Part 20 (1/2)

'Good morning,' he said to me from near the window. He had such nervous, anxious eyes. His lip was split to his nose. His gum was exposed. When he spoke, his words sounded as strange as my own must have. That aside, he was good-looking. He had very white skin, a heavy beard-shadow, a strong jaw, a neatly combed head of black hair. 'Actor-Manager,' he said, inclining his upper body politely towards me. 'What a splendid name!' He looked towards the doorway again and I saw that my little room was full of visitors five men and women, two standing, one leaning in the doorway, two sitting on chairs. They all wore hospital gowns and they all had missing faces, cleft palates, conditions where teeth penetrated lips, misfortunes so repelling it would have been difficult for me to quietly contemplate them even in the colour plates of a magazine. You may not like me saying it, but my visitors were gross.

Who was I to be repulsed by them? No one, obviously.

But who were they they to stare at to stare at me me with such jumpy, frightened eyes? with such jumpy, frightened eyes?

'Can you speak to us?' asked the man with the harelip.

I rolled my eyes in impatience. The effect was obviously repulsive.

'Your maman's on her way,' the harelip said. He was a good enough man, I guess. He was here to have himself made normal. I a.s.sume he wanted marriage, children, decent things. He found me disgusting but he was trying to calm me, telling me lies about my mother who was still, at that hour, conducting her own search of the freeway verges.

'So, you can't go home just yet,' he said.

'No ... I'm ... going ... to ... my ... daddy's ... house,' I said.

'He said daddy. Did you say daddy?'

'His daddy's out.' out.'

'His daddy's house.' house.'

'You're going to your daddy's house?' house?'

I nodded. I was going to the Feu Follet.

'I don't think you're going anywhere just yet.'

'I ... am.'

'Not until you've had your little op.'

They were adults, I was a kid. When they told me there was an operation planned it was difficult, in spite of all the circ.u.mstances that had led me there, not to believe them.

'I'm ... going,' I said.

'Going? Not until you're better,' said a woman who was sitting on the visitor's chair. She had a bright red burn scar down one side of her face. Half her grey curling hair was shaved clean off her head.

'Have you had your pre-op?'

'Mistake,' I said. And again, very slowly, 'Mis ... take.'

They did not bother to hide their smiles.

'He's here by mistake.' mistake.'

I tried to explain how Wendell Deveau had found me, but they could not understand me. Even as I gurgled and babbled about mistakes I knew it was not true. I was meant to be here. I belonged here. Their faces defined the territory.

'Relax,' the harelip said. I did not like the way he sat so big and heavy on my bed. He was so ugly, perhaps not as ugly as I was, but ugly just the same. He was not like Vincent or Bill. He had bad breath. 'You're safe here. Everything will be OK, little Actor-Manager.'

'Go ... away,' I shouted.

He could not have guessed how much he scared me or I am sure he would have left. But perhaps he did know, and he was embarra.s.sed, hurt to be, even here, unloved, and therefore he stayed, because he could not admit to being unwanted.

'We're your freres.' He showed his gums to me.

'f.u.c.k ... OFF.'

The words were clear to them. They splashed around that little room, like boiling water, caused men and women in white gowns to exclaim, leap, stumble in their hurry to avoid the burn.

'f.u.c.k ... off,' I screamed.

A minute later the room was empty, the door was shut, and I was alone scared and shaking. All I knew was: I was not them, would not be them, would not be looked at in that way.

There was a nurses' station right outside my door. I could not leave that way. But there was also a window in the room, a chair. I foot-walked to the chair and crawled up on it. My knees hurt more than I expected. Then I noticed that they were bandaged and there was some black blood soaked through on one of them.

The window looked out into a light-well with an open side reaching to a little lane. The drop, the danger, the hit of fear that rushed into my body all this felt wonderful. I sought the sensation like a tennis champion feels the satisfaction of the racket gripped in his hand, like the smoker seeks the rough, raw feeling of smoke on the lungs. Perched on the window sill, elevated, alone on the eighth floor, I experienced the ecstasy of performance before there was one.

On the opposite wall there were thick metal waste pipes running in a neat daisy chain from floor to floor, five storeys to the ground. I made a very small leap and caught hard on the round, rusty pipe. I stuck there a minute or two, held fast, a limpet on the side of the Mater Hospital.

Watching the performance, you would not have seen the pain, but that pipe was rusty and sometimes rough and very, very cold. Twice there were leaks and, around the leaks, a slippery green mould or slime. The elbows at every level seemed to offer resting places but they proved almost the most treacherous of all. The elbows had inspection plates which were sometimes loosely held, or secured by only one bolt. When I grabbed the elbow, the whole plate swung sideways, and twice I nearly fell. It was much harder than a tree, rope or ladder, and I could not concentrate on anything but what to cling to, one inch at a time. Yet the hands that reached out towards me from the toilet windows were not an annoyance, nor the changing s.h.i.+ft of adult voices a soothing distraction.

I did not know what floor I was on at any moment. My arms felt like ripped lead. My hands were numb, bleeding, but I was transformed. I was no longer one of the pitiable wretches I had left behind upstairs. As I descended, I was an actor Mark Antony, Richard the Third, the Phantom of the Rue Morgue.

So intense was my relations.h.i.+p with that pipe that I only realized I was near the ground when the murmur of voices, of slammed car doors, reached my ears. Finally I permitted myself to look down to my audience. The ground was not more than twenty feet below me. Faces were tilted up towards me. I turned to them.

The faces were all wrong.

They were not faces looking at an actor. Nor were they looking at something as simple as a boy on a pipe. The faces looked at something like snot, like slime, like something dripping down towards them from which they wished to take their eyes and which, the clearer and closer it became, produced in their own eyes and lips such grotesque contortions that I knew properly, fully, for the first time in my life I was a monster.

Wally, his mouth tight, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g, stood on an oil drum at the base of the pipe. He held his pale freckled arms out towards me. When I fell into his arms he crushed me to him, as if, in holding my snotty face so forcibly against his neck, he could block out everything I had just learned.

43.

They were a fast-food crowd outside the Mater, sweaty, pasty-faced, overweight, slippery in their ponchos. They shoved hungrily into the cul-de-sac, pressing in against the ladders and bricks, trampling on the yellow builder's sand. They did not spare a glance for Wally as he rolled the empty oil drum against the wall.

In those years Wally still had a tennis player's grace, a lightness. He did not clamber on to that drum, but leapt so cleanly, in one light bound, that later, when Roxanna realized that the drum must have been at least four feet tall, she began to doubt what she had seen.

He stood on the rocking drum and reached out his long arms towards the small bandaged figure as it edged its way down the wall. He made a kind of cooing noise.

When first he heard this noise, the boy speeded his descent, but then he paused, and looked down, and there was something in the moment that suggested Sirkus to Roxanna the way he hung out by one arm, like Darnell Dommartin at the top of her slippery pole. His dreadful face was flushed, his fine fair hair blowing in the breeze.

A kind of shudder went through the crowd. It s.h.i.+fted its ground and emitted a little murmur of disgust.

'It's a mutant, Maman,' someone called. 'It's Phantome Drool.'*

The boy heard it. You could see it reach him, like hot water reaching a spider in your sink. He shrivelled.