by Joe Heap
‘Oh. I guess I couldn’t see them before,’ Nova searches the constellations that have appeared on Kate’s face.
‘I get more of them in the summer, if I’ve been out in the sun.’
Nova nods slowly, frowning.
‘Come on then, freckle face.’
They pass several versions of the crucifixion, but none trouble Kate. In Raphael’s version, Christ seems to hover serenely on the cross, weightless and painless. His death looks like another act in a colourful pantomime. Then they come to the Crucifixion Altarpiece. The painting is much older. Kate reads the label, noting the date of 1490, searching for something else to focus on, but she can’t look away.
Her mother is Roman Catholic. Well, she was, back in Italy. Her parents’ faith waned with distance from home. By the time Kate was born, in Finchley, there wasn’t enough holy mystery left to spare, and she has never believed in anything much beyond the world she knows.
Christ’s arms are thin, pulled taut, and seem to bear the entire weight of his body. His ribs protrude, his whole being made of knuckle and sinew. Then there are the nails – not the dainty bits of metal in the other paintings, like cute accessories, but fat bolts, driven through skin and muscle, forcing the bones of the hand apart to make space, until they crack like chicken ribs. Looking at him, Kate can feel the tension in her shoulders, her upper body pulled into a position more architectural than human. Her weight seems to hang from that inverted triangle. She feels the raw wood at her back. Faint fire burns in her palms.
‘Come on,’ Nova says, untroubled, ‘let’s go cruise the gift shop.’
She puts her hand on Kate’s back and leads her away from Golgotha.
In the café, they buy slices of carrot cake and strong coffee. These days, Kate feels always in a half-dream, and the shot of caffeine draws her into waking.
‘Thank you for today.’ Nova puts her hand over Kate’s.
‘You’re welcome. It’s nice to get out of the flat.’
‘You been staying in a lot?’
‘Well, no, just working from home as much as I can … but I feel like I should go back to the office.’
‘Why?’
Kate shrugs, reluctant to admit. ‘Because everyone must think I’m being lazy.’
‘No, they don’t! You can’t think like that.’
Kate takes a shaky breath. ‘Anyway, I’ve got the new flat to work on. I’ve painted some walls. How about you? Been getting out much?’
‘Not since Venice, really. I go into work and come home again. I get stuff delivered, I ask people to come to mine. You got me out of the house.’
‘Should I be flattered, or am I dragging you out against your will?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself that you could drag me anywhere against my will,’ Nova riffs. ‘But, no, I want to come out. It feels like an event. Like a special occasion.’
‘I’m flattered.’
Nova grins, then her expression turns serious. Kate loves this about her – that her moods are so obvious, so open. Nova doesn’t hide anything.
‘Look, it’s none of my business, but … is everything all right?’
‘What do you mean?’ Kate shrugs. ‘Everything is weird.’
‘Yeah, I know. What I mean is, when I came around …’
‘The meal?’
‘Yeah, the meal.’
‘Didn’t you enjoy it?’ Kate can’t keep the hurt out of her voice.
‘Yes, of course! But … Tony …’
It isn’t really a question, but she leaves his name hanging a second, trying to make Kate fill in the blank. She seems unhappy, and it isn’t all to do with what’s going on in her head.
‘Tony? He’s fine.’ Kate’s face is hot. How can she know?
‘Okay, he’s fine.’ Nova won’t stop looking into her eyes. ‘But what about you?’
Kate doesn’t reply for a moment, fiddling with a napkin as though trying to fold it into an origami shape. Sometimes Kate wonders where Tony’s anger came from, but she already knows. Tony is one of those people who remembers old conversations, childhood moments of humiliation, ex-girlfriends’ parting words, and boils them down into a kind of psychic rocket fuel. For as long as she has known him, it was a clean fuel – it burned away, driving his life but leaving nothing behind. This anger hasn’t ‘come from’ anywhere – it was always there. It has just never been turned on her.
‘I’m fine. We’re fine. It’s been … a difficult few months.’ Kate pauses for her friend to say something, but Nova just waits. ‘That’s all. He’s not good at talking. That’s why I’m so glad I met you.’
She reaches her hand out and puts it on Nova’s, and if her breath speeds up a bit, Kate doesn’t seem to notice. They finish their drinks.
‘Would you like to come back to mine?’ Nova asks, not knowing exactly what she means by the question. Kate pauses, as though it’s unclear to her too.
‘Maybe sometime soon? I should be getting home.’
Sixteen
‘SHE’S JUST A FRIEND.’
‘Friend …’ Vi rolls the word around her mouth experimentally, like a wine tasting, before spitting it back out again. ‘Friend – nope, you’re going to have to explain.’
Kate sighs. Vi was not invited around; she’s just shown up. After a week of Kate ignoring her calls, she finally staked out the flat and was waiting there when she got back from the museum. She should feel bad – Kate still hasn’t been to see Vi’s baby, has only spoken to her friend over the phone since the birth. She fetches her a drink while Vi establishes herself on the sofa, flicking through the channels on the television. Kate hasn’t watched it for weeks. If Tony’s watching something, she goes through to the kitchen and puts the radio on.
‘We’re friends, okay? I feel like she understands me.’
‘And you met her at the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she used to be blind?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s … all right?’
Kate groans – Vi is making her nauseous. ‘I like her, okay – is that so weird?’
Vi grins, sensing weakness. ‘Weird? Not for most people. But for you, Kate, it’s pretty fucking odd.’ She shrugs, then changes tack. ‘God, it’s good to have five minutes without a tiny human attached to my boob. Mind if I vape in here?’
Kate shakes her head and Vi starts rummaging through her handbag.
‘Jesus, how did this get in here?’
Vi pulls a thin book out of her handbag, called Baby’s First Shapes. Kate looks at the book, not immediately remembering what it reminds her of.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, the health visitor gives you one when they come to check out the baby.’
She hands her the book and Kate flips through the pages. On each is a different black and white picture – three dots, a spiral, a smiling face.
‘Apparently, babies like it, ’cos they can only see in black and white or something, but Finn doesn’t seem interested.’
Kate is silent for a moment, remembering Nova’s packs of cards, then hands the book back.
‘Why is it weird that I should make a friend?’
Vi twists her mouth.
‘I didn’t say that. You’ve just … always kept to yourself.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes, you have. Name me one friend you’ve made in the last couple of years?’ Kate opens her mouth to respond, but Vi is there before her. ‘You can’t, right? Because you haven’t made any friends since you married Big Man. I’m your best friend, and even I’ve hardly seen you …’
She doesn’t say ‘since I had a baby’, but Kate hears the words.
She isn’t wrong, of course. Kate hasn’t made any real friends since she got married, and has lost plenty by turning down invitations. She has ignored everything from nights out to weddings. It’s not that Tony tells her to turn them down, exactly. He just always seems to have made another plan – seeing a film, visiting a relative, shopping
for a new vacuum cleaner – which he has neglected to tell her about until this moment.
Vi bounces up and down on the sofa, a sure sign that she’s uncomfortable, and Kate feels herself bobbing in time with her. Surely there is something wrong with her hormones – it’s like being friends with a Labrador puppy. Kate is angry now. Vi has always hated Tony, and she’s dragging Nova into it just to prove a point.
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying, Katerina Tomassi, that you’ve suddenly become besties with a girl you met after hitting your head.’
‘And what, you think I’ve gone soft? Crazy?’
For once, Vi doesn’t respond straight away, and when she does, Kate can tell the sincerity is making her squirm. She feels it like a tightness in her chest.
‘I’m just worried about you. You’re acting weird.’
‘So what do you think I should do?’ Kate sounds angrier than she intended.
‘Maybe stop for a bit. Just … take some time.’
‘Just stop! You sound like my fucking doctor.’ Her voice is rising, high and shaky. Her emotions are not hers to control any more – they ebb and flow to a tide table which she knows nothing about.
‘Maybe he’s right.’
‘So fuck off if you think that’s all I am – I’m not some kid who can’t make her own decisions.’
Vi sits there for a moment, not saying anything. Kate has never shouted at her like this before. They’ve had a thousand arguments, all of them about nothing. She puts her drink down, gets up from the sofa, and lets herself out of the flat. Kate walks to the door which Vi has calmly closed behind her. Carefully, she turns the latch and puts the bolts on, locking herself in.
She is beautiful, lying on the rocks in the sun.
Her hair is golden, falling over her shoulders and down her back in waves. Her skin is pale, freckled on her arms and chest. She is naked to the waist – no, she is entirely naked. It’s just that, at her waist, she changes. She has no pubic hair. The scales are the colour of soap bubbles, shifting greens and purples and blues. Her tail is long, elegant, but heavy looking – real.
It concerns Nova that such a heavy, soft fishtail is resting on those sharp rocks, but the woman seems unconcerned. She looks back serenely, and though Nova still can’t read expressions, she feels that there is a question in her gaze. She’s about to ask what the woman wants to know when she wakes up.
The sunlight dies, snuffed out in her head. She’s in bed, and knows that it’s sometime midway through the night. Though the dream was peaceful, she finds her breath is fast and ragged.
People often ask Nova what blind people dream of. For them, dreams are mostly images. They wake and remember a confusion of pictures, doubting that there is any sound or touch. But of course blind people dream, even if they have been blind from birth.
Nova dreams of spaces she knows, which will rearrange themselves – her living room leading into Scotland Yard’s canteen, or her first school’s classroom. She dreams of people – their voices and their touch, the shape of them. She would even see colours in her dreams – the shifting pastels that she saw during the day, but no more than that. She didn’t know what it meant to ‘see’ when she was asleep any more than when she was awake.
After the operation, her dreams stayed the same – she saw in the day and was blind at night. It was a relief. Time out. No matter how tiring it was to learn to see all day, at night she could rest. Sleep was easy, when you were that tired. Nova would wake up, refreshed by the warm, dark waters that she’d sunk into.
The image of the mermaid is clear in her memory. The light of the foreign sun has died, but she can remember it. Where did the shape of the mermaid come from? She remembers holding an ornament in the doctor’s office, trying to divine its purpose.
‘A gift from my daughter,’ he’d explained. ‘She loves mermaids.’
But the ornament had been dead, its expression painted on. The mermaid in her dream was something she had never seen – pasted together from faces she knows, swimsuit adverts, fish in Brixton market … It seemed alive, in a way that her waking visions of other people still don’t.
Unable to sleep, she closes her eyes in the dark and weeps.
‘How have you been since our last meeting?’
Nova is back in the doctor’s office, looking down at the desk where the mermaid ornament looks back at her.
‘Better, I guess.’
‘You guess? What improvements?’
Nova likes Dr Schulman. He’s matter-of-fact when she needs him to be, amazed when she’s describing something she considers strange. She supposes it’s all part of his manner, and that none of her symptoms are truly a surprise to him, but it’s comforting anyway. Her life has become so alien, she’s grateful for any assurance that her reactions to it are correct.
‘Faces are a little easier to pick out … I can tell when people are smiling most of the time now, even if they don’t show their teeth. I’m getting better at making out letters – I read a couple of sentences the other day.’
The words, from a book loaned to her by the library:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Nova had read Pride and Prejudice before, by Braille, and had listened to the audiobook. But somehow the words seemed to mean something different when she read them on the page. The ‘universal truth’ seemed encoded, its meaning locked up in hieroglyphs.
‘That’s good – faster progress than I would have expected. Have you been experiencing fewer visual disturbances?’
The illusions that made her first months especially challenging – colourful auras and comet-tails, free-floating objects and dissolving surfaces – have become rarer as time passed, but haven’t vanished altogether. Sometimes, if she is tired or hungry, these symptoms will reappear.
RULE OF SEEING NO.207
The developing visual cortex is a gas guzzler – it needs glucose to run. If vision deteriorates, do not worry – you are not losing your sight. Have a sandwich and wait.
Often Nova doesn’t know if something is an illusion or not, like the first time she saw the display screens with their colourful adverts in Leicester Square.
‘Yes, they’ve gotten better. But last night …’
‘Yes?’
She tells him about her dream, the mermaid on the rocks. He smiles – that flash of white is a familiar sign – and makes a noise of more than simulated interest.
‘Amazing! I wouldn’t have thought your visual imagination was capable of something so complex.’
‘Do you think it’ll happen often?’
‘Seeing in your dreams? Yes, I imagine it will become more common. The more developed your visual cortex becomes – the more information it assimilates – the more it will want to sort through all that information when you’re sleeping. Dreams are a part of learning.’
‘Ah. Right.’ Nova suppresses the urge to cry.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m just … I’m really tired.’ She presses her lips together and closes her eyes. Doctor Schulman sighs and leans forward.
‘Nova, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be seeing the world through your eyes. It must be very difficult.’
She nods. ‘It just doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.’
‘It will.’
‘How long?’
‘You know I can’t put a number on that. People have different experiences. Partly it depends on how much time is spent performing exercises, developing your new sense.’
‘But I can’t think. I can barely work. I can’t do anything else. Learning to see is a full-time job.’
‘Yes …’ He seems uncertain of what to say. This is simply the way it is.
‘What I’m trying to say is, I used to have a life – I had a job, I had friends. I had hobbies. Now I just have this task.’
‘And you want to go back to the way things were?’
Despite the scepticism in his tone, the words seem full of hope to Nova.
‘Could I do that?’
‘If by that you mean “can a surgeon perform an operation to make you blind again”, then the answer is obviously no.’
‘Sure, I get it. Ethics and all that jazz.’
‘Right.’ He smiles, more subtly this time – no flash of white, but an upward curvature of the pink line that is his mouth. ‘Well, yes, I suppose you could just ignore your sight. You could put on dark glasses and let the visual ability that you’ve developed die away …’
‘And then the dreams would stop?’
He rubs his eyes and sounds, for the first time, annoyed.
‘Was it so bad to dream, Nova? There are a lot of people in the world who would chop off a limb to gain what you have.’
Tears prick her eyes. She keeps them shut.
‘I know. I know that. I do know that. But …’
‘But?’
‘But I’m scared that I’ll lose my mind.’
A long sigh, the sound of anger deflating. ‘I’m sorry, Nova. I didn’t mean—’
She’s shaking her head, angry with herself as much as the doctor. ‘That’s okay. Just tell me what I need to know.’
‘It’s only what you already know – you have a choice. You can persevere with learning to see, at a cost to your work life and relationships, or you can close your eyes, go back to being blind, and have the life you had from the day you were born.’
Nova opens her eyes and picks up the mermaid ornament. She turns it over in her hands, feeling a disconnect between the jagged thing under her fingers and the shimmering bubble of compressed light that she can see. How can they be the same thing? How can they ever be the same thing? She puts it back down on the desk, with a precision she never had before.
‘Thank you.’
Seventeen
Are you busy?
It’s okay if you are.
I just need to talk to a normal person.
Or an abnormal person.
You know what I mean.
Kate feels her phone buzz against her thigh, five times in quick succession. She stares at the stacked messages for a long moment, then starts to type.