The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Page 7

  If her eyes now slid away from his, it was because she was not telling 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 before, this act of Bill Millefleur’s – an historical enactment which involved performing with horses and monkeys – would have been regarded as blasphemy in Voorstand. As recently as 255 EC one Piers Kraan was sent to prison for lion taming and the lions transported, at the expense of the state, to ‘that place where God intended that they dwell’.

  15

  When Bill left us, it was as if he had died, and life in the tower became tearful and depressed.

  My red-eyed mother read the foreign bank advices – pale yellow slips with her name misspelt ‘Smit’. She entered the amounts into her ledgers, but could not bring herself to spend the money as she had planned. Instead, the company went out to play agitprop at fish cannery gates, at street fairs, in the streets around the mudflat suburbs like Goat Marshes where no one had money to spend on such luxury as a theatre ticket.

  There was no Efican playwright, none of any talent, who shared our passions or our politics, so the company devised its own material. These little plays were crude and funny. There was juggling and feats of strength and acrobatics, but everywhere with both a story and a purpose. We mocked our snivelling ‘alliance’ with Voorstand, publicly libelled the silk-shirted facheurs who ran the Red Party. We dressed one actor as an obese Bruder Rat, another as randy Oncle Duck. We had our audience write down the phone numbers of top DoS agents and sometimes had a little fun telephoning them from the stage. We broke the obscenity laws, the alliance laws, the secrecy laws, all in one act with two posturers.*

  Life in the Feu Follet was passionate, paranoid, sometimes dangerous. I did not understand it was not normal. I was picked up, put down, rushed into cars and trucks and up the stairs of net lofts, down alleyways to rooms behind hamburger restaurants, back to Gazette Street where, by the time I had survived another eight weeks, the Feu Follet was in rehearsal for a very athletic production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

  I was to play THE BABY. There are not a lot of roles for babies in the theatre, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle is not really one of them, but it was my mother’s way of keeping me with her while she performed. Of course, it didn’t work. I was often in pain, I cried and grizzled and distressed my fellow actors. Felicity, already guilty and depressed about my father’s absence, became so stressed that her milk refused to flow.

  It was not a good time for me – by the night of the first dress rehearsal I had lost not only my first father, but also my first role to a straw dummy, and, worst of all: lost my mother’s breasts.

  I know I complained about them – hard, white, made my stomach hurt etc. – and I spoke truly. Also, you might as well know, they spurted too much, hit the peristaltic button at the back of my throat so I gagged and vomited. But finally these breasts and I had reached an understanding, and I was (just as you were, Meneer, Madam, in your own time) happy there.

  There was no warning that these pink and slippery friends were also to abandon me. One minute my world was centred on the soft spurt and trickle, the apple-scented skin against my nose, the next it was prosthesis: rubber, plastic, the chlorine-heavy smell of sterilizing solutions.

  I did not take it lightly. Indeed it changed what was previously a pacific disposition. I became irritable, devious, needy, capable of blazing fits of rage. It was at this stage, an hour before curtain of the dress rehearsal, that my maman telephoned Vincent.

  *At this time we had, in our company, Ernest Gibbs, an Englishman, who could disjoint almost his whole body. He could produce at will, without aid of cotton wadding, forms as diverse as Quasimodo and the president of your great country. He was a political cartoon made flesh, and was with us until his death in a boating accident in 374. [TS]

  16

  Vincent was a busy man. He was not merely the chief executive of a large company, he was also an important strategist for the Blue Party. He spent a great deal of his waking life plotting ways to expose the servility and cynicism of the Reds, to somehow, with one stroke, produce the kind of crisis that can unseat a corrupt and gerrymandered government. The week in which Felicity’s milk stopped was also the week before an important by-election t
o which he had personally contributed both money and time.

  It was a dramatic Moosone. There was flooding and a cyclone which swept away the old sea wall and sank a ferry in the Madeleines. Vincent spent his days at his downtown office, his nights driving from meeting to meeting in his Bentley Corniche, negotiating flooded streets in Berthollet, fallen trees and power lines in Goat Marshes. He drove with his nose pressed up against the windscreen, with loud music blasting from the speakers.

  He believed that the history of Efica was about to change direction. The weather intensified his passion. He drummed tom-tom beats on the steering wheel, and whooped when he saw the lightning strike the earth. He imagined Efica would soon be free of Voorstand influence – its spies, its cables, and of the Sirkus which was then threatening to wash across us like a tidal wave.

  He wanted Efica to be free of Sirkus. But also – he loved the Sirkus. This was what the VIA never understood about him. He was a serious scholar of Voorstand culture, painting, music, literature. He was also, in a country whose people were not usually aware that the Sirkus had an ethical and religious history, something of an expert on the theology of the ‘Settlers Free’.

  Vincent loved to read. It was the thing that bonded Vincent and Felicity – the belief that talk was not just talk, that what you said mattered, what you thought could change society, that a book in a foreign language, a meeting above a pizza parlour in Goat Marshes, a theatre production in a decaying circus school, could be the thing that made the river of history break its banks.

  And, indeed, he was on his way to one of these meetings (above an oyster lease in Swiss Point) when my mother called him on his car phone in a state about the baby.

  Vincent turned down the Pow-pow music,* spoke softly into the receiver. He was already late for a strategy meeting, but when my mother could not be calmed he detoured across the Narrows Bridge (which already had one foot of yellow water rushing over it) and drove the Corniche right up to the door of the Feu Follet. It was now six-thirty and he was late for his strategy meeting.

  He put on his black hat, tightened his wide leather belt, smoothed his beard with his metal comb, and walked slowly up the ramp through the Moosone rain and into the foyer.

  Here he was astounded to find a whole team – edgy electricians, sound techs, production managers, soup servers for the most part – seemingly all waiting for him. They had bags of bandocks, bottles, a carrycot, written instructions, which they all seemed to want to transmit the minute they saw him. Behind them, on a folding chair which wobbled on the cobblestones, sat my mother – pale, stretched, tense.

  ‘I cannot carry him on stage,’ she said, when Wally had finished explaining how to sterilize a teat. ‘I tried, but it can’t work.’

  Now Vincent loved the theatre. He was, in some ways, the original stage-door Johnny (loved to be around actresses, loved to watch Felicity on stage, was moved by her courage, aroused by the sight of her long legs in the public gaze). But the Therouxes traced their lineage back to the first century of the Efican Calendar, and his great-great-great-grandfather had been forcibly shipped from Marseille by Louis Quatorze and sent to practise his foul-smelling craft in hell. Vincent had drunk politics from his mother’s breasts, and he was flabbergasted to realize that he was being asked to disrupt a major strategy meeting for … babysitting.

  ‘You know I’ve got a meeting,’ he began. He paused, imagining it. His brother* would be there. He could not do it.

  ‘Vincent.’ She smiled and held out her hand. ‘You don’t need to be ashamed of him.’

  Vincent looked at my mother – the eyes sunken with weariness, the mouth small and down-turned, the arms thin and white – and knew she had pushed her idea of herself to a place where it would soon publicly collapse.

  He took her wrist with his left hand, and with his right then silently handed over his car keys to Wally.

  As Wally and the others hurried outside with the baby under their umbrellas, Vincent was a curious mixture of sympathy and anger. He drew my maman to him, kissed her.

  ‘Sleep,’ he said to her, ‘meditate.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, hearing what he imagined so well disguised, ‘he’s your son. Is it such an ordeal to look after him just one night?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not for one night.’

  When he went out into the night he could hear me screaming through the loud drumming of the rain. He found me in his car, my face like a flapping crumpled rag, my pale eyes bulging, all my skin wet with snot and sour milk. I was strapped into a safety seat right next to the driver.

  Vincent felt he could not endure the smell. He opened the windows, then shut them because the rain was blowing in on me. He set the car in gear and drove.

  Before he had even arrived at the first meeting I had thrown up on his velour upholstery and left tell-tale white formula stains on his black collars, but Vincent was, again, a better man than he feared. He endured the smell, the noise, the slime coating on his collar. He walked on to his own stage with me in his arms. He did not introduce me, but he held me, and continued to hold me – partly because this was the only way I would be quiet.

  No one commented on my appearance, but Vincent’s brother – a quiet, conservative man, five years older – showed him how to pin a bandock and then touched him with uncharacteristic gentleness upon the shoulder.

  Vincent did not take this moment to say: this is my son, Tristan. Indeed, for Vincent, that moment never came. However, he established, silently, that his relationship with me was intimate, and as The Caucasian Chalk Circle continued its previews this relationship improved.

  He was so happy that week, manic, exhausted. The prime minister had been accused of taking money from the VIA. There was a paper trail that led all the way from Saarlim via Berne and Amsterdam. Vincent had faxes, photocopies, statutory declarations.

  ‘We’ve got them, mo-poulet, we got them with their parsley showing.’ Vincent was high.

  I began to enjoy the rides in his car, the green-glowing dials, the rented car phone which could talk to other countries.

  I went to sleep to music, woke to music. I was lifted from the car, cried on cold stairways, interrupted meetings. Though I was never named in public, I was changed and powdered by famous names. I was touched, caressed, tickled.

  But then it stopped.

  I woke up one afternoon – no tickle, no car, no green dials. The by-election had been lost.* Vincent had shrivelled, collapsed, disappeared. He had gone home to Natalie, depressed. This, everyone knew, was typical of him. But Tristan Smith did not know, and there was no way for them to tell me.

  *The peculiarly rhythmic music created by POWs – prisoners of war – in Voorstand.

  *St John Theroux, b 332 EC, General Secretary Efican Postal Workers Congress.

  *In 371 the Red Party had a bare one-seat majority in the lower house, and this by-election (for the seat of Swiss Point) could have brought down the government. Whatever evidence Theroux had of government corruption, there is no mention of it in the zines of the time.

  17

  It had not occurred to anyone that the violiniste with the small round burn scars on his arms might secretly wish to be a father. He was the production manager of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Right up until the dress rehearsal, he was trying to get a grandiose set built with a two hundred dollar budget, and on the stormy night I first went off with Vincent, he was still trying to ‘locate’ eighty yards of canvas. How he finally did this, at no cost, no one liked to ask, but as usual his ingenuity saved the show, and my maman said – as she had said a hundred times before – that the Feu Follet could not have existed without him.

  When he was praised, Wally hid his feelings of pleasure. Likewise, he never hung around my crib, but hovered around the periphery of my life, watching everything. If he sometimes changed my bandock, my maman was grateful, yes – but it did not occur to her that he was practising.

  On the night the by-election was lost, he seemed as depr
essed as anyone at the Feu Follet, but he was a poker player with a winning hand. He knew how Vincent would behave. So when, next day before the curtain, my maman was trying to locate a baby-sitter, Wally stepped forward.

  While Felicity watched him, he expertly changed the sodden bandock. I was ten weeks old. He was already fifty, his flaming red hair gone mostly grey and nicotine brown, his skin marked by old cigarette burns and (two) knife slashes, his skeleton – if you could have seen it – showing the marks of three mended fractures, a man so damaged by life, so secretive and suspicious, that he had long ago stopped dreaming that he would find someone to love.

  ‘How do you know how to do this?’ my maman asked.

  ‘Rest,’ he told her, as he expertly pinned my bandock in place. ‘You have a show to do.’

  ‘Dear Wally,’ she said. ‘You really are amazing.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, ma’am.’ He picked me up and felt my soft skin against his prickly cheek. All his ears – those great fleshy wattles – suddenly red with blood. ‘You do your show,’ he said.

  He already had my dinner in the fridge.

  He took me down the stairs to the cavernous old brick – floored kitchen. He had a brand new bright red high chair, which he had ‘located’ that afternoon.

  ‘There,’ he said, turning the chair. ‘Look at the pretty tree.’ He faced me towards the courtyard under whose flowering oak, it was believed, Ducrow had tethered the ancient lion that finally caused his death.

  Then, with his face shining, immobile, his mouth compressed under the weight of his pleasure, he took one of his very sharp knives and began to fillet the fish, a playing card he had bought for my dinner. It was precise work, and he was good at it, just as he was good at soldering and using a key-hole saw. He separated the delicate white flesh from the pink and pearly skeletons. He placed two delicate fillets on a pale blue plate – and I know, Madam, a ten-week-old child does not eat fish, but Wally did not know. I was his first.