The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (31 page)

‘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.

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.

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.

She had sex with him (and champagne and chocolate mousse). With me, she studied acting. Ostensibly she did this as a favour to my maman, to pay her rent, but when you saw her kneel upon the sawdust to play
Exits and Entrances
the light shone out of her. She did not ‘act’, which is what amateurs usually do. She had the capacity to ‘be’ which is a gift, not something you can learn in drama school or acting workshops. She was great at exits, at being about to kiss, about to die, about to stab her enemy. Sometimes she seemed paralysed by her own intense feelings, and when she moved it was as if she had to tug herself free of them. She was sometimes obvious in her choices, but there was always something eccentric in her enactment of these choices, a quirkiness which made her interesting to watch. She was technically ignorant, and occasionally sentimental in her tastes, but she had it – the thing that
makes you watch an actor on the stage. No one told her she had it. No one said anything to her. But I saw my mother, who had begun by thinking of Roxanna as a whore, soon begin to treat her very differently. As for me, she quickly became my intimate friend and fellow student.

Who knows how our lives would have been if there had been no Gabe Manzini. There is no reason, for instance, why Roxanna might not have become the actress my eleven-year-old heart imagined. We might have reopened the Feu Follet – why not? There is no doubting her raw talent or her enjoyment of the exercises she did with me on the stage.

Roxanna, however, wanted very specific things for her new life: a country house with a park, peacocks, a fountain. She wanted a white carpet, a brass bed with lace-covered pillows of different sizes, and she had persuaded herself that Gabe Manzini could provide these items.

I do not need to point out how naïve she was, on every level, but she had no previous experience of even moderate wealth and she trusted the appearance of his hotel room, the cost of the restaurants he took her to.

She would arrive back at the Feu Follet just after midnight, no ring on her finger, still muggy and musky and happy from love-making. Then she would join me in my mother’s master class – do her entrances and exits, pass through her circles of concentration, frighten and amaze herself, earn herself my maman’s warm embrace.

At two o’clock my maman had to leave. I never knew where she slept, only that it was a different place each night and that she was afraid. I did not know the person she was afraid of was Gabe Manzini. No one knew his name in those days, but I could always feel him – I did not know it was the same thing, the same person – the one who was there in the night, the one who gave Roxanna her puffy eyes, Wally his morning melancholy.

After breakfast Roxanna came with us to the fish markets.

Then we would come back to Gazette Street and Wally would fillet the fish. At around noon he and Roxanna would begin to drink beer. They would argue about food or sing folk songs in rough harmony.

Sometimes Sparrow sang with them. He had a good baritone
which he liked to use and he would have come more often, but he found a job in a music-hall restaurant. His employer was a Mr Ho, an Efican-Chinese who, whilst undemanding about many things – he was sloppy in dress and careless about hygiene – had such reverence for the text of his Victorian melodramas that he twice dismissed actors for departing from the written word.

‘You would think it would be easy,’ Sparrow said, ‘but it is just exhausting. The guy is a maniac. He sits in the restaurant following the script with a flashlight.’

The city had election fever. The light poles were wreathed in red or blue streamers made of crepe paper which bled in the rain each afternoon. Ice-cream vans with loudspeakers on their roofs prowled the suburbs. As the day of the election drew closer, more actors began to visit us. It was incorrect, they said, for the Feu Follet to be dark at this moment in history. They offered their services. They wanted to do something for the election – a review, a fundraiser, street theatre. They sat in our kitchen and judged us. They looked at Wally’s depressed demeanour, Roxanna with her Irma hair-do, me in my Mouse mask. They saw only surfaces. They did not see history lurking in the dark.

It was half past eleven at night. Roxanna was with Gabe Manzini, having her ankles kissed. I was lying on my mattress. Wally was sitting on his bed, a blue-lined notebook resting on his knees, his upper body contorted around the pivot of his pencil. He erased constantly, seemingly more words than he wrote. The wattles of his pendulous ears glowed pink.