My audience was all spellbound — Wally pale, my father smiling, but my maman was so still, so intensely still. She held her windblown curls back from her eyes, squinting up at me. My arms were an agony. My legs hung like tails. But there was nothing I would not have done to maintain the private look of admiration that I found in her face. So although I dared not hang as I had planned, I turned and climbed.
I will not easily forget the boiling green ocean I found up that tree, or the blustering easterly which swept the sea spray up the cliff face and stung my broken skin as delicately as Vincent’s eau de Cologne, or the resinous sap, rich in pine or the mouettes, their wings white, their eyes orange, who came squalling around me as I, unknowingly, approached their rough-stick nest.
Everything smelt of salt and seaweed. It was as if I had finally ripped through the Glad wrap that had always separated me from my true history.
Far, far below me was my silent mother. She stood beside the grey weather-board hall, her eyes creased but still young and beautiful, her red anorak wrapped tight around her, her black skirt flapping like a flag against Wally’s bent grey flannel legs.
‘Watch him,’ I heard her say. And felt, even from that distance, that she and I were in communion.
Wally said, ‘For Christ’s sake.’
The wind blew her answer away.
All I heard Bill say was, ‘… kid.’
‘He knows,’ my mother answered.
What did I know? I knew nothing. I knew only that I was weak, in pain, delirious with fear and pleasure, that the branch I was edging out along was bending, that I might die a famous death, that the sky was a brilliant cobalt blue, that the birds were hitting me with their wings, that the wings did not hurt, that I did not know how to go backward. I froze. ‘Just watch him,’ my mother said. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’
Just the same, I was very pleased to hear Bill say, ‘Maybe we should get a ladder.’
I began, obligingly, to shift into reverse. But my legs would not go backwards. The birds were coming back. I shut my eyes, opened them. I could see their nest ahead of me, a bundle of sticks with a toffee wrapper woven into it. If I were a Famous Actor, what would I do? I had no choice but to perform my action, to edge towards the nest. There were four eggs, pale blue with brown spots. I would stay in character, till the death.
‘What good is a fucking ladder now?’ Wally shrieked. ‘What would I do with a ladder?’
The branch was dipping and swaying. I leaned forward and pressed my face deep into the nest.
THE HAIRY MAN took one egg in its maw. He held it there, trying to breathe around it.
‘You should listen to me,’ Wally shrieked. ‘Not wait for this to happen.’
THE HAIRY MAN wanted to throw up. He could taste bird shit in his mouth.
I breathed through my nose and managed to make my arms go backwards. I knew I wasn’t going to die my famous death just yet. I began to experience the feeling of what I would later know when I did my first show in Saarlim — a feeling of intense well-being which was not contradicted, but rather amplified by the pulsing pain in my arms. I came down the tree, my arms feeling warm and sticky with blood, and shrugged myself free of my mother’s eager embrace.
“Ah,’ I said. ‘Uh-uh-UH.’ Finally she saw it: the egg in my mouth.
She held out her palm, her eyes bright, that bright, bright look, love-bright, nothing like it, and started laughing. Her coat was marked with my blood, her cheek pink from my blood.
‘You can start a collection,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you a book about birds.’
‘You’re insane,’ Wally was saying. I thought he meant my maman, naturally.
He grabbed me and held me so hard it hurt — chin, zipper, arms too tight around the chest — tobacco, stale sweat, rubber, liniment oil for his bad knee. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said as he released me and patted down my snotty hair.
‘Relax,’ Bill said. ‘It’s the circus in his blood.’
‘You keep out of this,’ Wally said to Bill, and then, to my maman, ‘I never want to see something like that again.’
‘I don’t think you’re going to have a choice,’ my mother said.
She put her hand on my head and stroked me. ‘Do you want to see how to keep the egg?’ she asked me. And she showed me there, beside the old rusting tank stand. She made a small hole in each end of the egg and blew its contents.
‘That is the mouette’s baby,’ Wally said. ‘Is that what you want to teach him?’
‘I want him to be strong and brave,’ Felicity said.
‘You can’t teach that,’ Wally said. ‘It’s how he is. He is, anyway.’
‘That’s right. He is.’ And she gave me back the egg, now light and as slippery with egg white as my own skin was with blood.
22
Two weeks before the Hairy Man climbed the tree, my father had gone to find a Saarlim newspaper in a provincial mall.
He had left my mother sitting on the bumper bar of the Haflinger, eating vanilla ice-cream. He had walked down into the shining wet-floored mall, dressed in rumpled faded dungarees and a plaid shirt, but he carried with him still, in spite of the ordinariness of his dress, his stardom — the softness of his skin, its sheen.
As he walked along the deserted early-morning mall he was very happy to be exactly where he was. There had been a full house the night before. There was another full house tonight. The day was clear-skied, eighty degrees. He planned to spend the morning fishing from a clinker boat.
Bill returned to Efica in the summers as other actors, his colleagues in Voorstand, went off to climb mountains in Nepal, to retain touch with something basic which his real life made impossible to know.
Here in the islands of Efica there were circus, theatre, horses, solitude, conflict, battles you could imagine might be won. Here, working for peanuts in a shitty little tent on the edge of the crumbling coast of Inkerman, playing to hatchet-faced oyster farmers, you could forget the franchised Sirkus Domes and the video satellites circling above the ozone layer, and you could imagine that theatre could still change the destiny of a country. In Efica you could have the illusion of being a warrior in a great battle, and when you toured you lived with others who shared the same illusion. When you toured, you performed as if art mattered. Doing agitprop under a petite tente you were inventing your nation’s culture.
And he was — although he was to forget this in a moment — pleased to see his face in the large blue Sad Sack Sirkus poster at the news stand, pleased to be important in his own country. And when the voice called out his name, ‘Bill Millefleur,’ he turned, as an actor turns towards the light.
He saw two youths in their teens, conservatively dressed in three-button suits.
‘Hi, fellahs,’ he said.
So convinced was he of the scenario that when the button-nosed one drew out a box cutter, Bill’s brain insisted that it was — against all the physical evidence to the contrary — a pen.
He smiled.
‘Muddy,’ the man said, and seemed to wave the ‘pen’ across Bill’s cheek.
Tapette,’ said the other, and spat.
There was no pain, and when he felt the wet on his cheek he thought it was the spittle. The two young men did not run. They turned and walked quietly in amongst the nylon underwear on sale in Lucky Plaza, and then Bill’s face began to sting and then to burn, and then he knew he had been slashed by members of the Ultra Rouge.
As he watched the blood drop in fat warm splats on the tiled floor of the mall, he thought what a fool he had been.