The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  When she felt the attentions of the collector next to her a shiver of irritation passed up her spine and into her hair. She felt him move around her, stand on one side of her, then the other. He was a guy. He was doing the guy-things that her entrance had encouraged him to do, but Roxanna was not attracted to these nerds.

  ‘So what do you think?’ the man asked. He spoke English with a Voorstandish accent, but she did not look at him. She could feel him at her side, in her space – short, tweedy.

  ‘Think of what?’ she said. She was so pissed off.

  ‘The Hilperts,’ he said.

  He meant the figures.

  ‘Don’t look like bloody Hilperts to me,’ Roxanna said.

  She had seen few Hilperts in life, but many in photographs, and when she looked at these two figures in the harsh neon light the precision of the colour and the details of the moulding confused her.

  ‘The curator says they’re Hilperts.’

  ‘Bully for him.’

  ‘What do you think they are?’

  She looked at him more closely. He was wearing tweed, it is true, but not in that nerdy way. He was wearing very precise cuffed corduroy trousers and soft Italian slip-ons. He was, in short, the image of a rich man on a Saturday. Also, now she looked at him, she saw he was actually good-looking – he had chiselled lips and intense, dangerous, blue eyes. He was looking at her, up and down, but subtly at least. ‘It says here’ – he held up his catalogue – ’that they’re “bloody” Hilperts.’

  Roxanna felt herself blushing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was angry about something.’

  ‘You think it’s not Hilpert?’

  And then she saw: it was working, it was really working, even though she used a swear word, it was happening like the book promised it would. Nothing in her life had ever worked out, but here she was, talking with a rich man. She knew stuff he didn’t know. He was looking at her tits.

  ‘What year did Herichsen start business?’ she asked him.

  ‘Your calendar?’ he said. ‘240.’

  She knew it was 236. She did not want to show him up. She knew the answers. She knew the questions. She felt everything, her destiny, at her fingertips.

  ‘It’s very detailed,’ the man said. ‘There’s that – the detailing on the musket.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean – there was no native cavalry until after the native wars. And the native wars did not end until 249, and then they put a few survivors in a uniform.’ Reade would have died to see her answer. He knew her, or thought he knew her, back in Jonestown High School: never knew the answers, purple lipstick, black eyeshadow. Bad Girl, Fast Girl, I’ll-cut-your-fucking-face-Girl.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. He was cute. His accent was cute. He had the suggestion of a smile, a wonderful cool, almost scary blue about his eyes.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Then they shipped them off to fight in Europe, and they died.’

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s very bloody astute.’

  Roxanna giggled.

  The collector smiled.

  She liked him, she liked him anyway. She wanted to touch his mouth with her fingers.

  ‘Could I buy you lunch?’ he said.

  And it was done. They had met.

  When, exactly three hours later, she went with him to his hotel, she guessed it was too fast, that you should not conduct this sort of relationship like that. She knew a lot about him, but. His mother was a waitress. His daddy was missing. He grew up in a little town where they used poisonous snakes to prove their faith in God. He was very high up in a bank. If you sat in his office you could look across at the Skyscraper Cathedral, and down to the Bleskran. He was not married. He was funny and kind of wild. She thought: whatever happens, happens.

  As she walked into the elevator in the Ritz she wished Reade could see her.

  Reade would have been frightened to walk into a hotel like this. She too, once. But she read a book and here she was. She was in a daze, and only once – the moment she entered Room 2302 – did she feel a crackle of anger, out of nowhere: the unfairness of it, that there were women who lived every day of their lives in places like this.

  Wealth was not like she had imagined – no dark panelling, no gilt – all these different pearl greys, dove greys, this velvety, almost colourless luxury with its single big bed, crisply turned down, and its antique writing desk and the big bathroom with its phials and canisters and silk kimonos, and this wide, deep anger lay glowing beneath a silky sheet of pleasure and gave her that dangerous ecstatic feeling she knew she should not encourage in herself.

  ‘Would you like an Aqua?’ Gabe asked her now.

  Eficans never used the word. It was as exotic and beautiful to her ears as a glass angel.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the breathless little voice which she had learned from Irma.

  He went to the bar and she sat at the writing desk. Probably it was called a bureau, something unexpected. She ran her hand over the leather desk top. She thought: there are people who do this every day of their lives.

  He brought her the drink. She took it without looking at it, half giddy with what she had done.

  ‘I have to go soon,’ she said.

  He smiled at her.

  He was not very much taller than she was, but he had a broad strong body and a handsome olive-skinned face with a neat, short haircut and a cute grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth and made his eyes crease up. He was forty, maybe forty-five.

  She tried to sip her drink slowly, but something inside her made her gulp at it. She squeezed her eyes shut against the bubbles. When she opened them he was smiling at her and she knew he thought she was cute.

  ‘Tell me more about your job in the bank,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the one who’s got the job in the bank.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘But I love the way you talk,’ he said. ‘Talk to me about anything.’

  She loved the way he talked. She liked the bright, clean confidence of his voice and that three-showers-a-day smell, all soap and steam and light spicy after-shave.

  It made her giddy, gave her that feeling, made her laugh more than she might have otherwise, and when he came behind her and put his hand on her thin straps she curled her shoulders up and let the straps slip down over her soft white shoulders, and she turned and bowed her head a little and pulled up her hair to let him see the tattooed dove she had hidden on her neck.

  He did not go away. Indeed, he kissed her there, and made a little moan in her ear, and in a moment that 450-dollar dress was on the floor like a great black bloom fallen on to the soft grey carpet and he was telling her he was crazy about her lopsided smile.

  Now the dress lay on the floor as if it were nothing better than a pair of shucked-off overalls. She should hang it up. She should say, well, honey, you’re just going to have to wait. But he already had his jacket and trousers lying there beside the dress and if she was going to insist she would have to stand up and walk across the room in her pants and bra and she didn’t want him lying there and looking at her. She was prettiest when closest, so she left the dress where it had fallen, but it stayed in the corner of her mind, this big black worry which had cost her all her capital.

  She just wanted to hold him against her, feel herself sort of folded into his chest, but whenever she reached for him he was not where he had been – his face was in her stomach, at her knees for Chrissake.

  Now he was at her ankles. She blushed bright red and tugged away.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Babe,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘Let go.’ Her ankles were like meat, fat, pork-chop, ugly.

  But he took a hold of them, against her will. That really pissed her and she suddenly felt that sort of distance – she just watched him as he kissed them. He was kneeling on the floor and kissing her ankles, taking off his wrist-watch while he did it
.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Babe, please.’

  ‘I hate my ankles.’ Her voice caught on the word. She hated to have to say it out loud.

  Gabe ran his tongue between her toes.

  She felt the tears run down her face before she even knew she was crying. It just came out of her as if she were a thing, a sponge, soaked with too much moisture.

  ‘Hey, hey.’ He crawled up towards her. Oh thank God, she thought. He held her. It was like she wanted. ‘Don’t cry, hunning. Daddy’s here. Why are you crying?’

  She held him hard. She pushed her face into his neck and sobbed. She could not say.

  ‘What did I do?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I love your feet,’ he said. ‘I just love your feet.’

  ‘Don’t mock me,’ she said.

  ‘These are the kind of feet I like.’

  She looked up at him, tear-smeared. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  She snorted. She could not help it. It was not quite laughing, but that’s what it became.

  ‘I mean it,’ he said, blushing. ‘There are leg men and breast men and feet men. I am a foot man.’

  ‘Gabe, my ankles are ugly.’

  ‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘These are beautiful feet.’

  ‘Really?’

  She was too tensed about everything – her impetuousness, the 450-dollar lump of dress she had left lying on the floor, this dizzy, unconnected feeling. She wept then. Once a whore, she thought.

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ he said, rubbing her neck. ‘Just tell me what to do.’

  ‘Hang up my dress,’ she said. ‘Please, would you do that for me?’

  He looked at her incredulously. At first she thought he was going to laugh, and then his eyes narrowed and she thought he would tell her to hang it up herself.

  ‘Please.’

  He shrugged his head down into his shoulders and splayed his hands. He hung up the dress. She did not look at him do it, because she would not have wanted him to look at her.

  When he came back into bed he held her head between his hands and kissed her on her eyes and then softly, repeatedly, on her mouth. She felt herself open up to him.

  She had done everything wrong. She had lost the plot completely but for this long at least she did not give a damn.

  53

  When Roxanna confessed to Gabe Manzini that she was a pyromaniac, he felt a give-away smile appear on the edges of his small, pretty mouth. He kissed her neck to hide it and felt the coarse tickle of her thick, strong hair. He inhaled her smell, whisky, barley. He rubbed his nose against her little rough tattoo and he was happy. God damn: she fit the specs. She had the look. He had known her when she came into the auction room – slightly bruised but golden, small-waisted, heavy in the legs, they were always similar, each time, and here was this thing – pyromania this time – it clicked into place like the keystone in an arch. Whatever it was he was repeating, he did not want to stop. He was going to have a perfect gig in Efica.

  ‘What is it?’ she said, snuggling up to him.

  ‘You’re my good-luck charm,’ he said.

  All his girls had some kind of craziness – kleptomania, agoraphobia, always something that would later be a pain in the ass, but which would also be part of their sexual fizz. Sometimes he tried to think how their personal craziness matched the craziness of the country, but pyromania, no, please, not Efica. Pyromania was more applicable to Indo-China, South America, time-warp Marxists, Jesuits with blazing eyes.

  Gabe Manzini liked Eficans. They were dry, ironic, uncomfortable with dogma, suspicious of high-sounding rhetoric. Their small population, their geographic isolation, their lack of natural riches, their tiny GNP, their historical military dependence on both the French and the English had helped forge a pragmatic people, not easily given to visions of bloody revolutions or even rosy futures. Yet, for all that, they were presently engaged upon a full-scale national misunderstanding – that they could renegotiate their alliance with Voorstand.

  If this had been a major nation, one would be irritated, but this was not a major nation. This was Efica, for God’s sake, with neither military nor economic power. You would imagine that after three hundred years they would understand their position, but suddenly they did not get it – not just the intellectual minority, but an infuriating 51 per cent (October), 52 per cent (November), 50 per cent (December) were responding to the current Blue Party rhetoric. If the Blues won the upcoming elections, Voorstand would be directed to remove its devices from Efican soil and Efica would become ‘friendly but neutral’.

  In the world of realpolitik, this was fantasy, not because Efican territorial waters supplied 25 per cent of Voorstand’s fish, or even because the northern islands provided a safe storage place for chemical waste. It was fantasy because Efica’s southern granite islands were now host to fifteen vital subterranean defence projects. Eficans would not be permitted to reject their twenty-five-year-old alliance with Voorstand.

  And this, of course, was why Gabe Manzini was here. It was his job to make sure the status quo was maintained.

  ‘So,’ he grinned, ‘you’re a pyromaniac? You burn things, right?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be horrible.’ Roxanna lifted her face from his chest and showed him her wide, moist brown eyes. She was delicious.

  ‘Isn’t that what you were telling me?’

  ‘You tricked me into saying it. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘So I should I hide my matches from you,’ he teased. ‘No flambés.’

  ‘It isn’t like it sounds. It isn’t really that at all.’ She paused. ‘What’s flambé?’

  ‘We could have room service, right now.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He loved the way she flushed and the way her lips parted. He placed his hands under her plump arms and pulled her further up his chest. She moved up with a soft grizzle like a puppy and kissed him with that huge soft open mouth. He checked the clock from the corner of his eye. ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he said. He kissed her on the nose. ‘Those other fellows in the bank will be out whoring and making themselves miserable.’

  ‘Mmmmm,’ she wriggled against him.

  ‘I just hate I’ve got to go to sleep.’

  ‘Me too,’ she yawned.

  Gabe sat up. ‘Roxanna. I’m not permitted to do that. I can’t actually sleep with you.’

  ‘Oh listen …’

  ‘It’s not personal, Roxanna.’

  ‘Listen, I was just playing a game with you. You told me you were dangerous. I just said it to trump you. I don’t even know what a pyromaniac is, not really. Do I really look like a crazy person?’

  ‘This is policy …’

  ‘I wouldn’t do anything to you, honey. If you knew how much I loved being here, you wouldn’t send me away. Please let me sleep here, Gabey, please. All I want to do is sleep, and wake up, and then I’ll go away.’

  ‘If it was up to me …’

  ‘But it is up to you.’

  ‘If it was up to me you could stay a week.’

  ‘Who is it up to?’ she said, sitting up.

  ‘The bank.’

  ‘Some guys don’t like to fall asleep with women, I know that. Maybe they’re Catholic or something – they just want to call the girl a cab. If that’s what it is, just tell me. I can take it.’

  ‘We have a policy,’ he said. He pulled her reluctant body towards him and kissed that delicious little ink-blue dove under her hair. ‘We have a policy, in foreign countries, to protect our executives. Guys in my job get kidnapped, killed, colleagues of mine.’

  ‘This is Efica.’

  ‘So if you just give me your driver’s licence number or your ID, they’ll check you out and then we can sleep.’

  ‘I have to give you my ID?’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘I guess this is a foreign country,’ Roxanna said. ‘I guess I seem as foreign to you as
all this does to me.’ But she got out of bed and found her ID and gave it to him and watched while he wrote it down. ‘Now I take a cab, right?’

  ‘Now you take a cab.’

  She took her ID back and opened her wallet.

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I left my cash at home.’

  For a moment it occurred to him that she was on the game. He felt a bitter disappointment, a kind of anger. It flushed into him like speed when it enters straight into the vein. It changed his face, slitted his eyes, thinned out the bow in his lips.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what do you need?’

  She was looking at his face and her own was pale. ‘Five,’ she said. ‘If you don’t have it, it’s OK.’

  He laughed then, and gave her the 5 dollars. At the door he kissed her again. He was in a good mood. He kicked off his shoes, poured himself another glass of red wine, and then he rang through to the Voorstand embassy to have them send over the latest communiqués.

  54

  Gabe Manzini is the man who ruined my life. I had no idea that he existed, or rather I knew only that ‘something’ had arrived which threw a shadow across Wally’s countenance, that had him sitting by his bed at one a.m., waiting for Roxanna to come home.

  It was this nameless ‘something’ which also made Roxanna so gentle with Wally, and had her performing small domestic tasks for which she had no aptitude – she darned his socks (once), ironed his trousers (twice), and cooked meals and sandwiches for him continually.

  Roxanna was no cook, believe me, but she performed these sad services for Wally in recognition of her role in his silent pain, and Wally, sitting with his rough-skinned elbows resting on the kitchen table, observed her crack eggs inexpertly and did not seem inclined to criticize.

  I had never heard or read Gabe Manzini’s name, but I knew he was out there, on the other side of the dusty windows, a something in the night. I intuited him.

  This was the man who would end up as Direkter of The Efican Department at the VIA, but let me tell you, Meneer, Madam, your man did not intuit us, not by computer or any other method. His ID check on Roxanna used data banks in four continents, led him to arson in Melcarth, but not to Gazette Street. The part of Roxanna’s life she lived with us was unknown to him.