The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read online

  My mother smiled and kissed me.

  In defence, I picked up the Stanislavsky. I opened the musty pages. This is what I read:

  There are those who think that nature often works poorly. To some aesthetically minded people, taste is of greater consequence than truth. But in the instant that a crowd of thousands is being moved, when they are all swept by a feeling of enthusiasm, no matter what the physical shortcomings of the actors who cause this emotional storm. At such times, even a deformed person becomes beautiful.

  I did not tell her. I did not take the chance that she would say something sarcastic which would weaken it. Instead I took the book and quietly wrapped it in a pillowslip.

  Soon, I was pleased to see, she changed her clothes and announced she was having ‘supper’ with Vincent at the Chemin Rouge Ritz. She made me eat some vitamin pills and wrote her hotel room number on a slip of paper and pinned it to the door.

  She kissed me. I kissed her back.

  The minute she was gone – before Wally came looking for me – I stole the Stanislavsky. I dragged it downstairs – thump, thump, thump – thinking I would hide it under the bricks in the stables where I had rehearsed for The Sad Sack Sirkus tour.

  The pigeons, however, had got there first. They whispered and fluttered in their wicker baskets in the very corner where I had planned to hide my (now slightly damaged) Stanislavsky. It was only then I realized I might really lose my tower.

  I stood in front of their baskets, staring at them with my white quartz eyes. If I were Napoleon, I would have killed them. Even a lesser spirit, like Jango, would have opened the door and let them fly away. In the histories I had read there was always the defining moment when the hero had to act wilfully, selfishly. The man of destiny would have grasped the thistle, bitten the bullet. But I was only a kid. I was afraid of Wally.

  I retreated into the dark space under the raked theatre seats.

  Here, in my oldest hide-out, it was dark and safe, but also melancholy and rather damp. I thought of heroes HOLED UP in mountains. Above my head I heard the actors’ footsteps and imagined GUARDS. I thought of ROBERT BRUCE and the SPIDER. But there were no spiders, only scuttling cockroaches which I attacked with a wooden block until it was covered with their black slimy insides.

  I already had a blanket here, also a flashlight, and a clasp knife I had stolen from Chen. I had a tartan blanket my mother used in Hedda Gabler and a whole series of crowns, bowler hats and helmets which had since been replaced in Wardrobe.

  Also, as soon as the next show opened, more stuff would fall from overhead – sweets and coins particularly, but not exclusively – and I knew that I could find, after almost every performance, something edible or valuable. Once I had found a ten-dollar note, once a condom in a plastic packet, once a phial of what I now realize was heroin but which I kept for years imagining it was a medicine I could cure my mother with if she were going to die.

  Now, I unwrapped the Stanislavsky from its pillowslip. I laid the pillowslip on the dusty floor and placed the Master’s text on top of it. I placed my left hand on its cover and my right hand on my heart. And there I vowed that I would never desert the theatre.

  30

  The collective had already begun its normal ‘development’ stage for their new show – a deconstruction of Uncle Vanya. They were preoccupied and hardly noticed me as I made the many trips around the circular stage, bringing the items I would need for my siege.

  This was a reputedly physical company, with actors always at the osteopath because they had pushed their body the wrong way. I was an actor with a shape that was already interesting. I passed them TWELVE TIMES, walking on my knees, but they did not seem to see me.

  I was in my hiding place an hour before one of them came to speak to me – Sparrowgrass Glashan, he who could make himself a ‘Human Wheel’ and recite a comic version of ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ while spinning round the stage and grinning. This Sparrowgrass Glashan, six foot five inches tall, with big comic bug eyes and his skeleton showing through his skin, was squatting outside the tiny triangular hole through which I had egress to my lair.

  ‘What’s cooking, mo-frere?’ he called, squatting at my doorway, his bright white bony knees level with my eyes.

  I held up the Stanislavsky.

  ‘Wally’s looking for you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m … reading … Stanislavsky.’

  ‘You know he bought those pigeons for you, son.’

  ‘I … didn’t … ask … him … to.’

  Sparrowgrass did not argue with me. ‘You’re a good kid, Tristan,’ he said. ‘You know what’s right.’

  ‘He … bought … them … for … me,’ I admitted.

  ‘That’s the boy. You know what’s right.’

  ‘I … didn’t … know … he … would … keep … them … in … the … tower.’

  Not unusually, Sparrow did not understand me.

  ‘You know what’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s all the money he has.’

  ‘In … the … TOWER … my … home.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pigeons … in … the … tower.’

  ‘T-o-w-e-r?’

  ‘SHITTY … BIRDS.’

  Sparrow didn’t tell me not to swear. He didn’t say anything for a moment.

  ‘In the tower? Felicity won’t let him do that, son. Don’t fret.’

  ‘Her … idea,’ I said.

  He looked into my hole and grimaced and screwed up his eyes.

  ‘She’s … changed,’ I said. ‘She’s … all … upset.’ And, without knowing I was going to do it, I began to weep. ‘I … AM … AN … ACTOR,’ I said, but I was now crying so hard not even Wally could have understood me.

  Sparrowgrass did not know what to do. ‘You’re a funny little bugger,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame you don’t have other kids to play with.’ He found a crumpled tissue and passed it in to me. Finally he went away and there was no point in continuing crying.

  I began to cut my tartan rug with Wally’s clasp knife. I ran the knife down the yellow lines so that the cut was hidden in the depth of the colour. I stayed in my hiding place for two hours. I became hungry again. I skirted around, looking for crumbs, but the theatre had been dark all through the summer and all I got on my wet finger was bits of dirt and dust. The actors moved from the stage to the seats above my head. They did not drop anything interesting.

  At last Wally came for me.

  ‘I got your dinner,’ he called. ‘I made special chicken.’

  The actors above my head stopped talking. I thought this was to do with me, but then I heard Sparrow’s stage cough and everyone became quiet.

  Wally placed the plate of crumbed chicken and fried banana two feet from the opening. I stayed inside in the dark, looking out at it.

  ‘All right,’ Sparrowgrass said. ‘Quorum. Definitely a quorum.’ It was a stage voice, more appropriate for Gogol. ‘For those members who have just come in, we have one item of urgent business.’

  Someone coughed. A chair creaked. I pulled the chicken into my cave.

  ‘We are a collective,’ Sparrowgrass said. ‘It says so on that blue piece of cardboard inside the front door. Anyone who comes in from Goat Marshes can see it. Anyone, even if they have a stretch limousine in the street outside, can see how it is that we live and work here.’

  No one interjected. No one called to get off his high horse. I picked up the chicken thigh and began to eat it. It was sweet and greasy, just the way I liked it. I alternated bites of chicken and plantain.

  There was applause above my head. Wally was a wonderful cook. He had beans and onion sautéed together, and little eggplants dry-roasted from the oven.

  Claire Chen was speaking. Her voice was tight and a little shrill. She also said something about limousines in the street. This was the collective’s normal way of speaking critically of Bill and Vincent.

  I returned to work on the rug. I cut out a slice of yellow from the middle. My mother shouted
out something – I had not even known she was there.

  That was not like her, to shout. She did not like to interrupt, but now Claire Chen shouted her down. Somebody was thumping their boot nervously above my head.

  I put the clasp knife in my pocket and slipped out through the high narrow canyon between the raked seats. Vincent was talking. I crept close enough to the ring to see him. He had been called away from a downtown office and was wearing a conservative pinstripe suit and pale blue shirt and tie.

  ‘It is her vision,’ he was saying. ‘None of you would have had the vision to do this.’

  ‘Capital,’ Annie McManus called.

  Vincent put his hands in his pockets. It made him look like a Conservative politician. ‘Annie thinks capital and vision are the same thing,’ he said. No one laughed.

  Still intent on proving myself to everyone, I did not appreciate the nature of the catastrophe that was befalling us. I crawled to the back wall and began to climb up the steel ladder which ran up beside the booth.

  My mother took the stage as I began to climb. I was beyond the third circle of her concentration and she did not look at me. She was frightened of the audience. I could see it in her smile, the way she engaged with them, one by one.

  I was up with the lights now, as high above the floor as Wally had been on the day I first came into his life. The lights had not been stripped and rerigged since the dry season started. There were spider webs, sticky ancient gaffer tape, curling coloured cells. I swung out around these obstacles, hoping to find my way to the other ladder backstage left.

  As I moved out across the audience’s heads, Moey Perelli stood. He began talking from his seat before my mother had a chance to speak. Vincent, apparently, had left his Corniche in the street. There was a chauffeur behind the wheel and the engine was running. Moey was talking about the exhaust emissions, waste. He called Vincent Carbon-rich. Vincent tried to explain that he was only staying for a moment, but everyone started laughing at him. He walked forward to the edge of the circle and shouted about the amounts of money he paid to the collective each month. I was edging around a Leko with a loose gel filter; my mother tried to say that she had given her life to this theatre.

  I was now above her. She seemed so small on the stage. I could see a small round white patch on her scalp, the size of a 20-cent piece.

  ‘There are landlords everywhere,’ Claire Chen said (she did not bother to stand – she was sitting, cross-legged, in the audience).

  ‘Claire, please,’ my mother said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’d rather house pigeons than people,’ Claire said. ‘You want me to sleep next to a blocked toilet and you want the pigeons to sleep in the best place in the building. Fuck you!’

  My mother looked at Claire. ‘Claire, it’s me you’re talking to.’

  ‘I know who I’m talking to,’ Claire said. ‘It’s all become very clear at last.’

  My mother began crying. Vincent stood to one side. He thought it was the right thing, the feminist thing, to not take her light, her position, to let her shine. He was fine at all this stuff, but this time he was wrong: he should have been beside her and I – I knew what I should do – I should have dropped on Claire Chen, hurt her, but even though my arms were in agony, I was frightened of dying. I counted to ten but at the end I could not let go my grip.

  ‘Get out,’ my mother said to Claire.

  Claire stood at last. She brushed her purple hair back from her eyes and looked around her and smiled. ‘I’ll go if the collective votes it.’

  Sparrowgrass Glashan stood up in his front-row seat and looked back at the seated company who had only yesterday made jokes about Tartuffe with my mother. ‘Show of hands.’

  ‘Get out,’ my mother said to Claire Chen. She stepped out of the ring and stood in front of the empty Starbucks. ‘Get out of here, and don’t come back.’

  ‘All those in favour,’ said Sparrowgrass. No one was putting up their hand.

  ‘No,’ my mother said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’ Claire Chen was shaking her head and snorting through her nose at my mother. ‘You get out of my theatre. Go.’

  She owned the Feu Follet building. She had spent years persuading everyone that, in some fundamental spiritual way, this was not so. She had done a damn good job of it, but the fact remained – it was her name on the title. It was hers in her secret heart, and not because it was her money that had purchased it, but because she made it, dreamed it, spun it out of herself. Perhaps she was an anarchist, as the police later claimed, but she was not a socialist saint.

  ‘Go,’ she said to Claire Chen, with the result that Moey Perelli was already walking towards the door, and other members of the company looked like they were going to join him. ‘Try the real world,’ she said.

  I clung to the lighting rig.

  Vincent came to put his arm around her, whether to restrain her passion or to comfort her, it was not clear. She shrugged him off and climbed back into the sawdust ring, white, shaking with passion. She was Nora, Hedda Gabler. She no longer cared what happened to her. She shook her tumbling curls back out of her eyes and put her hands upon her hips.

  ‘Go,’ she yelled to no one in particular. ‘Go – audition.’

  Only as the actors left did I realize what it was I’d done.

  31

  Roxanna was walking on ice, on thin glass, high-heeled shoes, one step at a time. She had no house, no husband. But she was not dead. She was not falling apart.

  She had no money yet, but she did not need money yet. Nothing creepy had happened.

  She had no clothes: she had torched the lot of them, knickers, kerosene, black carbon. She had nothing, just these shoes, a red dress, a black skirt. She was very light.

  Quite nice feeling.

  He had pale, pale lips, scars along his arms, hurt in his eyes she did not know whether she should fear or trust.

  When Wally had begun to shift the pigeons from the draughty foyer, she had followed him. He had not asked her to, but it was not her kind of place and she had not liked to stand around alone. He had not invited her, but she had followed closely behind him, her high-heels clacking on the duckboards. When she realized that he had led her into the theatre, that actors were performing, she was no longer sure of the protocol. She tried walking mostly on her toes, like church.

  A pretty actress with long black hair and kohl-ringed eyes was calling out, ‘Oh Vanya,’ over and over.

  The tall streak of Sparrowgrass, the one who had driven the horse float, had made himself into a Human Wheel. He spun round and round in a circle crying, ‘I love you,’ while the actress followed him with a little hoop-stick, striking him on the backside and singing in a foreign language.

  Wally stopped, and put his leg up on the little wooden ring curbs, balanced the wicker crates on his knee.

  Roxanna folded her arms across her breasts.

  ‘Is it different from what you thought?’ Wally asked her.

  She did not answer him.

  ‘It’s different,’ he insisted.

  The woman and the man were trying to make a double wheel – the woman in the centre and the tall streak of Sparrowgrass wrapped around her like a floppy retread. It was like one of those seedy little circuses that make a living out of hokey towns, raising money for the volunteer fire brigade.

  The man and woman stopped and fell apart and the other characters gathered around them and abused them.

  ‘Is this an old play or a new play?’ Roxanna whispered.

  ‘It’s an old play.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like one. All those f’s and c’s.’

  ‘They’re not the words in the play itself.’

  ‘Why don’t they learn the real words?’

  ‘You want to go to the Comédie, you can see that kind of acting. This is what they call the avant garde.’

  ‘The words of this play,’ she asked, ‘they’re no good?’

  ‘You’re kidding. It’s Chekhov.’

>   ‘So,’ Roxanna said. ‘Dot dot dot.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So dot dot dot – what’s wrong with the frigging words?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with the words.’ Wally smiled.

  She slit her eyes and looked at him.

  He stopped smirking – which made him smarter than Reade.

  ‘I’ve got a pretty face,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make me stupid, mo-frere.’

  ‘My apologies,’ he said. He looked so serious, so respectful, she suddenly wanted to laugh. He had a boner in his pants, no way he didn’t.

  ‘This is a very artistic theatre company.’ He looked her straight in the eye. His eyes were grey and velvety, the softest thing about him. ‘They don’t like to use the original words.’

  ‘Let me get this straight.’ She cocked her head and squinted, because now she had the picture of the boner, she had to stop herself from laughing at his solemn expression. ‘The words are fine?’

  ‘The words are fine. I didn’t mean to say they weren’t.’

  ‘Then they should learn them and use them.’ And she put her hand out and touched his shoulder. First time she actually touched him. He was hard as a brick.

  ‘They’re deconstructing it,’ he said, looking down. ‘That’s what they call it. It’s tray artistic.’

  Roxanna had studied many aspects of art – tin soldiers, art-nouveau crystal. The theatre was not outside her range of possible interest. It met many of the right criteria, and she really did try, for a moment at least, to be respectful of what she saw here in this little circus ring.

  ‘The minute I saw the maman,’ she said at last, ‘I knew she wouldn’t like me and I wouldn’t like her.’

  ‘You’ll like the theatre, in the end.’

  But it smelt like poor people, musty, old. ‘Allow me to know, mo-frere.’

  ‘It’s like drinking green wine.’

  ‘You like to drink, mo-frere. Let’s drink.’ He had pale, pale lips, scars along his arms. ‘Let’s get these birds dry and quiet and then you can go to the bank and get your money, and then we can dot our i’s and cross our t’s.’