The Rules of Seeing

by Joe Heap

  ‘I’m sorry, John …’ she begins, but can’t finish. After all, he’s the one who should be apologizing for leaving her high and dry when she needs him most. Some tutor, you, John Katzner, for leaving a student hanging before her big assignment.

  She feels guilty for even thinking this, but it’s true – without John, there is no job in Oxford for her (and none waiting for her back in London, because she’s such a fucking idiot). Maybe Nova could not have predicted that he would die so suddenly, but she feels that she has made too many assumptions in the last couple of years. She has taken too many things for granted. Anyway, guilt is a familiar emotion these days. A little more guilt is no big deal. She’s used to it.

  She brings her hand up to her eyes.

  ‘Hey!’

  Hands grip her sides, making her jump.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Whoa, language, Miss Safinova – you’re on sacred ground.’

  ‘Fuck off, Rebecca. This isn’t funny.’

  Nova turns to look at her. She could still be blind and know that Rebecca is drunk, but the evidence is there – the flushed cheeks, the skewed angle of her shirt collar, the way her head is cocked to one side, as though compensating for the tilt of the ground.

  ‘Want to grab a drink?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Where the fuck were you? You said you’d be here.’

  ‘I was here! In the crowd. Didn’t you see me? I just had to pop to the loo.’

  Nova lets it slide.

  ‘Come on, the reception will be starting.’

  Rebecca, reassured by the promise of a bar to prop up, hooks her arm around Nova’s.

  ‘Come on, babe, I’ll take care of you.’

  The flat is quiet when she gets back. Of course it’s quiet – it’s always quiet now, and Kate wishes she hadn’t gone to such lengths to block out the sound from the street and the flats around her. She wouldn’t mind some of that noise now.

  She goes and opens the doors to the Juliet balcony, and the sound of cars calms her down for a moment. She realizes she’s shaking – a low, constant tremor. Just another fault that she’s developed.

  A failing machine.

  She pulls an armchair over to the balcony, but doesn’t sit down. She goes to the kitchen, gets a large glass of water, and takes it through to the bedroom. There, in the drawer of her bedside table, are all the sleeping pills her doctor gave her. She had complained about the nightmares that kept waking her up, or stopping her from ever getting fully to sleep, and he had eagerly written her a prescription for the pills. But they hadn’t worked. Or, at least, though they kept her asleep, they didn’t stop the nightmares. Which was worse – to be trapped in a nightmare and not wake up. So she had stopped taking the pills, but had not stopped picking them up from the pharmacy.

  She takes the pills from the drawer, uncovering a note written on a scrap of paper. The writing is hers, but the words belong to someone else.

  Nova’s To-Do List

  1) Go up a really tall building.

  2) Ride a really big rollercoaster.

  3) Look at family pictures, (see myself as a baby and the grandparents I never knew).

  4) Watch the freaking moon landing!!!

  Kate places the note back in the drawer and closes it. Her lungs are squeezing shut. She stares at the pills for a moment. Was she going to do this all along? But she doesn’t like to pause – if she’s still, she notices the tremor. Kate pushes the pills out of their plastic coffins, all of them, one by one, until she has a pile on the bed next to her.

  The tremor has faded. Something about this makes her feel calm. It’s as though she can see a door, right in front of her, that she can step through at any moment. As long as she stays by the door, she’s calm. She can wait.

  She picks up her phone and dials Nova’s number. She has no intention of speaking to her – that’s not the point. It’s more like a last wish. She wants to hear her voice one last time. The phone connects, rings seven times, then goes to voicemail.

  Hey, this is Nova! This isn’t a voicemail – this is a telepathic thought-recording device. After the tone, think about your name, your reason for calling and a number where I can reach you.

  There is a burst of cut-off laughter, and a beep. Kate says nothing, but thinks about what she would say, if Nova were here. She ends the call, switches her phone off, and puts it down on the bed.

  She pauses for another second, but not out of hesitation – only to see if she’s scared. But she only feels this deep calm, and so she picks up the glass of water and starts to swallow the pills, one by one.

  The reception is in one of the college lounges, a dark room, clad to head-height in wainscot oak panelling, with institutional beige walls leading up to polystyrene ceiling tiles and strip lights. Things are already underway by the time Nova and Rebecca arrive. There are a couple of trestle tables at the far end of the room, arrayed with glasses of red and white wine, with a smaller contingent of orange juice.

  ‘I’ll get you a drink, yeah?’ Rebecca asks.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Nova shrugs. For a while she resisted the drinks that Rebecca plied her with, partly in the hope that the example would curb her worst excesses. But this hadn’t worked, and Nova doesn’t have much incentive to stay sober.

  Rebecca disappears into the crowd and doesn’t return for several minutes.

  ‘Nova! God, I haven’t seen you in forever!’

  A girl hugs her without warning. Nova can see her face, but remembers her from her voice. Monique. Ah, yes, Beginner’s Spanish with Mike Wilkinson: she had scented pens and trouble remembering gender pronouns. She sighs internally that she didn’t wear her dark glasses to the occasion – it’s so much easier to pretend to be blind that way. She decides to get to the point straightaway, telling Monique the story of her miracle cure.

  ‘Oh, my God, that’s incredible! Congratulations!’

  Rebecca returns by the time Nova finishes her explanation, hands her one glass of red and one of white, both of which seem to be for her, and vanishes again with a muttered excuse that might have something to do with talking to a friend. It’s unlikely that Rebecca, physics PhD and natural hermit, has many friends in the Modern Languages department of a college that isn’t hers, but Nova barely listens to her excuses any more.

  She drinks down the red and makes a start on the white while Monique expounds on her Masters in Italian literary translation, which has inexplicably been ongoing for the last six years. Nova has just finished the white when her phone starts to buzz in her pocket.

  More as an excuse to escape than to take the call, Nova holds the phone up like a talisman and moves towards the door. By the time she’s standing in the corridor, the caller has hung up. She puts the phone away, breathes a sigh of relief and stands, back against the cold wall, listening to the muffled chatter in the lounge. The building smells of damp and seems echoingly empty other than the reception. Nova has an image of being inside a huge, dead body. A dead building, lying in state, where their party is the last fizzling bit of cellular activity before decomposition sets in.

  She walks down the corridor until she finds an exit, and steps out into the cool of evening. Somewhere in front of her is the River Cherwell, and beyond that, a light is shining …

  It takes Nova

  a long moment to remember what

  it was John Katzner told her about the sunset

  and apply his words to the arc that is cut from the

  grey fabric of the horizon to let the shimmering light

  There is another buzz from her pocket.

  Nova takes her phone out and blinks the tears away. The caller has left a voicemail. She looks at the missed calls log.

  Kate Tomassi.

  She dials her voicemail. Listens as the automated woman tells her she has a new message, followed by a beep.

  There is no sound. Almost none – there is the soft fuzz of thermal noise, a faint digital flicker at about three seconds, and beyond that … can she hear breath
ing? Nova isn’t sure. The message ends. She presses the button to replay the message, closing her eyes and listening at a granular level to the drizzle of sound.

  Nothing.

  Nothing means something. Something is wrong, she thinks, then doesn’t know why she thought it. It has been weeks since Kate tried to call her. Why now? And why leave a creepy, empty voicemail? That’s not her style.

  She thinks about what to do. Before she can overthink things, she calls Kate back, pressing the phone to her ear. The line rings once before going to voicemail. Nova hangs up.

  She thinks for a second, the wine hazing her decisions.

  Of course it’s nothing.

  But it’s good to make sure.

  She’d make herself look stupid.

  But Kate rang first …

  She pulls up another number in her phone book – Kate’s friend, Vi – and hovers her finger over the call button.

  ‘Um, Nova?’

  A face has popped around the door. It’s Monique.

  ‘Yeah? What’s up?’

  ‘It’s just, uh, your girlfriend … Becky?’

  ‘Rebecca. She’s not my girlfriend.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s just, she’s a bit unwell …’ Monique shifts uncomfortably. ‘Maybe you could come help us?’

  Nova sighs, puts her phone back in her pocket, and goes to bail out her drunk ex-girlfriend.

  Kate is sitting in the armchair by the window, trying to decide whether it’s the light that’s fading or her brain. On the table next to her is a slice of her mother’s cake, oozing lemon syrup like a sickly, disembowelled organ. She’d had the idea it would be the last thing she would eat. It’s sentimental, she knows, but isn’t she allowed to be sentimental, when she’s dying? Now she feels full and queasy from the pills, so the cake sits there, uneaten.

  She feels heavy – heavy enough to go through the floorboards and bring down the building with her. She’s amazed that the armchair can hold her.

  Her breaths come less frequently, as though time is slowing.

  She doesn’t feel regret, and her life certainly doesn’t flash in front of her eyes. She is stuck, like a fly trapped in syrup, in this present moment. This present moment that will be her last. She’s a little annoyed that this moment – looking out at the rain – is the last one she’ll see. It’s interesting to find out, at last, how she dies, but mostly disappointing.

  Searching for a better final image, Kate reaches out to the table next to the armchair. Her arm is clumsy, and she knocks the lemon cake to the floor. The plate shatters, but the impact sounds far away. Kate grabs the collection of papers that the plate was resting on – a sheaf of her own drawings. She looks through them for one that she likes, but they all seem so childish to her now. A picture of coats hanging in the hall. A picture of coffee cups. A picture of flowers in a vase. She throws them to the floor, one by one.

  The last picture, hidden under the rest, makes her pause. It is a view of the sofa, taken from across the room. Nestled into the cushions, one arm thrown over her face, is Nova. This picture is not so bad, Kate thinks. She has never been much good at drawing people, but she got the posture right here. She can almost see Nova’s chest rise and fall in her sleep.

  Kate closes her eyes, because her eyelids are also heavy.

  The light fades.

  I am an object, she thinks, like a pair of scissors. They can do whatever they want with me, because I am just an object now.

  I’m just an object.

  Kate stops thinking.

  Kate bobs up to the surface, unsure how long she has been under. Too long? She looks at the picture in her hands, an imperfect window onto an earlier moment. Something automatic kicks in. She does not want to die. Some part of her, unlocked as the rest of her brain switched off, does not want to die.

  Slowly, with the difficulty of someone whose hands have been frozen by swimming in the sea, she gets her phone out of her pocket and presses the power button. As she waits for it to turn on, Kate dips under again, darkness washing around her …

  9-9-9

  She presses the button three times but cannot raise the phone to her face.

  It’s too heavy.

  But there is a voice talking, a tiny voice from the receiver.

  Kate tries to form words, to say her address. The words come out as a slurred whisper, but she keeps repeating them, over and over, until she feels the darkness rising over her again, her mouth still working as the inky ocean washes in and silences her.

  Thirty

  August

  IT’S BEEN ALMOST TWO months since Nova has been to her flat. It’s good that she’s going back, she reasons, if only to check that it hasn’t burned down. She’s going to visit her parents in a couple of days and wants to get some nice clothes to wear for them.

  She rides the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus and changes for the Victoria Line down to Brixton. Two years after her operation, her vision is still improving. The Underground is less intimidating, but it still feels like being put through the spin wash at the launderette and spat out at the other end. By the time she reaches her flat, Nova is tired and ready to sit down and close her eyes. Shapes are swimming in and out of focus, familiar objects like cars and trees keep breaking down into their constituent colours and contours.

  She’s hungry, and buys a cheese sandwich from the corner shop she always used to go into. Brixton is as lively as ever, people drifting up and down the street, pushing carts of vegetables and fish on ice, wheeling refrigerators and stacks of fabric. Everybody seems to be arguing, enticing, catcalling. Nova has grown used to the library-hush of Oxford, and Brixton feels like an onslaught.

  Finally, she pushes through the street door that leads up to her flat and walks upstairs. She puts the key in the lock to her front door, which seems sticky, as though stiff with underuse. She steps into the flat, remembering its familiar, musty smell. The air is stale. There is another smell, which she doesn’t recognize – did she leave some food out, or has a mouse come here to die?

  She walks down the passage. She slumps into an armchair, looking around at the cluttered contents of her living room, remembering the confusion of patterns, colours and textures. It amazes her that anybody let her live in this ridiculous, overcrowded space.

  There is so much in the room, it takes her a good thirty seconds to see the man sitting in the chair opposite her.

  RULE OF SEEING NO.382

  There are two kinds of seeing – the ‘where’ and the ‘what’. The ‘where’ tracks objects as they move through space. The ‘what’ decides what those objects are. These work together – if something is not moving, it may be hard to decide what the object is.

  Nova has stopped breathing. Her body is tensed. She thinks of a caveman, seeing the shape of an unmoving jaguar through a confusion of jungle foliage. Fight-or-flight.

  Is he sleeping? Maybe if she gets up and walks out very slowly, he will never know she was there. Then she can call the police …

  ‘Finally spotted me?’

  It’s not the voice of a jaguar. The voice is so familiar, it doesn’t matter that she can’t see his face clearly in the half-light.

  It is Tony.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ The words don’t want to come out, but Nova isn’t going to let him see that he’s scared her.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been here ages. I expected you to be back much, much sooner. But then, I suppose you and Kate have been having fun.’

  Nova almost corrects him, but thinks better of it. She’s scared, angry, doesn’t know what to do. She knows she can’t escape him. Even if she’s quicker on her feet it won’t matter. She can’t move around objects as quickly as he can, can’t react as fast to what’s going on. She realizes that her hands are still in her jacket pockets, and her hand closes around Kate’s penknife. Several times she has considered throwing the knife in a bin, or down a drain, or – once – into the River Cherwell from Magdalen Bridge. Each time she put it back in her jacket pocket, wher
e Kate first placed it.

  ‘Good job I checked your address while I was working at the Met.’

  ‘You got my address from work? That’s so …’

  ‘Illegal?’ He’s smiling, but she knows enough about smiles by now to know that this is not a nice smile. Nova once read that chimpanzees smile to show aggression, and it’s that kind of smile. A fuck-you smile.

  She has her thumbnail in the groove on the knife, and starts to coax it out. It’s difficult to flick the blade out with one hand, but not impossible – she’s done it before.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not like I’ll be going back there any more.’

  ‘You’re a fucking psycho.’

  He shrugs. ‘Probably. It’s not like I’m going to ask a shrink for a test. But I’m not stupid – pathological lying, tendency to get bored, manipulative … I fit the bill.’

  ‘You sound pretty relaxed about it,’ Nova says, feeling as though she’s in a shark tank. There is a hollow space behind Tony’s words – how did she not notice that before?

  ‘You’re forgetting another psycho trait – lack of remorse.’ He bares his teeth again in a not-smile.

  Nova plays for time.

  ‘So you’ve been living here? All this time?’

  He shrugs. ‘Some of it. Couldn’t risk it too soon, when my old friends at the Met were still doing their job.’

  Nova doesn’t want to make him angry, she just wants to get out. She wants to warn Kate. He stands, and she tries not to flinch, but it’s hard. He walks over to her, reaches out and grabs her by the neck. Nova makes a guttural sound, feeling his fingers squeeze the soft flesh under her jaw.

  ‘Don’t worry, dyke. I’m not going to kill you. Not yet. This is just a warning. No, not a warning …’ he corrects himself. ‘A taste of what’s to come.’

  He leans down, still holding her neck, putting his other hand on the arm of the chair. She thinks about kicking him, but what would she do next? He’s easily twice her size. She can feel her jugular throbbing under his grip. She’s trapped. Nova can feel his breath on her face, can taste its staleness, the taste of whisky and not much else. She forces herself not to panic – to stay still.