Then, with his face shining, immobile, his mouth compressed under the weight of his pleasure, he took one of his very sharp knives and began to fillet the fish, a playing card he had bought for my dinner. It was precise work, and he was good at it, just as he was good at soldering and using a key-hole saw. He separated the delicate white flesh from the pink and pearly skeletons. He placed two delicate fillets on a pale blue plate — and I know, Madam, a ten-week-old child does not eat fish, but Wally did not know. I was his first.
When he had the fillets done, he wrapped the bones in paper, placed the fillets in the fridge, opened a beer, poured a bride. He flicked on the gas and quickly, deftly, cooked the delicate fish fillets in a little milk. Then he mashed it with a fork and, worrying it might be too hot, placed it in the freezer to cool.
I, of course, did not know what fish was. So when, at last, he offered me the meal he had so lovingly prepared, I rejected it. He called me Rikiki, but it made no difference: I wanted Vincent. I wanted my bottle. Wally gave me a cup. I had never seen a cup. I knocked it over. Wally yelled at me. I cried. And that is how it was always to be with us — Wally was the one who made the rules and was angry, the one who cooked breakfast and lunch and yelled at me when I didn’t eat it.
Amongst the actors, he was famous for his sentimentality, but in spite of all the ‘Rikikis’ he was not soft and conciliatory like Vincent, who had often, in his euphoric pre-election mood, stroked his baby’s cheek with the back of his pudgy hand. Wally brought no gifts, like Bill would. He was not full of compromise and sweet smells like Felicity. Indeed, he did not bathe enough. And when no one was around to see him do it, he would scream and yell like a maniac, particularly at the end of a long weekend.
Wally loved me, but he did not find this prayed-for state to be the blessing he had imagined. Love aged him, made his forehead taller, his shoulders a little more hunched, his brow increasingly hooded.
It was Wally who confiscated the toy laser gun which Bill sent — this was a year or so later — for my birthday. It was Wally who stopped me going to the country with Vincent because Vincent had been drinking and could not figure out my new safety seat. And it was Wally — later still, when I was just over ten — Wally who told the doctors about my penchant for climbing. He wanted it stopped, and hoped to invoke a greater authority than his own. He knew Tristan was their precious thing, their cracked and mended pot, and that they would not want it shattered, and it is true — from the moment I was born, the doctors had not been able to keep their hands off me.
Felicity, who had begun so independently and who was, any way, a great one for homeopaths, naturopaths and iridologists, unexpectedly capitulated to what she called ‘straight medicine’. She still, at bedtime, dropped sweet little grains of Silica (for mucus) into her son’s lipless maw, but once The Caucasian Chalk Circle was over it was ‘straight doctors’ who began to deal with Tristan Smith’s ‘anomalies’. They began with the duodenum, which had a partial blockage. At eleven months of age, they put me to sleep, cut me open, sewed me up, resuscitated me in sterile rooms where I found myself held down like a frog in a dissecting room, pinned at the legs and arms. They had catheters up my porpoise, tubes down my throat, drips in my arm, and when that was over and my temperature began to rise, they did not give me Panadol but took samples of my blood, spit, shit, urine, often by the most painful methods.
At eighteen months, they pinned me with their soap-smelling hands and took marrow from my bones. I shrieked and screamed and begged for them to let me be.
Vincent was squeamish around hospitals, but Bill — to his credit — came flying in to sit beside me on more than one occasion. He was nice to me. It would be years before he would be able to act as if he were responsible for my existence, but he could look me in the face and touch me. He was less than a father, more than an uncle. He arrived with tricks up his sleeves — wind-ups, frogs that blew bubbles, geese that farted, fake vomit, gross picture cards. He flew back to Saarlim. He sent postcards.
Wally was always there. He argued with the santamaries about his cancerettes. He held me down.
And this was my childhood: Dr Tu slid me into dark tunnels; Dr Fischer strapped me on steel platforms and tilted me upside down. They tortured me, not just in that first year, but on and off for the first ten years of life. They mended the hole in my heart, but took three goes to get it.
The doctors (Dr Tu, Dr Fischer, Dr Wilson, Mr Picket-Heaps, Dr Ayisha Chaudry, Dr Brown etc.) were able to tell my mother exactly what operation they wanted to do next, but they could find no pigeonhole to shove me in, and the summation of all of their investigations was ‘Multiple Congenital Anomalies’.
They had wanted to give me lips, but my mother chanced to see their ‘similar case’ and was so distressed by this poor man’s goldfish pout, she would not let them touch my mouth. Either way, there was no chance I would ever have a smile you would recognize. Nor was there any hope that they might make me taller. But these ingenious Efican toubibs made me function better, stopped the green bile bubbling out of my mouth, stopped my heart walls leaking, repaired my faulty duodenum, and although this was not a pleasant way to begin a life, consider this — Tristan Smith had a loving mother, an entire company of actors who cooed and cosseted him and tickled his tummy and took him for rides on their shoulders. Plus I really had three fathers — Bill and Vincent, sometimes, and Wally every day. And if Wally did shout at me he was also the one who bought me chocolate and icecreams, the one who tried to sneak me into the Voorstand Sirkus when I was five years old. My mother nabbed us at the entrance way.
One minute we were standing in line outside the bulbous free-form ‘tent’, already inhaling the pervasive odours of spun sugar and ketchup, watching the projected twenty-foot high shadows of Bruder Dog chasing Bruder Duck around and around inside of the luminous pink shell;* the next we were trudging back along the river bank and my mother’s pretty face was spoiled by that disapproving expression which is described in Chemin Rouge as being ‘like the ass of a hen’.
After that, I did not get to the Sirkus for another another seven years. Wally went alone on Saturday afternoons and came back with beer on his breath and a perroquet in his hand.
‘For Bruder Rikiki,’ he would say as he set the sugary green drink before me, ‘with the compliments of Bruder Mouse.’
Later he would ‘tell’ me the whole Sirkus, describing the spectacles, the falls, the injuries, the songs. It was our secret, the thing that bonded us more than any other. I would fall asleep dreaming of the cheeky Bruder Mouse or the clever Bruder Duck, whose laser images I, probably alone of all the children in the eighteen islands, had never seen in life.
*
From the very beginning, the Voorstand Sirkuses in Efica had laser clowns. By the time the Sirkus came to Chemin Rouge the days when performers put on animal suits were gone. We never saw a ‘live’ Bruder Dog or Mouse. As for Simulacrums, we read about them, but there were none in the eighteen islands.
[TS]
18
I grew up preferring the dry season, and not just because it was in the Moosone that I always had my operations. In the dry season the company hired a little one-ring tent and went out into the countryside with the Haflinger bus, a horse float, a rented truck, and an ever-changing show my mother named The Sad Sack Sirkus.*
More circus than Sirkus, and more revue than either, The Sad Sack Sirkus was a patchwork of tumbling and posturing, skits, Shakespearean speeches, and — best of all — equestrian displays which country people always loved to see. The Sad Sack Sirkus made a little money; it got the company out of the city; and — thanks to the occasional egg-throwing of Ultra Rouge† fanatics — it gave a sense of urgency to the company’s political agenda.