The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (40 page)

‘Why are we listening to this?’ Wally said, loud enough for anyone to hear.

The woman fiddled with her index cards, but she did not look at Wally.

‘Now if you come up here, I have postcards depicting Burro Plasse, two for each of you. One, I’d like you to take the trouble to mail to me, the other is a souvenir. Ah-zeez here will take you through the tunnel, but you can’t ask him to lick the stamps. So I’m asking you. When you get to where you’re going, send me the card. I like to know my customers got there safe and sound. I’m going to give you your cards and a flashlight each. Thank you for using Burro Plasse’s tunnel.’

She opened a door behind her lectern. Wally stood and limped forward. It was only then I saw how tired he was. His grey eyes were empty, exhausted. His face was dust-caked, streaked with dry sweat.

‘You … want … to … rest?’ I asked him.

‘Please hurry,’ said Aziz.

Wally turned, he turned slowly, like an old turtle, craning his neck up to bring his tight-lined jaw to the same height as Aziz’s. ‘Don’t tell me to hurry. Don’t waste my time with all this horse-shit and then tell me to hurry.’

‘Please,’ Aziz insisted. ‘You hurry.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Wally said.

Aziz’s little shoulders seemed to shiver beneath the white cotton skin of his shirt.

‘Just shut the fuck up,’ Wally said, climbing into the wheelbarrow. ‘Can you manage that, mo-ami?’

Aziz lifted his chin, and his face, for the moment he looked at Wally, was cold and shining. Then he ducked his head and passed into the cold air of the tunnel.

Our extraordinary nurse had not expected to walk straight into the tunnel. Even when the door was opened, he had imagined that there would be an ante-room, toilets, perhaps even some bread, or one of those yellow cans of herrings which he had seen on roadside tables and which, although disgusting to contemplate at first, had become more and more appealing as the day wore on. But there was no food or water. The door opened – and there was a blue gravel floor leading away into the chilly darkness of Voorstand. There was no chance to prepare for it. He was in the tunnel before he was ready. He felt the weight of rock above his head but also – paradoxically – inside his mouth. The air was dry and cold. His bladder was filled to bursting. He had to push the wheelchair hard in order to keep up with the farmer and the wheelbarrow. His arms ached. The blisters on his hands had burst, blistered, burst again, and were now weeping for a second time. The floor of the tunnel was uneven. Rough outcrops tripped him, stopped the wheelchair dead and jammed the handles into his hip bone or stomach, and it felt, almost from the beginning, like more than he could manage.

No matter what lies he had told to get here, no matter what long strands of life led him to this point, no matter that it had seemed – as recently as two hours ago when they first caught sight of the Mountains of the Moon – as if this voyage was nothing less than his destiny, now his body was traitor to his will. If he could have
resigned, he would have done it. (So it felt. So he feared.) He could have cried, but of course he could no more cry than piss, no more piss than he could resign.

It was the nature of his secret life. The whole armature of his body was, every minute of the day, pushed and pulled by the requirements of disguise. Even the way he walked had to be disguised. He had no training as an actor. He was an intellectual, a Ph.D whose prize-winning thesis had been entitled ‘Orientalist Discourses and the Construction of the Arab Nation State’. To change his natural walk had not come easily to him, and it was difficult, when occupied with this performance, to be sufficiently aware of others. But to hide his true sex, to continue to be a ‘he’ when he was in fact a ‘she’, produced a kind of numbness, fits of absent-mindedness and stupidity. There were too many things to think about, things you now had to decide with your conscious brain – how you moved your hand, whether you smiled or not, listened or interrupted. To be a man was like driving a huge and complicated machine on manual systems, so even something as simple as urinating involved planning and subterfuge, asking for a place to shit so you could squat in private.

Wally and Tristan, Aziz, the farmer – we would pee just about anywhere. We had no sense of privacy and would wave our penises and splash our sour, luxuriant urine against the blue rock walls, flap our foreskins, squeeze them dry. But Jacqui thought of urine and its disposal like a desert traveller rationing a supply of water.

It had not been like this at the beginning. She had begun her association with me at a time when the risk was less, the stakes were lower, but by the time she was in the tunnel with her bursting bladder she was the real thing, an undercover agent, an operative of the Efican DoS in an operation which involved the secret agencies of both Efica and Voorstand.

For three years she had sat behind her computer terminal at her third floor ‘pen’ in the DoS ‘Green House’ on the Boulevard des Indiennes, a POLIT analyst, a long-haired girl who was remarkable mostly for her eccentric dress, her baggy pants, her Polynesian earrings, the geometric tattoos on her upper arm.

Fresh from the University of Efica she had applied for a posting in Operations. ‘No angst, sweets,’ the Section Leader said. ‘We’ll
transfer you when we have the opening.’ But that was typical DoS bullshit – there were two women in Operations and no one was going to add another one. She visited her Section head twice a week for thirty-four months. She drove him crazy, flirted with him, bored him, infuriated him, made him laugh. She wrote a sign in Sirkus-style lettering –
Lost in POLIT.
She stuck it on her terminal: apart from her Section head (who smiled), only Daphne Loukakis found it funny, and she was in the same boat – a smart woman trying to get into Operations.

Jacqui translated and analysed trade journals, foreign press transcripts of newscasts in Tashkent and Quom. From her desk she liked to observe the unmarked cars of the operatives as they waited at the security gate to be admitted to the building. She never saw an operative on the third floor, never met one inside the building. They drove in and out of the security gate with their tanned male arms resting on their open windows. They hung around in the basement wearing shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters. They told jokes and threw medicine balls at each other. She knew this because she managed, through Daphne Loukakis, to get asked to the drinking parties at the Printemps.

In Analysis the operatives were thought to be barbarians. They were crude. They had words for penises that Jacqui had never heard before – wind sock, blood sausage, rifle, cyclops, middle finger, marrow bone, zob, tringler, drooler. They did not just take a shit. They laid a log or cast a bronze. But they were not halfhearted, or meek. They were alive. They took risks.

You had to discount a lot of things they thought – intellectually, politically, they were not far above the neighbours in her mother’s street – but at the core they were the real thing. That was her opinion. They did not live as if they were in rehearsal. They lived like this was it. They did hard things, they suffered. They would walk off a cliff for you if you were their friend. They died for each other. They had nightmares and found it hard to trust their lovers.

And Jacqui, who feared only what was mild and reasonable, massaged their sweaty heads, pressed her face against their chest hair, driven by an anxious itchy sort of need that you could say, if you were being simple about it, went back to a cautious mother wasting her life behind a privet hedge.

She first heard about me when she was in the Printemps Inn with
Wendell Deveau watching the Nez Noir Grand Prix with the sound muted. Wendell was not her ‘boyfriend’. She did not have a boyfriend. Wendell was a camarade. They had sex together. He was not an old man, no more than thirty, and he was still handsome, but he had already been through the fire-bombing of Blue’s headquarters and he was now balding and pale and overweight as though bloated with the gas of secrets he could not release. He was wry and he could be a gentle man and he had a cute dimpled chin, but on each of the three occasions they went to bed he spoiled the night by being angry about the DoS and what it had done to him. On the day of the Nez Noir Grand Prix he had learned that he was about to be appointed ‘baby-sitter’ to a monster so notoriously ugly that the previous two operatives were said to have retched involuntarily on first encounter.

I did not know it, but I was their ‘keyhole’ to the January 20 Group. I was a low-level security risk, a boring, tedious report job. I had a 30-megabyte file filled with detailed examples of my unpleasant character, my ugly face and body.

So there you see it: her interest in me, at the beginning, was opportunistic, manipulative. I was so unattractive a job that others might just let her have me.

‘No way,’ Wendell said when she suggested she might apply for the post. ‘The mark won’t hire a woman. He falls in love.’

Someone else would have been discouraged, but this was Jacqui. She wanted me. And two days later there was a furore at the third floor ‘man trap’ when the guard tried to deny her admittance to her own workplace. She had chopped her long black hair and swept it back with mousse. She was wearing a wide-shouldered black jacket which had once been her father’s. The layered look came later – on the first day, she wore just one shirt with a white tank-top beneath it.

The thing was: she fooled them all, not just the guard but everyone who saw her. She had practised with Wendell, had him walk and sit whilst naked, watched what his cock and balls did to his walk. And she got the walk, without exaggerating it. She did not go in for ball-scratching or leg-spreading or any of the mistakes you see so often on the stage. She centred her maleness on her eyes, and in her jaw. She led with her chest. She hollowed her cheeks, made herself dangerous and slit-eyed like a snake, and her body followed the instruction.

If the assignment had been politically hot, there is no way she would have got me. But although the January 20 Group had the publicly declared aim of attacking sites of Voorstand’s installations in Efica, no one really expected anything more terrorizing than an essay or a letter to the
Chemin Rouge Reformer.
Jacqui got me because I was low-status work – demeaning, disgusting, safe.

Once she got me, she changed what I was. I was safe, she made me unsafe. I was inactive, she made me active. I was a thing to her, a maw, a streaming face, a line of gums, a pair of pale staring eyes. At the same time she was professional. She valued that quality almost as much as courage. And once she was my nurse she cared for me with almost fanatical dedication – washed my body, changed my sheets, fed me with a spoon when necessary. She was as discreet and complete as any butler, but at the same time this twenty-three-year-old young woman was fraudulently misrepresenting my activities to her computer.

In DoS terminology, she made me Sexy, that is, she loaded my file with interesting specs and features, until her superiors had no choice but to send her on this trip halfway across the world. They had no other choice, because it was her choice that they should not.

Likewise: it was her choice to speak to Aziz back at the Morean border, to accept the pistol when he offered it, to spin its six-pound weight on her single index finger.

When he walked beside her in the tunnel, illuminating the uneven floor with his moon-yellow flashlight, it was her choice to keep going, to lean forward and put her full 102 pounds into the chair, to force it over the jags of rock. The blisters would heal. The pain would go. She could control her bladder, could carry this piss all the way to Saarlim City.

When she had spun the pistol on her finger it had been her choice, but it had not felt like it. She had walked towards Aziz on that gluey grey-skied day because … she was twenty-three years old … she had that jelly feeling in her legs, the warm soft heat behind her eyes. It had been a little madness, a frisson. But far from evaporating, as you might expect, this feeling had been distilled,
condensed, intensified by almost everything she saw thereafter – even, for Chrissakes, the man’s domestic life. The sight of a wife, children – you would expect this to be a killer, but she carried her crush in deep disguise, right into his home. She slit her eyes, hollowed her cheeks, thrust her jaw, got a tingling at the nape of her neck watching how this cool, elegant man with the poker player’s eyes was also the dab, the patron. She got numb and icy in her sinuses watching how he exercised his power, how he listened to his brothers with his dark eyes never leaving their faces, how he nodded, gestured, settled a dispute about propane gas by placing a hand against another man’s cheek. Jacqui, who hated the ordinariness of the lower-middle class of Efica, found herself sympathetically imagining life inside that little grocery store. She liked how they lashed the bedding on to the rafters just before dawn, the way they scrubbed the cracked green concrete floor until it smelt like a ship at sea; and although the men did have Glock automatics stuck in their belts, there was also a definite edge to the place she found almost religious – hierarchical, ascetic, clean. She was not, herself, religious, but this slight foreign man with weird-looking sideburns was that rarity – not mediocre.

When she rode with him in the truck, he talked to her man to man. It was almost unbearable, the intimacy. She twice had visions of resting her palm on his bristly olive-skinned neck. He told her frankly, in English, how they hi-jacked the big gasoline auto-lorries when they crossed the border out of Voorstand. He would die not knowing he had said these things to a woman. She did not want to tell him either. That was the paradox. It was her business to hold secrets, to retain them, to gain pleasure only from their tumescent pressure, never their release.

Aziz made Wally Paccione appear more and more a spiv. He was rude about the blown-out tyre, bad-tempered on the road, and now, as they pushed on through the stale air of the tunnel, the old Efican seemed to Jacqui to look like a Grand Duke by Bertolt Brecht. Sometimes, when his wheelbarrow hit a bump, you could hear him cuss. But he never did direct a human remark to the man who pushed him. Jacqui had watched. She had not yet seen so much as a smile or a nod pass between them.