The Blind Eye

by Georgia Blain

  Despite this, she still slept with him, only three weeks after they met. I do not know whether she did so hoping she would get to know him more, that this would be the start of a relationship, but I would guess so. Most of us want to be loved. Some of us go to extraordinary lengths to hide this need, others of us have it on display, naked and awkward. Greta was always looking for the person who would save her, who would love her enough to make everything all right, and she was always disappointed.

  As she and Silas had been about to part on the usual corner, he had stopped her. She was surprised when he had suggested a drink, when he had suddenly seemed to want to be a part of the early evening, the street lights flickering on overhead, the rush of people heading home carrying food and flowers, the bars opening their doors, and she had followed him across the street and down the back alley.

  His footsteps were loud in the lobby as, some hours later, they both stumbled into his apartment building, arm in arm. She saw herself in the elevator mirror and she hated the flush across her cheeks, the haziness in her eyes, and the lurid orange of her mouth under the fluorescent light, but then he was kissing her, his lips moving up to her ear; Greta, Greta, Greta, he whispered, and she knew he was drunk too as he dropped his keys twice at the entrance to his flat. That was when she remembered that she had meant to finish writing up the first part of her notes, but she just thought fuck it, this was what she wanted, and as she felt the brush of his lips on her neck as he led her through to the bedroom, there was a moment when he seemed about to say something, but she didn’t let him because, whatever it was, she was pretty certain she didn’t want to know.

  In the soft light of the next morning, Greta sat opposite Silas and wondered why she hadn’t just gone, grabbed her bag in the middle of the night and gone. She supposed she had been so confused, so uncertain as to whether what was happening was in fact happening, that she had been unable to act. But that was not all there was to it; she had also been worried about leaving him alone.

  Now, sober and exhausted, she was scared, wanting only to leave, but feeling that she had to somehow go through the motions of attempting to talk.

  Do you have any idea what you did? she asked him. Her mouth was dry from the alcohol and cigarettes and she did not want to look at him because she did not want to see him for what he really was: a stranger.

  He did not answer and she glanced at the wounds he had been cutting into his arms when she had found him, there on the kitchen floor, alone in the darkness. He was watching her and his eyes were black in the paleness of his face. He looked away.

  Has it happened before? She did not know why she wanted to cry and she bit her lip.

  He told her it had.

  Often?

  A couple of times a month.

  The intimacy of having had sex was close and raw enough. Attempting to have this conversation was too much for either of them.

  Why? And her voice was small as she shook her head. You should have warned me, and she was aware of the ludicrousness of her comment as soon as she made it.

  He smiled for the first time that morning, the expression on his crooked mouth sheepish as he told her it wouldn’t have been much of an enticement in getting her up to his place. I hoped it wouldn’t happen, he said. I really did.

  As she rubbed at the sleep in the corners of her eyes, she said she thought he needed to get some help.

  He had already tried; he had been to psychiatrists, to doctors, there had been meditation, naturopathic treatments, diet, acupuncture, and as he listed each attempt he had made, she just wrote down my name, Daniel Lehaine, and the place where she’d heard I had my practice.

  She reached for her bag. From his kitchen window, she would have been able to see how the sky stretched, soft blue, over the impossible perfection of the day. The first autumn leaves would have floated past, and with the sun behind them, they would have shone, translucent.

  She kissed him awkwardly, wishing she hadn’t as soon as the moment passed, and she told him she would see him around.

  Later, when I asked her why she had sent him to me, I was surprised by her answer.

  She smiled. He reminded me of you.

  Really? I asked her, trying to keep my voice level.

  Not what you are now, she told me. What you were then.

  2

  Port Tremaine has a main street and five back streets that make up the grid of the town. Only the main street is bitumen; the rest are dirt, eventually petering out into either the surrounding scrub or the mangrove swamps that border the gulf.

  Silas could remember it all in sharp detail. He could mark each house and tell you whether it was deserted or occupied, and if it was occupied, who lived in it. He could tell you which of the businesses still opened their doors to customers and which were boarded up, the owners having long since given up on any hope of surviving in a town that depended on a country now laid bare and empty, stretched out, silent and wasted, beneath the vastness of the sky.

  He even told me about the giant palms, their growth stunted by the tyres around the base of their trunks; they sit, squat and ugly along the centre of the main street, like discarded overgrown pineapples. It is a street that stretches down to a jetty, the jetty reaching for over a kilometre into the still, silvery waters of the gulf. Built to accommodate a tide that sucks out and out, leaving tiny crabs scurrying across the sand and clumps of weed drying to a salty crisp under the harsh glare of the sun, the length of that jetty is the only claim to fame the town has.

  In the searing heat of the long summer days, it is usually deserted. There may be one or two locals who are out there, or perhaps the occasional fisherman who has turned off the highway to spend a slow and lazy afternoon leaning over the railing, line dangling, bait at his feet, but most of the time it is empty. The streets are also bare, just a few chickens scratching around in the dirt to indicate any sign of life, and nothing else.

  Once a working port, there were over 600 people living there in the early 1900s. The grain was brought down through the Port Tremaine Gorge and loaded onto the boats to be shipped off to the rest of the world. When Silas arrived, the port had long since closed and the town had dwindled to sixty residents, including Rudi and Constance, although most of Port Tremaine would not consider them in any head count. Silas could name many of them; he could describe what they looked like, where they lived and what they did. He later told me that occasionally their faces would float across the slow beginnings of a dream, and he would start, waking suddenly with the fear that he was back there once more.

  The sign at the entrance marks the population as 240, but it is, of course, many years out of date, and with numbers continuing to drop so steadily there has never been any point in regularly changing it. Silas saw it in the beam of the headlights as he slowed down, knowing he had hit the top of the main road, the four street lights pale in the darkness. There was only one other car out, its engine at a low throb as it cruised down to where the jetty began, the driver revving the accelerator for a minute or so, before turning and proceeding at the same slow pace, back to the other end of town.

  Unsteady on his feet, and slightly nauseous from lack of food and too much dope, Silas got out at the first pub he came across, not even noticing how dark and quiet it was until he was there at the front door and he realised it was closed. Each window was shut, tattered canvas blinds were pulled down, the glass in the front door was smashed and boarded up with chipboard, the sign on the front advertised counter meals with prices he had not seen for years.

  He stood in the middle of the deserted street and smelt the salt in the air. After the heat of the day, the gulf breeze was cool on the clamminess of his forehead and he looked down to where the jetty began, relieved to see that there was another pub, one that appeared to be open.

  That was when he noticed the old man, head down, an almost empty bottle in one hand, his entire body concentrated on getting another drink, his face hidden by long grey hair that fell to below his shoulder
blades. He was talking to himself, muttering into his beard, words that Silas could not hear as he followed him towards the hotel, eventually finding himself close enough to smell the sweet alcoholic sweat on the old man’s skin as he pushed the bar door open, letting it swing shut behind him with a thud, so that it almost closed in Silas’s face.

  In the dim light of the vast room, Silas saw the few men clustered at the counter turn away as the old man took a seat and fumbled for coins in his pocket, only to turn back again seconds later when they saw Silas enter. All eyes were on Silas now, and in that moment he knew they all wanted to know who this person was, this person who was foolish enough to come to a town that everyone had left.

  3

  Dear Rudi

  Sitting at his reading desk, Silas would press his knuckles into his eyes, wanting the world to swim momentarily, wanting to see the swirl of colours that filled his vision before the darkness took over. This, he once told me, was what he did with his days.

  He had his notepad open in front of him, each page covered with those two words, and next to it were the books he had discovered when he first came to the library. Kirlian photography, a technique for capturing the electromagnetic field that surrounds every living object. Leaves represented by flares of orange, red, violet; one finger touching another, the colours deep and dark except at the point of contact, a brilliant yellow glowing between them; a dying flower; the image of where a petal had been just prior to the moment when it was plucked; that was how the field appeared.

  He would look up at Greta there in front of him, her head bent over a box of letters from her sculptor’s tutor to his lover, and as he stared at the part in her hair, a crooked white zigzag between the paleness of her plaits, he would wonder what the colours were that surrounded her.

  Dear Rudi

  Those two words. Crossed out for the twentieth time that morning.

  4

  It took Silas six weeks to get his first appointment with me. Unfortunately, this is the way it is with most of us who practise in this field, the length of individual consultations making it impossible for any of us to take on many new patients.

  I am sorry, the receptionist told him, as she tells most people who ring, if it’s urgent, I can try and squeeze you in a little earlier, but it must be urgent.

  Because he had been living with the way he was for such a long time, it was difficult now to describe his need as urgent. Silas told her it was okay, he would wait. But once the time was booked, the turnover of days began to slow and he wished he had said he was desperate.

  Each day that he saw Greta at the library, he wanted to talk to her, but the few attempts he made were awkward, and he did not know what to say to change what had happened. When he told her he had made the appointment but the waiting list was over a month, she said she was sorry there was nothing she could do to push it along.

  It’s just that I don’t really know him anymore.

  He was about to walk away, but she stopped him, finding it hard to meet his eyes as she told him we had been in a relationship some time ago. We met before she went to art school, when we were both at the College of Healing, and as she spoke she realised that she had made this revelation in the hope of returning to the case with which she and Silas had originally conversed.

  I was never going to finish, I was never any good at it, she said and smiled, embarrassed, but glad he had stopped.

  Later, when Silas told me that it was Greta who had referred him, I wondered for a moment whether I should find out more about his relationship with her, and whether I should, in fact, refer him to someone else. I glanced at my notes and saw that he had already been waiting six weeks. I looked across at him and saw the anxiety in his eyes, and I decided against it.

  I told him that the first appointment would be a little different to those that would follow. It would be longer, for one thing. It would involve a lot of questions, questions that might seem irrelevant, but that would help me in seeing the total picture.

  I asked him why he had come and he attempted to explain a burning sensation in his heart, a tightness that would wring the breath out of him, leaving him crippled with pain.

  Anything else?

  Silas shook his head. He could not speak of the wounds he inflicted upon himself, despite the fact that this was the real reason for the visit. This is the way it often is with patients; the process of bringing out the core of the problem is not a quick one. For Silas, the memory of Greta’s face the morning after she had stayed the night was still fresh and the shame he felt made him glance at the ground.

  The questions that I asked were fairly standard: Silas’s like or dislike of various weather conditions and whether he noted an aggravation of symptoms in wind, rain, damp, heat; whether they changed according to the time of day, morning, night; his appetite and whether he had any particular food cravings or aversions . . . Silas answered everything despite not being able to see the point.

  What about sex? My gaze was direct and he did not attempt to meet it.

  What about it?

  Tell me a bit about your sex life, your desire, the frequency with which you have it.

  He said he didn’t have sex often at the moment. Greta was, in fact, the only person he had slept with in a year, and as he told me this I could see he was uncertain as to whether he should have mentioned it.

  It’s fine, I assured him, and he looked relieved.

  I paused for a moment in my note-taking, sipping the water in the glass next to me, in the hope of creating a space that he would fill with words, but Silas kept silent.

  So, and I smiled, how about your general energy?

  It was low, Silas said, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  What about your relationships with other people?

  He did not know what I meant. He was not in a relationship with anyone, he hadn’t been in one for a long time.

  I told him that I was talking in a more general sense; I wanted to know about his family, his friends.

  He said that his mother was dead, and his father, from whom he had been estranged, had also died a year ago. I suppose I spend most of my time alone, and he looked out the window at the plumbing from the opposite building, the rusted pipes the only possible distraction from the intensity of the interview.

  I could see that the facts of his life, laid bare like this, did not seem as though they belonged to him, and I waited for a moment before I asked my next question.

  It was sleep I wanted to know about, and as Silas opened his mouth to reply, his face blanched. It was the tightness in his chest, the constriction, ferocious enough to render him incapable of answering.

  How is it? Fitful? Deep, disturbed, any regular dreams, night wakings, difficulties going to sleep, waking up?

  It took me an instant to see that he was in pain, and the moment I did, I reached for him, my hand on his sleeve as I told him to breathe, it would be all right, it would pass. As he leant forward, I tried to get him to meet my eyes.

  Slowly, Silas sat up. He touched the spot where I had been holding him, gently, carefully. I could still feel it, the burning tightness there in my hand.

  So that’s the pain? I asked.

  Silas nodded.

  5

  I saw the pub that Silas stayed in when he first got to Port Tremaine. It was, surprisingly, still open for business despite being completely deserted. I remember calling out, hoping to find someone to whom I could talk, but no one answered. I waited for a moment, and then decided that I would keep going. I wanted to make it out to Rudi’s garden and back before the chill of the evening, and if I had no luck there, I would try to find the owner later.

  Silas told me he spent his first two days in that town crashed out, sweaty and exhausted, finally waking to find himself in a room that was, as the owner had promised, suffering from the fact that it had been uninhabited for some time.

  He remembered a woman called Martha bringing him a set of sheets, worn with a faded cornflower print,
a single blanket, a pillow with a cigarette burn that went through to the stuffing, and a threadbare towel. When he woke, they were all where she had left them, there at the end of the bed. He had slept fully clothed on the mattress, unaware that night had passed to day and back to night again.

  Walking down the main street, with the address of his mother’s house written on a scrap of paper, he saw, as I also did, the extent of the desolation. At first glance it appears like a perfectly preserved country town, the stone buildings golden in the brilliance of the sunshine, the awnings shading the footpath; but where you would expect to find people resting out of the heat, talking to neighbours they have known for years, it is empty, always empty. It was, Silas once said, like being in a Western. All of the shops, apart from Pearl’s General Store and the garage across the street, were deserted, the displays faded in the windows, the plastic grass in the butcher’s no longer a brilliant green but the true yellow of the country, the shelves at the back of the haberdasher’s still stacked with bolts of cloth, rotten to the touch, some doors creaking open, others locked with ‘Keep Out’ scrawled across in red paint, the rooms beyond ransacked, even the floorboards pulled up, leaving nothing but an empty rotten shell.