Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘No.’ Bill found a paper-clip and began twisting it. ‘It is not clear.’

‘It’s your baby, isn’t it?’ Claire said, and held his eye.

‘Hello,’ she said, still looking hard at Bill. ‘Hello, Feu Follet.’

‘No,’ Bill said to Claire as she hung up, ‘it’s not my baby — not necessarily.’

‘Not necessarily?’ Claire said.

Wally stared at the strong body, the intelligent face with its sensual lips, at this young man who had been graced by God in so many ways, not least with the pleasure of holding Felicity Smith in his arms.

‘What?’ Bill demanded of him. His lips had lost their shape. ‘What’s so weird about that? It’s true. All I said was, not necessarily.’

Wally hesitated. ‘Did you talk to the Gardiacivil? Did they frighten you, mo-ami?’ he asked. ‘They don’t know anything. They’re only penguins. They’re not doctors.’

‘No one frightened me,’ Bill said. ‘What’s everyone acting so weird about?’ He picked up a paper-clip from the floor and handed it to Wally. ‘If anyone is frightened, it’s you two. Look at you.’

‘The curtain’s up in fifteen minutes,’ Claire said. ‘If you want to change the platform you’ve got twelve minutes to do it.’

‘You want to talk about this platform?’ Wally said.

‘Sure,’ Bill said.

‘Well come on, mo-ami.’ Wally cuffed him lightly on the head — he could not help it. ‘We’ll sit up there together.’

‘I don’t have a problem sitting on it,’ Bill said, rubbing his head and frowning. ‘I have a problem fighting on it.’

‘I know,’ Wally said, ‘I know.’ As he walked out across the cobbled path and pushed through the velvet curtain into the sweet pine smell of the deep, sawdust-covered stage, he took his tension in his shoulders, pulled his biceps in against his ribs, and when he began his ascent towards the platform he was a production manager going to fix a problem. He had no intention of quarrelling with an actor before a curtain.

To picture Bill and Wally as they climbed up the set of the Scottish Play, you need first to know that the theatre was constructed in the largest of the old Circus School rings. The ceiling was a good forty feet from the sawdust ring and around the ring were seats — not the original bleachers, which had been termite-infested, but in the original configuration, that human circle which the Voorstand Sirkus abandoned but which gave the much humbler circuses of Efica their live, electrically charged audiences.

Many of the Feu Follet actors had some sort of connection with the indigenous circus and my mother used to like to shape her plays so that they used or developed, wherever possible, these disappearing skills. Our Shakespeare had tumbling, slack ropes, posturing, trapeze and general acrobatics, and in the case of the Scottish Play she had designed a kind of jungle gym which could suggest a room in the palace, say, but also a scaffolding on which some fight scenes could be choreographed.

The idea was that Macbeth would work himself into higher and higher and more ‘dangerous’ positions until, on a platform just under the lighting rig, in his final conflict with Macduff, he would tumble and fall, not into their normal safety net — there was not room to stretch it — but into an eight-by-eight footer they had borrowed from the Theatre for the Deaf.

Wally, as everybody knew, was never happy with heights. He, the ‘Human Ball’ , was observed to avoid long ladders and lighting rigs whenever possible, and even though he had been aware of the safety problems with Bill’s platform, he had not climbed to inspect it himself, but had sent Sparrowgrass Glashan to deal with it instead.

But now, of course, he had no choice. He climbed, following the glow-tape in the gloom.

On the platform, forty feet above the audience, breathing the hot air under the cobwebbed corrugated roof, he searched for the new black safety wires he had ordered to be strung around the perimeter of the platform. With the lights on pre-set, it was gloomy up here. There was glow-tape marking the platform perimeters, but the wires were painted black. He searched for them with his hand, a little giddily.

‘How’s that?’ he said, finding a wire and twanging it, as if he were touching it only for the purpose of demonstrating its strength. ‘Does that solve your safety problem?’

Bill ran his hand over the wires. He knelt so he could inspect the point where they were anchored to the wall. He leaned against them, gingerly at first and then more aggressively. He bounced once or twice, like a boxer against the ropes, but when he had done with his tests he withheld his judgement. Instead he turned, and looked down into the gathering audience.

‘There’s no point you being angry,’ he said at last. ‘Obviously, there’s something wrong with that baby and denial isn’t going to help anyone.’

‘How’s the wire, mo-ami?’

‘Tray bon, thank you.’

‘That’s good,’ Wally said, and turned to leave.

‘It might be Vincent’s baby,’ the actor said. ‘No one can say it isn’t.’

Wally was kneeling on the platform, getting ready to descend.

Bill said, ‘You needn’t look at me like I’m so weird.’

Wally rose. ‘Listen, frere — you’ve got a show to do in ten minutes.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Bill said. ‘Who are you to look so fucking righteous?’

Wally knew better than to argue with him, especially not now — he was like a drunk, full of chemicals — ten minutes before the curtain on press night.

‘Mollo-mollo,’ he said.

‘Mollo bullshit,’ Bill said. ‘Why is everyone pretending there’s nothing wrong?’

‘If there’s something wrong, mo-frere,’ Wally said (gently he hoped), ‘she’s going to need you. You can’t afford to be afraid.’

Bill stared at Wally, his black eyes suddenly brimming with poisonous emotion. The look was intense, unwavering.

He jumped. The platform shook. Wally put his hand out to hold the wire.

‘Look at you, you old twat,’ Bill said. ‘Don’t lecture me about fear. You’re too piss-weak to even check the scaffold. You sent the Sparrow here instead.’

‘You knew it was fixed? You knew?’

‘Don’t lecture me about fear.’ Bill jumped again. The whole platform kicked and swayed, listing over nearly twenty degrees before coming back to a shuddering horizontal. ‘What ever made you think you had all this wisdom to impart to me?’

Wally put his arms out, found a wire, steadied himself, looked down into the half-full house. There he saw a familiar beard-fringed countenance scowling up from the front row. It was Vincent, stewing in his own negativity.

When he saw Vincent’s defeated face, something changed in Wally. He was still afraid, it’s true. He hated heights, feared the giddy emptiness of air. But when he realized that Vincent had already abandoned me and my mother to the whims of fate, he went a little crazy.

Wally loved my maman, and it was this powerful and secret emotion that moved him now. When he began to speak to Bill he no longer cared that they were only minutes from the curtain.

‘It’s true — I don’t like heights,’ he said to Bill, and something in his manner transmitted itself to the actor who extended a placating arm.

‘Come on, mo-ami …’

‘What is love?’ Wally said.

‘I’m sorry …’

‘When you love,’ he answered, ‘you don’t care. If you’re thinking about your own prestige, your own position, that’s not love.’ Wally was grinning now. He was bright red and sweating, he had purple fungicide between his toes. The long hair on the back of his head was lifting off his neck. He went to the edge and stood with his toes sticking out over the edge of the platform. Down below, directly below, was the eight-by-eight foot net he had finally ‘borrowed’.