Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Then she laid me on the bed, lay down beside me, and began to cry. I woke and vomited — more green stuff. Sobbing, she wiped me clean with a pillowslip. She had no tissues, no bandocks, nothing but a bottle of eau mineral for herself to drink.

When the company, alerted by our crying, came tapping on the door, she would not let them in or even whisper through the door.

Afterwards she pretended that this had all been part of her plan — her dramatic announcement later in the evening of that day. This was how she liked history told, but the truth was, she lost her nerve.

Bill and Vincent were called. They left gifts at the top of the stairs — a pack of bandocks, a tape of meditation music, a cellular telephone — but she stayed behind the locked door, ashamed, frightened, shaken. When the hospital sent a pair of doctors and a Gardiacivil demanding that the baby be handed over for special treatment, she left them hammering on the door.

Vincent tried to talk to them, but he had no status with the authorities and so learned nothing, only that there was something possibly illegal about the baby’s care.

The company did a line run for the show in the afternoon. I slept from two until six-thirty, and when I woke Felicity was already putting on her make-up.

Wally had first fallen in love with my maman from a theatre seat. To say he worshipped her is not hyperbole, but although his love was not requited he carried his sorrow without complaint, revealing it only in the slight widow’s hump that began to show across his shoulders. It was a load, always present, a pain, a pressure, and it was this which drove his engine, which kept him moving, dancing, talking, joking, as if the sheer pain would be too much if he sat down and let himself feel it.

No matter what went wrong, he was always positive. He believed, or said he did, that what happened was always for the best, that you could triumph through the expenditure of will and optimism. He spent his days and nights in ceaseless motion across the cobbled floors, through the labyrinthine corridors, running up the stairs, down the stairs, fretting, sweating, and he spent my first day on earth being positive, not merely about my maman, or the Gardiacivil who were ominously knocking at her door, but about all the things which will concern a small theatre before press night — the First Witch’s absence, Macduff’s sore throat, the props list, the hot weather, the noisy air-conditioning, the bookings. At half past six he was in the first-floor office, manning the telephones.

On the ground floor, the doors of the hot little theatre were already open and a few of the actors — Banquo, Lennox, the Porter — were on the sawdust stage, pacing, whooping, publicly performing all the normally private activities that go under the name of ‘warming up’.

Wally found the ASM smoking in one of the old stables and sent her out for bandocks for ‘the baby’. He filled two jugs with water and ice. And in all of this he kept up a manic, snapping sort of fret, a hand-clapping, irritable, sometimes sensible commentary. When the ASM returned, Wally took the bandocks, the jugs, and personally delivered them to my maman’s door. A moment later he was back in the office, slipping a red usher’s waistcoat over his white T-shirt. He kicked off his rubber thongs. The white phone rang. Claire Chen took it. The black phone rang — four more seats. Wally took the credit card details and smoked a cancerette right down to its fat white filter.

He put his elbows on the long bench and looked out through the high arched windows, across the rusting rooftops, the trawler hulls beached at the end of concrete driveways, the dense shows of bougainvillaea, the wind-torn palms, all the way to the wide mudflats where his great-great-grandparents had met, ankle deep in mud, their backs bowed by the weight of ‘blue briques’, the little gastropods which the Imperial Dye Works bought for a penny a sack.

It was in Gazette Street that his grandparents’ union had been ‘gazetted’ in a weatherboard government office — number twenty-eight — which was now the site of a bankrupt panel-beating business in front of whose closed roller doors the cast of the Scottish Play was presently demystifying itself. Macduff — tall, anachronistically bespectacled, cadaverously thin — was playing cricket with … a busload of noisy giggling schoolkids who had somehow got themselves tickets to a press night.

‘Shit,’ said Wally. ‘Rug rats.’

Claire Chen put her plump little hand across the phone and looked down into the street.

‘Get rid of them,’ she said.

‘Yes, your majesty.’

‘Get rid of them please. ’

‘Get rid of who?’ It was Bill Millefleur in his Macbeth costume — pale, nervous, sweating inside the sculpted foam rubber.

‘It’s not who,’ Wally said. ‘It’s what. Get rid of what. Ask me.’

‘Tsk,’ Bill said.

‘Paper-clips,’ Wally said, kneeling to pick up one from the floor. He took Bill’s arm and drew him away from the window to a place where the actor would not be upset by the sight of schoolchildren. As Wally had a much caricatured tendency to furtiveness, a habit of bringing his mouth up to your ear to communicate to you the most public facts, his behaviour did not seem unusual. ‘We’ve had a major problem with the paper-clips, frere,’ he hissed to Bill, still holding his arm tightly. ‘I wondered if I could get your advice.’

‘You want to talk to me about paper-clips?’

‘You don’t have time for that sort of stuff? OK, I understand. So how is the suit? Is it too hot?’ He began patting at Bill’s sculpted foam rubber like a tailor, shifting the shoulders, smoothing the chest.

‘Stop it, frere. I’ve got to talk to you about the set.’

‘The set. Of course. Let’s get out of here.’

Bill didn’t move. ‘I don’t like that platform. It’s lethal.’

Claire Chen placed her phone on the cradle. ‘Oh great …’

Wally winked at Claire and made a face and pushed his hair back from his hair line so it stood high on his head. He raised his ginger eyebrows at her, rolled his eyes, trying to signal that he did not want Bill looking in her direction.

To Wally, Claire said, ‘What?’

To Bill, ‘Who was the macho man who didn’t need the rails?’

‘It’s OK,’ Wally said. ‘Just leave this stuff to me.’

‘It is not OK,’ Claire said, ‘to say one thing at a company meeting and then come in here half an hour before the curtain in a funk.’

‘A what?’ Bill said, stepping towards her.

‘A funk,’ she said, picking up a phone. ‘Hello, Feu Follet.’

‘It’s OK,’Wally said.

But it was not OK — Bill was staring out the window past Claire’s bare back.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘Very nice. You’ve got rug rats. I see. So,’ he said to Wally, ‘get rid of them.’

‘Frere, you know that ain’t possible.’

‘Well I’m not playing to them.’

‘Talk to Felicity,’ Claire said, her hand across the mouthpiece.

Bill looked at Wally, his black eyes fast and anxious. ‘Please, frere. This is press night.’

‘Talk to Felicity,’ Claire said, holding the phone under her smooth round chin. ‘Sorry, could you hold. It’s not just rug rats,’ she said, ‘it’s other stuff. For God’s sake, Bill, surely you can go into her room. Please?’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’ Bill said. You could see his colour glowing through his make-up. The second phone began to ring. Wally answered it and put it on hold.

Claire took the phone from Wally. ‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘is Felicity playing First Witch or not? If I have to do her lines as well, I want to know. Surely you can go in and ask her. Isn’t that clear enough?’