The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Online Free PDF Page A

enough?’
    ‘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 somany 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.

6
    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, thesedisappearing 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