Part 8 (1/2)

'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 s.h.i.+ft 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 f.u.c.king 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 s.h.i.+t 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 b.u.mper bar of the Haflinger, eating vanilla ice-cream. He had walked down into the s.h.i.+ning wet-floored mall, dressed in rumpled faded dungarees and a plaid s.h.i.+rt, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+tty 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 pet.i.te 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 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. 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-b.u.t.ton suits.

'Hi, fellahs,' he said.

So convinced was he of the scenario that when the b.u.t.ton-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.

He was an actor, disfigured, for what? For what good reason? To play-act at politics? He walked through the mall, a rueful smile on his face, bent forward to keep the blood off his s.h.i.+rt, but by the time he reached Felicity on the street his face was s.h.i.+ny with it. She was sitting cross-legged on the fender of the company truck still eating the ice-cream from a cone, but when she saw him he thought he saw a flash of excitement in her bright green eyes.

Trust was always a fragile commodity with Bill, and when he saw, or imagined he saw, my mother's excitement, he thought it was a Voorstandish response the excitement over risk, danger, blood. It was the same look you saw in the lines in Saarlim every night. It was what made Voorstand Voorstand, kept it alien no matter how long he stayed.

He blamed her then. He blamed her, silently, secretly, for placing his face on the poster, for using his fame to sell tickets for something that was, to his taste, distinctly mediocre. And now this d.a.m.n scar, this wound.

She staunched the blood with her silk scarf, cancelled the night's show, flew him back to Chemin Rouge to see a good doctor, but somehow the cut changed things for Bill, and when he saw her blow the egg beneath the pine tree, he decided it was typical.

What he could not say to her was: wattle-eared old Wally had acted like an Efican, not timidly, but with respect for life. She was an alien, a foreigner, no matter what pa.s.sionate speeches she made about culture or navigation cable, and he was surprised lying beside her that afternoon, naked, squeezed in next to her on the twin bed in the Shark Harbour Motor Inn to recognize the degree of hostility be felt towards the woman whom he had always thought of as his only love.

'He was not bird-nesting,' he said.

'Sweets, he brought me eggs.' eggs.'

'It was the Hairy Man. It was his action.' He turned on his side and raised himself on his elbow. 'He was showing you his action. He was showing you he had the guts to perform his action. He did not plan the eggs. He made them the character's aim.'

She smiled. 'You're turning this into a story about you.'