The hospital where she had planned that I would be born was half a mile to the south of the theatre. It was built on the banks of the Nabangari* river which, being wide and blue on the maps, was usually a disappointment to visitors, who were likely to find it empty, dry, full of blinding white round stones, with no sign of the waters whose crop gave the Central Business District of Chemin Rouge its controversial smell.
When the famous river flowed into the port it raged not blue, but clay-yellow, filled with grinding boulders and native pine logs which drifted out into the harbour where they floated just beneath the surface, earning themselves the name of ‘widow makers’ with the pilots of the sea planes to Nez Noir. Every four or five years the Nabangari broke its banks and more than once filled the basement of the Mater Hospital, and then the front page of the Chemin Rouge Zine would carry a large photograph of a hospital administrator netting perch on the steps of the boiler room.
Felicity had a striking face. She had long tousled copper hair, a straight nose, a fine ‘English’ complexion, but as she came to the bend of the river where she should be able to see the hospital, her mouth tightened. What lay between her and the hospital was a Voorstand Sirkus in the process of construction, more different from our own indigenous circus than the different spelling might suggest.* The giant vid screen was already in place and high-definition images of white women with shining thighs and pearlescent guitars had already established their flickering presence — 640×200 pixels, beamed by satellite from Voorstand itself — shining, brighter than daylight, through the immobile yellow leaves of the slender trees.
The incredible thing was that she had forgotten her enemy was there. She had opposed its importation as if it were a war ship or subterranean installation. She had fought it so fiercely that even her political allies had sometimes imagined her a little fanatical, and when she said the Sirkus would swamp us, suffocate us, they — even while supporting her — began to imagine she was worried about the box office at the Feu Follet.
As the great slick machine of Sirkus rose before her, her muscles came crushing down upon my brain box. Her mouth gaped. She backed a little off the narrow path, her arm extended behind her, seeking the security of a pale-barked tree trunk. She got the base of her back against the tree and propped her legs. She breathed — the wrong breathing — hopeless — but she did not know I was now ready to be born. When the contraction was done, she limped through the confusion of the circus, which lay in pieces all around her. She stepped over coloured cables as thick as her arm, limped past wooden crates containing the holographic projector. The road crews, working against punitive clauses in their service contracts, had their pneumatic tools screaming on their ratchets. They wore peaked hats and iridescent sneakers which shone like sequins. They danced around the woman who was, by now, almost staggering through them.
My maman made it up the front steps of the Mater Hospital, whose staff, in true Efican style, responded instantly to her condition. Within three minutes of her arrival she was on a trolley, speeding along the yellow line marked Maternity 02.
The birth was fast and easy. The life was to be another matter.
†
Pronounced
Foo Follay –
Ed.
‡
Jacques Ducrow (245–310), former cavalry sergeant and then equestrian, later proprietor Ducrow’s Efican Circus and (302–9) Ducrow Circus School. Ducrow claimed to be one of the English circus family which produced the equestrians Andrew, Charles and William and the clown William. There is good reason to doubt this.
*
Those Voorstanders only now acquainting themselves with Efican English may notice, from time to time, place names like Nabangari which seem to owe nothing to either English or French. The Nabangari was so named by the ‘lost’ Indigenous Peoples (IPs) of Efica. The names of these long dead people litter our islands — tombstones in a lost language
.
[TS]
*
The Efican circus has its roots in English circus — lions, elephants, equestrian acts, acrobatic performance, feats of strength. The Voorstand Sirkus began its extraordinary development, not as the powerful entertainment industry it is today, but as the expression of those brave Dutch heretics, the ‘Settlers Free’, who were intent on a Sirkus Sonder Gevangene — a Circus without ‘prisoners’, that is, one without animals
.
[TS]
3
On the afternoon of my birth, as the clock in the Chemin Rouge Town Hall struck three, an actor named Bill Millefleur sat down on one of the moulded plastic chairs in the Mater Hospital Maternity waiting room and began to peel the wrapper from a doigt de chocolat. My mother’s lover was very young — just twenty-two, but tall and handsome, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, with finely chiselled, beautifully shaped lips. He ate the chocolate bar quickly, hunched over, as if he were alone.
There were, at the same time, two other men waiting in the same room, and they were there for the same reason Bill was. One of them — Wally Paccione — was the production manager of the Feu Follet. The other — Vincent Theroux — shared with Bill the distinction of being my maman’s lover.
Bill worked with Wally every day, saw Vincent at least four times a week. Yet he managed to finish the chocolate without acknowledging either of them. He could not make them go away. Indeed, he feared they had some business being there.
As he wiped his pretty lips carelessly with the back of his hand and folded his arms across his broad chest, he told himself again what he believed to be true.
My mother had been with him when she conceived. It was him she loved. She had been with him when her waters broke. It was his speech she had walked out of, turning the great noisy latch and laying a jagged white knife-blade across the circle of his concentration. He had seen her, no one else had. Vincent had been at his office. And Wally, who was now acting in so pathetically paternal a way, had been up in the booth, and from the booth you could not see the door.
It therefore seemed impossible that they should be here now, unless — and the very thought of this betrayal made Bill’s smooth cheeks darken — my mother had telephoned them.
My maman had a curious network of loyalties, it is true, but in this case she had no time to telephone anyone — it was Bill Millefleur himself who sent the signal, by leaving the theatre without waiting for compliments about his work.
When Wally Paccione learned Macbeth had disappeared before notes,* he knew I was about to be born, and he slid down the narrow ladder with a grin on his face which Bill — had he been able to witness it — would have found at once grotesque and threatening.
Wally was fifty years old. He had big pale lips, a craggy nose, pale grey eyes, ginger bushy eyebrows, a tall freckled forehead, a receding hairline.
When he strode across the centre of the stage the curve of his broad back suggested excitement, furtiveness, urgency, secrecy. He checked the ‘foyer’, then ran, hunched over, elbows tucked in against his ribs, up one flight of stairs, down three steps, and up another flight to the tower which had once housed the office of the Director of the Circus School but which was now my mother’s apartment. The tower was empty. He skittered down the narrow steps to the second floor. He knocked on the bathroom door and disturbed — not Bill, not my mother — but the notoriously constipated Claire Chen.