The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (10 page)

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 depressed 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.

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.

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.