The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Free Page A

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-hairedarms 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.
    *
The critique of an actor’s performance normally offered by the director and, sometimes, the playwright. In the leftist Feu Follet these critiques might be offered by other actors, assistant stage managers, the house manager – by any member of the company.

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    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.