Free The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey Page A

who could be seduced by Sirkus.’
    If her eyes now slid away from his, it was because she was nottelling the truth and she was ashamed. She could not stop thinking about the money he would earn. She coveted it almost as much as she feared losing him.
    She was a woman who owned only three dresses, two pairs of shoes, who was always scratching around for extra in order to pay her mortgage, or her actors, or build the sets, or repair the ancient lead plumbing. If you had asked the actors, still gathered in the theatre downstairs, they would have said my maman was rich. And it was true that she owned the crumbling bricks and powdery mortar of the Feu Follet and she had capital invested which returned her a small income, but not enough, not nearly enough, and the future of the theatre was always in doubt. The thought of all that Sirkus money drove her crazy with guilt and longing.
    ‘You
want
me to go,’ Bill said.
    ‘
No
,’ she said. ‘How could you say that? I don’t
want
you to go, sweets. I
want
you to stay.’
    ‘It is a lot of jon-kay …’
    ‘Never do anything for money,’ my maman said. ‘Never, ever.’
    ‘That isn’t what you said before.’
    ‘It’s what I’m saying now,’ she said. ‘It’s your life, but if you want to know what I think – you’re an Efican actor. You belong here, with us. We have important work to do. We have a whole damn country to invent.’
    The light was behind Bill when she said this. She did not see him start to cry, and it was a moment before she caught the sheen of the tears on his beautiful high cheeks. She left the bed and put her long pale arms around his neck.
    ‘Don’t cry, Billy-fleur.’
    ‘Just let me go,’ he said. ‘Please, just let me go.’
    ‘Darling, darling,’ she said softly, standing on tip-toes. ‘Do whatever it is you want.’ She kissed him with her mouth soft and open, kissed his big rough salty face.
    ‘You’re right.’ He withdrew from her to carefully blow his nose. ‘If I stay, I’ll always regret it.’
    She took his handkerchief from him and threw it on the bed. She stretched up to kiss his lower lip. ‘If you stay, you stay. Baby,’ she said, smiling, but retreated to the bed, to the other baby. ‘Your son has thrown up on the blanket,’ she said, but neither of them did anything to remedy it. They sat, and waited, as if something would happen.
    And, indeed, something did eventually happen.
    As the yellow street lights flicked on and the rain began again, my father appeared to choose. My maman saw him do it. She watched him as she might have watched an image form on a sheet of photographic paper. She saw how he tried to hide his decision from her. He ran his hand through his hair and then across his face. He got himself engaged in a bit of business with a handkerchief which occupied his whole attention from the window, where he had been standing at that moment, to the bed, beside which he now knelt.
    He placed his big hands flat on the white linen cover and looked at my ugly wrinkled face. His eyes were glistening, and there was a small smile on his archer’s-bow lips which my maman was familiar with from more intimate circumstances and which now made her believe that he had decided to stay.
    She felt dull, anti-climactic.
    ‘Goodbye little boy,’ he said.
    Then she saw – he was going.
    As my maman’s head bowed, as her beautiful face began to crumple, he kissed the crown of her head and walked away, out the door, down the stairs. When she looked up towards the door, he was already passing through the foyer. She stood in the gloom and watched him run through the Moosone rain with a small black rucksack he must have had already packed and waiting since the day before.
    She rested her face against the glass. ‘You bastard,’ she said.
    The drains were overflowing. A plastic rubbish bin was blowing down the street. My father ran gracefully away, his head back, his white shirt already black with rain.
    *
One hundred years