The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (2 page)

The year was 371 by our calendar. My maman was thirty-two
years old, tall, finely boned. No one watching her walk along the grey sandy path beside the river bed would have guessed at what her body was experiencing. She was an actress of the most physical type, and for the first half of her journey her walk was a triumph of will. She wore a long bright blue skirt, black tights. On her back she carried a black tote bag containing an extra shirt, another pair of tights, four pairs of pants, a pack of menstrual pads and a life of Stanislavsky she had always imagined she would read between contractions. This last thing – the book – is a good example of the sort of thing that irritated people, even members of her own company who loved her. They sensed in her this expectation of herself, that she could, for Christ’s sake, read Stanislavsky while she had a baby.

She had a rude shock coming to her. They did not say that, hardly had the courage to think it in the quiet, secret part of their minds, but it was there, in their eyes, fighting with their sympathy. She had obsessed so long about this birth, not publicly, or noisily, but she had done the things that sometimes annoy the un-pregnant – eaten yeast and wheat germ, chanted in the mornings.

No one from the Feu Follet saw her walk across the Boulevard des Indiennes. Had they done so, they might have been tempted to see it as evidence of her will, even her pride, her belief that she could walk while a lesser woman would be in an ambulance calling for the anaesthetic, but Felicity was someone who liked to celebrate the milestones of her life – birthdays particularly – and she had imagined this moment, this walk beside the river, for too long to abandon it.

My maman was a foreigner, but she loved Chemin Rouge with a passion barely imaginable to the native born. She believed it was this provincial city in this unimportant country that had saved her life, and if she had believed in God it was here she would have kneeled – on the grey shell-grit path beside the river. If she had had parents it was here she would have brought them to show them what she had become. She had no God, no parents, but still she celebrated – she brought me here instead.

She had been a resident for fourteen years. She had been a citizen for ten. She had her own theatre company. She was going to give birth. It was so far from where she had been born. All these sights – this ultramarine sky, these white knobbly river rocks, the six-foot-tall
feathered grasses which brushed her shoulders – were unimaginable to anyone in the great foreign metropolis of Saarlim, and they were, for her, at once exotic but also as familiar as her own milky Hollandse Maagd skin.

This small, slightly
rancid
port city was her home. And her feelings for the Eficans, those laconic, belligerent, self-doubting inhabitants of the abandoned French and English colonies, descendants of convicts (and dyers who, being conscripted by Louis Quatorze, were as good as convicts), grandchildren of displaced crofters and potato-blight Irish, were protective and critical, admiring and impatient. It was no small thing to her that I should be an Efican, and she betrayed her foreign birth in the way in which her ambitions for each of us, the country and the child, were not humble.

Although the theatre was appreciated for its rough colloquial Shakespeare, she and the actors also devised a sort of agitprop, part circus, part soapbox, in which they attacked our country’s craven relationship with yours. There were people who valued the Shakespeare but found the agitprop unrewarding, and others who never set foot inside the Feu Follet who imagined the famous actor-manager to be both strident and humourless. It was half true – she was capable of being both of these things occasionally, but she was also a softly spoken woman with warm eyes. No son was ever so cherished by a mother as I was by her.

The hospital where she had planned that I would be born was half a mile to the south of the theatre. It was built on the banks of the Nabangari
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river which, being wide and blue on the maps, was usually a disappointment to visitors, who were likely to find it empty, dry, full of blinding white round stones, with no sign of the waters whose crop gave the Central Business District of Chemin Rouge its controversial smell.

When the famous river flowed into the port it raged not blue, but clay-yellow, filled with grinding boulders and native pine logs which drifted out into the harbour where they floated just beneath
the surface, earning themselves the name of ‘widow makers’ with the pilots of the sea planes to Nez Noir. Every four or five years the Nabangari broke its banks and more than once filled the basement of the Mater Hospital, and then the front page of the
Chemin Rouge Zine
would carry a large photograph of a hospital administrator netting perch on the steps of the boiler room.

Felicity had a striking face. She had long tousled copper hair, a straight nose, a fine ‘English’ complexion, but as she came to the bend of the river where she should be able to see the hospital, her mouth tightened. What lay between her and the hospital was a Voorstand Sirkus in the process of construction, more different from our own indigenous circus than the different spelling might suggest.
^*
The giant vid screen was already in place and high-definition images of white women with shining thighs and pearlescent guitars had already established their flickering presence – 640×200 pixels, beamed by satellite from Voorstand itself – shining, brighter than daylight, through the immobile yellow leaves of the slender trees.

The incredible thing was that she had forgotten her enemy was there. She had opposed its importation as if it were a war ship or subterranean installation. She had fought it so fiercely that even her political allies had sometimes imagined her a little fanatical, and when she said the Sirkus would swamp us, suffocate us, they – even while supporting her – began to imagine she was worried about the box office at the Feu Follet.

As the great slick machine of Sirkus rose before her, her muscles came crushing down upon my brain box. Her mouth gaped. She backed a little off the narrow path, her arm extended behind her, seeking the security of a pale-barked tree trunk. She got the base of her back against the tree and propped her legs. She breathed – the wrong breathing – hopeless – but she did not know I was now ready to be born. When the contraction was done, she limped through the confusion of the circus, which lay in pieces all around
her. She stepped over coloured cables as thick as her arm, limped past wooden crates containing the holographic projector. The road crews, working against punitive clauses in their service contracts, had their pneumatic tools screaming on their ratchets. They wore peaked hats and iridescent sneakers which shone like sequins. They danced around the woman who was, by now, almost staggering through them.

My maman made it up the front steps of the Mater Hospital, whose staff, in true Efican style, responded instantly to her condition. Within three minutes of her arrival she was on a trolley, speeding along the yellow line marked Maternity 02.

The birth was fast and easy. The life was to be another matter.

On the afternoon of my birth, as the clock in the Chemin Rouge Town Hall struck three, an actor named Bill Millefleur sat down on one of the moulded plastic chairs in the Mater Hospital Maternity waiting room and began to peel the wrapper from a doigt de chocolat. My mother’s lover was very young – just twenty-two, but tall and handsome, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, with finely chiselled, beautifully shaped lips. He ate the chocolate bar quickly, hunched over, as if he were alone.

There were, at the same time, two other men waiting in the same room, and they were there for the same reason Bill was. One of them – Wally Paccione – was the production manager of the Feu Follet. The other – Vincent Theroux – shared with Bill the distinction of being my maman’s lover.

Bill worked with Wally every day, saw Vincent at least four times a week. Yet he managed to finish the chocolate without acknowledging either of them. He could not make them go away. Indeed, he feared they had some business being there.

As he wiped his pretty lips carelessly with the back of his hand and folded his arms across his broad chest, he told himself again what he believed to be true.

My mother had been with
him
when she conceived. It was
him
she loved. She had been with
him
when her waters broke. It was
his
speech she had walked out of, turning the great noisy latch and laying a jagged white knife-blade across the circle of his concentration.
He had seen her, no one else had. Vincent had been at his office. And Wally, who was now acting in so pathetically paternal a way, had been up in the booth, and from the booth you could not see the door.

It therefore seemed impossible that they should be here now, unless – and the very thought of this betrayal made Bill’s smooth cheeks darken – my mother had telephoned them.

My maman had a curious network of loyalties, it is true, but in this case she had no time to telephone anyone – it was Bill Millefleur himself who sent the signal, by leaving the theatre without waiting for compliments about his work.

When Wally Paccione learned Macbeth had disappeared before notes,
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he knew I was about to be born, and he slid down the narrow ladder with a grin on his face which Bill – had he been able to witness it – would have found at once grotesque and threatening.

Wally was fifty years old. He had big pale lips, a craggy nose, pale grey eyes, ginger bushy eyebrows, a tall freckled forehead, a receding hairline.

When he strode across the centre of the stage the curve of his broad back suggested excitement, furtiveness, urgency, secrecy. He checked the ‘foyer’, then ran, hunched over, elbows tucked in against his ribs, up one flight of stairs, down three steps, and up another flight to the tower which had once housed the office of the Director of the Circus School but which was now my mother’s apartment. The tower was empty. He skittered down the narrow steps to the second floor. He knocked on the bathroom door and disturbed – not Bill, not my mother – but the notoriously constipated Claire Chen.

While Bill was running across the Boulevard des Indiennes towards the Mater, Wally was using all his charm to persuade Claire to slide 5 dollars out under the door. He did not run to hospital. He went by cab. Thus he was already in the foyer when Bill came striding in. The two men, both six foot tall, rode up in the lift side by side staring at the numbers above the door.

When they opened the Maternity waiting room door they found Vincent Theroux – forty-six years old, not very tall, wide in the shoulders but now plump, even portly. He was sitting in a plastic chair, still wearing his broad-rimmed black hat, smoking an Havana cigar. Like Bill, he had a remarkable mouth – a rose-bud which shone like a flower in his neat sandy beard.

‘Cigar?’ he said.

Bill turned his back without answering. Wally nodded, took a cigar, and tucked it in the pocket of his iridescent pink shirt.

Bill inspected the water cooler, looked out the window at the sky. Wally selected a chair on the long wall, facing Vincent.

Bill also sat. He folded his arms across his chest and watched Wally flipping through a zine. Though he did not like Vincent being there, he was
offended
by Wally’s presence.

Wally claimed to have been raised in a touring circus and to have spent his early years as a ‘Human Ball’ being thrown in an act from mother to father, but this cut no ice with Bill, to whom he was nothing more than a small-time crook, one of those Efican facheurs who hang out in artists’ bars, carrying books of poetry for the purpose of attracting middle-class women. Certainly he had done time. He did not deny it. He talked like a crim – said ‘violin’ for jail, ‘musico’ for con-man, ‘riveter’ for homosexual. He was now the production manager – a good one – but he had become so attached to Felicity, during the pregnancy, that he had begun to give the impression that he had been responsible for it.

So Bill found his presence impertinent.

Yet when the santamarie entered the waiting room and asked, ‘Which of you gens is the dab-to-be?’ Bill could not publicly lay claim. He began to fear that someone in the room knew something he did not.

He felt his neck burning. He folded his shirt cuffs. He began to button his red and black plaid shirt.

‘It’s you,’ the santamarie smiled, locating him by his high colour. She touched his sleeve.
‘You’re
the dab.’

He moved sideways.

‘You’re Mr Smith, right?’

Of course he was not Mr Smith. He drew further away, pressing his back against the window. His brows pushed down over his dark eyes and his blush spread right behind his pierced flat ears and disappeared down the collar of his work shirt.