If you make anything red in Efica, it means something particular, but not what you are presently imagining. It was red dye-stuffs the French came to get, the reason they shanghaied the master dyers of Rheims and shipped them to Chemin Rouge, the reason you will sometimes find Efica on old French maps named ‘Rouge Asie’. It was red that Louis Quatorze wanted, and red he found in the little yellow-flowered cactuses which grew on Efica.
Even after Louis found easier ways to get red at home, the red dye works continued to do business with Europe and the colour red begat its own establishment in Efica — the owners of the so-called Imperial Dye Works who produced it. It was these local capitalists who called in European armies on three occasions to help them put down the Blue factions.
You may have noticed that poor Banquo wore blue. It was the colour blue that Wally’s great-great-grandparents were collecting, out on the mudflats with their jute sacks. The colour blue, extracted from shellfish by a stinking process, was the poor people’s dye, harvested originally by ex-convicts. Blue has been the party of idealism, of reform.* Blue governments have given women the vote, a thirty-five hour week, a national health scheme.
To be consistent, my mother should have made me up with red — after all, I was a witch’s child — but she could not put that hateful colour on my skin, hence the two blue spots. And although many of the company found the symbolism confusing, and some others were critical of the manner in which she had introduced me to the world, it was — they all agreed — just like her.
It was not like her to limp up the stairs after Scene III and leave her comrades one witch short for the remainder of the play, but that is precisely what she did. She laid her sweating baby in the crib. She lay down on the bed herself, curling up, her knees almost touching her chin. Her red make-up was still on her face. Her body was still clad in foam rubber, strapped with canvas. She pulled a pillow across her eyes and lay still, but only for a moment. Almost immediately she began to forage amongst the rumpled sheets, finally finding what she had been looking for — a small plastic bag of very dry marijuana (not like her either — she had stopped smoking on the day she knew she had finally conceived). Then, with her make-up still caked on her face, she rolled what was not the first cigarette of that particular day. It was a small cigarette, but the ganja was from Nez Noir, the northernmost island, and was therefore very strong.
In a short while the entire company would come up the stairs and enter the tower. It was what happened after each production. Unless she was to be a total coward, she would have to unlock the door.
*
The Voorstandish Navy’s ELF-FOLK (ELF for Extra Low Frequency) PROJECT has remained a mystery to the Efican people until 427, as we go to print. We now know that 2,400 miles of insulated cable was threaded through our nation’s belly. The cable was grounded at each end in the dry bed-rock of Inkerman, thus turning our most populous island into a giant antenna. The low conductivity of Efican granite allowed for the more efficient generation of extra low frequency waves and enabled the Voorstandish Navy to communicate with its
SNEEK
77 submarines at depths of 400 feet.
*
The Blue Party is formally known as the Efican Democratic Party, or EDP. Its supporters are more familiarly referred to as Blueys or Muddies, the latter term providing a direct link back to the men and women who gathered those ‘briques bleus’ in the mangrove mudflats in the early days of settlement.
10
Vincent skulked around the windy little cobbled courtyard, while all the cast and half the audience pushed up the noisy staircase to the tower to see exactly who I was. It was the tradition at the Feu Follet that anybody could come up to the tower on opening night — audience members, critics, visiting actors, spies from the VIA and DoS* — and anybody could give notes — Moey Perelli’s dad, for instance. Vincent too, and this was a privilege that he relished. He was the theatre’s biggest single patron, but on opening night he always sat on the dusty floor in his good black suit. He drank wretched wine from paper cups without ever puckering his fastidious lips. He seemed so confident, so worldly, wealthy but hip. He had such a detailed knowledge of theatre history, an excellent eye, a real feeling for the moment when a scene lost energy or focus. No one but my mother knew that each opening night he had to steel himself to face ‘them’, to win the respect of actors of half his age, wit or taste.
And because of these windmills he felt he must dispense with, the sessions in the tower had always been the high points of his life — first the discussion, the exercise of his considerably theatrical education and sensitivity, and then, some time before dawn, his secret love-making with the leading lady beneath the turning ceiling fan. He was addicted to the whole process, and no matter how he anguished over the deceitful phone calls to his wife, he could not bring himself to give up either my mother or the theatre.
On the press night for Macbeth, however, he stayed down in the foyer. He pretended to read the tattered hand-written notices on the walls. He jiggled his car keys in the big pockets of his fashionably baggy black trousers.
He could not love his child — he was clear on that. It was not that he would not like to, but that he could not. It was his flaw, his weakness, not admirable, but beyond him. And if he could not love the baby — one step led to the next — Felicity would not love him. He had seen it in her eyes on stage when she pasted that vile green muck on to her cheeks and pointed at him. It was not to do with text or character, but to do with him and her — he understood her perfectly.
But he, also, understood himself — he could not walk up the stairs. Nor could he leave the building, for if he left the building now, tonight, then that would be it, the end, and he would not permit it to be the end. He went to the open door and looked balefully at the last of the theatre patrons, a man and woman, standing in the middle of the street and talking in the sweet salty air.
‘Croco cristi,’ he said to himself, but more loudly than he intended. The man turned sharply to look at him, and Vincent thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and turned back to face the bleak little foyer with its ragged self — important notices.
‘Croco cristi,’ he whispered. He undid his wide leather belt in that elaborate way of his which always suggested a man about to undress for bed.
‘God damn.’
He tightened the belt a notch.
What happened next was not very much — his mouth tightened a little. But a second later he was crossing to the staircase in three strides.
Next he was ascending the stairs. Next, revealing a more athletic frame than his bulk might have promised, he was striding along the deserted first-floor corridor. His squeaking crepe soles echoed in the empty couchettes, and then receded as he climbed the steep narrow stairs which led to the roar of conversation.
The tower room was small, ten foot by ten foot six, and by the time the chief executive officer of Efica’s largest aspirin manufacturer had reached the top there were fifty people crammed inside. One step below the door sill, his courage failed him. He stopped, marooned it seemed, jiggling his keys.
He could not see Felicity, but he could hear her. There was a stirring in the crowd — the tall, gaunt Sparrow Glashan stepped aside, and there she was, totally alone, exhausted, with the spooky white-eyed baby on her crumpled bed.