Free The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey Page B

before, this act of Bill Millefleur’s – an historical enactment which involved performing with horses and monkeys – would have been regarded as blasphemy in Voorstand. As recently as 255
EC
one Piers Kraan was sent to prison for lion taming and the lions transported, at the expense of the state, to ‘that place where God intended that they dwell’.

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    When Bill left us, it was as if he had died, and life in the tower became tearful and depressed.
    My red-eyed mother read the foreign bank advices – pale yellow slips with her name misspelt ‘Smit’. She entered the amounts into her ledgers, but could not bring herself to spend the money as she had planned. Instead, the company went out to play agitprop at fish cannery gates, at street fairs, in the streets around the mudflatsuburbs like Goat Marshes where no one had money to spend on such luxury as a theatre ticket.
    There was no Efican playwright, none of any talent, who shared our passions or our politics, so the company devised its own material. These little plays were crude and funny. There was juggling and feats of strength and acrobatics, but everywhere with both a story and a purpose. We mocked our snivelling ‘alliance’ with Voorstand, publicly libelled the silk-shirted facheurs who ran the Red Party. We dressed one actor as an obese Bruder Rat, another as randy Oncle Duck. We had our audience write down the phone numbers of top DoS agents and sometimes had a little fun telephoning them from the stage. We broke the obscenity laws, the alliance laws, the secrecy laws, all in one act with two posturers. *
    Life in the Feu Follet was passionate, paranoid, sometimes dangerous. I did not understand it was not normal. I was picked up, put down, rushed into cars and trucks and up the stairs of net lofts, down alleyways to rooms behind hamburger restaurants, back to Gazette Street where, by the time I had survived another eight weeks, the Feu Follet was in rehearsal for a very athletic production of
The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
    I was to play THE BABY. There are not a lot of roles for babies in the theatre, and
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
is not really one of them, but it was my mother’s way of keeping me with her while she performed. Of course, it didn’t work. I was often in pain, I cried and grizzled and distressed my fellow actors. Felicity, already guilty and depressed about my father’s absence, became so stressed that her milk refused to flow.
    It was not a good time for me – by the night of the first dress rehearsal I had lost not only my first father, but also my first role to a straw dummy, and, worst of all: lost my mother’s breasts.
    I know I complained about them – hard, white, made my stomach hurt etc. – and I spoke truly. Also, you might as well know, they spurted too much, hit the peristaltic button at the backof my throat so I gagged and vomited. But finally these breasts and I had reached an understanding, and I was (just as you were, Meneer, Madam, in your own time) happy there.
    There was no warning that these pink and slippery friends were also to abandon me. One minute my world was centred on the soft spurt and trickle, the apple-scented skin against my nose, the next it was prosthesis: rubber, plastic, the chlorine-heavy smell of sterilizing solutions.
    I did not take it lightly. Indeed it changed what was previously a pacific disposition. I became irritable, devious, needy, capable of blazing fits of rage. It was at this stage, an hour before curtain of the dress rehearsal, that my maman telephoned Vincent.
    *
At this time we had, in our company, Ernest Gibbs, an Englishman, who could disjoint almost his whole body. He could produce at will, without aid of cotton wadding, forms as diverse as Quasimodo and the president of your great country. He was a political cartoon made flesh, and was with us until his death in a boating accident in 374
. [TS]

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    Vincent was a busy man. He was not merely the chief executive of a large