess it’s just not perfect any more.’

  The laugh was so natural, so relaxed, that he smiled too.

  ‘Natalie …’

  ‘You’re going to die,’ she sighed. ‘And so is she.’

  He could feel the gun, still in her hand. He could feel it against his thigh. He walked her across to the settee. ‘Drop the gun on to the settee,’ he said.

  She did. It did not go off.

  ‘I can wait another day or two,’ she said. ‘I used to wait for you to go to sleep.’ She sighed. ‘Then I would go to the linen closet and take out the gun and bring it back and point it at you. Tons of times.’

  He could feel her frail body. He held it tight, frightened to let it go, wary of what it might do. He turned her, so she was facing away from the window.

  ‘I used to put the gun an inch away from you, while you slept. And you know why I didn’t?’

  ‘Natalie,’ he said, ‘you need help now. I’m going to get you help.’

  ‘The only reason I didn’t shoot you is that if you fucked me, I might have a baby.’

  He could feel her crying quietly, feel her thin shoulders shuddering against his chest.

  ‘Natalie … please …’

  ‘I know you had a child with her, so watch out, buddy boy,’ she said. He could see her face, bright, sharp, wet-cheeked, broken-toothed, shining at him from the mirror. ‘Watch out for Natalie.’

  Vincent was now so frightened of this pale, fine-boned woman, he dared not let her go. He imagined she would somehow stab him, murder my mother in the car. He held both her wrists in one hand while he telephoned his brother.

  ‘I know who you’re calling,’ she said, ‘but it won’t work, no matter who you know.’

  At five a.m. Natalie Theroux was a client in a psychiatric institution in Goat Marshes. Twenty-nine hours later she was free again, riding through downtown Chemin Rouge in a taxi cab.

  This was why Vincent sat in the rented car outside the theatre while my mother went in to conduct the first of my acting lessons – he was keeping guard. He kept the car doors locked and sat low in the seat with his eyes on the rear-view mirror, and only after I had appeared, wet and frightened in the rain, and he, in terror, had nearly shot me, did he come inside.

  If you witnessed Vincent (who could not even program his own vid-remote) sitting in the kitchen, reading a photocopied instruction manual for Natalie’s Globlaster, you knew he would shoot himself or someone he did not mean to.

  He had not liked the bulge the holster made on his jacket so he had spent the day shifting the gun from briefcase to clutch bag, from clutch bag to belt. At lunch he left it underneath his chair with the result that his secretary was forced to ring all the previous places on the morning’s itinerary, asking noncommittal questions without ever mentioning the word ‘gun’.

  He was nervous that he would squeeze the trigger too much or not enough, and when he sat in the car that night, watching the taxis come and go in Gazette Street, he sometimes feared the tightness in his hand, the tension in his muscles, would make him squeeze off a shot when he had not meant to. He did not trust himself with the safety catch, so left it off.

  When I tapped on the glass, Vincent got such a fright he nearly fired the gun, and then he was so shaken he had to give the weapon to Felicity. She took it in both hands and walked slowly back into the kitchen, where she placed it on top of the kerosene refrigerator.* When Vincent entered the kitchen he was holding me in his arms and pressing his bearded face against my neck and kissing me. He had nearly killed me. He could feel his own heart thumping in his chest.

  It was at this moment that Wally chose to serve his Pigeon Patissy.

  *The frequency of power blackouts during the Efican Moosone means that the old kerosene refrigerators continue to co-exist with microwaves and vids.

  51

  I never tasted the famous Pigeon Patissy, or witnessed – as Vincent did – the effect the pigeon’s flesh had on Wally and Roxanna. I had seen the candles lit in the kitchen. I had observed the brand new crystal glasses, the two bottles of champagne which Wally had ‘found’ for the occasion, but when my maman said that she and I must be excused the meal, it did not occur to me to be either apologetic or disappointed.

  And I must ask you please, Madam, Meneer, to leave Vincent in his priestly black to be the sole witness to the lovers’ meal, and to follow my strutting knee-walk across the foyer, and to take your seat inside the Feu Follet.

  In the kitchen a cork popped, but in the soft sawdust of the ring I removed my shoes and tangled socks and felt the whole history of our national theatre between my liberated toes – Ducrow, Dubois, Millefleur, Smith. My maman also slipped out of her shiny black shoes and placed them, neat as quotation marks, on the wooden ring curbs.

  My mother went into the workshop and returned with two wooden-handled rakes. She gave me one. She took the other. ‘First we rake. You work that side of the shoes. I do the other.’

  It is not often that you recognize a milestone in your life, but I knew that this was serious. I treated the vulgar sawdust like a zen garden.

  When it was done, my mother took my rake and laid it down, together with her own, so it indicated a cord cutting across one side of the ring.

  It was now two a.m. That day she had done three ‘street walks’, a press conference, eight interviews, delivered a speech, and seen her lover nearly shoot her son, but as she swept she became calmer, quieter in herself. She lost the pale political beauty of the Kroon Princess. She began to rebuild herself from the outside in, to define herself by her movements, to make her body a mould for her emotions. She became at once precise and tranquil. She arranged the two rake handles so they touched between the high-heeled shoes.

  She removed her grey shot-silk skirt and folded it. She took it to the wings, and returned with two empty paint tins and a small black towel. Then she sat cross-legged – just in her jacket and panty-hose – on the black towel. She indicated that I should sit opposite her.

  Then we meditated, for perhaps ten minutes.

  ‘Now,’ she said, at last.

&nb
sp; I opened my eyes. My mother was very still. A smile – almost a smile – was on her face. All the focus of her eyes was on me. I felt a physical sense of expectation, a pins and needles in my limbs.

  ‘We are going to do The Chef of Efica.’

  ‘No!’ The word escaped, a puff of disappointment – to hear her say something so common, so vulgar, was a great disappointment to someone with my ambitions. I had expected a text from Shakespeare, Molière, Racine.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. She leaned across and ruffled my head. Then she gave me one high-heeled shoe and an empty paint tin. ‘This is your voice,’ she said.

  ‘I … want … to … be … LEAR.’

  ‘This is your voice,’ she said, placing the shoe firmly in one hand, the paint tin in the other. ‘You can move however you like, but the only thing you can say is with this shoe. You bang it, or tap it. You are the Chef,’ she said. ‘I am the soldiers. You know the story.’

  ‘It’s … so … corny.’

  ‘Corny or not – this is our play. I want to kill you, but you want to live. We soldiers are hungry, but cannot cook. We don’t believe you are really a chef. We think you are lying to save your life.’

  She picked up a shoe and banged it on the paint tin. As she did this, she changed herself. Her cheeks blew out, her eyes slitted, her stomach bulged. She sneered at me. Bang, bang, bang. She scared me.

  ‘I’m talking,’ she said. ‘This is how I talk to you.’

  I picked up the other shoe and banged the ring curb. My mother took it away from me.

  ‘You are trying to persuade me not to kill you. Think what you need to tell me. First you smell the smoke, the burnt food. You hate the soldiers. They have bright red coats with huge hats made out of fur. You are frightened of them. You have to tell them that you can cook their meal, before they kill you. Let’s stand.’

  She made ‘the horse’, i.e. the fighting stance, legs wide apart, knees bent. She crouched to bang her shoe on her tin can, then straightened, but her eyes never once left my face.

  I banged my own tin can right back at her.

  She stopped, shook her head.

  ‘Listen to me, watch me, don’t decide what you’re going to do until you see what I have done. Come on, Tristan – you want to act. This is acting – the moment while you wait to hear what I say. While you think what to do – that’s it. It isn’t the lines, or the lights – this is what we give them: the energy, made by this gap which is made by you listening to me. Drama is a spark plug. Your listening is the gap the spark flies across.’

  Then she sprang into the air and came down hard – the horse – upon the floor. She drummed a loud rat-tat, an aggressive, sneering territorial tattoo.

  I tried to make the horse myself. Of course I could not. I teetered, fell. She laughed – not my mother – the soldier laughed. He laughed. They laughed, all of them.

  My eyes welled up with tears. I showed them the shoe. It was empty.

  She hit the shoe against the tin once, hard, a warning shot.

  I began to make the food with the shoe, I was quiet and busy, I chopped.

  They moved in on me, around me. They shoved, but also: they smelt the food. They became gentler, then fierce again: they said it was no use. They told me I would die.

  I faced them. I held their eyes. I made myself be calm and then I persuaded – I used the shoe to sing them the recipe.

  They faltered. They were like feral dogs. You could not trust them.

  I described the dinner I would cook them – gravy – bubbles in a pot.

  They told me I was a liar. They said they would split my head, burst my guts. I stayed calm. I watched their eyes. When they were still again, I described silky sauces, butter, gravy, things simmering on the stove. I promised them thick bread, treacle puddings. Time ceased to matter for me.

  I was walking across a tightrope. I moved through the soldiers’ defences until the moment, the famous moment, when they were sated, and I had the sharp knife in my hand.

  ‘Bravo,’ my mother said. ‘Bravo.’

  I looked, dazed. Wally and Roxanna were standing by the door to the foyer, swaying, arm in arm, their glasses raised.

  ‘He actually has some talent,’ my mother said, and hugged me.

  Then Vincent stepped up into the ring and spoiled it all.

  He fetched my mother’s skirt. He held it out to her. She took it. He brought her case. He picked up my mother’s shoes and placed them by her feet. He gathered the rakes.

  My mother always hated to be organized by others, but when Vincent came on to the stage to take her away, she surprised me by being no longer angry with him.

  ‘I left all my stuff in the hotel bathroom,’ she said.

  Vincent was so paranoid, not only about his wife. He lived in a world of secret agencies. VIA, DoS, conspiracy, misinformation, destabilization. Four days into the campaign he had my mother sleeping in a different hotel each night. ‘It’s all been packed,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s moved already. Come on, you have to sleep.’

  My maman walked obediently off into the wings and came back with her skirt on. She was the Kroon Princess again – conservative, trim. She was about to kiss me goodnight but then I saw her soften, change her mind.

  ‘Stand on the other side of the ring,’ she told me.

  ‘Felicity!’ Vincent said.

  One can easily sympathize with Vincent’s agitation, but look at my mother – no matter what mistakes she may have made in raising me, you can never doubt her feelings for me. Now she was committed to making me an actor, she behaved as if each moment were precious.

  ‘I’m so sorry, mo-chou,’ she told Vincent.

  Vincent looked at his wrist-watch and shook his head.

  My mother looked at her own watch. ‘Roxanna,’ she said, ‘would you help us?’

  The older I get, the more amazed I am by the number of people who spend their whole life waiting for a chance to jump on to a stage. Before my mother had finished speaking, Rox was inside the ring, kicking off her shoes, tugging down her skirt, fluffing her hair, looking for a place to put her champagne glass.

  Vincent went and sat on a Starbuck. My mother’s eyes never lost their focus on me. ‘Tristan,’ she said. ‘This is an acting exercise you can do without me. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You can do it as often as you like. What I want you to do is move very slowly towards each other. I want you to look straight into each other’s eyes. When you reach a point where this makes you uncomfortable, I want you to stop and explore the feeling. Then, when you are ready, come on forward again. Roxanna, maybe it would work better if you could kneel too. Could you manage that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Roxanna said. She kneeled.

  ‘You’re wearing stockings. Take off your stockings.’

  Roxanna stayed stubbornly kneeling.

  ‘You’ll wreck your stockings.’

  But Rox had her ankles hid in sawdust. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘leave the stockings to me. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ my mother said.

  As Rox and I edged across the ring towards each other I was, at first, aware of everyone. It was half past two in the morning. I could feel Vincent’s agitation, Wally’s happiness, my mother’s exhaustion.

  Roxanna came towards me, smiling crookedly, holding her skirt in an odd little curtsy.

  I looked at her eyes. I concentrated. I could feel her so personally. I felt myself being looked at. When I stopped, it was not from calculation.

  ‘Explore it,’ my mother’s voice said.

  ‘It’s like a pain,’ she said. ‘Get used to it. When you can stand it, come closer. I’m leaving now,’ she said.

  I was now in the scary world of Roxanna’s eyes. It was like holding your hand in a flame. My ugliness was all around me. I was vile, on my own stage, in my own home.

  I did not even hear Vincent and my mother leave. I did not see her walk out into the dangerous dark.

  52

  Roxanna had promised he
rself she was going to marry a rich man, and there was nothing on earth – not Pigeon Patissy, not sex, not French champagne, not the tender feelings she had begun to engender in her breast towards Wally Paccione – nothing that would make her change her mind.

  She was going to marry a rich man. She was going to meet him at an auction – it was all she had lived for for two years, and yet, after five minutes in the auction room, Roxanna believed that her plan had failed.

  She stood in front of two flat lead figures – soldiers of the French Colonial Native Cavalry. She knew these figures from the catalogue, but now she hardly saw them. She was sick, disappointed, angry. She had spent two years of her life preparing for this, and the thing was: she was so damned stupid. She had bought a pig in a poke, a cul in a sac.

  Her new dress was black with thin shoe-string straps and a camisole top. Her stockings were seamed. She had a small clutch bag. Her hair had been cut, coloured, permed. She had spent every penny of the 650 dollars for this moment, but when she walked into the wide echoing room, she was very disappointed to be the most dramatic person in it.

  The auction room was filled with nerds, wimps, frumps, stooped men with leather patches on tweed coats, women with string bags.

  She had not allowed for this, had not even considered the question of the husband’s face, body, personality. She had not thought of sex. She had thought it was frivolous, unimportant, but now, as she walked around the exhibits with her annotated catalogue, she began to panic.

  A calmer personality might have thought that she should wait a minute or an hour, to see what other fish might enter the trap, but a calmer personality would not be in the place Roxanna was now in, would not have married Reade, torched the house, travelled to Chemin Rouge, accepted a proposal of marriage from Wally Paccione and then rejected it next morning.

  Her hands were damp. She could feel sweat between her shoulder blades. She looked at the lead figures and thought she would like to melt them, see them droop and bend, see the red paint drown and burn inside the bubbling metal.