The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Online Free Page A

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.
    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.

5
    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 wasnot 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