by Joe Heap
She hovers by the bed for a second, then goes to the bottom drawer of her bedside table. Under old photographs and loose paperwork is a hardcover book, Impara a Vedere by Giovanni Mezzasalma.
The familiar pictures on the cover – Vitruvian Man, an unfurling flower, the golden ratio superimposed over a seashell – are faded with age. She wonders if, in the lines of Italian that she cannot read, Nova might find the rules of seeing she’s looking for.
Kate opens the cover. There, above the Da Vinci quotation, a message scrawled in English – To Katerina, Happy 9th Birthday! Keep practising until you learn to see. Love, Dad xxx
She blinks a few times, then flicks through the book until a picture falls out. The drawing, done in pencil, is quite good – a sketch of some Venetian apartments on a canal, with mooring masts sticking up out of the water. The colours, crudely daubed over the sketch in watercolour, are obviously not by the same person who drew the picture. Kate remembers asking her father for a sketch that she could colour in with her new paint set, watching him work, head against his shoulder, his flannel shirt soft against her cheek.
She puts everything away, gets into bed, turns off the light, pulls the duvet over her and lies in the dark, feeling the empty space next to her.
Saturday dawns. Tony is on shift, Kate is left to mooch around the house. Outside, the June sun barely struggles through a thick cloud layer. Kate turns all the lights on, puts the radio up loud, but still feels as though the house is a diving bell, and the grey air is pressing in on all sides. She doesn’t want to be alone, but doesn’t want to be with anyone either.
At lunchtime, for twenty minutes, she sits at the kitchen table with a piece of paper in front of her. She has a pencil in her hand, poised over the paper as though waiting to record something that is about to happen. But nothing happens.
She goes to the hall and finds the jacket she wore the day before. From the inside pocket, she pulls out the beermat with Nova’s number scribbled in biro and stares at it for a long time. Then she goes through the pockets of her coat, pulling out used tissues and old receipts and takes all of them to the kitchen. The bins are squeezed into the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Kate opens the cupboard and throws the scraps of paper, including the beermat, into the recycling.
Ten
November
‘OKAY. YOU KNOW THE drill – I just want you to pick up the balls and put them into the bins that match their colour.’
Nova looks around the room and sighs. There are four coloured bins, and many coloured balls, littering the floor, chairs and tables. It has been seven months since her operation. Seven whole months. Summer has faded into memory and the air outside has a bite.
‘Come on, Jillian, I know you can do this.’
Nova doesn’t correct the use of her first name. She’s too tired. She’s always tired, these days. She doesn’t make jokes. She doesn’t flirt. She feels like a zombie.
Dutifully, Nova makes her way around the room, picking up balls, one in each hand, examining them for colour and placing them in the correct bin. She is getting better at picking the balls up. She still has no depth perception, but the objects themselves stay in the right places, and don’t swim around.
The first two balls are red and yellow, and, having remembered these two colours, she sticks to red and yellow for the next few, trying to keep things simple.
‘Change it up, Jillian.’ The nurse says.
Nova grits her teeth and carefully picks up two more. They are different colours, that much she can see. After some thought, she remembers blue and green, but can’t remember which way around they go. Blue and green are like foreign words that sound similar but mean very different things. Blue is the ocean, and ice, and the sky (though how ice and the sky can be the same colour, she doesn’t know. How can you even see the sky? Isn’t the sky just nothing?). Green is the colour of trees, grass and mint-chocolate ice cream.
She places one of the balls in a bin, not really knowing if she’s right.
‘Nope, try again.’
Nova sighs audibly, clenching her fists. She hates this, too – how she is grouchy all the time. She used to pride herself on being a cheery person. Fun to be around. She has one more month of going to the hospital on weekends. She’s exhausted, but she has to make the most of this time.
She picks the ball out of the bin and prepares to try again.
The last thirty or so of Nova’s Rules of Seeing consist of definitions of objects. For instance:
RULE OF SEEING NO.92a
A tree is an object, but it contains other objects, such as leaves.
RULE OF SEEING NO.92b
A leaf is an object, even on the tree, because it holds the certainty of one day being separate.
But then she saw a picture of Venus Williams holding a tennis racket and wondered: why is Venus-Williams-holding-a-tennis-racket not an object, despite them being connected, like a tree with its leaves? Of course, she knows how a hand picks up a tennis racket or puts it down. She has done it herself, when Alex played in school. She would strum the strings as though she were playing her dad’s guitar. The real thing was locked up because she kept strumming too hard and breaking strings.
But this does not help when learning to see one thing as separate from another – two bodies interacting in the realm of Newtonian physics. What she can feel does not translate to what she can see. People holding coffee mugs look as though they have a strange, extra appendage for containing fluid. A woman wearing a feathery hat seems to have plumage. When objects separate, it looks to her like a cell undergoing mitosis. When they come together, they form a seamless whole. She can’t understand the illusion, any more than she can understand how she sees a three-dimensional world as flat.
Still, she keeps trying, hoping that logic will fix the problem.
RULE OF SEEING NO.105
Objects are separate when they are not firmly attached, such as apples in a bowl, or a T-shirt on a body.
And, confident in this definition, she goes on:
RULE OF SEEING NO.106
An object is whole when it is continuous, without borders. For example: the sea, Mount Everest, a human body.
But doubt creeps in – what about when the sea goes out, leaving part of it behind on the land? When does Everest turn into another bit of the Himalayas? When does the water she drinks become a part of ‘Nova’? When does the water stop being part of her? When she pisses it out? The whole thing is absurd. So she scratches it all out (metaphorically speaking, because this is all still in her head), and goes back to:
RULE OF SEEING NO.92
There are no such things as objects. Things come together and fly apart. Every solid thing is made of tiny pieces. Attaching a label to any of these things is a matter of convention.
It’s the book that does it. She’s sitting by one of the windows in the stroke rehab ward, and it’s sunny outside, she can tell, but there is a blind drawn over the window to make the light soft. Alex will be here to pick her up soon, and she’s keeping her eyes shut until then. She’s found a Braille book in the tiny ward library, an abridged Wuthering Heights. She’s read it before, but she’s happy to have found it again. She just wants something to take her mind off training.
Except she can’t seem to focus on the words. Her finger runs smoothly over the shapes of the Braille at first, but then she finds she can’t remember what she just read. She goes back and starts again. After a couple of lines she is lost and starts over. She is concentrating hard this time, so it is not a lack of focus that stops her after a couple of words.
Was that word ‘desolation’ or ‘isolation’? Or something else? She traces over the word again, and instead of becoming clearer, it seems to melt away, as though her finger is wiping the dots clean off the page.
Nova is not a superstitious person. She does not have lucky numbers, pieces of clothing or charms that she carries with her. She does not have unlucky days of the year or certain events that spell doom. She believes in
reason. And yet she is beginning to think of her vision as something separate from her, something separate and sentient.
Malevolent.
Her vision is a clever parasite, eating away at every part of her – her ability to go out on her own, her ability to follow a conversation, and now her ability to read.
When Alex arrives, she doesn’t notice him standing near her.
‘Jillian? Jilly Bean?’
Her eyes are open, she’s looking at a picture of ocean waves on the wall, and she’s crying so calmly that Alex assumes she is not upset at all, but experiencing some kind of rapture, a private vision.
‘Right. Okay.’
Kate speaks small words to herself, no more than reassuring sounds. She’s standing in the downstairs hallway of their building, with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. Fiddling with the strap on her umbrella, trying to tie it neatly together, she waits for the right moment to step onto the street.
She can do this. Just yesterday she went all the way to the chemist to pick up a prescription. It wasn’t easy, but she fixed her eyes on the pavement and it was okay. Today feels different. Every time she thinks of pushing through the door there is the sound of high heels tapping by, or someone talking into their phone, or a burst of schoolboy laughter, and she stops. The patch of stubble on the back of her head has grown long, but the fear is still there. She’s sweating.
‘Right … right.’
She takes a deep breath, shoves the umbrella in her coat pocket, opens the door and steps out.
There is a blare of a sound as a passing ambulance switches its siren on. Kate jumps, pulling her arms into her sides, but the ambulance is already gone. She’s shaking, but she refuses to go back inside now. She clears her throat and sets off down the street. It’s just a few things for dinner, something to make for Tony. She tried to do an online shop, but there were no delivery slots.
Kate keeps her eyes down, studying the paving slabs, but the path between the buildings and the road is narrow, and she needs to look up occasionally to avoid people.
She checks her left arm. It’s covered by a black cardigan, but she wants to make sure the bruises aren’t visible in the light.
They’re nothing, really.
Tony apologized straight away.
She used to be clear on this – if Tony ever hit her, ever hurt her, she would leave. She always said this matter-of-factly to herself. It had been hypothetical, but she had no doubts.
But why would she leave, over something so small? He’d had a drink – it was nothing, not even a hit – he’d shoved her out of the way in frustration. Just a stupid moment.
Nothing to end a marriage over.
The first person she sees is an old man, stooped with age, in a worn-out waxed coat. Kate imagines her back bending, the spaces between vertebrae compressing, bones grinding together. She passes the man and he peers at her through bushy brows. He says nothing, but Kate feels that he’s judging her.
The next people she sees are a mother and toddler. The mother is slightly behind, pushing an empty pram, laden with shopping. The toddler (mostly eclipsed by her puffy pink jacket) is running ahead, and comes within a metre of Kate before she trips and falls forward, scraping her hands on the wet pavement. Kate stops dead in shock. It takes a moment of silence for the toddler to react, then she bursts into tears and Kate feels like she is about to cry herself. She’s so shocked that it takes her a moment to hear the mother’s sarcastic, ‘Just stand there, don’t mind us.’
Too late, Kate bends down to help the screaming child, but the mother has caught up, and shoos her away. Kate walks on, but now she feels shaky.
She has hardly walked any distance, only about a third of the way to the shop, but every step feels like she’s stretching a cord linking her to the flat. The elastic is getting tighter and tighter, so that even standing still requires effort. Is she becoming agoraphobic? Her doctor warned her that the Valium she’s taking could cause agoraphobia, and to be careful of taking it too often. But what counts as too often?
She works from home now, only has to go into the office to meet new clients or make presentations, which is rare. Tony had encouraged her to press for it. ‘Why do you need to go in, anyway?’ She had been grateful for the encouragement, and the new arrangement had seemed a blessing, to begin with. Now she wonders if she has made a mistake.
She struggles on a little further, until the pavement widens and she comes to the first of the shops. Breathless, she looks up, as though scaling a mountain.
The street is full of people, young and old, big and small, and Kate feels her attention drawn to each of them. She feels their feet shuffling along, feels the smoke of a grubby roll-up enter her lungs, the hand of someone else’s boyfriend groping her arse. She feels a dozen second-hand things, and all of them make her feel dirty.
She stumbles forward a few more paces, focusing back on the ground, then halts. But this is a bad place to stop – sitting in the nearest doorway is a body, wrapped in blankets and a soiled fleece.
‘Spare some change?’
Kate cannot ignore the man, yet she must. His voice is gentle, but she can smell him from where she’s standing.
‘Spare some change, love?’
Without looking, Kate rummages in her pocket and finds some change. Her breath is growing short. She turns, closing her eyes, and drops the money onto the man’s blanket.
‘Thanks. You all right?’
Kate straightens up, head swimming. ‘Yes, fine … I’m fine.’
She starts to walk, quickly, and it’s not for half a minute that she realizes that she’s walking back in the direction of the flat, borne along by the tension in the invisible cord.
Kate is lying on the couch when Tony comes home. The lights in the flat are off and she doesn’t have the radio or television on.
‘Hello? Kate?’
‘I’m on the sofa.’
Tony walks through and turns the lights on.
‘Ow, hey!’ Kate puts a hand up to her eyes. ‘You could have warned me.’
He frowns. ‘What are you doing in the dark anyway? Got a migraine?’
Kate sits up and runs a hand through her hair. She does, in fact, have a headache, but wants to be honest. She wants to tell Tony about what happened on the street. After months of trying to cope with her anxiety in silence, she wants his sympathy. And, mirroring his sympathy, she might feel some sympathy towards herself.
‘I tried to go out, but there were so many people on the street …’ she begins, but Tony’s expression doesn’t soften, and she wavers.
‘Have you not cooked?’
‘I couldn’t get to the shop for ingredients.’
‘You couldn’t …’ he begins with a sneer.
Kate curses herself for being stupid. Why is she bothering him with her stupid feelings? It’s like hearing about someone else’s dream.
‘I’m sorry. It was difficult …’
Tony stands for a second, then, as though she hadn’t spoken, asks, ‘So what are we going to eat?’
‘We can get a takeaway?’ She smiles a little.
‘I can’t afford to be buying takeaways all the time.’
‘I’ll get it – my treat.’
Tony grunts and walks out. Kate listens to him getting changed in the bedroom. On other days, she would have gone to him. Things might have been fixed with a kiss. But today she feels like she can’t break through the wall between them. The wall that she put there.
Kate remembers how things used to be, before her fall, and thinks about how they are now. She has the weird sensation of not being a separate person. There are still good times, but she can only be happy if Tony is happy, only have fun if he is having fun. And she wonders – is this new? Or have we always been like this? When ‘we’ were in a bad mood, was it just that he was in a bad mood? All this time, has she been nothing but a mirror?
But no – it’s obvious what has changed. Kate knows, in that moment, that the only way to make th
ings better is to pretend. She will make changes to her life, she will do the things she needs to do to get by, and she will hide her feelings from her husband.
They are sitting on the sofa, waiting for the food to arrive, and Tony has turned the television on. He scrolls through channels, wordlessly, while Kate reads on her phone. He flicks to the news – a report about a war-torn nation – and her eyes avoid the screen like magnets repelling.
‘What do you want to watch?’
She puts the phone down and looks at him.
‘I dunno; I was enjoying reading …’
‘You don’t want to watch with me?’
‘No, I just mean, you could stick on something that I don’t need to concentrate on. Like a panel show. I dunno.’
He sighs. ‘Look, if you don’t want to watch anything …’
Kate almost tells the truth, then thinks of her new resolution.
‘Forget it, I don’t need to read. I just want to spend some time with you. What do you want to watch?’
‘A film, maybe?’
‘Sure.’ Kate feels a knot tighten in her belly as he scrolls through the movies they can rent. She hears herself agree to a film, but cannot remember the title a moment later. It’s an action film.
‘I’ll just pop to the loo.’
Kate goes through to the bathroom, opens the cabinet, hooks her fingernails under the white hardboard back, and lifts it a crack. There is a space between the cabinet and the wall, with several foil cards of medication stuffed inside. Kate ignores the green rectangle of contraceptive pills that she’s still taking and fishes out a card of Valium.
She swallows three with water from the tap. A single pill makes her woozy, and she knows that three will be no fun. But she needs something to take the edge off. Something to help her fake it. Either she fakes being a normal human being or everything she has worked for and accomplished in life will slowly crumble. The fightback starts here.