The Unusual Life Of Tristan Smith Part 7

What he was suffering from I see now was s.e.xual jealousy. When we were on tour, Bill shared my mother's bed. In the turmoil of his unhappiness, Vincent turned his tenderness on me. He gave me gifts, taught me to hold a crayon, to form my quivering big letter 'S'. He sat next to me, his shampooed beard occasionally brus.h.i.+ng my neck, and spoke to me in French, a language I did not understand.

'Mon pet.i.t, mon pauvre pet.i.t,' he would say.

But finally the dry season smelt, not of Vincent's shampooed beard, but of sweet hot horse-s.h.i.+t, chaff, dust, tick drench. Each day dawned clear and painless, long sweet gravel roads, chalk-grey dust, singing actors packed into the old Haflinger bus, the horses and the rented truck bringing up the rear. Wally drove the bus. He liked to drive. If he could have done it, he would have driven the float and truck as well.

The tours were long, covering not only the (formerly English) main islands which were all to the north of Chemin Rouge, but back south through the whole 'Granite Necklace', and the old dye towns of Melcarth and King's Coat. I knew the granite caves beneath our feet were often filled with your government's navigation cable, but the truth is, I did not think about it.

When we were on tour, my mother devoted herself to me with an intensity few parents could have sustained for long. She listened to my every sound, brought to my taut malformed face the full focus of her curiosity and attention. Even though Bill was there, she brought me into the bed before she finally went to sleep, and I was in child-heaven. I woke to no doctors the sound of magpies carolling and the smell of warm sheets and my mother's sweet musky skin-smell. Almost every day we woke up in a new place rock-walled fields of brown gra.s.s thatched with rust like Harris tweed, ravines, dry rivers with stones like prehistoric eggs, a chalky coastal estuary where, even when I was ten years old, my mother would strap me on to her body and we would slowly, quietly, gather oysters and mussels at low tide.

The southernmost islands (the Madeleines) were like cake crumbs on the map, and on our way back up to Melcarth* we would spend almost as much time on ferries as on roads. The roads themselves were mostly dirt, bordered with century-old cairns commemorating famous deaths by starvation, 'rot', spearing, typhoid, pig-headedness and folly. we would spend almost as much time on ferries as on roads. The roads themselves were mostly dirt, bordered with century-old cairns commemorating famous deaths by starvation, 'rot', spearing, typhoid, pig-headedness and folly. This was the country everybody felt was Efica mostly wind, water, sky. There was an emptiness, a refusal to charm, an edge of terror in the air which cut us to the bone. The landscape was dotted with failed attempts at European enterprise bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills. The skies were a huge and empty ultramarine. This was the country everybody felt was Efica mostly wind, water, sky. There was an emptiness, a refusal to charm, an edge of terror in the air which cut us to the bone. The landscape was dotted with failed attempts at European enterprise bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills. The skies were a huge and empty ultramarine.

Of course I often repulsed strangers in those isolated estuary towns, but when I say this did not affect me you have to see the crowd that I was travelling with: men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair, crushed velvet, aromatic oils, ornamental face scars. By the time I was two I had become their emblem, their mascot, and I shared with them their sense that we were an avant garde, not only artistically, but also morally. Thus I remained as swaddled and protected under the bright southern skies as I was inside the rank dusty womb of the Feu Follet.

I was, indeed, a curious-looking child strong in the shoulders, withered and tangled in the legs. My hair was dense and blond, and the irises of my eyes although no longer white as they had been when I was born were now milky, marbled, striated with hair-line spokes of gold. They were my best feature, and were sometimes thought to be quite beautiful.

Naturally my maman worried continually about her deformed little boy's self-esteem, but the truth was, I was being privately tutored not only in my schoolwork, but in the radical's conceit, that I was different, but superior. To cause upset in motel dining rooms something which would later be the cause of such shame and anger was no ordeal to me. My comrades placed me in a new high chair which Wally had built for me, and when we played Ultra Rouge towns I would sit with a crushed velvet shawl around my shoulders and bring my intense eyes to stare accusingly at anyone I imagined was the enemy. Few could hold my gaze bristling Ultras with their s.h.i.+rtsleeves cut high and their elastic-sided boots red with bauxite dust: they grimaced and looked down at their barley soup.

*To the Voorstand reader the disrespectful conjunction of 'Sad Sack' and 'Sirkus' may seem to indicate an ignorance of the meaning of Sirkus, but it was exactly this conjunction that made the name so appealing to my maman. [TS] [TS]These political thugs published various pamphlets and news sheets which revealed a perplexing mixture of ideas Efican nationalism, anti-semitism, a pa.s.sionate attachment to the alliance with Voorstand. While their often extreme actions were always criticized by the government, it now seems certain that they were funded by right-wing elements of the Red Party.*Bill Millefleur, as Voorstand readers will be aware, was not as famous a name in Saarlim as we all imagined. In Efica he had become a star. Everyone watched Vids of his Saarlim performances, particularly his part as Franco Hals in The Black Stallion Gallops into the Burning House. [ The Black Stallion Gallops into the Burning House. [TS]*Named, as every Efican schoolchild knows, after the G.o.d of dyeing.All European deaths. The deaths of the IPs (Indigenous Peoples, the eighteen tribes of Efica) remain essentially uncommemorated and unresolved. Even Vincent Theroux had difficulty resolving the notion that his great-great-grandfather may have been party to a genocide.

19.

It was never my mother's plan that I should be an actor, and if she had not been desperate she would not, I am sure, have permitted the seed to be planted by Bill Millefleur: he had always been, until now, an amateur as a father and you only have to look at the handwriting, the spelling, the eccentric capitalizations to know this an unlikely expert in the field of formal education.

Until January 381, when Bill's postcard arrived, my education was conventional enough. Between the ages of six and eight I had a Korean tutor, a Mr Han, a delicate old man who finally died of asthma. He was succeeded, in my ninth year (380), by Claire Chen, who, despite her erratic personal life and slovenly dress, had an almost tyrannical code of behaviour in the cla.s.s room that formerly pristine little tower room which was now a wilderness of broken chalk, torn theatre programmes, half-a.s.sembled rak-rok blocks, the Great Works of Literature, old horseshoes, and French coins I had found while playing truant in the labyrinthine underworld of the old Circus School.

The chubby Chen had an MA from the University of Nez Noir. Her field was the cla.s.sics Plato, Horace, Seneca but she also made me understand the principles of algebra. She was both clever and impatient, and having had a convent education herself not above striking me on the knuckles with a wooden ruler.

It was in response to one of these attacks that I bit her on the thumb, and this, in turn, got me into big trouble with my maman, who began, that night, to shout and scream at me in such a frightening way.

Was she shouting at me about the bite? No, she was not.

Madame, Meneer, she was shouting at me about the bandage bandage on her actor's thumb. on her actor's thumb.

Chen was meant to teach me in the morning and be available for rehearsal in the afternoon, but when she had returned from the Emergency Room that afternoon, she would not act before she knew why did her character (Clytemnestra) have a bandage? What should Clytemnestra's att.i.tude towards the bandage be?

Chen was an anxious actor at the best of times, with a negative intelligence that could readily destabilize a cast. Now she wished to know should her bandage affect Orestes' att.i.tude towards her character? Should the bandage be so white and bright when all the costumes were so bloodied and brown? Should she paint her bandage red? Could she perhaps apply other bandages to other parts of her body, and so on?

The production was frail and complicated anyway, very 'techy', and the actors had still not found their characters and were trying to fix their problems by rewriting their own lines. Also, the problem with Chen and her bandage arrived in a period when my maman was in crisis with her taxes, her loans, her repayments, her applications to the funding bodies, her medical insurance claims. It was, in addition, the end of the wet season, which meant she was trying, once again, to raise funds for The Sad Sack Sirkus. The Sad Sack Sirkus.

My maman came back from rehearsal and asked me, calmly, why I bit my teacher.

Instead of saying that Chen had hit me with the wooden ruler, I said that I did not like her and I would not have her for a teacher any more.

My maman said there was no other teacher she could afford.

I said I did not need a teacher. I said I would be an actor instead.

My maman then turned nuts. She screamed at me in a way I had never seen her scream before. She tore her hair. While I s.h.i.+vered and snivelled in the corner she told me I was beyond her, that she was a working actress and I was a child with Special Needs.

I said I was sorry, but she was lost, beyond herself. She said that she was going to find a Special School for me.

I said Wally would never let her.

That sent her totally crazy, ripping corks out of bottles and drinking wine like water. She said Wally was an emotional cripple. She said she would fire him if he said a word about it. She wept and said she was going to die. I went to sleep behind her great wall of shuddering back.

She frightened me, I'll admit. Damaged me, even. And yet this truly dreadful night, which gave birth to the fearful notion of 'Special Needs', also produced the following message from my father which came into my life like a golden ray from G.o.d on High.

'My advice to you, liebling,' Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later, Bill wrote to my maman in a postcard that arrived two weeks later, 'is to relax excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a 'is to relax excuse him his lessons. All the education anyone could need is available just through the work you do. Let him watch Orestes instead. Also: we have a Sad Sack Sirkus Sad Sack Sirkus coming up, Let him play a PART,' coming up, Let him play a PART,' my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom. my dab wrote on the back of the card, which my mother straight away locked in the third drawer from the bottom. 'Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of 'Obviously I am not suggesting he top the bill but why not give him a CHARACTER? I myself am rather taken by the idea of The Hairy Man. The Hairy Man.* Give him the Give him the exercise exercise develop character's develop character's ACTIONS ACTIONS for himself.' for himself.'

When my mother finally decided to read this to me, I grunted and said that that would be OK, but I was so excited that I developed diarrhoea.

*A Voorstandish character often used in the Feu Follet to represent Voorstand as a whole. It seems likely that the character has its roots in the animistic culture of the Native People of Voorstand the famous 'Suit of Goose-feathers' in the Saarlim Museum bears a striking resemblance to early artists' representations of The Hairy Man. It is only after two centuries of Christian settlement that we find The Hairy Man used as a synonym for Moloch or Satan. Even the church-sponsored Badberg Edition of The Tales of Bruder Mouse Tales of Bruder Mouse suggests an ident.i.ty more like a 'Bogey-man' than the devil. These two ident.i.ties, folk character and Christian demon, co-exist to the present day. suggests an ident.i.ty more like a 'Bogey-man' than the devil. These two ident.i.ties, folk character and Christian demon, co-exist to the present day.

20.

I had become a furtive, even sneaky child, one given to wild and dangerously unrealistic dreams. I devoured histories and fictions, personally identifying not only with revolutionaries but with figures like Napoleon whom I was expected to despise. I wrote: 'J'y suis une grande Destinee', on a cigarette paper and watched in silent satisfaction while Wally ignited and inhaled my words.

At ten years old I believed books would be written about me.

And although I said, and will say again, that I was not aware of my monstrosity, the opposite was also true: I knew exactly why I could not be an actor, and I was equally determined to become one. I also knew that if my maman saw how excited I was she would become fearful for me and send me back to Chen.

That is why, when she offered me my part in the Sirkus Sirkus, I affected a pa.s.sive, pathetic, half-defeated att.i.tude, and when the actors were called the following day, I did not push myself forward amongst them. Instead I sat in the dark and watched them argue about Orestes. Orestes. When I finally came into the light, it was to complain about boredom. I sat on my mother's lap and whined and fidgeted, until finally she gave me what I had wanted all the time a rehearsal room in one of the old stables. When I finally came into the light, it was to complain about boredom. I sat on my mother's lap and whined and fidgeted, until finally she gave me what I had wanted all the time a rehearsal room in one of the old stables.

There, with no one watching me, I was an egotist in the great theatrical tradition. I declaimed. I leapt into the air and landed. I scrabbled around the dirty brick floor roaring like a lion. I did my own version of 'warm-ups' and 'breathing exercises' until my clothes were covered with mud and straw and my knees were cut and bleeding.

Stanislavksy says that in order to build favourable conditions for creativeness, an actor's organism must be prepared. The Master of the System would have clucked his lordly tongue not merely about my face and body, but also my voice the failure of fusion in my mid-line structures meant that I would always, all my life, have trouble enunciating my words so a stranger could understand me.

To h.e.l.l with that. I would make my Hairy Man a mute, something scary that jumps at you from the dark. I would base him on a spider.

This was not original, of course. I had watched my father building a character.* He would say: This character is a crab, or that character is a mole. And he would cut himself some sandwiches and go off to the zoo or the aquarium to study. He would say: This character is a crab, or that character is a mole. And he would cut himself some sandwiches and go off to the zoo or the aquarium to study.

I therefore crawled around the stables, clawing at loose bricks with my broken nails, trying to find a spider so I might study it. The spiders I caught were not easy models for my instrument to follow. Their legs were fine and supple, mine were twisted, and my feet although I hate to use the term were clubbed. When I walked, my ankle had to do the job normally done by the sole of the foot. I had developed thick calluses all over my ankles, but to walk this way for ten minutes put strain on the knees and the hips that could cause me pain for weeks. In short, I could not do a character that walked.

My biceps were not large, but the pale blue-ish skin covered healthy muscle and I knew that muscle could be made to grow. My Hairy Man could climb and drop free-falling out of the dark sky.

There was a rusty steel ladder fixed to the courtyard wall outside my stables, and by the time the company was hammering and sawing at the new set for Orestes Orestes, I had taught myself to climb, to hang upside down for fifteen minutes. As a student I was known for my squirming and impatience, but as an actor I had that quality by which great men are often marked: their ability to endure tedium in pursuit of their obsession. By the time my absent father returned to Chemin Rouge I had calluses behind my knees, across my palms. But I could hang upside down for half an hour.

Without revealing my reason, I had found out exactly what time Bill's flight would land. I knew when his taxi should arrive. The company, which imagined me an amiable sort of pet, would have been surprised at my deviousness. But when, at six o'clock that night, my father finally entered the theatre, he saw the Hairy Man, spotlit precisely, hanging from the ladder on the back wall of the theatre, right up near the lighting rig.

I saw Bill Millefleur, upside down, loose and handsome in his grey silk suit. He looked up at me, light reflected from his skin, his suit, his hair.

'Hairy Man?' he called. 'Am I right?'

My limbs were crying out with pain, but my heart, as your great poet says, 'was all over the heavens'.

'He's a spider, right?' Bill called. 'Your Hairy Man's a spider?'

Beneath my blood-filled head I heard my father walk softly across the cobbled floor. He climbed up the rusty old ladder to where I hung closer, closer he smelt of fame, of foreign spices and dry-cleaning.

'I'm very proud of you,' he said, and caught me just in time. He lifted me off the rung. He held me to him, thirty feet above the floor, not worrying about the snot streaming from my nose.

'Just be careful, OK?'

'Thanks ... Dab,' I said.

My words were not clear and he did not understand me, but I did not care.

'Floor-work,' he said when he had got me to the ground. 'I'd work on that.' Then he ruffled my hair and went to find my maman.

There were now ten days before the tour began. Sparrow, Bill and my mother were busy rehearsing with the horses. Wally was flus.h.i.+ng and pressure-testing the radiator on the Haflinger, a.s.sembling his mammoth tool kit vice-lock, brake-adjusting tool, centre punch, hacksaw, heavy hammer, side-cutters. Once I would have been by his side, under his legs while he fitted tubes inside the tubeless socks, collected bra.s.s rivets, clips, blades, rubber rings, corks, bits of wire. But all these activities which had once so interested me now seemed mundane, and I abandoned Wally for my more glamorous father.

I have no excuse. I knew it hurt Wally. I saw the pain when I ate my lunch sitting in Bill Millefleur's lap.

In the last week they brought the new horses into the Feu Follet and began to run the show. Without giving away the more spectacular part of my performance, I made my character visible. I hung upside down from the ladder where Bill could see me. And in the middle of the animal and human chaos which now filled the whole theatre, and spilled out amongst the taxis in Gazette Street, he would say, 'Good work', or, 'That's coming along.'

Having been so often and so publicly blessed, I was furious to be informed that the collective had decided not to let me perform the spider action.

Typically it was not Bill who broke this news to me, but tall, cadaverous Sparrow Glashan. He was widely known to be a decent man. It was what everybody said about him, and yet he took my action from me casually, not even noticing what it was he did.

'But ... Bill ... told ... me.'

'Bill told you?'

'It's ... much ... better ... than ... he ... saw ... I ... fall ... from ... heaven.'

Sparrow smiled and patted me.

'f.u.c.k ... you ...'

'What?'

'f.u.c.k ... YOU ...'

Maybe he understood me. He pretended not. He said that it was only in Saarlim that they risked an actor's life for entertainment. He said that was why it was better to be an Efican.

As for my father, I could not believe what he had done to me. I watched him, smiling, joking with the other actors.

*Although I had heard the other actors mock this process behind his back, I knew without being told that it was not to do with the process, but his fame in the Sirkus. Sirkus stars, it was commonly thought, could no more act than singers in an opera. They said their inane lines, but it was not acting as we did it at the Feu Follet. You, of course, will know that this opinion is born of jealousy and, further, that the a.s.sessment of Sirkus acting is ignorant and ill-informed. It is true that the standard of 'acting' in certain of the high-risk Saarlim Sirkuses is not high, but this is the exception, not the rule. As a Voorstander you will quickly see the inability of these provincial actors to 'read' a tradition of performance which is closer to Kabuki than their own. [TS] [TS]

21.

Eight weeks later, three hundred miles from Chemin Rouge, Bill came around the corner of Shark Harbour Parish Community Hall, and saw THE HAIRY MAN already five feet off the ground.

At first he did not know it was the Hairy Man. All he saw was me, snotty, white-eyed Tristan, doing something dumb and dangerous. He started hollering my name.

This drew Wally out from under the half-erected tent, his head thrust forward like a turtle. He was followed by my maman, crawling on her knees, carrying a mug of coffee.

'What is it?' she called to Bill. 'Are you OK?'

Wally tried to grab me by the leg, but I was the Hairy Man, and he was only human. I pulled away from him. He tried to follow, and you would think he was made to fit a tree his legs were Louis Quinze, and his biceps prominent but he scratched and scrabbled and could not hold.

'No, wait,' Bill said to Wally. I heard this. I heard it clearly. 'Wait, I know what he is doing.'

Whatever joy this understanding unlocked in my heart, it produced the opposite effect in Wally's. He had been polite to Bill until this moment, but now all the pa.s.sions he had bottled up came rus.h.i.+ng out, and he was so mad at Bill, at me, my mother he picked up pine cones and hurled them up the tree. 'You're never here,' he said to Bill. 'Don't play the father now.'

A pine cone hit my ear.

'Come down, you little p.r.i.c.k.'

'Wally,' my maman said. 'That's enough.'

By then the Hairy Man was already fifteen feet above their heads. I dragged my running nose upwards, past lines of ants. I pressed my cheek hard against the corrugated bark as if skin alone might keep me stuck there, and watched, from an inch away, the ants congregate around the snot-smeared bark.

I now waited for my maman to understand my action. Not a word came up to me. Her silence went on and on, pushed me up and up. When I finally looked down, I was perhaps forty feet from the earth.

My audience was all spellbound Wally pale, my father smiling, but my maman was so still, so intensely intensely still. She held her windblown curls back from her eyes, squinting up at me. My arms were an agony. My legs hung like tails. But there was nothing I would not have done to maintain the private look of admiration that I found in her face. So although I dared not hang as I had planned, I turned and climbed. still. She held her windblown curls back from her eyes, squinting up at me. My arms were an agony. My legs hung like tails. But there was nothing I would not have done to maintain the private look of admiration that I found in her face. So although I dared not hang as I had planned, I turned and climbed.

I will not easily forget the boiling green ocean I found up that tree, or the bl.u.s.tering easterly which swept the sea spray up the cliff face and stung my broken skin as delicately as Vincent's eau de Cologne, or the resinous sap, rich in pine or the mouettes, their wings white, their eyes orange, who came squalling around me as I, unknowingly, approached their rough-stick nest.

Everything smelt of salt and seaweed. It was as if I had finally ripped through the Glad wrap that had always separated me from my true history.

Far, far below me was my silent mother. She stood beside the grey weather-board hall, her eyes creased but still young and beautiful, her red anorak wrapped tight around her, her black skirt flapping like a flag against Wally's bent grey flannel legs.

'Watch him,' I heard her say. And felt, even from that distance, that she and I were in communion.

Wally said, 'For Christ's sake.'

The wind blew her answer away.

All I heard Bill say was, '... kid.'