The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (6 page)

You may have noticed that poor Banquo wore blue. It was the colour blue that Wally’s great-great-grandparents were collecting, out on the mudflats with their jute sacks. The colour blue, extracted from shellfish by a stinking process, was the poor people’s dye, harvested originally by ex-convicts. Blue has been the party of idealism, of reform.
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Blue governments have given women the vote, a thirty-five hour week, a national health scheme.

To be consistent, my mother should have made me up with red – after all, I was a witch’s child – but she could not put that hateful colour on my skin, hence the two blue spots. And although many of the company found the symbolism confusing, and some others were critical of the manner in which she had introduced me to the world, it was – they all agreed – just like her.

It was not like her to limp up the stairs after Scene III and leave her comrades one witch short for the remainder of the play, but that is precisely what she did. She laid her sweating baby in the crib. She lay down on the bed herself, curling up, her knees almost touching her chin. Her red make-up was still on her face. Her body was still clad in foam rubber, strapped with canvas. She pulled a pillow across her eyes and lay still, but only for a moment. Almost immediately she began to forage amongst the rumpled sheets, finally finding what she had been looking for – a small plastic bag of very dry marijuana (not like her either – she had stopped smoking on the day she knew she had finally conceived). Then, with her make-up still caked on her face, she rolled what was not the first cigarette of that particular day. It was a small cigarette, but the ganja was from Nez Noir, the northernmost island, and was therefore very strong.

In a short while the entire company would come up the stairs and enter the tower. It was what happened after each production.
Unless she was to be a total coward, she would have to unlock the door.

Vincent skulked around the windy little cobbled courtyard, while all the cast and half the audience pushed up the noisy staircase to the tower to see exactly who I was. It was the tradition at the Feu Follet that anybody could come up to the tower on opening night – audience members, critics, visiting actors, spies from the VIA and DoS
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– and anybody could give notes – Moey Perelli’s dad, for instance. Vincent too, and this was a privilege that he relished. He was the theatre’s biggest single patron, but on opening night he always sat on the dusty floor in his good black suit. He drank wretched wine from paper cups without ever puckering his fastidious lips. He seemed so confident, so worldly, wealthy but hip. He had such a detailed knowledge of theatre history, an excellent eye, a real feeling for the moment when a scene lost energy or focus. No one but my mother knew that each opening night he had to steel himself to face ‘them’, to win the respect of actors of half his age, wit or taste.

And because of these windmills he felt he must dispense with, the sessions in the tower had always been the high points of his life – first the discussion, the exercise of his considerably theatrical education and sensitivity, and then, some time before dawn, his secret love-making with the leading lady beneath the turning ceiling fan. He was addicted to the whole process, and no matter how he anguished over the deceitful phone calls to his wife, he could not bring himself to give up either my mother or the theatre.

On the press night for
Macbeth
, however, he stayed down in the foyer. He pretended to read the tattered hand-written notices on the walls. He jiggled his car keys in the big pockets of his fashionably baggy black trousers.

He could not love his child – he was clear on that. It was not
that he would not
like
to, but that he could not. It was his flaw, his weakness, not admirable, but beyond him. And if he could not love the baby – one step led to the next – Felicity would not love him. He had seen it in her eyes on stage when she pasted that vile green muck on to her cheeks and pointed at him. It was not to do with text or character, but to do with him and her – he understood her perfectly.

But he, also, understood himself – he could not walk up the stairs. Nor could he leave the building, for if he left the building now, tonight, then that would be it, the end, and he would not permit it to be the end. He went to the open door and looked balefully at the last of the theatre patrons, a man and woman, standing in the middle of the street and talking in the sweet salty air.

‘Croco cristi,’ he said to himself, but more loudly than he intended. The man turned sharply to look at him, and Vincent thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and turned back to face the bleak little foyer with its ragged self – important notices.

‘Croco cristi,’ he whispered. He undid his wide leather belt in that elaborate way of his which always suggested a man about to undress for bed.

‘God damn.’

He tightened the belt a notch.

What happened next was not very much – his mouth tightened a little. But a second later he was crossing to the staircase in three strides.

Next he was ascending the stairs. Next, revealing a more athletic frame than his bulk might have promised, he was striding along the deserted first-floor corridor. His squeaking crepe soles echoed in the empty couchettes, and then receded as he climbed the steep narrow stairs which led to the roar of conversation.

The tower room was small, ten foot by ten foot six, and by the time the chief executive officer of Efica’s largest aspirin manufacturer had reached the top there were fifty people crammed inside. One step below the door sill, his courage failed him. He stopped, marooned it seemed, jiggling his keys.

He could not see Felicity, but he could hear her. There was a stirring in the crowd – the tall, gaunt Sparrow Glashan stepped aside, and there she was, totally alone, exhausted, with the spooky white-eyed baby on her crumpled bed.

How he loved her, loved her at that instant, beyond anything he had known before.

Felicity saw him. She caught his eye. He did not know how to look at her. His own eyes wobbled, then dropped. He stepped into the room and busied himself at the drinks table. He took a paper cup and filled it brimful of dark red wine.

When he next looked up, the crowd had blocked his view again, and he could hear Felicity asking someone to phone the hospital again to see when Wally’s arm would be attended to. Her Voorstand accent was clear and crisp. It cut through the humming, sighing Efican voices like a silver knife.

He stepped back into the doorway and raised himself on his toes. Someone had, at last, taken pity on Felicity – Claire Chen. Vincent had always thought of Claire Chen as a limpet on Felicity’s life – low-life dramas, breakdowns, abortions, bail money. But now she was the one who sat on the bed and laid her ringed hand on the baby’s foot.

When she did this, the room quietened.

She began to stroke the baby’s twisted foot. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. You could hear her nerviness. ‘All the bones and skin,’ she said.

Felicity asked Claire, ‘Would you like to hold him?’

Sparrow Glashan moved sideways and blocked Vincent’s view again. Vincent left the doorway and pushed in past Annie McManus.

‘Sure,’ Claire said, ‘I’ll hold him.’

As the baby passed from its mother its spindly arms sprang out like a spider and Claire flinched and screwed up her face. The actors watched. Vincent watched. He could see by the way she pulled her chin into her neck – everything in her wanted to thrust the child away.

Claire did the thing Vincent knew he was expected to do himself – touched the lipless little tragedy, stroked its gaunt little praying mantis head. It was very quiet in the square, high-ceilinged little room.

‘See,’ Felicity said, speaking generally, smiling, fondly, like a mother.

‘Feel,’ Claire invited, her little brown eyes flicking about the room – she had done the brave thing, but she did not want to do it a second longer. ‘It’s so amazing.’

Vincent felt the crowd stir and shift. He imagined eyes looking for him.

‘Feel,’ Claire repeated. Vincent looked down at the floor, avoiding her eyes.

Annie McManus turned and looked at him. Her pretty face had no expression – she did not know he was Felicity’s lover, no one did – but Vincent was convinced the opposite was the case and he pushed forward, to escape her. He bumped into the critic for the
Neufeine
, who turned, and then, misunderstanding his intention, stepped to one side to let him through. A path then opened up before him, and he walked it – what else was he to do? – squeaking on his crepe-soled shoes.

At the bed he looked into my mother’s eyes, and gave a melancholy kind of shrug which gave no indication of the wild, confused state of his emotions.

But then he held out his square, soft hands – their palms soft as the underbelly of an animal – and fitted them around Tristan’s chest cage, hooked under my arms, and lifted me out of Claire Chen’s sweating embrace, slowly, smoothly into the air.

When he had me held aloft, all he could think was that he was going to faint.

No one spoke, no one made a sound. They left him there, alone, teetering on the edge. He glanced around the room, his eyes weak with need, his mouth oddly shapeless. Only Moey Perelli gave him any sign – pushed his own mouth into the shape of a grin.

‘He has intelligent eyes,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s not beautiful, but he has intelligent eyes.’ And then he embraced me. He was harsh and awkward – pushed his beard into my eyes and ears, grazed my skin, held me too tight, nearly tripped as he tried to walk a little closer to Felicity. He landed heavily on the bed. Felicity stretched out her light, tense hand and grasped at his knee.

Moey began to talk, very loudly, about his security dossier (which he claimed to have seen), and somebody pulled a cork from a bottle of case-latrine.

‘He has extraordinary eyes,’ said Vincent. It was not easy for him. It took everything he had. He sat beside Felicity and made a little seat for me with his fat hairy arm. He supported my head with his fleshy pectorals.

Felicity held his knee and smiled and bit her lip.

Moey came – his head shining now he had removed his wig – and held out a long finger with wide tombstone fingernails.

Vincent took Felicity’s hand – not something he normally did in company. ‘He has a strong grip,’ he said.

Felicity nodded, and blew her nose.

‘Whose turn is it to pick up the reviews?’ she asked.

What Bill could not stand was: why must they deny there had been a tragedy? Why must they all smile and coo? When Felicity put out her hand and tried to hold Vincent’s old fat knee, he felt he was in an alien country where you could not even guess what might be going on. So while he believed he could
feel
the horror running through the room like a shiver, all he saw was smiling faces. All these actors – not one of them in touch with what they felt.

‘I’ll get the zines,’ he said.

‘No, mo-chou. You should be here with us.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ Bill said, his eyes full of poison. ‘I need the air.’

Felicity frowned at him. He saw the need in her eyes, but she was sitting next to Vincent and Vincent had his fat valsir where he was so clever at placing it – on the moral high ground.

Three minutes later, alone on the ramp in front of the theatre, Bill unscrewed his hip flask and took a long swig, spat the wine out on the bricks.

The Feu Follet bus, a three-ton Haflinger with big slab sides and small decal-spotted windows, was parked right in front of the theatre. He found Felicity’s sandals sitting on the dashboard. He picked up and flung them deep into the dark body of the van.

He let the clutch out so hard you could feel the prop shaft thunk and he accelerated out into Gazette Street in loud metallic first gear, shifting noisily into second as he passed the brightly illuminated taxi base. He pulled across the tram tracks and turned right, away from the Voorstand Sirkus and the Mater Hospital down towards the port.

He thought: that’s it, I’ll keep on driving and never come back, but the truth was, of all my maman’s admirers, he was the one
who needed her the most. She had altered his life. She had taken him into the company when he was nineteen years old, a cambruce. He had fallen out with a travelling circus over his wages. Fearing a beating from the proprietor and his brothers, he had run away to Chemin Rouge and there he had wandered down Gazette Street and discovered a free Wednesday-night performance of
Hamlet.

He was dirty, starved, down to 120 pounds when he saw my maman play Ophelia. He sat in the dark, Row P, and fell in love.

That night he slept in the lane behind the Feu Follet. Next day he walked out into the suburbs and stole roses, hollyhocks, snapdragons, whatever he could find, and next evening he brought them to my maman at the Feu Follet. It was the same the next night, and the night after that.