The Rules of Seeing

by Joe Heap

  There is a man standing at the end of the street, holding something rectangular and white that might be a newspaper. There is something about this man. Something familiar. He moves on. Nova walks back into the hotel, telling herself not to be stupid. If Kate can get over her paranoia, she can too.

  The problem with not being able to see fully, to not understand everything that she sees, is that there are many interpretations for everything. Instead of one man looking like Tony, many men do. For Nova, there are too many details to pin down. And so, if she’s inclined to think that Tony is in Paris, trailing them, that’s exactly what she sees.

  She pauses for a moment in the lobby, breathing, making herself calm down. She can’t upset Kate. They have to keep moving forward. She doesn’t know what their end destination is, but they will get there someday.

  Someday they will be free.

  Twenty-Seven

  April

  ‘THERE’S A BIT THAT you haven’t got, bottom right …’

  Kate shifts her weight, keeping balanced on the stepladder. She takes a piece of tape from the window frame and presses it over the spot Nova pointed to. A chink of light disappears.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The flat isn’t dark, but the light seems evenly spread, without dark or light spots. The tinfoil on the windows has blocked out the winter sun – the kind of light that pinballs down from the sky, twanging off clouds, someone’s windshield, ringing the windowpane like a bell on its way in. Now there is light, but it doesn’t move in lines. It doesn’t move at all. It’s like a hanging mist. Kate sits down on the steps, and looks at Nova.

  ‘So?’

  Nova closes her eyes. The light is soft, the warm glow she knew from birth. She moves around a little. There are no flashes of light to tempt her into looking. That’s the thing she had found about seeing – it was difficult, but it became addictive. Over time, closing her eyes felt more alien.

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘Good …’

  Kate puts her arms around her. Nova is a little startled – before, she would have heard Kate coming, but after so long learning to see, her hearing has dulled. No, not dulled exactly. It has become less prominent in the mix, now that there is a new instrument playing along. With her eyes closed, she feels more blind than she was before, but she will get used to it. She’s looking forward to getting used to it. She just needs a break, a rest from studying.

  She has come to see Kate’s flat as an essential part of her learning, a place where she doesn’t need to be learning all the time. It has come to seem like a necessity. It still feels like an extended sleepover. They still sleep in the fort that Kate made in the front room.

  Time has passed, and nothing has happened. Or rather, everything has happened – Kate feels like so many things never happened before in the rest of her life. It’s been two years since she fell and hit her head, and she feels like she’s finally starting to live again.

  Her days with Nova are strange yet natural. Flashes of their first time keep repeating, echoes of the moment where she lost her sense of Kate and Nova and was only aware of one person. She’s scared that, if she lets Nova leave now, she will be taking a part of Kate that she can’t get back. The second time, she closed her eyes as Nova often does, focussing on everything else – the touch and taste of the woman next to her.

  She draws all the time, and stains her own drawings with colours that Nova buys for her – cheap poster paints from the corner shop, lurid acrylics from a Soho art supplier, hazy pastels that settle in the cracks of her hands like silted riverbeds. And the watercolour set from Paris, of course. The white plastic box is almost identical to the one her dad first bought her, and Kate will open it sometimes, just to inhale the powdery smell of the paints.

  Her drawings are mostly of things in the flat – the toaster, the pillow fort, Nova’s boots with their tangle of laces – because it is the transposition of these everyday objects onto paper that delights her girlfriend so much. But sometimes they go out and she will sketch the scenery. Sometimes she will sketch her reflection in a mirror. Sometimes, when she is sure her girlfriend is asleep on the sofa, Kate will sketch Nova in repose, then hide the result away. She draws and, in doing so, feels as though she is learning to see the thing she is drawing, for the very first time.

  There is no sign of Tony. He seems to have disappeared. Kate still works from home, only now she sometimes has Nova to keep her company in the days, and that helps.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Nova pulls back from the hug to look into her eyes.

  ‘Mm-hm. Just thinking.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I wonder if I’ll ever get used to this …’

  ‘You will.’

  Nova comes wordlessly into the kitchen, stands before Kate and places her hands on her shoulders, as though to kiss her. But instead, she hops up into Kate’s arms, wrapping her own arms around her neck.

  ‘Oof, a little warning would have been good!’

  ‘Are you saying I’m heavy?’

  ‘No, Supernova – you’re annoyingly light for someone who eats pepperoni-and-peach sandwiches.’

  ‘Good …’ Her voice is muffled, pressed into Kate’s neck. ‘Then there’s no hurry to get down.’ She kisses Kate’s clavicle, making her squirm. Instead of trying to shake Nova off, she walks them both through the flat until she gets to the bedroom, then collapses sideways onto the bed. Nova screams.

  ‘Woo! I wanna go again!’

  ‘Shut up.’ Kate kisses her.

  ‘Why’ (kiss) ‘should I’ (kiss) ‘shut up’ (kiss) ‘… oh, okay.’

  Kate returns from the corner shop to find Nova sprawled out on the living-room rug, surrounded by sweet wrappers. But she isn’t eating – all the unwrapped chocolates are carefully laid on a plate next to her. She’s playing with the wrappers, each of which is transparent and a different colour. She has smoothed them flat.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Nova starts. ‘Oh, hey, come here – look what I can do!’ She holds up a blue wrapper in her left hand and a yellow one in her right, then slides them in front of each other. She looks at Kate, mouth open, as though she’s just performed a magic trick.

  ‘See? I made green!’

  Kate laughs and pulls Nova close, kissing the top of her head.

  ‘You’re so clever.’

  Nova smiles innocently. ‘Oh, and here – you should have these.’ She hands Kate the plate of chocolates.

  ‘Feeder.’

  Nova winks – a new skill – and goes back to playing with the wrappers, while Kate takes the shopping through to the kitchen. Nova is working on a new rule, sliding one coloured gel in front of another until she gets it clear in her head.

  RULE OF SEEING NO.311

  The rule of occlusion (see Rule No.1) can be confused by transparency. An opaque blue square overlapping an opaque red square is easy to see as closer. But a transparent blue square overlapping a transparent red square will look like three shapes – a red one, a blue one, and a purple one in the middle. It will be difficult to tell which of these shapes is in front, or even how they are separate.

  ‘Come get your dinner.’

  Nova sweeps all the wrappers into a pile and goes to join Kate in the kitchen.

  ‘Dammit, Nova!’

  ‘What … what have I done now?’

  ‘Can’t you put your clothes in the laundry bin?’

  She looks around – the flat is colourfully littered with Nova’s socks where she has kicked them off, jumpers where she was too warm and pants where she had decided simply to strip off. Nova sighs extravagantly.

  ‘Yes, mothership.’

  ‘How did you even manage as a blind person? How did you find anything?’

  Nova shrugs. ‘It’s like squirrels burying nuts – sometimes I remember where I left them, sometimes I don’t.’

  ‘But how do you know if things are clean?’

  ‘The ol’ sniff test.’ She gri
ns proudly, like a child showing off a bogey.

  ‘Ugh, gross.’

  It is afternoon, and they’re sitting listening to the radio, when Kate remembers something she bought from the newsagent’s.

  ‘Here – a present for you.’

  She hands Nova a small, cold object, and her fingers try to make sense of what her eyes can’t understand.

  ‘It’s a toy car,’ Kate explains.

  ‘Oh …’ Nova is puzzled. ‘I know I act a bit childish at times, but toys?’

  ‘No, that’s not it. I was thinking about what you said, ages ago, when we went to the zoo. Do you remember you said that you could understand what the tiger looked like, because you knew what a cat felt like, and a cat is like a miniature tiger?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  ‘And I was thinking – it’s not easy, trying to feel a whole car. You can feel the bumper, or the wing mirror, but not the whole thing. But if you had a miniature one …’

  As Kate talks, a smile is spreading over Nova’s face. She can feel the four wheels, the slope of the windshield and the blunt end at the back. A shape starts to form in her head, becoming clearer with each pass her hands make over the car. She runs it up and down her palm on its four tiny wheels.

  ‘Come on!’ She grabs Kate’s hand, dragging her from her chair. ‘I want to go down to the street.’

  ‘What, right now?’

  ‘Yes, now come on!’

  Nova stumbles her way to the door, too excited to wait. With Kate just behind her, she races down the staircase and through the door to the street. In front of them, the traffic speeds in both directions. Kate stands next to her, puffing a bit. They stand in silence for a second.

  ‘Well?’

  Nova doesn’t want to say anything for a moment. Some shift is taking place in her head. She still has the toy car in her right hand and keeps running her thumb over its contours. Before, cars were bright blurs when in motion. Cars were like fish – they seemed to just float around. Even when they were parked, they looked like coloured blocks sitting by the side of the road. She throws her arms around Kate.

  ‘You’re a genius!’

  ‘Can you see them?’

  ‘Yes – I get them now. I get how they move. I can see all the details at once, all in one object. Do you think we can get more toys like this?’

  ‘Sure. They do toy trains and planes, toy animals, all sorts of stuff. I’ll get you a toy chest.’

  Nova is hopping with excitement. She pulls Kate close and whispers in her ear.

  ‘I’m going to make you my wife, some day.’

  Kate feels herself blushing and clears her throat. ‘How about a more immediate reward?’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Well, you could take me out for dinner.’

  Nova grabs her arm. Quickly, they go back inside, grab their stuff and together they walk down the street, watching the cars go by.

  La Cucina is on the High Street and, although Kate doesn’t fancy talking to anyone but Nova, she knows Benny will get them a good table. All the time, Nova is telling her about the cars she can see, and how even the ones that don’t look exactly like the toy car are becoming clearer.

  ‘It all makes sense now!’

  Kate can’t pretend to understand what has changed – how Nova saw the cars before, or how she sees them now. But she is happy. It bubbles up like champagne, an uncorking of joy. They reach the restaurant and Benny emerges from the shadows as quickly as if he’d been expecting Kate.

  ‘Katerina Tomassi! I thought you were dead!’

  ‘Hey, Benny, how’s it going? Nova, this is Benny, my cousin.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ Benny shakes Nova’s hand, uncertainly outstretched, and raises his eyebrows at Kate. She’s eaten at La Cucina plenty of times, but always with Tony. Her family has barely talked to her since she left him. Kate can’t deal with Benny reporting back to his mother, who will report back to her mother. She tries not to think about it.

  Benny leads them through the busy restaurant, weaving through tables faster than Nova can follow, so Kate guides her with a hand on her arm. Physical contact is still novel, and still starts the strange feedback loop. They are shown to one of the red leatherette booths. It has a reserved sign on it, which Benny removes.

  ‘Can I get you two anything to drink?’

  ‘Bottle of red?’

  ‘Right away, signora.’

  He swoops off. Food and drinks arrive at regular intervals. They share grilled artichokes with aioli, deep-fried rice balls and a beetroot risotto. They drink the house red. They talk about each other. Kate is surprised by how much she still doesn’t know.

  She’d not known that Nova’s mother was second-generation Pakistani, her father third-generation Ukrainian, and that they’d met at teacher-training college. She’d not known that her favourite food growing up had been pasta and tinned meatballs. She still knows so little, and she’s hungry to know more. It feels strangely like she’s discovering secrets about herself.

  She’d fallen out with Vi for saying it, but it was true – Kate didn’t do friendships. Her relationships were interludes between work and sleep. Before Tony, she told herself that when she found the right person, she would settle down. But she always suspected that the right person wasn’t out there. It wasn’t that she was lacking the right person, but that she was categorically the wrong person. When Tony asked her to marry him, she’d surprised herself by saying yes.

  ‘My turn to interrogate you,’ Nova says. ‘So … what would your perfect day be?’

  ‘That’s a tough one.’ The question from anyone else would have irritated Kate. It would have seemed contrived. But from Nova it feels genuine. It’s an attempt to understand – in the same way she has come to understand the shape of a car – the particular shape of Kate’s life.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says finally. ‘To be honest, I used to love working …’

  Nova laughs. ‘Your perfect day is going to work? Oh, babe.’

  ‘But it’s true – I could lose myself in work. I looked forward to going in. I loved drawing up plans …’

  ‘Making something people would enjoy living in?’

  ‘Maybe …’ Kate says, knowing that’s not right. She’d always regarded the people as an inconvenience, something that had to be accommodated for in the plans, like air-conditioning vents or sewage pipes. Buildings were not like machines for living in, or whatever people said, but like giant, asymmetrical crystals. They had white spurs of steel, vectors of plate glass, planes of level concrete. They grew in her head when she closed her eyes at night. Buildings were simple. It was the people who were complicated.

  She still enjoys working, but she doesn’t feel the same about buildings any more.

  ‘I enjoyed putting shapes together in ways that I’d never thought of before.’

  ‘That sounds like what I do now, in reverse.’ Nova leans closer, picking at a bowl of olives. ‘I’m always pulling shapes apart, trying to see how this triangle and those circles and that curve add up to make a face … I’m sick of shapes.’

  Kate doesn’t know what to say to that. Nova sounds tired, in spite of her energy, but Kate is desperate to keep her spirits up. She can’t stop now.

  On the walk home, Nova seems more positive, talking about how she is getting used to seeing intangible things like clouds and rainbows that meant nothing to her when she was blind. They reach the flat, go in through the downstairs door, and Kate holds Nova’s hand as they walk up the stairs.

  ‘So, how about a movie? I know we’ve been doing a lot of that recently, but we could try something from that box set …’

  They have reached the top of the flight of stairs that lead to the front door. Nova stops talking because Kate’s hand has tightened around hers.

  ‘Kate?’ Nova looks ahead, towards the door, and there is something hanging there, in front of them, but she can’t understand what it is. The shape is new, novel, with elements of something familiar.


  ‘Kate?’

  She doesn’t reply, but makes a guttural, choking noise, as though she’s being strangled. She turns away from the door, and it’s only then that she starts screaming. Even the screams sound choked. Nova can’t see much, but can see well enough to know that there’s nobody else there.

  She’s heard Kate wake from nightmares screaming, but this is worse. This isn’t the stifled fear of night terrors – this is waking, broad daylight.

  ‘Kate, please calm down. Please. What is it?’

  Nova can’t get her to talk, and her hand has slipped out of hers. Nova walks forward and Kate doesn’t stop her. She puts her hand out to the thing that’s hanging in front of the door. She feels rope leading down, which must be strung from the light fixture over the door. The thing on the end of the rope is quite small, furry, and slightly warm. She runs her hands over it.

  ‘Please, come away.’ It’s the first thing Kate has managed to say. ‘Please, don’t look at it.’

  Now Nova realizes what’s in front of her – it’s a rabbit. The rabbit that belongs to the downstairs neighbour, and lives in a hutch in their garden. She can see the black-and-white patches of fur. She can make out its face, tilted upwards as though it wants to be tickled under the chin. Somebody has killed it.

  She goes to Kate, takes the phone out of her pocket and carefully dials 999.

  The police arrive. They take pictures, take the rabbit down and talk to the downstairs neighbour, who weeps and shouts and curses. She comes storming up the stairs to talk to Kate.

  ‘You! Do you know who did this? One of your friends?’

  ‘No, I’m so sorry, I …’

  ‘If this is your fault, I’ll see you suffer for it.’ She jabs her finger in Kate’s face.

  ‘Hey, calm down.’ Nova steps between them. ‘She’s had a shock too.’

  The woman takes a breath as though to answer back, then starts crying again and stamps back down the stairs.

  ‘Sandra, can you go talk to her?’ It’s the detective inspector, Paul Sandler. Kate likes him. He’s about forty-five, his pale blond hair flecked with white, and he rubs the back of his head when he’s thinking.