The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (45 page)

How we got our POW papers was as follows. We came to the head of the line. I was nervous. There was a rope. A man undid the rope. We passed through: the four of us. There was a woman behind a metal desk. She had a big chest with many medals on it. She took the papers Leona gave her. She stamped them. She signed them. She then filled out forms for half an hour. She would not speak to Jacques. She looked at me, but did not react to my appearance in any way at all. She did not once speak to any of us except Leona.

When she was done with us, she sent us to another queue. This queue was inside the building with black and white tiles on the floor and peeling paint on the walls. We were in this queue for two hours thirteen minutes. At the end of this time we were taken into a room where we were given a pink slip of paper
^*
and instructed to place our right hand, underside upwards, on a silver cuff which was set into a wooden block. A machine was then clamped across the wrist. The wrist felt hot. When the machine was removed we had a number. Mine was A034571. My maman was born in Saarlim, but this was my status – a ‘Guest’ number – it gave no guarantee of residency or protection of the law but it was, just the same, there for life.

Using the Guilders the business-gjent had donated to the Simi, we purchased two nights at an hotel – the Marco Polo – in one of the rougher parts of Kakdorp. The room was large, but gloomy, backing on to a wide balcony on which robed men with blue-black skin and yellow eyes – landlopers – were living.

They were outside. They washed their clothing there, in a pink plastic tub, and spread it out to dry on the hot concrete.

I was inside, on the floor, trying to find a place where I could begin to unpick the body of the Simulacrum.

I sat next to Jacques, so close to him that his short cuffs brushed against my wrist, his hand against my hand.

‘Not there,’ he said as I fiddled with the Simi’s blue sequin waistcoat. ‘You’ll rip it.’

‘Mollo … mollo.’ I tugged at the creature’s white plastic boots.

‘Don’t hurt it,’ Jacques said. ‘This is worth a fortune in Chemin Rouge.’

‘Worth … good … money … here.’

Wally sighed loudly. I looked up to him through my sweaty white hair. He was sitting on the rumpled bed and rubbing his bare feet. He stared belligerently at the Simi which he had once, so blithely, invited into our life.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me you’re going to be a tin-rattler.’

‘If … we … don’t … have … money … we’re … as … good … as … dead.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Wally said, ‘no one needs to beg.’

‘You’d … thieve.’

‘Yes, I’d thieve, I’d con, I’d be a lever man, if it was necessary.’

‘I … don’t … want … you … to … thieve.’

‘I never said I was going to thieve. I said I’d rather thieve than beg.’

‘The … Simi … paid … for … this … room.’

‘You don’t need the Mouse to pay the rent.’ He was trying to catch my eye and hold it. I ignored that. I held up the Mouse’s grey spongy paw.

‘Our … meal … ticket,’ I said.

‘Our Sirkus ticket, more like it.’

‘Yes … that … too … I … can … get … the … money.’

He shook his head. ‘We’re not going to the Sirkus.’

‘You … know … that’s … why … we … came.’

He shook his head. ‘You hate the Sirkus, Tristan.’

‘We’ve … come … to … do … the … Sirkus … Tour.’

‘Bullshit.’ He was all closed down, hooded and bony – narrow eyes, shining cheeks. ‘Ten fucking years,’ he said to Jacques. He took some beef jerky from his back pocket and bit down on it. ‘Ten
fucking years the Mouse was the devil. You would think it was Bruder Mouse killed his maman. He wouldn’t even let me say its fucking name.’

‘The … Sirkus … is … for … you … It’s … my … gift … This … Simi … is … going … to … finance … your … Sirkus … Tour.’

‘Bullshit.’ Wally tugged at the jerky. ‘You think I’d go through all of this for some Sirkus?’

‘Not … for … only …
one.’

‘Not for a hundred. Let’s stop playing games, Rikiki. Let’s just admit it, we’ve come to Saarlim so you can make peace with your father.’

‘NO.’

‘Oh yes,’ Wally said, passing his hands repeatedly over his bald skull. ‘It’s time to say it. We’ve come to see Bill Millefleur. So don’t give me all this crap about the Sirkus. You hate the Sirkus.’

I did not answer. I was still trying to find some stitching, a seam that would allow me to unpick the Simi’s skin. My hand was shaking.

‘Tristan … just telephone him. That’s all it’ll take.’

‘I’m … going … to … make … money … and … I’m … going … to … take … you … to … the … Sirkus.’

Wally sighed. ‘You can’t go tin-rattling with a Mouse,’ he said at last. ‘You know you
hate
that thing.’

‘Please,’ I said.

‘You think it’s legal, it’s not. It’s just as illegal as thieving.’
^*

I ignored him.

‘You’ll get sick,’ he said. ‘Is that what you want? You climb inside that stinking thing, you’ll catch a virus. You want doctors poking at you in a foreign country?’

He watched me as my mouth began to dribble, my head to nod. I hated how I was, how I looked, how I trembled.

‘You want strangers looking at you? Is that what you really want?’

‘SHUT … UP,’ I said. The words came out of me. Without warning, hot and shameful as shit itself.

Wally passed his big dry hand thoughtfully across his mouth. Then he stood, picked up his stick, and walked towards the door.

I called to him, ‘Don’t …’

He stopped at the doorway. He had his hand across his mouth again.

‘Please …’

‘Please what?’

‘Promise … you … won’t … see … him.’

‘Who?’

He knew. He knew exactly.

‘Bill … Mille … fleur.’

‘So,’ he said. ‘You can actually say his name.’

He walked out. I threw the Mouse aside.

‘What is it?’ Jacques said. ‘Can I help you?’

I was trembling. I shook my head.

‘It’s your father? Your father is in Saarlim? Then let’s go see him.’ Jacques pulled the Mouse to his side. He folded its grey arm across its blue metallic chest. He stroked its fur. ‘We could borrow the jon-kay from him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I could not tell him. But now, I see, I must tell you, Madam, Meneer. I must return to that night, that death, the single event I spend my waking hours avoiding.

Bill had not been there the night my maman died. He had been in Saarlim City, eating cheese and herring for his breakfast. I had telephoned him after Wally cut the death rope with a box cutter, after I began to hit the Bruder Mouse mask with the brick, pulverizing it against the theatre’s concrete floor.

There was the smell of the shit.

There was no sequence of events.

There was Rox arriving, before the rope was cut, after the rope was cut.

Vincent had been already in the theatre, had arrived by car soon after.

Wally had a definite memory of laying my maman on the sawdust and of Rox fetching a stainless-steel mixing bowl of soapy water. She wanted to clean my maman.

She said, ‘I am a nurse.’

Rox was not a nurse.

Vincent was in a terror, circling my maman like an injured dog, fearful of blame, angry with everyone around him. He would not let Rox touch the body. Everyone remembered that. Rox and Wally discussed it afterwards, often. Rox always said, ‘What was he afraid of?’

My maman’s body lay in the same place they had once placed old Ducrow’s remains. So much for history.

Wally remembers me talking to Bill on the telephone. Was I left alone? Wally cannot remember. He can remember thinking: Bill will soon be here.

Wally did not like Bill, but Bill was my biological father and Wally had a strong sense of what was right and wrong – he thought he must be there.

Wally can remember Vincent trying to light candles on the stage and refusing to let Rox wash her, my maman, his lover.

‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘You must not touch her.’

Rox tried to get me out of the building. I would not leave. Maybe it was in response to this that Vincent covered my maman’s face with a green plastic garbage bag. In any case, too late, too late – none of us would forget what we had seen before the bag came down – the bared gums, the bleeding eyes.

When the garbage bag was across the face, I was present. They gathered around me. I had talked to Bill by then. Bill was maybe on his way already, flying 30,000 feet above the frozen lakes of the Canton of Saarlim. Wally steeled himself against this intrusion.

Vincent’s candles were finally burning. The police arrived. They asked endless questions about the candles.

I was like an injured cat. I did not want to be held or touched. Rox and Wally circled me like a bandage, a blindfold, a blanket. They stayed with me all through the night. Other things happened – police, doctors, sedatives, statements – but they all happened after this. At five a.m., against my wishes, my maman’s body was removed on a stretcher.

I rocked back and forth, pounding the now hateful Meneer
Mouse with the brick, turning the balsa wood into a feathery pulp.

Vincent sat behind me. Sometimes he put a hand on my shoulder. He was so frail and guilty, unwashed, matted, so wan and washed out in his crumpled lint-and snot-marked black suit – no one could have guessed he would be married again before two years were out.

Bill arrived late the next day, the Tuesday.

He was tall, tanned, gravure-handsome, with huge padded shoulders and pointed snakeskin shoes with silver tips on the laces. He looked like the embodiment of everything the Feu Follet had fought – your culture, your Sirkus. He opened his arms and, with tears streaming down his crumpled face, fell on his tightly trousered knees. He pressed the snotty rag of my face against the puffy shoulder of his black silk suit.

Wally remembers this.

He remembers also how he swallowed hard, how he felt grief and jealousy combine deep in the darkness of his throat. His hard freckled body woodenly resisted Bill’s embrace. Yet when he said, ‘I’m pleased you came, mo camarade,’ he meant it sincerely.

But on the following morning, when Wally walked into his kitchen and found Bill already there – holding me balanced on his shoulders while he dredged skipjack fillets, one-handed, in a plate of flour – he was no longer pleased at all.

He looked at how I clung to my father’s neck and felt usurped, injured, insulted. He stayed in the doorway, fiddling with his cigarette pack.

Bill was wearing a loose crumpled white shirt with ballooning sleeves and a big collar. ‘We’re going to do some acting exercises,’ he told Wally. ‘We’ll need the theatre for the morning.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘a great idea.’

After breakfast, he drank two small tumblers of brandy and cleaned up the mess Bill had left behind him.

Half an hour later he remembers looking into the theatre and finding Bill and me kneeling opposite each other on the sawdust, inside the ring. We were both weeping. Wally walked quietly through the darkened house and climbed up to the booth, and there, sitting alone and unobserved, not even smoking, he spied on us moving about the stage.

I was not his actual son, but he loved me like a son. He put me to
bed each night. He checked my breathing, bathed me during my fevers, talked to me when I had bad dreams.

The big glass window of the booth framed the illuminated stage like a vid screen. He switched on the house mike.

Now Bill was asking me to ‘do’ different funerals. What I performed were more in the nature of revenges than funerals – stabbing and shooting. I moved around the stage like a wind-up toy, rolling, walking on my knees, spitting, shouting, crying in a high wild voice Wally never heard before.

I remember none of this. Wally saw it all. He saw Bill and me begin to move around the stage, pretending to pick things up and place them in the centre. It was some minutes before Wally understood: we were collecting Bruder Mouses for an imaginary bonfire.

After we had set the fire alight, I became a little calmer, and soon I was loudly imagining the four of us, me and the three fathers, wearing white make-up to the funeral. ‘Thick,’ I said, ‘that … zinc … stuff … thick … like … mud.’

‘That’s beautiful,’ Bill said. ‘She’d like that.’

‘Would … she … like … that?’

‘She’d like that very much.’

‘Could … we … do … that … in … real … life?’

‘We can do what we like,’ Bill said. ‘Anything we like.’

‘Horse-shit,’ Wally said, alone, to no one, inside the booth.

Vincent was standing outside the upstairs toilet when Bill found him. He had wet hands and did not immediately take the jar of Zinc 3001 when it was proffered.

‘It’s
Hamlet
,’ he said, patting his trouser pockets in search of a handkerchief.

‘How
Hamlet?’

‘Felicity had the mourners paint their faces for Ophelia’s funeral. Zinc 3001 –
Hamlet.’

‘Then it is not inappropriate for us to do the same.’

Vincent finally located a wad of tissues in his breast pocket and used this slowly to wipe his square white hands. ‘The vid news will
be there,’ he said at last. ‘They’ll have vans and cables. They’ll have it on the satellite.’

He threw the tissues through the open door of the toilet, lobbing them into the wastebin.

‘Catch!’

He turned to see the Zinc 3001 flying at him. He had no choice but to catch it.

‘I do not
want
this,’ Vincent said, pushing the heavy jar of make-up at the actor who made no move to take it. ‘It doesn’t help to treat this funeral like a Sirkus.’