Take Me to Paris, Johnny by John Foster

Author:John Foster [Foster, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘The slight despair

At what we are,

The marginal grief

Is source of life.’

—W. H. Auden, ‘The Exiles’

We were not like lovers in a novel, amazed with joy in the moment of our reunion. We had travelled too often, and too far, for that. No, it would be truer to say we were content, happy with the prospect of ordinary pleasures and a life together. And if we had known how brief this time would be, how fragile were the foundations of our contentment, we would not have arranged things any differently.

He arrived on a visitor’s visa, as the GITF recommended. We seemed to fit so neatly into the Minister’s guidelines that we didn’t anticipate any problems with his application for permanent residence. The only cause for apprehension was the health tests the Department routinely administered. Would they introduce an AIDS test, either as a general policy or, still worse, targeted at high-risk applicants? There was pressure for them to move in this direction, though so far they had been deterred by concern about civil liberties or the desire to maintain the confidence of what they now described increasingly as ‘the gay community’. Yet if they did introduce the test, what if he turned out to be HIV-positive? Would they declare him a public health risk? Would they consider the care for him an unwarranted impost on the national health budget? Would they send him back to New York? And then? The sooner he submitted his application, the better.

By now the GITF people had considerable expertise in the matter of applications. They had advised on half a dozen cases and the Minister had complimented them on the exemplary documentation provided. Clearly it would be wise to follow their guidelines.

In submitting an application they said, the Australian half of the committed relationship needed to show that if the permit were not granted he would suffer severe emotional hardship. But how do you talk to a bureaucracy about such things?

It seemed easier, safer, more in line with the GITF’s sense of etiquette, to leave my threatened emotional stability to the representation of friends: of Susan, who had opened her house to us in Lincoln and guided us round the cold cathedral; of Jim, whom Juan always associated with the great bearded Assyrian kings in the British Museum; of Rickard, to whom I had first written about my encounter with Juan; of our neighbour, Father Jim. They composed the most supportive testimonies, saying that we had been through thick and thin, that it was costing us a fearful amount of money to maintain our trans-Pacific relationship and that I would suffer severely if the Minister didn’t give us what we wanted. The combined effect of these statements was to make me sound a trifle unhinged; but Juan thought that they were perfectly correct.

There was a lot that was left unsaid. Take the question of money, for instance. There were people who wondered about that. They asked me, ‘Who paid for all those fares?’ And in

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