by Joe Heap
I’m at the new flat. Want to come round?
She feels butterflies in her stomach, knowing she shouldn’t. Nothing is going to happen, after all. She paces twice around the front room, before adding:
It’s just me.
There is a pause. Kate watches the screen, her stomach jolting when the ‘…’ pops up to show that Nova is writing. Then,
That would be nice.
I’ll send you the address.
The new flat is easy enough to find, once Nova has made her way to Acton Town on the Piccadilly. She presses the buzzer and is let into a pleasantly dark hallway, walks up two flights of stairs, and comes to a doorway, where Kate is leaning against the frame.
‘I wasn’t sure if you were going to come.’
‘Do I look unreliable to you?’ Nova asks. Even with her inexperience at reading faces, she can tell that Kate looks startled. ‘I’m joking!’ They hug and Nova plants a kiss on her cheek. Kate smells Nova’s now-familiar perfume and feels dizzy.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Oh, sure! Come see my work-in-progress. There’s hardly any furniture. I’m afraid.’
Nova walks past her, stepping carefully to make sure she doesn’t bump into any walls. This isn’t difficult, because Kate’s hallway has light floors and dark walls. The moment she steps in there she feels at home, which is only strengthened as she goes from room to room, a sense of having been here before, a sense that this is a safe place. It’s an animal sense, Nova thinks. Kate’s flat feels like somewhere safe that she is just returning to after a long time away.
‘Let me take your coat.’
‘Thanks. I brought wine, and some movies.’
‘You brought movies? I don’t have a telly here yet.’
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t really want to watch one. My doctor gave me a whole bag of them.’ Nova takes off her backpack and pulls out a handful of plastic cases.
‘What for?’
‘To test me – to practise seeing new things. He thought I’d like them, I guess.’
‘That was nice of him.’
‘Yeah.’ She shrugs. ‘I’ve not watched many movies yet – most of them are too fast to follow. I still get on better if I close my eyes.’
‘I don’t watch much at the moment. I’ve started reading books more.’
Kate hangs up Nova’s coat and takes her rucksack. Nova slips off her shoes to reveal fuzzy black-and-yellow socks, striped like bumblebees. Her T-shirt says NEVER TRUST AN ATOM – THEY MAKE UP EVERYTHING.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Nova asks.
‘Your T-shirt.’
‘Oh yeah. You should know, I make horrible chemistry puns, but only periodically.’
It takes a moment for the joke to land, and Nova just stands there, grinning. Kate mock groans. ‘Come on, let me give you a tour.’
They go to the kitchen, then the front room. Everything is softly lit, and it is very quiet here. Her flat in Brixton seems porous – sound leaks in from the trains on the viaduct, the car horns on the street, the cafés playing reggae. Somehow, Kate has hermetically sealed her world away from the noise of other people.
‘It’s super-quiet in here, dude.’
‘Oh, architect’s hocus-pocus. When I bought this place, I raised the floors and had everything insulated. I designed some home-recording studios at the first agency I worked for, so I know a few tricks.’
‘I like it. Mind if I sit?’
‘Sure. Want me to break into this wine?’
‘Please.’
‘Oh, it’s not a screw-top …’
‘Shit, do you have a corkscrew?’
Kate thinks for a moment. ‘No, but I do have a screwdriver and a claw hammer.’
‘Which helps us how?’
‘I’ll twist a screw into the cork, then use the hammer to pull it out.’
Nova grins. ‘You’re a regular Girl Guide.’
‘I don’t think Girl Guides drink wine.’
‘Kids these days.’
Kate goes to find her tools. Nova sits on the sofa, which is charcoal grey. The front room, like the hallway, is dark red. The window is outlined by a white frame. The floor is light cream. These blocks of colour reassure her. Though the flat isn’t lived-in yet, she senses that there will be no clutter here. Not like her own flat – so full of patterns and designs that she never knew were there. Patterns are tiring, because she can’t stop looking at them.
RULE OF SEEING NO.227
After a while, pattern-seeking becomes a reflex over which you have little control. You will see faces in clouds, clouds in wallpaper, and strange animals dancing in the oil-sheen of a puddle.
Kate is in the kitchen, talking while she twists a screw into the cork, asking polite questions about her day, how her journey was. But Nova can’t hear the words. Suddenly she’s crying, silent tears streaming down her cheeks. She feels as though she couldn’t leave Kate’s flat even if she wanted to. Like a planet that has gotten too close to a black hole. But instead of being alarmed, she feels intense relief. The tears flow, and it is only when Kate returns, holding two glasses of wine, that Nova becomes aware again.
‘I’m sorry.’ Kate says, putting the wine down quickly.
‘What f–for?’ Nova grins, choking on a sob.
‘I don’t know. I must have done something.’
‘Y-you’re like Catholic guilt became a person.’ Nova laughs. ‘I just …’
‘What?’
Nova looks into Kate’s eyes and Kate looks back. Her look feels like it means something – something important – but Kate isn’t sure what. Signs, symbols, codes. Foreign languages. They sit on the sofa in silence for a while.
‘What does my face look like to you?’ Kate asks.
‘Well, it has two eyes, a nose, a mouth …’
‘No, but what do I look like? What kind of person?’
‘Do you mean, are you pretty?’ Nova laughs – a mischievous chuckle – and Kate is glad that the other woman can’t tell how uncomfortable she looks. ‘But really, I’m not sure. I can’t use faces to read a person.’
‘In the movies you always see blind people touching faces to get used to them.’
‘Ha, yeah, that really doesn’t help me. Don’t believe everything Hollywood tells you, toots.’
‘Oh,’ Kate says, unexpectedly disappointed. ‘That’s a shame.’
‘Well, I can give it a go if you like,’ Nova shrugs. ‘See what I come up with.’
‘Sure.’ Kate swallows hard. ‘Humour me.’
‘Okay, hold on to your butt.’
Nova waggles her fingers like a concert pianist.
She closes her blue eyes, scooches closer on the sofa, then puts her hands out in front of her. Kate leans closer, her breath speeding up until Nova’s fingertips touch her cheeks. Nova runs her fingers over her cheeks, very gently, over her cheekbones, her jaw, her mouth, nose, eyebrows – smoothing out to the edge – her brow, temple, ears. Tiny movements gauge every millimetre. Kate presses her eyes shut, suppressing the shivers passing through her.
She imagines her face appearing in Nova’s mind like an Ordnance Survey map, with tight rings of lines describing the peak of her nose, the valleys of her eyes and the broad-spaced bars of her forehead. Nova’s hands come to rest again under her jaw, and Kate hopes that she can’t feel her heartbeat hammering in her throat.
She opens her eyes. She watches Nova, as she explores her face with gentle hands. Her face is so close to hers, and it feels like something of a reflex. She does it before she knows she’s doing it. She leans forward, what – one or two inches? A small margin of error.
Her lips touch hers.
If Nova’s lips part, it must be in shock.
For a second, maybe two, they kiss. Then they both pull back, propelled by another, opposing force.
Nova’s blue eyes are open now, scanning Kate for something that her hands missed. She’s confused. Panic swamps Kate.
‘I … I’m s-sorry … I d-don
’t know …’
‘Calm down.’ Nova smiles. It’s a reassuring smile, but not a happy one.
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.’
‘Look, I’m not offended. But you’re married, remember?’
Kate’s breath comes quickly, in shuddering bursts. Her skin is burning. How could she be so stupid? Why has she ruined everything? If she hadn’t done that, she could have stayed near her, been close to her. Everything could have been okay.
‘I’m sorry.’ Kate stands up, stumbling over herself, and goes to the window. Nova hesitates for a second, then stands.
‘Kate, this doesn’t mean—’
‘Would you … would you go?’ Kate doesn’t look at her.
‘Please, listen—’ Nova tries to calm her down, but Kate walks past her, in the direction of her bedroom, and closes the door behind her.
Nova looks around the flat. The urge to stay here is undiminished. She hasn’t felt so at home for months. Then, slowly, she finds her coat and rucksack. She waits at the door in case Kate comes bursting out of her room. But there is no sound.
She closes her eyes.
She leaves.
Eighteen
September
SIX MONTHS AFTER SHE left Kate’s flat, Nova slips her hand into her coat, grasps the object in her pocket, and rolls its weight against her fingers. The September air is a muggy haze, and she savours the weight of the object, its solidity and coolness.
The night after the kiss, she had dreamt of Kate’s face. In the dream, she understood it perfectly, and could answer Kate’s question. She knew exactly the kind of person this face belonged to, and she wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come out right. The touch and the image became a single thing – the first thing that Nova truly understood as a sighted person.
‘You are pretty,’ she told her, in the dream. ‘You’re beautiful.’
She did not wake up this time, to cry in the dark. She slept through to morning and woke with no memory of the dream.
In the morning, lying in the darkness, Nova felt as though a decision had been made for her. With Kate, she would have kept trying. Without Kate, there is no point going on. She would give up, starting now.
She would go blind again.
Tears spilled down to Nova’s pillow, as though her extraordinary eyes understood the decision that was being made and were already grieving. From now on, they would be imprisoned behind dark glasses, starved of light, shape and colour – those delicious, nauseating candies – until their appetites shrank away to nothing.
But blindness seemed unimportant to her, in that moment. Kate was gone, and would not be coming back. Nova was already living in that outer darkness, beyond light and warmth. All that remained was to get used to it.
Later, as she was getting ready to go out, dark glasses on and white stick under one arm, her hand had closed around something in the pocket of her leather jacket. It took her a while to understand what the object was. It was small and dense. She turned it over and over, feeling the lines of it, the small ring attached to one end. It was a penknife. Somehow, she knew it must belong to Kate. She must have slipped it into the pocket, a surprise for later, before everything went wrong. Nova wonders over its significance, but cannot remember any conversation about penknives. She supposes, if the kiss hadn’t happened, that Kate would have explained.
It’s been months since Kate took her last contraceptive pill. It doesn’t matter – there has been no sex. Tony comes home later than whatever late shift he’s on. The last couple of weekends he’s been away, rock climbing with friends. She expects to start her period soon. She is in bed with Tony and the lights are off, and they have been trying to sleep for five minutes.
She feels his hand on her hip.
Kate feels all the muscles in her stomach tighten, but she tries not to show her fear. She doesn’t react when he rolls her onto her back. She tries not to make a noise. This is what she chose.
When it is over, she rolls back onto her side of the bed, while Tony goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t make a sound as the tears fall. She doesn’t shiver or shake. She just lets the tears flow as Tony gets back into bed and quickly falls asleep. She doesn’t move, and after a while, she stops feeling.
‘He says he couldn’t have stabbed him – he was getting a haircut when it happened.’
Nova listens for a moment more to the unbroken flow of words.
‘And he says that three people can vouch for him. People who know him at the hairdresser’s.
The officer asks Nova to ask the suspect for the names of these three people, and Nova does so. The accused man reels off alibis while the officer makes notes. Abruptly, the interview is over. Nova picks up her cane and gets up. She knows the dimensions of all the interview rooms well, but bumps into an out-of-place chair on her way to the door.
‘Sorry,’ the officer mutters. ‘You want me to take you anywhere?’
Nova shakes her head – a habit she picked up when she was learning to see. ‘Nah, I’m just going to get a coffee. I know the way.’
She makes her way through the corridors of Scotland Yard. There is bustle in the corridors, but people make way for her. It’s a couple of months since Nova came back to work, telling colleagues that the operation to restore her sight had been a failure. She’d made up something about her body rejecting the procedure. She said she could still see blotches of light but not much more, and had kept her glasses on at all times. For a group of professional investigators, they’d easily swallowed the lie. Some had offered awkward commiserations, but Nova just smiled and told them that she didn’t miss it. They hadn’t known what to say to that, and the conversation moved on.
It took her time to return to normal, after her decision to ‘become blind’ again. It was easy to keep her eyes closed, keep the dark glasses pressed close to her face so that no flashes of light could trick her into peeking. To begin with, that was all she was – not blind, but a person keeping their eyes closed. She was stuck in a limbo between sight and blindness. If she opened her eyes, which she occasionally did at home, she would find her abilities – which seemed so fragile before – annoyingly tenacious.
After a month of keeping the glasses on, Nova could tell something was starting to change. If she looked, her perception of the room took a moment to solidify, and lacked definition. She couldn’t reach out and pick up objects, as she had done before. She couldn’t use her sight to walk around a cluttered room. Her sight was starting to slip away. After two months passed, the jumble of ‘seeing’ was becoming more and more confusing – a shifting sea of shapes and colours. After three months, there was nothing left. If she opened her eyes, she saw something, but could make no sense of it. All she let in, by opening her eyes, was a messy blur.
She could see, but she was blind.
Nova finds the staff canteen, buys herself a coffee and something in a packet that she’s reliably informed is a blueberry muffin. She navigates through the tables, mostly by listening for voices, and asks, ‘Anyone sitting here?’ to an empty table.
The canteen isn’t busy, but there’s enough background chatter for Nova to tune out. She sips her coffee, thinking about what she will eat for dinner. One of those pasta meals, perhaps. But she’ll be careful not to buy the spaghetti one this time. She’s never liked spaghetti – maybe it looks appealing if you can see it, but she doesn’t like putting wormy things in her mouth. She could make a joke out of that.
Of course, Kate liked spaghetti …
She stops thinking for a second, and pinches hard at skin on her inside wrist. She’s like one of those people trying to kick a bad habit. One of those people who picks their nose or chews their nails. She just needs to get out of the habit of thinking about Kate. She’s almost cracked it. She almost went a whole day.
An unfamiliar voice calls to her: ‘Jillian Safinova?’
‘That’s me …’ Nova starts, unsure what direction the voice is coming from in the echoin
g room. The man comes closer.
‘Miss Safinova, you’re needed in Interview Room Six, if you can come now.’
She mock sighs.
‘All right, buddy. But you’re carrying my muffin.’
She’s told to wait outside the interview room for the officer and sits on a plastic chair until she hears someone approaching.
‘I’m surprised it’s taken so long for us to cross paths.’
It takes Nova a moment to place the colourless voice, but her body has already reacted. There’s a cold feeling in her stomach, like she drank ice water.
‘Tony? Hey – it’s been a while.’
‘It has …’ He leaves the sentence hanging. ‘You still in touch with Kate?’
Nova tries not to flinch.
‘No, I’ve been a bit caught up with my own stuff recently.’
‘I heard your operation didn’t work.’
‘That’s right.’ She shifts uncomfortably, wanting the interview to begin, for someone else to be interrogated. Tony pauses, and she wonders if he is looking at her face. She wonders what clues she is giving away.
‘I’m so sorry to hear that. Have you been briefed already?’
‘No, not yet.’ Nova relaxes a little as Tony runs her through the details of the case – a kidnapping, a twenty-three-year-old female in North London, possible trafficking. The man in the cell speaks limited English and Italian is his first language. He’s not a suspect, but there’s a chance that he’s aided the kidnapper unwittingly. The girl may still be in the country and time is of the essence.
Nova nods through all of this, her mind becoming calm as it focusses on the details. She knows how to do this. She knows how it goes. Briefing complete, they enter the room. She sits down first, then Tony, who goes through the usual routine for setting up. The man on the other side of the table makes no noise until Nova introduces herself and explains that she will be his interpreter today, that she is blind. The voice that comes back is older than she expected, and gentle.
‘Good morning, miss. It’s nice to meet a young lady with such perfect Italian.’