The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (3 page)

‘The doctor,’ said the santamarie, ‘says Mr Smith might as well go home and rest.’

‘Actually, Nurse’ – Vincent put his fat backside on the window ledge; it touched Bill’s elbow – ‘there is no Mr Smith. There is a Ms Smith, but no Mr. It’s Felicity Smith,’ he said.

Bill tried to make eye contact with the santamarie.

‘Felicity Smith,’ Vincent said, ‘the actress.’ He unbuckled his two-inch wide belt and tightened it an extra notch. The gesture was worldly, confident, sexual. ‘There is no
Mr
Smith. There is only us.’

The santamarie smiled at Vincent, nodded. ‘I see.’

‘What I see about our situation,’ Vincent persisted, ‘is that it’s vaguely ludicrous. The three of us, all smoking cigars.’

‘OK,’ said Bill, who just wanted the santamarie out of there before something embarrassing was said. ‘That’s nice of you. Thank you.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Class dismissed.’

‘Was I brusque? I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t know what
brusk
is,’ the santamarie said. ‘But I know when I’m not wanted.’

‘Why don’t
you
leave?’ Wally turned to Bill. He folded his zine and returned it to his back pocket. ‘If you can’t be decent you’d be better off not being here.’

‘I’m
here,’ Bill said, ‘because my son is being born.’ He turned back towards the Sirkus in the park. A giant mouse with a white stick was dancing on the video.

‘So you
are
Mr Smith,’ the santamarie said. She opened the door to the hallway. ‘The water closets are one floor down or one floor up.’

‘
I
sympathize with your enthusiasm,’ Vincent said, as the door slammed shut behind the santamarie. He laid his hand on Bill’s shoulder. ‘I sympathize, but you don’t know it’s a boy, and you don’t know it’s yours.’

‘You should go home and check your diary,’ Bill said. ‘If you’re the father you must have put your pecker in the post.’

‘Go home,’ Wally repeated. ‘Just like the doctor says.’

‘Maybe
Wally
is the father.’ Bill held his palms upwards in appeal. ‘Now there’s a vision.’

Wally had pendulous ear lobes, soft like wattles, fair-haired
arms with small round scars where no hair would grow. Now his austere face contracted a fraction more. ‘I have not had the pleasure,’ he said.

Bill whooped.

‘You petticon,’ Wally said. He sprang from his chair, stepped on to the coffee table, and launched himself at Bill, his neck tendons tight, his pale lips stretched across his teeth, his right fist raised like a hammer.

Bill leaped over a row of blue plastic chairs, yelping with pleasure, his teeth white, his eyebrows arched high.

‘For Chrissakes,’ Wally said. ‘You didn’t even ask why we can go home.’ He let his scarred and tattooed hands hang limply by his side. ‘You didn’t even ask her how she was.’

He went to stand beside Bill, to look out of the window at the Sirkus. In a moment Vincent joined them, his large black hat silhouetted against the bright arc lights in the park. Vincent put his arm first around Wally’s shoulders, then Bill’s. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ he said.

It was the first time it had occurred to Bill that she might not be.

As for Tristan – not a word about me. I did not exist for any of them – I was a thing, an idea, a ripple on the other side of a beautiful woman’s large white belly.

But by this time, just after noon, I was, regardless of what the santamarie had said, already two hours old.

My three ‘fathers’ were treated badly, as if their alliance with my maman were unnatural or perverse, and they were separately and jointly responsible for my peculiar condition. They were lied to. They were given to understand the labour was long, that the labour had not begun, that there was a C-section to be performed, that Ms Smith had been shifted to another hospital. They were told, bluntly, to go away, to wait at home for a call, and what is incredible is that they tolerated this treatment. They were not meek men, but they were men, intimidated by birth, and so they went meekly, and with so little idea of what was happening to Felicity that they could not even answer each other’s questions in the street outside.

Five storeys above their heads, in a small windowless examination room, two doctors were nervously trying to persuade Felicity that it would be better, although they did not use so blunt a word, for them to kill me.

There was nothing much in the room: a metal cabinet with one thin drawer and two fat ones, a bright red bin labelled ‘Sharps’ and another, larger one, marked ‘Bio-hazard’, the chair on which my maman sat, the paper-covered couch on which Dr Eisner perched.

Marc Laroche, the obstetrician, leaned against the door and folded his long thin arms across his chest. He had known Felicity for ten years, had seen every play she had appeared in or directed,

‘You don’t have to decide anything now,’ he said, but he could not look her in the eye or pronounce the illegal act he was silently advocating.

My maman turned to the paediatrician. She had not known him three hours ago. His name was Eisner. He was very young. He had dark beautiful doe eyes which were now filled with pity. ‘You can take as long as you want,’ he said.

Marc Laroche jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. ‘God damn it,’ he said.

Felicity had given birth less than an hour before. She was weak, frightened, in shock.

‘I want to see him,’ she said.

‘What?’ Marc Laroche said. Then, ‘Of course.’

He left the room. Dr Eisner smiled at her, frowned, fussed with the slippery paper on his examination couch, then left the room as well.

Felicity was abandoned to the hum of the lighting. She thought: this is not happening to me.

A long time later the two doctors returned, rolling a small perspex crib. Tristan was lying in the crib. She did not look at him directly, but saw that he did not take a lot of space. He was swaddled in a bright patterned cloth.

‘Unswaddle him.’ She heard herself say it. She was aware of removing herself from herself, of becoming a character whom she could watch. She closed her eyes, breathed a little – in–out, in–out.

The young men did not say when they had done unwrapping, but she could tell from the stillness in the room. She opened her eyes. She had no distance from herself, or not sufficient. When she saw the baby’s face again, she put her hand across her mouth. A noise came out, a noise so painful that Marc Laroche’s anxious face contorted in sympathy.

‘God damn,’ he said.

She thought: I am the mother.

But she did not want to touch Tristan. She made herself. Her
character
touched me. I was naked, defenceless, frightening.

‘Damn,’ said Marc Laroche.

‘Shut up,’ she said.

She held her finger out and touched my hand. I grasped the finger and held it with an intensity that surprised her. I was barely human. I was like some dream she might expect to stay forever hidden in the entrails of her consciousness. She tried to jerk her hand away. I would not let go.

The feeling – she had felt this before: it was when you held the worm in your fingers before you baited your hook, the way the life shrank from the hook, the way you responded to it, that strong demand within your fingers. It was not your personality or your character. It was something more basic than character. Now she held her hand against the little thing’s chest where you could see its beating heart. She did not know what she felt. It was like the bomb blast at the theatre when Suzi Jacques lost her leg – flesh, blood, screaming. I wailed and my awful face shrank up in fear as if I could smell the harm floating in the sterile air.

Felicity heard herself make mummy-noises.

When the hovering Marc Laroche came to her side, she saw his intention was to take Tristan away.

‘Show me how to wrap him,’ she said. And when he hesitated: ‘Please.’

She was aware of how she looked. She was an actress. She had been a model. People were always stirred by her beauty. It was the first thing anyone would write about her. She was ‘tall and willowy’, had ‘stunning cheekbones’, a ‘mass of curling coppery hair’ which framed her ‘slightly triangular face’. She could see the doctors being moved (Marc Laroche to tears) by her beauty, my lack of it, by what they would describe as ‘love’. But what she
could not say to them was that it was not anything half so noble. It was not anything she could help or alter.

‘I think you should let us have him now,’ Marc Laroche said when he had swaddled me, not expertly.

‘I’m OK,’ she said. She took the bundle and sat with me on the straight-backed chair.

‘Just the same,’ he said.

She looked at his long bony fingers as they stretched towards her. She shook her head.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just take your time.’

But no one moved. They stayed like this, not speaking, for the best part of half an hour.

‘Well …’ Marc Laroche said at last. ‘I think we might put him in the nursery now. What do you think?’

My maman shook her head. ‘I want him in my room.’

‘Listen,’ Marc Laroche said, ‘you’ve got to face it, Felicity …’

‘In my room,’ my maman said.

‘It will be even harder for you later.’

‘In my room.’

My maman got her way. She kept the crib hard against her bed. In the night there were feeding difficulties because of deficiencies in my lips.

She tried to stay awake all through the night, but finally she could not keep her eyes open. She slept with an arm and a leg placed protectively across the top of the bassinet.

I was safe. Laroche and Eisner were home in their beds, relieved, you can bet, not to have jeopardized their careers with an illegal action, but at seven o’clock the next morning, just as the night staff were leaving, when the first floor-polishers and vacuum cleaners brought a level of confusion into previously calm corridors, a santamarie tried to move Tristan to the nursery. There was no evidence that the woman meant to kill me, but my maman was not taking any chances. She picked me up – I weighed only four pounds – and walked out of the hospital.

There had been no time to try to find her tote bag – she arrived on the street in her hospital wrap. But although she was nearly naked at the back, she held herself in such a way that you would never think the wrap was more than just a summer dress. And as, walking to the hospital, she had hidden the feeling of the
pumpkin between her legs, she now hid the fact that she was aching and sore from labour and everything in her wanted to shuffle, not along a public street, but in some quiet protected environment with shiny floors and pink-faced women in white uniforms.

She barely noticed the alien Sirkus. The river bed existed like some bright white over-exposed photograph. She carried Tristan along the sandy path in a kind of daze, and when he vomited an acrid substance the colour of summer grass, she wiped the muck with her finger. There was not much of it – but it was bright and inexplicable and she was frightened.

The Boulevard des Indiennes was filled with large trucks loaded with reinforcing mesh. She got caught for a minute on the traffic island before limping across to Gazette Street which was, at this hour, dominated by dull corrugated walls of metal shutters and roller doors and lined by bright red and silver taxis, all double-parked, driverless, complacently illegal. Her destination was number 34 – the Feu Follet. The posters on the cracked concrete wall outside advertised the Scottish Play with previews beginning on this first Monday in January. In normal circumstances Felicity would have played Lady Macbeth, but she had taken the part of First Witch in respect of her condition.

Between the striking black and white posters was a rusty roller door. Above the roller door was a second floor with six high, gracefully arched windows. The building was topped by the tower in which I had been conceived (and in which, in the time of the Circus School, the great Ducrow was said to have seduced the contortionist Gabrielle Dubois). The rest of the company lived in little monks’ cells scattered through the building. There was no nursery ready. Everyone had been too busy getting ready for the Scottish play.

Felicity walked carefully up the brick ramp and let herself in through the small door inside the big rusty roller. Holding my soft head protectively, she edged through the dark dusty space which was called ‘the foyer’, and walked painfully – her inner thighs hurt, her vulva hurt, every step hurt – up the wide wooden stairs to the second floor where the air was scented with patchouli oil, dirty laundry, incense, cigarette smoke, musk, and the insidious but persistent odour of a blocked toilet which was the subject of
dispute with both plumbers and debt badgers. The poky cells in which the great Ducrow had once housed his students were now covered with posters both political and theatrical, the brick walls with spray painting, the frosted glass with glass beads, cane blinds, folk prints.

When my maman arrived on the second floor she was already beyond exhaustion. She had no plan. She began the narrow splintered stairs up to the tower thinking only about the impossibility of the next step, and once she finally gained the safety of the tower, she did something she only did when making love – she locked the door.

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.