The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Page 8

  When he had the fillets done, he wrapped the bones in paper, placed the fillets in the fridge, opened a beer, poured a bride. He flicked on the gas and quickly, deftly, cooked the delicate fish fillets in a little milk. Then he mashed it with a fork and, worrying it might be too hot, placed it in the freezer to cool.

  I, of course, did not know what fish was. So when, at last, he offered me the meal he had so lovingly prepared, I rejected it. He called me Rikiki, but it made no difference: I wanted Vincent. I wanted my bottle. Wally gave me a cup. I had never seen a cup. I knocked it over. Wally yelled at me. I cried. And that is how it was always to be with us – Wally was the one who made the rules and was angry, the one who cooked breakfast and lunch and yelled at me when I didn’t eat it.

  Amongst the actors, he was famous for his sentimentality, but in spite of all the ‘Rikikis’ he was not soft and conciliatory like Vincent, who had often, in his euphoric pre-election mood, stroked his baby’s cheek with the back of his pudgy hand. Wally brought no gifts, like Bill would. He was not full of compromise and sweet smells like Felicity. Indeed, he did not bathe enough. And when no one was around to see him do it, he would scream and yell like a maniac, particularly at the end of a long weekend.

  Wally loved me, but he did not find this prayed-for state to be the blessing he had imagined. Love aged him, made his forehead taller, his shoulders a little more hunched, his brow increasingly hooded.

  It was Wally who confiscated the toy laser gun which Bill sent – this was a year or so later – for my birthday. It was Wally who stopped me going to the country with Vincent because Vincent had been drinking and could not figure out my new safety seat. And it was Wally – later still, when I was just over ten – Wally who told the doctors about my penchant for climbing. He wanted it stopped, and hoped to invoke a greater authority than his own. He knew Tristan was their precious thing, their cracked and mended pot, and that they would not want it shattered, and it is true – from the moment I was born, the doctors had not been able to keep their hands off me.

  Felicity, who had begun so independently and who was, any way, a great one for homeopaths, naturopaths and iridologists, unexpectedly capitulated to what she called ‘straight medicine’. She still, at bedtime, dropped sweet little grains of Silica (for mucus) into her son’s lipless maw, but once The Caucasian Chalk Circle was over it was ‘straight doctors’ who began to deal with Tristan Smith’s ‘anomalies’. They began with the duodenum, which had a partial blockage. At eleven months of age, they put me to sleep, cut me open, sewed me up, resuscitated me in sterile rooms where I found myself held down like a frog in a dissecting room, pinned at the legs and arms. They had catheters up my porpoise, tubes down my throat, drips in my arm, and when that was over and my temperature began to rise, they did not give me Panadol but took samples of my blood, spit, shit, urine, often by the most painful methods.

  At eighteen months, they pinned me with their soap-smelling hands and took marrow from my bones. I shrieked and screamed and begged for them to let me be.

  Vincent was squeamish around hospitals, but Bill – to his credit – came flying in to sit beside me on more than one occasion. He was nice to me. It would be years before he would be able to act as if he were responsible for my existence, but he could look me in the face and touch me. He was less than a father, more than an uncle. He arrived with tricks up his sleeves – wind-ups, frogs that blew bubbles, geese that farted, fake vomit, gross picture cards. He flew back to Saarlim. He sent postcards.

  Wally was always there. He argued with the santamaries about his cancerettes. He held me down.

  And this was my childhood: Dr Tu slid me into dark tunnels; Dr Fischer strapped me on steel platforms and tilted me upside down. They tortured me, not just in that first year, but on and off for the first ten years of life. They mended the hole in my heart, but took three goes to get it.

  The doctors (Dr Tu, Dr Fischer, Dr Wilson, Mr Picket-Heaps, Dr Ayisha Chaudry, Dr Brown etc.) were able to tell my mother exactly what operation they wanted to do next, but they could find no pigeonhole to shove me in, and the summation of all of their investigations was ‘Multiple Congenital Anomalies’.

  They had wanted to give me lips, but my mother chanced to see their ‘similar case’ and was so distressed by this poor man’s goldfish pout, she would not let them touch my mouth. Either way, there was no chance I would ever have a smile you would recognize. Nor was there any hope that they might make me taller. But these ingenious Efican toubibs made me function better, stopped the green bile bubbling out of my mouth, stopped my heart walls leaking, repaired my faulty duodenum, and although this was not a pleasant way to begin a life, consider this – Tristan Smith had a loving mother, an entire company of actors who cooed and cosseted him and tickled his tummy and took him for rides on their shoulders. Plus I really had three fathers – Bill and Vincent, sometimes, and Wally every day. And if Wally did shout at me he was also the one who bought me chocolate and icecreams, the one who tried to sneak me into the Voorstand Sirkus when I was five years old. My mother nabbed us at the entrance way.

  One minute we were standing in line outside the bulbous free-form ‘tent’, already inhaling the pervasive odours of spun sugar and ketchup, watching the projected twenty-foot high shadows of Bruder Dog chasing Bruder Duck around and around inside of the luminous pink shell;* the next we were trudging back along the river bank and my mother’s pretty face was spoiled by that disapproving expression which is described in Chemin Rouge as being ‘like the ass of a hen’.

  After that, I did not get to the Sirkus for another another seven years. Wally went alone on Saturday afternoons and came back with beer on his breath and a perroquet in his hand.

  ‘For Bruder Rikiki,’ he would say as he set the sugary green drink before me, ‘with the compliments of Bruder Mouse.’

  Later he would ‘tell’ me the whole Sirkus, describing the spectacles, the falls, the injuries, the songs. It was our secret, the thing that bonded us more than any other. I would fall asleep dreaming of the cheeky Bruder Mouse or the clever Bruder Duck, whose laser images I, probably alone of all the children in the eighteen islands, had never seen in life.

  *From the very beginning, the Voorstand Sirkuses in Efica had laser clowns. By the time the Sirkus came to Chemin Rouge the days when performers put on animal suits were gone. We never saw a ‘live’ Bruder Dog or Mouse. As for Simulacrums, we read about them, but there were none in the eighteen islands. [TS]

  18

  I grew up preferring the dry season, and not just because it was in the Moosone that I always had my operations. In the dry season the company hired a little one-ring tent and went out into the countryside with the Haflinger bus, a horse float, a rented truck, and an ever-changing show my mother named The Sad Sack Sirkus.*

  More circus than Sirkus, and more revue than either, The Sad Sack Sirkus was a patchwork of tumbling and posturing, skits, Shakespearean speeches, and – best of all – equestrian displays which country people always loved to see. The Sad Sack Sirkus made a little money; it got the company out of the city; and – thanks to the occasional egg-throwing of Ultra Rouge† fanatics – it gave a sense of urgency to the company’s political agenda.

  My mother now scheduled these tours to coincide with the summer recess of the Saarlim Sirkus. Thus Bill was able to come back for every tour and he and Sparrow Glashan and my mother rode three-men high and Bill performed flip-flaps, round-offs, pirouettes and somersaults on the back of a cantering horse, just as he did under the big Dome in Saarlim where the tickets cost 100 Guilders each.

  Vincent, of course, could not come on tour. He stayed in the city, running his business, dining with his wife, waiting for his life to start again. When he could not stand the separation any more, he would visit, stumbling out on to a southern beach from the belly of an ancient aluminium-bodied aircraft with one colossal engine and oil streaks on its wings. Vincent was an urban animal, never at home in the countryside. He was nervous around
the horses, and obviously disconcerted to feel himself disadvantaged with ‘Young Bill’, who had quickly become an international star.*

  I liked Vincent better in the dry season. He was less sure of himself, often melancholy.

  What he was suffering from – I see now – was sexual jealousy. When we were on tour, Bill shared my mother’s bed. In the turmoil of his unhappiness, Vincent turned his tenderness on me. He gave me gifts, taught me to hold a crayon, to form my quivering big letter ‘S’. He sat next to me, his shampooed beard occasionally brushing my neck, and spoke to me in French, a language I did not understand.

  ‘Mon petit, mon pauvre petit,’ he would say.

  But finally the dry season smelt, not of Vincent’s shampooed beard, but of sweet hot horse-shit, chaff, dust, tick drench. Each day dawned clear and painless, long sweet gravel roads, chalk-grey dust, singing actors packed into the old Haflinger bus, the horses and the rented truck bringing up the rear. Wally drove the bus. He liked to drive. If he could have done it, he would have driven the float and truck as well.

  The tours were long, covering not only the (formerly English) main islands which were all to the north of Chemin Rouge, but back south through the whole ‘Granite Necklace’, and the old dye towns of Melcarth and King’s Coat. I knew the granite caves beneath our feet were often filled with your government’s navigation cable, but the truth is, I did not think about it.

  When we were on tour, my mother devoted herself to me with an intensity few parents could have sustained for long. She listened to my every sound, brought to my taut malformed face the full focus of her curiosity and attention. Even though Bill was there, she brought me into the bed before she finally went to sleep, and I was in child-heaven. I woke to – no doctors – the sound of magpies carolling and the smell of warm sheets and my mother’s sweet musky skin-smell. Almost every day we woke up in a new place – rock-walled fields of brown grass thatched with rust like Harris tweed, ravines, dry rivers with stones like prehistoric eggs, a chalky coastal estuary where, even when I was ten years old, my mother would strap me on to her body and we would slowly, quietly, gather oysters and mussels at low tide.

  The southernmost islands (the Madeleines) were like cake crumbs on the map, and on our way back up to Melcarth* we would spend almost as much time on ferries as on roads. The roads themselves were mostly dirt, bordered with century-old cairns commemorating famous deaths by starvation, ‘rot’, spearing, typhoid, pig-headedness and folly.† This was the country everybody felt was Efica – mostly wind, water, sky. There was an emptiness, a refusal to charm, an edge of terror in the air which cut us to the bone. The landscape was dotted with failed attempts at European enterprise – bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills. The skies were a huge and empty ultramarine.

  Of course I often repulsed strangers in those isolated estuary towns, but when I say this did not affect me you have to see the crowd that I was travelling with: men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair, crushed velvet, aromatic oils, ornamental face scars. By the time I was two I had become their emblem, their mascot, and I shared with them their sense that we were an avant garde, not only artistically, but also morally. Thus I remained as swaddled and protected under the bright southern skies as I was inside the rank dusty womb of the Feu Follet.

  I was, indeed, a curious-looking child – strong in the shoulders, withered and tangled in the legs. My hair was dense and blond, and the irises of my eyes – although no longer white as they had been when I was born – were now milky, marbled, striated with hair-line spokes of gold. They were my best feature, and were sometimes thought to be quite beautiful.

  Naturally my maman worried continually about her deformed little boy’s self-esteem, but the truth was, I was being privately tutored not only in my schoolwork, but in the radical’s conceit, that I was different, but superior. To cause upset in motel dining rooms – something which would later be the cause of such shame and anger – was no ordeal to me. My comrades placed me in a new high chair which Wally had built for me, and when we played Ultra Rouge towns I would sit with a crushed velvet shawl around my shoulders and bring my intense eyes to stare accusingly at anyone I imagined was the enemy. Few could hold my gaze – bristling Ultras with their shirtsleeves cut high and their elastic-sided boots red with bauxite dust: they grimaced and looked down at their barley soup.

  *To the Voorstand reader the disrespectful conjunction of ‘Sad Sack’ and ‘Sirkus’ may seem to indicate an ignorance of the meaning of Sirkus, but it was exactly this conjunction that made the name so appealing to my maman. [TS]

  †These political thugs published various pamphlets and news sheets which revealed a perplexing mixture of ideas – Efican nationalism, anti-semitism, a passionate attachment to the alliance with Voorstand. While their often extreme actions were always criticized by the government, it now seems certain that they were funded by right-wing elements of the Red Party.

  *Bill Millefleur, as Voorstand readers will be aware, was not as famous a name in Saarlim as we all imagined. In Efica he had become a star. Everyone watched Vids of his Saarlim performances, particularly his part as Franco Hals in The Black Stallion Gallops into the Burning House. [TS]

  *Named, as every Efican schoolchild knows, after the God of dyeing.

  †All European deaths. The deaths of the IPs (Indigenous Peoples, the eighteen tribes of Efica) remain essentially uncommemorated and unresolved. Even Vincent Theroux had difficulty resolving the notion that his great-great-grandfather may have been party to a genocide.

  19

  It was never my mother’s plan that I should be an actor, and if she had not been desperate she would not, I am sure, have permitted the seed to be planted by Bill Millefleur: he had always been, until now, an amateur as a father and – you only have to look at the handwriting, the spelling, the eccentric capitalizations to know this – an unlikely expert in the field of formal education.

  Until January 381, when Bill’s postcard arrived, my education was conventional enough. Between the ages of six and eight I had a Korean tutor, a Mr Han, a delicate old man who finally died of asthma. He was succeeded, in my ninth year (380), by Claire Chen, who, despite her erratic personal life and slovenly dress, had an almost tyrannical code of behaviour in the class room – that formerly pristine little tower room which was now a wilderness of broken chalk, torn theatre programmes, half-assembled rak-rok blocks, the Great Works of Literature, old horseshoes, and French coins I had found while playing truant in the labyrinthine underworld of the old Circus School.

  The chubby Chen had an MA from the University of Nez Noir. Her field was the classics – Plato, Horace, Seneca – but she also made me understand the principles of algebra. She was both clever and impatient, and – having had a convent education herself – not above striking me on the knuckles with a wooden ruler.

  It was in response to one of these attacks that I bit her on the thumb, and this, in turn, got me into big trouble with my maman, who began, that night, to shout and scream at me in such a frightening way.

  Was she shouting at me about the bite? No, she was not.

  Madame, Meneer, she was shouting at me about the bandage on her actor’s thumb.

  Chen was meant to teach me in the morning and be available for rehearsal in the afternoon, but when she had returned from the Emergency Room that afternoon, she would not act before she knew – why did her character (Clytemnestra) have a bandage? What should Clytemnestra’s attitude towards the bandage be?

  Chen was an anxious actor at the best of times, with a negative intelligence that could readily destabilize a cast. Now she wished to know – should her bandage affect Orestes’ attitude towards her character? Should the bandage be so white and bright when all the costumes were so bloodied and brown? Should she paint her bandage red? Could she perhaps apply other bandages to other parts of her body, and so on?

  The production was frail and complicated anyway, very ‘techy’, and the actors had still not f
ound their characters and were trying to fix their problems by rewriting their own lines. Also, the problem with Chen and her bandage arrived in a period when my maman was in crisis with her taxes, her loans, her repayments, her applications to the funding bodies, her medical insurance claims. It was, in addition, the end of the wet season, which meant she was trying, once again, to raise funds for The Sad Sack Sirkus.

  My maman came back from rehearsal and asked me, calmly, why I bit my teacher.

  Instead of saying that Chen had hit me with the wooden ruler, I said that I did not like her and I would not have her for a teacher any more.

  My maman said there was no other teacher she could afford.

  I said I did not need a teacher. I said I would be an actor instead.

  My maman then turned nuts. She screamed at me in a way I had never seen her scream before. She tore her hair. While I shivered and snivelled in the corner she told me I was beyond her, that she was a working actress and I was a child with Special Needs.

  I said I was sorry, but she was lost, beyond herself. She said that she was going to find a Special School for me.

  I said Wally would never let her.

  That sent her totally crazy, ripping corks out of bottles and drinking wine like water. She said Wally was an emotional cripple. She said she would fire him if he said a word about it. She wept and said she was going to die. I went to sleep behind her great wall of shuddering back.

  She frightened me, I’ll admit. Damaged me, even. And yet this truly dreadful night, which gave birth to the fearful notion of ‘Special Needs’, also produced the following message from my father which came into my life like a golden ray from God on High.

  ‘My advice to you, liebling,’ Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later, ‘is to relax – excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a Sad Sack Sirkus coming up, Let him play a PART,’ my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom. ‘Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of The Hairy Man.* Give him the exercise – develop character’s ACTIONS for himself.’