The Blind Eye Read online

  In those early days, I was never sure whether we would make any progress. I could see he did not have any faith in what I do (in fact, like most of my patients, he had close to no understanding of the process), but over the years since his return from Port Tremaine, he had found no help from traditional medicine, and he had become, as he admitted reluctantly, somewhat desperate.

  As he sketched out his life for me prior to that trip, I was astounded at the hedonistic abandon that had clearly been an integral part of who he was. Not because it shocked me, but because the change that had occurred appeared to be so dramatic.

  Even as a child he had never been able to keep still. The numerous nannies who were hired to look after him had usually quit after a couple of weeks. There was a brief period in which his mother had taken him to psychiatrists, all of whom had pronounced him to be precociously bright, somewhat difficult, but quite within the range of normal, and with no relief to be found in their verdicts, she had decided to just accept the way he was. If the nannies threatened to quit, she offered them a raise. When that didn’t work, there was always another who would take the job (particularly with its accompanying salary). If Silas had too much energy, well, there was no point fighting it, and she took to bringing him down from his room for dinner-party guests, his wild dancing to any music they chose to play always a sure source of entertainment, particularly after they’d had a few drinks. And as he got older, there were the boarding schools.

  Eight by the time I was sixteen, he admitted.

  Why? I asked.

  He looked out the window as he listed his sins: selling drugs, sex in the dormitories, refusing to participate in sport; he was even an instigator in a Gay Pride rally despite having no clear sexual preference. Just the usual stuff, he told me.

  His parents finally found an experimental school that was willing to take him.

  The School Without Walls.

  I smiled as he told me the name. I knew it. I had been there myself, three years earlier.

  Similar sins, I told Silas, unable to hide the glimmer of amusement in my eyes as I remembered the way in which I, too, had rebelled, shortly after my mother was first hospitalised with depression, and how my father, an analyst, believed that the answer was more freedom, rather than less.

  It was at that moment that Silas decided he would attempt to trust me, despite the misgivings he’d had on first entering the building and seeing the tenants listed at the entrance: aura readers, psychic healers and colour therapists.

  As he shifted in his chair and looked around the consulting room, he told me he wanted this to work, he needed it to work, and I promised him I would do all I could to help.

  3

  Silas had been living with the way he was for three years before he saw me. Looking back, I do not know how he did it.

  As I sit outside in the brightness of the morning sun remembering our conversations, I can hear the others packing a picnic lunch and I know I will soon have to join them. I have found myself becoming increasingly antisocial (not just here, but in life generally, although at home this trend is less obvious than it is in a place such as this where I have to live with others), and I do not know how to reverse this process, or if, in fact, I even have the will to attempt it.

  Are you working on something? Hamish asked me this morning. He is one of the provers and he has been encouraging everyone to do yoga with him in the morning, refusing to give up on those of us who promise him we will be out there on the verandah with him in the freezing cold, just not today, not this particular dawn, but tomorrow.

  He wanted to know whether I was writing a new text, and I told him I was simply using the time as space in which to think, that it was something I had been craving.

  I guess it must get draining, treating people, he said.

  Not really. It was an automatic response, and as I uttered it I realised there was no need to lie. I smiled at him. Actually, it does.

  I had never expected the degree of exhaustion that I would experience in full-time consulting, and this is not to say that I do not enjoy my work. I am lucky, I have found what is right for me. Six months into my medical degree, I stumbled upon this field and switched courses, despite considerable advice to the contrary. Suddenly, I had discovered a whole new way of looking at the world, and at the end of my studies I was eager to begin practising. I wanted to heal, I still do; it is just that sometimes the weight of other lives, the intensity of the process that is necessary with each and every patient, can be overwhelming, and I was ill-prepared. In my eagerness to make a difference, I took on too much. Worse still, I am, for various reasons, a person who finds it difficult to mark off where responsibility for another should end. I manage, but I am only just coming to realise the price I have paid, and despite my repeated vows to remedy the situation, I have done nothing about it until now.

  Silas once told me that he had often spent weeks completely alone. After his return from Port Tremaine, he did not, in fact, see anyone for over a month; he just stayed in his apartment, with all the curtains drawn. Finally he stepped outside into the warmth of the late summer sunshine and walked to the street corner, uncertain as to what to do with himself when he got there. He stood for an hour, watching the old ladies with their immaculate hair and too-bright lipstick walking their tiny dogs, the junkies arguing with each other, the council workers sweeping the previous night’s refuse into piles, the heated exchange between a waitress and a young man who had ordered his coffee over ten minutes ago; all of it spread out, distant and unreal, in front of him.

  That was when he saw Rachel. As she hurried across the street, tiny, thin, her mouth brilliant red in the paleness of her face, he remembered when he had thought he was in love with her, the brief time when he would have done anything for her, and he called out her name, without thinking.

  She was surprised to see him. She had heard he’d been away, some impossibly small town somewhere, and he told her the name of the place, knowing it would mean nothing to her.

  For godsakes, why did you go and do that? she laughed.

  I don’t know, he said, and he didn’t. He had no idea why he had done anything he had done.

  She looked at him, concerned for a moment, but she was in a hurry, he could see that, and any vision he’d had of them talking now seemed foolish. Rachel, and everyone else he had known from the time they had been together, belonged to a life that had gone; they could have no place in his existence as it was now.

  Give me a call, she said. You look like you need to get out.

  And he tried to sound convincing as he promised her he would.

  4

  The image you have of a place when you see it on a map rarely concords with the reality that confronts you when you arrive.

  I had heard Silas’s descriptions of Port Tremaine so I had an idea of what the town would be like when I first turned off the highway in the direction indicated by the sign, but he had nothing to help him build a picture of what he would find. It was a holiday place, he supposed: beaches, old shacks, a milk bar selling ice-creams, a house where he would paint, maybe write, perhaps just lie around and read; it didn’t matter. Now that he had decided this was what he wanted to do, he was determined that it would be amazing, incredible, something he should have done years ago, and that was how he would envisage it.

  He drove for two days with Tess Davis in the passenger seat next to him. After three nights of toasting his departure, she had been the last one left at his apartment, and the next morning he had talked her into getting in the car with him. Come on, he had urged, throw caution to the wind, not wanting to recognise that somewhere, deep inside, he was scared; and, still drunk, she had finally just shrugged her shoulders and grinned: why the fuck not?

  As the country became increasingly barren, desert brush and prickly pear stretching flat before them, the sky unrelentingly blue overhead, they talked less and less. Driving past abandoned roadside stalls, collapsed signs promising cheap flowers, vegetables, fruit, one
kilometre away, five hundred metres and then, there at the promised site, nothing, they passed a joint back and forth without a word.

  I think I want to go home, she eventually said when they pulled up at a service station near the entrance to the gulf, the water a dirty grey on the horizon.

  With the car door open an inch, Silas could feel the blanket of dry heat hovering still around him, breathtaking in its ferocity.

  It’s not far, he urged. Look at it, and he waved his arm, trying to indicate how extraordinary it was, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see the realisation of where she was in her eyes.

  There was a bus station two kilometres back along the road and he drove her there, gave her some money and told her he’d write. She just stared at him in disbelief.

  Aren’t you going to wait with me? she asked.

  He hadn’t wanted to. He feared that if he stopped he wouldn’t go on. He was also so stoned that he hadn’t even thought of the obvious, that it probably wasn’t okay to just leave her on the highway. They sat in the car with all the doors open, hoping to catch a breeze from the gulf but none came. Thick clusters of flies clung to their faces, their legs, their arms, barely moving when they tried to flick them away. Silas would have just given up on them, but Tess kept brushing at them, her hands occasionally slapping against his neck or his cheek in her attempts to get them out of the car. He was close to the point of hitting her back when he finally saw the bus, its metal roof shimmering in the distance.

  There it is, and the sudden volume of Tess’s voice made him jump.

  She was out of the car immediately, waving her arms in the air, not wanting to risk even the slightest possibility that it would go past without stopping, barely looking at him in her eagerness to get away, her fare in one sweaty hand, her bag in the other. As the doors clanged shut behind her, she did not even turn to wave.

  See you, Silas called out to the departing bus.

  As he watched her go, he caught a glimpse of his face in the rear-vision mirror, tired, his eyes bloodshot, the sweat trickling through the dirt on his forehead, and he was surprised that he was still where he was, there by the side of the road in the long hard heat of the afternoon.

  Silas drove that last four hours with the radio off, the sun slowly sinking as he passed derelict buildings, golden in the afternoon light, some no more than walls crumbling into the sandy soil, others more recently deserted, pubs with doors barred shut, empty houses with gardens choked by thistles, boarded-up shops, their signs faded and rusty.

  He pulled over at the turn-off to Port Tremaine and looked behind him at the last of the light hitting the ranges in the distance, the dark red now faded to a dusky mauve, the slopes flecked with trees, tufts of olive against the purple. It was cooler now and he could finally feel a slight breeze from the gulf as he rolled another joint and drank the last of the bottle of water Tess had left on the floor. He lit the joint and got out of the car.

  This was country that had been decimated. I know, I saw it. Lured by months of surprisingly good rainfall, the settlers who first went there had thought it would be rich land, farming country where wheat would grow, golden and strong, but as years passed and the rain failed to return, they realised they had been fooled. Those who stayed were left with nothing but a memory of what might have been, in a place that proved far harsher than they would ever have believed.

  As Silas walked across the paddock, the dry grasses scratching his ankles, he saw the great ravines that rip across the land, the surrounding soil collapsing in upon itself, cake-like. He touched the edge of a mound of dirt with his toe and watched it crumble, dirty yellow, revealing another inch of tree roots beneath his feet, and he traced them back with his eye to where it stood, the only tree in sight.

  Fifty kilometres to Port Tremaine. That was all. He could see the faded black paint on the sign and he knew it would take him no more than twenty minutes to get there. It was not going to be the seaside village he had envisaged, there was no point in pretending otherwise, and he ground the last of the joint into the dirt and headed back to the car.

  the first consultation

  . . . case-taking is an art. The interviewer can be compared to a painter who slowly and painstakingly brings forth an image which represents in its essence a particular vision of reality.

  George Vithoulkas, The Science of Homeopathy

  1

  I have to at least try to be honest with myself; I have to at least admit that my preoccupation with Silas is not just due to the fact that he was a patient I found particularly interesting, it is also because he was responsible for bringing Greta back into my life. Because the truth is, each time I remember him, I am also drawn back to her, and I flinch, uncomfortable with her renewed presence in my consciousness, unable to leave it alone, yet still not knowing how to make peace with this particular aspect of my past.

  I knew her over ten years ago (I was twenty-one at the time, and so very different to the way I am now), and I did not know her for long. But she was, I suppose, a turning point in my life. Sometimes I wonder whether all that happened between us marked the line between the person I once was and the person I became, which is not to say that I took a completely unexpected path; I didn’t. I already knew I wanted to do this kind of work, that it was right for me, I was already the type to throw myself in with too much intensity. After Greta there was, however, a fear, an anxiety about failing others that grew, creeping, dark and intangible, at the back of all I said and did, tempering me, constricting me, never letting me forget its presence.

  When Silas first mentioned Greta’s name to me, I did my best not to react. It was, in fact, right at the beginning of our first appointment. I asked him who had referred him and he told me that it was someone he had only recently met.

  Greta, he said, Greta Sorenson.

  And I wrote her name down in the appropriate space on the form, without glancing in his direction.

  He had sat behind her in the reading room of the State Library for three months before they talked. Later, she told me that she had found it curious that he always picked the seat directly behind hers. Wherever she was sitting, he would follow, seeming to choose her as a marker, as some kind of stable point in the enormity of that room, without ever really being aware of her existence. As far as she knew, he never did anything. Occasionally he had a book open in front of him and, even more rarely, she would hear him take out a piece of paper and pen, but most of the time he just sat there.

  Greta was researching the life of a little-known sculptor for an academic. When I saw her again, shortly before I came out here, she told me that work such as this, along with brief stints in galleries and the odd hours in art-supply shops, was how she earned a living. She didn’t enjoy research (it was the solitude that she found difficult), but it was far better paid than most of the other jobs she could get, and she had begun to find a certain pleasure in taming a life into a neat row of categories, her pages ruled into columns with headings such as ‘Work’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Love’ marked across the top.

  Sometimes she would catch herself leaning backwards, trying to see what Silas was doing. Other times, when he went out for a cigarette, she would get a little bolder, turning right around in an attempt to find some clue as to who he was, but the only thing he ever wrote was the beginning of a letter, the same two words scrawled across the page – Dear Rudi – only to be crossed out, and then repeated, over and over again.

  She was sitting on the front steps, her back warm in the early autumn sunshine, when they first spoke. He asked her if she had a light.

  He told her his name and took the step below her, cupping his hands over the end of his cigarette as he tried to stop the match from blowing out.

  Greta was never shy with people she did not know. She was, in fact, at her best with strangers, disarmingly attractive in her ability to strike up a conversation with someone she had only just met, and she grinned as she looked at Silas and told him that she had wondered when he was
finally going to speak to her. I’ve been curious about you, she explained, and she asked him what it was that he did.

  Nothing, he told her, aware of how strange his answer sounded. I guess I’ve just been thinking.

  In the glare of sunlight bouncing off an office block, his eyes were dark green; hazel when he turned away.

  About anything in particular?

  He shook his head and traced the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the step. What about you?

  She told him about the project she was working on, and the academic who had employed her. She is trying to prove that this woman was at the forefront of a particular artistic movement, that she was an unrecognised great. The problem is, her work was fairly ordinary.

  She took out a photo to show him and he smiled as he looked at the piece. It doesn’t look too flash, he agreed.

  Greta’s phone rang, and as she searched for it in her bag, Silas stubbed out his cigarette and raised a hand in farewell. She watched him, tall and thin, taking the stairs two at a time as he made his way back to the entrance, and she thought it was strange that he always wore a jumper, the sleeves never pushed up, even though it was still warm.

  They soon found out that they lived only a couple of streets away from each other and they began to leave at the same time, either walking across the rapidly darkening park-lands together, or catching the train. I can only guess as to what they would have talked about, I can only take the pieces that I know and join them myself, but this is the way it will have to be if I am to form a coherent whole.

  She would have told him that she had been brought up by her grandparents in the country, that she had moved to the city when she was seventeen, and that she wanted to live in New York.

  Just for a while. Just to see if I can.

  She wanted to be a curator. She was not good enough to be an artist herself, she had learnt that a long time ago, and she would have smiled slightly as she told him that she wanted to work overseas because she had a constant need to test herself, to push beyond the boundaries of the safe worlds she knew. Leaving the country town where she had grown up had been the first step. Going to New York was the next. But it was not just geographical boundaries, and she would have laughed; she had a tendency to push herself to the limit in all she experienced. She would have blushed then as she realised she had once again revealed too much, only to find that he had not told her anything about himself; in fact, after several days of walking home together, she would have to admit she knew no more about him than she had on the first day they had talked.