The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (16 page)

‘I’m sick of this,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said, but I was already shot through with panic.

‘Yes,’ she shouted, rugging at the sleeves of her Ophelia dress. ‘Really. Totally, completely sick of it.’

I unrolled my mattress and lay down on it and folded my arms behind my head.

‘I’m … not.’

My maman walked to the window where she looked down at Wally and Roxanna, who was unloading pigeon cages on to the vert-walk.

‘Funny old Wally,’ she said.

‘It … always … smells … like … this … when … we … get … back … Open … the … window … the … smell … goes.’

‘Tristan, your maman is too old to live like this any more.’

I pulled my knees up to my stomach. She sat down on the mattress beside me. She stroked my head, but there was something actorly in the way she did it and I flinched from her.

‘Don’t!’ she cried.

I took her hand and kissed it.

‘We could live in a proper house,’ she said. She touched my hair, again not hard, and even though it still felt false, I let her do it. ‘You could have a yard,’ she said. ‘With trees. We could be in a proper house tomorrow.’

‘Hate … trees.’

‘Oh,’ she tried to tease me. ‘It must be another boy who liked to climb them.’

I opened my stony-white eyes and stared into hers. ‘I … need … a …
theatre,’
I said softly. ‘Maman … I … have … a … destiny …’

My poor mother. She put her hand up against the place on her chest where you could see the bones beneath the skin. ‘Tristan, listen to me.’

I knew what she was going to say.

‘I … know … I … am … not … handsome.’

‘Don’t kick.’

I shut my eyes, squinched up my face.

‘I … will … play … Richard … the … Third.’

Felicity put her hand across her mouth. ‘You know who Richard the Third is?’

‘A … mighty … king.’

‘Who set you up to this?’

‘Now … is … the … Winter … of … our … discontent.’

‘You
cannot
be an actor,’ she said. ‘You would not
want
to be.’

‘You’re … an … actor.’

‘Not any more,’ she said.

‘The … smell … will … go … you’ll … get … used … to … it.’

‘I don’t want to get used to it,’ she said.

She leaned out the window to where Wally was unloading the pigeons and stacking them along the street.

She called, ‘Wally.’ Then, ‘Come up.’

‘He … knows … what … I … want,’ I said. ‘He … loves … actors … when … he … is … reincarnated … he is going … to … be … an … actor.’

‘Re-what?’

‘When … he … lives … after … he … has … been … dead.’

‘Do you really think I’d ask Wally’s advice about acting?’

‘Why … you … asking … him … up?’

‘We could let him keep his pigeons here,’ she said brightly. ‘This could be a perfect pigeon loft.’

‘NO.’

‘Tristan, what have we ever done for Wally and what has Wally done for us? He loves you so much, I think he would die if anything happened to you. He only bought those pigeons because you liked them.’

‘Birds … in … our … HOME? … No … one … will … let … you … do … it.’

‘No one will
let
me?’

‘The … collective … won’t … let … you … REALLY.’

She came and sat down beside me on the mattress. ‘You want to know what’s bad about being an actor?’

Her skin looked white and tired, but her eyes were dangerously active – angry and demanding.

‘When you are an actor, you are so dependent. You’re a baby. You stand in line. The director and the producer look at you (look at me if I let them) like you’re a worm. They know less about the play than you do. They have the most superficial understanding of the material, but they turn you into a lump of nervous jelly, even the most pathetic specimens, just with their power. They talk about the character you will play as if it is nothing to do with you. They talk about your body like it was a thing. They give someone else the role. When you are an actor your normal state is unemployed. It is so hard to even have a reason to get up in the morning.’

‘You … are … an … actor,’ I insisted.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m an actor-manager, and if I want to put pigeons in my tower, then that is going to be my pleasure.’

All my mother’s misery was now focused, not on Bill or his comments about the company’s work, but on the tower. My father had left us, but it was the tower that was the demon. Once she had decided this, she could not stay still. Even though it was a Sunday, she had to act.

She rushed out to the cavernous old Levantine shop on the Boulevard des Indiennes and came back with
Zinebleu
, the
Argus
, the
Herald
, the
News, Chemin Rouge Zine, L’Observateur, Le Petit Zine
, and took to them with a big pair of dress-maker’s scissors. She covered the slippery floor with sheets of expensive cartridge paper and on each sheet she wrote the name of a street or an area she imagined might be pleasant to live in. Then she cut out the little avverts and glued them to the paper.

Wally arrived twice to invite me to come and feed the pigeons, but I would have nothing to do with pigeons. I stayed on my mattress ostentatiously reading
Theatre Through the Ages.

I wished Vincent would come and look after my maman. But Sunday was Natalie’s time and my mother could not even call him at his home. The only thing she could do is what she did – stay up all night cutting up the sheets of paper and arranging them in different
ways. When I took her Voorstand first-edition Stanislavsky from her shelf, she did not try to stop me. I read it, pointedly, waiting for her to take it back.

Some time in the night she woke me to give me a chocolate bar. She touched my hair, tenderly. I was very hungry, but I knew that eating chocolate would somehow weaken my hold on the tower. I picked up the Stanislavsky and left the chocolate, unopened, on the coverlet.

The next thing it was six-thirty a.m. The Stanislavsky was sitting on my maman’s desk. She was talking to Vincent on the telephone. She was bright, alert, positive, but her bed had not been slept in and she was still wearing the same long grey dress with the white collar. While she talked I tried to find the chocolate bar but could not see it anywhere.

At half past nine we left the theatre, walking past the pigeons which were piled up in the gloomy foyer in their wicker cages. Vincent tried to persuade me to fondle one but I drew my fingers back into a fist and wrinkled up my nose. Then he took us for breakfast in a booth at the Patisserie Jean Claude where I ate two plates of scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three hot chocolates. By half past ten I had a stomach ache and we were touring property in Vincent’s Corniche. These were not the properties advertised in the papers, but properties owned by Vincent and his brother.

I had no intention of leaving Gazette Street, I told my mother. She listened to me carefully, nodding her head and seeming to give weight to my objections, but I knew she thought she could bring anyone round to her point of view.

Each new property made her more animated, talkative, ‘girlish’, and Vincent spent the day with his neck glowing pink above his collar, a sure sign of what was happening below his belt. Yet when we returned to Gazette Street she did not, incredibly, ask him in.

She kissed him on the street, in public, and carried me inside.

The minute we were inside the Feu Follet, everybody wanted Felicity Smith – they set upon her in such a hungry way that I barely had space to notice the pigeons were gone from the foyer – but we stopped for none of the supplicants. We went up to the tower, shut the door, and locked it.

There my mother walked up and down, loudly noticing how small the tower was, talking about the big house we had seen on
Cockaigne Place, the two bathrooms on Hellot Road, but mostly about the little house Vincent had had Belinda Burastin build for him in the bushland fifteen miles away. She said I would be more cheerful when I was not constricted by ‘this wretched place’.

‘What … wretched … place?’

‘Oh darling, you’ll see – there’s so much more to life than theatre.’

My mother smiled and kissed me.

In defence, I picked up the Stanislavsky. I opened the musty pages. This is what I read:

I did not tell her. I did not take the chance that she would say something sarcastic which would weaken it. Instead I took the book and quietly wrapped it in a pillowslip.

Soon, I was pleased to see, she changed her clothes and announced she was having ‘supper’ with Vincent at the Chemin Rouge Ritz. She made me eat some vitamin pills and wrote her hotel room number on a slip of paper and pinned it to the door.

She kissed me. I kissed her back.

The minute she was gone – before Wally came looking for me – I stole the Stanislavsky. I dragged it downstairs – thump, thump, thump – thinking I would hide it under the bricks in the stables where I had rehearsed for
The Sad Sack Sirkus
tour.

The pigeons, however, had got there first. They whispered and fluttered in their wicker baskets in the very corner where I had planned to hide my (now slightly damaged) Stanislavsky. It was only then I realized I might really lose my tower.

I stood in front of their baskets, staring at them with my white quartz eyes. If I were Napoleon, I would have killed them. Even a lesser spirit, like Jango, would have opened the door and let them fly away. In the histories I had read there was always the defining moment when the hero had to act wilfully, selfishly. The man of
destiny would have grasped the thistle, bitten the bullet. But I was only a kid. I was afraid of Wally.

I retreated into the dark space under the raked theatre seats.

Here, in my oldest hide-out, it was dark and safe, but also melancholy and rather damp. I thought of heroes HOLED UP in mountains. Above my head I heard the actors’ footsteps and imagined GUARDS. I thought of ROBERT BRUCE and the SPIDER. But there were no spiders, only scuttling cockroaches which I attacked with a wooden block until it was covered with their black slimy insides.

I already had a blanket here, also a flashlight, and a clasp knife I had stolen from Chen. I had a tartan blanket my mother used in
Hedda Gabler
and a whole series of crowns, bowler hats and helmets which had since been replaced in Wardrobe.

Also, as soon as the next show opened, more stuff would fall from overhead – sweets and coins particularly, but not exclusively – and I knew that I could find, after almost every performance, something edible or valuable. Once I had found a ten-dollar note, once a condom in a plastic packet, once a phial of what I now realize was heroin but which I kept for years imagining it was a medicine I could cure my mother with if she were going to die.

Now, I unwrapped the Stanislavsky from its pillowslip. I laid the pillowslip on the dusty floor and placed the Master’s text on top of it. I placed my left hand on its cover and my right hand on my heart. And there I vowed that I would never desert the theatre.

The collective had already begun its normal ‘development’ stage for their new show – a deconstruction of
Uncle Vanya. They
were preoccupied and hardly noticed me as I made the many trips around the circular stage, bringing the items I would need for my siege.

This was a reputedly physical company, with actors always at the osteopath because they had pushed their body the wrong way. I was an actor with a shape that was
already
interesting. I passed them TWELVE TIMES, walking on my knees, but they did not seem to see me.

I was in my hiding place an hour before one of them came to speak to me – Sparrowgrass Glashan, he who could make himself a
‘Human Wheel’ and recite a comic version of ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ while spinning round the stage and grinning. This Sparrowgrass Glashan, six foot five inches tall, with big comic bug eyes and his skeleton showing through his skin, was squatting outside the tiny triangular hole through which I had egress to my lair.

‘What’s cooking, mo-frere?’ he called, squatting at my doorway, his bright white bony knees level with my eyes.

I held up the Stanislavsky.

‘Wally’s looking for you,’ he said.

‘I’m … reading … Stanislavsky.’

‘You know he bought those pigeons for you, son.’

‘I … didn’t … ask … him … to.’

Sparrowgrass did not argue with me. ‘You’re a good kid, Tristan,’ he said. ‘You know what’s right.’

‘He … bought … them … for … me,’ I admitted.

‘That’s the boy. You know what’s right.’

‘I … didn’t … know … he … would … keep … them … in … the … tower.’

Not unusually, Sparrow did not understand me.

‘You know what’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s all the money he has.’

‘In … the … TOWER … my … home.’

‘What?’

‘Pigeons … in … the … tower.’

‘T-o-w-e-r?’

‘SHITTY … BIRDS.’

Sparrow didn’t tell me not to swear. He didn’t say anything for a moment.

‘In the tower? Felicity won’t let him do that, son. Don’t fret.’

‘Her … idea,’ I said.

He looked into my hole and grimaced and screwed up his eyes.

‘She’s … changed,’ I said. ‘She’s … all … upset.’ And, without knowing I was going to do it, I began to weep. ‘I … AM … AN … ACTOR,’ I said, but I was now crying so hard not even Wally could have understood me.

Sparrowgrass did not know what to do. ‘You’re a funny little bugger,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame you don’t have other kids to play with.’ He found a crumpled tissue and passed it in to me. Finally he went away and there was no point in continuing crying.

I began to cut my tartan rug with Wally’s clasp knife. I ran the knife down the yellow lines so that the cut was hidden in the depth of the colour. I stayed in my hiding place for two hours. I became hungry again. I skirted around, looking for crumbs, but the theatre had been dark all through the summer and all I got on my wet finger was bits of dirt and dust. The actors moved from the stage to the seats above my head. They did not drop anything interesting.