The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

by Peter Carey

  Between the striking black and white posters was a rusty roller door. Above the roller door was a second floor with six high, gracefully arched windows. The building was topped by the tower in which I had been conceived (and in which, in the time of the Circus School, the great Ducrow was said to have seduced the contortionist Gabrielle Dubois). The rest of the company lived in little monks’ cells scattered through the building. There was no nursery ready. Everyone had been too busy getting ready for the Scottish play.

  Felicity walked carefully up the brick ramp and let herself in through the small door inside the big rusty roller. Holding my soft head protectively, she edged through the dark dusty space which was called ‘the foyer’, and walked painfully – her inner thighs hurt, her vulva hurt, every step hurt – up the wide wooden stairs to the second floor where the air was scented with patchouli oil, dirty laundry, incense, cigarette smoke, musk, and the insidious but persistent odour of a blocked toilet which was the subject of dispute with both plumbers and debt badgers. The poky cells in which the great Ducrow had once housed his students were now covered with posters both political and theatrical, the brick walls with spray painting, the frosted glass with glass beads, cane blinds, folk prints.

  When my maman arrived on the second floor she was already beyond exhaustion. She had no plan. She began the narrow splintered stairs up to the tower thinking only about the impossibility of the next step, and once she finally gained the safety of the tower, she did something she only did when making love – she locked the door.

  Then she laid me on the bed, lay down beside me, and began to cry. I woke and vomited – more green stuff. Sobbing, she wiped me clean with a pillowslip. She had no tissues, no bandocks, nothing but a bottle of eau mineral for herself to drink.

  When the company, alerted by our crying, came tapping on the door, she would not let them in or even whisper through the door.

  Afterwards she pretended that this had all been part of her plan – her dramatic announcement later in the evening of that day. This was how she liked history told, but the truth was, she lost her nerve.

  Bill and Vincent were called. They left gifts at the top of the stairs – a pack of bandocks, a tape of meditation music, a cellular telephone – but she stayed behind the locked door, ashamed, frightened, shaken. When the hospital sent a pair of doctors and a Gardiacivil demanding that the baby be handed over for special treatment, she left them hammering on the door.

  Vincent tried to talk to them, but he had no status with the authorities and so learned nothing, only that there was something possibly illegal about the baby’s care.

  The company did a line run for the show in the afternoon. I slept from two until six-thirty, and when I woke Felicity was already putting on her make-up.

  5

  Wally had first fallen in love with my maman from a theatre seat. To say he worshipped her is not hyperbole, but although his love was not requited he carried his sorrow without complaint, revealing it only in the slight widow’s hump that began to show across his shoulders. It was a load, always present, a pain, a pressure, and it was this which drove his engine, which kept him moving, dancing, talking, joking, as if the sheer pain would be too much if he sat down and let himself feel it.

  No matter what went wrong, he was always positive. He believed, or said he did, that what happened was always for the best, that you could triumph through the expenditure of will and optimism. He spent his days and nights in ceaseless motion across the cobbled floors, through the labyrinthine corridors, running up the stairs, down the stairs, fretting, sweating, and he spent my first day on earth being positive, not merely about my maman, or the Gardiacivil who were ominously knocking at her door, but about all the things which will concern a small theatre before press night – the First Witch’s absence, Macduff’s sore throat, the props list, the hot weather, the noisy air-conditioning, the bookings. At half past six he was in the first-floor office, manning the telephones.

  On the ground floor, the doors of the hot little theatre were already open and a few of the actors – Banquo, Lennox, the Porter – were on the sawdust stage, pacing, whooping, publicly performing all the normally private activities that go under the name of ‘warming up’.

  Wally found the ASM smoking in one of the old stables and sent her out for bandocks for ‘the baby’. He filled two jugs with water and ice. And in all of this he kept up a manic, snapping sort of fret, a hand-clapping, irritable, sometimes sensible commentary. When the ASM returned, Wally took the bandocks, the jugs, and personally delivered them to my maman’s door. A moment later he was back in the office, slipping a red usher’s waistcoat over his white T-shirt. He kicked off his rubber thongs. The white phone rang. Claire Chen took it. The black phone rang – four more seats. Wally took the credit card details and smoked a cancerette right down to its fat white filter.

  He put his elbows on the long bench and looked out through the high arched windows, across the rusting rooftops, the trawler hulls beached at the end of concrete driveways, the dense shows of bougainvillaea, the wind-torn palms, all the way to the wide mudflats where his great-great-grandparents had met, ankle deep in mud, their backs bowed by the weight of ‘blue briques’, the little gastropods which the Imperial Dye Works bought for a penny a sack.

  It was in Gazette Street that his grandparents’ union had been ‘gazetted’ in a weatherboard government office – number twenty-eight – which was now the site of a bankrupt panel-beating business in front of whose closed roller doors the cast of the Scottish Play was presently demystifying itself. Macduff – tall, anachronistically bespectacled, cadaverously thin – was playing cricket with … a busload of noisy giggling schoolkids who had somehow got themselves tickets to a press night.

  ‘Shit,’ said Wally. ‘Rug rats.’

  Claire Chen put her plump little hand across the phone and looked down into the street.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, your majesty.’

  ‘Get rid of them please.’

  ‘Get rid of who?’ It was Bill Millefleur in his Macbeth costume – pale, nervous, sweating inside the sculpted foam rubber.

  ‘It’s not who,’ Wally said. ‘It’s what. Get rid of what. Ask me.’

  ‘Tsk,’ Bill said.

  ‘Paper-clips,’ Wally said, kneeling to pick up one from the floor. He took Bill’s arm and drew him away from the window to a place where the actor would not be upset by the sight of schoolchildren. As Wally had a much caricatured tendency to furtiveness, a habit of bringing his mouth up to your ear to communicate to you the most public facts, his behaviour did not seem unusual. ‘We’ve had a major problem with the paper-clips, frere,’ he hissed to Bill, still holding his arm tightly. ‘I wondered if I could get your advice.’

  ‘You want to talk to me about paper-clips?’

  ‘You don’t have time for that sort of stuff? OK, I understand. So how is the suit? Is it too hot?’ He began patting at Bill’s sculpted foam rubber like a tailor, shifting the shoulders, smoothing the chest.

  ‘Stop it, frere. I’ve got to talk to you about the set.’

  ‘The set. Of course. Let’s get out of here.’

  Bill didn’t move. ‘I don’t like that platform. It’s lethal.’

  Claire Chen placed her phone on the cradle. ‘Oh great …’

  Wally winked at Claire and made a face and pushed his hair back from his hair line so it stood high on his head. He raised his ginger eyebrows at her, rolled his eyes, trying to signal that he did not want Bill looking in her direction.

  To Wally, Claire said, ‘What?’

  To Bill, ‘Who was the macho man who didn’t need the rails?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Wally said. ‘Just leave this stuff to me.’

  ‘It is not OK,’ Claire said, ‘to say one thing at a company meeting and then come in here half an hour before the curtain in a funk.’

  ‘A what?’ Bill said, stepping towards her.

  ‘A funk,’ she said, pickin
g up a phone. ‘Hello, Feu Follet.’

  ‘It’s OK,’Wally said.

  But it was not OK – Bill was staring out the window past Claire’s bare back.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘Very nice. You’ve got rug rats. I see. So,’ he said to Wally, ‘get rid of them.’

  ‘Frere, you know that ain’t possible.’

  ‘Well I’m not playing to them.’

  ‘Talk to Felicity,’ Claire said, her hand across the mouthpiece.

  Bill looked at Wally, his black eyes fast and anxious. ‘Please, frere. This is press night.’

  ‘Talk to Felicity,’ Claire said, holding the phone under her smooth round chin. ‘Sorry, could you hold. It’s not just rug rats,’ she said, ‘it’s other stuff. For God’s sake, Bill, surely you can go into her room. Please?’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’ Bill said. You could see his colour glowing through his make-up. The second phone began to ring. Wally answered it and put it on hold.

  Claire took the phone from Wally. ‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘is Felicity playing First Witch or not? If I have to do her lines as well, I want to know. Surely you can go in and ask her. Isn’t that clear enough?’

  ‘No.’ Bill found a paper-clip and began twisting it. ‘It is not clear.’

  ‘It’s your baby, isn’t it?’ Claire said, and held his eye.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, still looking hard at Bill. ‘Hello, Feu Follet.’

  ‘No,’ Bill said to Claire as she hung up, ‘it’s not my baby – not necessarily.’

  ‘Not necessarily?’ Claire said.

  Wally stared at the strong body, the intelligent face with its sensual lips, at this young man who had been graced by God in so many ways, not least with the pleasure of holding Felicity Smith in his arms.

  ‘What?’ Bill demanded of him. His lips had lost their shape. ‘What’s so weird about that? It’s true. All I said was, not necessarily.’

  Wally hesitated. ‘Did you talk to the Gardiacivil? Did they frighten you, mo-ami?’ he asked. ‘They don’t know anything. They’re only penguins. They’re not doctors.’

  ‘No one frightened me,’ Bill said. ‘What’s everyone acting so weird about?’ He picked up a paper-clip from the floor and handed it to Wally. ‘If anyone is frightened, it’s you two. Look at you.’

  ‘The curtain’s up in fifteen minutes,’ Claire said. ‘If you want to change the platform you’ve got twelve minutes to do it.’

  ‘You want to talk about this platform?’ Wally said.

  ‘Sure,’ Bill said.

  ‘Well come on, mo-ami.’ Wally cuffed him lightly on the head – he could not help it. ‘We’ll sit up there together.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem sitting on it,’ Bill said, rubbing his head and frowning. ‘I have a problem fighting on it.’

  ‘I know,’ Wally said, ‘I know.’ As he walked out across the cobbled path and pushed through the velvet curtain into the sweet pine smell of the deep, sawdust-covered stage, he took his tension in his shoulders, pulled his biceps in against his ribs, and when he began his ascent towards the platform he was a production manager going to fix a problem. He had no intention of quarrelling with an actor before a curtain.

  6

  To picture Bill and Wally as they climbed up the set of the Scottish Play, you need first to know that the theatre was constructed in the largest of the old Circus School rings. The ceiling was a good forty feet from the sawdust ring and around the ring were seats – not the original bleachers, which had been termite-infested, but in the original configuration, that human circle which the Voorstand Sirkus abandoned but which gave the much humbler circuses of Efica their live, electrically charged audiences.

  Many of the Feu Follet actors had some sort of connection with the indigenous circus and my mother used to like to shape her plays so that they used or developed, wherever possible, these disappearing skills. Our Shakespeare had tumbling, slack ropes, posturing, trapeze and general acrobatics, and in the case of the Scottish Play she had designed a kind of jungle gym which could suggest a room in the palace, say, but also a scaffolding on which some fight scenes could be choreographed.

  The idea was that Macbeth would work himself into higher and higher and more ‘dangerous’ positions until, on a platform just under the lighting rig, in his final conflict with Macduff, he would tumble and fall, not into their normal safety net – there was not room to stretch it – but into an eight-by-eight footer they had borrowed from the Theatre for the Deaf.

  Wally, as everybody knew, was never happy with heights. He, the ‘Human Ball’, was observed to avoid long ladders and lighting rigs whenever possible, and even though he had been aware of the safety problems with Bill’s platform, he had not climbed to inspect it himself, but had sent Sparrowgrass Glashan to deal with it instead.

  But now, of course, he had no choice. He climbed, following the glow-tape in the gloom.

  On the platform, forty feet above the audience, breathing the hot air under the cobwebbed corrugated roof, he searched for the new black safety wires he had ordered to be strung around the perimeter of the platform. With the lights on pre-set, it was gloomy up here. There was glow-tape marking the platform perimeters, but the wires were painted black. He searched for them with his hand, a little giddily.

  ‘How’s that?’ he said, finding a wire and twanging it, as if he were touching it only for the purpose of demonstrating its strength. ‘Does that solve your safety problem?’

  Bill ran his hand over the wires. He knelt so he could inspect the point where they were anchored to the wall. He leaned against them, gingerly at first and then more aggressively. He bounced once or twice, like a boxer against the ropes, but when he had done with his tests he withheld his judgement. Instead he turned, and looked down into the gathering audience.

  ‘There’s no point you being angry,’ he said at last. ‘Obviously, there’s something wrong with that baby and denial isn’t going to help anyone.’

  ‘How’s the wire, mo-ami?’

  ‘Tray bon, thank you.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Wally said, and turned to leave.

  ‘It might be Vincent’s baby,’ the actor said. ‘No one can say it isn’t.’

  Wally was kneeling on the platform, getting ready to descend.

  Bill said, ‘You needn’t look at me like I’m so weird.’

  Wally rose. ‘Listen, frere – you’ve got a show to do in ten minutes.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Bill said. ‘Who are you to look so fucking righteous?’

  Wally knew better than to argue with him, especially not now – he was like a drunk, full of chemicals – ten minutes before the curtain on press night.

  ‘Mollo-mollo,’ he said.

  ‘Mollo bullshit,’ Bill said. ‘Why is everyone pretending there’s nothing wrong?’

  ‘If there’s something wrong, mo-frere,’ Wally said (gently he hoped), ‘she’s going to need you. You can’t afford to be afraid.’

  Bill stared at Wally, his black eyes suddenly brimming with poisonous emotion. The look was intense, unwavering.

  He jumped. The platform shook. Wally put his hand out to hold the wire.

  ‘Look at you, you old twat,’ Bill said. ‘Don’t lecture me about fear. You’re too piss-weak to even check the scaffold. You sent the Sparrow here instead.’

  ‘You knew it was fixed? You knew?’

  ‘Don’t lecture me about fear.’ Bill jumped again. The whole platform kicked and swayed, listing over nearly twenty degrees before coming back to a shuddering horizontal. ‘What ever made you think you had all this wisdom to impart to me?’

  Wally put his arms out, found a wire, steadied himself, looked down into the half-full house. There he saw a familiar beard-fringed countenance scowling up from the front row. It was Vincent, stewing in his own negativity.

  When he saw Vincent’s defeated face, something changed in Wally. He was still afraid, it’s true. He hated heights, feared the giddy emptin
ess of air. But when he realized that Vincent had already abandoned me and my mother to the whims of fate, he went a little crazy.

  Wally loved my maman, and it was this powerful and secret emotion that moved him now. When he began to speak to Bill he no longer cared that they were only minutes from the curtain.

  ‘It’s true – I don’t like heights,’ he said to Bill, and something in his manner transmitted itself to the actor who extended a placating arm.

  ‘Come on, mo-ami …’

  ‘What is love?’ Wally said.

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘When you love,’ he answered, ‘you don’t care. If you’re thinking about your own prestige, your own position, that’s not love.’ Wally was grinning now. He was bright red and sweating, he had purple fungicide between his toes. The long hair on the back of his head was lifting off his neck. He went to the edge and stood with his toes sticking out over the edge of the platform. Down below, directly below, was the eight-by-eight foot net he had finally ‘borrowed’.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Bill said.

  Wally’s big pale lips twisted in a smile, a kind of grimace. ‘I’m here for the long haul.’

  ‘Sure you are.’

  ‘You want to know what love is?’ Wally said.

  ‘Wally,’ Bill said, ‘don’t do this to me.’

  But Wally did do this. Showed him exactly what his love was made of. First he grinned, showed his two gold teeth to Bill, then he winked, then he knelt and slipped under the bottom wire.