The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (17 page)

At last Wally came for me.

‘I got your dinner,’ he called. ‘I made special chicken.’

The actors above my head stopped talking. I thought this was to do with me, but then I heard Sparrow’s stage cough and everyone became quiet.

Wally placed the plate of crumbed chicken and fried banana two feet from the opening. I stayed inside in the dark, looking out at it.

‘All right,’ Sparrowgrass said. ‘Quorum. Definitely a quorum.’ It was a stage voice, more appropriate for Gogol. ‘For those members who have just come in, we have one item of urgent business.’

Someone coughed. A chair creaked. I pulled the chicken into my cave.

‘We are a collective,’ Sparrowgrass said. ‘It says so on that blue piece of cardboard inside the front door. Anyone who comes in from Goat Marshes can see it. Anyone, even if they have a stretch limousine in the street outside, can see how it is that we live and work here.’

No one interjected. No one called to get off his high horse. I picked up the chicken thigh and began to eat it. It was sweet and greasy, just the way I liked it. I alternated bites of chicken and plantain.

There was applause above my head. Wally was a wonderful cook. He had beans and onion sautéed together, and little eggplants dry-roasted from the oven.

Claire Chen was speaking. Her voice was tight and a little shrill. She also said something about limousines in the street. This was the collective’s normal way of speaking critically of Bill and Vincent.

I returned to work on the rug. I cut out a slice of yellow from
the middle. My mother shouted out something – I had not even known she was there.

That was not like her, to shout. She did not like to interrupt, but now Claire Chen shouted her down. Somebody was thumping their boot nervously above my head.

I put the clasp knife in my pocket and slipped out through the high narrow canyon between the raked seats.
Vincent
was talking. I crept close enough to the ring to see him. He had been called away from a downtown office and was wearing a conservative pinstripe suit and pale blue shirt and tie.

‘It is her vision,’ he was saying. ‘None of you would have had the vision to do this.’

‘Capital,’ Annie McManus called.

Vincent put his hands in his pockets. It made him look like a Conservative politician. ‘Annie thinks capital and vision are the same thing,’ he said. No one laughed.

Still intent on proving myself to everyone, I did not appreciate the nature of the catastrophe that was befalling us. I crawled to the back wall and began to climb up the steel ladder which ran up beside the booth.

My mother took the stage as I began to climb. I was beyond the third circle of her concentration and she did not look at me. She was frightened of the audience. I could see it in her smile, the way she engaged with them, one by one.

I was up with the lights now, as high above the floor as Wally had been on the day I first came into his life. The lights had not been stripped and rerigged since the dry season started. There were spider webs, sticky ancient gaffer tape, curling coloured cells. I swung out around these obstacles, hoping to find my way to the other ladder backstage left.

As I moved out across the audience’s heads, Moey Perelli stood. He began talking from his seat before my mother had a chance to speak. Vincent, apparently, had left his Corniche in the street. There was a chauffeur behind the wheel and the engine was running. Moey was talking about the exhaust emissions, waste. He called Vincent Carbon-rich. Vincent tried to explain that he was only staying for a moment, but everyone started laughing at him. He walked forward to the edge of the circle and shouted about the amounts of money he paid to the collective each month. I was
edging around a Leko with a loose gel filter; my mother tried to say that she had given her life to this theatre.

I was now above her. She seemed so small on the stage. I could see a small round white patch on her scalp, the size of a 20-cent piece.

‘There are landlords everywhere,’ Claire Chen said (she did not bother to stand – she was sitting, cross-legged, in the audience).

‘Claire, please,’ my mother said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’d rather house pigeons than people,’ Claire said. ‘You want me to sleep next to a blocked toilet and you want the pigeons to sleep in the best place in the building. Fuck you!’

My mother looked at Claire. ‘Claire, it’s me you’re talking to.’

‘I know who I’m talking to,’ Claire said. ‘It’s all become very clear at last.’

My mother began crying. Vincent stood to one side. He thought it was the right thing, the feminist thing, to not take her light, her position, to let her shine. He was fine at all this stuff, but this time he was wrong: he should have been beside her and I – I knew what I should do – I should have dropped on Claire Chen, hurt her, but even though my arms were in agony, I was frightened of dying. I counted to ten but at the end I could not let go my grip.

‘Get out,’ my mother said to Claire.

Claire stood at last. She brushed her purple hair back from her eyes and looked around her and smiled. ‘I’ll go if the collective votes it.’

Sparrowgrass Glashan stood up in his front-row seat and looked back at the seated company who had only yesterday made jokes about
Tartuffe
with my mother. ‘Show of hands.’

‘Get out,’ my mother said to Claire Chen. She stepped out of the ring and stood in front of the empty Starbucks. ‘Get out of here, and don’t come back.’

‘All those in favour,’ said Sparrowgrass. No one was putting up their hand.

‘No,’ my mother said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’ Claire Chen was shaking her head and snorting through her nose at my mother. ‘You get out of my theatre. Go.’

She owned the Feu Follet building. She had spent years persuading everyone that, in some fundamental spiritual way, this was not so. She had done a damn good job of it, but the fact remained – it was her name on the title. It was hers in her secret heart, and not because it was her money that had purchased it, but because she
made it, dreamed it, spun it out of herself. Perhaps she was an anarchist, as the police later claimed, but she was not a socialist saint.

‘Go,’ she said to Claire Chen, with the result that Moey Perelli was already walking towards the door, and other members of the company looked like they were going to join him. ‘Try the real world,’ she said.

I clung to the lighting rig.

Vincent came to put his arm around her, whether to restrain her passion or to comfort her, it was not clear. She shrugged him off and climbed back into the sawdust ring, white, shaking with passion. She was Nora, Hedda Gabler. She no longer cared what happened to her. She shook her tumbling curls back out of her eyes and put her hands upon her hips.

‘Go,’ she yelled to no one in particular. ‘Go – audition.’

Only as the actors left did I realize what it was I’d done.

Roxanna was walking on ice, on thin glass, high-heeled shoes, one step at a time. She had no house, no husband. But she was not dead. She was not falling apart.

She had no money yet, but she did not need money yet. Nothing creepy had happened.

She had no clothes: she had torched the lot of them, knickers, kerosene, black carbon. She had nothing, just these shoes, a red dress, a black skirt. She was very light.

Quite nice feeling.

He had pale, pale lips, scars along his arms, hurt in his eyes she did not know whether she should fear or trust.

When Wally had begun to shift the pigeons from the draughty foyer, she had followed him. He had not asked her to, but it was not her kind of place and she had not liked to stand around alone. He had not invited her, but she had followed closely behind him, her high-heels clacking on the duckboards. When she realized that he had led her into the theatre, that actors were performing, she was no longer sure of the protocol. She tried walking mostly on her toes, like church.

A pretty actress with long black hair and kohl-ringed eyes was calling out, ‘Oh Vanya,’ over and over.

The tall streak of Sparrowgrass, the one who had driven the horse float, had made himself into a Human Wheel. He spun round and round in a circle crying, ‘I love you,’ while the actress followed him with a little hoop-stick, striking him on the backside and singing in a foreign language.

Wally stopped, and put his leg up on the little wooden ring curbs, balanced the wicker crates on his knee.

Roxanna folded her arms across her breasts.

‘Is it different from what you thought?’ Wally asked her.

She did not answer him.

‘It’s different,’ he insisted.

The woman and the man were trying to make a double wheel – the woman in the centre and the tall streak of Sparrowgrass wrapped around her like a floppy retread. It was like one of those seedy little circuses that make a living out of hokey towns, raising money for the volunteer fire brigade.

The man and woman stopped and fell apart and the other characters gathered around them and abused them.

‘Is this an old play or a new play?’ Roxanna whispered.

‘It’s an old play.’

‘It doesn’t sound like one. All those f’s and c’s.’

‘They’re not the words in the play itself.’

‘Why don’t they learn the real words?’

‘You want to go to the
Comédie
, you can see that kind of acting. This is what they call the avant garde.’

‘The words of this play,’ she asked, ‘they’re no good?’

‘You’re kidding. It’s Chekhov.’

‘So,’ Roxanna said. ‘Dot dot dot.’

‘What?’

‘So dot dot dot – what’s wrong with the frigging words?’

‘Nothing’s
wrong
with the words.’ Wally smiled.

She slit her eyes and looked at him.

He stopped smirking – which made him smarter than Reade.

‘I’ve got a pretty face,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make me stupid, mo-frere.’

‘My apologies,’ he said. He looked so serious, so respectful, she suddenly wanted to laugh. He had a boner in his pants, no way he didn’t.

‘This is a very artistic theatre company.’ He looked her straight in
the eye. His eyes were grey and velvety, the softest thing about him. ‘They don’t like to use the original words.’

‘Let me get this straight.’ She cocked her head and squinted, because now she had the picture of the boner, she had to stop herself from laughing at his solemn expression. ‘The words are fine?’

‘The words are fine. I didn’t mean to say they weren’t.’

‘Then they should learn them and use them.’ And she put her hand out and touched his shoulder. First time she actually touched him. He was hard as a brick.

‘They’re deconstructing it,’ he said, looking down. ‘That’s what they call it. It’s tray artistic.’

Roxanna had studied many aspects of art – tin soldiers, art-nouveau crystal. The theatre was not outside her range of possible interest. It met many of the right criteria, and she really did try, for a moment at least, to be respectful of what she saw here in this little circus ring.

‘The minute I saw the maman,’ she said at last, ‘I knew she wouldn’t like me and I wouldn’t like her.’

‘You’ll like the theatre, in the end.’

But it smelt like poor people, musty, old. ‘Allow me to know, mo-frere.’

‘It’s like drinking green wine.’

‘You like to drink, mo-frere. Let’s drink.’ He had pale, pale lips, scars along his arms. ‘Let’s get these birds dry and quiet and then you can go to the bank and get your money, and then we can dot our i’s and cross our t’s.’

She could feel her smile lying easy on her face. She looked him in the eye, asking him to show his own, and when he was shy and combed his hair back from his forehead she was pleased.

A week ago she had a new washing machine, a new gas drier. Now she was walking side by side with this frere, bumping shoulders. She knew exactly what she planned to do eight days from now, but she had no idea what she would do in the next minute. They walked down into some little dungeon then up some steps and into a little sweet-smelling courtyard where an old Efican oak was dropping its sappy petals on the damp green bricks. She felt fantastic, for a moment, free, young.

Then he stopped again, and looked at her. When he opened his
mouth she thought, I don’t know what he is going to say. It hit her with a jolt. She saw the pale lips parting and was scared.

‘You ever hear of Ducrow?’ he asked.

‘Look.’ She hardly heard him. ‘I didn’t say I was going to be your friend, OK?’

‘All I asked was – did you ever hear of Ducrow’s Circus?’

‘Ducrow’s Circus, of course.’

‘You ever hear of Ducrow’s lion?
Ducrow’s lion/sadly sighing/ate his nose and foot …’

‘He died and his own lion ate him,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘This is where it happened, on this spot, under this very tree. This was Ducrow’s Circus School where he had the romance with the prime minister’s wife,’ Wally said.

‘Solveig Mappin was her name.’

‘Solveig Mappin, yes.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘dot dot dot.’

‘I worked with Ducrow. I never knew him here. He was here when he was an old man.’

‘Everyone knows about Ducrow.’

‘I knew him when he was trying to have a real Sirkus. Not just the horses and bears and the birds. He bought a laser projector. Our pay cheques always bounced.’

‘He had a bird rode a bicycle,’ Roxanna said. ‘I saw that.’

‘He had an eastern parrot ride a bicycle, and the toucan jumped through hoops. I trained those birds myself.’

‘I saw those birds.’

‘Get out with you. You’re too young.’

‘It was in 372. In Chemin Rouge, at Gaynor’s Paddock at Goat Marshes.’

‘They were my birds in ‘seventy-two,’ Wally said. ‘I caught that parrot myself in a wicker trap not two miles from here. Its name was Linda.’

‘Get on with you.’

‘The show Ducrow did that year. Remember? He had the Royal Hussars. He had the Moroccans.’

‘Of course I remember.’ She had just run away from the convent. She was fourteen years old and her picture was in every Gardiacivil office in the southern islands. She sat alone, her hair dyed
red, jealous of the families around her.