The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (7 page)

At first she joked about him, teased him, said she was too old for him. But she never seemed too old to him. He loved the language she used, the language she knew. He told my maman he was the best voltige
^*
artist in the southern hemisphere. And although he had never been inside a theatre until he walked into the Feu Follet, he told her he was going to be the best actor in Chemin Rouge. He asked her for books about acting and she could not refuse him. She gave him her precious first-edition Stanislavsky with her neck tingling and her eyes feeling loose and unfocused. He read the whole three volumes of
An Actor Prepares
, one volume a day. He argued with it. He was very handsome. He had a long flexible back, and dancing passionate eyes that never left her face. He was nineteen, a baby, but she could not withstand it.

The first time they made love he told her he would die for her and she wept in his arms.

Later, she read him
Paradise Lost
in bed, her head resting on his smooth and luminous chest. She bought him two dictionaries, the big two-volume Oxford and the smaller Efican University edition with its creolized French and English prison slang.

He took her to a dressage ring in Goat Marshes and taught her voltige. She learned it too, without the benefit of a meccano.
^†
She
was twenty-eight, knew nothing about real circus, but she had such guts, such style. Within a week they were performing ‘two men high’, round and round, no one watching.

He took her out into the cantons to the petites tentes. She did not see the meanness of the circus, the lying proprietors, the stinking caravans, the brutal beatings Bill had suffered. She saw instead the discipline, the lack of affectation, the highly critical audiences who could compare a given performance with others from a hundred years before. Seeking to invent an Efican national style in drama, she began then to incorporate circus skills into her shows. Not too much later she bought this old Haflinger bus and began to take her circus-theatre back into the little towns.

It was the only vehicle the Feu Follet owned. There was nothing lighter or easier to use when they went shopping or, as now, to collect the zines. Bill bounced over the train tracks, and followed the old Ridge Line Road down into the port of Chemin Rouge. He drove past flour mills, catalytic converters as pretty as cruise ships decked with lights, oil terminals with their long pipes running out into the night. He drove, thinking of Vincent.

He never had liked Vincent. From the very beginning, even when he had thought he was usurping him, he had been threatened by his wealth, his educated accent, his confidence. Tonight in the tower, he had let Vincent win again. Bill had walked away. He always walked away. He didn’t know any other solution. He felt sour shame come to take his cooling skin. He was sorry at the injuries he caused, the toxic things that had passed between them, in their eyes.

He loved her. He could not bear to see her with Vincent, the fucking patapoof. He had been counting on the baby to change all that. It was his baby,
necessarily.
He was the father. He had built domestic pictures he dared not even name himself. But when he saw the real child – on stage, in the middle of his performance – his first feeling, in the middle of the horror, was outrage, the sense of theft, as if his happy life had been stolen from him.

Then – for ten, twenty seconds – he was capable of anything. He wanted to hurt her, break her. He was a frightened soldier in a burning village.

For a moment, in front of one hundred and eighty people, he was mad. And then, slowly, a bit at a time, he turned his rage
away from Felicity, and turned it back into his performance.

The wind was warm down in the port. It smelt of heavy oil and sea salt. He drove with the window rolled down, clattering past the bleak waterfront bars with their yellow tiled walls and used-car-yard bunting, heading towards the
Zinebleu
sign where the review of
Macbeth
was already rolling off the presses. It was the quaint habit of the
Zinebleu
to adopt what it imagined was the Voorstand practice – they would not send a reviewer to ‘press nights’, only opening night. So they held the theatre page till half past ten and the poor suck-arse reviewer either scribbled his review in the dark, or – as Veronique Marchant had obviously done tonight – wrote most of it before the show began.

He picked up the zines and headed back up the Boulevard des Indiennes. He could not run away. He had to go back. But he was not going to lose to Vincent Theroux.

When he arrived back in the tower he had not only the zines but a brown paper bag full of bottles, and as he entered the little room he was pleased to learn that Vincent had been called home to wifey.

Felicity looked up and smiled, but he saw, already, the distance he had lost. He did not know how he knew this – a flattening of the cheeks, a tightening of the upper lips, a lack of animation in the eyes.

He threw the zines on the bed. The normal praise-addicts – Moey, Heather, Claire – all leapt upon them, but Bill kicked off his moccasins and sat cross-legged on the quilt, going through his bag of bottles.

‘I have Rosemary oil,’ he announced, ‘Apricot Kernel, and Scented Olive. I think Rosemary is appropriate, don’t you?’

‘No, sweets,’ Felicity said. He could see her trying not to offend him while she was, at the same time, shocked by what she thought he was suggesting.

‘Come on, Flick, I’m not going to massage
you.’

His own hands, when he held them out for the child, felt as dull and heavy as lead.

Felicity tucked the wrap around the child a little tighter. He was left with his hands held in the empty air.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Felicity’s reluctance hurt him like almost nothing he could
remember. He felt his lip tremble, and when she gave him the child he actually wanted it, but could not bear to think she had given it to him because she saw this weakness.

His son was so light: a parcel of bad dreams.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said.

If she meant
don’t do it
, Bill did not get it.

‘He’ll like this,’ he said.

He laid the parcel down and unwrapped it. The child had woken and was looking at him with those disconcerting marble-white eyes.

‘Is it OK to massage him?’ Felicity asked.

The chest cage did not seem right somehow. The skin seemed to hang there like rag on wire. The legs and feet were all wrong too. He could not look, but it seemed as if the heel was missing. Bill felt sick. He poured the oil into his hands and blew on it. It was warm anyway. He had stolen the oil from Annie’s room. Annie had gone to visit Wally in the Emergency Room. She would not be happy if she knew he had done this.

‘Of course it’s OK,’ said Moey. ‘Look at him, he’s smiling. He sees me.’

‘He’s too young to smile,’ Bill said. ‘It’s not a smile.’

The little creature looked at him. It scared him shitless. Bill put his broad-palmed hand across the fragile chest, and spread the oil.

‘You have to take his bandock off,’ Felicity said.

He did not want to. He feared there would be something horrible there as well, but when Felicity had undone the bandock the penis looked quite normal. He began to massage. He could feel the little being inside his hands, some sort of life-form not your own. He was half repulsed, half attracted. He could feel Felicity beside him now, felt her red hair brush his neck.

He looked at her. She leaned across and kissed him. Now she was not withdrawn from him, he was really angry with her – she had forced him to play the musico, to out-Vincent Vincent in his admiration of this tragedy.

The more he massaged, the more the child cooed, and kicked his malformed limbs, the more angry Bill became. The company began to press around, and it made him sour and cynical to see how they now wanted to massage too, and he gave up to them, gave up gladly, listening to everything they had to say. It was an orgy of denial. It disgusted him.

He looked from this to see Annie standing at the door alone. She raised an eyebrow at him and held up a bottle of case-latrine. He looked at Felicity. He turned, before he could stop himself, and followed Annie down the stairs.

Wally claimed to have been born ‘on the sawdust’, to have grown up in a circus family, to have been the ‘Human Ball’ from ages one till three.

When he first arrived at reform school he had still been able, so he said, to fit himself, together with twenty-four green soda bottles, inside a box measuring 24″ × 12″ × 12″. It was this which bent his back the way it was.

Furthermore, his father had been a contortionist so extraordinary that he had been able, whilst still alive, to sell his skeleton to medical science. He had travelled around Efica with a coffin already addressed James Hazzard, MD, Boulevard Raspail, Chemin Rouge, Efica.
^*

‘My old dab was a dreadful gambler,’ Wally said. ‘If it had not been for the need for money, he would never have done it – it was a shocking inconvenience to be always toting that coffin about.’

All his life Wally had been around the circus and the theatre. He had been a roustabout, a tent-staker, a stablehand, a farrier, a driver, a turnboy,
^†
a carpenter, a production manager, but the truth was – this leap into the safety net was his first performance ever.

Now he wished he had never made it. He wished he had died instead.

He sat in Casualty and held his throbbing arm while the flesh swelled like yeast dough around the fracture.

He waited for the visitors he knew would arrive after curtain time at the Feu Follet. He waited with trepidation, embarrassment, imagining Bill Millefleur impersonating him to the people in
the tower, repeating his speech, mimicking his accent, revealing all his very private feelings about my mother.

On a different night it might have turned out as he feared (some cruel things sometimes went on in that little tower), but Bill had other matters on his mind and the whole question of Wally’s motivation was overshadowed by the
Zinebleu
, which had noted the leap (‘inverse levitation’) and had seen it as setting the tone of the production – ‘the Smith forte – the Efican vernacular’.

So the hospital visitors, all actors, came to celebrate the review as much as to commiserate about the injury.

‘I was just testing the rig,’ he said. ‘Jeez.’

He sat on the plastic bench with a forbidden cancerette cupped in his palm, his arm resting across his thigh, and listened while the review was, once again, read out to him. To have his performance admired by actors was worth anything to Wally.

‘Bill was a bit worried,’ he said. ‘I just tested it is all.’

His veined face flushed and his ears burned red with pleasure. He sat on the plastic bench, his cancerette hidden in his palm, and listened to repeated readings of the review. It was not until the sixth recitation that he noticed the mention of the ‘Witch’s homunculus’.

‘What’s a homunculus, for Christ’s sake?’

‘A foetus,’ Moey said.

‘A baby,’ Claire said. ‘It means a baby.’

‘The Witch doesn’t have a baby.’

‘Felicity does,’ Claire said. ‘You both made your début the same night.’

‘Jeez,’ said Wally. ‘Hope it looks like Bill.’ He winked at Moey. ‘Hope it doesn’t look like you.’

‘It’s a boy,’ Claire said.

‘How is it?’ he asked Moey. ‘Who does he look like?’

‘He’s got very intelligent eyes.’

Wally registered the tone. They were like actors talking about a performance they hated. They would never call another actor a ringhard. They’d say, oh, I loved your business with the tea towel.

‘What does he look like?’ he asked Claire Chen.

Claire fiddled with her big silver death’s-head rings and told him Flick’s baby was
amazing.

Wally stared at her with his still grey eyes until she said it was time for her to go and lock up the theatre, and Moey said he’d better walk with her across the park. When they said goodbye they looked mournful and depressed. They gave the review to Wally – just a scrap of paper – but it was the first time he and I were linked together. I found it among his papers when we were leaving Efica, just before his death. It was folded inside his driver’s licence – as dry and fragile as something from a flower press.

At one o’clock in the morning Wally was alone in Casualty waiting for the results of his X-ray. He knew something was very wrong with me. His arm was throbbing. His leap now seemed no more than a vulgar joke, a raspberry in the face of fate. There was something wrong and he knew he had to be with my maman.

He tried to go to her. They would not let him. In Saarlim you could have walked right out the door, but this was Efica – more humane, more bureaucratic – there were forms to sign, the forms were missing, and thus it was nearly three in the morning when he walked out the door, with his unset arm held in a Lasto-net, and that was how he was – with that knobby white material on his arm and that slight ammonia smell-when he first held me.

The lights were all out except an Anglepoise on the floor beside the bed. Felicity was asleep on her back in a long white T-shirt, her hair spread out on the pillow, snoring ever so softly, and Tristan Smith was placed between her legs.

Wally approached me with his neck craned, squinting, his lips compressed in a pale grimace.

He saw – loose-skinned puppy – marsupial not ready to leave its mother’s pouch – skin folds, wide staring eyes.

‘You poor guy,’ he whispered. ‘You poor little guy.’

Felicity, in her sleep, put her hand across her mouth and moaned.

‘Flick?’

Her lips were dry and cracked. She made a small whistling snore.