Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

It was an unlikely thing for me to say, given that I would not go as far as the Levantine shop across the street, but when I saw how Wally responded, what life it gave him, I dimly realized that this might be our life-line and I began to inch my way timidly forwards, not towards the trip exactly, but into a more intimate proximity to its glow.

First we clipped the coupons in the advertisements in the zines, then we waited for the colour brochures. For a long time it was what we lived for — all those beautiful pictures of Voorstand in the mail. We were going on a Sirkus Tour of Saarlim.

All this was enough for me: the fantasy — but Wally was not going to let me get away with that. He set a date. He hired a new nurse. He bought the wheelchair. I watched him come alive, glowing in the reflected light of travel brochures.

I moved into a room with a window. I prepared.

My nurse on this journey was named Jacques Lorraine, and this individual, who turned out to be the most curious young man I ever met, had more to do with the course of events than any of us understood.

Jacques had distinguished himself, from the first interview, by insisting that he would do whatever it was we needed him to. This was an immediate relief to us. His two predecessors had had such strict descriptions of what the title nurse might mean: Phonella would not do the dishes or mop the floors; Jean-Claude would not make the beds. He would cook, but if there was no food in the house he would not go and buy it. Phonella was a Ph.D in Archaeology. Jean-Claude was a flautist, and was saving up to travel to the Old World.

In contrast to both of them, Jacques seemed to have no other ambition but to serve, not just me, but Wally too. He was a nurse. It was all he wanted to do. He was self-effacing, like a good waiter is self-effacing, but not meek, or subservient. Whatever misunderstandings we had about his true nature, we always knew, even while he cooked and washed and scrubbed and dealt with the intimate secrets of my body, that this was an attractive person with considerable reserves of self-esteem. He had an ‘edge’, and although we did not know just how much edge he had, we never called him pissmarie or prick-buttock, not even behind his back.

He replaced broken zippers, darned socks, even typed my essays and manifestos for the January 20 Group. When it was necessary that he learn to drive a five-ton truck — our only vehicle — he did it. It was in this truck that he delivered me, as curtained from the public gaze as a lady in a mobile-amor, to the Group’s meetings. In this and other ways he made himself some sort of ideal figure in our lives.

He was below middle height, but handsome, with honey-coloured skin, large brown eyes and lashes that Roxanna would have died for. He was lightly built, but athletic. He squeaked around the dark rooms of the old Gazette Street building in fastidiously clean white running shoes.

Then he was merely our employee, but now let me make it clear — this next part of the story belongs to him as much as to me or to Wally, and not just to him, but to the extraordinary family that he came from — the father with his ludicrous passion for tropical snow, the mother with her martinis resting incredibly on the peeling front veranda of that lower-middle-class street.

However, on the spring morning we boarded the trawler John Kay in Chemin Rouge harbour, it did not occur to me that I might grant our recently employed nurse this importance in my own private history. I was so tense and frightened about everything ahead, and I felt — not incorrectly — that Jacques was secretly intolerant of my fear.

When he trundled my new wheelchair down past the skipjack boats on the No. 25 wharf, I was half dead with shame and self-consciousness. As we passed men filling their water tanks or loading gas cylinders, I pulled my panama hat low over my eyes. Though covered by clothes, by hat, I felt like a snail — de-shelled, slimy and naked in the vast and merciless light of day. We were setting out on a journey of 3000 miles and I was nervous, not just of ‘logical’ fears, like your agents, or storms at sea, but of the light, the air, the naked eyes of my fellow humans.

And although you, Madam, Meneer, now know me at a time when I have strode across the world and even been, for a moment, famous, in September of 394 I was still a prisoner of Phobos — I stood on the deck of the John Kay and felt like fainting.

Jacques, in this situation, was a master, managing to accommodate himself not only to my phobia but also my pride. He helped me on to the trawler, introduced me to the skipper.

I now know he had talked to this fisherman beforehand, had shown him photographs which had appeared in medical histories when I was born. But I did not know it then. So imagine my gratitude when the Captain showed no shock, looked at me as if I were human, held my eye, nodded. He may not have understood every word I said, but he knew I was the shapoh — i.e. it was me, not Wally, who was going to pay his bill. He shook my hand politely.

Not once in our five-day journey did this man ever treat me with less than respect. All this was due to Jacques. Also: as a result of his expert care, I arrived in the little republic of Morea a great deal calmer than I had been in years. Whilst continually subject to fits of irrational panic, I was now able to calm myself with Dr Fensterheim’s breathing. I was well fed, freshly shaved, a little suntanned, with no more discomfort than that created by the 50,000 Voorstandish Guilders I had bound to my chest with adhesive tape.

We have fully automated credit systems in Efica. We use them daily, just like you do in Saarlim. When I entered Voorstand like this, without a cash parole or any type of credit card, with only cash strapped to my chest, it was not because I was naïve or ill-informed, or rather — not in the way you might imagine.

Wally and I had, at that stage, a high opinion of your efficiency, your expertise. We imagined Voorstand to be a web of co-ax, optic fibre, little chips with brains the size of elephants. We travelled with cash because we were illegal and wished to keep our names out of the computers, and that is why I was lowered on to the dinghy in Morea with 50,000 Guilders strapped to my body with surgical tape. A saboteur, of course, would have known that this was stupid.

The morning we arrived at the Morean tourist resort of Club Hedoniste, the air smelled like overripe papaya. I was down to one layer of white cotton but Jacques was still wearing his three shirts and long black jacket. He placed the panama hat on my head and set it at an angle.

The dinghy was already heading back through the surf to the John Kay. I was on the beach — small, exposed, but I was there , under that velvety sky, and I was dizzy, a little, but not panicked.

It was seven in the morning, and the guests, if there were any guests, were not awake to see me. They missed an interesting procession.

First came Wally. He had always been a little hunched, but like a ping-pong player is hunched, like a man listening to a story is hunched. Now he was like those old men you see in Efican fishing villages, bent over with the weight of long-dead tuna and skipjack. He was seventy-three years old, a pensioner. Most of his hair was gone, the rest he had shaved off, and he had covered his craggy nose and freckled scalp with glistening sun-tan lotion. He wore a camera case around his neck but, with his heavy eyebrows and gimlet eyes, he must have looked — to anyone who did not know his sentimental heart — like some cruel old bird, some kind of vulture in crisp white T-shirt and white canvas frippes. He led us up the cracked concrete paths, beside the empty swimming pool where exotic red fish dropped flaking scales of red paint on to a bilious puddle of old storm water.