by Ronald Smith
*******
Unable to find the quantities of dope I was looking for, Mairi and I left London. The journey had been expensive and I resolved to pay her back, not wanting to take advantage of her open-handed generosity. I was feeling tender and protective towards her - it wasn't actually love, but I sensed something vulnerable in her which seemed to lean its head on my shoulder whenever I was around, and I knew that a deeper bond than mere conspiratorial friendship was growing its invisible tendrils between us.
Back in Edinburgh, when I climbed the stairs to my flat, an adrenalin shock of surprise gripped my chest as I saw the door was not closed. Pushing it open, I felt suddenly sick and violated - my flat was totally devastated: wreckage of furniture, clothes and pictures was strewn everywhere and desecrated with paint. My antique curios were gone, including the cloisonné opium pipe. The stink of urine permeated the jumbled rooms.
Burgled.
I had been independent of Mairi, keeping my own house, but as a result of the break-in, I moved into her flat. Soon we began having blazing rows which ended with me saying, "Right, I'm leaving!"
"Oh, come back, don't go," she would cry penitently.
We stayed together from then on. I had been penniless and dejected until I had met this delightful girl who drove me about in her sports car and gave me breakfast in bed; life now seemed marvellous and full of promise.
My artistic output began to attract attention; I got to know a number of other artists in Edinburgh and I held several exhibitions; people bought some of my pictures, a sense of impending fame fanned the flames of my ego, and I even managed to arrange an exhibition in Germany.
To make my flat less vulnerable while I was away, I decided to fit some heavy locks on the door, and to fix a steel plate on the inside so the police couldn’t kick it in. The job called for a blacksmith and I raked through my mental list of acquaintances for someone to do the work.
One of these was Black Bob, an artist whose paintings I had admired, as well as a blacksmith. He had acquired a truly evil reputation as one of the most pathological villains in Edinburgh, much feared because of his maniac psychotic rages, and his associates who were small, mean, and quick with knives. Very large and muscular, he had a rounded bullet head which looked like a turnip, and he went about with a fearsome mohican haircut. Bob was heavily involved in drug-dealing and violence - just the man for the job, I thought.
So Black Bob came up and fortified my flat; while he was there, he also repaired a large coffee percolator I had found in a junk shop. Soon after, I bought some finely ground coffee to drink with Mairi and two friends, and used the percolator for the first time since he had fixed it.
It had been bubbling away on the stove for some time but the coffee had not come through, so I wrapped a towel around it, held it under the cold tap and tried to wrench it open, clasped against my chest.
There was an explosion like a bomb, which blew out a window ten feet away, and knocked holes in the wall. The point of the lid impaled my right temple, making a deep hole. The towel directed the blast into my face, embedding coffee grounds into my skin and under my eyelids, scorching the corneae.
Horrified, Mairi and her friends helped me to their car and rushed me to the casualty department. I had been about to leave for Germany but instead, found myself in the Eye Pavilion, unable to see, fearful that I had been blinded.
There was only one surgeon on duty and he had already been on call for fifteen hours, but he immediately performed an emergency operation which dragged on for five hours.
I knew, inside the blackness, that I had to cooperate if he was to save my eyesight. I lay on the table trying to relax while his hand trembled with fatigue. He couldn't use an anaesthetic, and the pain was terrible.
I detached myself, from it, attempting to look down on the searing, burning waves as from a distance.
I noticed that the surgeon spoke with a foreign accent and asked, "Are you from Pakistan?" I knew at once that was wrong. "No, no, don't tell me, I'll guess... Iceland."
He was astounded I had got it right.
While he gingerly removed my eyes and cleaned out the coffee grounds, I told joke after joke, the best ones I had ever recited, as if my life depended on it. He completed the painstaking task by putting twenty-seven stitches like fine needlework into the gaping hole beside my right eye.
I could see again.
The explosion was perhaps only a coincidence, caused by coffee grounds blocking the holes in the percolator, but I wasn't sure. Black Bob felt it was his fault and was very upset, and I didn't see him again for several years.