The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (15 page)

But when Bill smiled at my mother, the scar was ridged, raw, purple, and destroyed the symmetry of his archer’s-bow lips.

‘Let’s have a good time,’ my mother said. ‘It’s our last night for a year.’

Bill held up his glass, smiling. My mother filled it. Bill sipped the champagne and placed it carefully beside the bed, but once that was done, he was quiet and she could feel nothing had changed. She put her hand out to the scar and this time touched it deliberately.

‘You know how you’ve
worked
to convince me that this didn’t matter to you?’

‘So think: why would I act like that?’

‘Well, it’s not so crazy …’

‘… so you’d admire me.’

She looked across at him. He turned his head towards her, his mouth loose, his chin a little soft.

‘So you’d
admire
me,’ he repeated.

She shook her head. She could feel all his upset broiling and churning away beneath the surface.

He lay on his back again, staring up at the carefully finished teak ceiling. She lay propped up on her elbow, watching him. He said, ‘Your whole life you are surrounded by people doing things so you’ll admire them. Moey does a high-wire act. Your son tries to kill himself in a pine tree. I pretend this doesn’t matter.’

‘You get yourself slashed … for me.’

That isn’t what I said, but still: who put me on the poster?’

‘Bill, that’s not even logical. You’re so angry.’

‘I’m not angry. I’m not angry at all. This has been happening to you all your life,’ he said. ‘You should let yourself see it.’

She sat up again and sipped her drink. ‘This is nothing to do with me. It’s all to do with you.’

‘What?’
He also sat up and raised his eyebrow at her.

‘You’re angry. You’re looking for something to let your anger out on.’

‘Of course I am fucking angry. You would be angry too. I got my face slashed for nothing.’

‘Hunning, it’s going to be fine. It looks horrible now, but you told me what the doctor said …’

‘A tour like this. What’s it for? If there’s an election tomorrow …’

‘There’s one on January 22 …’

‘All right. If there’s an election next month, what have you affected?’

My maman looked at him a long, long time, her forehead creasing, a shadow appearing in her eyes.

‘People come,’ she said at last. ‘They laugh, they cry, their minds are engaged.’

‘Why are you so wilful? Why are you so deliberately not understanding? You know who these people are that come. They’re converts. You come down out of the sky like some angel of fucking light. They love you before you get there. Nothing changes.’

‘So why are
you
here?’

‘I don’t see that it is worth it,’ Bill said. ‘I said a group of performers who feel they are beyond criticism, who elevate sloppiness to a style of acting.’

‘You think our work is poor?’

‘It’s perfectly fine.’

‘Don’t patronize me.’

‘I’m not patronizing. I’m saying: it is perfectly fine. It’s like this champagne …’

‘You don’t like the
champagne … ’

‘Well, actually it is not champagne … You cheer up the lonely liberals, you annoy the fascists. It entertains. It educates.’

‘But you despise it.’

‘No, I don’t despise it. It’s just not worth getting myself slashed for. I feel a fool. I feel like I’ve been in a theme park, acting out some heroic role, and now it’s time to go home and …’

‘Have I become provincial?’

‘All art is provincial.’

‘That’s an evasion.’

‘Well, what do you mean?’

‘I always thought I’d know if I was becoming second-rate.’

He shrugged. It took only a second. She did not ask him to explain it. She did not need to.

‘I always thought I’d know.’

He took her hand and held it. ‘You know what you should do?
Tartuffe.
Costumes, the works. Have some fun. You might even make money. There’s a great French video of Bernstein’s
Tartuffe.
It’s a little campy, but very nicely done.’

‘You’ve thought this, all through the tour?’

‘You’re too smart to waste your time like this.’

She looked at him, her brow furrowed.

‘You thought all this, when you were giving notes?’

‘I’ve fooled myself,’ he said. ‘It’s like some kids’ game. I got too excited and let myself believe it was real.’

‘You little snot,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You little snot. You shallow, vain, posturing little snot. Don’t you dare act out your vulgar Sirkuses and come and tell me that what we do here does not matter. ’

‘I don’t think you should talk to me like that.’

‘Why? What will happen to me?’

‘I might not be interested in coming back.’

‘Why would I want you back?’

‘To fill the seats,’ he said. ‘You had me on the fucking poster, so don’t you curl your lip and say “Oh dear” to me, and
never
, not
ever
do I want you to use that word about me again.’

And so on.

Some time before dawn Bill and my mother stumbled back along the narrow cattle path, dehydrated from the wine, heavy with sleep, trying to avoid blackberry tangles in the dark. At the camp site, they felt their way carefully through the tethered horses and crawled into the bus.

‘Are you OK, Billy-fleur?’ she asked him.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘Did you kiss your little boy goodnight? He’s been so happy to have his father home.’

‘I didn’t mean it,’ he said. ‘The work is really wonderful.’

I boarded the Haflinger next morning ignorant of my future. I sat next to Bill Millefleur and put my hand in his. I had no idea, as I fiddled with the ornate silver ring on his left hand, that he was breaking up with my mother and therefore ipso facto was breaking up with me.

His eyes were puffy, his mouth disconsolate.

‘Are … you … tired?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Then my mother came on to the bus.

I knew she had woken with lank dirty hair and a headache, but now as she came down the aisle of the Haflinger she had changed herself into a bride in a satire – beautiful, golden, funny, drunk on oxygen. She wore the long white loose-fitting dress and sandals she always wore in
Hamlet.
This item was now thirteen years old. It was patched, threaded, had yellowed patches round the hems.

I did not know what it meant. I simply clapped her. She looked so beautiful. She kissed me very sweetly and smiled at Bill. Her fury was odourless, invisible. She sat herself between us, tucking her legs girlishly under her.

‘We’re going to do
Tartuffe
,’ she told the bus of actors as the Haflinger lumbered out of our camp site. ‘It’s the new season. Just Molière.’

None of these actors had ever played Molière, and not one asked her what she meant, but her delivery was so fast, funny, and everybody picked up on
Tartuffe
, and as we headed for the ferry along the Road of Broken Bridges the bus was filled with
Tartuffe
jokes.
^*

‘Will … I … have … a … part?’ I asked her.

‘We’ll all have parts,’ my maman said carelessly.

I clapped again.

‘Especially Bill.’

But when I wished to talk about my part, she would not hear me.

‘What … about … my … part? … What … about … my … part?’

Finally she hissed in my ear, ‘It’s a joke, there’s no
Tartuffe.’

It was, you can see, complicated weather in that bus, and no one could have guessed that
Tartuffe
, this word she continued to throw around so lightly, was a knife, and that my maman was using it to saw at the bonds that tied her to my father.

I watched my maman laugh and felt unhappy. I did not know why I should. All I could see was that Claire Chen was now the driver of the Haflinger and I had lost Wally to Roxanna and her pigeons. I doubt that this would have mattered to me if the air had been less poisonous, if my maman had not been so agitated about
Tartuffe
, but in the course of a few hours the pigeons became the basin into which I poured all the bilious liquid of my distress. I came to dislike them like you come to dislike the last meal before an illness. I was repulsed by the memory of their nervous fibrillating hearts, the way they squirmed and made my fingers oily. On the bus I became nauseous. On the ferry I threw up – raisins and apple juice all down my front.

‘Would you?’ my maman asked my dab.

Bill took me to the bathroom and cleaned me up, roughly, impatiently.

He felt he had
outgrown
his relationship with us. He had come out on the flight, eager to be with us, to be a proper father. Now he had decided we were hicks, cambruces. He brought me back on to the deck with raisins still sticking to my shirt.

‘Oh look,’ my Maman beamed at me. ‘Don’t you have a lovely father.’

All the way up, across the Straits of Shanor, up Highway 1, Bill lived in a morass of sub-text. Nothing, even my mother’s hand on his thigh, meant what it seemed to mean. And this white dress, the same one he had seen her wear as Ophelia thirteen years before, was a bitter reproach whose meaning, being unable to be discussed, could never be exactly clear and was, in all its ambiguity, all
its possible meanings, like one of those barbarous bullets which fragment inside the body.

Bill wanted to be out of there. He could not wait. He thought of women he knew in Saarlim, young, sophisticated, very pretty. He thought of shops he might visit. Restaurants where he was known.

On the outskirts of Chemin Rouge, he announced that he would not travel all the way back to Gazette Street but catch the airport bus at the Ritz. My maman did not argue with him.

When the Haflinger stopped, my father shook my hand. He wished me well. I had no idea of the damage that had been done. None of the actors watching Felicity kiss Bill goodbye outside the Chemin Rouge Ritz guessed how urgently he wished to leave or how badly they had hurt each other. She kissed him lusciously, softly, sensuously, but carelessly too, like you might eat a peach in the middle of the season.

‘Stop it,’ he said, gripping her shoulders.

‘Tartuffe
,’ she told him, and slipped away, laughing. From her seat in the bus she blew kisses and waved and the bad feeling did not break through the sea wall until she was inside the tower again and the actors were running in and out of the building, shaking the floor joists as they unloaded the remnants of
The Sad Sack Sirkus.

Gabe Manzini arrived at the Chemin Rouge Ritz at the same time as Bill Millefleur got down from the Feu Follet bus, and if it took him a moment to recognize him, it was not just the fresh scar, which was certainly disconcerting, but the fact that Manzini was just off the flight from Saarlim.

It was not exactly culture shock that the short athletic man with the trimmed grey-flecked hair was suffering from. He came here too often for shock. It was something softer, more diffuse that he felt, a sort of mosquito net between himself and life, a dulling of some senses, a heightening of others, an almost sexual response, not unconnected to women, but also related to the place itself, the wide sleepy straight streets, the fragrant mangoes, the dried biche-la-mar hanging in racks in the old godowns by the river, the river itself which would, with luck, soon be filled with thunder-borne water, raging, turbulent, clay-yellow.

Gabe Manzini loved the taste of the air at this time of year. He was alive to the taste of mould spore amongst the fresh-mown grass. It was all so far from the great Sirkus Domes of Saarlim City and when a tall dark-haired man in a crushed light suit brushed past him, it took a moment to place him properly.

‘Mr Millefleur,’ he said.

The Sirkus performer turned, blinked.

‘You don’t know me,’ Gabe said. ‘I just love the way you handle horses.’

The young man frowned, nodded, and something in the way he did it, his embarrassment, made Gabe remember that he was indeed an Efican and, rather than being annoyed by his gracelessness, as he once would have been, he privately celebrated it. He liked Eficans, their lack of slickness, their sense of privacy, even their disconcerting habit of calling their superiors by their first name. He liked their lack of bullshit, their pragmatism, their sense of realpolitik. And as he walked across the soft grey carpet to check in, he began to think how he might use this Efican actor with strong ties in Voorstand. It occupied him as he signed in, as he went up to his room, and when he was finally alone he dictated a short note which would sit in the computer casebook all through the exercise.

In the end he would not try to recruit Bill Millefleur – he would not need to – but the actor’s name would sit in the secret action book of Voorstand’s chief undercover ‘vote-dokter’
^*
for the following six weeks, and when the elections were finally over he would look back at this moment, when he crossed paths with Bill Millefleur, and marvel at the symmetry.

It was the smells that got my mother, I was sure of it. She had forgotten the way they pile up – dampness, mould, the leaking gas, rodents in the walls, rotting wood in the sills, the rust-and-grease odour from damaged plumbing. These are things she had lived with, shaped herself to, but when she re-entered her old life,
which was, in the afternoon sun, as unlovingly lit as a stage under work lights, overly warm, bright, malodorous – it reminded her of everything that was unsatisfactory about her existence.

The tower had become smaller than her memory of it. It smelt of mouse and mouldy paper. Yellow sun entered through a screen of rain-spotted dust. It made her whole life seem second-rate.