The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read online

  ‘My old dab was a dreadful gambler,’ Wally said. ‘If it had not been for the need for money, he would never have done it – it was a shocking inconvenience to be always toting that coffin about.’

  All his life Wally had been around the circus and the theatre. He had been a roustabout, a tent-staker, a stablehand, a farrier, a driver, a turnboy,† a carpenter, a production manager, but the truth was – this leap into the safety net was his first performance ever.

  Now he wished he had never made it. He wished he had died instead.

  He sat in Casualty and held his throbbing arm while the flesh swelled like yeast dough around the fracture.

  He waited for the visitors he knew would arrive after curtain time at the Feu Follet. He waited with trepidation, embarrassment, imagining Bill Millefleur impersonating him to the people in the tower, repeating his speech, mimicking his accent, revealing all his very private feelings about my mother.

  On a different night it might have turned out as he feared (some cruel things sometimes went on in that little tower), but Bill had other matters on his mind and the whole question of Wally’s motivation was overshadowed by the Zinebleu, which had noted the leap (‘inverse levitation’) and had seen it as setting the tone of the production – ‘the Smith forte – the Efican vernacular’.

  So the hospital visitors, all actors, came to celebrate the review as much as to commiserate about the injury.

  ‘I was just testing the rig,’ he said. ‘Jeez.’

  He sat on the plastic bench with a forbidden cancerette cupped in his palm, his arm resting across his thigh, and listened while the review was, once again, read out to him. To have his performance admired by actors was worth anything to Wally.

  ‘Bill was a bit worried,’ he said. ‘I just tested it is all.’

  His veined face flushed and his ears burned red with pleasure. He sat on the plastic bench, his cancerette hidden in his palm, and listened to repeated readings of the review. It was not until the sixth recitation that he noticed the mention of the ‘Witch’s homunculus’.

  ‘What’s a homunculus, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘A foetus,’ Moey said.

  ‘A baby,’ Claire said. ‘It means a baby.’

  ‘The Witch doesn’t have a baby.’

  ‘Felicity does,’ Claire said. ‘You both made your début the same night.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said Wally. ‘Hope it looks like Bill.’ He winked at Moey. ‘Hope it doesn’t look like you.’

  ‘It’s a boy,’ Claire said.

  ‘How is it?’ he asked Moey. ‘Who does he look like?’

  ‘He’s got very intelligent eyes.’

  Wally registered the tone. They were like actors talking about a performance they hated. They would never call another actor a ringhard. They’d say, oh, I loved your business with the tea towel.

  ‘What does he look like?’ he asked Claire Chen.

  Claire fiddled with her big silver death’s-head rings and told him Flick’s baby was amazing.

  Wally stared at her with his still grey eyes until she said it was time for her to go and lock up the theatre, and Moey said he’d better walk with her across the park. When they said goodbye they looked mournful and depressed. They gave the review to Wally – just a scrap of paper – but it was the first time he and I were linked together. I found it among his papers when we were leaving Efica, just before his death. It was folded inside his driver’s licence – as dry and fragile as something from a flower press.

  At one o’clock in the morning Wally was alone in Casualty waiting for the results of his X-ray. He knew something was very wrong with me. His arm was throbbing. His leap now seemed no more than a vulgar joke, a raspberry in the face of fate. There was something wrong and he knew he had to be with my maman.

  He tried to go to her. They would not let him. In Saarlim you could have walked right out the door, but this was Efica – more humane, more bureaucratic – there were forms to sign, the forms were missing, and thus it was nearly three in the morning when he walked out the door, with his unset arm held in a Lasto-net, and that was how he was – with that knobby white material on his arm and that slight ammonia smell-when he first held me.

  The lights were all out except an Anglepoise on the floor beside the bed. Felicity was asleep on her back in a long white T-shirt, her hair spread out on the pillow, snoring ever so softly, and Tristan Smith was placed between her legs.

  Wally approached me with his neck craned, squinting, his lips compressed in a pale grimace.

  He saw – loose-skinned puppy – marsupial not ready to leave its mother’s pouch – skin folds, wide staring eyes.

  ‘You poor guy,’ he whispered. ‘You poor little guy.’

  Felicity, in her sleep, put her hand across her mouth and moaned.

  ‘Flick?’

  Her lips were dry and cracked. She made a small whistling snore.

  Wally leaned over and managed to scoop me up with his good arm. He held me against his shirt, one-handed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’m here now.’

  He sat on the edge of the bed. Felicity listened to him. She heard him sniffling.

  ‘They mean well, mo-rikiki,’* Wally said, ‘but they don’t know anything.’ He held my puppy-skin against his old veined face.

  Felicity began to sob. Wally knelt on the bed and, jerkily, panicking, tried to return me to my resting place.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Hold him, hold him.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Hold his head, hold his head.’

  ‘Flick … I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no.’ She was rubbing her running nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt, but her whole beautiful face was wrung like a rag.

  ‘I’m just an ignorant old violiniste. I should shut my mouth.’

  ‘They rose to it, they really did. I was proud of them.’

  ‘I’m putting him in his crib. He’ll be happier there.’

  ‘Do you know about babies, Wally?’

  ‘Oh Flick,’ Wally said, as he laid me on my back in the crib and tucked a sheet around me as smooth and tight as any matron at the Mater. ‘I’m just an old pea and thimble man.’

  And then Felicity was crying again. This was the first time she let herself really cry in company. Bill was downstairs in bed with Annie. Vincent was at home with his wife. It was Wally who came to hold her. My second night on earth was the only time he ever held my mother’s body.

  He was wide awake. He was so shaken, so sad, but at the same time he knew this was his moment, his time. He had seen himself, he told me later, in my eyes. While my maman and I slept, he made the promise, said the words, out loud. He was going to be the father, the one who would really do the job.

  *Students of the Efica circus may recognize the story of Petit Paul who, having died in 335 EC, was probably still performing when Wally was a child.

  †Originally a chauffeur, but later a mechanic. Probably originates with the job of starting an engine with crank handle.

  *‘My little one’, or ‘my little finger’. Rikiki can also refer to a 4 fl.oz. glass of beer.

  13

  It was my fourteenth day and I woke to the noise of heavy rain thundering on the tower’s thin roof. My first Moosone had arrived. The Nabangari had begun to flow again. Outside you could hear the river roaring, the muffled noises of boulders and logs crashing against the river wall. Slowly I became aware that my mum and dab were already awake, talking to each other. We lay, the three of us, on the same hard mattress I had been conceived on. My mum was on the telephone side, Bill on the window side. I lay between them, staring up at the pressed metal ceiling whose fat-bottomed little Cupids must have dated from the time when old Ducrow brought Solveig Mappin* into his bed.

  ‘It’s your life,’ my mother was saying to my father. ‘You’ve got to live your life.’

  My bandock was wet. My stomach burned me. A bitter taste was in my mouth. While I grizzled quietly, my mother stroked m
y head, ran her little finger down into the soft indentation at the base of my skull.

  ‘If I go to Voorstand now,’ Bill said, ‘I know I’m going to lose you.’

  ‘You can’t lose me, sweets,’ she said. ‘I’ll always be here.’

  ‘You want me to go,’ he said.

  ‘No, I want you to stay.’

  ‘Tray bon. I’ll stay.’

  ‘If you stay, mo-chou, that’s your business, but if I persuade you to stay you might hate me for ever.’

  ‘I guess,’ Bill said, lying on his side, stroking his chest with the back of his fingernails.

  ‘You guess? You’re not meant to agree with me.’ She started tickling him. He squirmed and tried to still her. As they bumped and rolled, I lay there between them, a concrete fact of life. I kicked my legs and farted.

  ‘Watch the baby.’

  They came to rest with Bill lying on my mother. She put her hand out, just checking me.

  ‘It’s your life,’ she said again, but she had become sad, and the animation had left her face.

  ‘Oh Flick,’ Bill said, ‘I feel so bad, mo-chou. I get offered a part and all it does is make me feel like shit.’

  My mother smiled wanly. She had sore breasts, cracked nipples. She did not mention them.

  ‘I know it is an honour.’

  My mother stroked my head. There was a clap of thunder.

  ‘It’s a great honour,’ my dab repeated, a little petulantly.

  ‘Sweets, you must not make a meal of it,’ my mother said. ‘You have been cast in a show, that’s all. Now you have to decide if you want the part or not.’

  My father rolled off my mother.

  ‘Croco cristi,’ he said. ‘I’m the first Efican actor to be cast in a Saarlim Sirkus!’ He stood up by the bed and looked down on us. There was a second clap of thunder. The rain intensified.

  I went to sleep. When I woke – hours later – buttery sunshine was shining on the rain-splattered windows. My mother was wearing a large white T-shirt and Bill – bare-chested, dressed only in white canvas frippes – was sitting on the end of the bed. Their argument had not developed.

  ‘It’s only a fucking Sirkus,’ my mother said, ‘for God’s sake. You’re not about to invent penicillin. Do it or don’t do it.’

  ‘All right I will.’

  ‘Will what?’ my mother said, kneeling beside me, flipping me on to my back and removing my bandock.

  ‘Do it,’ Bill said.

  ‘Well, if you want to …’

  ‘No, I don’t want to, but the company can use the money.’

  ‘Hand me the wipes.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s a lot of money,’ Bill said. ‘More than anyone in the Feu Follet was ever offered.’

  My mother picked me up and pulled up her T-shirt. I was hungry, but I also knew that each time I fed on those hard white breasts it made my stomach hurt again. To make things worse, she was not concentrating, and although you would not detect it in her tone she was agitated.

  ‘Don’t be frightened of the company meeting,’ she said to my dab. ‘They’ll tell you what a hypocrite you are, but in the end they’ll agree that it’s a good thing to get thirty per cent of your salary. It’s never any different.’

  ‘You’re the one who hates the Saarlim Sirkus.’

  ‘Sweets, I hate it here, not there. In Saarlim, the Saarlim Sirkus is just the Saarlim Sirkus. I don’t hate it in Saarlim.’

  ‘It’s so tedious,’ Bill said, staring at us distractedly. ‘There’s always the same posturing, and then they accept.’

  What he was talking about was the collective policy – those who got ‘straight’ jobs contributed 30 per cent of their salary or fees to the company. Each job offer had to be considered by the company as a whole. So when Sparrowgrass Glashan, for instance, was offered a part in an ice-cream commercial everybody gathered to weigh up the public benefit and the moral damage. You never heard such long and protracted deliberations.

  Bill, it turned out, had called a company meeting for ten that morning. You need a certain sense of your own importance to call a theatre meeting at that hour. My mother, who might normally have advised him to have the meeting later, withheld her counsel. It was as if she had decided to let the dice fall as they would.

  The dark theatre had a smell which was never present when a show was on. Perhaps the big casseroles burnt away the odours of damp and dust and poverty, but when Bill stood before us on the sawdust and frowned and rubbed his denim shirt against his pectorals, the casseroles were dark and a single 100-watt work light provided the illumination.

  As he delivered the news, he made himself – in spite of the arrogance of the hour – small before us, belittled his talents (as he was expected to) and talked about the moral and artistic consequences of the role in terms that may strike you – someone for whom Efica is small and unimportant–as grandiose, if not comic.

  What this poor theatre saw itself doing was inventing the culture of its people. So even while the rain leaked through the ancient roof and ran in a rippling wash down the back wall, the young man who paced back and forth on the sawdust stage presented himself as someone involved in a moral judgement which had the highest consequences. He was going to work in the interests of – please do not take this personally – the enemy. I do not mean your country, but your Sirkus. In its celebration of the individual, in its inequitable rewards for luck, in its invitation to have the audience be complicitous in the not infrequent death of performers, it ran counter to everything we Eficans held so dear. The Saarlim Sirkus was thrilling, spectacular, addictive, but also heartless. Was this all? No it was not, but it is enough for now.

  My father was impressive. Despite his lack of education, his mind was the most classically inclined of all the actors. He had an almost Jesuitical sense of argument, and when he came to the conclusion of his formal statement, my mother squeezed me hard in her lap.

  On that stage on that long ago Sunday morning, Bill Millefleur shone, a star already, and the members of our collective, sitting under that dark and distant canopy, were happy for him, jealous, relieved to hear that such substantial funds would be brought into the Feu Follet.

  Just the same: when he concluded that the immense size of the salary meant that he was obliged, on moral grounds, to take the part – they smiled, some more cynically than others. When he said that he was frightened of the role, and, indeed, might still refuse it, his obvious excitement made him appear disingenuous and his colleagues’ laughter had a harder, less patient edge. Those who stood to speak afterwards were harsher than they might otherwise have been. They could not imagine he might really say no.

  *Solveig Mappin (271–336), the young wife of Henry Mappin, Red Prime Minister of Efica (240–307).

  14

  To reach your great capital, Bill would have to fly for three hours above the long island chain of Efica and then for five hours more across the landlocked web of lakes and inland seas, the great green and gold hinterland of Voorstand dotted with the mushroom shapes of Sirkus Domes – and what he said was true: he was frightened, not only that he would lose my maman, but also that he would somehow lose himself at the other end of this great maze.

  We Eficans, generally speaking, were frightened of Saarlim. It may make you smile to think how much: how we rubbed and burnished our idea of its cruelty and ruthlessness.

  My father was a colonist, an islander, an Efican. He was, by definition, not a Voorstander. When he spoke his lines in Saarlim, he would need to abandon his soft, self-doubting Efican patois – Shapoh, mo-ami, mo-chou, cambruce – learn to speak with a clip to his consonants, give up his Feu Follet habits of irony and self-mockery. To you he would be an exotic performer introducing live animals into the Sirkus.* But to himself (and to us) our circus boy would be acting out, with his own body, the surrender of our frail culture to your more powerful one. He would be singing your songs, telling your stories, and this went strongly
against the grain, undercut the whole notion of who he thought he was. So even though the collective had told him, go, he could not let it be so easy.

  Back in the tower, he said the same things he had said before.

  My maman also: ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘It is your life.’

  It was perhaps the twentieth time she had said it, but this time something different happened. Bill began to comb his thick black hair with both hands, rapidly. ‘What does that mean, Felicity?’ He used only a slice of his great booming actor’s voice, a whisper, thin and nasty as a piece of wire: ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  It was now three in the afternoon. My maman lay down with me on her unmade bed, fully dressed. She pulled the blanket up over us, and looked up at my father with her green eyes.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  She pulled her hair back from her forehead and held it at the nape of her neck. She was the mother of a scary child with special needs, the owner of a theatre whose existing debts would easily consume Bill’s 30 per cent.

  ‘What?’ he insisted.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said.

  ‘What you thought.’

  She turned her head aside, exhausted.

  ‘You thought …’ Bill insisted.

  ‘You have to go,’ she said. She felt sick in her stomach, but she was an actor, too – she smiled. ‘Take the part.’

  ‘Take it?’

  ‘You have to go, mo-chou,’ she said, sitting up. It was not so hard as you would think – this moment. ‘You’ll see the best theatre in the world, every night. You’ll do voice with Fischer and movement with Hals or Miriam Parker. You’ll be a great actor. You’ll never be a great actor here.’

  ‘Flick, you know this isn’t acting. It’s a fucking Sirkus.’

  ‘The Sirkus won’t last for ever,’ she said. ‘You won’t be seduced by Sirkus. The Sirkus is mechanical and manipulative. I wouldn’t love a man who could be seduced by Sirkus.’