He was wide awake. He was so shaken, so sad, but at the same time he knew this was his moment, his time. He had seen himself, he told me later, in my eyes. While my maman and I slept, he made the promise, said the words, out loud. He was going to be the father, the one who would really do the job.
*
Students of the Efica circus may recognize the story of Petit Paul who, having died in 335
EC
,
was probably still performing when Wally was a child.
†
Originally a chauffeur, but later a mechanic. Probably originates with the job of starting an engine with crank handle.
*
‘My little one’, or ‘my little finger’. Rikiki can also refer to a 4 fl.oz. glass of beer.
13
It was my fourteenth day and I woke to the noise of heavy rain thundering on the tower’s thin roof. My first Moosone had arrived. The Nabangari had begun to flow again. Outside you could hear the river roaring, the muffled noises of boulders and logs crashing against the river wall. Slowly I became aware that my mum and dab were already awake, talking to each other. We lay, the three of us, on the same hard mattress I had been conceived on. My mum was on the telephone side, Bill on the window side. I lay between them, staring up at the pressed metal ceiling whose fat-bottomed little Cupids must have dated from the time when old Ducrow brought Solveig Mappin* into his bed.
‘It’s your life,’ my mother was saying to my father. ‘You’ve got to live your life.’
My bandock was wet. My stomach burned me. A bitter taste was in my mouth. While I grizzled quietly, my mother stroked my head, ran her little finger down into the soft indentation at the base of my skull.
‘If I go to Voorstand now,’ Bill said, ‘I know I’m going to lose you.’
‘You can’t lose me, sweets,’ she said. ‘I’ll always be here.’
‘You want me to go,’ he said.
‘No, I want you to stay.’
‘Tray bon. I’ll stay.’
‘If you stay, mo-chou, that’s your business, but if I persuade you to stay you might hate me for ever.’
‘I guess,’ Bill said, lying on his side, stroking his chest with the back of his fingernails.
‘You guess? You’re not meant to agree with me.’ She started tickling him. He squirmed and tried to still her. As they bumped and rolled, I lay there between them, a concrete fact of life. I kicked my legs and farted.
‘Watch the baby.’
They came to rest with Bill lying on my mother. She put her hand out, just checking me.
‘It’s your life,’ she said again, but she had become sad, and the animation had left her face.
‘Oh Flick,’ Bill said, ‘I feel so bad, mo-chou. I get offered a part and all it does is make me feel like shit.’
My mother smiled wanly. She had sore breasts, cracked nipples. She did not mention them.
‘I know it is an honour.’
My mother stroked my head. There was a clap of thunder.
‘It’s a great honour,’ my dab repeated, a little petulantly.
‘Sweets, you must not make a meal of it,’ my mother said. ‘You have been cast in a show, that’s all. Now you have to decide if you want the part or not.’
My father rolled off my mother.
‘Croco cristi,’ he said. ‘I’m the first Efican actor to be cast in a Saarlim Sirkus!’ He stood up by the bed and looked down on us. There was a second clap of thunder. The rain intensified.
I went to sleep. When I woke — hours later — buttery sunshine was shining on the rain-splattered windows. My mother was wearing a large white T-shirt and Bill — bare-chested, dressed only in white canvas frippes — was sitting on the end of the bed. Their argument had not developed.
‘It’s only a fucking Sirkus,’ my mother said, ‘for God’s sake. You’re not about to invent penicillin. Do it or don’t do it.’
‘All right I will.’
‘Will what?’ my mother said, kneeling beside me, flipping me on to my back and removing my bandock.
‘Do it,’ Bill said.
‘Well, if you want to …’
‘No, I don’t want to, but the company can use the money.’
‘Hand me the wipes.’
‘Please?’
‘Please.’
‘It’s a lot of money,’ Bill said. ‘More than anyone in the Feu Follet was ever offered.’
My mother picked me up and pulled up her T-shirt. I was hungry, but I also knew that each time I fed on those hard white breasts it made my stomach hurt again. To make things worse, she was not concentrating, and although you would not detect it in her tone she was agitated.
‘Don’t be frightened of the company meeting,’ she said to my dab. ‘They’ll tell you what a hypocrite you are, but in the end they’ll agree that it’s a good thing to get thirty per cent of your salary. It’s never any different.’
‘You’re the one who hates the Saarlim Sirkus.’
‘Sweets, I hate it here, not there. In Saarlim, the Saarlim Sirkus is just the Saarlim Sirkus. I don’t hate it in Saarlim.’
‘It’s so tedious,’ Bill said, staring at us distractedly. ‘There’s always the same posturing, and then they accept.’
What he was talking about was the collective policy — those who got ‘straight’ jobs contributed 30 per cent of their salary or fees to the company. Each job offer had to be considered by the company as a whole. So when Sparrowgrass Glashan, for instance, was offered a part in an ice-cream commercial everybody gathered to weigh up the public benefit and the moral damage. You never heard such long and protracted deliberations.
Bill, it turned out, had called a company meeting for ten that morning. You need a certain sense of your own importance to call a theatre meeting at that hour. My mother, who might normally have advised him to have the meeting later, withheld her counsel. It was as if she had decided to let the dice fall as they would.
The dark theatre had a smell which was never present when a show was on. Perhaps the big casseroles burnt away the odours of damp and dust and poverty, but when Bill stood before us on the sawdust and frowned and rubbed his denim shirt against his pectorals, the casseroles were dark and a single 100-watt work light provided the illumination.
As he delivered the news, he made himself — in spite of the arrogance of the hour — small before us, belittled his talents (as he was expected to) and talked about the moral and artistic consequences of the role in terms that may strike you — someone for whom Efica is small and unimportant — as grandiose, if not comic.
What this poor theatre saw itself doing was inventing the culture of its people. So even while the rain leaked through the ancient roof and ran in a rippling wash down the back wall, the young man who paced back and forth on the sawdust stage presented himself as someone involved in a moral judgement which had the highest consequences. He was going to work in the interests of — please do not take this personally — the enemy. I do not mean your country, but your Sirkus. In its celebration of the individual, in its inequitable rewards for luck, in its invitation to have the audience be complicitous in the not infrequent death of performers, it ran counter to everything we Eficans held so dear. The Saarlim Sirkus was thrilling, spectacular, addictive, but also heartless. Was this all? No it was not, but it is enough for now.