The Blind Eye (10 page)

Do I continue with this?
he held up the bottle, attempting to change the topic.

I scrolled down the screen to the end of the last session’s notes and then turned, slowly, towards him.
Tell me
, I said,
a little more about this person
.

Silas looked out the window.
Constance
.

I waited.

She died
. He closed his eyes, rubbing his thumb gently across his forefinger, the pressure gradually increasing.
Snake bite
. He breathed in sharply. I
couldn’t save her. It took too long to get help
.

He was silent. When he turned to look at me, his gaze was cool, remote. He looked back at the window, and I thought for a moment that he was not going to speak again, that I would need to ask another question, but then he opened his mouth, and his words were soft in the quiet.

I loved her
.

I leant a little closer.

At least, that was what I told myself
. He closed his eyes again, his voice so faint now I could barely hear it.
That is the excuse I have tried to use
.

3

Port Tremaine is surrounded by desert country, great tracts so parched that even the saltbush struggles to grow in the sandy soil. It is country that sweeps in golden arcs towards the red ranges sprawling under a harsh blue sky, burning dust in the summer, freezing dirt in the winter. It is country that is coarse and bare, with the little vegetation that manages to survive sticking up like mangy tufts of hair on a hide that had long since been rubbed back to a worn leather.

Silas sat on the sand and looked in amazement at the world lying beyond the cyclone fencing. It was, he told me, jewel-encrusted. It was, he said, surreal.

China blues, shimmering scarlets, bitter yellows, crimsons that throbbed against forest greens, ivory creams that twisted silken against soft pinks; Silas told me that he stared like someone who had been starved of colour, who wanted to gather it all into his arms, heap it and crush it and bury his face in it, and as he pressed his nose up against the padlocked gate and looked at the twists and turns of the paths that led through the garden to the shack in the centre, each
one thick with flowers, he wondered what it was that he had discovered.

Unnatural
, Pearl had told him when he had gone to her after leaving Thai’s hoping she would direct him to Rudi’s. He had held onto that one word from the moment she had uttered it, wanting a story, a tale to lift him out of the state into which he had been descending.

Sitting in the darkest corner of her shop, crocheting one of her rugs that never sold, Pearl had not looked up as the door had swung shut behind him; she had not glanced in his direction until he had finished recounting the boys’ attempts to describe the quickest way out to the garden.

It sounds unbelievable
, he had said, wanting to encourage her to create with him a picture of whatever it was he was hoping to find.

He had watched her select the next colour for her design, holding up balls of wool against the pattern, and he had wondered for a moment whether he might faint. Despite the fact that the sun did not penetrate beneath the tattered canvas awning that hung across the street, the lack of air in the room made it almost unbearable. He could see the damp sweat under her arms, staining the floral print of her frock, and the loose folds of her flesh, waving slightly, as she clicked the crochet hook in and out of a purple wool.

Visitors aren’t welcome
, and she had leant forward to make
sure Silas was listening.
He takes a gun to people who sniff around
.

Silas had pulled back.
Why?

A fly had buzzed near her head and she had reached for a rolled up newspaper to swat it with. The slam had slapped through the stillness.

When’s the repairs starting?
and she had nodded in the direction of his mother’s house.

Soon
, he had told her, knowing that any attempt to lead her back to the story would only fail, and he had watched in fascination as she stood up, her weight forcing her to take it step by careful step, the squashed fly balanced on the edge of the newspaper, constantly threatening to topple off as she had lumbered, heavily, towards the bin.

Suppose you’ve been organising the builders for the past Jew weeks
, and she had snorted as she sat down again.

Silas hadn’t bothered to correct her.

You know he has a daughter?

He had leant forward, his smile wide and cheeky.
Locked up?

Pearl had winked at him.
Beautiful as the morning and blind as the night. She’s the one that grows everything. Poisons, the lot of them. Wouldn’t let your dog go up there, if you had one that is. Doubt whether he’d come back alive
.

He had assured her he would be careful and he had been surprised, for a moment, at the flicker of fear he’d felt,
tinged with a new excitement, sharp and quick in his blood.

Sitting outside that cyclone fencing, mesmerised by the spectacular vision in front of him, Silas found the one thought that kept returning to him was the word Pearl had used:
unnatural
. A strange description for a place that could not have been more abundant with nature.

He was, conceivably, still ripped. He was, perhaps, still far from himself, still as gone as he had been each night on that verandah with Thai, because what he saw here was, quite simply, impossible. He did not understand how it could exist and yet there it was, right in front of him, and he pulled himself up, leaning his entire body into the fencing.

Hello
, he called out, not seeing her, not immediately.
Hello
.

She was standing right there, only fifty metres away, and staring at him. He forgot that Pearl had told him she was blind, her gaze seemed so focused on him, and as he raised his hand to signal a greeting, she stepped forward: Constance, tall, poised and more exquisite than any of the flowers that clustered around her.

I wouldn’t come any closer
, she warned, and she nodded in the direction of the shack, back towards Rudi, who was making his way down the path towards Silas, a gun in his hand.

4

I know there is a small part of me that wanted to see what Silas saw. When I drove to Port Tremaine, I went to find out whether he had returned, but this was not the only reason for my detour. I wanted some truth to the vision he had attempted to describe for me, I too wanted to see it, extraordinary and beautiful, spread out in front of me.

Was I delusional?
Silas once asked me, and then he stared out the window, aware that I was unable to answer his question.
I had smoked so much dope, I was such a mess
, he searched for a reason and then lapsed into silence.

He did not know. He would never know.

Greta did not go to the library on the weekends, and nor did Silas, usually, but on the Saturday morning after he first spoke to me about the garden he was there, without the distraction of her in front of him.

The reading room was almost empty and he took a seat, the scrape of the chair loud in the silence. He found a blank piece of paper and laid it on the desk, determined that this time he would get somewhere.

Dear Rudi

He wished there were a better way of beginning.

I need to tell you what happened, but each time I attempt to I am overwhelmed by how impossible it now all seems
.

Calcarea Carbonica
. – – . . . a trituration of the middle layer of oyster shells.

John Henry Clarke,
A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica

Of the whole [mollusc] family, the oyster has the most undifferentiated body and possesses no limbs whatsoever. The animal is completely encased in its shell and absolutely immobile, since it is attached to a rock. Its only visible life expression consists in the slight opening and closing of the shell . . .
Calcarea
is standstill, passivity, immobility, clinging, restraining, peripherally enclosing, restricting, in going, the negative or holding-in receptive principle.

Edward C Whitmont,
Psyche and Substance: Essays on Homeopathy in the Light of Jungian Psychology

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