'And I have to pay for the guard, and the pumpkins.'

'No worries, mo-ami. We need to purchase his wheelbarrow as well.'

'That's ... my ... money ... you're ... spending,' I said.

'I'm sorry,' Wally said. 'We'll be in Voorstand tonight.'

My face never coloured evenly. When I was upset my nose streamed. I dribbled, and my head jerked and rolled. Wally picked me up. He was seventy-three years old. He curved his body around mine, and pinned my arms around my chest. 'You want to get laid, son,' he said, 'it can happen in Saarlim. Anything can happen there.'

9.

I am a pa.s.sionate man, full of feelings and opinions, but I knew no woman wanted me and I knew no woman ever would. When I wanted to go back to Aziz's store it was for two sane reasons: number one: I did not want to be stared at; number two: I did not want to sit out there in the open with all that money taped to me.

But Wally could not forget something that had happened six years ago, and I was therefore punished all over again, and the memory of the humiliation and pain, the darkness of the nights and days when I never wished to live again the past all came back, while in the present we were compelled to exhaust ourselves, to push on toward the border in a ridiculous fashion, without dignity.

The convoy travelled in this order: first, Aziz with his rifle; second, Wally riding in the wheelbarrow; third, a squat broad-shouldered farmer with a black hat and bare feet, engaged to push the wheelbarrow; fourth, me in my chair; fifth, my stylish, uncomplaining nurse. Three children also followed for a little way, but by the time we came to the first stream, they had gone.

There was more audience for this silly spectacle than for any of my somersaults or tumbles at the Feu Follet, more than you might believe such a deserted-looking road could have delivered. All along the way there were knots of people standing if they were waiting for something else, I don't know what it was.

These people were extremely poor you could see it in their skin, their clothes, but mostly in their dark, deep, recessed eyes and a sort of tension across their cheekbones that made them shine.

'Goeie daag,' Jacques said, not once, but many times.

No one answered him.

Occasionally a woman would cross herself. As we moved closer to the border the situation of these silent farmers seemed to become more desperate. They stood on their broad splayed bare feet staring at us, ammunition belts strapped diagonally across their chests, their eyes filled with awe, disgust, pity. They did not know that they were seeing 50,000 Guilders pa.s.s them by.

Aziz was angry to have been forced to leave the truck and now all his solicitousness had gone. He was cold and withdrawn. He strutted ahead of us, duck-footed, a second pearl-handled pistol clearly visible against his black trousers. He rarely turned around.

I could hear the distant crump of what may have been artillery, Jacques' rasping breath as he uncomplainingly pushed my chair up the hill, the crunch of gravel beneath our tyres. Wally, balanced in a wheelbarrow which jarred his spine and rubbed the skin raw, twice lost his balance and was tipped out on to the roadside. The first time he leapt up cursing, fast as a crab on an open beach. The second time he lay there, dry-lipped and exhausted. None of the bystanders stooped to help him. Indeed they stepped back, pushing back in amongst a small stand of maize, damaging the new crop rather than touch the old vulture with the bleeding crown.

I could not a.s.sist him, a hateful feeling. I will not dwell on it. It was Aziz who did it, although he spoke to Wally more as employer to employee and, when he did bend to lift him, displayed a kind of disdain for his injured person which would have been unthinkable an hour before. He locked his fine olive-skinned arms under the old man's, and lugged him upright. Wally's white shirt and trousers were now filthy. Aziz's mouth was fastidious. His dark eyes were furious. It was all to do with being forced to abandon his truck, the damage to his pumpkins.

By noon he had led us into even less hospitable country and, apart from a solitary farmer with a rough-handled hoe on his shoulder, we had no more witnesses to our journey. All this, I now know, was exhilarating for Jacques. In fact, I knew it then. I could feel it in my chair. His hands were blistered, his lips white and dry, but his eyes were small, bright, burning in the secret shadow of his brow.

The road was slowly rising and we switched on my electric motor to give my nurse some rest. It had perhaps three hours' range in this country, slipping, growling against the gradient and the loose rocks. Jacques walked behind me, steadying the chair. The country was becoming more open. The vegetation had thinned until you would have to call it desert khaki gra.s.ses, small clumps of fleshy cactuses with long nicotine-yellow spikes. White limestone broke through the yellow clay of the road surface, which was also deeply scoured along its edges. The chair lurched and crashed, but I was not frightened.

As we came closer and closer to Voorstand, my irritability also seeped away. Colour crept into the soil, first in pinks which became more and more bilious, then in acid greens. We stopped to rest beneath b.u.t.ts as gorgeous and sickly as melted ice-cream. In the distance we could see the snow-capped Mountains of the Moon, inside Voorstand itself. Twice we saw the ice-cold lines left by fighter planes across the cloudless sky.

We pushed on, towards the Sirkus Tour of Saarlim.

Soon the air began to have an afternoon chill, and the road degenerated further we had to find a path downhill over dangerous gutters and between strewn boulders.

Jacques called and pointed down into a gully beside the road, and there, in the gloom of the valley, I could make out what at first appeared to be a wireless station (antennae, satellite dishes, guy wires), but I soon saw was a series of huts all secured to the ground by a complicated series of guy ropes.

'Kan ons kakshtoop?' Jacques called to Aziz.

'What are you saying?'

'I asked, is there somewhere where we can take a s.h.i.t,' Jacques said.

The road became softer, sandier. We came across a wide white glistening flat towards the cabins where the red and yellow Voorstand flag the big moon, the sixteen stars hung limply in the air. Standing below the flag was a figure dressed in navy blue an overweight pink-white woman of perhaps sixty or seventy, dressed in a metallic flecked pant suit. She wore a peaked hat with gold braid. She had tightly curled blonde hair. She wore bright blue-framed gla.s.ses and shining leather lace-up shoes.

'Ah-zeez,' she called, as we approached. 'Ah-zeez, where in the Christ have you been?'

She turned on her heel and we b.u.mped along behind her, towards the huts. As we went she talked, but she did not once turn her head.

'You ain't going to have them out the other side till three a.m.' The accent would have been familiar to you she was a Voorstander, a trader, one of your people, a lone entrepreneur on the very edges of your law and land. 'When you make an appointment,' she said, 'you got to keep it. Next time, Ah-zeez, I'll just footsack you. I got other stuff to do out here sides this, you hear me?'

Aziz inclined his head in what may have been a sarcastic version of a bow.

'Good,' she said. 'I thank you.'

'Excuse me,' Jacques said. But she turned and led us into a small hut which proved to be nothing more than an ante-room. We pa.s.sed up a small wooden ramp (me still in my chair and Wally still clinging to his wheelbarrow) into a little dusty cave with whitewashed walls. There were a number of rusty folding chairs facing a small lectern and it was obvious that we were intended to sit there. Wally climbed out of the barrow and sat in the front row rubbing at his hands and elbows.

'OK' I asked him as Jacques pushed me in beside Wally. 'You ... want ... to ... rest ... here?'

His eyes were dull, exhausted. 'I just want to get there,' he said. 'How about you?'

'I ... just ... want ... to ... get ... there ... too.'

Jacques sat behind us in the second row. The farmer who had pushed Wally's wheelbarrow took his hat off and sat in the back row. Aziz remained at the door.

The woman took off her braided cap and placed it on the lectern.

10.

That woman never looked at me, not all the time I sat there. She was not so easy on the eyes herself she had a fleshy face, with large jowls and small eyes which distorted behind her thick lenses. She did not even glance my way. She looked down at her lectern, or over my shoulder at Jacques. I was not insulted. It was fine with me.

'This three-mile tunnel,' she said, referring to a stack of tattered index cards, 'was dug by a fellow wanted to get into Voorstand every bit as bad as you. Thanks to him you have this lovely tunnel. Thanks to his widow I have the pleasure of being its present owner.

'The man who dug this tunnel, his name was Burro Pla.s.se. Burro Pla.s.se was a posturer in Saarlim, Voorstand. Has anyone ever heard of Pla.s.se's Knot?'

None of us.

'Pla.s.se's Knot was the invention of Burro Pla.s.se. He was a famous posturer. He could do the backwards and the forwards, both. Mostly, people who claim to do Pla.s.se's Knot are not doing what he did.

'Burro Pla.s.se was a posturer in Saarlim, Voorstand. Came home one night, just after midnight. It was a snowy night, mid-winter, and there was the Hairy Man sitting on Pla.s.se's stoop, sack in his hand.

'"What you got there?" Burro Pla.s.se said to the Hairy Man.

'"Just a little old sack," said the Hairy Man.

'Then Burro Pla.s.se knew the Hairy Man had come to get him and take him down underneath the earth. He knew his time had come.

'But Burro Pla.s.se he was young and had a fancy lady sleeping in his bed upstairs and he was determined not to be took by no little black hairy thing, so he says to the ugly little creature who is sitting there, "I know you like the Sirkus, Hairy Man. How about I show you a few new tricks fore we go?"

'The Hairy Man had icicles on his beard and snow on his big eyebrows, but when he heard this he swished his tail and he said to Burro Pla.s.se, "I reckon I seed just about everything there is to see, but why don't you go ahead? Don't make no difference to me."

'So that night in the snow in the Kakdorp in Saarlim City, while his fancy lady was sleeping in the room above his head, Burro Pla.s.se did the best show of his life. He did it in the street wearing his blue singlet and his swimming trunks. He was thirty-three years old, which is old for a posturer, but that night he did knots for the Hairy Man no one ever saw on earth, or in the other place.

'When the show was done, the Hairy Man said to Burro Pla.s.se, "I'll tell you what I'll do, on account of how you are just about the best posturer I ever saw. Instead of taking you below the earth I'll take you on to the other side of the Mountains of the Moon, and if you can dig through the mountains, you can come home to that fancy lady in the room upstairs."

'Now maybe you folks come from some parts like Pakistan where they never heard of no Hairy Man, and maybe you are thinking this is just a story I'm telling for the money. But you already paid your money to Aziz and I don't have to tell no one any story, and I'll tell you there are folk who say he came here because he had TB, but if I have to choose between the Hairy Man and a fellow with TB digging three miles through solid rock, well, you tell me.

'Folks thinks his name is Burro Burro cause he cause he burrowed burrowed this tunnel, but that is not the case. He was named Burro cause he had this-here donkey. We call it a burro. He used to take that burro into Droogstroom once a month to get supplies. I knew Burro Pla.s.se. As you'll see from the postcards he was a big old fellow with a long white beard.' this tunnel, but that is not the case. He was named Burro cause he had this-here donkey. We call it a burro. He used to take that burro into Droogstroom once a month to get supplies. I knew Burro Pla.s.se. As you'll see from the postcards he was a big old fellow with a long white beard.'

She removed the card from the top of the stack and placed it on the bottom. I looked across at Wally. His hands were cut and bleeding from the wheelbarrow.

'What is this horse-s.h.i.t?' he said.

'Many folks,' the woman said, 'also think he digged the tunnel for smuggling purposes. Nothing could be further from the truth. He digged that tunnel to get back to that fancy lady, but by the time he got back there she was an old lady, eighty-five years old. Her name was Mary Anne Lubbock and you can see her grave in Saarlim Central Cemetery. She was the one I bought the tunnel from, and she was the one told me this story.'

'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 Pla.s.se, 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 Pla.s.se'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-s.h.i.t and then tell me to hurry.'

'Please,' Aziz insisted. 'You hurry.'

'Shut the f.u.c.k up,' Wally said.

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

'Just shut the f.u.c.k 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 pa.s.sed into the cold air of the tunnel.

11.

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 p.i.s.s, no more p.i.s.s 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 ent.i.tled '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 s.e.x, 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 s.h.i.t 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 p.e.n.i.ses 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.n.a.lyst, 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 bulls.h.i.t 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. 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. 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 a.n.a.lysed 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 bas.e.m.e.nt wearing shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters. They told jokes and threw medicine b.a.l.l.s at each other. She knew this because she managed, through Daphne Loukakis, to get asked to the drinking parties at the Printemps.

In a.n.a.lysis the operatives were thought to be barbarians. They were crude. They had words for p.e.n.i.ses 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 s.h.i.t. 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, ma.s.saged 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 s.e.x 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 c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s 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 a.s.signment 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. Chemin Rouge Reformer. Jacqui got me because I was low-status work demeaning, disgusting, safe. 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 s.e.xy, 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.