The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Free Page B

‘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 shecould 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