The tower had become smaller than her memory of it. It smelt of mouse and mouldy paper. Yellow sun entered through a screen of rain-spotted dust. It made her whole life seem second-rate.
‘I’m sick of this,’ she said.
‘Really?’ I said, but I was already shot through with panic.
‘Yes,’ she shouted, rugging at the sleeves of her Ophelia dress. ‘Really. Totally, completely sick of it.’
I unrolled my mattress and lay down on it and folded my arms behind my head.
‘I’m … not.’
My maman walked to the window where she looked down at Wally and Roxanna, who was unloading pigeon cages on to the vert-walk.
‘Funny old Wally,’ she said.
‘It … always … smells … like … this … when … we … get … back … Open … the … window … the … smell … goes.’
‘Tristan, your maman is too old to live like this any more.’
I pulled my knees up to my stomach. She sat down on the mattress beside me. She stroked my head, but there was something actorly in the way she did it and I flinched from her.
‘Don’t!’ she cried.
I took her hand and kissed it.
‘We could live in a proper house,’ she said. She touched my hair, again not hard, and even though it still felt false, I let her do it. ‘You could have a yard,’ she said. ‘With trees. We could be in a proper house tomorrow.’
‘Hate … trees.’
‘Oh,’ she tried to tease me. ‘It must be another boy who liked to climb them.’
I opened my stony-white eyes and stared into hers. ‘I … need … a … theatre,’ I said softly. ‘Maman … I … have … a … destiny …’
My poor mother. She put her hand up against the place on her chest where you could see the bones beneath the skin. ‘Tristan, listen to me.’
I knew what she was going to say.
‘I … know … I … am … not … handsome.’
‘Don’t kick.’
I shut my eyes, squinched up my face.
‘I … will … play … Richard … the … Third.’
Felicity put her hand across her mouth. ‘You know who Richard the Third is?’
‘A … mighty … king.’
‘Who set you up to this?’
‘Now … is … the … Winter … of … our … discontent.’
‘You cannot be an actor,’ she said. ‘You would not want to be.’
‘You’re … an … actor.’
‘Not any more,’ she said.
‘The … smell … will … go … you’ll … get … used … to … it.’
‘I don’t want to get used to it,’ she said.
She leaned out the window to where Wally was unloading the pigeons and stacking them along the street.
She called, ‘Wally.’ Then, ‘Come up.’
‘He … knows … what … I … want,’ I said. ‘He … loves … actors … when … he … is … reincarnated … he is going … to … be … an … actor.’
‘Re-what?’
‘When … he … lives … after … he … has … been … dead.’
‘Do you really think I’d ask Wally’s advice about acting?’
‘Why … you … asking … him … up?’
‘We could let him keep his pigeons here,’ she said brightly. ‘This could be a perfect pigeon loft.’
‘NO.’
‘Tristan, what have we ever done for Wally and what has Wally done for us? He loves you so much, I think he would die if anything happened to you. He only bought those pigeons because you liked them.’
‘Birds … in … our … HOME? … No … one … will … let … you … do … it.’
‘No one will let me?’
‘The … collective … won’t … let … you … REALLY.’
She came and sat down beside me on the mattress. ‘You want to know what’s bad about being an actor?’
Her skin looked white and tired, but her eyes were dangerously active — angry and demanding.
‘When you are an actor, you are so dependent. You’re a baby. You stand in line. The director and the producer look at you (look at me if I let them) like you’re a worm. They know less about the play than you do. They have the most superficial understanding of the material, but they turn you into a lump of nervous jelly, even the most pathetic specimens, just with their power. They talk about the character you will play as if it is nothing to do with you. They talk about your body like it was a thing. They give someone else the role. When you are an actor your normal state is unemployed. It is so hard to even have a reason to get up in the morning.’
‘You … are … an … actor,’ I insisted.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m an actor-manager, and if I want to put pigeons in my tower, then that is going to be my pleasure.’
29
All my mother’s misery was now focused, not on Bill or his comments about the company’s work, but on the tower. My father had left us, but it was the tower that was the demon. Once she had decided this, she could not stay still. Even though it was a Sunday, she had to act.
She rushed out to the cavernous old Levantine shop on the Boulevard des Indiennes and came back with Zinebleu, the Argus, the Herald, the News, Chemin Rouge Zine, L’Observateur, Le Petit Zine, and took to them with a big pair of dress-maker’s scissors. She covered the slippery floor with sheets of expensive cartridge paper and on each sheet she wrote the name of a street or an area she imagined might be pleasant to live in. Then she cut out the little avverts and glued them to the paper.
Wally arrived twice to invite me to come and feed the pigeons, but I would have nothing to do with pigeons. I stayed on my mattress ostentatiously reading Theatre Through the Ages.
I wished Vincent would come and look after my maman. But Sunday was Natalie’s time and my mother could not even call him at his home. The only thing she could do is what she did — stay up all night cutting up the sheets of paper and arranging them in different ways. When I took her Voorstand first-edition Stanislavsky from her shelf, she did not try to stop me. I read it, pointedly, waiting for her to take it back.
Some time in the night she woke me to give me a chocolate bar. She touched my hair, tenderly. I was very hungry, but I knew that eating chocolate would somehow weaken my hold on the tower. I picked up the Stanislavsky and left the chocolate, unopened, on the coverlet.
The next thing it was six-thirty a.m. The Stanislavsky was sitting on my maman’s desk. She was talking to Vincent on the telephone. She was bright, alert, positive, but her bed had not been slept in and she was still wearing the same long grey dress with the white collar. While she talked I tried to find the chocolate bar but could not see it anywhere.
At half past nine we left the theatre, walking past the pigeons which were piled up in the gloomy foyer in their wicker cages. Vincent tried to persuade me to fondle one but I drew my fingers back into a fist and wrinkled up my nose. Then he took us for breakfast in a booth at the Patisserie Jean Claude where I ate two plates of scrambled eggs and bacon and drank three hot chocolates. By half past ten I had a stomach ache and we were touring property in Vincent’s Corniche. These were not the properties advertised in the papers, but properties owned by Vincent and his brother.
I had no intention of leaving Gazette Street, I told my mother. She listened to me carefully, nodding her head and seeming to give weight to my objections, but I knew she thought she could bring anyone round to her point of view.