The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  Gabe had been grateful to be given this task, nineteen days before polling day, and he enjoyed this feeling now, with just nine days to go, that he could save Efica without a single shot being fired, keep the Red Party in power with the sheer force of his will.

  On the seat beside him were the newspapers, not just those from Chemin Rouge but from all over La Perouse, from the other islands, too – Inkerman, Nez Noir, Baker, tiny islands like Shark that no one in Saarlim City ever heard of, all of them carrying the one story, his story, fresh, hand-made – the suicide of the wife of the candidate’s lover.

  Before this happened, Smith had been ten points up in a vital seat. Now he sat in his car to watch her cop the bad tomatoes. The guys from Zinebleu were parked across the way, right in front of the steps. They were gutter hounds, pit-bull terriers. He had released her location to them, exclusive. You could rely on them. Their front-page photograph would make her look sleazy beyond belief.

  Of course, Analysis would call this luck. What they never did appreciate was that things only fell together with a great deal of assistance. Operations had not induced the wife’s mental state, but only an amateur would call the action lucky. It was the result of detailed knowledge, of discipline, and the ability to act swiftly, cleanly, without hesitation. Natalie Theroux was unstable. She had a gun. The gun now bore her prints. The bullet in her brain was from this gun.

  You could not have this sort of ‘luck’ without happy, well-motivated people on the ground. Gabe had these people, not by accident, but because he personally selected them, trained them, and flew thirteen-hour flights in order to visit them regularly. They were a particular type – active by nature, intelligent, but able to endure weeks of drudge work. They were more than this – they were like this driver who sat beside him now, a Uzi strapped inside his coat, a man who picked a bag of apples from his own tree before he came to work at four a.m.

  Now, as he waited for Smith and her campaign manager to emerge from the front door of the building, Gabe bit into one of these small pale yellow Efican apples. The skin had the golden translucency of a yellow plum, the flesh was very white, slightly tart.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Best damn apples in the world.’

  He was not wrong, Gabe thought, washing down the white sweet apple with hot sugarless Efican coffee. This was also good, heavy, characteristically fragrant, slightly furry on the tongue, and he thought how much he always enjoyed what was particular about every country he had ever worked in.

  He smiled and contracted his thigh muscles, recalling his three-hour R&R with Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, her honey-salt taste, her adventurousness in bed, her soft baby tears and her easy need. He had thought about her all through the long night afterwards. She had lain there like a promise.

  Indeed, he was thinking of Roxanna, gazing across at the building, listening to the flapping flags, admiring the way the sun seemed to glaze the chipped and flaking white wall of the Feu Follet, when he saw, framed perfectly in a window, a woman so exactly like her that he gasped.

  He poked his close-cropped head a little out of the car, and squinted up towards her. The woman was rubbing her scalp and yawning. As she yawned, her eyes closed up, but as the yawn ended, the eyes opened. She saw him looking up at her. And he understood, not so much because of her appearance, which was clouded by the filthy window, but by the frozen guilty moment that came before she ducked her head, that it was Roxanna.

  He shut his eyes and exhaled.

  When he opened his eyes, a man and woman were walking out the front door of the theatre – the woman was in a yellow dress, the man was bearded, all in black; it was Smith & Theroux. The boys from Zinebleu came in from the flank. Their flash gun was popping from fifteen feet away, but Gabe could no longer enjoy it. He opened the car door.

  ‘Tell Cantrell advise the CRTV,’ he told the driver.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Cantrell.’ He was already heading for the theatre door. ‘Hurry. There she goes.’

  As he crossed the street, a terrible feeling took control of him. He had been set up by a woman. He could not believe something so humiliating was happening. He prayed, as he entered the rank foyer with its whining little notices pinned to the wall, as he ran three steps a time up the stairs, that he was somehow mistaken about what he had seen, that the woman at the window had just looked like Roxanna because he was thinking of her at that moment. But even while he prayed this he could see, in his mind’s eye, the results of the residence check he had run, but barely looked at – Gazette Street. God damn.

  On the second floor he discovered a line of deserted offices. He was light on his feet and he moved down the corridor with the careful grace of an athlete, but he felt ill-prepared, clumsy, like someone drunk called into combat. He had been sloppy, complacent, second-rate – everything he despised. His only weapon was the box-cutter which he now transferred to the palm of his hand, still closed. He opened one door after the other – not following procedure, but with a deliberate carelessness – a challenge to fate to prove his fears unfounded.

  The rooms whose doors he so casually opened all had that particular potent emptiness he equated with stake-outs, sniper posts. They were like sweaters with their labels torn out – they taunted him with their lack of information.

  In the last room he found three mattresses on the floor, a fug of blankets, sheets, socks. The door banged back when he kicked it. Two of the mattresses were empty but on the third he could see a small white wrist showing from beneath a pile of blankets. He wrinkled his nose and passed his broad hand over his clipped hair.

  ‘Roxanna?’

  The blankets stirred, and then her tousled blonde head appeared, caped in a tartan blanket.

  ‘Gabey?’

  Even now, in extremis, a part of him was touched by her, moved by the white softness of her flesh. She was sleeping naked, and as she kneeled he could see the pronounced curve of her belly, and he could imagine the smell of her warmth, the feel of it against his face.

  ‘You stupid bitch,’ he said.

  ‘Gabey …’

  ‘What amateur trick is this?’

  ‘No, Gabey,’ she said. ‘No trick.’

  She pulled the blankets around her shoulders like a shawl. She squatted, frowning up at him. He could see her little foot, her ankle, her chipped toenails.

  ‘I’m poor, that’s all.’

  He went to the window and looked down. Everyone had gone.

  ‘I am respected, all over the world,’ he said. ‘Peru, Burma, China – they know me in these places. They know I am the best. I write their fucking history books, Roxanna. People stand in my way, Rox, I kill them.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘Read the paper, bitch. Look at the front page of today’s paper.’

  ‘Gabey, don’t be angry. What’s in the zines, honey?’

  ‘You tell your people, Rox – they’re dead. They’re fucking history.’

  ‘What people, Gabe?’

  ‘So what did you get?’ he said. ‘Why would you risk it? What the fuck could you get anyway?’

  Roxanna stood up and walked to her handbag which was sitting on a milk crate underneath the window. She opened her handbag. His neck bristled when he heard the sound of small objects, clinking. Then he saw what they were: small Ritz shampoo bottles, moisturizers. Oh my God, he thought, the bitch has wired me.

  ‘Put them there.’ He pointed to the window ledge.

  When she had arranged all the items on the sill, she stepped back. He stepped forward, picked up the shampoo. It seemed heavier than normal to him. He opened the cap, poured the goops of shampoo on to the floor, peered inside, then stopped. He was being an amateur himself.

  There was a plastic shopping bag amongst tangled dirty clothes on the floor. He picked it up and swept the little bottles into it.

  ‘We could never let them win the election,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that? Do you have any
thing else?’

  ‘You’re not a banker,’ she said. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Very funny. Do you have anything else?’

  She stooped and lifted up the corner of her mattress. Turning, she held out a big menu from the Ritz dining room. He dropped it in the plastic bag.

  ‘I would never have picked you,’ he said.

  ‘I picked you.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I thought you were the answer to my prayers.’ He saw her smile collapse, and the tears begin to run. Resisting the desire to embrace her, he turned and went out the door.

  57

  I could feel suicide all around me, viscous, shameful, wrong. I could see the inside of Natalie’s mouth in my mind’s eye, the broken tooth. The odour of death lay in the hallways. It got mixed with pie, cinnamon, sugar, pigeons’ throats, vents opening, closing, was overlaid with a persistent vision of the dead woman’s bony chest – birds’ bones, white translucent skin.

  Wally would not let it matter. He was a sergeant-major, stamping and stomping in his big suede boots. He brushed my teeth. He made me gargle salt and water. He combed my hair with his comb, digging its sharp tortoiseshell teeth into my scalp. He strapped on my mask and sent me down into the leafy courtyard where old Ducrow got eaten by his lion.

  ‘Do your warm-ups,’ he said.

  ‘Are we going to do a show?’

  ‘Just do what I say.’

  He was hectoring and impatient with Roxanna too. He bullied her into going out for coloured chalk. I had not seen him treat her this way before. I did not understand it, why she let him, why he wanted to do it. I did not know why she was so upset – she had less connection with Natalie Theroux than any of us.

  She had a little lambswool cardigan she had found in Props. It was a size too small. She buttoned it to the neck and folded her arms across her breasts. Her eyes were weepy, her nose red, her shoulders were rounded, but she went out to buy the chalk and came back to the courtyard where Wally, having swept the cobblestones fastidiously, was now running a long orange power-cord to one of the stolen vids he always had around the place.

  Roxanna, in giving him the chalk, made a small noise, a sob.

  ‘Don’t dwell on it,’ was all he said.

  As for me? I could not warm-up. I was too disturbed. Whenever I closed my eyes to begin my breathing I saw the crazy woman’s face-her throat, her tooth, blood, gore, ooze.

  Then Wally turned on the vid.

  Roxanna sat heavily on the garden bench. She held out her arms for me. I sat in her lap and pressed my body hard back into her.

  The weather forecast was on the vid. Wally began to draw white and yellow chalk marks on cobblestones. The chalk did not always take well, but he was not prepared to wait. Following his blue-lined exercise book, he made a series of loops, arrows, arcs, all with the greatest urgency, but when my mother’s face appeared on the screen, he stopped. He tucked his chalk back behind his ears.

  ‘Shush,’ he said, but the only voices were crackling from the slightly damaged two-inch speakers. ‘This is it.’

  What they were saying was – my maman as good as killed Natalle Theroux, and when I saw Felicity’s ghosted image on CRTV4 it seemed as if she really had. I watched her mouth, her eyes, the 625 lines across her face, at noon on 20 January, in Chemin Rouge in the year 382.

  ‘This is political,’ she said.

  It did not seem the right thing to say. They wanted to talk about her and Vincent. I pushed further back into Roxanna’s breasts. I tightened the buckles on my mask and stared at my mother through the slits. She was scared. She laid her hand briefly against her throat. She tried to smile. It did not seem the right thing to do.

  My mother swallowed. She touched her hair. I could feel her shame behind my own eyes, a cold, cold pain like ice.

  The camera showed the interviewer with his head on one side, stern, judicial.

  My maman was irritated, angry.

  ‘This was a political assassination.’

  ‘No,’ said Wally, ‘she doesn’t need to say that. She shouldn’t say that.’

  Then she started to talk about ‘military and security elements in Voorstand’.

  ‘No one wants to hear this,’ Wally said. ‘She makes herself look bad …’

  ‘Shush,’ said Roxanna.

  ‘She should not be saying this,’ Wally said. ‘She looks as if she doesn’t care about Natalie.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Roxanna said.

  ‘This was a political assassination,’ my maman said. ‘Natalie Theroux did not break the laundry window of her own house in order to kill herself from one foot away … ’

  ‘OK,’ Wally said. ‘That’s that.’ He turned off the television.

  ‘Gabe did this,’ Roxanna said. ‘This is what he did.’

  ‘That’s history,’ Wally told her. ‘It happened in the past. Now we’ve got to deal with the future. Whatever happened between this Voorstand jerk and you, that’s one thing. What happened with Vincent’s missus, that’s another. It’s all in the past.’

  ‘What are you so scared of?’ Roxanna said. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘You’ve got to keep it clear in your head,’ he said. He was back at work, drawing on the cobblestones with chalk. He moved across the courtyard like a monkey, on his haunches. He had sticks of chalk behind his big lobed ears. He looked only at his exercise book and at the floor, never up at us. He made a dotted line.

  Roxanna pushed her eye into my hair and rubbed against my skull. ‘Wally, you can’t see yourself?’

  ‘I’m drawing lines for toucans …’

  ‘You are drawing lines for toucans. What the fuck is that?’

  ‘I can train them,’ Wally said. ‘You know what I do. You’ve seen my birds.’

  ‘I am sure that what the mother says is true. I slept with this little creep, do you understand? He was the one at the Ritz. Why won’t you listen to me?’

  When Wally turned he looked as if his face had been slapped.

  ‘Don’t you see what’s happened to me?’ Roxanna said. ‘I know him. His name is Gabe Manzini. I was going to marry him. He’s the one I picked. He as-good-as told me he did exactly what the maman says.’

  ‘He as-good-as told you?’

  ‘He said, Tell your people that they’re dead.’

  ‘That could mean anything.’

  ‘No, no. It was very clear. He’s not a banker. He said, we could never let them win the election. Can’t you even imagine how I’m feeling?’ Roxanna said. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened to me? Can’t you imagine how bad I feel, how stupid I’ve been?’

  I looked at Wally. I had known him all my life, known the freckles and hair on his arms, the mole on his neck, the pouches under his grey eyes, but when I looked at him across that spray-wet sawdust I saw, for the first time, what his life had been like, how he had been in prison. He squatted on the floor, cold, cruel, like a dog, face drawn, hatchet-shaped.

  ‘Just shut the fuck up,’ he said. ‘All you’re doing is getting yourself in a panic.’

  ‘All I want is a cuddle, Wally,’ Roxanna whimpered. ‘Is that so much to ask? Do I deserve to have you tell me shut up?’

  Wally laid his chalk down on the cobbles. He put it down so slowly you could feel all his fear in the action. He laid the chalk as if it were precious crystal that might fracture, a bomb that might explode. He came and knelt beside us. He was stiff, contained. He put his hand towards Roxanna’s shoulder. She flinched from him. He lifted his hands up, away, flat-palmed.

  ‘Take responsibility for yourself.’

  Roxanna held me tighter. ‘Why are you so horrible to me?’ she said. ‘I am taking responsibility. I’m saying it’s my fault. But what the maman says is true.’

  ‘We have to get on with our lives,’ Wally whispered. I twisted my neck to look at him. He was very close to me. I could see the fear swimming in his eyes.

  ‘We make our lives out of what we have, out of what’s possible.’

  ‘Out
of toucans?’

  ‘This is Efica. We’ve got to be reallstic.’

  He reached behind his ear for another length of chalk.

  ‘We can make a decent life,’ he said. He knelt and began to draw a long yellow arc across the stage. All this was happening in the last twenty-four hours of my mother’s life. No one told me it was so. I thought I would have her for ever.

  58

  If Natalie’s suicide had damaged Felicity more, she might have lived.

  Her support dropped seven points – not quite enough for safety’s sake. They came and put a rope around her neck, and pushed her off. She hung and kicked above the sawdust ring, her own damn stage. She pissed, she shit, she bled, she died. Tristan’s mother, a young woman in a yellow dress, forty-three years old.

  Vincent was in the car outside playing with his gun. Tristan, Wally, Roxanna, were on the floor above her. Friends all around her, seconds from her side.

  The maman loved Efica but she was born in Voorstand. The Voorstanders did not hate her personally. They stole her life – Manzini, the VIA, someone. It was not personal. They took her life from Tristan, not personal. They did not think through the consequences. They did not even think that when the boy found his maman, at two a.m., they were presenting him with a horror he would carry all his life, the picture of his mother dead and ugly, hanging from a bright green rope.

  Tristan came down the stairs because he heard a noise, thought his mother’s master class was about to start. His green rope was missing from the stairs. He came down a step at a time. Slowly. He heard the scuffling. Theatres are always full of scuffling, shouting, cries – it is the business of the theatre: life, death, catharsis.

  Until this happens to you, you have no idea how the brain works, how it refuses to deliver the bad news, how it seeks anything but the truth, runs naturally away from it like water running down hill.

  Tristan saw his mother hanging dead inside the Feu Follet theatre. Her handbag was on the floor. Her eyes bulging, her jaw slack. His brain lied to him.