by Joe Heap
Kate could ask him now, again, about the piece of paper. But, somehow, she knows that things have not changed. If they had, he would have told her what the paper was already. He would feel sorry that she was hurt, that she was in hospital, that he had caused this by not telling her. Kate has always felt safe, with Tony. At home. But it wasn’t a passive kind of safety. She always felt that, if anyone tried to hurt her, Tony would hurt them in return. Now it feels as though he is guarding Kate from herself. She waits, hoping he will say something.
‘Do you want anything?’
‘No, I think I have everything I need.’
‘Okay …’ He looks down at his shoes, breathes in deeply, breathes out again.
‘I should probably be going. My shift starts in half an hour.’
‘Yeah, you should go.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ He bends over her and places a kiss on her forehead. She is glad that her arms are under the sheets, so he cannot see how she clenches her fists.
Six
June
‘YOU SHOULD TAKE THE glasses off.’
‘Not yet.’
The bus is crowded, sticky in the heat, and Nova can’t wait for the automatic voice to call her stop. She’s wearing the clothes she went to the hospital in, back when the weather was cold. She has her eyes closed, dark glasses on. Alex sits by her, arm looped through hers. Occasionally, she will open her eyes, but the world is rushing by like water, and she gets the tumbling feeling of being swept away.
RULE OF SEEING NO.36
Buses, cars etc. – because glass is both see-through and reflective, the inside of these glass boxes, particularly when in motion, is a constant, swimming mixture of images. It is best, where possible, to get close to the window. Otherwise, travel with eyes closed.
Anyway, it’s pointless – she can understand things when they stand still, but as soon as they start to move she can’t keep track. Leaving the rehab ward, she feels like a foreigner, with only a handful of phrases at her disposal: ‘Hello’; ‘Thank you’; ‘Where is the bank?’ Those were enough, when she was just holidaying in this foreign place, but now she must do her job, have relationships, have a whole life – all in a language that she barely knows.
So, she screws her eyes shut and tries to forget for a little longer. She never thought it would feel strange to ignore her new sense – to close her eyes – since she had lived thirty-two years with her eyes closed.
‘You’ll never get used to it …’ Alex nags.
‘Just give me some time, okay?’
Her training in rehab consisted of seemingly unrelated activities. She sat at a computer, pressing the button when a certain shape appeared on the screen. She stared down lengths of string with coloured beads on them, trying to line them up. She wore glasses with strange, thick lenses. She balanced on a wobbling platform, trying to keep her eyes focussed on a black dot on the wall in front of her. More than once she vomited from the effort. She was told that her therapy was revolutionary, a combination of techniques to develop different parts of her visual brain. It felt to her like orchestrated torture.
Of the problems Alex warned she might suffer, Nova seemed to have them all. Objects had halos, auras and colourful tracks like comet tails. Colours changed as she looked at them. Everything seemed to move around, to grow and shrink in waves. Even the air would become textured, grainy. Her mind struggled to contain this volume of light. By the end of each day in rehab, Nova was exhausted, hardly able to talk. Sometimes she fell asleep in the middle of a lesson.
When things started to improve, nurses taught her shapes and colours using flashcards. These were the things that came first – squares and triangles and circles, blues and reds and yellows. They were like the first syllables of a child – oo, aa, eeee.
Even in isolation these were difficult, but her progress was subject to an exponential increase in difficulty. A plain square was easier than a yellow square. A red triangle above the yellow square was four times harder again. Then adding the squares, circles and crossed lines required to make the picture look like a ‘house’ only multiplied the difficulty. Finally, tears of frustration would break the image into fragments.
Slowly, Nova came to recognize faces, and their geography became more fixed, if not less alien. Faces scare her, because they seem like any other objects – lamps or tables or toilets − yet imbued with life. She can’t tell what they are thinking. Voices are clear. She can hear truth or lies in a voice. But human faces to Nova are no different to insect faces – alive, but grotesque and inscrutable. (She doesn’t even want to look at pornography.) She saw her own face in a mirror, but it was no different from the rest. It certainly didn’t feel like her face. ‘Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness,’ the doctor said, as though that helped.
In addition to faces, she still can’t understand depth. Everything is on one plane, like a screen a few centimetres in front of her face. If people walk away from her, they seem to be shrinking. ‘Stereo-blindness,’ the doctor said. Nova is amazed by the variety of blindnesses that have nothing to do with her eyes. Some of these may also be healed, but there is no guarantee. She learned the colours orange and purple (though she often confused both with brown), and learned to tell the time on a clock.
Alex visited once a day. When he got over her lack of joy at seeing his face, he helped Nova practise. Though she had no sense of depth, they practiced hand-eye co-ordination, Alex moving a ball on a stool around the practice room. Because it kept moving, Nova couldn’t just memorize where the ball was – she had to use her eyes. At first her hand couldn’t follow the bright red dot she was seeing, and she would always knock the ball off the stool. After a fortnight, she could grasp the ball about half the time. A week later, she could grab it every time.
Outside the practice room, Nova still knocked over glasses of orange juice and put her hand in the soup instead of grasping the spoon, but grabbing the red ball was her first small victory – a sense that, by increments, she might actually get better.
‘Nearly home,’ Alex says, his voice still keen with an excitement Nova can’t feel. He wants to be the older brother, to help her out of her shell. She wants to tell him that, after thirty-two years, the shell is part of her.
Nova grew up speaking English and Urdu, learned French at school, then Italian and Arabic at university. She got freelance jobs as an interpreter, then a full-time job working for the police. It brought her satisfaction, but there was nothing difficult about learning those languages. Seeing for the first time required the same rote learning – the repetition of faces, cutlery, shoes, with all their conjugations. But the patterns were hard to find, and she couldn’t predict them.
‘What do you think this is?’ a nurse had asked, holding up a card. There are rows of circles which could be buttons, or teeth.
‘A telephone? A smile?’
The object was corn on the cob.
Now her time is up. Her ‘rehabilitation’ is not over – this is like being let out on parole for good behaviour. She’s allowed to go back to work, if she feels able. Nova wants to try. Maybe, as with other languages, immersion is the best way to learn.
They get off the bus and walk the short way to Nova’s flat. She tries not to look at the sky.
RULE OF SEEING NO.45
Clouds look surprisingly solid. Do not worry – planes/birds will not crash into them.
She can tell Alex wants to come in, but she’s too anxious.
‘Can I do this on my own?’
‘Oh …’ She can hear his disappointment. ‘Sure. I’ll see you soon?’
‘Yeah … be seeing you too, doofus,’ she tries to appease him.
‘Okay.’
He hugs her and leaves. Inside the door, Nova stops, waiting for the ebb and flow of her fear to settle. She takes off her dark glasses, to see the place where she lives. The room is like others she has seen, its geography bound by certain rules and containing objects that, with a little thought, she can ascribe to a category. She c
ross-references these objects with her memory, like trying to match a map to a landscape. Is this way north? Are the mountains over there? Is that her armchair?
Whether the room is attractive or not, she doesn’t know, but it seems more cluttered than the room in her memory – objects piled around the edge of tracks that wind through the space. She hasn’t had a guide dog since she was seventeen, but she wishes she were coming home to one now. Dogs are good companions, and they don’t ask questions.
The living room is dark, so she finds the switch. The light won’t come on – perhaps the bulb is broken. She walks into the kitchen, to the sink. There is a window in front of the sink where she sometimes stands, feeling the sun while she does the dishes. Now she can see outside, though with no depth perception, the window is like a screen.
Her flat backs onto wasteland. She’d heard residents complain about the litter, the broken concrete. The sun is bright, and she can see the litter – blotches of colour poking through a dazzle of silver weeds. Dominating the space is a tree, its roots tangling through the concrete.
The tree is as tall as the buildings surrounding it. Nova has never realized that trees are so big. She looks at its leaves. Each of them is a familiar shape, and it takes her a moment to remember what the shape is. Almost like a teardrop, but with an indentation at the fat end. It’s called a heart.
There are thousands of these hearts, stretching for dominance on a hierarchy of branches and sub-branches, rippling together until a breeze disrupts the pattern, shivering it apart, and they become a million separate hearts again. The tree isn’t a single thing. It isn’t a single word, or thought. It isn’t ‘tree’. It’s a shimmering cloud, forming and dissolving in front of her, over and over, and the more she looks, the more she is dissolving with it, all the parts of her scattering in the wind.
Nova turns away from the window.
Kate orders a pizza on the taxi ride home from the hospital. She felt strangely flat, while in the hospital – unable to enjoy the normal things. The pizza was the one thing she could find to look forward to.
The flat is quiet, of course. Her time in the hospital seems unreal, but she expected to return home and find the life that she left behind. Now she’s not so sure. Whose home is this? It seems to be hers – the quilted blanket her mother gave her when she left home is thrown over the sofa. The food in the kitchen cupboards is stuff that she likes. Her running shoes are sprawled in the hall where she kicked them off.
Most convincingly, there are pictures of her family in frames on the wall. One of the pictures is friends from university, faces daubed in Day-Glo paint, all crushed together to get in the frame, grinning like gorgeous idiots. Mark and Sally and Jenna and Andy … When was the last time she spoke to any of them? Kate can’t remember. They just seemed to fade out of her life. Another of the frames is heart-shaped, and she’s standing next to a man. After a moment, she remembers that the man in the picture is Tony.
But the more she searches, the more she feels like this flat is an imposter. It’s a clever recreation. A film set. If she pushes hard enough, the walls will come toppling down.
She stands in the kitchen, and replays the memory of falling. She brings her hands up to her heart as though holding something there. But the square of white paper is nowhere. She looks at the tiles where her head surely made contact. The hard surface that did the damage. But there is nothing there – no mark, no crack.
She waits.
Twenty minutes pass, and Kate is feeling none the wiser when the buzzer announces her pizza. Bored with silence, she puts the radio on for the news. The doctor told her not to drink, but she deserves a beer. She is down to the last slice when her phone rings.
‘Kate?’
‘You rang my number, Vi.’
She laughs like this is a new joke. Vi – Violetta to her mother – is her oldest friend. Their parents emigrated at the same time and found houses a few streets apart. They grew up together, eating dinner in each other’s kitchens.
‘You want to see a film tonight?’
‘I only just got home from the hospital.’
‘You all right?’
Kate rolls her shoulders, trying to smooth the tension out. ‘I’m okay.’
There is a pause.
‘Well?’
Kate sighs, not wanting to go out, but not wanting to make her excuses to Vi.
‘Okay, sure.’
Seven
‘COULD YOU GET HIM to repeat that?’
In Urdu, Nova asks the man to repeat his name.
‘Hassan Rana,’ he sighs. The interviewing officer takes a quick note, checks a glance from his colleague stood by the door, and they get down to the interview proper. The room is cold, and under the fluorescent lighting the prisoner looks blue, corpse-like.
RULE OF SEEING NO.61
An object may be viewed under various conditions. It may be illuminated by sunlight, a fire or a harsh electric lamp. In each of these examples, the colour of the object will vary.
Sighted people don’t notice this. They have learned ‘colour consistency’. To them, an apple always looks red, day or night, under the sun or by candlelight. To Nova, the pale blue of Hassan Rana’s face is unnerving. He looks unhuman – a god or a demon. Her heart is beating so hard she thinks someone is bound to notice.
Nova has been working for the police for ten years, full-time for seven. In her own voice she has related the words of arsonists, murderers and rapists. Of course she never knows, when she is interpreting for them, whether they are guilty or not. Many of them she never hears from again, unless she is assigned to their trial. She never has a problem with the interviews, other than initial nervousness that their aggression might be directed at her instead of the officer. But most of them are on their best behaviour.
This isn’t the first interview she has done since the operation. She does a lot of them from home, over the phone. But the more important or complicated interviews are done in person, and this is the first time she has been into the station. She came in with her dark glasses but without her white stick.
Now the walls of the room are washing in and out, and the patches of colour that make up the man in front of her swim over each other like oil on water. She could have kept her dark glasses on, but everybody at the station knows about her operation and seems to think she has already recovered. Nova accepted their congratulations and left the glasses off, even though her new sight is more hindrance than help.
The officers took turns to be ‘seen’ by her for the first time, finding her reactions to their faces hilarious, as though she was revealing some truth about their appearance that others were too polite to articulate – big nose, receding hairline, ruddy cheeks. Nova wanted to tell them that what she saw was anything but accurate, and changed from minute to minute, but she hardly had the words to describe what she was seeing, even to herself.
‘What were you doing in the Sunny Morning corner shop, Brixton, at 10.36 p.m. yesterday, Mr Rana?’ the officer asks, facing him.
The prisoner doesn’t look at him, but at Nova. The question is unhurried. In the brief, Nova was told that there were five witnesses and good CCTV footage showing him holding up the store, then beating the owner around the head with a baseball bat. This interview is a formality.
She translates the question, making an effort to look Mr Rana in the eye, which Alex told her is important. He is handcuffed, wearing a white T-shirt stained brown with dried blood (his own), and is bandaged around the head. The raid was stopped by a shopper, who clubbed him with a jar of dill pickles as he emptied the till.
When Nova finishes the question, the man keeps staring.
‘Would you like me to repeat the question?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he replies in Urdu. Hassan Rana doesn’t say anything for a long moment, breathing loudly through his nose, which was recently broken. Finally, he asks, ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
Nova flicks a look at the officer, but is unable to read h
is expression. She starts to panic, unsure what to say. For a moment, she looks down at the floor. The plastic tiles are a shape she remembers – a hexagon. So many of them, fitting together perfectly. The shape of cells in a beehive. Nova can hear a buzzing, and wonders if it’s only in her head. She looks back at Hassan, forcing herself to focus.
‘I’m sorry … I used to be blind.’ The words come out before she can realize how badly judged they are.
‘What’s he saying?’ the officer asks, irritated.
‘Sorry. He’s asking where I’m from.’ She plays for time, aware that for the first time in ten years, she has lied in a recorded interview. ‘Give me a minute,’ she says, aware that she isn’t supposed to lead proceedings.
‘All right.’ The officer shrugs.
Nova turns back to Hassan, who seems to be smiling, though she can’t be sure. There are things similar to a smile. The buzzing is louder.
‘You used to be blind? What is this, a police trick?’
‘No, it’s true … I’ve done this job for years, but I had an operation.’
‘Wow,’ he drawls, ‘a real miracle. So tell me – what do I look like to you?’
Nova isn’t sure what kind of answer he wants. He looks awful – small, cold and grey. Before she could see, people seemed bigger, somehow. Sometimes now, when she looks at the people around her, they seem to be shrinking away to nothing. She doesn’t know what to say, but she knows that if another Urdu speaker listens to the recording, she’s already in trouble.
‘You look like you could use some help,’ she says.
He sneers.
‘I’m fine. I’ll be looked after now. I’ll be seen by doctors, given meals … put somewhere safe.’ He growls the last word.
Nova makes a guess.
‘You didn’t do this for yourself, did you?’
He looks at her for a long moment.