Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I was also dressed in white — long white shirt, long cotton trousers, Italian canvas shoes, my white wide-brimmed hat. I came behind him in my wheelchair, my face in shadow.

Behind me was Jacques, his hands on my wheelchair, a big pack on his shoulders. He had dressed for tropical Zeelung exactly as he had for Chemin Rouge — the white tennis shoes, the three layers of spotted shirts, the wide-shouldered suit jacket, the black hair slicked back on his head, the two silver rings in his left ear.

You would think our distinctive group would make a strong impression in Morea, but the taxi man, who waited for us in the steaming gravel car park, did not seem to notice anything unusual. He was listening to a loud speech on the car radio and as the speech became more passionate he drove faster. The country was poor, hardly lived-in. There was some white sand, tussocks, a few fishing boats with inverted triangular sails. Then we were at the Zeelung border post.

The customs office was like a portable latrine on a parldng lot but the soldiers, contrary to their reputation, were stone cold sober, wore pressed fatigues and were erect in their postures. The Captain — spit-bright, gold braid — was everything I had feared when I set out.

He looked at me with horror and disgust. He shouted. He crossed himself. He spoke volubly and abusively to Jacques in Old Dutch, but although I felt that sea swell of dread, I did not die, or even faint. I felt dizzy, yes, but finally he stamped my passport and we went, in triumph , Madam, Meneer, in total triumph.

Ahead of us was a bus station and a clay road with potholes and dark-eyed teenage girls roasting corn and selling small glass cups of tea.

We were in Zeelung. I was entering my second country in two hours. I had become an adventurer.

In Zeelung, we ran the gauntlet of the border hustlers, predators, buskers, owners of religious artefacts and flea-bitten hotels, all of whom, it seemed, were scoping us, trying to figure out a way to get at our wallets. They called to us in English and the local Dutch-Indian creole, but did not actually press in. They leaned and lounged against the chipped pale blue wall of the bus-shelter.

Then, right in front of them, Wally’s new plimsolls came unlaced.

‘Stop,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You want to break your hip?’

He stopped.

The efficient Jacques was immediately by his side, taking his little pack, kneeling, intending to tie the lace himself. But Wally, typically, did not wish this sort of help in public, and he shooed the nurse away as if his offer was completely unexpected.

Phonella would have been offended by this dismissal, Jean-Claude would have fought to tie the lace, but Jacques gracefully retreated, reshouldering his own pack.

So we all watched — Jacques, me, the Zeelung predators — while the bony-headed old man stooped down, like a big old shell-backed turtle, to slowly tie up his shoelace.

On the periphery of my shaded vision I became aware of one of the Zeelungers, a white-shirted, dark-eyed Presence, leaning his bony shoulder blades against the bus-shelter wall.

I felt this man before I properly saw him. I felt a prickling on my neck, and even before I studied him I was twisting away from him in my chair, so I could discreetly slide my precious Efican passport down into the secret linen pouch inside my frippes.

No sooner had I got the passport hidden than Wally finished with his shoelace.

‘OK,’ he said, slowly straightening. ‘Illico presto. Let’s go.’

He began to walk, but my wheelchair did not follow him. I twisted my neck and found Jacques gone.

Then I saw him: in the bus-shelter. Surrounded by Zeelungers.

As I watched I saw him accept a cigarette from the Presence and permit the dangerous-looking man to light it for him. These local violinistes were short. Jacques was even shorter, but, in the midst of all those creased and weathered faces, he shone like something loved and valuable.

The Presence had dark, deep-set brown eyes and scimitar-shaped sideburns, and as I watched he held out a gun — black-nosed, white-handled — towards our young employee. The hair on my neck stood on end.

Wally called harshly, but Jacques did not even turn. The Presence was like a stage magician, a demonstrator in a department store on the Rue Tienture. As I watched I saw that this was possibly a deeply dangerous situation, but I also realized — and this made my skin tingle — that Jacques was not at all afraid.

As the man shucked cartridges from his revolver, I felt I had entered a dream.

‘Jacques!’ Wally clapped his big freckled hands together.

Jacques turned, and nodded. To the Presence, he said, ‘Derthunken, un moment.’

He walked back to us, insouciantly pigeon-toed, across the gravel. I was so relieved to have him safe again, so easily.

‘He’s doing the prelude to Van Cleef’s bit from The Heroes’ Sirkus ,’ he said. ‘He could never have seen it live, but he can do the bit. It’s the show when Henk Van Cleef died.’

‘You are working,’ Wally said. ‘You are not on holiday.’

‘Any … way,’ I said. ‘This … looks … iffy.’

‘Iffy?’ Jacques smiled at me. I would not call it a pitying smile. I could not call it condescending, but he showed me the line of regular teeth in his handsome face. This was not someone who would stay locked in a dark theatre eleven years. I did not like him then. I was shocked to imagine he might not like me.

‘It’s like a quote this man is making,’ he said to me, ‘from something he never saw.’

And, damn it, if he didn’t turn and walk back to them.

‘OK,’ called Wally. He sounded like an Inkerman sheep farmer calling up his dog. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Good to meet you, Aziz,’ I heard Jacques say to the Presence. ‘Gut veer enloader.’

Wally clasped his big hands across his slippery scalp and groaned.

‘One more minute,’ Jacques called to Wally, but even as he spoke he was slipping his slender finger into the trigger guard of Aziz’s gun. He placed his feet apart. He held his left-hand index finger in the air. Then, with his right, he spun the weapon, and flicked it high into the air.

The slippered pimps and bare-footed thieves lined up along the bus-shelter wall must have been as stunned as I was, but when Jacques caught the spinning weapon by its stubby barrel they all burst into applause. It was clear to me then — not to Wally — that nothing bad would happen to him. The Zeelungers produced more guns and began to do the same sorts of Sirkus tricks themselves.

Jacques looked back at me and blushed.

Wally came behind my chair and began to push me away across the featureless grassless earth. After fifty yards or so, Jacques caught up with us, his cheeks red, his headphones slipping from his head.

‘Sorry,’ he said as he took the chair from Wally and repositioned his headphones.

‘Listen, Jules,’ Wally said in that dead quiet voice that had its roots in the violin, ‘you play that trick again, I’ll hurt you.’

In the silence that followed it occurred to me that Wally was perhaps too old to be making threats like this.

‘You understand me?’

‘I understand,’ Jacques said at last.

‘Now’ — Wally jerked his head back to where the boys from the wall had gathered in a loose semi-circle some twenty yards back — ’unless you want those violinistes to cut your throat, you better push the chair.’

We were in a kind of clay-pan bus station with no buses and three roads leading out of it. We walked along the widest of them, between a grove of banana trees rich in the odours of human excrement. It was very hot by now, and spittering with rain. The man with the white-handled revolver, alone now, began to follow us.