The Unusual Life Of Tristan Smith Part 27

'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 ...' 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.' 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.

'd.a.m.n.'

'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 gla.s.s of red wine, and then he rang through to the Voorstand emba.s.sy to have them send over the latest communiques.

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 apt.i.tude 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 something in the night. I intuited him. 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 s.e.x 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 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 wh.o.r.e, soon begin to treat her very differently. As for me, she quickly became my intimate friend and fellow student. 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 wh.o.r.e, 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, peac.o.c.ks, a fountain. She wanted a white carpet, a bra.s.s 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 naive 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 cla.s.s do her entrances and exits, pa.s.s 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.

55.

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.

'What ... are ... you ... rubbing ... out?'

'Nothing.'

'A ... letter?'

'None of your business.'

There was a time when Wally would not have risked being seen writing in a notebook. It would have been too much like his early days at the Feu Follet when he had fraudulently represented himself to Annie McMa.n.u.s as a 'prison-poet'. But now there was no other witness but me and I had no memory of the prison-poet. I imagined him composing a love letter to Roxanna. I napped, dreaming about Roxanna and Wally getting married.

When I felt hands on the buckles of my mask, I was not alarmed I imagined Roxanna had come in and was doing what she often did before our acting cla.s.s. I felt the buckles undone, the straps loosened, the mask removed, and my sweaty face meet the coolness of the draught from the open window.

And then: this shriek.

I awoke, my hair on end. The lights were blazing. Beside my mattress, kneeling on the floor a pale-skinned, slim woman with short hair. My eyes met hers. She shuddered, hid her own eyes, shrieked again.

Maybe I screamed too how do I know? The woman by my bed was so thin I could see the bones in her chest above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Once she had finished one scream, she began another. She put her hands across her eyes, but I could see her chipped front tooth, her pink epiglottis. I watched her as she gulped, screamed, gulped, screamed.

You would imagine all this fuss would bring Wally leaping from his bed, but he continued sleeping. He lay on his back with his exercise book on his chest, his mouth open, his arms flung sideways.

A taxi began to toot its horn outside. Still he did not stir. When the woman finally stopped screaming, he turned on to his side, his back toward me.

'You're it?' the woman said. She lowered her white, red-nailed hands to her lap. She looked at me as if I were a source of light so bright that I might cause damage to her sight. 'You're his son son?'

She scared me. Everything about her scared me. She had her handbag open. I could see a gun inside. It was quite clear, undisguised, lying amongst crumpled tissues and a rent-a-car agreement.

'Are you Vincent Theroux's son?' she quavered.

I was too afraid to answer.

She put her hand into the bag. I thought she was reaching for the gun. I screamed. I threw my mask at Wally and it smashed into the bridge of his nose and brought him leaping out of his sheets, white-legged, outraged, his hand clutching his injured tarboof. The woman dropped her handbag.

Wally was in no state to understand anything quickly. He stared at the woman as she picked up her handbag and ran out the door. I could hear her on the stairs, laughing.

The front door banged shut Wally flung up the window but she was already driving away.

'A crazy woman,' he said, patting my hair. 'That's all, just some old crazy woman.'

He helped me back on with my mask, making the buckles as tight as I liked them, biting hard against my skin. He wrapped some blankets around my shoulders, tucked his exercise book into his back pocket.

'Some old crazy woman, that's all.'

'She ... was ... going ... to ... murder ... me.'

'No.' Wally's hair was standing skew-whiff on his head. His face was pale, drawn. His nose was turning purple around the small cut the mask had made. 'She wasn't going to shoot you, son.' He hugged me into his cigarette-smoke shoulder. 'You scared her, that was all. You frightened her.'

'She ... came ... to ... kill ... me.'

'You both scared each other, that's all.'

But he began to busy himself around the room, gathering blankets, a kettle, the vid, and when he was completely loaded up with all these things he stooped, grunted, and brought me into the tangle of hard and soft things in his arms. 'We'll have a little kip up in the tower.'

The tower was now empty. Everything that had marked it as my home was now gone and it had, instead, a rather depressing dusty appearance, but it still had the same heavy bolt my mother had always slid across when making love, and when Wally had set me on the dusty floor, the first thing he did was drive that old bolt home.

I stood on my ugly stick-thin trembling legs, s.h.i.+vering. I tugged my mask straps one notch tighter.

Wally plugged in the kettle and the vid and arranged them beside each other on the floor. He inserted a pirate recording of Irma. While the show began he wrapped me in two blankets and made a hood for my head.

'There,' he said, 'that's cheerier.'

He squatted beside me for a moment but when I looked across at him I saw he was writing in his exercise book again.

'Aren't ... you ... calling ... the ... Gardiacivil?'

But Wally did not feel free to call the Gardiacivil about Vincent's wife. He held his handkerchief to his injured nose and turned his bleak grey eyes on me.

'You're ... writing ... her ... description?'

'She's gone,' he said. 'The door is locked, OK? We don't have to tell the Gardiacivil about her.'

'What ... are ... you ... writing?'

'I'm staying awake with you, OK? I'm writing because I'm staying awake.'

'But ... what ... is ... it?'

'NOTHING,' he said. 'Just watch the vid.'

'You're ... writing ... a ... play.' play.'

Wally looked up at me, his eyes accusing, his mouth uncertain.

'Watch the vid,' he said, but I knew I had got it right. He was writing a play for me. I was at once excited, but incredulous. My legs became itchy and kicky. Could he write a good play? I watched Irma on the vid. She splayed her small white fingers, bent her wrists backwards.

'Never, ever tell anyone, right? Not till I say it's OK.'

'OK,' I said, but I could not stop my legs drumming on the floor.

'What I can do,' Wally said, 'is write parts for them.'