The Blind Eye Read online

  You are in the same field? Rudi asked.

  Silas saw him reach for his keys. I am interested in plants.

  It is not just plants we use. Rudi was at the gate now, fumbling with the lock. It is anything and everything. That is the wonder of it.

  Silas agreed eagerly, knowing that Constance was listening, her eyes on him, not seeing him, but assessing him, judging him. He turned to her, the gate clanging shut behind him.

  You’ve grown all this? he asked, taking one step closer to her and then, stunned by a rich sweet perfume that seemed to cling to her, he pulled back.

  Somehow she was aware that it was her, and not her father, he had been addressing and she smiled, amused. They are the ones that do the growing. Her eyes held his.

  I had heard how extraordinary this place was, his words came out in a rush as he attempted to keep her attention, but I never expected anything like this.

  Her smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and it was Rudi who spoke. You have read my articles?

  Silas could not take his eyes from Constance as he lied. Some.

  And you write for?

  Different publications. He was aware that Constance was still facing him, and he remembered, with some relief, that she would not be able to see the rush of crimson across his cheeks.

  He turned to her; I have never seen you in town.

  I don’t go there. Her tone was dismissive, and then she touched her father’s arm gently as she said that she would leave them to talk.

  Come, Rudi beckoned.

  The path that led to the shack was shaded by trees. The light fell in dancing pools at Silas’s feet as he followed, reluctantly. He had never seen such a place: the gentle sway of the branches against the clear blue sky, the soft rustle of the leaves, the sweetness of the flowers that clung to him as he passed, the damp velvet of their petals smooth against his skin; it was intoxicating.

  Everything I built myself, Rudi told him proudly. Everything I found, nothing was bought. This stove, and he pointed to an old Kooka that took up most of the kitchen annex, just thrown out.

  Imbeciles, and he waved his hand impatiently to indicate the outside world. New, new, new, that is all they want. They are killing this land with their greed for new. It is dying on them. But do they listen? Pah, and he shrugged his shoulders in exasperation.

  Through the window, Silas could see her. She was adjusting a temporary shade rigged over one of the garden beds, long tassels of brilliant pink flowers falling around her (love-lies-bleeding, she was to tell him later), pausing for a moment to feel the direction of the sun before turning back to the task.

  This, and Rudi pointed to the garden, shows what can be done. When we came here, after the others left, it was all sick, diseased, but now it grows.

  As Silas stepped away from the window, he noticed that smell once again, the fullness of the perfume that had clung to Constance also pervading the closeness of the shack. He looked for flowers, but there were none.

  There was only one room, two single beds, a table and two chairs, but despite the lack of furniture, the place was cluttered. There were books everywhere, Silas had never seen so many: piled high on the stove, the floor, stacked into the few shelves that had been rigged along the walls, they filled the place.

  We will talk, and Rudi pulled out the chair, clearing a small space at the table for him.

  Has she always been blind? Silas turned back to where Constance worked, the pale blue of her shirt shining soft against the brilliance of the day.

  She sees. More than you or I will ever see.

  Unaware that they were watching her, she stood, slowly stretching herself in the shade, her face turned up towards the clear arc of the sky, and Silas was certain he could see her smile.

  She has the art. Rudi wrapped his fingers around Silas’s arm. All of my knowledge I have given to her. But she has more than that. He looked out to her, his eyes softening as he watched her bend back towards her work.

  Silas could feel the pressure of Rudi’s fingers on his skin, and he knew that when he turned he would see the eagerness on Rudi’s face. It was clear that this was something he had wanted, for who knows how long; a chance to talk, to be understood, to be recognised.

  Where shall we begin?

  Silas had not even opened his mouth to respond before Rudi continued, waving his hand dismissively, as he answered his own question: I am not interested in the past. It is not worthy of discussion. What happened to the others happened. They did not have the dedication, the patience, the perseverance, and so they left.

  Silas nodded.

  It is our work now that matters, the progress we are making, and as Rudi gathered his papers, Silas turned once again, shifting his chair a little so that he could steal a glance at her each time Rudi’s attention was diverted, because it would, he feared, be a long afternoon; unbearable if it weren’t for the sight of her, right there, just outside the window.

  3

  It is difficult for me to remember the initial attraction I had for Greta — everything became overshadowed by her desperate need – but I can’t (and shouldn’t) completely deny the fact that it did once exist.

  She was, and is, beautiful. Tall and pale with wide nervous eyes and long slender hands that move rapidly when she talks. She always drank too much, smoked too much and she was always intense. She was a year below me at college and, even though I did not know her, I had noticed her. We all had. We had witnessed her fights with boyfriends who dropped her off and picked her up, her tears in the cafeteria, her inability to sit still for long, her passions for particular causes that would wane only moments later; she was a presence that you felt.

  Sometimes I saw her out and we would grin at each other across a crowded bar, acknowledging each other and the fact that we were, unlike so many of the other students, clinging to our vices. I was often with someone, and so was she, but regardless of that, I would not have gone out of my way to get to know her, I would not have pursued her.

  Yet when we did start spending time together, it was, to my surprise, far more enjoyable than I would have expected. I discovered that a one-on-one conversation with her was disarmingly alive. She loved to sit up and talk, and not only did she want to talk, she wanted to draw out revelations from the person she was with. I remember the empathy in her eyes, the way in which she leant forward and asked questions, wanting to know more, and how it was, at first, enormously seductive.

  So I can understand why Silas felt connected to her, why she was the first person to whom he attempted to speak about the wounds he was inflicting upon himself. It was not just that she had seen him in the act, it was also that he felt he could trust her, he felt she would listen.

  When he woke, the clock on the mantelpiece clicked over. It was four in the morning and, although it was cold, Silas could feel the sweat down his back and the fire in his throat. He did not move. At the foot of his bed, a spider was spinning a web across the corner of the room. It was illuminated by the street light and Silas could see each thread, still sticky, and the intricacy of the pattern in its making, the pause before the drop, the swing to the next point, the pause.

  He stood up slowly, his limbs aching and exhausted. Even in the dark, he could make out the sharp gouges in his arms. He turned away when he passed the mirror in the hall, not wanting to face what he had become.

  When he began to talk to me, he told me that the first time it happened was shortly after his return from Port Tremaine. He had woken to find the man he had brought home staring at him in terror.

  What the fuck are you doing to yourself? The look on his face had been one of complete repulsion.

  Somehow, he had come to be sitting on the floor in the kitchen, the tiles cold beneath his skin, his arms covered in blood.

  Silas had watched as the man had gathered his clothes from the bedroom floor, never once taking his eyes off him as he had backed towards the door, dressing himself as fast as he could, and letting himself out. Silas had he
ard him pressing the elevator button over and over again, agitated, wanting it to arrive, the door finally clanging shut behind him, loud in the quiet of the night.

  He had looked down at his own flesh. They were holes he had cut, deep holes that he had carved out with a knife, and he had stared at them in disbelief.

  When he slept with Greta, it had been a couple of years since anyone had stayed the night. Drunk and attracted to her, he had decided to take the risk.

  The next morning, when she had told him how she had found him, how she had tried to stop him, he had flinched, knowing how likely it was that he would have attempted to hurt her had she got in his way.

  I couldn’t hold you still, and she had turned to the window in order to avoid his gaze.

  She had not shown Silas the bruises on her own arms, but he had seen them, her pale skin purpling in the early morning light.

  You thrashed and you shouted, and Greta had kept her eyes fixed on a branch of the tree that grew outside his kitchen. And then, she had paused for a moment, it was like you blacked out.

  Silas did not tell her this was a relief that came too rarely. More often than not he would wake, and that was how he would stay, eyes wide open until the first colouring of the sky, the first tentative birdsong. It was only then that he would allow himself to relax, his entire body tight from the pain; he would finally lie back, exhausted, too tired to sleep despite his relief at the night having passed.

  He needed to talk to someone. He needed help, and as he lay in bed that morning, it was Greta he thought of, it was Greta he wanted to see.

  4

  Once he had begun to speak of Constance to me, Silas did not stop.

  She was, he said, worthy of the words Pearl had used, as beautiful as the morning. But this was not, by itself, the reason why he had kept going back there.

  There was more to it than that, he told me, trying to explain what it was that had attracted him.

  Here again? she would say on the few occasions she happened to be near the gate when Rudi came to let him in, and she would smile, just slightly, as she turned to face him.

  It was this elusiveness and the whole fairytale nature of her existence that enticed him. The little he knew about her, the lack of contact he had with her, the way in which she always seemed to appear when he had just about given up on any hope of seeing her, and the way in which she would dis appear, slipping back into the lushness of the garden; all of it fascinated him.

  Thai was no help. She was not, Silas told me, particularly fond of conversation, and she was at her least talkative when she was on the other side of a dope-smoking binge such as the one they had all indulged in during his first few weeks in the town.

  She did not want to hear Silas’s enthusiastic descriptions of the garden, nor did she display any inclination towards answering the numerous questions he had about Constance each night he returned, frustrated that he had once again been unable to talk to her alone, that she had been there, but just out of reach, always just out of reach. Thai would slap the meals on the table, an alternating diet of tinned spaghetti and Vegemite sandwiches, her eyes small and mean as she called the kids in, their names all running into one long, unpronounceable word: Elilucasjadesass.

  She was waiting for word from Steve. She did not say this, but Silas knew. Each time they heard his car, the deep menace of that engine often the only sound in the night, she would tense slightly, her thin shoulders hunched forward as she drew back on the cigarette, listening; was he coming this way?

  Silas did not care. He was swimming in visions of Constance, floating in the new-found knowledge of her existence, and all else had ceased to matter. The desolation of the town, the ruin of his mother’s house and his failure to do anything about it, even the fact that Thai had been ripped off, or, more to the point, he had been ripped off (it was his money, after all); it was all of little importance to him.

  No deal yet, Steve kept telling them. Won’t be long but.

  As he walked home in the late afternoon, the ranges darkening behind him, Silas would plot ways of being alone with Constance. Crossing the last of the sand and scrub that borders the dusty grid of streets, thinking only of her, he would see Steve parked out on the edge of the dirt track with Shelley sitting next to him. She was younger than Thai, better looking than Thai, and having just broken off her engagement with Dave, who lived on the other side of the gulf, she was available.

  On the rare occasions when Silas came close enough to the car, Steve would nod in his direction. Linin’it all up, mate. Any day now.

  Silas could see how glazed Shelley’s eyes were, and how quickly Steve had turned away, but he couldn’t be bothered to respond, and as Steve came to sense that Silas was absorbed elsewhere, he stopped making any attempts to acknowledge what was still owing.

  But Thai refused to give in. Chain-smoking on the verandah, she would drum her fingers, the nails bitten down red-raw, barely glancing up when Silas asked her a question about Rudi and Constance.

  What the fuck would I know? she snapped once, slapping at a mosquito, the smear of blood red on her forearm. He’s a fuckin’ madman who keeps his daughter locked up.

  It was the only thing she ever said about Rudi, and what she had to say about Constance amounted to even less.

  Never seen her, and Thai stood up abruptly, her body thin and sharp in the moonlight, each muscle tensed at the sound of Steve’s car, pulling up outside the pub.

  Might just have to nick off for a few minutes. She smiled at Silas for the first time in days, a look of cunning flickering across her face. Reckon you could look after the kids? She touched his arm briefly, in an attempt to convince him she was the relaxed earth mother she would have liked him to believe she was, and then she was gone, her silver bracelets clicking back and forth as she loosened her hair from the thin scraggly knot at the base of her neck and crossed the dirt yard.

  The boys stared up at Silas. The youngest girl, Sass, sucked her thumb, a dirty T-shirt clutched in one hand, while the older one, Jade, continued chopping the hair off her Barbie doll.

  When are you meant to go to bed? Silas asked her.

  She shrugged her shoulders. No time.

  Want to go for a swim?

  They stared at him.

  Where? Lucas asked, a wide grin cutting across his face.

  Where do you reckon? Silas pointed out to where the jetty stretched towards the horizon, splicing straight and sure through the black night-time waters of the gulf.

  He scooped Sass up in his arms and reached for Jade, the two boys dancing around him and giggling.

  We got no swimmers, and Lucas smirked at the sheer lunacy of the idea.

  Who cares?

  As they crossed the dirt road and turned right towards the jetty, Silas asked them questions. It was information on Constance that he wanted, anything they knew, and as they quickly sensed his eagerness for answers, Eli indicated that he wanted a rollie, Lucas, ten dollars, before they would tell him anything, both of them running circles around him, both of them holding out their hands in expectation of their bribes.

  Sass was asleep when they reached the thin strip of weedlittered sand, all that was left of the expanse of beach that had glared under the hot daytime sun. Silas laid her down on his towel, and, asking the question again, he gave each of the boys the payment he had promised.

  They stared at him, faces blank.

  Well?

  Eli started miming, his thin hands moving rapidly, the expressions on his face exaggerated, as Lucas watched him intently. Silas could only wait for the translation, impatient with the game they still insisted on playing.

  Yes? And he looked at Lucas, who had the ten dollars clutched firmly in one hand.

  He just stared back.

  What was he saying?

  Lucas turned to his brother for an instant and then back to Silas. Nothin’, his voice was loud and clear, almost sweet in its innocence and then he pulled his T-shirt off over his head, eager to get in the wa
ter.

  Silas tried to snatch the money from his grasp, but Lucas was too quick, skinny legs flashing white in the darkness as he squealed in excitement at the possibility of a new game. Eli stayed sitting next to Jade, attempting to roll the cigarette, the tobacco spilling out the ends, as he glanced up briefly, warily.

  What were you saying to him? Silas asked.

  He just looked down, his concentration focused on the piece of paper in his hand.

  Silas sighed in exasperation. There was no point. He would float out in the cool, salty water, the moonlight spilling across his body, and attempt to make up his own answers to the questions he had.

  Wait right here, he made them promise, wishing he had never brought them in the first place, and he pointed to the cigarette in Eli’s hand, or I’ll tell your mum you nicked it from me.

  He paddled slowly, feeling his way through the black water, listening to the slap of the sea against the pylons, Lucas’s whoops of joy from the shore and, from further out, the occasional murmur of voices, Mick and Jason, fishing in the darkness.

  With his eyes closed, Silas did not hear it or see it before he felt it, the rip of the hook against his shorts, and the sharp splice of the twine against his flesh as he struggled to break free.

  Jesus, and his voice rang out in the silence. Jesus, his splashing was furious as he tried to look up.

  He could hear them laughing and the twang as one of them pulled a ring can, flicking it down to where he struggled below them.

  Gottya, Jason laughed, but it was Mick who looked over the railing.

  Watch it, his words a whisper in the quiet.

  5

  When Silas failed to show up at the library, Greta became anxious.

  He was always there, she told me later.

  She was aware of a concern she felt for him, a slight unease each day he didn’t come in, his boots loud on the hard floor as he passed her, looking across to give her a quick grin as he slid into his seat. She occasionally contemplated going to his place to see if he was all right but she was, as always, slightly uneasy at the thought of seeing him outside the safe routine they had established together.