The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Free

the numbers above the door.
    When they opened the Maternity waiting room door they found Vincent Theroux – forty-six years old, not very tall, wide in the shoulders but now plump, even portly. He was sitting in a plastic chair, still wearing his broad-rimmed black hat, smoking an Havana cigar. Like Bill, he had a remarkable mouth – a rose-bud which shone like a flower in his neat sandy beard.
    ‘Cigar?’ he said.
    Bill turned his back without answering. Wally nodded, took a cigar, and tucked it in the pocket of his iridescent pink shirt.
    Bill inspected the water cooler, looked out the window at the sky. Wally selected a chair on the long wall, facing Vincent.
    Bill also sat. He folded his arms across his chest and watched Wally flipping through a zine. Though he did not like Vincent being there, he was
offended
by Wally’s presence.
    Wally claimed to have been raised in a touring circus and to have spent his early years as a ‘Human Ball’ being thrown in an act from mother to father, but this cut no ice with Bill, to whom he was nothing more than a small-time crook, one of those Efican facheurs who hang out in artists’ bars, carrying books of poetry for the purpose of attracting middle-class women. Certainly he had done time. He did not deny it. He talked like a crim – said ‘violin’ for jail, ‘musico’ for con-man, ‘riveter’ for homosexual. He was now the production manager – a good one – but he had become so attached to Felicity, during the pregnancy, that he had begun to give the impression that he had been responsible for it.
    So Bill found his presence impertinent.
    Yet when the santamarie entered the waiting room and asked, ‘Which of you gens is the dab-to-be?’ Bill could not publicly lay claim. He began to fear that someone in the room knew something he did not.
    He felt his neck burning. He folded his shirt cuffs. He began to button his red and black plaid shirt.
    ‘It’s you,’ the santamarie smiled, locating him by his high colour. She touched his sleeve.
‘You’re
the dab.’
    He moved sideways.
    ‘You’re Mr Smith, right?’
    Of course he was not Mr Smith. He drew further away, pressing his back against the window. His brows pushed down over his dark eyes and his blush spread right behind his pierced flat ears and disappeared down the collar of his work shirt.
    ‘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