The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey Page A

sense of theft, as if his happy life had been stolen from him.
    Then – for ten, twenty seconds – he was capable of anything. He wanted to hurt her, break her. He was a frightened soldier in a burning village.
    For a moment, in front of one hundred and eighty people, he was mad. And then, slowly, a bit at a time, he turned his rageaway from Felicity, and turned it back into his performance.
    The wind was warm down in the port. It smelt of heavy oil and sea salt. He drove with the window rolled down, clattering past the bleak waterfront bars with their yellow tiled walls and used-car-yard bunting, heading towards the
Zinebleu
sign where the review of
Macbeth
was already rolling off the presses. It was the quaint habit of the
Zinebleu
to adopt what it imagined was the Voorstand practice – they would not send a reviewer to ‘press nights’, only opening night. So they held the theatre page till half past ten and the poor suck-arse reviewer either scribbled his review in the dark, or – as Veronique Marchant had obviously done tonight – wrote most of it before the show began.
    He picked up the zines and headed back up the Boulevard des Indiennes. He could not run away. He had to go back. But he was not going to lose to Vincent Theroux.
    When he arrived back in the tower he had not only the zines but a brown paper bag full of bottles, and as he entered the little room he was pleased to learn that Vincent had been called home to wifey.
    Felicity looked up and smiled, but he saw, already, the distance he had lost. He did not know how he knew this – a flattening of the cheeks, a tightening of the upper lips, a lack of animation in the eyes.
    He threw the zines on the bed. The normal praise-addicts – Moey, Heather, Claire – all leapt upon them, but Bill kicked off his moccasins and sat cross-legged on the quilt, going through his bag of bottles.
    ‘I have Rosemary oil,’ he announced, ‘Apricot Kernel, and Scented Olive. I think Rosemary is appropriate, don’t you?’
    ‘No, sweets,’ Felicity said. He could see her trying not to offend him while she was, at the same time, shocked by what she thought he was suggesting.
    ‘Come on, Flick, I’m not going to massage
you.’
    His own hands, when he held them out for the child, felt as dull and heavy as lead.
    Felicity tucked the wrap around the child a little tighter. He was left with his hands held in the empty air.
    ‘Come on,’ he said.
    Felicity’s reluctance hurt him like almost nothing he couldremember. He felt his lip tremble, and when she gave him the child he actually wanted it, but could not bear to think she had given it to him because she saw this weakness.
    His son was so light: a parcel of bad dreams.
    ‘He’s asleep,’ she said.
    If she meant
don’t do it
, Bill did not get it.
    ‘He’ll like this,’ he said.
    He laid the parcel down and unwrapped it. The child had woken and was looking at him with those disconcerting marble-white eyes.
    ‘Is it OK to massage him?’ Felicity asked.
    The chest cage did not seem right somehow. The skin seemed to hang there like rag on wire. The legs and feet were all wrong too. He could not look, but it seemed as if the heel was missing. Bill felt sick. He poured the oil into his hands and blew on it. It was warm anyway. He had stolen the oil from Annie’s room. Annie had gone to visit Wally in the Emergency Room. She would not be happy if she knew he had done this.
    ‘Of course it’s OK,’ said Moey. ‘Look at him, he’s smiling. He sees me.’
    ‘He’s too young to smile,’ Bill said. ‘It’s not a smile.’
    The little creature looked at him. It scared him shitless. Bill put his broad-palmed hand across the fragile chest, and spread the oil.
    ‘You have to take his bandock off,’ Felicity said.
    He did not want to. He feared there would be something horrible there as well, but when Felicity had undone the bandock the penis looked quite normal. He began to massage. He could feel the little