The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (51 page)

Jacqui grabbed my arm. Then her hands were busy clapping. Then she was cheering, standing, and then, as the lighting drew attention to the poor Gjent, she gravely took her seat. The water was up to the Gjent’s neck.

There was a great silence, and the sound of water, one drop dripping like a metronome.

The level rose over the Gjent’s bearded chin, over his tightly clenched mouth. As his eyes stared at us across the surface of the lake, there was some nervous giggling, but for the most part that whole dark space was totally quiet and 2000 people watched the
performer subjected to a total immersion which could not but help recall the Waterhouse of ancient Amsterdam.

We Eficans were Ootlanders, but we knew – as all the world knows – that death, the possibility of death, is always on the menu in your entertainment.

We saw the bubbles come out of the Gjent’s mouth. We saw his hands begin to grapple with the Drool’s knots. We saw his eyes widen, as the water now poured in above his head through pipes as big as sewers. Soon even these were submerged and the entire performance area was like a giant aquarium. At the very top of this were chairs where the chorus (Bruder Dog, Bruder Duck, Bruder Mouse, Spookganger Drool, Heidi) sat, looking down into the water.

The Gjent had now been without air for minutes. We could see him panicking. We could see his hands flailing at the knots. We could see the bubbles coming from his mouth and now, as we watched, he opened his mouth in a silent scream and a great rush of air escaped – bubbles floating upwards to the Gods above.

His limbs jerked, his head rose, his hair floated.

He was free.

We roared. He was alive. He streaked upwards towards the air. He jumped out on to the catwalk above the water. He bowed to us. He stood in profile to us, turned and opened his mouth and, in a perfect replica of the De Kok sculpture, made himself a fountain – water poured from his open mouth back into the tank, and then he put out his hand and caught … a small goldfish.

Breathing deeply from his broad athlete’s chest, he smiled at us, and held this tiny creature briefly by the tail.

‘Meneer, Madam,’ he said. ‘We give you …’

He dropped the fish into the water.

‘The Water Sirkus.’

And so the show began, a breathless, relentless entertainment-the man in the suit and bow tie walking through the water, looking for the fish with a flashlight. The huge fish that eats the man. The tiny man, no more than two feet tall, a Simi, of course, but it was endless. There was underwater dancing, great comic interludes, replicas of famous paintings, villainous creatures who seemed so real until they climbed from the water and then were hit by cannon and exploded in the air above our heads.

There was no plot, or shape, although there was the continual preoccupation with drowning that distinguishes Voorstandish art in general. There was no circus ring at all, and as such it would have damned itself, not only politically, but also theatrically, with the members of the Feu Follet. But few of the critics at the Feu Follet ever saw a Sirkus. Certainly not the Water Sirkus. They therefore overlooked one vital thing – the Sirkus is thrilling. Would it have captured half the world if it were not?

The last ‘act’ of the Water Sirkus was a performance of ‘Pers Nozegard’, the first ever performed beneath the water. The plot you know: the child whose beauty is boasted of by its mother in the hearing of sea spirits, the capturing of the child, and its life under the sea with mermaids while its parents mourn above, thinking it drowned, the funeral in the world, the child’s christening in the water etc.

In this production the performers said their lines underwater.

This was such a new development in the Sirkus that when the father turned to the mother and said the first words of the little play
(‘Our child is dead’)
the audience hooted and stamped with appreciation.

I for my part assumed the actors were miming a pre-recorded sound track. But later, in the finale, as the holograms spun, as the performers made themselves into a great water wheel, hand to ankle, and spun at speed, and what looked like a real live dog walked calmly through them and wagged its tail, one of the performers bumped a bright blue coral reef which had been a feature of the show.

‘Shit,’ he said.

It was only then that I knew what everyone else in that Dome had known from the beginning – that these brave performers were really saying words underwater and these words were being broadcast to us in our seats. I had witnessed one of those technical feats, the invention of which had probably resulted in the form of entertainment we had just witnessed.

I was beginning to reflect on this, and what this meant about the Voorstand Sirkus generally, when I felt myself half strangled from behind. I turned my head. I saw the face. It took me three, four, five seconds to understand who it was, this man who was cutting off my air pipe by embracing me so emotionally. He had bronzed skin
and jet-black curly hair. He had sequins on his shoulders. He shone like a king in the midst of the common folk in the crowd, and when he let go my throat and hooked his big hands underneath my arms, and picked me up, all sixty-five pounds of me, none of the Mouse’s admirers disputed his right to have me to himself.

‘Hello, Tristan,’ he said in that big actor’s voice.

Madam, Meneer – it was Bill Millefleur.

It was not that he had grown older – indeed, he was as young as ever – but that I had changed him in my memory. I had remembered his sneer, his spleen, the hurt and anger in his eye.

But here he was, my maman’s circus boy – his handsome sun-lamped face – mint smell, flossed teeth gleaming – little crooked scar on his chin. He looked so soft, and beautiful, and burnished, shining. He was so big, had such good skin, such glossy hair. He stood shoulder high above the crowd, and although he was not as famous as I thought he was – he had the look of someone very famous indeed.

This was the man who had picked me up so many times before, and put me down and walked away each time I needed him, but when he held me aloft and smiled up at me, I loved him without reserve. I felt a sort of giddiness, a great surge of relief.

I had worked so long in learning not to love him, not to trust him, but all he had to do was hold me, and he melted me, the Sirkus man, like he melted my maman – such charm, such energy, such focus – so many times before. What it is – I wonder, do you know?-to be loved by someone beautiful.

I forgot about Jacqui and Wally. I felt a great surge of happiness, of completeness, as my father carried me above the crowds. The tide of my already turbulent emotions made me unobservant and it was not until much later in the night, when I was falling asleep on my father’s dining table, that I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crew-cut man named Gabe sitting quietly in row 3.

Seven o’clock on the evening of the Water Sirkus found Wally on a plateau of sweet emotion. Steam from the bathroom drifted out into the hotel room where he sat. He was no longer agitated, but almost serene. The tickets to the fabulous Water Sirkus lay beside him on
the quilt – three long paper slips on onion paper inside an embossed silver envelope.

He had washed, showered, shaved. He could feel that clean cotton next to his skin. He had taken his beta-tene. He had taken aspirin, but not too much. The landlopers out on the balcony were singing. They had a violin and a drum. They were like crickets in the night.

At seven-fifteen he walked along the corridor to the elevator in his formal bow tie and tails.

This time he was prepared for the odours and confusion of the Colonnades. He held his nose and grinned and shook his head and when he walked he tapped his cane jauntily on the sidewalk. If the crowds had remained normal he would have reached the Sirkus in an excellent mood.

But he was in the company of Bruder Mouse and before we had gone twenty yards there were admirers stretching out their hands to touch the Bruder’s grey furry face.

‘Shoo,’ he said when the crowd began to form. ‘Go on – skat.’

But no one shooed and no one skat.

‘Piss off,’ he said.

But it was half past seven at night, and bow-legged Bruder Mouse was on the town.

‘Tristan! Jacques!’

This was the first time we had a chance to show Wally the successful act we had spent the week developing – the cartwheels, the tumbling, the juggling with tennis balls or apples.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘For Chrissake.’

‘Look at him,’ Jacqui said. ‘He’s amazing. He’s a star.’

‘Just stop it,’ the old man hissed.

‘But why?’

‘No reason – just stop.’

There was a reason – he had not planned it. It was not part of his secret. It upset him so much that, when that show was finally over and Jacqui and I escorted him along the streets of Kakdorp, his head was pushed forward from his shoulders, his brows down on his old grey eyes, and he looked so much like a bad-tempered old vulture, a predator, that he helped effect what physical force might not have done – the comparatively peaceful entry of Bruder Mouse into a Water Sirkus.

Once he had me in my numbered seat, the seat he had planned, he began to regain his old humour. He sat in his seat, crossed his legs, arranged his stick. He took pleasure in not looking round to the row behind where he knew Bill Millefleur was sitting.

Perhaps it was prison that did it to him, or perhaps it was that brutal childhood which left those pale and slippery circles forever etched into his skin, but a secret gave Wally pleasure – whether it was something as simple as the meal he had cooked for dinner, the origin of a brand new washing machine, or the real reason he wished to go to Voorstand. There was always a secretive air to Wally, and he could not give you the time of day without standing next to you too close and looking at the floor. He had the habit of whispering when he could have spoken normally, a habit of withholding information from you.

When I had come along the wharf at Chemin Rouge, pale, frightened, a snail just come out of his shell, I had already been – without knowing it – on my way to see Bill Millefleur. Wally had written to my father. They were long letters which, while hinting much, revealed nothing, not even the date of our arrival.

It was this cache of secrets that had given Wally’s cleanshaven face that tumescent shine all the way across the ocean to Morea. And when he had seen Aziz’s long-bladed bone-handled knife move upwards, sharp and slick as a surgeon’s scalpel, insinuating itself between my bandage and chest skin, all he could think was that I would have to seek out my father, if only for the money.

He had let me believe that I was taking him to Saarlim to indulge his passion for the Sirkus, but he was seventy-three years old and had a painful spinal condition which made even the most luxurious Starbuck uncomfortable for him – he would never have set out across the world just to see the Sirkus.

Indeed, he felt most content at home in his kitchen or in the sandy streets around the port. There he had come to savour the preciousness of time, the sweet sappy papaya trees resting their heavy fruit on corrugated iron verandas, the smell of seaweed that still drifted up the Boulevard des Indiennes after the winter storms.

He could see Sirkus enough for an old man in Chemin Rouge. There was too much death in the Saarlim Sirkus and he did not wish to think about death. It pushed in on him everywhere these
days: there were tastes in his mouth, discomforts in his stomach, he was secretly convinced was cancer.

He wrote a will. He went through his zines and threw away a number that were pornographic. And, as his final act, he set out to extricate me from the Feu Follet and reunite me with my father.

It was this last project which gave him the glow, the light, the surge of stamina which I imagined had been produced by travel brochures.

And in the last few days before he finally led me to a seat directly in front of my most problematic parent, the days when Jacqui and I were tin-rattling in the streets of Saarlim, or standing side by side in Shutter Steeg gazing up at the handsome stone house where my maman had been born, Wally conducted secret telephone conferences with Bill, refusing to divulge my whereabouts until the ‘right moment’.

This ponderous, controlling secrecy drove my father crazy.

‘Just tell me where you are,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right over.’

‘You come right over, it’ll all
be
over,’ Wally said. ‘If he thinks I arranged this, he’ll walk away. He has to think it’s all an accident.’

When Jacqui came home with the tickets for the Water Sirkus, that was the venue Wally chose for the ‘accidental’ meeting.

‘People are always bumping into each other at the Sirkus,’ he said to Bill. ‘You get the seat behind us. It’s beyond suspicion.’

‘Mo-frere,’ Bill said. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking. This is the hottest show in town.’

‘This will be perfect,’ Wally said. ‘No way could he believe we set him up.’

‘I’ve got a dinner party that night. I can’t get seats.’

But of course he did get a seat. He was sitting there now, exactly as Wally had planned he would.

Wally did not turn around. He looked up at the shimmering walls of the Water Sirkus, which changed colours constantly as the currents of dyed fluids rose and fell, plastic walls of a material which reflected or absorbed the light depending on no apparent process.