My mother now scheduled these tours to coincide with the summer recess of the Saarlim Sirkus. Thus Bill was able to come back for every tour and he and Sparrow Glashan and my mother rode three-men high and Bill performed flip-flaps, round-offs, pirouettes and somersaults on the back of a cantering horse, just as he did under the big Dome in Saarlim where the tickets cost 100 Guilders each.
Vincent, of course, could not come on tour. He stayed in the city, running his business, dining with his wife, waiting for his life to start again. When he could not stand the separation any more, he would visit, stumbling out on to a southern beach from the belly of an ancient aluminium-bodied aircraft with one colossal engine and oil streaks on its wings. Vincent was an urban animal, never at home in the countryside. He was nervous around the horses, and obviously disconcerted to feel himself disadvantaged with ‘Young Bill’, who had quickly become an international star.*
I liked Vincent better in the dry season. He was less sure of himself, often melancholy.
What he was suffering from — I see now — was sexual jealousy. When we were on tour, Bill shared my mother’s bed. In the turmoil of his unhappiness, Vincent turned his tenderness on me. He gave me gifts, taught me to hold a crayon, to form my quivering big letter ‘S’. He sat next to me, his shampooed beard occasionally brushing my neck, and spoke to me in French, a language I did not understand.
‘Mon petit, mon pauvre petit,’ he would say.
But finally the dry season smelt, not of Vincent’s shampooed beard, but of sweet hot horse-shit, chaff, dust, tick drench. Each day dawned clear and painless, long sweet gravel roads, chalk-grey dust, singing actors packed into the old Haflinger bus, the horses and the rented truck bringing up the rear. Wally drove the bus. He liked to drive. If he could have done it, he would have driven the float and truck as well.
The tours were long, covering not only the (formerly English) main islands which were all to the north of Chemin Rouge, but back south through the whole ‘Granite Necklace’, and the old dye towns of Melcarth and King’s Coat. I knew the granite caves beneath our feet were often filled with your government’s navigation cable, but the truth is, I did not think about it.
When we were on tour, my mother devoted herself to me with an intensity few parents could have sustained for long. She listened to my every sound, brought to my taut malformed face the full focus of her curiosity and attention. Even though Bill was there, she brought me into the bed before she finally went to sleep, and I was in child-heaven. I woke to — no doctors — the sound of magpies carolling and the smell of warm sheets and my mother’s sweet musky skin-smell. Almost every day we woke up in a new place — rock-walled fields of brown grass thatched with rust like Harris tweed, ravines, dry rivers with stones like prehistoric eggs, a chalky coastal estuary where, even when I was ten years old, my mother would strap me on to her body and we would slowly, quietly, gather oysters and mussels at low tide.
The southernmost islands (the Madeleines) were like cake crumbs on the map, and on our way back up to Melcarth* we would spend almost as much time on ferries as on roads. The roads themselves were mostly dirt, bordered with century-old cairns commemorating famous deaths by starvation, ‘rot’, spearing, typhoid, pig-headedness and folly.† This was the country everybody felt was Efica — mostly wind, water, sky. There was an emptiness, a refusal to charm, an edge of terror in the air which cut us to the bone. The landscape was dotted with failed attempts at European enterprise — bauxite claims, farmhouses, abandoned rusting windmills. The skies were a huge and empty ultramarine.
Of course I often repulsed strangers in those isolated estuary towns, but when I say this did not affect me you have to see the crowd that I was travelling with: men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair, crushed velvet, aromatic oils, ornamental face scars. By the time I was two I had become their emblem, their mascot, and I shared with them their sense that we were an avant garde, not only artistically, but also morally. Thus I remained as swaddled and protected under the bright southern skies as I was inside the rank dusty womb of the Feu Follet.
I was, indeed, a curious-looking child — strong in the shoulders, withered and tangled in the legs. My hair was dense and blond, and the irises of my eyes — although no longer white as they had been when I was born — were now milky, marbled, striated with hair-line spokes of gold. They were my best feature, and were sometimes thought to be quite beautiful.
Naturally my maman worried continually about her deformed little boy’s self-esteem, but the truth was, I was being privately tutored not only in my schoolwork, but in the radical’s conceit, that I was different, but superior. To cause upset in motel dining rooms — something which would later be the cause of such shame and anger — was no ordeal to me. My comrades placed me in a new high chair which Wally had built for me, and when we played Ultra Rouge towns I would sit with a crushed velvet shawl around my shoulders and bring my intense eyes to stare accusingly at anyone I imagined was the enemy. Few could hold my gaze — bristling Ultras with their shirtsleeves cut high and their elastic-sided boots red with bauxite dust: they grimaced and looked down at their barley soup.
*
To the Voorstand reader the disrespectful conjunction of ‘Sad Sack’ and ‘Sirkus’ may seem to indicate an ignorance of the meaning of Sirkus, but it was exactly this conjunction that made the name so appealing to my maman.
[TS]
†
These political thugs published various pamphlets and news sheets which revealed a perplexing mixture of ideas — Efican nationalism, anti-semitism, a passionate attachment to the alliance with Voorstand. While their often extreme actions were always criticized by the government, it now seems certain that they were funded by right-wing elements of the Red Party.
*
Bill Millefleur, as Voorstand readers will be aware, was not as famous a name in Saarlim as we all imagined. In Efica he had become a star. Everyone watched Vids of his Saarlim performances, particularly his part as Franco Hals in
The Black Stallion Gallops into the Burning House. [
TS]
*
Named, as every Efican schoolchild knows, after the God of dyeing.
†
All European deaths. The deaths of the IPs (Indigenous Peoples, the eighteen tribes of Efica) remain essentially uncommemorated and unresolved. Even Vincent Theroux had difficulty resolving the notion that his great-great-grandfather may have been party to a genocide.
19
It was never my mother’s plan that I should be an actor, and if she had not been desperate she would not, I am sure, have permitted the seed to be planted by Bill Millefleur: he had always been, until now, an amateur as a father and — you only have to look at the handwriting, the spelling, the eccentric capitalizations to know this — an unlikely expert in the field of formal education.
Until January 381, when Bill’s postcard arrived, my education was conventional enough. Between the ages of six and eight I had a Korean tutor, a Mr Han, a delicate old man who finally died of asthma. He was succeeded, in my ninth year (380), by Claire Chen, who, despite her erratic personal life and slovenly dress, had an almost tyrannical code of behaviour in the class room — that formerly pristine little tower room which was now a wilderness of broken chalk, torn theatre programmes, half-assembled rak-rok blocks, the Great Works of Literature, old horseshoes, and French coins I had found while playing truant in the labyrinthine underworld of the old Circus School.