‘I really liked that bird,’ she said. ‘I don’t like birds, if you want to know. I don’t like pigeons. I’m very pleased to have them out of my life.’
‘You can make money with pigeons.’
Roxanna chose to say nothing.
‘You can,’ he insisted.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if you got them for the boy, that’s really sweet, that’s very nice of you. And even if he’s not too excited now, he’ll come around.’
‘He’ll come around.’
‘He’ll come around. He doesn’t look too interested right now.’
‘You got any kids?’
‘Do I look like I have a kid?’
‘You have a good figure.’
‘You’re full of shit, you know that. You don’t really think …’
‘Have I lied to you yet?’
‘I don’t know whether you lie or don’t lie. I can’t imagine getting into the situation of wanting to know. I don’t have kids, OK. I don’t know what kids do, least of all this one. Let me tell you who I am, Monsieur Pigeonnaire: I am someone who is going to make money. It is the only thing I am interested in: money. I don’t like this place here. I don’t like how it smells, or looks, or feels.’
‘Then go,’ he said.
‘You haven’t paid me.’
‘I’ll pay you.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘when you pay me, then I’ll go.’
She brushed the fallen flowers off the bench under the tree and sat and watched him as he stacked the pigeons into the old stables. It was too dark in there, and damp. She did not say anything. What was it to her?
When he had finished he came out and washed his hands under an old wide-mouthed tap. ‘Take some advice,’ he said, as he flicked the water off his hands. ‘Don’t say things with double meanings unless you want the second meaning took.’
But she was not listening to him. She was thinking of toy soldiers, a group of them, turbaned, moustached, a marching musical corps of the French Zouaves, one of eighty lots to be auctioned in Chemin Rouge on 11 January, eight days from now.
This thought made her feel so good, she reached out her hand and took his. It was wet and cool with tap-water.
32
My mother, in real life, was always neat. Her white blouses were always white and spotless. She was as ordered as her desk top, graceful, clean. But on the evening when the actors walked, she filled the paper cups carelessly, sending sticky bubbles cascading over her friends’ hands, forcing Roxanna (whom she had hitherto referred to as that little spin drier) to retract her red shoes quickly into the shelter of her dress.
‘Cheer up,’ she said to Wally, ‘you’ve just got yourself a pigeon loft.’
Wally shook his head and mumbled.
‘What?’ my mother said.
Wally looked down at the silver foil ashtray he had placed on the floor, between his feet.
‘I’d rather kill the birds,’ he said.
Roxanna murmured. My mother ran her wine-wet hands through her hair and shook her curls. Vincent held out a handkerchief. ‘No thanks,’ she told him. She then wiped her hands on her red velvet dress.
‘I’d rather kill the actors,’ she said, and laughed uproariously. ‘Not you,’ she said to Sparrow — the only person standing in the tower — tall, thin, bug-eyed. ‘Not you.’ She laughed until her face was red and her eyes running. Vincent took her pale white hands and she watched him while he wiped them as though her fingers belonged to someone else.
‘That’s enough,’ she said, and tugged them out of his grasp.
Wally said, ‘I don’t want to be remembered for closing the Feu Follet.’
My mother smiled at him vaguely.
‘You haven’t closed down anything,’ Sparrow Glashan said. ‘They’ll be back. No way they won’t be back.’ He winked at me.
‘Take it from me,’ my mother said, all humour suddenly leached from her voice, ‘they won’t come back.’
There was a longish silence which ended only when she picked the dripping magnum from the red plastic ice bucket and overfilled Vincent’s paper cup. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘drink up. It’s not every day I change my life.’
She turned to me and ruffled my hair. I looked her right in the eyes but she would not accept the heavy weight of remorse I tried to press on her.
She patted my legs with her sticky hands.
‘Cheer up, buster.’
But all I wanted was to undo what I had done, to never have crawled under the seats in the theatre, to never have spoken to Sparrow Glashan, to never have destroyed our lives.
She tousled my head. She stood and wrapped the magnum in a black and white checked tea towel. She poured champagne into Roxanna’s paper cup, filled it right to the top like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant.
‘So will you hire new actors now?’ Roxanna asked.
‘I’ll have pigeons instead,’ my mother said. ‘Much, much nicer.’
‘I don’t even like the birds,’ Wally said. ‘I’m just so sorry I ever bought them.’
Roxanna pulled her dark glasses down from her hair to her eyes.
‘You’ll get another company.’ Sparrowgrass held out his empty cup towards my mother and watched her fill it up. ‘It’s not as if there aren’t good actors looking for work.’ He looked for my mother’s response but she had moved on and was trying to find a Pow-pow station on the short wave. While she did this, everybody else talked, but they were aware of making conversation. There are elections coming up,’ Sparrow Glashan told Roxanna.
Roxanna slitted her eyes. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not from Mars.’
‘I meant — people really want to work in political theatre right now. There’s nowhere else but the Feu Follet. It’s an institution. The Blue Party should do something.’ He looked at Vincent.
‘Claire Chen never worked on that voice,’ Vincent said. ‘It was always tight.’
‘Claire’s voice is not great,’ Sparrow agreed, ‘but she can use her body well. She’s very physical.’
‘It wasn’t their acting.’ My mother had found her Pow-pow station. She turned the music up, then down so low I wondered why she’d bothered. ‘It wasn’t even yours,’ she told Sparrow. ‘You got to be an actor, but you weren’t one when you came.’
Sparrow made a show of being offended, but my mother was not playing games. ‘When we were on the road at Melcarth,’ she said, ‘what did you think of our work? Really.’
‘It was good,’ Sparrow said. ‘It was great.’
‘But compared to something really good.’
‘People laughed and cried, and now it’s gone.’
My mother dropped her eyes. When she looked up her face had become the colour of her arms.
‘Didn’t it ever look second-rate to you?’ she asked.
Sparrow looked so stung I felt sorry for him. ‘No, why? I’m sure not.’
‘But what would be first-rate?’ my mother insisted. She had come temporarily to rest and was now leaning against an open window, her arms folded across her chest, a paper cup in her hand.
‘She means Brecht directed by Alice Brodsky,’ Vincent said, ‘at the Saarlim Volkhaus, something like that.’
‘We’ve lived by our principles,’ Sparrow said. ‘I think that’s first-rate. We’ve played towns like Melcarth and Dyer’s Creek where people never took a show before. That’s first-rate. We’ve got something to say. We make people think, and laugh, and cry.’
‘But what did we change?’ my mother said. ‘At the end of the day?’
‘That’s a different question,’ Vincent said.
‘Did we even begin to define a national identity?’ Felicity said. ‘No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be. We’re northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south. All we know is what we’re not. We’re not like those snobbish French or those barbaric English. We don’t think rats have souls like the Voorstanders. But what are we? We’re just sort of “here”. We’re a flea circus.’