‘What are youse on about, I wanted to say, it’s completely beside the point. Should I have done?’ she said to Bruce, who had been rinsing their mugs in the sink.

‘No, they wouldn’t have got it.’

That had been her thought too. They would only have gone silent on her and paid no notice. And anyway, she had remembered then their kindness to invite her along like that and felt better disposed towards them.

And it was not like any of their remarks had been news to her. She had read such a portrait in Murray’s own self-deprecating words, part of his recent output. But she disliked them coming from anyone else.

The simple truth was, she had never much cared for appearances. A person’s looks – pretty or ugly or pretty ugly – being neither here nor there. Only once or twice, in her teens and twenties, had she bothered with make-up or clothes thought fashionable in imitation of sighted people (and some blind she knew), and neither experiment had lasted very long.

She remembered, from back in primary and high school, sighted girls feuding pointlessly over their favourite heartthrobs. ‘He’s five foot eight,’ a girl would say of this or that screen or pop star. ‘He’s so not,’ another would retort, ‘more like five foot seven and a half.’

She’d remembered this in the taxi home from the reading. It had made her laugh.

✲

Woolloongabba. Not a word Amanda could ever forget, even now. She had started school – a school for the blind – there. Twenty minutes or so in the taxi from her parents’ home.

Her mother had worked in an office as a typist. Her father sold automobile spare parts, and would later give tours of Brisbane on his motorcycle.

Woolloongabba. In her memory were the tricycles, the breathless circling of the schoolyard. Round and round and round you went until the air inhaled blazed the lungs. Or you fell off. Then a grown-up would come and pick you up and kiss the graze or scrape better. ‘Haven’t you been in the wars, Amanda?’

No helmets in those days. No protection pads for elbows and knees. She’d assent to the kiss but not to being picked up. She’d pick herself up. Then jump back in the saddle. How hard and fast she’d pedal! Tutting at the walls – a click, click, click of the tongue – so as to hear the bricks as they approached, and know just when to turn.

The first time she had laid fingers on a page of Braille was in year one. She was six and making the acquaintance of a machine called the Perkins Brailler, a sort of typewriter, though the keys were few, in a single row, and wrote dots that embossed the paper. ‘A’ was a single raised dot you typed with your left index. ‘C’ – two dots – required both indexes to depress their keys simultaneously. You typed the four dots of ‘G’ with the index and middle finger of both hands. When she typed (‘brailled’) a sentence, a ding told her she had seven spaces left before she reached the margin. Then she counted to seven as she typed, pressed the new line button, moved the cursor back, and continued writing.

The Perkins used sheets of paper that were rather thick and stiff. Amanda would pull hers out of the machine when she was done, lay it flat and get a feel for reading. She trailed her left index along each sentence, felt the tiny bumps of its words and the tingles flashing up her spine. Soon, whenever she spoke a sentence, she found she could summon up every dot of every word and sense them in her mind: the repeating diagonals in ‘taxi’, the vertical drops in ‘ball’, the expansive texture in ‘book’.

Around this time, education policy in Queensland was changing; disabled pupils were being integrated into mainstream schools, and Amanda joined them reluctantly. It was hard to leave her class of half a dozen in Woolloongabba for a class of thirty. Obtaining good grades did not make it any easier. She never got used to the ways of these bigger schools and pursued her own curriculum on the side.

Now that she was a full-fledged reader, she needed a supply of books; but books in Braille occupied only a modest shelf of the school library, a poor excuse for a library really. There were some novels that she could check out, but no poetry. An abridged biography of Louis Braille. For the rest, textbooks. She did open their covers, during playtime, and it was then that she learned to what tuneless uses language might be put. All the same she read on, the pages at least making up in interesting words what they lacked in story. At home, her hands wandered inside the longest of these tomes for hours. History. Geography. Physics. Music. She read until her fingers ached and she stopped to rub them. She was gathering words, much as other children gather insects or stickers. She could make a game of locating those with similar feels, vowels in common, palindromes. Those that go well together in a sentence. Sentences which, spoken aloud, play a melody of strength or wariness or pleasure. A great inquisitive itch urged this compiling and listing and sorting, and it would never entirely leave her. She was discovering how a word, used right, becomes an echo – an echo of the world.

She felt her mind encompass new possibilities, among them, the possibility of belonging.

Always, as she grew up, Amanda sought out little oases of silence – what other people think of as silence – in a library, or at her brother’s side. Away from these she was seldom out of the oppressive sound of talk and traffic and television. Even long after she went to bed, her parents’ house would not fall quiet. The TV set, unplugged and two rooms down, kept up its pestering whine. On summer nights, cooling walls popped and creaked; year-round, water gurgled in pipes. Noises that lit up her brain, and held her back from sleep. A Walkman. That was the solution she came up with. An audiobook on cassette – the volume upped just enough to block out the bedroom. Some nights, for a change, she switched on the radio – through which she would go on to discover just how magical poetry could be.

It might have been during the day, not at night. She had got into the habit of listening to the radio after class. One day, then, she had come into her room and turned the dial on her Walkman. Emily Dickinson was on. Emily Dickinson on ABC national radio.

This would have been the mid-nineties. She was eighteen then, starting out on her bachelor’s degree in media.

The name pronounced on the radio meant nothing to Amanda, other than an invitation to listen. She was ever eager to learn something new. As she sat and listened, the realisation crept up on her that the lady talking rather slowly, even strangely, was not in fact talking but reciting, and that she was not Emily Dickinson. The broadcaster was reciting something like a nursery rhyme but it wasn’t quite that. It was more solemn. Longer words. Latin-sounding. Like something a sorcerer might say, Amanda thought. Higitus figitus. It made her think of an incantation.

At the end of the programme, a discussion of Dickinson’s life and work, the broadcaster would have said ‘poet’. That was a reading of selected verses by the American poet Emily Dickinson, the lady might have said.

Amanda went to her computer at the university the next day and looked the poet up. She downloaded some Emily Dickinson.

She would download more poets after that. But not Murray. Not yet. That would be for another, later, time. Another her.

✲

It is a hot day, a yellow day, and the emu stops to drink the morning’s shower at a rock-hole. Her neck is long and thin and curved to Amanda’s touch. Circuitous must be the raindrops’ journey through it. When the beak lifts at last, Amanda follows her across the pages and kilometres, in and out of the shade of the kurrajong trees, tasting dust. The bird is gawky and shy. She does not sing as she zigzags, though she wears her hair like a Beatle. (That is what the Braille says.) Her attention goes to pebbles, big and small, round and oval, smooth and jagged, and all of them, appetising. Pebbles that, closer to towns, are in fact bottle tops. Collectibles in the private museum of her stomach.

Amanda knows all this from her reading, in particular the poem by Les Murray whose full title is ‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’.

She knows the shape of the bird’s body, from the head to the three toes, thanks to a scale model she bought online several years ago.

The model stands on her computer desk. The emu poem lies at the heart of her thesis.

She takes time out to keep coming back to these lines – to this sun and rock and tracks in the sand.

The roaming freedom of an emu.

Cédric

‘Monsieur Villani, Cédric Patrice Thierry, has voted.’

The woman’s voice was neutral. It was her election official’s duty to pronounce each voter’s name as they slid their envelope into the ballot box. The rangy man at the box was none other than the district’s deputy in the National Assembly; after a short campaign, he hoped to secure a second five-year term. This scene in which the woman and deputy were taking part, in a classroom in the Essonne, outside of Paris, was being filmed for TV, and during those self-conscious seconds the man saw himself in the mirror of the camera’s gaze: his pageboy brown hair and three-week-long beard. A glittering spider brooch on his lapel. A shirt, its collar open.

Viewers, turning to the day’s rolling news (or to one of the bulletins), had long ceased to be captured by the spider. In any other country, of course, or here as well ten or twelve years ago, that’s just about all anyone would see; only, people in France had grown so accustomed to the sight by June 2022 they could take it more or less for granted.

Cédric Villani’s unique style. Many had discovered it on late-night culture shows; many more, in primetime interview slots. I’d seen it in both and also on the news – long before his foray into politics – in 2010 when he won a Fields Medal, among the most prestigious prizes in mathematics. Say ‘Cédric Villani’ thereafter and you pictured his three-piece suit completed by a silk cravat – red, green, blue or white – a pocket watch, and the eight-legged brooch that intrigued so.

What planet are you from? the interviewers and presenters asked him, or wished to, jokingly or half-jokingly. From what century?

But it was simply his style, he noted quietly, not speaking in jest. The spider? Well, it came out of a personal collection of several dozen. It was a mystery why he wore these brooches. However hard questioners tried pressing him he always denied them any explanation.

The impression left by these media appearances in his life before politics had been of unabashed eccentricity; but also, and inseparable from this, of a restless intelligence employed in furiously obscure ways. All those evenings, not long after suppertime, he had come into millions of homes and spoken in that soft and reedy voice of his about excited plasmas and lazy gases, curved spaces and differing geometries and the surprising harmonies in a theorem. He was happiest, most fluent, describing the beauty he detected in these harmonies. The remembered joy would animate his body and widen his large brown eyes and sometimes, as he was speaking, he rocked himself ever so gently back and forth.

His voice had seemed – after a period of getting used to it – innocent: it seemed to say things as they were, without distortion. The verbal tics and tricks that infect so much of public speech were, in him, nowhere to be heard. Each of his utterances rang with sincerity.

✲

In the autumn of 2012, around the time of the release of my third book, I was invited to address a multidisciplinary conference on society in the future. It was taking place before a large audience at L’Olympia, the capital’s oldest concert hall. Bryan Adams had played there a few weeks before, and the Pixies – not the easiest acts to follow.

One of the organisers led me backstage to a large dressing room and I stepped inside, expectant. I was early and most of the other speakers due to go on hadn’t arrived yet. As I went to hang up my coat I noticed a pair of feet in socks lying on the floor over by the far wall. The owner of these feet, hearing the clatter made by the coat hangers, promptly stirred and rose and came over to greet me. He’d been lying on his back to collect his thoughts, he said. He didn’t need to introduce himself.

A freedom of limb, a face shaven clean (as it always was in those years), a spontaneity in his speech. At once he addressed me familiarly as tu, perhaps because he had read my work or seen me on stage or TV somewhere before, or because we were rather close in age, both of us in our thirties, or quite simply because he wasn’t one to stand on ceremony. Having readied myself to address him using the formal vous, out of habit but also for politeness’s sake, I now found myself at a loss to know how I should continue. For a moment I stood silent, hesitating between tu and vous. But the mathematician was unlike anyone I had ever met, so thoroughly himself, it seemed to me, and candid. Tu it was, then.

I didn’t feel much surprise that he should speak to me so directly; I took it to be in his nature, which struck me as childlike. Indeed it wasn’t at all hard to see the erstwhile child in him, as it could be in other men. It was too easy, if anything. His earnest manner of speaking, his socked feet, and gaze – timid yet intent – made you forget all the years that would have brought him to his present height (he stood a fraction under six feet tall) and stature. You could forget that he had a history, and many facets to his personality.

To open our conversation he asked me one or two – routine enough – questions. I barely knew him then, but my impression was that he asked these less for the answers – equally routine – than in order to ask better questions. The best question, I felt, to his way of thinking, would be one that spawned no narrowing answer but instead a dozen expanding follow-up questions simultaneously. And as it happened, this was the kind of conversation I too liked to practise: protean, prone to digressions, free-associative. Soon, we were on to prime numbers and poems, going down lines of mutual enquiry: here was a man after my own mind.

We could have talked then for hours, like old friends reunited after a long separation, but minutes into our conversation one of the organisers came through the door, ‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur Tammet, Monsieur Villani, the conference is about to start.’

He showed no sign of stage fright. He lived for mathematics, and talking about mathematics, and the long succession of public events that kept him on the road never appeared to take it out of him; after every conference, another would be allocated a slot in the following month’s, or year’s, diary. On the contrary, it seemed, all this talking shop replenished his reserves of energy; he craved and thrived on it. One day he’d be down south in Lyon to meet a lab of aspiring physicists, the next, up on stage here in Paris to address a full house of amateurs. He liked mixing things up, addressing everyone, building bridges between the arts and sciences, two worlds which tended otherwise to keep entirely to themselves.

He went to his rucksack then and carefully brought out a pouch and opening it revealed a nest of spider brooches (I counted six), some decorated with red glass, others green, sizes itsy-bitsy to tarantula. He chose one whose sparkly long legs would catch the stage light best and pinned it to his lapel. And then suddenly he remembered his shoes and crouched on the floor putting them on before we headed for the hall.