'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 gla.s.ses down from her hair to her eyes.

'You'll get another company.' Sparrowgra.s.s 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 inst.i.tution. 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 really good.' 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 ident.i.ty?' Felicity said. 'No one can even tell me what an Efican national ident.i.ty 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 sn.o.bbish 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.'

'You mean, you wish we were more famous.'

'No,' Felicity said, pa.s.sionately. 'No, you know I don't mean that. I mean, I don't know what we are. Or maybe it's just me, still a Voorstander after all.'

The bright nimbus of saline across her eyes did not break into tears, but it was perfectly clear to me then that, for whatever reason, my mother was now finished with the theatre.

She sat down on the bed again and snuggled into Vincent. He put his arm around her and she closed her eyes. She was shivering. Wally took off his sweater and draped it on her shoulders. Vincent slipped off his jacket and arranged it round her.

I put my arms around her too, as far as I could reach. I was very frightened.

33.

Roxanna had this flash it came to her that night, marooned in the draughty tower in Chemin Rouge drinking warm champagne. She saw the blood, like in a horror film, a wall of it, wet, liquid, with a sheen of blue licking around its edges. She should kill the s.h.i.tty pigeons now.

The moment pa.s.sed, like a clear frame in a film, like the brief mad moments when you think you will throw yourself off the bridge or swing the wheel into the oncoming traffic a tic, a shudder, not real life but something parallel, something that could only happen if the thin muscled walls between the worlds of thoughts and things got frayed or ruptured. She was not, Deo volante Deo volante, the woman with the knife, chopper, axe. But she was the person who innocently carries the plague, like that woman Rebecca (whoever she was really) they named Rebecca's Curse after just a pretty red and yellow flower, and now it raged through the pasture of half of Efica and every schoolkid, even the little rag-mouth here, knew it was called Rebecca's Curse.

The pigeons were like that: like dog-s.h.i.t sticking to her name.

They had been in Chemin Rouge for only thirty-six hours but already the famous Apple Pie and his twenty-six fellow pigeons had brought down this theatre company. The pigeons were like some spore, some s.e.xually transmitted disease, and when she thought of the night Reade brought them home she knew that her first sense about them (before her bending, obliging, smiling, head-nodding personality got in the way) had been the right one.

It was not just that he was mistaken about their money-making possibilities. She had not liked the way he touched touched them, with his big h.o.r.n.y hands around their chest and neck. She d.a.m.n well them, with his big h.o.r.n.y hands around their chest and neck. She d.a.m.n well made made herself think she liked it but it was bulls.h.i.t. It made her jealous that was her true feeling. She wanted him to act like that to her, not to a bird. She told herself how nice it was to see a man acting gentle, but that was s.h.i.t, she knew it even then. herself think she liked it but it was bulls.h.i.t. It made her jealous that was her true feeling. She wanted him to act like that to her, not to a bird. She told herself how nice it was to see a man acting gentle, but that was s.h.i.t, she knew it even then.

She did not like those pigeons' eyes, not that pair, nor any other. She never did see a pigeon's eye that did not frighten her a little. She told Reade that. He was patient with her at first he said it was because they had an eye each side of the head which made them sort of stare, and she tried to buy that, except it wasn't true. It was something in the eyes themselves she did not like stupid, nervous, demanding and it did not matter whether they were speckled or plain, the condition was the same. They scared her.

As for money forget it. It was the pigeons caused the rift with Reade. It was the pigeons ipso facto lost her the joint bank account, the $105,023.56. They lost her shelter, protection. She should have killed them in Melcarth when she BBQ'd the house. Now she was in Chemin Rouge, they were still with her. She could chop their heads off with a tomahawk, have them run around Gazette Street with the blood squirting in the air like a poulet. She could see it, she really could. She could see the blood pooling in the bluestone gutters. It was most realistic.

She blinked and drank champagne. It was perfectly clear that Madame here would now lease or sell the building and then Wally would have lost his home, all thanks to pigeons. She did not care. She refused to care. She should BBQ them before they did the next thing.

Don't even think it, Roxanna.

She held her breath but the lack of air made the flames burn brighter. They were carbon-hemmed, orange-skirted. There was soot, kerosene, a sweet hot singeing smell. She grinned at Wally. He smiled back at her. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face, then she turned and walked down into the street, hoping the air would make this feeling go away.

The air in the street smelt cold and damp. The wind was from the east and it carried, not the salt of the port, but a sweet mouldy smell, the smell of gullies and rotting leaves from twenty miles away. She stayed out there, just leaning against a car, looking up at the moon, listening to the sarcastic voice of the dispatcher coming out over the taxi radios. She saw Vincent Theroux open the door and stand at the top of the steps. He raised his arm. A car engine started and then a low expensive car she did not know the make pulled up in front, and Vincent, having checked his jacket and trouser pockets, carefully descended the stairs, got into the back seat, and was driven away. My G.o.d My G.o.d, she thought. It was as if she had splashed cold water on her face.

Around ten o'clock she saw Sparrow Glashan, made hunchbacked by the rucksack under his poncho, slip quietly out of the door, and walk down to the dark end of the street, away from the taxi base. A moment later Wally sauntered across the street with his hands in his pockets.

'You OK?'

'The patapoof, what's his name?'

'That's Vincent ... did you see his car?'

He stood in front of her grinning, as if he knew that she was excited by a wealthy man.

She shrugged. 'What of it?'

She turned back towards the theatre. Now the actors were gone she would have, she hoped, a better place to sleep than a mattress in the corner of Claire Chen's room.

The pigeons were no longer in the foyer although, imagining she could still see their bloom hanging in the air, she held her nose as she pa.s.sed through. It was only eight more nights. She would buy a padlock for her door.

It was a rabbit warren, a flop-house. She went looking for a room she could make lockable. The doors were ply. Most of the locks and many of the k.n.o.bs were missing. The rooms themselves were dead, curtainless, creepy. The floors were covered with litter created by the actors' flight, the sort of things rag-pickers might have fought over and left behind when alcohol or thunderstorms changed what they thought important empty vid cases, print-outs, T-shirts, bras, single socks.

In eight days' time she would turn up at the Chemin Rouge Antiquities Fair, a b.u.t.terfly emerging from a s.h.i.t-heap no one who looked at her would ever imagine the chain and padlock on the door, the ice-cream container for peeing in at night.

She went from room to room, looking at the doors. Wally accompanied her, but hung back, did not enter the rooms, occupied their doorways.

No way was she going to f.u.c.k him. No way at all. When she caught his eyes, he smiled at her.

'What's so funny?' she asked, but before he could answer she walked past him, out into the corridor. Her high heels were loud. She hated that sound. The rooms were all insecure. The windows opened on to verandas and roofs. There were no latches.

Wally leaned against the wall behind her and began to roll himself a cigarette. 'You don't want to worry about them pigeons,' he said. 'I'll build them something.'

'Better you than me.' She turned to face him. 'Pigeons are a mug's game,' she said. She took a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. You could hear the front door swinging open on its hinges that was two chains, two padlocks she would have to buy.

'My grandad had pigeons,' he said, reproachfully.

'So you told me.'

He pulled a comb out of his shirt pocket and dragged his long hair back from his high forehead. Then he leaned across and, without asking permission, lifted her dark gla.s.ses from her face. 'I paid you six hundred bucks for them.'

'It was a fair price,' she said, but she slipped out of her shoes.

'Seems to me you were offering a little more than pigeons.'

She bent down and picked up her shoes. She refused to be guilty.

'It seems to me you were offering something tray specific.'

She held out her hand for her dark gla.s.ses. He hesitated a moment, but then he gave them back to her.

'What I said was I'd set you up, OK?'

'That's right.'

'I know you think that's a double meaning, but it isn't. I meant I'd get you the seed for them to eat, show you how to set up the automatic watering.'

He shook his head. His eyes had that hurt look men got she didn't know whether to pity him or fear him.

'I'm sorry if I gave the wrong impression,' she said carefully. 'I'm also really sorry I put the hex on you.'

'You didn't hex me. I like you being here.'

'I hexed the theatre. The pigeons did. I wrecked her theatre for her.'

'You don't know Felicity,' he said.

She snorted.

He c.o.c.ked his head. 'What did you do that for?'

'What?'

'Laugh.' He folded his heavy freckled arms across his chest.

She shrugged.

'Why did you laugh?' he demanded. He tightened his mouth. She did not want to look at all that dangerous hurt dancing in his speckled eyes.

'I was thinking you don't know her,' she said. 'That's all. I'm probably wrong. It was my impression.'

'How would you know if I knew her or not? How could you even have an opinion on the subject?'

'You're a man.' She smiled and touched his forearm with her hand. 'That's all.' And she turned and headed up the corridor, before it got any more intense. She hurried into what had been Annie McMa.n.u.s's room. It was the room she had planned to commandeer, but now she saw it had a door opening on to that spooky little courtyard.

'You're saying I don't understand women?'

'Look at you,' she said, suddenly angry. 'You're hanging round me like a dog. You want to f.u.c.k me, you don't do it like that. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. You've paid a fair price for the pigeons, but that's all you did. You bought some pedigree pigeons, OK? Enjoy them.'

He leaned across and held her arm. The maman and the boy were up in the tower. They were all alone on this floor. He was hurting her.

'You think you know who I am, Roxanna. You think I am some sort of creep, but you don't know s.h.i.t. You want to know about me, go upstairs and ask her. Do you think she'd have me here if I was a creep? I'm a good man, Rox. You're too scared to see that. You're so jumpy you think you have to rip me off. You're so nervous you don't know what to do. But I'll promise you this and you can trust it you can sleep in my room, in your own bed. You'll be safe. No one's going to bother you in any way at all.'

She looked at his face the velvet grey eyes and believed him.

'OK?' he said.