The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (20 page)

‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

When I saw my mother look expectantly to Vincent, I thought this was his Achilles’ heel.

I closed the Stanislavsky and placed it carefully on the floor.

‘A … restaurant,’ I said, thinking that this, at least, would get my maman back closer to the theatre. ‘Let’s … go … back … to … town … and … eat.’

Crows rose from, and settled back into, the canopies of
Enteralis.
I listened to the crows and imagined them to be cold, goose-pimpled below their oilslick black feathers. I wrapped my sequined silver waistcoat around me.

‘What have we got to eat?’ my mother asked.

I looked at Vincent, his startled eyes. I thought I had him in check, but not checkmate.

‘First,’ he said, ‘we need wood for a fire.’

The hill on which the house sat was steep and slippery with stones, logs, fallen leaves and
Enteralis
seedpods. I lay flat on the cold hardwood and edged myself to the outer rim of the floor. I looked down and watched Vincent and my mother try to gather wood. They were not suited to this new life. My mother had sandals. Vincent had bright black slip-ons with a little gold chain across the top.

Vincent slipped and fell on his fat backside. He tried to break long sticks but his shiny little feet kept sliding off. Felicity dragged a big log half up the hill.

‘I can’t burn that,’ Vincent called. ‘I’ve got no axe.’

My mother dropped the log. It slipped then rolled. It hit a large projecting rock and then catapulted itself into the air, narrowly missing Vincent’s head. The log crashed into the woods below, without either of them knowing what had happened.

Vincent and Felicity came back to the house and tried to start the fire with bits of torn-up cardboard, toilet paper, dead leaves. I knew it was not the time to discuss my own future, that Vincent had dirty hands, that they both felt incompetent and angry with themselves. So I waited, a really long time, until there were smoky yellow flames licking around the brittle green sticks.

I thought they had no food. I did not mention food. I knelt next to my mother and dropped little bits of broken leaf in amongst the smouldering twigs.

‘I … need … the … theatre,’ I said.

My mother looked up from the fire. Her eyes were red. There was a streak of ash on her cheek. ‘Do you, sweets?’

She carefully lifted a charred and smoking stick and inserted it so it was against a feeble little yellow flame. Then she stretched out her arm to stroke my head. ‘There’s plenty of time for you to decide. Lots and lots of time.’

‘I’ve … decided,’ I said.

‘Sweets,’ my mother said, her eyes red from smoke, ‘I’ve made you imagine it’s a happy life.’

‘It’s … not … happy … here,’ I said. I looked back at Vincent when I said it. He stared straight back at me.

‘It’s a beautiful house.’ My mother stroked my hair. ‘It’s actually the most perfect house for bird-nesting. Did you think of that? Think how many birds must live here.’

She knew I did not care about birds or bird-nesting. I tugged myself away from her.

My mother squeezed her eyes shut. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘you are ten years old. You have serious problems you are going to have to cope with in your life.’

‘I … know,’ I said.

‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault. I protected you too much.’

‘I … know,’ I screamed. ‘I … know … I’m … ugly.’

‘Darling …’

I pushed her away. She sucked in her breath. ‘Sweets-ki, I’m doing my best to help you, but, please, help me too – just accept that I can’t go back to the theatre.’

‘Why?’

‘Shush,’ said Vincent.

‘Why?’

‘Come on,’ Vincent said. ‘Cool it.’

I glared at him. ‘I … want … Wally.’

My mother opened her eyes. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, speaking very quietly and slowly, ‘Wally has a job. His job is to build a pigeonloft.’

‘You … can’t … afford … that,’ I said.

Vincent stood behind my mother and began waving his finger and shaking his head at me vehemently.

‘It’s Wally’s job,’ she said. ‘That’s all. It is his job to do that.’

‘Who … pays … Wally? How … will … Wally … pay … rent?’

‘Your mother can afford whatever she wants,’ Vincent said. ‘She can fill the tower with ping-pong balls if that’s what she wants to do. Just let her rest.’

‘YOU … LET … HER … REST,’ I said. I looked at my mother. She was grinning at me, but there was a wildness, a real craziness about her. ‘YOU’RE … CRAZY,’ I said.

She slapped my hand, hard, so it stung.

I looked at Vincent, who just nodded his head, as if to say, you had it coming.

‘I’m … an … actor,’ Tristan Smith said. I was crying, but my mother did not comfort me. She broke a stick across her knees like a woman in a fable and then put the two pieces on the fire.

I was betrayed, abandoned, slapped, broken like a stick, smouldering, oozing bubbling sap.

My maman fiddled with the smoking fire, thinking what a problem she had with me. She never guessed how serious it was. She did not imagine that I was planning to run away. But why would she? I had never walked further than a hundred yards. My legs were twisted like old pipe cleaners. My only wheels were on my skateboard. I was ten years old, knew nothing, had no money. But once I saw her break that stick and throw it on the fire, I had to confront the fact that I would have to fight to earn my right to occupy a higher category of life.

I had, of course, been wrong about the food. They had plenty. It was tasty, but I ate the moist grilled skipjack thinking of the tower being filled with ping-pong balls, and later, as my mother read me the Voorstand folk tale of the duck riding the dog to market,
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I did not listen to the words in case I softened. I lay on my mattress and held my anger tight to me. I was the son of two actors.

Not long after my maman turned out my light, a wild wind-storm arrived, slapping the canvas walls beside my bunk. I lay on my back
with my eyes open and listened to Vincent and my mother running round pulling ropes, closing hatches and shutters. When the rain eased I realized they had moved to the bedroom. I could hear my mother crying and Vincent murmuring. I imagined she was remorseful. My heart softened.

But then, just as I was about to go to her, the weeping turned to moaning and all my anger was alive in an instant. She had broken the stick. He had filled the tower with ping-pong balls. I hated her cold green eyes, her little mouth, the tired line at each of its edges, and I hated Vincent most of all, and I curled my lip in the dark as I thought of his talcum-dusted flab, his bearded mouth between my mother’s legs.

I got out of bed. The rain had stopped. The moon was out, projecting images of trees weaving and waving like thick grass stalks across the walls and floors.

I crept down into the living room and looked out across the wild shaking tops of sclerophyll scrub to the glowing buildings of Chemin Rouge and the golden light of the forbidden Sirkus Dome which was less than a mile from the abandoned Feu Follet.

The idea – the vision – of my journey to reclaim my theatre now burst from the tight little place I had been keeping it and gushed, bubbling like lava, towards my destiny. At that moment, I should have been afraid, but what I had instead was a feeling so intense you could almost call it ecstasy. I lapped at the cold spring water from Belinda Burastin’s terracotta pipe. I strapped on my knee pads and tucked folded newspaper underneath for extra protection. As I stuffed Vincent’s treasured driving gloves with newspaper and then pulled them on to my own hands, I did not know what roles I would play, but I imagined them as great ones, not the parts written for Fools or Jugglers, but those for Kings to whose own loves and tragedies, misfortunes, weaknesses of spirit, I would lend my own peculiarly expressive form. I could be their spirit, manifest, their pain made three dimensional, their tragedy got up to walk around.

To be inside the house, to feel it shudder and shake in the wind, was unnerving, but to pursue this action, to crawl and walk up the path to the road, to feel the wind envelop my body, swallow it, hold it, was thrilling. The resistance of my body, the immediate and early declaration of its limitations, was nothing – the stretch of my
abbreviated hamstrings was, not quite pleasure, but certainly not pain.

Tall dry grasses brushed my face. I thought:
I can do this.

The moon was bright, and everything was very clear.
(I can do this.)
I had imagined myself stumbling and falling and I was ready to accept that, but there was a tamped dirt path which more or less followed the tree-lined driveway up to the road. Yes, sticks scratched my face, and my breath, so early in the journey, was rough in my lungs, but I did not fall and I carried my skateboard under my arms and walked uphill on my knees, like a pilgrim, and all above my head the great tree canopies whipped and waved, tossed like hair, like showgirls’ feathers.

Now, recounting this, I know more. I have travelled through dangerous tunnels in foreign countries, climbed steel ladders where bats are used to roosting, and my imagination, thinking of my younger self, is filled with the possibility of rats, brush-hogs, tree-adders, but that liquid silver night was free of them. No tree-adder jumped on me, no brush-hog collided with me. I dealt with my life one knee-step at a time.

Every ten yards or so I stopped, caught my breath. I looked back down at the shining roof of the house between the wild tossing umbrellas of foliage.

After the driveway there was a street. It was wide, and hard. It was here I confronted, in that broad shining black macadam strip, the size of my decision, and yes, sure, I was frightened there. Yes, I wanted my maman and my bed a moment, but then I remembered my maman and the twisted anger of my bed, and I had to proceed, one knee-step, then another, along the pebble-littered concrete gutter – it was too steep for a skateboard – down towards the rumble of the freeway, towards the theatre. The forest roared like a river in flood on either side of me.

I will not say that some self-pity did not smear the glassy brightness of my earlier jubilation, but the thing is –
listen to me – I
kept on going.
My mother was right – it was how she brought me up:
I had no idea of how I looked.

I had no real conception of my effect on others. Had you told me this then, I would have argued fiercely. I would have described myself to you, unflatteringly, in more detail than you could possibly have observed, and I might have convinced you. But I had no
idea.
And although no one ever spelled it out to me, I was really led to believe that it was only BAD PEOPLE who found me repulsive – supporters of the Voorstand Alliance, racists, fascists, not ordinary decent folk.

And when, on that long-ago midnight, I came knee-walking down that moon-bright concrete gutter with my white hair fluttering and my torn-rag mouth loosened by the wind, I could not know how my wave would appear to the driver of the first oncoming car.

The car stopped. There was nothing in my education to make me fear it. It began to make that slow, whining noise so beloved of hitch-hikers – the sound of reverse gear, fully engaged. It came to a stop right next to me: high, mud-splattered, vaguely white.

There was a radio playing Pow-pow music – rough field-hand voices, long sad dissonances, violin, cello.
^*
It switched off. I knelt beside the door, waiting to be let in. Then the passenger-side window came down a little, about an inch.

‘What you want?’ a man’s voice said.

‘The … Feu … Follet.’

‘Wha?’

‘Foo’ – I spoke slowly – ‘Folll-ay.’

The car backed some more and then drove directly at me, so slowly I could hear individual pieces of gravel crunching beneath its rolling tyres. Hot urine washed my thigh. The car’s headlights shone full on me, so brightly that, when I turned to face them, I had to hold my arm across my eyes. My left leg was wet and warm. I could also feel the heat of the car’s radiator. I could hear its tappets singing. I took my hand down and stared into the lights, but then the car backed off, swung out, and slowly drove past me. I watched its red lights slowly drop over the rise and descend to the freeway on the plain below. Soon my trousers were wet and cold, sticking to my legs.

I began to crawl back up towards Belinda Burastin’s house, but it was just too steep. That’s the truth – it was easier to go on down,
towards the freeway. The skateboard was more a hindrance than a help. Finally I grasped it with my hands and crawled behind it, using my knees as brakes when it went too fast, skidding and scraping my way down to the bright ribbon of macadam whose carbon-rich emissions I could now smell, in brief bursts, upon the wind.

An hour later, my belly swollen with nervous gas, my fingers bloated, my knees red raw, I finally climbed down the side of the ramp and slipped down a rough grassy bank to the freeway verge. I lay there, in the shadow of the overpass, for perhaps an hour, feeling the buffeting of big wheat trucks coming down from the north, their sirens blasting as they exceeded the governed speed limit.
^*
I would have gone back to my bed if I could, but I no longer had that option. I just lay there in my pee-wet trousers, shivering, lost in space until the cold became worse than the fear and I edged my way slowly out of the overpass shadow and into the bright stage-light of the freeway. There I managed to stand on my feet and hold out my thumb. I don’t know what I expected. No longer something good.