Blindsight

by Gee, Maurice

  Blindsight

  Maurice Gee

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2005

  Copyright © Maurice Gee 2005

  The right of Maurice Gee to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

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  ISBN 9781742288000

  Chapter One

  Father taught us how not to love.

  The thought came fully formed as my brother walked by. As usual he did not see me, for I never stand in his way, but he slowed his step and changed his line for others on the footpath: college girls in summer uniforms, office workers with swipe cards on their belts. The girls look away with that affronted expression the young, especially the female young, take on at the sight of dereliction and decay. They cannot believe in a fall of such magnitude and set their faces in hostility. Some of the office workers believe. A man, well dressed, said: ‘Gidday, mate.’ That was kind of him – or perhaps it expressed foreknowledge in some way. Gordon did not hear; but must, I believe, have heard the whispering in my head, the message, the reminder, from the sister he had loved.

  I wanted to say it aloud: ‘Gordon, Father taught us …’, not to plead with him for recognition but to explain our lives, or at least make the attempt. He would not have understood. And, indeed, it’s ambiguous. But I mean Father’s greediness in love, his benevolence and appetite, which started Gordon and me on our divergent ways.

  This is how we come together: Alice walking up Molesworth Street and Gordon walking down. He hears no message, even when I add to it: I love you, Gordon, not in Father’s way, and I thank you, take care – which is the silliest thought I could ever have.

  I don’t blame Father – who owns that name (the fellow up in heaven can’t compete) and usually owns ‘he’ and ‘him’ as well. The other men I’ve known stand aside, although Gordon and Neville have places more important in their way. My secondary list – Tom, Derek, Fergus, Jake, and Richie of course – is too long for decency, but I was trying hard to get rid of and to find, not simply bed-hopping in the modern way. I talked the matter over with Gordon one day but went too far and he protested: ‘For God’s sake, Sis!’ He told me to get my hooks in the lawyer one and marry him. That was a slap in the face. I’d have gone to bed with my brother if he’d asked me, or touched me, or if he’d even hinted at a need; but it would have been ruinous, for in those days he used me as a kind of fixed star, far away, glittering, unchanging and pointing him along the way to go; but a star close at hand as well, that he could pluck down and slide into his pocket to keep him warm. Pointing his way, keeping him warm, were sisterly acts, and the needs that he once or twice told me of, and at other times nudged me to understand, could only be satisfied by a lover – with whom I became fierce in advance, instructing her.

  There’s nothing dark in this, just too much closeness, too much love, and love goes back to Father, doesn’t it?

  We were a happy family, like in those cards: Mr Bun and Mrs Bun and the two Bun children. We rested on a ground of love, and also of pride in what I’ll call our Ferry-ness, and no holes opened underneath. I could write our childhood tale: a kitcheny mother, a father who completed us, coming home from work. We felt no need for a dog or cat. We had puddings, games, stories, sunburned salty holidays at Brown’s Bay, long cosy winters by the fire, and when the year ended we carried home school reports in brown envelopes, which Mother leaned against the mantelpiece clock for Father to open when he came home. Then we saw his throat swell with pride and his face redden with pleasure. Excellent, Excellent, Gordon’s report said. He rarely sank to my level of Very Good.

  But I’m not going to do it: Father, Mother (notice I don’t say Mum and Dad), the beach, the kitchen, playgrounds, reports, because I don’t want to, it’s as simple as that. I’m not afraid of what I’d find. There’s nothing to be afraid of in those bedrooms and that living-room, in the garden, in the street, in our town.

  The full flow of emotions, that is what I choose. How wonderful it was. The caring for each other, the comforting. Perhaps I should add, the eating up, for I was full of Father and Mother and Gordon, and they of me. There was nothing wrong with it, but I’m trying, I am trying, to see what was right, beyond the ease and comfort and fullness of it all. I’m trying to see the world and other people beyond our fire, in the dark.

  We extended our benignity out there, and Father, Mother too, had sensible knowledge of friends and neighbours, I am sure; but I saw faces that must either frown or smile, and Gordon, he’s never said, but was it – I try to fit my mind into his – ghostly suppliants? He stepped out into the world with such innocence and goodwill.

  Here’s a tale: it is 1942, or is it 43? Anyway, the time of battles in the desert overseas and our brave boys halting the madman Hitler in his tracks and just beginning to push him back. Father is too old to go to the war but Mother is beginning to ask, Will it all be over …? She means before Gordon is old enough to go. Gordon is ten. That is the sort of worry excessive love can breed. She is bosomy, our mother, apron-wrapped, floury-handed, professionally cheerful and deeply worry-fraught. There is so much out in the world to damage us. It seems designed for such a purpose: an outside world made for killing children. In our town, in our years at primary school, a boy – our paper-boy – fell under the train at Loomis station, and two sisters from the Catholic school drowned in the creek (they were found locked in each other’s arms, which thrilled me and made me weep: I could do both things at once). These tragedies confirmed Mother in her belief that death fell in behind us when we stepped outside our door, and she laid charmed phrases on us as we set off for school: ‘Stay on the footpath. Remember to look both ways.’ And: ‘Don’t go near the creek, promise me. God bless.’ She still believed in God, although I can’t recall any other time she appealed to him.

  We started off along our street, past the railway houses, with our leather schoolbags on our backs and lunches wrapped in newspaper inside – brown bread spread with Marmite and peanut butter and honey – and crossed the bridge down in the hollow, climbed to the road running beside the railway line, passed the jam factory and Ah Lap’s store – but I remind myself I’m not doing the childhood bit, with its memory of contentment and w
armth, with its details of bread, jam, apples, milk at school, superannuated teachers back to take the place of men gone to the war, spelling (‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’), mental arithmetic, long division, and the strap for boys ‘as stupid as Russian peasants’ who can’t name all the countries coloured red on the map. See how easily I force myself. What does it prove? That we had a childhood? That my memory is OK? I don’t want these things, but to deal in mystery. I want to know how Gordon came to be and where he has travelled and where his memory has gone. I don’t believe it has broken up over the years and faded to nothing like a cloud, but hold the wishful image of a sunken ship lying intact on the ocean floor, waiting to be found and raised. If I can make him see me and if he can find my name … I practise all sorts of things to say.

  So – 1942 or 43. Our side of the street is the high side. You climb a dozen steps cut in the bank to reach our path. Five railway houses lie on the other side, above the abandoned orchard and the swamp. A signalman, a driver, three track workers live there, men too old for the war. The Catholic Boyles are at the end of the line, beside an arm of the swamp that runs along the road edge. Father and Mother have seen the four Boyle boys grow up – ragamuffins, Father says; hooligans, says Mother – and seen them go two by two into the army. Now Mike, the oldest one, is dead.

  We, the Ferrys, are respectful and hushed. We stand at our front windows and watch the priest go in, and I wish, romantically, that we had a priest, but then see it as a wish that one of us will die. I mew with fright and Mother reaches out her arm and hugs me to her side.

  ‘I’ve written them a letter,’ Father says. ‘I’ve told them how we all – Alice and Gordon, you too …’ He fits his hand caplike on my head and his other hand on Gordon’s. We project waves of sorrow and comfort over the street at the Boyles’ house and the Boyles inside.

  I must stop writing in that tone. Simply, it’s not fair. Father’s sorrow was genuine. No matter how hard I try, with Mike Boyle’s death and everything else, I cannot catch him out in pretence. He meant what he said, and what he did. In the Boyles’ case he wrote his letter of condolence and carried it across the road to put in their box the following morning on his way to work. I liked the thought of my name being there. Tears filled my eyes as he slid it into the wooden mouth. Previously ‘killed in action’ had been exciting. Father created new feelings in me.

  We sang God Save the King and saluted the flag and marched class by class into school. My room was Standard Five, Gordon’s Four (he skipped a year). The spelling and arithmetic and strapping began. There was also art. Mr Warren was teaching us perspective, and I drew our family in the foreground and unnamed people, pigmy-sized then doll-sized then as small as mice, farther off. It was like a chart of human evolution with the Ferrys showing how far the human race had advanced.

  Gordon, with Miss Grandison, had drawing too. His picture lay flat. (Standard Four hadn’t learned perspective.) He posted it in the Boyles’ box on his way home. Mrs Boyle found it with her mail the following day.

  She must have sat all afternoon in her kitchen, looking at the drawing, turning away, turning back, while pain and disbelief turned into rage. She ran into the street – a large woman, pretty once, with rounded parts softened by middle age – and met Gordon midway between our steps and her gate. He was alone, I ten steps behind with my classmate Lois Munro (out of custom, not friendship: she lived two houses down).

  I have captioned it The Event in Orchard Street. (Once I used Terrible Event but it’s too stark for adjectives.) Mrs Boyle burst from her gate. She seized Gordon and shook him, and when his shirt tore and part of the sleeve came away in her hand, struck him on the face with it like a whip – Gordon squealing. She forced him on to his knees in the gravel, dragged him up, shook him again, rattled him, all the time crying, ‘Cruel boy, wicked boy.’ Gordon’s schoolbag bucked on his back. His cowlick bounced on his forehead and his shocked eyes – where was he? – found only bits of her, a leg, a face. I ran around them, looking for a way to save my brother. I caught a handful of Mrs Boyle’s dress and swung on it, which made her grip him two-handed. The piece of paper she had screwed into his face as she attacked fell under her feet. I swung on her, skidding in the gravel as she freed one hand and slapped him – ringing slaps on his brow and cheeks. My best help was screaming, which brought Mrs Dandridge from her house and Mother tumbling down our steps – she skinned her palms and knees – and the Brotts’ mongrel dog leaping over its fence. It ran nipping ankles round Gordon and Mrs Boyle until Mrs Dandridge kicked it away. She unlocked Mrs Boyle, and the woman collapsed; rage and strength went out of her, she deflated like a bladder, while Mother seized Gordon, putting blood-marks on him, and hurried him out of danger up our steps.

  Lois Munro had run as far as her gate. Mrs Dandridge took Mrs Boyle into her house. The yellow dog cornered the sheet of paper against our milk-box. I shooed him off and ran with it up our path. The paper was the key. I stopped, panting, at our back door, uncrumpled it, looked at Gordon’s drawing, and knew that we, the Ferrys, were out of step. It was gone in a flash – Gordon’s sobbing in the kitchen, Mother’s crying, were too much. I ran in and joined myself to them. Only later, when Gordon’s face was washed and Mother had painted iodine on her hands and sponged her knees and Gordon had been placed, heaving sobs, on his bed, and Father was home, only then – three Ferrys – did we smooth the paper on the kitchen table and look at what he had drawn.

  The desert sand was made with pencil dots. Mike Boyle flung up his arms and died, with his rifle spilling in the air. ‘Private Boyle’ stood in capitals at the head. ‘He died for King and Country,’ Gordon printed. ‘Do not grieve.’ (He was top of his class in spelling.)

  ‘Well meant’ became our saving phrase. Father used it to Mr Boyle when he walked across with the priest to talk to us that night. Mr Boyle agreed. He added that he knew Gordon was not a bad boy. ‘Thoughtless,’ Father Colvin supplied. I think he was there to see that Mr Boyle did not lose his calm and shout or cry. I was fascinated by his back-to-front collar and black suit. He was not like ordinary men but came from the world of dead soldiers and grief, and I felt our kitchen was not good enough, was somehow mean, while Mr Boyle, with his rough hands and working-man’s face, was good enough. I felt as I had with Gordon’s drawing – out of step. (Our kitchen was not mean, of course. We had coloured linoleum and papered walls and a table with turned legs and the first electric stove in the street, and Father’s BSc degree stood framed on the mantelpiece.)

  ‘Can we speak to the boy?’ Father Colvin said.

  ‘No,’ Mother said.

  ‘He’s sleeping. He’s had a nasty shock,’ Father said.

  ‘Attacked like that,’ Mother said. ‘If Mrs Boyle had bothered to see me …’

  ‘It was well meant. You must see that,’ Father said.

  ‘And calling him wicked,’ Mother said.

  ‘My boy is dead,’ Mr Boyle said.

  ‘Come on, Michael, let’s go home,’ Father Colvin said.

  ‘Lily’s had too much to bear. She’ll never get over it,’ Mr Boyle said.

  ‘We’re sorry,’ Father said. ‘Gordon meant well. It was misjudged.’

  None of us went further than that, although I knew, I knew, we were out of step. Father showed Mr Boyle and Father Colvin out the door. He put his hand on Mr Boyle’s shoulder – ‘Mick, I’m sorry.’ He meant for everything and all of us. Mr Boyle lifted his shoulder, not rudely but in a rejecting way.

  When the door was closed and the footsteps gone we went into Gordon’s bedroom. He had heard the men walking up the path and crawled under his bed and not crawled out as he heard them go. The empty room made Mother scream but Father, instantaneous in knowing, went down on his knees: ‘Come on, son. Come out.’ He put his arm into the dark, took Gordon’s arm and pulled him – gently, gently – out. Gordon was curled up like a lobster and red with crying. Father stood him up, straightened him, took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose. He he
ld Gordon in his arms and let him cry.

  ‘I thought they’d like it,’ Gordon wailed.

  ‘You meant well,’ Father said.

  ‘I wanted … I wanted …’

  ‘We have to be careful of what other people feel,’ Father said.

  We got over it, and quickly too. No more Boyle boys were killed. And Mother still ran across the road if it rained when Mrs Boyle was out, unpegged her washing and put it in the basket in her wash-house. But the feeling in Orchard Street was against us. I felt it in cooler smiles and offers of kindness rebuffed: ‘Can I help carry your groceries, Mrs Dandridge?’ ‘No thank you, Alice. I can manage.’

  ‘Out of step’ came less frequently into my mind. ‘Different’ more often. ‘Better’ too. Father was a chemist and had his own shop. He didn’t work on the railways or catch the train each morning to a factory in Auckland. He smoked tailor-made cigarettes, not roll-your-owns. He made compost, scientifically, and dug it into our garden, turning the yellow clay into ‘good rich soil’. All sorts of things. He had two shelves of books – history and science and several poetry books – and although Mother didn’t read, even magazines, even the paper, she knew things ‘the way women know’ and was more sensitive than most, Father said. And Gordon was top of his class. I was top too.

  When I write that we were better I don’t mean we were snobs. I mean that we were in the wrong place and also – it stretches understanding – the wrong time. It was the 1940s. The war was on. When I look at us I see 1920s people. It was possible to be apart in that earlier time, show cleverness and learning and refinement, without causing resentment or ridicule. So I understand. ‘The war effort’ and ‘pulling together’ and later on ‘getting the country back on its feet’ blurred all sorts of distinctions in the 40s.